Sidewalk Love

Preface: I wrote this back in 1977. Yes, as long ago as that. It is set the previous year because a 1976 clean-up campaign in NYC is useful to the plot. New York in the mid-1970s was far different from today, especially Times Square and the area west of Broadway. Today, Times Square is Disney-fied, and the whole Theater District is full of trendy restaurants, pricy office space, and pricier living space. In the free-wheeling 70s, the area was much seedier. It was the center of the city’s sex trade, and the trade was not hidden away out of sight. In those days when STDs were believed curable (and most were), strip joints, peep shows, porn shops, and massage parlors abounded amid the legitimate theaters. 8^th Avenue from 42^nd to 52^nd Streets was the Minnesota Strip (named for the Midwestern origins of many of its denizens), always lined by scores of streetwalkers asking passersby for dates. Inside the surrounding parlors and fleabag hotels were hundreds more working girls (and working boys). I was young enough in those days to find the people and the scene intriguing. Hence this tale about a worker and a customer. While my own 1970s were far from innocent, this particular tale ought not to be considered autobiographical.

Sidewalk Love

Is paid sex romantic? Variation on an old joke: it is if you do it right. How one does it right may best be explored with a mythic tale of a boy and his tart.

Do not confuse myth with fiction. There really was a Trojan War even though the details grew fabulous through the retelling. There quite possibly was an Aeneas though the truth of who and what he was is deeply obscured by the mist of time. Perhaps there was an Arthur, whoever and whatever he was, to inspire the legends of Camelot. Accordingly, let us borrow this last name for the hero of this mythic tale.

Mythic romance is an epic theme that requires a suitably pompous voice. We shall strive to achieve this. We shall forego dactylic hexameter however. That is as difficult to write as it is to read and the author is no Vergil or Homer. But he has heard the story of a moment spent by a modern Odysseus in the arms of his Calypso, so of those arms and the man I sing.

Arthur lived in a place called Roxbury, NJ. This was a far flung suburb of the mythical city of Gotham, sometimes called New York, a great metropolis of a mythical country known (with the degree of sardonic humor customary to that time and place) as the Land of Liberty. Our hero was in his early 20s, epigone of a well-heeled family that had made its modest fortune in a construction supply business. He now worked in that business although the precise nature of his job and authority was unclear, especially to the workers for whom the son of the boss is by long tradition risible.

In accordance with the custom of the land, Arthur had received 17 years of liberal education which prevented him from properly learning the family business or any other suitable livelihood, but at least taught him the philosophy to live without the independence the education itself obstructed. So, while he was inept at distinguishing spruce from fir in the family lumberyard, he could distinguish Euripides from Sophocles, and quote both aptly and accurately.

Let us look in on Arthur walking the Gotham pavement.

The bright sun affected his eyes so as to give the world a bluish hue, but it had failed to crack the bitter cold. The February wind could be felt beneath his winter coat, a red plaid hunter’s jacket ordinary in his hometown of a few thousand people but conspicuous in the city. Our hero’s hands pushed deep into his jacket pockets. His fingertips complained bitterly at the cold. Perversely, Arthur hoped the pain would continue. His hands displayed a certainty and urgency of response that somehow his mind had stopped showing.

Arthur, like many a young man, was given to uncompromising pronouncements on this or that subject. In politics, he favored third parties because they allowed him to “be involved” without the risk of electoral victory and subsequent disillusionment. But his pronouncements were intellectual play only, devoid of real emotional content. Had he actually been asked to join in a pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” one suspects he would have coughed and excused himself to the kitchen. Again like many a young man, especially of the literary variety, he had acquired a taste for nihilism. He believed the material world to be indifferent and humans to be careless when not malevolent, but he no longer was able to work up any animus about this state of affairs. It seemed a waste of energy. In consequence, a creeping numbness had overtaken him. He generally thought this for the best.

Weekend walks through New York City relaxed our hero. He liked the city’s hard edges that so contrasted with the leafy fuzziness of his own town. Today, however, he walked with an ill-defined restlessness. He crossed Broadway and passed the Times building at 43rd where trucks unloaded a forest in the form of giant rolls of paper. He crossed 8th Avenue, nicknamed the Minnesota Strip, and walked north past the sidewalk princesses. He was merely window-shopping. Our hero had no objection to the ladies or their line of work. He in fact had succumbed on one occasion when he was 18 and a virgin. Having found the episode rather more mundane than expected, he refrained from further incursions into the demimonde. He had pursued more conventional arrangements with women although all of these to date had been in some regard unsatisfactory. Still, his hormones nudged him onto the Strip.

Arthur ambled for several blocks while deliberating grimly on the worthlessness of humankind, the paucity of pulchritude necessary for survival on the Strip, and the gloomy fate of the Republic. He scarcely heard the iterations of, “Hi, you want go out?” It was an unusually pitched voice rather than the aforementioned hormones that caused him to glance left and catch the hazel eyes of an extraordinarily attractive young woman. Her face was unexpectedly innocent in its expression, her hair had the hint of red that for some reason appealed to him, and her frame seemed a happy compromise between the delicate and the athletic. She strongly reminded him of an old college favorite who had not in fact favored him. She stood as a repudiation of his thoughts except perhaps those about the gloomy fate of the Republic. This irritated him and he continued walking toward Central Park. He imagined the admiration of the other pedestrians for his strength of character. He also contemplated the role of cowardice in his retreat but he was able to push that thought away quickly.

Before long he reached the park and now was at a loss for a goal. He searched for a bench that was unbroken and distant from the impecunious and the peculiar. He found one and sat to watch the traffic. Crisp white clouds moved swiftly across the sky. The sharp taste of ozone was strangely invigorating. The chill of the gelid bench was uncomfortable through his pants.

The image of hazel eyes and strawberry blonde hair returned to him. “Don’t be a low life,” he chided himself aloud as a nervous man self-consciously looked his way. “Oh, I don’t care what people think,” he lied to himself more quietly, and to prove it he retraced his steps down 8th Avenue. After all, the route is in the general direction of the Path subway terminal, he rationalized. But to avoid looking deliberate about getting a second look at the girl, he crossed to the opposite side of the street.

The girl who had chosen the appellation “Brandi” leaned against the half-empty brick building on the corner of 48th. Her real name was Rebecca. The beginning and ending sounds of “Brandi” were close enough to her childhood nickname “Becky” for the street name to be comfortable.

She wished her feet would stop feeling the cold. She was quite successful at her job despite a caution not all of her competitors demonstrated. She made no apologies for being at least a little picky. Even guys in business suits sometimes were dangerous or crazy. One had mutilated a woman in a hotel across the street the previous week. So, you had to trust your instincts about potential customers when the vibes weren’t right. She had been arrested repeatedly, but since New York courts placed prostitution in a category with spitting in public, there never had been a penalty more severe than a couple of hours in jail and a $50 fine.

Brandi had few complaints with her status. It was an improvement over her early life. Rebecca grew up outside of Tallahassee, Florida, as one of 4 children in a poor family. Her father was a violent alcoholic gambler who wasted whatever her mother, a NATO bride from Luxembourg, earned. She had been shuffled among aunts who made no secret of the burden of her existence. At 15 she had enough, informed the appropriate aunt of her departure with sufficient impoliteness so as to raise no objection, and hitched a ride north.

Brandi went to work as soon as she reached the city. At first she rationalized that it was all she could do. Today at 23 she frankly admitted that she was too lazy to do anything else. Occasionally she would find a customer disgusting, but in general the work struck her as neither difficult nor unpleasant -- and it was very lucrative. She earned thousands in a three or four day work week, spent freely and enjoyed a comfortable apartment near Gramercy Park.

Today business was dead, though her girlfriend Janet had picked up a date a few minutes earlier. She thought she had a prospect earlier with a young guy who must have been an out-of-towner with that plaid jacket. Some men show every emotion on their faces. She could read his well enough when she asked, “Would you like to go out with me?” But like so many others he walked on past. The trouble with working in public, she reflected, is that it is in public. She knew that more men would accept if they were not in full view of others. Some girls handed out business cards but the police didn’t like it and they always fell into the wrong hands. Police were usually OK if you weren’t so brazen as virtually to dare them to bust you.

Brandi creased her lips in annoyance as a passing woman about her own age gripped her husband’s arm and glared at her from behind pink sunglasses. She smirked when the man apologetically shrugged her shoulders. Across the Avenue she espied a familiar plaid jacket. There really was no reason to walk down 8th Avenue twice except herself and the other girls. She smiled that he was on the other side of the street. Do men ever grow up? She waved. He discreetly waved back. The light changed to WALK and Brandi crossed the street to meet him.

Arthur occasionally experienced dissociation, the sense of being an observer of the scene in which he was acting. The most dramatic case was when he had fallen out of a tree as a child. To this day his recollection of the event is from above the scene at an altitude of some 50 feet. He clearly envisages himself on the ground below. He tended not to mention these episodes in case they indicated some psychosis. One such episode began the moment the young woman addressed him in an odd mixed accent best described as Southern-fried Manhattan.

“Hi. Mah name is Brandi.”

It was only when climbing the second flight of stairs in the Mayfair Hotel that he recovered enough self-possession to ask himself, “What am I doing now?”

“Did you say something, sweetie?”

“Nothing important.”

Seemingly committed barring an unseemly fuss (our hero could be cowardly about such things), he decided to make the best of it. This proved quite easy. Brandi was talkative, had an extremely pleasant disposition, and was determinedly normal. His limited experience had not yet shaken the stereotype for hookers of streetwise hardness and arms with needle tracks. Ludicrously, it was the girl who lived next door to him out in the suburbs who fit that description better. Besides, Brandi was the most attractive woman he ever had been invited to touch. As the winter gear dropped the prospect looked less and less like a bad idea.

Arthur found himself appreciating the simple honesty of the transaction as compared with the unspoken contractual provisions of conventional dating. Without unrefinedly indulging in unnecessary detail, let us say that the next hour was spent in pleasant conversation in both the literal and euphemistic sense. He traveled home relaxed and with an intent to revisit his new acquaintance.

In the next few months, such afternoon hours were a recurrent and refreshing feature of his life. He fretted a bit over dollars but in truth she was less expensive than some of his other dates. He soon lost any lingering disquiet. Surprisingly to Arthur, after 8 years in the business Brandi still displayed sensitivity about it. Let us listen in on one occasion when our hero picked the wrong way to be playful.

“Brandi, why do I like you?” he teased.

Not playful at all. “Why, am I that hard to like?”

“Well, uh …”

“Yeah, I know. ‘Get yourself a NICE girl. All I want is your money. Right?”

“Well, uh … “

“I AM nice, and I don’t take advantage of anyone. I’d never do that to a guy. Like I’d never marry him, you know? I don’t take anything a guy doesn’t willingly give me. Does my being a hooker bug you or something?”

“Well, uh …”

“Nobody cares anymore except prudes and closet fags.” Although not squeamish at all about servicing mixed couples or engaging in other gender bending activities, Brandi sometimes voiced extraordinarily rude remarks regarding male homosexuals – perhaps a trade bias.

Arthur backed off the subject. He was secretly amused that she did not refute the “only after your money,” but was wise enough not to mention it. Any doubts he might have had that their relationship was strictly business, at least on her part, were dispelled when, during the warm afterglow of lovemaking, he suggested another type of date.

“Brandi, there are a couple of shows over on Broadway. Would you like to see one with me? Maybe get dinner?”

“Do you really want to?” she asked noncommittally.

“I asked if you would like to.”

“How much were you thinking of spending on this evening?”

“I don’t know. Broadway is getting expensive. Altogether, a couple hundred, I guess.”

“I would rather have the money. I’ll make it worth your while.”

She did, too. Arthur did not propose expensive activities afterwards. Yes, our hero was growing fond of Brandi, and found himself flattering her simply because he enjoyed doing it. Witness:

“Do I look OK?” she asked, primping herself in the mirror at the end of a session.

“Gorgeous.”

“Stop it! That’s no help at all. You always exaggerate.”

“No. You’re beautiful.”

“I’m cute, sweetie, but I’m not beautiful.”

Arthur disagreed. He didn’t recognize this as a danger sign.

Summer arrived. The Democrats planned to convene in New York to throw parties and to nominate a Georgia peanut farmer for president. Financially insolvent New York City hoped to impress the present and future distributors of taxpayer dollars. As a possibly misguided part of this effort, the city initiated a campaign to “clean up” 8th Avenue prior to the convention. Laws against prostitution previously had been difficult to enforce, since (except in sting operations) neither witness was inclined to testify, but the Assembly passed a new anti-loitering law which could be used instead and eliminated the need to prove solicitation. The police, of course, were expected to enforce this selectively.

Armed with a new law and eager to protect the morals of conventioneers, the city sent its 30,000 strong police force into action. (The Republicans convened in Miami that year where they were left dangerously at the mercy of loiterers, but that is outside the realm of our tale.) The impact in Gotham was immediate and total.

Brandi was furious. Arthur didn’t care much. She had given him her phone number prior to the crackdown, so he simply could call ahead and arrange dates. In principle Arthur opposed the law as yet another busybody intrusion by lawmakers, but he didn’t get emotional about it. Our hero still was not getting very emotional about anything. Or so it seemed.

A hint that all was not as it seemed was present in his admiration of Euripides. The ancient playwright, after all, is the ultimate gut twister. No soap opera can match his pathos. His characters often are fanatics. They indulge themselves in some emotion or other and bring themselves to disaster. Witness Medea, Hippolytus, or Pentheus. Like a later playwright’s creation, all would have been better to have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. That our hero liked this kind of thing indicated that romantic excesses brewed in him beneath his placid surface after all. They might yet bubble over.

During the summer, Arthur’s visits to New York decreased in frequency. In the whole month of August he was sufficiently motivated to make the journey only once. It was the height of the building season and so his days were busy at the family supply business. His leisure time was filled with innocent diversions except for once when he and his buddies drank to excess. On the day after he was reminded why he had let so much time pass since the last occasion he had joined them in this activity.

He hadn’t given up Brandi by any means, but sometimes New York seemed a long way to go.

On the first day of September our hero stopped at the local delicatessen. Standing outside the store was a cadre of teens in their last week before the reopening of high school. When Arthur walked past them to his car and bent to enter it, his wallet slipped from his pocket. Nary a one of the teens spoke or raised a finger – not even the middle one. Instead, when Arthur backed away from the curb one of their number stepped off the curb and stood on the wallet as he drove away. Contained in the wallet was a card saying Small Engine Repair on one side and sporting Brandi’s number on the other.

          Having arrived home, Arthur discovered his loss and panicked. He drove back to the bologna emporium but the politicians of tomorrow had vanished. Arthur thought first of the money and his credit cards. Then he thought of his license. Then he thought of Brandi. What was that number? Why couldn’t he quite remember the order of digits? Was it 794-6496, 674-9476, or 674-7496? Or maybe a digit was not transposed but was wrong. Maybe he remembered two of them incorrectly. That put the possible combinations in the thousands. He tried the few sequences that seemed to him most likely to be right. All were wrong numbers.

          It might seem strange that our hero did not know where our heroine lived, but it is not strange at all. Arthur, after all, was a good customer but still a customer. Brandi liked to keep her home and business separate. Consequently, they always had met in modest hotels that charged by the hour for their liaisons. Arthur allowed momentary free rein to a sense of romantic loss. It was surprisingly powerful. It lasted until the solution occurred to him of simply looking her up during business hours. Enforcement of the loitering law had faltered after the Democrats left town though sporadic animation by the police still had an effect. Nevertheless, Brandi had mentioned to him her intent to take the risk in order to recover some of her lost income. He reprimanded himself for having enjoyed the loss overmuch.

A few days later our hero launched his reconnaissance mission into New York. The time and place were right but Brandi was not in sight. Neither were her competitors. The police must have done a sweep. He decided to try later. After a hike downtown and an extended browse through Barnes and Noble on 18th he returned to 48th. Brandi was not there but a thirtyish brunette was. She looked as though she hadn’t slept for days.

“Hi. You want to go out?” she asked.

“No. I’m looking for Brandi. Blondish. Works this block.”

“Why ya lookin’?”

“A friend.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah, I know her. She don’t work here no more. Cops were hasslin’ her. Can’t I do somethin’?”

“No. Know where I can find her?”

“How should I know? Try Lex. Or one of the parlors. Why, ain’t I good enough?”

Refraining from an impolitic response, our hero mumbled a thanks and walked eastward. En route to Lexington Avenue, one of the other solicitation hot spots, Arthur grasped the serious prospect of never finding her at all. What if she had taken an indoor job? From this moment on his illicit mistress grew in his estimation and seized his heart. True to his fears she was not on Lexington. He asked one of the street’s workers if she had heard of her.

“No. I’d know her if she was here in the daytime. Try at night or real early, like 3 or 4. I don’t know what else to tell you. Maybe one of the parlors.”

Not prepared to investigate scientifically every one of the city’s brothels, our hero felt his hopes dashed. In his mind Brandi became Apollo’s Daphne, Cupid’s Pysche. Exquisite loss! Arthur was charmed by the violence of the emotion and he cut the reins he briefly had relaxed the night he lost his wallet. He would search for her, of course, but it would be in vain. Visions came to him of Candide and Cunegonde, Tom Jones and Sofia, Pepe le Pew and the cat. He indulged in the bittersweet taste of resolution in the face of doom; a taste that makes us feel noble. His life acquired a 19th century romantic sense it had been denied previously.

By a remarkable coincidence, WOR-TV ran Walk on the Wild Side that night. In the movie the hero tries to find Hallie, a lost lover who is working in a New Orleans brothel; so, he hitches a ride from Texas in a truck with Jane Fonda and... well, there is no need to recount the entire plot. Suffice it to say that our hero hopelessly identified with it and sank ever deeper into the swamp of his emotions. It troubled him briefly that Brandi didn’t make a convincing Hallie but then in the movie neither did Capucine.

Every weekend for a month our hero forayed into the city without result. Another full month then passed before our hero returned again. The fires of longing had abated slightly but to his satisfaction flickered still. He had arrived in town not to continue his quest, however, but to seek out the Lionel Casson translation of The Selected Satires of Lucian. Lucian was lighthearted, cynical, and enjoyable. Arthur still loved the classics but had lost some of his taste for his former favorite playwright. The asperity of Euripides’ final acts bothered him of late. Yet, he was in town and making an effort to find his love was a dramatic necessity in his own personal theater. So, after leaving the bookstore he went on with the show. He took the A train to 42nd and walked up 8th Avenue.

Arthur was lost in thought and paid little attention to the sights on the Strip. His eyes focused on his feet as he rushed to make up for the lost time the detour on 8th was costing him.

“Well hi there stranger!”

Arthur looked up into hazel eyes. Our hero could think of nothing adequate to say. He settled for, “Brandi, do you know how hard you are to find?”

“I imagine. I was in California. Backpacking in the Sierras. I needed a break, Arthur.”

“California.” Only by luck did he not repeat “Arthur.”

“Why? Did you miss me?” she asked,

“Yeah, a little.”

Our hero rejoiced in rediscovery. But during his recent agonies he had acquired a more realistic eye. He realized Brandi was right: she was cute rather than beautiful. The familiar pleasures of the next hour were warm and comfortable, but in her presence his emotions lacked the edge they had in her absence. The business transaction somehow felt less refreshingly honest than it had before; instead it was close to banal. In the most intimate of circumstances our hero stifled a yawn. He looked forward to getting home so he could finish the 3rd volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Before they departed, Arthur re-obtained Brandi’s phone number and placed copies in different pockets. He also handed her a card with his own number.

“Now that I think of it, I’m surprised you never asked for this,” he said, referring to his phone number.

“I never ask for it. I don’t want to talk to anyone’s wife.”

“I’ve always told you I’m single,” he said.

“They’re all ‘single,’ Arthur.”

“Well, this one actually is.”

Brandi smiled and shrugged. They kissed goodbye. Arthur ran to catch the Path train to Hoboken.

The train pulled into Hoboken with 1 minute and 46 seconds to spare for the 4:30 Dover connection. Arthur hustled up the stairs, picked out the right train among the row of tracks, and clambered aboard with only moments to spare.  As the train lurched forward, Arthur found an empty seat near a window. Erie-Lackawanna still operated the ancient electric carriages that Arthur had ridden since his boyhood. An autumn chill was in the air but the car was unheated. He watched as the familiar yards slipped past and gave way to heavy industry. A spotty carpet of brown leaves rustled across the asphalt in the petroleum storage yards. Our hero closed his eyes and listened to the steel wheels on steel rails. He marveled how it was better to have loved and lost than to have loved and found.

“EAST ORANGE!” the conductor bellowed.

“How long does it take to get to Millburn?” asked a nervous woman passenger.

“Not long,” the conductor answered cryptically. In the conductor’s mind, as he clipped her ticket, Old 97 hurtled toward its fateful bend.

Fault Lines

A familiar meow made Zach cringe. It was pitched like fresh chalk on a chalkboard. Zach had read somewhere that wildcats don’t meow. It’s a technique used by domestic cats to annoy humans.

“Is that you, Arpie?”

As Zach headed for the kitchen, he imagined for moment getting an articulate reply, “Of course it’s me, dumbass!” Instead, Arpie wailed again. It meant the same thing. The grey tabby stood in front of her dish and looked up at him expectantly. Arpie was wet and dirty, but appeared to be unharmed. She had been AWOL for three days.

The name “Arpie” came from the initials “RP” for Royal Pain. Her voice had earned her the moniker. The cat had shown up in the kitchen on the day he moved into the house two years earlier. He assumed she had belonged to the former owners. They were a married couple who had been killed when a fight with a neighbor over politics escalated out of control. Without the big price discount on account of the murder, Zach never could have afforded the property. Enough buyers are superstitious about such things to make most crime scenes bargains. So, it all worked out well for him, though Zach resolved not to get to know any of his neighbors. The house was only four years old, and boasted a SecurePlan, the most fortified of the four home models in the development. The house was modest in size, but was the next best thing to a bunker

The two cat doors, apparently custom-ordered, were chinks in the home’s armor. One was installed in the steel door between the kitchen and the garage; the second was built into the far concrete wall where it exited behind bushes. A grenade or Molotov cocktail easily could be tossed through the outer cat door. However, the garage contained an excellent fire control system, so the risk of serious damage to the rest of the house was minimal. If he planned on keeping the cat, he figured the risk of the keeping doors unblocked was lower than that of opening a full size door to let the animal in or out. He had second thoughts about this the night a rabid raccoon entered the house through the doors, but he had dealt with the crisis quickly with a 9mm. It was possible the animal had been pushed into the garage deliberately, but he couldn’t be sure. He hadn’t had the exterior cameras turned on at the time. He kept them turned on permanently after the incident, but none was currently working. He didn’t know if they had been shot out or if the back-up batteries simply had worn down.

Zach opened a cabinet and withdrew a can of something promising “Seafood Flavor.” The can didn’t specifically promise seafood itself. He emptied it into the cat’s bowl. Arpie ate unfussily. She then marched off to the dining room, jumped on a padded chair, and curled up to nap. She left much needed grooming for later. Zach opened the pantry where he kept most of his own food, and looked at the sparse contents on the shelves. He needed to go grocery shopping very soon, or he would be sharing cat food with Arpie.

Zach hadn’t heard gunfire for two days, and Arpie’s presence was additional evidence the streets were quiet. Her survival instincts were excellent. She knew when to hole up and when to travel safely.

Zack decided to look. He opened the sash window above the kitchen sink, reached through the steel bars, and unlocked the steel and Kevlar shutters. He moved to one side and cautiously pushed them open. He intended just a quick glimpse, but the pretty view held his attention. Light snow covered his back lawn and bushes though it was no more than two centimeters deep. He went to the living room, opened a front window, and bravely pushed open the shutters. The scene out front was peaceful, too. Snow made everything look clean.  There were no tire tracks on the road. Zach shut the sash and walked around the house opening more shutters.

With more hope than expectation, Zach retrieved his VirtiGlasses from the coffee table. For the past 48 hours he had been cut off from the outside world. His fiber optic connection went dark the day after the riots started, and no wireless signals had gotten through for the past 48 hours. He was as isolated as though he were living in the 20^th century. His grid electric power was out, too, but the solar panels on the roof at least kept his overhead LED lights on. Zach tentatively slipped on the glasses. He sighed relief as the internet booted up. He was catching a signal so weak that it was no wonder it had failed to penetrate his brick walls, metallic roof, and armored shutters. A heads-up notice appeared from his internet provider: “The loss of a microwave tower on the West end of Cordialville may cause some gaps in coverage.” The lost tower was barely a kilometer from Zach’s house.

He called up the local news on heads-up display. In a live feed the mayor was taking credit for the restoration of peace while blaming her political opponents for the violence: “Thanks to the hard work of city administrators and our first-responders, security has been restored to our citizens. We want to thank the National Guard for their additional help. Opponents of our fine administration in this election year need to take responsibility for their inflammatory rhetoric that has incited so much violence, property damage, and death. I’ve instructed the district attorney to look into the possibility of criminal charges on that basis!”

As far as Zach knew, the riots had nothing to do with city electoral politics. He doubted the mayor rightfully could take credit for the current calm either. Weather always was more effective than law enforcement in these situations. The rioters – or activists, as nearly all preferred to be called – of all the various stripes had been willing to face rivals and police, but not an unseasonable chill.

A message from the city Violations Bureau flashed on his glasses. It was an e-Ticket. Zach had been fined $200 for not sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house within 24 hours of the snowfall as required by city ordinance. He looked out the window at his neighbors’ properties. None of the other sidewalks was clear. The city would be recouping some of the riot-control costs.

Zach connected to his employer’s website and signed in. Zach expected a termination notice for failure to show up to work at the Forty Winks Hotel where he serviced the hotel’s computers and electronics. Clerks had been replaced long ago by digital desks, so the only employees in the hotel usually were himself, a security guard, and one or two maids, who did little more than supervise the cleaning robots. A notice popped up, but it was not a pink slip. It was a temporary suspension without pay “pending reconstruction.”  Zach did a news search for Forty Winks and learned that the hotel had been closed for a week; it had been targeted in separate attacks by radical conservatives, anarcho-feminists, neo-Marxists, and four different ethnic gangs. Each had objected to different activities or biases “tolerated” at the hotel. The hotel had been damaged by rifle fire, RPGs, and fire bombs. Several of the guests had been dragged out of their rooms and executed. The security guard was missing, and had failed to return home. Zach was relieved. He didn’t want to go on some database as a possible disgruntled former employee.

Food was the only pressing issue for Zach. The latest models of affordable 3D home printers had replaced the need to shop for almost anything else. Online retailers and delivery services had seen sales and business plummet in the past year. Even complex products such as TVs simply could be printed. The new printers could accrete products from any mix of materials, fusing metal powders with lasers – and Zach had one of the newest. He also had a plentiful supply of all the necessary powders, and, if need be, his home Kem-Kit device could make more. The Kem-Kit, among other useful capabilities, could recycle trash, separating it and converting it into various compounds – or all the way down to powdered elements, if so desired. Together, the two machines turned every home into an omni-purpose factory. As much of a boon to consumers as they were, however, they had a dark side: the spread of truly dangerous weapons. In addition to churning out radios and laundry soup, they just as easily could make rocket launchers and nerve gasses. Software for producing such weaponry was illegal to distribute, of course, it was simple enough to find and download on the internet from safely encrypted sites.

The clock on the wall thermostat caught his eye. It was blinking 12:00. Utility grid power had been restored. This meant his printer and Kem-Kit were functional. Zach decided to check on them before leaving the house. He light-footedly descended the stairs to the basement. His basement was a walkout in one corner, but this was not a security weakness: the heavy steel double doors, held shut by a hefty steel cross bar, were safe against anything less than armor piercing 20mm fire. He re-checked his printer supplies. He reassured himself that the quantities were ample.

Just inside the double-doors was his pride and joy, and he was happy to hear it humming again. It needed grid power – the home photovoltaics were not enough to power it – so it had shut down when the power went out. He couldn’t believe how lucky he had been for having been selected to “market test” the device for free. Called Philosopher’s Stone, it was a radical home assembly that went a leap beyond 3D printing. Manufactured by FinalWord Enterprises, a non-public company, Philosopher’s Stone could transmute elements using miniaturized lasers and particle accelerators. Only a dozen other lucky people around the world had been selected to test the device. Internet searches turned up nothing about the manufacturer – not even a company address – but Zach understood the need for secrecy. A machine such as this surely was worth millions per unit. FinalWord had contacted him online and made absolute secrecy part of the deal; Zach agreed readily, not least because his possession of the device, were it known, would make him a target for thieves. The machine had arrived in an unmarked van; men wearing masks set it up in his basement. It seemed unnecessarily melodramatic, but, at the same time, exciting. Zach tested the machine at once on a platinum ring. The process took days to complete, but the machine little by little vaporized the ring and re-deposited it as gold. True to the machine’s name, and the claims of the manufacturer, Philosopher’s Stone could indeed transmute elements. Many transmutations were possible, but some transitions were simpler than others. The process wasn’t fast and it was energy intensive (Zach’s energy bills soared through the roof), but it worked. Zach placed his hand on the humming device, smiled, and walked back upstairs.

Zach perused his social network pages. They were filled with rants from his NetFriends, all of whom vented their offense at the rants of other NetFriends. They rudely raged about each other’s discourtesy. Zach was glad for the impersonality of the internet. He hadn’t socialized with a friend in the flesh in six months, and these postings were a reason why. He had no wish to argue like this over politics while within the reach of an interlocutor’s fist – and his friends seemed to want to discuss little else. He’d even given up on dating except for the love-bot he kept in the closet, if that counted. When turned on and connected to the VirtiLife gaming site on the net, the robot displayed the AI personality he had selected for her. Her simulated personality suited him quite well, and he thereby escaped the hassles of the real thing.

Zach scanned the local headlines. He learned the nearby microwave tower had been destroyed by the radical eco-group 3RockFirst, who objected that the tower was powered by electricity derived from fracked natural gas. A statement on the group’s website said the company was to blame for inciting the attack with its violence against the Earth. The power company website in turn announced it had authorized the use of deadly force against future incursions by 3rdRockFirst, and said the group had only itself to blame.

Zach zipped quickly through the headlines, briefly opening the occasional article. It seemed every nut-job with a cause had joined in the riots, and the blame always lay with whomever they had harmed. Some of the assaults had been serious. A sarin gas attack had been unleashed on a street where tax objectors battled tax fairness protestors, killing scores of each. Each side blamed the other for the attack and promised retaliation. A video zoomed on a man of ununclear affiliation beating an already senseless and bloody prone body with a baseball bat: “What are you making me doing this?!” the man shouted. Politicians in DC joined the blame game. Congressman Geneen Offmyer of the Social Equity Party denounced “the depravity of right-wing extremist pundits, who must take responsibility for the violence.” Senator Loophorn of the New Federalist Party blamed “the hate speech of the loony Left which deliberately incited the violence against our nation’s wealth creators.” The bulk of the rioters, though, had agendas that went beyond the traditional left/right divide. A local Men’s Rights group blamed “femo-fascists” for bombing their local offices while the President of Cordialville Community College blamed “troglodyte” patriarchalists for burning down the Women’s Studies building. The actual perpetrators remained unknown in both cases. Then there were the racial gangs. Radicals from various religious groups fought with each other and with the atheists. There even was a melee of vegetarians and carnivores.

Among all the rioting factions, there was one constant assertion: it was always the other side’s fault. No one yet had totaled the casualties. It was known that IEDs killed hundreds. Gas attacks had killed thousands, but no more exact numbers than that were available. Zach sighed and turned off the news. He remembered fondly the simple days when a “polarized electorate” meant two sides misrepresenting each other’s opinion with a level of sarcasm that by comparison was polite. Current politics were multi-polar with (literally) a vengeance – the sitting President had won with only 27% of the vote in a six-way race, and retained little confidence even from that 27%. She was a unifying force only to the extent that a large majority of Americans hated her.

Zach called up a view from a traffic drone and zoomed in on his route. The roadways to the mall looked clear. Zach decided to risk it. He went to the bedroom and donned his Kevlar travel suit.

Zach climbed into his natural gas hybrid sedan, remotely opened the garage door, and backed into Amity Road, his neighborhood’s cul-de-sac street. A low-flying drone circled overhead. He hoped it was a police drone, and not one owned by some radical group – or even some loner. Drones, too, could be home printed from plans off the internet, complete with air-to-ground missiles. He turned onto Elm Street. Zach once again wondered about the name, given that there were no elms on either side of the street. There was a copse of buckthorn, though, and it was from there that the two rounds that pinged off his bullet-resistant windshield were fired. The gunfire might have been simple playfulness, but it also could have been in retaliation for the negative votes on school bond funding that came from his neighborhood, where few children resided. Zach felt naked without his own guns, but mall policy expressly forbad them and the mall’s security devices could detect them.

There were no other incidents during the drive, but burnt cars and charred buildings lined both sides of the road. He passed a small strip mall with smashed windows. It was an older structure that hadn’t been fortified to modern standards. The stores had been trashed and looted. He approached the razor-wire topped wall surrounding the Cordiality Mall. Just outside the gate were demonstrators carrying signs: “Zero tolerance for intolerance!” “Hate the haters!” “Behead Extremists!” He wasn’t sure what faction they represented or why they were here, but they seemed peaceful enough. He pulled up to the security gate. Cameras and other devices scanned his vehicle. The gate swung open. He drove through. Inside the wall, guards patrolled with submachine guns. The central mall structure looked unscathed. Far to his right he noticed the gate open at the service entrance. A Carbo-Bake delivery truck entered. Given the recent emotional political battles over food legislation, which restricted the sale of pastries of the type made by Carbo-Bake by banning their sale to minors and imposing heavy taxes, he thought it took some bravery for the driver to wheel the honestly marked truck on the streets. The truck drove around to the back of the mall to the loading docks.

Zach parked near the mall’s main entrance. The parking lot was less than a quarter full. He entered the building. The interior had the generic pleasantness of most large malls. A fountain gurgled in the center of a domed atrium from which aisles radiated. Four teenagers sat by the water seemingly staring into space, but more probably playing videogames on their VirtiGlasses. Zach felt some of the tension go out of him as he took in the normality of the scene. He walked past the fountain to the interior entrance of the U-Name-It-Mart. He grabbed hold of a push-cart just inside the entrance and rolled it to the grocery section. He had expected the shelves to be empty, but the store was well-supplied except for baked goods and dairy. Zach wanted canned goods anyway. In case violence had a second spurt, it was better to avoid perishables.

He loaded his cart quickly, and pushed it to the check-out counter. As he self-scanned his choices, a pretty browned-haired girl no more than 17 with the name “Nicole” on her nametag smiled at him as she oversaw the checkouts, keeping the shoppers honest. The woman in back of Zach asked Nicole “When do you expect fresh bread?”

“Probably tomorrow,” she answered, once again with a smile.

“I saw a Carbo-Bake truck enter the lot,” said Zach, “if that counts as fresh.”

“It’s not here for us,” Nicole said. “Our delivery is tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said the woman.”

As Zach put his last bag in his cart, Nicole said “Have super awesome day.”

The explosion erupted from the back of the store. Zach guessed instantly that the blast had come from the unscheduled Carbo-Bake truck. Someone had hijacked it and filled it with explosives. The shockwave threw him down next to the counter. The counter helped protected him as the roof came down. When the roar of the collapse subsided, Zach took stock of himself. To his own surprise, he was unhurt. He pushed away debris from over his head and stood up. The sounds of survivors’ moans grew steadily louder. Not from Nicole, however. An aluminum rod protruded from her chest. She would have no more super awesome days. Zach picked up as many food cans as he could find in the rubble and stuffed them into bags. He carried them back to his car. Shoppers from other parts of the mall, not knowing if there would be other bombs, were fleeing in a panic.

As Zach drove home, he was more than ever convinced that this cycle of hate had to end. He was uniquely positioned to make a contribution to that end. He could prove that they needed to find a way to get along. What folks needed was an overwhelming demonstration of force. They were making him do it. They had brought it on themselves.

Back at home, Zach put away his food and then checked on the Philosopher’s Stone. Getting hold of depleted uranium had been easier than he had expected. It was scattered here and there around the world in expended ammunition, and was easily obtainable on the net. The Philosopher’s Stone was busily converting it to plutonium 239. The 3D printer already had finished manufacturing the suitcase bomb, using plans downloaded from the internet. It lacked only the plutonium sphere the Philosopher’s Stone was accreting. The website predicted a 30 kiloton explosion. He briefly wondered if similar spheres were taking shape in any of the other dozen basements with Philosopher’s Stones. He shook the thought aside. Regardless, it was for the greater good. All those people who refused to take responsibility for their own actions had brought it on themselves. It was their fault, not his.

Graduation Day

“Good, you are awake.”

Headmaster Kraal approached the bars of Eugene’s cage.

“Let me tell you, young man, of the rich tradition of which you are about to partake.”

 “No wonder you locked me up,” answered Eugene. “It is only way you could force me to listen to another lecture on school tradition. Look, sir, you had better let me go now. I don’t care what crazy hazing rituals have gone on here for how many years. Let me go now or I’m going to sue you and this school for every cent.”

“I believe you. You should think about that.”

Eugene thought about it.

“Suppose I start screaming?” Eugene asked.

The headmaster leaned in close to Eugene’s face.

“Go ahead.”

“Lean back so I don’t inhale your whiskey-breath.”

Kraal smiled and stepped back.

Eugene took a deep breath and screamed until he was hoarse.

“Are we done?” the headmaster asked.

“I guess,” Eugene rasped. “OK. So, where am I? How did I get here? What do you want?”

“‘Where’ is an old secret root cellar under Wumper Hall,” said Kraal. ‘It predates the founding of the school in 1871. Did you ever wonder why I kept my office here in Wumper Hall rather than move it to the new Administration building with the other offices?”

“I figured you just wanted to set yourself apart,” said Eugene.

No, that is just a side benefit. The real reason is the secret access – the only access – to this private sanctuary from my office.”

“Someone must know about it,” said Eugene. “Someone had to install the electric and plumbing.”

“That was back in the 1950s. The crew thought they were upgrading the cellar into a bomb shelter. The 1950s is a lifetime ago, my boy. I’m quite sure no one at the school today knows about this place – except the two of us. As for ‘how,’ there was Rohypnol in your tea when I called you to my office to discuss your award.”

“Damn. I hate tea. I drank it only to please you.”

“You did please me.”

“Oh, crap, you didn’t…um…”

The headmaster laughed. “No, no, my boy. Nothing so innocent.”

“OK, tell me about this tradition. Let’s get whatever this is over with. You have my attention,” Eugene said.

“Good. If you had devoted more attention to your classes, you might not be here. You’ve been an indifferent student at best during your time with us.”

“I’ve kept a B average,” Eugene objected.

“Yes, by doing the barest minimum to qualify for one, which indicates you could do much better.”

“I don’t like to show off.”

“You mean you prefer to be underestimated. I can’t think of an honorable motive for such a preference.”

“Yet, you awarded me the Thaddeus Cup just last month,” said Eugene.

“Yes, and the Thaddeus Cup is at the heart of why you are here. Tell me what you bothered to learn about your award.”

“Why should I humor you?”

“I have the key to your cell.”

“Good point. OK. According to what it says on the wall next to the case with the cup, Thaddeus Wumper was a Civil War soldier with the 13^th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry under Sherman here in Georgia. Thaddeus was wounded and got separated from his unit. He crawled onto the porch of the Renard farmhouse, which nowadays is Wumper Hall. Victor Renard was just 13 when he opened the front door and found the mortally wounded Thaddeus Wumper, who asked Victor for water. Despite the depredations of General Sherman, Victor showed common humanity to the Yankee by bringing Thaddeus a drink of water in a pewter cup. Thaddeus drank. Thaddeus thanked Victor, shook his hand, and then died. Ever since 1871, the year Victor opened this school on his farm, the Thaddeus Cup Award has been presented annually to the student who ‘represents the values of Renard Preparatory School.’ His or her name is added to a plaque in the glass case with the original cup.”

“Very good. I knew you were capable of higher grades,” said Kraal.

“I never understood what was meant by ‘values of Renard Preparatory School.’ I see no pattern to the award.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, other than the fact that the winners are always Seniors, and I’ve been here since Seventh Grade. I’ve seen it go to two guys and three girls before me; two winners were jocks; another was a nerd; as students they ranged from top of the class to the bottom; a couple were socially popular, but two were total geeks. No pattern.”

“But there is a pattern. All of the award recipients have something in common, Eugene. I was hoping you would notice. Every one of them evidenced a moral elasticity – a disregard for arbitrary rules.”

“All rules are arbitrary,” said Eugene.

“Thank you. That statement perfectly illustrates my point.”

“What are you saying? That ‘the values of Renard Preparatory School’ equate to psychopathy?”

“Oh Eugene, I doubt you qualify as a psychopath. Psychopaths are impulsive; they focus on short term gains; they inflict pain and degradation just for fun. Not you or the other winners. You rationally weigh consequences; you’re not short-sighted; you aren’t sadistic. Nonetheless, you are extraordinarily self-serving, and you don’t concern yourself with ethics per se when pursuing your interests. You came to my attention your very first year here when you sneaked into your math teacher ’s office and downloaded an advance copy of the mid-term exam.”

“You knew about that?”

“Yes. I have spyware on all the faculty electronics. Yet, you only got a B on the test. Why?”

“I didn’t want to raise suspicion.”

“You weighed the consequences. You see, Eugene, the official story about the Thaddeus Cup is untrue.

“We’re back on the damn cup again? Mr. Kraal, why should I care? What can a Civil War story, true or untrue, have to do with anything today?”

“Judge for yourself when you hear it. This is the real story:

“Thaddeus Wumper wasn’t wounded in combat. He strayed off from the column with a buddy to do some freelance looting. Entirely by accident they came face to face with two civilian criminals who were trying to escape the war zone with their swag. Not all of looters at the time were with Sherman’s army, you see. Sad to say, some Southern criminals took advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves, too. These two had been very successful and were carrying saddlebags full of gold; there is no way of knowing where got them. A short but sharp exchange of gunfire ensued. Wumper was the only survivor out of the four, but he, too, was badly wounded. Dragging one saddlebag of gold, and armed with a cavalry revolver, Thaddeus wandered until he came upon the Renard farmhouse above this very cellar. No one answered Thaddeus’ calls. Bleeding profusely, he entered the house. In the kitchen, he found a jug of corn whisky. He poured some into a pewter cup – the Thaddeus Cup – and swallowed the contents. He heard footsteps behind him. He spun around and saw a red-haired farm boy no more than 13 years old. The boy was Victor Renard.

“Thaddeus raised his handgun to shoot the boy when an incredible thing happened. Suddenly Thaddeus was looking at himself out of the boy’s eyes. I know this sounds crazy, but it is what happened. At that moment the loss of blood and the wounds caught up with Thaddeus. The soldier’s eyes rolled up. The body of Thaddeus Wumper collapsed and died. Yet, the personality of Thaddeus lived on inside the 13-year-old boy, Victor Renard. The personality of Victor, I suppose, died inside the soldier. I don’t pretend to understand it. Thaddeus had discovered some freakish skill to transfer his consciousness with that of someone else. He previously hadn’t been aware of his ability, but his impending doom brought it out.

“It may be that physical differences between the man and boy altered the personality of Thaddeus in some way during the transfer, but he certainly felt himself to be the same person. He kept the same set of memories.

“A young female voice then called out, ‘Victor?’

“Victor-Thaddeus looked back into the parlor and saw a girl of perhaps eleven. A look of horror came over her. The girl ran out the front door and never appeared again. Neither did any member of Victor’s family. I assume they all met with foul play, as so many people did in that time and place. Thaddeus kept the identity of Victor Renard, who was the rightful heir to the farm. Several years later, Victor-Thaddeus founded this school on that farm, using the saddlebag of gold as seed money.”

“Do you expect me to believe any of this?” Eugene asked.

“Yes. You see, I am Thaddeus Wumper. I was the headmaster who preceded Kraal, too. ‘Jonathan Kraal’ was a student at Renard Preparatory School back then. He was a winner of the Thaddeus Cup Award, as are you. He stood exactly where you do now. I became him the same way I became Victor Renard, and in the same way I’ll become you.”

“Sure you will,” said Eugene. “That’s much more likely than you just being nuts.”

“I pick winners of the Thaddeus Cup who have outlooks similar to my own, because their brains might be structured in a similar way to mine, too; I’m hoping thereby to minimize the risk of a personality change when I transfer into them. In this way I get to enjoy life from youth to adulthood over and over. I always set up my new identity financially – in gold to avoid tax issues. My will also leaves my seat on the school’s Board of Trustees to the most recent winner of the Thaddeus Cup – in this case you – at the time of my ‘demise’; he also receives the right to use the office directly above us. I expect you – I – will become headmaster one day.”

“Let’s indulge your fantasy for the moment,” said Eugene. “If you do this transfer, won’t you be locked in this cell while I’m out there?”

“I think we can assume I know how to get out of there. I’ll take a poison before I make the transfer. The poison’s effects will look like a simple cardiac arrest. I’m afraid this body won’t be alive long enough for you to do anything with it when you find yourself inside it.”

“Thank you for explaining things, Mr. Kraal.”

“The least I could do. So, the time has come young man.”

“I’m curious about one thing before you start. Did you ever transfer into a female body? Half the winners of the Thaddeus Cup are young women, after all.”

“It would look odd if they weren’t, but, no, I transfer only to boys. You must remember I was born in 1842. I try to keep up with the times, but I’m a little old-fashioned in some ways. Changing gender is still a bit too radical for me.”

“I suspected you’d feel that way.”

“Any other questions, young man?”

“Just one. I see the jug on the table. Why do you think corn whiskey has anything to do with your ability?” asked Eugene.

“I’m not sure it does, but then again I’m not sure it doesn’t. I drank it the first time I transferred, so I do again whenever the time comes. Anything else?”

“No.”

“Good. Will you look into my eyes? I don’t actually need you to co-operate, but it will be easier on both of us if you do.”

“I’ll look at you.”

“Excellent. You surprise me, but excellent. First, to your health,” said Headmaster Kraal as he poured himself, a cup of corn whiskey. He swigged.

“I’m afraid this one is not to your health,” Kraal said as he removed one of two carafes from a shelf and poured the contents into a glass. He drank.

“Poison?” Eugene asked.

“Poison.”

“I’m pleased.”

“I know what you’re thinking, young man. You’re hoping to resist me until I die. No one ever has succeeded in resisting me, but, just in case, I have an antidote. Now look into my eyes.”

“Yes, sir.”

They stared at each other. The headmaster’s grin turned to a frown. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. He broke away and grabbed the second carafe. He poured a glassful and drank from a shaky hand.

“I can’t imagine what went wrong,” Kraal said. “It’s always worked before. I’m glad I took precautions.”

Eugene pulled a loose brick from the wall and removed a key from the space. He unlocked his cell door and exited into the larger room. “I was 99% sure it was you, Thaddeus,” Eugene said, “but it was at least possible you were just some old pervert, so I want to thank you for eliminating any doubt. I’ve always known the cellar was here. You installed a secret entrance to it when you remodeled the farmhouse, of course, but that didn’t take long to find. It didn’t take long to find the key to this cell behind that loose brick over there, either.”

“Who are you?”

“Francine Renard, Victor’s sister. I was the little girl you saw. Because I’m younger and more modern than you, I’m not as stuffily old-fashioned about sticking with the same sex: I was born in 1853 not 1842. The talent for transferring consciousness belonged to Victor, not to you, Thaddeus. It runs in our family, and it has nothing to do with corn whiskey. Victor switched bodies when he saw you were about to kill him. He didn’t expect your old body to collapse and die before he could throw away the gun and switch back. It seems you acquired his talent when you found yourself in Victor’s body, and it has stayed with you through later transfers the same way it does with us – with my family. I couldn’t bring myself to kill you while you were in Victor’s body, and I didn’t know if you could transfer again, but the possibility has nagged at me, so I finally came back to check. I can block your ability, as you see.”

“I do see, said Kraal. “Well, what is it you want?”

“I already have what I want. I took samples from those carafes the same time I found the key. I had them tested. I came back and left the poison as it was, but I spilled the antidote and replaced it with cheap wine. Oh, I found the gold, too. It’s buried in the corner.”

The headmaster leapt for the circular stairway leading to his office, but his legs failed him. He dropped to his knees and began to crawl up the treads.

“You won’t make it, Thaddeus.”

At the top of the stairs, the headmaster pushed open the oak panel behind his office desk. He crawled out onto the floor. He heard Eugene climbing the steps behind him.

“If you are trying to get to the extra antidote in your desk, I replaced that, too,” said Eugene. “But thanks for crawling up here by yourself and saving me the trouble of dragging you up afterward.”

The headmaster rolled on his back and his breaths came hard. Eugene stood over him.

“Thank you for the seat on the Board of Trustees, by the way, Thaddeus. I think I’ll be headmaster here one day as you suggest – or probably headmistress by then. It’s time this estate reverted to the Renard family.”

Through the Looking Glasses

Jerry heard a drone pass overhead as he waited amid the bushes for the others to show. It probably belonged to the municipality or the county. The State Police drones flew mostly over highways, shorelines, and waterways. Its infrared sensors would be able to pick him out through the leaf cover, but his clothing selectively leaked heat in a patchwork that broke up the human form. Jerry had doubts when he placed the online order for them from the manufacturer in Pakistan, but they worked as advertised. The drone wouldn’t be able to distinguish him from other animals in the park, and the woods were full of deer and coyotes, as well as smaller animals.

Suburban coyotes were shy of people, but thinking about them made him uneasy. A snort from behind startled Jerry. He turned fearfully, expecting to see coyote teeth. He saw nothing. He turned up the infrared setting on his Virtiglasses. A doe’s image shone through a nearby bush. She snorted again and stamped a front hoof at him. Jerry ignored her. The doe decided not to pursue the confrontation. She withdrew.

A raccoon ran across the bicycle path a few meters in front of him. The bike path ran the length of a “linear park,” a leafy corridor for hikers and bicyclists that stretched across the county. It connected the upscale and suburban Shropshire Hills with Oxburg, which, despite the bovine quality of its name, was a large town and the county seat.

The others were late. It wasn’t “The Clique” to be late on “Game Night.” Jerry was one of The Clique, or so they told him, but he always felt they were humoring him by saying so. For all that, Game Night couldn’t happen without him. He was the one with the skills to overcome the electronic tracking and surveillance endemic in the modern world. In truth, they weren’t difficult skills to learn: revolutionary groups posted the techniques on their internet sites. Jerry didn’t mention this to the others, and they apparently were too lazy to research the matter on their own. Game Nights kept him close to Susan, so it would be foolish to let the others know he was dispensable.

It all had started as a bet. Carter and Susan had been playing World of Mayhem. In a dark room the graphics on Virtiglasses are utterly convincing, but, as in any VR game, the knowledge that it is a simulation limits the excitement and fear a player can experience. Susan remarked casually that it would be fun to experience real mayhem for once, but that nowadays every action was recorded by somebody. They would be sure to get caught. It is probable that Susan wasn’t really serious, but Carter bet her there was a way to beat the surveillance. Susan told him to prove it.

Jerry had been surprised when Carter spoke to him between classes the next day at Shropshire Hills HS. Carter was was tall, good-looking, arrogant, popular with the girls. In short, he was what Jerry was not. He didn’t normally interact with Jerry except sometimes to tell him to get out of the way in the hall.

“Dude!” Carter liked obsolete slang. Besides, Carter probly didn’t remember Jerry’s name. “You’re a techie. Answer me this. Purely hypothetically…” He posed the question to Jerry if a gang could go on repeated spree muggings and not be identified despite all the electronic traces people leave in the current day. He explained about the bet with Susan.

“So, you and Susan…?” Jerry asked. He always had been attracted to Susan, even though she often acted high.

“Her, me, maybe some others. Maybe you, too,” Carter said.

“No, I don’t mean who would be the hypothetical gang members. I mean are you and Susan together?”

“Together? Dude! Who thinks like that anymore? If you want to play with her, play with her,” Carter laughed. “Get your mind back on the bet.”

 “Let me look into it. I’ll get back.”

“You do that. And I’ll put in a good word for you with Susan.”

It was easier than Jerry had anticipated. He found most of the links he needed on the websites of subversive organizations. They connected him to sites where he learned how to rout connections through illegal overseas servers that would generate false GPS readings for Virtiglasses, block most digital signals from nearby transmitters, and even tap into police communications. Whatever couldn’t be done with Virtiglasses could be done with affordable handheld devices that would fit in a pocket. A simpleton could do it.

He met with Carter, Susan, Ryan, Jose, and Leila after school where Susan lived with her mother the gated community Shropshire Commons.

“Hey, Dude. This is The Clique,” said Carter.

“The Clique?”

“Hey, if the police go looking for a badass gang, are they going to bother with a group called The Clique? It sounds like a sewing club.”

“I see your point.”

“So, what have you got?” Carter asked.

Leaving out any mention of simpletons Jerry explained that it was possible to turn electronic surveillance to their advantage by creating false readings. Infrared could be beaten with the right clothing. They could take the bike path to Oxburg, thereby avoiding street cameras and drones. They could go on a mugging spree near the edge of the park, and then get away clean. Their Virtiglass records would show them to have been home surfing entertainment websites.

“Great! I knew you could do it. Do whatever you need to do. Order whatever we need. I’ll transfer money to you to cover your expenses. Next Friday is Game Night. We do it,” Carter said.

“Um. Go out? It was just an imaginary exercise.”

“Oh, come on, Dude. It’s just a game. We’re not really going to hurt anybody. It’s just to see if we can do it. We’ll raise a little ruckus and come right home.”

“I’d like to go, Jerry,” said Susan.

Maybe Carter had put in a good word for him. Even though Carter called him nothing but “Dude,” she knew his real name. Despite having shared classes with her for three years, he hadn’t been sure she did.

“I can be very appreciative,” she added.

That did it. “OK,” said Jerry. “So long as we’re not actually going to mug people.”

But that is precisely what they did. The attack of The Clique on an Oxburg couple passing the park on a nighttime walk was brutal. It was done directly beneath a camera, but Jerry scrambled its signal with one of his devices. Jerry held back and watched until Susan pulled him forward into the action. By that time, both victims were on the ground, either unconscious or feigning to be so.

“You, too, so we know we can trust you,” Susan said. As Leila kicked the face of the woman. Jerry forced himself lightly to kick the side of the man lying in front of him.

“Again. Harder,” Susan prodded.

He kicked again harder. And again.

On the walk back to Shropshire Hills Jerry felt sick, less by the violence itself than by the fact that that by the end, he had been enjoying kicking the victim. Susan was elated. She jabbered incessantly about how awesome it all was. She was high on more than just the night’s events. Jerry didn’t know what, but he had seen her swallow pills of some kind. Susan went home with Jerry that night. It was the first time they “bounced” as Susan described it. It wasn’t the last. Jerry’s mom was out that night,  but might not have minded his overnight company. He never had brought a girl home before, so he didn’t know.

“The only thing as good as drugs is sex,” Susan said as they lay together, “and even that isn’t any good unless you’re high.”

Jerry didn’t agree, but he was not about to argue with anything that put Susan into his bed.

Game Nights put her there, too, so he did not object when the became a regular activity of The Clique. They changed targets and routes often enough to avoid being caught by an old-fashioned police stake-out of high crime location.

Jerry was getting concerned. How long was he supposed to sit in these bushes? The rules called for no phone calls.

An alert flashed on Jerry’s overseas e-mail account. The message was from Carter. “Tonight is off,” it read. “Get over to Susan’s pronto.”

He couldn’t call Carter to ask what was going on and there was no telling how long he would take to respond to a return e mail. Jerry brushed past the bushes and briskly walked along the bicycle path toward Willard Road and the main gate to the Shropshire Commons. He decided it was best to go through the gate risk anyone seeing him going over the wall – their usual route on a Game Night.

“Some trouble tonight, son,” said the guard when he reached the gate. The patch on the man’s shirt pocket read “Charley.” Charley was a puffy middle-aged man who always seemed mildly intoxicated.

“What trouble?” Jerry asked.

“Just stay out of everyone’s way.”

“OK.” Jerry figured that meant the guard didn’t know clearly what the trouble was either.

The guard had seen Jerry before and waved him through without asking him to sign in. The guardhouse camera and his Virtiglasses recorded the entry anyway. Jerry chose not to jam either.

The homes inside the gate were pricey but they all looked too much alike for Jerry’s taste. All had exteriors of grey stone and natural stained cedar, a conformity he assumed was demanded by the homeowners’ association. He saw Carter walking toward him on the sidewalk. He wasn’t wearing the anti-infrared clothing required for Game Night.

“Are you recording?” Carter asked when he reached him.

“No.”

“Good. Don’t. The police will be coming soon. Head on over to Susan’s. I’m going home.”

“What’s going on?”

“Something happened to her mom.”

Jerry hacked into the police communications as he walked. He hadn’t mentioned this ability to Carter or even to Susan. He wasn’t sure why he held the information back, but he did. The state police had pretty good cyber-security and he never had cracked their signals, but the local Shropshire Hills PD had defenses so trivial a child could breach them. He scanned the com-links until he found the right one. Officer Rene Reis was on Willard Roadapproaching the Commons in her patrol car. He kept her Virtiglass perspective on heads-up display.

Officer Rene Reis’ Virtiglasses instructed her to turn left in 100 meters. She had patrolled the town of Shropshire Hills nearly every day for the past five years, so she didn’t really need the directions, but she kept the GPS function on out of habit. She turned into the entrance of the Commons.

“Hi Charley,” Reis said. She could see the flickering of old-fashioned LED monitors inside the guardhouse office. Charley raised the gate and waved her in.

She passed a teenage young man walking along the sidewalk from the sidewalk. He wore wearing peculiar dark clothing. Reis’ GPS directed her to 18 Roland Drive. A dozen people, most of them teens stood in the driveway. She parked in front of the property on the road.

Reis exited her car. “Excuse me. Is one of you Miss Riley?”

“I’m Susan Riley,” said a dark-haired, pretty, but unkempt young woman.

Even seen remotely through Reis’ glasses, Susan stirred Jerry’s teenage libido. He doubled his pace.

Susan’s driver’s license appeared in Reis’ heads-up display. Despite the obstruction of the girl’s tinted Virtiglasses, Susan was plainly the girl in the license picture. The 17-year-old’s rap sheet popped up. A few minor traffic violations appeared, but otherwise the girl was clean. A chemical analysis of the air near Susan’s breath, however, revealed a 70% probability of marijuana and a 50% probability of an opiate cognate, probably prescription painkillers. Courts did not allow these Virtiglass air samples as evidence – yet. Reis followed a link to additional data and found that Susan’s father, who in nearby Oxburg and worked at the Martinez Garage, was two months behind on his child support payments.

“You placed the 911?” Reis asked.

Susan nodded.

“Is anyone in the house?”

“Yeah, my mom” Susan answered with sarcasm.

“Anyone else?”

She shook her head no.

Reis entered the house and closed the door behind her. Inside the foyer, Ms. Fossert-Riley lay on the floor in her blue business suit. There was bruising on her throat. From the position of her head, her neck appeared broken. Reis looked back toward the door. The security control pad by the front door shone green.

Jerry was appalled by the images he was receiving. Susan’s mom was a bit stuffy, but always had been polite to him. Susan had argued with her in his presence more than once, but, as far as Jerry knew, their relationship was no rockier than that of most teenage girls with their mothers. Something about the green security pad bothered him. Had Susan calmly punched in the security code despite the scene in front of her? Or did someone else know the code?

Jerry arrived at 18 Roland. Susan saw him, but motioned to him to hang back. Two unmarked cars abruptly screeched to a halt in front of the house.

Kayla Mendez, Shropshire Hills police chief exited one, and two men in suits exited the other. Jerry guessed they were County Detectives. All strode to the front door. Jerry remotely watched the door fling open from Reis’ perspective.

“Is anyone in the house, Reis?” asked Mendez.

“I haven’t gone through it, but the girl, Susan, says no.”

“We’ll interview witnesses,” Mendez said officiously, apparently to emphasize her status to the County men.

“Yes, Chief.”

“Did anyone go in or out since you arrived?” Mendez asked.

“No.”

“Then we’ll take over.”

Jerry waited until Reis was back in her car before approaching Susan.

“Susan, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. It’s horrible.”

“Not now!” she barked at him, loudly enough to turn some heads. Then she added quietly, “We’ll talk later.” Then she shoved him and said loudly, “Go!”

Confused, Jerry walked away. He returned his attention to Reis’ glasses.

“Did you see anything?” Reis asked the guard, ignoring her Chief’s instruction about witnesses.

“Nothing unusual. I already uploaded the gate vids for the detectives.”

“What about vids of 18 Roland?”

“There aren’t any. All the security cams are at the gate and on the perimeter walls. The Association voted to remove the ones inside the walls for privacy reasons, because lawyers kept demanding access to them in divorce cases – you know, trying to catch cheaters on camera.”

“I see. So, once inside the walls, someone could avoid being recorded?”

“Well, yes, in principle, if you are lucky. But with everyone Virtiglassed these days, there’s a big risk someone will record you,” Charley said

“Is there? If you look like you belong here, maybe no one would bother. Half the time when I come in here there is no one at all on the street or sidewalk. Charley, if you wanted to sneak in here, where would you do it?”

“Well, it’s a neighborhood, not a fortress. You can get over the wall almost anywhere. The south wall borders the park, so that’s the most logical place. I might not see you doing it if I’m not looking at the right monitor at the right moment, but there will be a record of you from the wall cameras.”

“You know, Charley, people place too much trust in technology. Maybe there are blind spots. Maintain a phone link with me while I check the walls.”

“Yes, OK.”

Reis drove out of the gate and parked next to the bike path at the point were it met Willard Road.

The Commons south wall was several meters from the path and paralleled it. She got out of the car and trudged along the south wall on foot, turning up her night vision for the dark. The cameras on the wall were clearly visible, presumably as a deterrent. She had traveled no more than a hundred meters when she pushed through some bushes and stumbled upon a stepladder. “M.G.” was painted on it.

“Martinez Garage?” Jerry wondered aloud while remote-viewing. This was the place at the wall he, Susan, and the others would climb over, but he never had seen this stepladder before.

Reis tapped her glasses. “Charley, this is officer Reis,” she said.

“I hear you,” said the voice from her glasses.

“Do you see me on any of your monitors? I’m at the south wall.”

Almost a full minute passed before Charley answered. “No.”

“We’ve found our blind spot.”

Jerry broke his connection with Reis and headed home.

The house was empty when Jerry arrived. His mom was out with “the girls.” If she came home at all before morning she surely would be drunk. The odds were that she wouldn’t come home – not on a Friday. She’d find company at one of the clubs she and her friends haunted. He wondered how he had turned out so socially awkward with such an outgoing mother. His father lived on the West Coast, so he wasn’t much of an influence one way or the other.

Jerry lay in bed and awaited a phone call from Susan. When it came, it was not what he expected.

“They arrested my dad,” she said.

“Oh, sorry.”

Susan said she wanted to make a drug run without registering a withdrawal from an ATM. In other words, she wanted to borrow money from him.

“Do you really want to do this tonight?” he asked. “The police might be keeping an eye on you.”

“No, they already took the body away and they don’t think I did it,” she said. “I’m 18 so there are no social services involved. So tonight is a perfect night. You know what goes well with a good buzz?” she asked.

It was a clear hint that there would be lovemaking if he accommodated her. She was manipulating him heavy-handedly, but Jerry acceded anyway. “Yeah, OK.”

“Don’t worry, hon,” she added. “I’m going to inherit my mom’s estate soon, and I won’t have to bug you for money then.”

Twenty minutes later they were in Oxburg, with Jerry at the wheel of Susan’s car.

“Pull in there.” She pointed at a dark row of covered parking under an overhang of a run-down apartment building.   Susan knew all the blind spots from cameras and drones where the drug dealers conducted business. Jerry pulled into an open parking space. He felt way too vulnerable, but then he always did on these runs.

Jerry couldn’t mention the stepladder with the “M.S.” marking without revealing his police hacking. He simply asked, “Think he did it?”

She shrugged. “My dad? How should I know?”

A man approached in a hooded grey coat. Susan opened the window 30 centimeters and handed the man Jerry’s cash. The underground economy was probably the only reason physical cash still existed, Jerry reflected. Neither buyers nor sellers wanted to give up on it entirely and they had enough political clout to keep it in circulation. The dealer dropped something into her palm. She closed the window.

“OK, pull out of here and just drive around,” Susan instructed.

“What did you buy tonight?” Jerry asked.

“Why, do you want to try it?”

“No.”

“It’s something new.”

Whatever it was, she smoked the same way as crack. She held a lighter to a tiny bronze pipe and inhaled. The air in the car suddenly smelled like burnt plastic.

“Whoo! You’re crazy not trying this,” she said.

She reached to the dashboard and turned up the air conditioner full blast.

“It’s sweltering in here!”

It wasn’t. Jerry hated these smoking drives of hers, but he knew that when she ran out (barring a demand for a second buy) they would end up in his bed.

It was Carter who had suggested that The Clique keep a low profile and cancel Game Night for a while after the murder. Jerry agreed readily, but an unanticipated side effect was that his nights with Susan were on hold, too. Since the night of her mom’s murder she hadn’t been with him once. It wasn’t for a lack of invitations from him.

Yet, despite the low profile, Officer Reis had asked to speak to him in the school library during regular school hours. He wondered if she had found out about his hacking somehow. As he hesitated outside the library door, he pinged Susan on her glasses.

Everyone wore glasses in school. The textbooks were downloaded onto them. Schools had given up on tests since answers to questions could be called up on the glasses almost instantly. Classes were no more than lectures and reading, which didn’t require a physical presence in school at all, but the teachers’ lobby was too powerful to allow their jobs to be undercut that way. Parents preferred physical schools, too, as someplace to dump their kids during the day.

Susan answered the ping, “What?”

“I thought you should know that a local cop wants to talk to me.”

“I know. She wants to talk to all of us,” Susan answered impatiently. “Wait for us.”

Almost immediately after she said this, she turned onto the hallway from a side corridor and approached Jerry.

 “What do you think she wants?” he asked. “If it’s about your mom, why does she want to speak to the rest of us here?”

“I really don’t know.” She nodded to the other members of The Clique who had entered the hallway. Two of them, Jose and Leila, were stoners and the walked as though high. They were having a public tiff because Jose had live-streamed Leila giving him a special favor. She posted on FaceGlass that she would have made herself up better had she known. Ryan Cruz was at Carter’s side, as usual. Ryan was beefy, silent, and menacing. Jerry sometimes wondered if there was anything physical between the two. If so, they never posted anything about it. Jerry couldn’t explain why Carter always was the leader. He just had charisma. He assumed command and others let him assume.

“You think it’s about… you know… Games?” Jerry asked.

“I don’t know,” said Carter. Expressing Jerry’s own fears, he flicked a finger on Jerry’s Virtiglasses and said, “Maybe you didn’t cover your tracks as well with those as you said you did. Let’s see what she wants.”

“Why are you smiling?” Jerry asked.

“I’m fascinated,” he said.

Carter opened the door and The Clique filed inside.

The library was an inspired location for privacy. No one went in here anymore unless their glasses were broken and they needed to use a computer. Officer Reis sat at a long table. No other chairs were on her side of the table but six were lined up opposite her. A metallic case lay on the table in front of her. She was un-spectacled. It was almost as disconcerting as if she hadn’t been wearing a shirt.

“Sit down,” Reis said. “Do me a favor, put all your glasses in this.” She slid forward a steel case wit a small blinking box attached. Her own Virtiglasses already were inside.

“Suppose I refuse,” Carter asked.

“Then you can leave and you won’t learn first-hand what this is about. I suspect you’ll stay if only to be certain what your compatriots say to me.”

“Are you recording this or transmitting?” Carter asked.

“No.”

“How do I know you aren’t?”

“You mean, how do you know I’m not lying? You don’t, but I’m not. This case blocks the signal to and from the glasses. It is specifically designed to do it.”

“Are you sure it works?”

“If it doesn’t, you can complain to the manufacturer.”

Carter smirked and dropped his glasses in the case. The others followed. They sat down at the table. Reis snapped the lid shut.

Jerry felt oddly disconnected, and it seemed as though his senses were numbed. He wondered if the next generation, who wore Virtiglasses in preschool, would be able to function at all without the devices.

Reis addressed Carter. “Mr. Delacroix… may I call you Carter?”

“May I call you Rene?”

“No.”

“Too bad. You can call me Carter anyway.”

“Carter, your Faceglass page links to an interesting manifesto.”

“I’m flattered. That is an obscure link in the ‘interests’ portion of the Profile. I wrote it a few years ago when I was a kid. I never took it down. Maybe I should, but I forgot all about it, to tell the truth. Did you enjoy it?”

“No, there is nothing new in it. It’s just warmed-over Nietzsche.”

“Well, like I said, I was a kid.”

“Do you still agree with it?”

“What part?”

“The part about morality being an arbitrary set of rules invented by rulers to keep the ruled in line and themselves in power. That free and superior people need not pay them any mind – except as a practical measure to avoid punishment.”

“Yes, don’t you?”

“So, what keeps you and your friends here from, oh, say, mugging and thieving and murdering?” Reis asked.

“Once again, you flatter me,” said Carter. “Your question implies that we are all superior people. Well, positing that we are just for the sake of argument, though it is debatable for some of us at least, we refrain from such things as a practical measure to avoid punishment. Also, superior people have better things to do.”

“Did the Oxburg muggings end because you found better things to do?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I think you know.” 

Susan interrupted. “I thought this was about my mother.”

“Oh, it is.”

“What is happening with the charges against my father?” Susan asked.

“They’ve been dropped. He had a point when he argued that the evidence against him was so convenient he’d have to be an idiot to leave it behind. We couldn’t rule out the possibility that he is an idiot, of course, but the whole set-up gave us pause from the start. He has witnesses placing him in the garage at the critical time. It’s true that witnesses are often mistaken about times, but their depositions complicated our case. The GPS record of your father’s glasses were of no help because he doesn’t wear them in the garage and could have left them behind to record a false location. Besides… Carter, I’ll ask you this question. In what way is person with good hearing more vulnerable than a deaf person?”

“He can be distracted or even disabled by a loud noise,” Carter responded instantly.

“Precisely,” said Reis. “All of our new surveillance techniques are a new sense that makes us vulnerable to people who know how to disrupt them. For example, did you know that Virtiglasses can record false locations by routing them through special illegal foreign servers?”

“My dad is good with car engines, but not the IT stuff,” Susan said.

“No, he it appears that he isn’t.” said Reis while peering at Jerry. Jerry shifted in his seat.

“What’s more, you can buy clothes that will defeat the infrared sensors of drones – clothes rather like the attire worn by a young man I passed while en route to Miss Riley’s house the night of the murder. Those aren’t illegal to buy or wear, of course.”

“Do you have an accusation to make, Officer,” Carter asked, “or are you just here to make insinuations?”

 “Let me finish my insinuations. I believe that Susan’s father, Mr. Riley, had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder and that the stepladder was a plant. I believe the sociopathic Carter here has headed a gang of sweet suburban kids for whom video game violence just didn’t cut it any more. No, you all wanted to experience the real thing – and to experience getting away with it. Then, to experience the ultimate thrill, one of you strangled Susan’s mom because she was threatening to send Susan to rehab – yes, we know about that, Susan. I believe that not only did you frame Susan’s father, you gave motive and clues pointing to Jerry. That’s right, Jerry, your friends told us about your special relationship with Susan and how you her mother objected to you. I suspect that if things got too hot, you might have committed ‘suicide’ and left a detailed note blaming yourself for everything.”

“This is slander, Officer,” said Carter coolly.

“Sue me. We can discuss it in open court.”

“No need. We’re all friends here. They know the real truth.”

“My guess is that only three of you do, but maybe five.”

Leila and Jose, who had been silent through the meeting, glanced at each other and looked as though they really needed some weed.

“Here’s the part that really makes me sick,” said Reis. “I can’t prove any of this. The Chief and the detectives think the whole idea is far-fetched and that we never could get an indictment, much less a conviction.”

“Well, they’re talking sense. So why are you bothering talking to us?” Carter asked, genuinely curious.

“To prevent crime. It’s my job, and if I can’t arrest those responsible for past crimes I at least can stop them from committing new ones. Besides, it may save Jerry’s life, not that he deserves it. I’m watching all of you, and I’ve at least planted seeds of doubt about you in the Department. I hate it that you got away with murder, but I want to make it very clear you won’t get away with another one.”

“You are mistaken about all this, Officer,” said Carter. “I’m sorry for you. It must be horrible to have such delusions. I’m so sorry for you that I won’t even sue you. But, if it makes you feel better, muggings are kids’ stuff. If anyone in this school ever has done such a thing, I’m sure it was a passing phase. There are bigger and better opportunities.”

“Such as?”

“Well, such as one I’m presently pursuing. I’m anticipating a career in politics. I’m eligible to run for town council this year. Those elections have miniscule turnout, so with a little help from my friends, I’m pretty sure I’ll win in the fall. Just a first step, you understand.”

“I do indeed.”

Reis opened the box and let the students retrieve their glasses. As they filed out the door, she felt gratitude that there were 17 years before Carter was age-qualified for the land’s highest office.