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I. A COUNTRY CALLED WOE
Minutes past midnight, rain descends upon Portofiro in sheets; the inaugural shower of several more to visit that day during the height of the rainy season. Weekend carousers head indoors and all jubilation is suppressed by a drone of murmuring water. Within an hour, thunder drags its ragged voice across the sky.
Roused by the weather, a woman stirs in bed. She is ever alert and her sleep is also light and easily broken. Someday this conditioned sensitivity will save her life. Tonight it merely deprives her of rest.
Thunder peals like distant warfare. The woman rises with effortless exactitude—all evidence of deep rest shirked—and draws a robe around her body before heading into the kitchenette to fill an iron kettle with tap water. She strikes a match, ignites the stovetop burner, and watches the flame steadily devour the stick. When sharp heat grazes her fingertips, she flicks the match into the sink and its little light goes out.
A chamomile aroma fills her nose as she retreats, with her ceramic cup, into a chair beside a window overlooking an avenue of the Housing Campaign. She nudges back a corner of the beige curtain to see streams of water writhing over the glass like serpents. Much of the massive housing complex is roofed, but there are gaps in the architecture that lend access to the sky at the top of long shafts of space between buildings, spanned by jungles of electrical wiring. The next block over remains bone-dry but for the sputtering of gutters and drainpipes.
Everything beyond the window is dyed in warm sodium-lamp amber: occasional passersby beneath umbrellas hurrying into shelter, a neighbor’s wilted potted plants on the balcony, the graffiti-clad postboxes. Rain seems to boil on the surface of the street. The thunder hushes into low mumbles over the teeth of a dark and distant mountain range.
The woman sips her tea and runs fingers through her brown hair to tame its muss. Keen hazel eyes catch and hold fast to an irregular person jogging into the cover of an awning. No umbrella, no hood. Pale limp hair, drenched by the rain, frames a pale and weary face. An opaque rust-colored raincoat gives off glances of translucence wherever droplets have beaded off. She fits a cigarette between her lips, lights it behind a shielding hand that shakes ever so slightly. A flicker of relief breaks through the drawn-out pain that overcasts her expression, but she is no less hollow, no less a ghost cursed with flesh.
CASCADE.
The observer’s heart skips a beat. Thrill and curiosity in equivalent dosage flood her veins as she watches the rival operant draw languidly from the cigarette as though it were the only nostrum for some unseen affliction.
CASCADE. Raw and recent memories seep in, unbidden but welcome. Seeing her drenched again returns to mind an eidetic visual of her unconscious body half-sunken in foul water. Rolled over by the toe of a boot, head lolling forward and back once lifted by the arms into recline. For a tall woman she is remarkably light, as though she were missing fundamental particles of existence from her material collective. Could such an ailment be infectious? Perhaps simply by touching her, one is made lesser than what they were. A tantalizing thought.
Tied to a steel chair, her jaw opens at the gentle prying of handkerchief-wrapped fingers. Her lips enclose them, knowing not the small tragedy of the unfelt caress they give. A hand rests behind her head, sometimes cradling, sometimes anchored harshly in her hair to angle her this way and that.
That face… wan and foreign, sullen and grievous, yet radiant with ineffable gravitas. Like a solemn ambassador from a country called Woe. Like the weeping sculptures of saints fashioned by the monotheists.
A present development brings the observer out of reverie. CASCADE has slid her right hand inside her coat. Something with weight bulges there. Her hand shifts, manipulates it, and the subtle gesture betrays the nature of her possession. Safety: off, it telegraphs to eyes inured to such motions. She’s armed. The hand stays rigid in the coat pocket.
The woman known as Zoe is at once relegated to the backstage of her psyche, and the agent known as SILHOUETTE steps forward into the spotlight. She leaves the chair, sets her teacup down on the first table en route to her bedroom. In the darkness she nearly trips over a child’s toy accidentally left behind by its owner: a lump of articulated plastic in fantastical lupine shape.
With a hiss on her lips she reaches her nightstand, tugs open the lower drawer, unlatches two prongs, and presses up from beneath to release the false bottom. The wooden panel, cluttered with blank memo pads and unopened junk mail, pops up to reveal a compact revolver and a switch-deployed stiletto blade. Highly illegal contraband, procured independently. Her employer does not facilitate or espouse the ownership of deadly implements outside of work hours, so the crime is hers to own and relish.
Adrenaline induces lightheadedness, but inner discipline disables an animal urge to panic. Analytical thinking prevails. Her mind is gelid and composed, one notch above meditative.
Why has CASCADE come here? To exact revenge? That is the most plausible motive, the motive any assaulted enemy agent would harbor if given the chance. Stowing the weapons in her robe pockets, SILHOUETTE heads back to the window to ascertain CASCADE’s position.
She has migrated to the postboxes. Her collar stands up around her neck as a hopeful but inadequate obscurant. CASCADE shimmies a screwdriver along each door in concert with a pick stuck in the lock, popping boxes open for her to raid. She scans the correspondences, sender and addressee. She slices open a few victims, plundering their secrets. So goes her operation on several postboxes in flagrant prosecutable violation of the law. And then she pauses upon reading something of consequence. It is a dire pause, charged with omen. She folds and pockets the letter, shuts the postboxes, and casts a glance over her shoulder before slinking away.
CASCADE’s guarded posture relaxes. She has obtained what she sought and has transitioned to off-duty loitering. Upon returning to the awning’s shelter, CASCADE leans against a wall and closes her eyes. A curtain of rain pours from the awning’s brim in thin waterfalls, rippling the sight of her. Three minutes pass. She opens her eyes and, with strange wistfulness, aims an insomniac gaze in SILHOUETTE’s precise direction.
The watcher from the apartment suddenly retreats from the window and lets the curtain flutter back into place.
Did she see me?
No. All the rain and haze make for ample interference. Inside SILHOUETTE’s pocket, she thumbs back the hammer of her compact revolver with a soft click and steps forward, straining to see shapes and color through the thin curtain, but she can discern very little.
The question: How does she know? And the answer: She has been here before. I wasn’t home.
But how did she find her? CASCADE’s sources of intelligence must have been dangerously competent, which was surprising and unlikely given that she hails from the Superbloc of all regions. Remnants of a bygone world, antiquated in habit and culture, and willfully impoverished. A whole society borne of a delusion. Whereas EMTERR’s grimoires identify delusions as the interphase of emergent private capital, and wields them lucratively, the People’s Republics prop up their economies on hostile redistributions, vibes, and fungible dreams. It’s a miracle that they can even afford to purchase tickets of transit for operants commissioned abroad.
The more she mulls the situation, the more SILHOUETTE is convinced that the Opera did not assist CASCADE in locating her. She was led here by her own initiative. The same initiative that brought her to the doorstep of the magazine office, brimming with naive questions interspersed with piercing ones that sent chills down SILHOUETTE’s spine.
Within a minute she has wandered back into memory to dwell on the salacious defiance CASCADE leveraged from the interrogation chair. Even with an echo of agony twitching through every muscle in her body, the operant lifted her sweat-slick face, eyes alight with exhilaration. Her snarl faded when she drew her bottom lip between her teeth and shivered.
Such vulgar promises and sweet invitations she gave. In a rasp: “Unbutton your blouse. Just one, two down… You’d look more intimidating that way.”
Lips pouted to kiss the air. Kisses meant for her tormentor.
SILHOUETTE tapped her red pen against the palm of her hand in implied threat as she weighed the request. Nonchalant, she unfastened the top button of her blouse to expose a sliver of milky skin, far too high on her chest to constitute a scandal.
“Are you intimidated?”
Liquid cogs of imagination turned behind CASCADE’s eyes—dim with lust—as she ogled the tiny concession as though it were a pinhole of pure light come to illuminate the basement. She was rendered dumb and speechless over that hanging moment until pain crashed through her body.
As soon as she stopped shaking and gasping, CASCADE hummed a single note and said, “I knew you’d be pretty. I’m never wrong about these thi—”
Pain seized her again.
She behaved as though they had together discovered or alchemized a rare intoxicant where most people would only find suffering. SILHOUETTE had once read that her favored technique of interrogation coincided with certain medical therapies, but the overlap was conjectural. Yet she could not help but cant her head in burning fascination.
How vacuous must a person become to be immunized from suffering? There was something immense and daunting about CASCADE’s wild disposition. Behind her smoldering glower lurked a transcendent nothingness, a void in which the seed of universal potentiality was cradled.
Despite their power differential, bewilderment had struck SILHOUETTE. Warmth came to her body; first kindling in her face, it spread to her breast, then settled deep between her thighs. As it does now, in the present.
Have you come to kill me, ma lapinette? she thinks. Is the memory of me seared so deeply in you that you cannot resist an encore? Or have you come to sate more personal vices? I would let you in. If you’re looking for a fight, we’ll fight, and we’ll bleed. Otherwise… whisper a few more vulgar things to my ear and I just might tie you up again.
She awaits a knock on her door as a fingertip slides over a cold metal barrel. Whether violence or pleasure awaits matters not. The hot-blooded thrill of either is imminent.
But CASCADE’s knock never arrives.
II. PERPETUAL MOTION MEAT GRINDER
Manus Fati opens a new door. SILHOUETTE is tasked by her superiors to make contact with a junior negotiator and supply a vital morsel of information. One that shall close certain gaps. But there’s a hitch. It is not known if or when the junior negotiator will appear to receive the information, and time is running out. Her department needs to make a swift yet calculated move to salvage the situation.
The plan adapts, adjusts like riverwater bending around a new boulder fallen in its bed. SILHOUETTE will now make contact with CASCADE. The meeting will be a peaceful one— it is in EMTERR’s interest to see the Opera’s plans come to fruition if it can fatally destabilize the Luzian central government. If agent CASCADE can deliver a miracle, the scales may ultimately tip in EMTERR’s favor without having to trade any tangible assets of their own. Pure profit potential.
In the early evening, SILHOUETTE lightly touches perfume to her pulse points and pigments her lips with a modest application of red-burgundy, just enough to court a gaze. Her ensemble is the humble camouflage of her persona, but she leaves one blouse button undone at the top.
Tonight she is Zoe, and her rival shall be Hershel.
The little bar in Party Alley, Sombra, is marginally classier than its surrounding neighborhood. A light rain starts. It patters the ground while Zoe nurses her first woefully dull callomanic, waiting. She steals furtive glances at the dingy street where all is limned in neon and puddles shine like mirrors. People bustle by, alone, in boisterous groups, as partners linked by the hands.
From the bizarre parade emerges a familiar pale face. Hair damp and slicked back in compromise, coat glistening. A founding member of the anti-umbrella league. Communists love to self-sabotage, thinks Zoe.
Hershel sits with her. Their thighs touch while they chat. Zoe hears a thread of caution running through her voice, but there is also longing. The operant’s eyes rarely stray from her adversary’s face and chest. Zoe likes how deeply they penetrate her while being so far removed from their base. Hershel’s gaze is a rogue vector of observation, origin abandoned. Her reconnaissance is masterful, but the information to be reeled in is sometimes warped, or lost in translation by a mind too good at making connections. She is odd in the way that ingenuity is almost always touched by madness.
Whenever Hershel idly swirls her tulip glass of mezcal, Zoe can see half-healed bruises and lacerations on her wiry wrists where they were once bound. They are an aggravated reddish-brown, blotchy with purple. They are beautiful. Some will scar.
Zoe points them out with convincing sympathy. “Do they still hurt?”
“Let’s find out,” says Hershel, braceleting one wrist with the thumb and fingers of the other. She massages the wounds. A small wince fleets across her features, roused by her own doing. She meets Zoe’s eyes again, vaguely mischievous.
“Good. Let me know if you want me to refresh them. You’ve been a lovely canvas.”
“I thought you were no patron of the arts,” says Hershel. She downs her second glass.
“Aesthetics are for everyone, lapinette. I only abhor efforts to make enigmas out of everything when human-made enigmas are already in surplus. A bruise is a bruise, gorgeous in itself. Let it be just that: a tender, painful memory. Let the world be real.”
“Let the world speak for itself,” Hershel thoughtfully infers. “Let the world be visceral. Is everything other than skin and stone a lie? An illusion?”
“No,” answers Zoe, her voice placid. She refills their glasses. “Artifice is what we—especially in our line of work—should be wary of, and familiar with. Convoluted masks and labyrinths designed to obfuscate the actual.”
“What if the labyrinth delivers you to the actual? Or reveals it?”
They postulate more about artifice and personas, somewhat playfully in their half-drunk daze. Whenever their voices hush to ponder, Zoe watches Hershel fade into herself. Her attention does not diminish but it is divided and partially directed inward, where murky epiphanies swim just out of touch. She is a natural enigma, needing no contrivances like poetry to embody an object of fascination. Poetry is something that must invent itself to be valid. By contrast, when Hershel lays a hand on her thigh—massaging softly, but with firm intent and a hint of possession—the warm pulse arising between Zoe’s legs is no pretentious artifice but an inalienable gift of her flesh.
She imagines pressing her bare foot onto Hershel’s bare chest and feeling her heartbeat beneath her heel. After all the electrical abuse it endured, it would beat shallower and more uneasily than before. Chronic arrhythmia: a gift to remember her by, in every flutter and tremor. Months or years reaped from its lifespan.
How romantic. Zoe tucks a palm under her chin and smiles. She covers Hershel’s hand with her other, imprisoning it on her thigh for a while. So much better than poetry.
Her head swims pleasantly in alcohol-induced bliss. The world tidally ebbs like the ocean. The overhead canopy of neon signage blooms, vivid and glaring. When Hershel puts a black cigarette between her lips, her companion waits until she snaps the lighter shut.
“Share,” orders Zoe. “Don’t be rude.”
Hershel smiles, repressing a laugh. “Sure. Sharing is my prime vocation,” she quips. After a first drag she ignores Zoe’s hand and offers it directly to her lips, fingertips brushing her mouth with a featherlight touch. “And having is yours.”
They pass the cigarette back and forth between anecdotes and glasses of mezcal. They taunt and tease the hapless bartender. Hershel tells of countries she’s visited or lived in, and strange people she’s met. Zoe responds with her own stories, professionally censored. Humor and darkness are married in their discourse. Their flirting grows reckless as the conversation’s orbit veers toward sex, helplessly caught in its powerful gravity well.
A ceramic ashtray on the bar inters the remains of their well-loved cigarette. In Hershel’s haunted face are set two hungry eyes, dark and non-reflective of the myriad colors glazing their bodies. With them she returns Zoe’s stare and together they hold an extended moment of quiet that belies torrents of desire churning within. Her lips wear a delicate sheen. Zoe watches them minimally part to draw a silent breath.
She wants to twist a scarf made of old Portofiran silk around Hershel’s neck to choke her; see her brow upturn with acute imploring and delirium, see a hot blush engulf her face. She wants to shove her digits into her mouth and make her suck them, wants to see her cheeks hollow. She wants to sweetly ruin her beyond the reach of anyone’s salvation, assuming she is not already that far gone.
Above all else, she wants to know what depraved thoughts Hershel has about her.
What monster lies behind those abyssal eyes? They are hunting her. Zoe can see their famished gleam. The hand on her thigh shifts higher.
She wants it under her skirt. She wants her fingers inside her cunt. Two, three, even four if she can manage. She wants Hershel’s mouth on her tits and between her legs. No one has ever truly disheveled her, but the nucleus of instinct that resides below her navel believes that Hershel could. She wants her to.
Theirs would be an affair of teeth and fingernails, of goading and praise, of bindings and struggle. An equal and opposite reaction to every breath-hitching impact. Pain complexed with pleasure. Velvet sighs. The panting whine of box springs. The physical world, clashing violent and true.
Zoe kisses the air between them and asks, “What would you do to me? Dis-moi.” She spares the question as much dire secrecy as she spares exchanges of precious intel.
There is no volume of words, or time enough to say them, that could sufficiently describe the universe of desire that wheels within Hershel. As though it were a prayer verse, she answers, “Everything,” and dismay begins to unfold in Zoe’s chest as reality gives a voiceless, innately-emergent correction: Nothing.
Hershel will do nothing to her.
For what can follow everything? The worst-case scenario is not incompatibility. The worst that can befall them is satisfaction, connection, and total eagerness to meet again. If they surrendered to their instincts and rutted until dawn bared its rosy face to strewn clothes and tangled bedsheets, what was the next step? Logically, they would return to each other for more. And what after that?
Enter the spiked and fanged engine of politics, roving long-armed and wrathful over the land. Possible futures play through Zoe’s imagination like film reels in the cinema: CASCADE completes and survives her deadly mission. International relations explode. EMTERR shields their Portofiran investments from Luzian retaliation. Departments activate their agents to enter a shadowy turf war, all cloak and dagger. Battles are won in basements, boardrooms, and bars. It is EMTERR versus everyone, for the benefit of everyone.
EMTERR versus the techno-fascists who trigger global instability to astroturf their annexations as a subduing force, like a perpetual motion meat grinder. EMTERR versus the communists who blow up buildings and magnates then hand out pamphlets to civilians promising a gray utopia, but only after the entire world has been eviscerated.
SILHOUETTE versus CASCADE.
Their respective superiors would eventually learn of it. For a little while, they could both pretend that fraternization is actually infiltration. Espionage in the bedroom, secrets leaked through sweet nothings. But soon their superiors would involve themselves, and their romance would sour overnight. Trysts would become yet another workplace.
Then, at some unfortunate terminus, an order would come down to kill the other.
Just once, Zoe negotiates with herself. It is hard to resist that dreary face, that hawkish stare raking over her body.
She tells Hershel to kiss her as reward for her helpfulness. With dreamy conviction, the other woman drops her gaze to her lips, cups her chin, and leans in.
But no— just once is the litany of the damned. One does not venture into fire saying just once, expecting to return to life as it was before. Desires need not rule them. They must sense the doom that stalks from the future and remove themselves from its path. This is not the fate that she wants for either of them.
Zoe interrupts her. One slender finger is the barricade between their lips, caressed on both sides, a single breath away.
In another life is her determination.
Hershel emerges from a long pause to spare her a self-effacing glance. She wrings her hands, pausing again. When she next reunites her gaze with Zoe’s, she blows her a kiss. The gesture is affectionate, simple, and delicate. Zoe smiles ruefully and looks into the refracted light pooling at the bottom of her glass. She does not watch Hershel leave. Her thigh feels cold, deprived of its supply of intimate warmth.
Politics, the psycho-semantic connective tissue of everything human. Contrived and ubiquitous, like religion. Politics brought them together, and politics will keep them apart.
Manus Fati switches off the lights and shuts the door.
III. THE NUMINOUS FINANCIAL PLAGUE OF 96
The intermittent rains quell to three consecutive days of sporadic clouds without precipitation. Zoe keeps busy, knowing it’s good for her. Her mind is sharply honed upon things that matter.
She has learned to visit her sister during the early hours of the morning, when she is least likely to be on a call with a customer. Fresh sunlight filters through eclectic towers and foliage to gild the narrow waterway. The kids are loitering outside the houseboat, stirring the turbid water with tree branches to see what krill or litter floats to the surface of their vortices. Daypacks adorned with colorful patches are slung over their shoulders. When they spot their aunt, their faces light up and they race forward to bombard her with questions.
“Auntie Zoe!” cries her niece. “The leaves are starting to fall off the ginkyo tree in town. Have you seen it?”
She has not. She cannot show her face anywhere near the Quisach Roundabout for quite a long time.
Inside the houseboat, her sister offers her coffee and compliments the bespoke ensemble that clads Zoe today. She wears an austere executive skin: heels and hosiery, a straight knee-high skirt, a jacket of tropical wool.
“I have a luncheon at eleven,” Zoe flippantly explains. The ‘luncheon’ is actually an early dinner scheduled at three in the afternoon. Mug of black coffee in hand, she lifts a corner of the curtain to glance through the starboard window. “I’m on a mission to impress. Promotion season is upon us, and the quarter may end well on my watch. My numbers have been very good.”
The news is received with a genuine smile. “Wonderful to hear it! It sounds like several good things have come to you lately.”
Zoe’s fine brow furrows in bemusement.
“Come on, don’t play dumb. So how’d it go? With Hershel? You don’t have to spill everything, of course— I’m just excited for you.”
Her expression turns to stone. “What did she tell you?” The question is curt, abrupt.
A blink illustrates her sister’s surprise. “That it went well. Do you feel otherwise?” She sighs and insists, “She’s a sweet girl. Helpful, inquisitive, sensitive… I hope you at least gave her a fair chance. She seemed interested in you.”
“Yes, well—” Zoe looks down at her fingernails. “Compatibility is a multi-faceted aspect, and rarely an exact science. Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
Another sigh. “I suppose there’s no contesting a matter of chemistry. What scared you off?”
Several long seconds elapse. Zoe maintains great interest in her nail beds as wood creaks softly in the hull. “She’s a communist. Star-crossed would be generous.”
“I see… Oh, I’m sorry, Zoe. You really liked her, didn’t you?”
Zoe does not meet her eyes. Her countenance is glacial and remote. There is nothing to ponder. There is not even enough interpersonal establishment between her and Hershel to mourn. They had a whirlwind of a nice time and moved on like two perpendicular lines in mathematical space: fated to meet once, then never again.
Nothing stirs in her empty heart. There is nothing inside the body that rejects the soul. Knock within, hear the echo.
Qui n’avance pas, recule. Je ne regrette rien.
The past does not exist. It is not here. The past is a crypt for corpses, and every resurrection thereof is necromantic, falsehood-generative, and distortion-prone according to one’s frequency and depth of recall.
Later that day, a mid-level gathering of EMTERR Intelligence Acquisition Specialists, held at an oceanside seafood restaurant lauded by elite critics, commences. Zoe sits at a table rounded by steely-eyed data analysts, corporate espionage plants, information brokers, and fellow interro-torturers. In the private dining room, artisanal wines and shining platters of food are ceremonially arrayed on the table like a hecatomb to the unseen gods of capital.
An exquisite crystal chandelier glints overhead. Above that ceiling—and past a thin strata of pipes and insulation—is the rooftop bar. Every few minutes a low murmur of voices can be heard, accompanied by the vibration of footsteps which elicits a delicate glitter sound from the dangling crystals. At the other end of the dining room, mounted on the wall just behind where the district lead squeezes a lemon wedge over a ninety-sol fillet of swordfish, is a glossy taxidermic specimen of the very fish he feasts upon. It must weigh at least eighty kilograms.
If the bar patrons above were to coordinate and conspire, one unified simultaneous jump might transfer enough force to dislodge the chandelier and the taxidermic swordfish from their mounts, injuring or outright killing half the people in this room. An explosion of prismatic glass, shrapnel embedding in eyes and throats. The swordfish’s revenge: a cracked skull oozing pink brain matter, or a chest lanced through by a blue rostrum.
None of that will happen, but Zoe can appreciate the obvious joke to be mined from the circumstances. Something about elite hubris, and organized communities turning capital against the bourgeoisie. Hershel would have appreciated the joke. She would have laughed at it. A scrunch in the bridge of her nose, a flash of bared teeth.
She regrets the thought as soon as it comes. Zoe aims a sour glare at her glass of white wine before drinking from it.
The district lead, a well-groomed man in his late forties wearing horn-rimmed glasses, speaks of ‘next phases’. But his suitcase of poster boards show projections with a half-life of days. Maybe even hours.
Everyone in this room knows that something monumental is about to transpire. Each mind is a little envelope containing a key meant for a vault unlocked by no less than three. Some have an inkling about the date and time, some the place, some the content. But never all three at once, and not accurately. And no one will freely volunteer their information to a cooperative effort to puzzle together a clearer picture, because each thinks themself a possessor of the crucial token, and cannot bear to commit any act that might devalue it.
Among those present, only two people, by Zoe’s estimate, know of the Opera’s assassination plot. Neither will speak of it. That knowledge shall remain locked away in a conditional time capsule, to unseal only if CASCADE’s mission ultimately proves beneficial for EMTERR. And that may take weeks, if not months to chart and assess.
An information broker in an icy blue suit, with eyes like a rat’s, asks the district lead about the ineffective cultural blockade. EMTERR embarrasses itself by pouring resources into a bottomless chasm. Whispers are abound, suggesting that EMTERR will soon abandon it.
“If it is abandoned,” says the district lead, “it won’t be abandoned for nothing. No matter how weathered and perforated the blockade gets, as long as we maintain its minimum funding, we can leverage it against La Luz. That’s from the top.”
EMTERR will win the long game. It has already slithered deep into the Luzian economy like a black mold within the walls of society. With a little capitalist sorcery, currency and credit can falter. Repossessions of assets abroad, speculative market crashes, retracted subsidies, widespread insolvency… These conditions are as injurious to a nation as ballistic missile strikes, and all within the capability of EMTERR to unleash. Their wrath will take the form of a numinous plague spreading like wildfire from one financial institution to the next, the scope and mystique of which shall be recounted in the religious texts of the next epoch of human history.
If indirect violence does not prevail, EMTERR has already wooed or coerced the favor of every free leader in the Developed World this side of the Superbloc. Is a single-issue cultural blockade too milquetoast? Try international embargoes on commodities. Order and peace will be reforged, even if it must first be shattered.
At dusk, a dying sunset bleeds fiery orange hues into a prevailing lavender sky, and gulls call from the rocky coast. Zoe follows the rat-eyed man into an abandoned warehouse on the Old Docks. Deep within a rusty chamber is a suspected agent of the Weeping Eye, held on suspicion of wiretapping hotel rooms reserved for EMTERR’s negotiators. The captive is an unconscious raven-haired woman in her forties, rope-tied to a metal chair. While Zoe shrugs out of her jacket and seeks an improvised hook for it, the rat-eyed man hisses a warning. They recovered a bottle of prescription medication among the woman’s personal belongings.
“She has a heart condition,” he says, pulling a red toolbox over a steel worktable toward them. “You can’t do your usual or you might kill her. Comprenez-vous? Information is the priority.”
She remarks, “It could get bloody. Their kind are harder to break than most. Should we risk drawing that much attention?”
He opens the toolbox and extends the tiered shelves to reveal an arsenal of blades, handsaws, pliers, and blowtorches. “Stakes are too high now. Corporate wants you to do whatever it takes. Get messy, if it gets results. You have three hours to call it in.”
Zoe meets his small dark eyes and says without a flinch, “Ne t’inquiète pas. I’ll get what we need.” She briskly tugs on a pair of black latex gloves, fixes her fringe in the reflection of a compact mirror, and clocks in for overtime.
Within the first twenty minutes, Zoe deduces that the woman ranks low on the Weeping Eye hierarchy, solely based on her pain threshold. She shrieks, begs, and weeps. Although, she looks pretty with tears running down her cheeks. Her eyelashes clump with moisture and her lips are full and wet from sobbing, drawing Zoe’s gaze. But the body that bleeds before her beseeches salvation too often from the magi of fate.
Even here Zoe unwittingly draws comparisons to Hershel, that gorgeous derelict long fled of hope and mysticism. Hershel endured as well as she did because she inhabits a shell that is already broken, a vessel bound and released by its innate properties.
Pain— a force made real by the body, a force that makes the body real. And ever that millstone turns, making and unmaking people until those in deepest despair see around to the other side, where the false world is ground away to reveal pain as no different than pleasure. Both are implements for shaping, controlling, and enjoying. Two wheels on the same chariot, hurtling down the same road.
Two hours before her deadline, Zoe calls in what she’s learned. Wiretap confirmed. The captive knew not the severity of her involvement because she is not officially Weeping Eye, just a minor asset assigned a task. She is a field grunt in dangerous territory, unwise to the secrets her enemies desire most.
The voice on the other end says, “Bon travail, SILHOUETTE. Wait for transit, fifteen minutes. We’ll move her out.”
IV. DISPATCH FROM THE HYPERWORLD
Zoe returns home. The click of her heels is gritty on the streets of the Housing Campaign as she rummages through a satchel for her apartment key. The building manager, sweeping the shallow gutters, affords her an unreciprocated nod when she passes.
She freezes in place at the sight of something unusual before her front door. A small gray box sits without evident agenda or origin, triggering misgiving on reflex.
Improvised ordnance. Gift-wrapped death. Zoe does not approach but cranes to see it better.
Fixed upon the box is a label. The brand lettering is rendered in brutalist Novessa script, overlaid with tasteful cursive to recapture the recipient’s human sympathies. Her Kohilan vocabulary is robust enough to make sense of it: the package was allegedly sent by a vendor of socks. As she reads it, the words inside Zoe’s mind spontaneously don Hershel’s half-suppressed Mircean cadence and accent. It is no mystery why the box, left out in the open, has gone undisturbed for hours. In Portofiro, communist fashion is universally reviled while L-Pop reigns supreme. An actual undisguised bomb would have presented a more desirable target for porch theft.
Long hesitation keeps her away from it. Zoe steps back many paces, removes one of her shoes, and takes aim. The tossed shoe tumbles through the air and strikes the box, knocking the lid askew. Nothing happens. Now she approaches.
With careful hands, Zoe lifts the lid from the box and sees that its contents are indeed a pair of olive-gray socks. She carries the articles inside and slams the door behind her, unable to contain the little jolts of cold fury infecting her movements. The socks and their packaging hover over a waste bin— but she stops to contemplate.
She unfolds the socks. The height is mid-calf and the material is viscose. The ribbing winds tighter around the instep and sole, offering gentle support and compression. They are well-made and well-suited for a warm climate, if a bit drab in appearance. Her examination leads her to the cuffs, where she discovers words embroidered in yellow by hands more comfortable applying sutures to wounds than thread to fabric.
One sock says: MY HEART. Its mate says: HURTS.
Hershel’s message plants one foot in plainness, and the other in ambiguity, to straddle a maddening zone of doubt. Her heart chronically hurts from electrocution. Her heart hurts because a woman broke it. Which is the true reading?
Zoe recognizes what this is. This is sentimental dross. This is poetry. She dumps the socks into the waste bin and walks away.
Fifty minutes later, once she has bathed, changed into comfortable clothes, and begins mixing a second rum cocktail on the kitchenette island, Zoe’s attention drifts back to the waste bin. Shortly thereafter, the socks are in her hands again. She sits in her chair by the window, having rationalized that she as a rival spy must perform her due diligence and decipher a hidden message if one exists. She reverses the order of the socks. She peeks inside the cuffs to check if there is another message on the negative stitch.
There is nothing pertinent to their jobs here. Through intuition Zoe knows that it is a personal matter from beginning to end, forward or inverted.
MY HEART HURTS: a soft wail from afar lamenting the conditions of life. A request for sympathy. HURTS MY HEART: a sly invitation for Zoe to embrace her role as someone who has wounded Hershel in more ways than one. An undergarment as the medium lends intimacy and affection to both interpretations. Not lingerie but footwear; humor is meant.
That is the full poem. Nothing more begs her understanding.
Yet the poem, like some advanced cognito-weapon, conceives a strange sensation from the interplay between object and observer. It lives in her conscience for hours, tampering with the assembly machine mold that normally casts her thoughts in predetermined shapes. She imbibes a little more to kill and sanitize the prion-esque saboteur in her mind, but alcohol only catalyzes its activities. When she dreams that night, symbols—radio wave dispatches from the hyperworld—float through mental airspace, looking for a receiver in a perfect void.
Retour à l’expéditeur. N’habite pas à l’adresse indiquée. Refusé. Refusé.
At three in the morning, Zoe is awoken by an insight rising to the surface of her psyche. A void has quietly opened within the larger void. It is a dark, iridescent, living absence.
She is sad about Hershel.
Somewhere there is a domicile meant for them. It stands on the horizon of nothing, full of strange chambers forever left unopened.
Many hours later, a din of chatter and utensils on dishes inundates Zoe as she alone slides into a diner booth. She has narrowly arrived in time to catch the tail-end of the establishment’s lenient breakfast hours after sleeping in on her day off. She orders a cup of black coffee, buttered toast, and a side of sliced fruit.
While awaiting her food, she lights a cigarette despite having no habit for them. Outside the window at her right, yellow ginkyo leaves flutter in a carrier breeze and pool in the streets. Atop the motley skyline, the sole tree of its kind in the city sheds its golden robe to warn of the coming winter, which is news of little urgency to the inhabitants of Portofiro’s subtropical marine climate. Any season that is not a Portofiran summer is generally a mild one.
Zoe taps her cigarette over an ashtray and returns it to her lips. Her food and coffee arrives. Beneath the table and unbeknownst to all, she wears the olive-gray socks under her slacks, in the HURTS MY HEART configuration.
And I’d do it again, she thinks. She eats her late breakfast.
The morning news plays on a television hanging from a ceiling corner. The ginkyo tree has earned a spotlight. People are summiting the steep limestone steps above Party Alley to watch the annual shower of leaves.
Her eyelids, heavy with lasting drowsiness, lift at the sound of a different reporter’s voice abruptly cutting into the previous story.
BREAKING NEWS, says the ticker crawling across the screen. SHOTS FIRED AT SHRINE TO THE DEATHLESS HEROES. LA LUZ MINISTER FACUNDO REYES FEARED DEAD.
A surreal silence drapes over the diner as its patrons become privy to the news. Whispers erupt, followed by exclamations. Some dismayed, some celebratory. Zoe’s eyes are locked on the television with laser focus. The head of her cigarette grows long and ashen, forgotten in the moment. Her heartbeat gallops in her chest.
The reporter continues to speak, but it is hard to make out her voice over the rising clamor. A large bald man at the counter stands and bellows, “Shut up! Cállense todos!” He hurries to the television, turns the volume dial up to maximum, steps back, and continues to watch with his arms crossed.
“…too much confusion surrounding the scene to make sense of what has occurred just yet… aero-tram has shut down for an official investigation, stranding visitors and employees at the shrine... Multiple suspects are at large… several witnesses describe a tall, blonde female between thirty and forty years of age approaching the minister… considered armed and dangerous…”
The broadcast displays a grainy monochrome instant photo snapped by a tourist. The intended subject of the photo is a lichen-crusted shrine. But at the moment of capture, CASCADE steps into frame. She is glancing over her shoulder and the blur of her body suggests a swift stride. One hand is concealed inside her coat.
A middle-aged woman proclaims from the other side of the restaurant, “Hey, I know that borracha! She owes me veinte sol!” and neighboring tables swarm her with inquiry.
Static washes over the display in the rhythm of ocean waves breaking on a shoreline. Sound and picture warble and decay. The large bald man slaps the television’s side with his open palm to no avail. Complaints arise. The broadcast’s fidelity declines until a field of static is all that is framed within the box.
Zoe extinguishes her cigarette in the ashtray with firm, hasty smashes and leaves a few sol notes on the table. After elbowing her way through the crowds she emerges onto the street where ginkyo leaves swirl in the sky like airborne embers from a wildfire, catching on her clothes and in her hair. She enters a jog.
Run, ma lapinette, she thinks. Ma fantôme. Run as fast and as far away as you can and never let them catch you. You and I are not like the others. We thrive in what destroys them. C’est pas la mort. C’est pas la fin.
The nearest payphone is occupied by an elderly man. She intimidates him away, hangs up the handset, and deposits the required coinage before dialing a sequence of twenty numbers.
A battery of chirps hits her ear as her call is parsed and rerouted to a special EMTERR messaging system. Following a few seconds of silence, a recorded message plays in a bright male voice. It’s in code, directing EMTERR agents to remain where they are and not attempt to leave the state. The Bank is here to stay, and it needs a teller at every window.
Just off the coast of Portofiro, a decrepit fleet of septuagenarian warships sails across open water with canonry aimed at the opposite side of the strait in response to reports of burnished Luzian military vessels thundering toward the former colony. Clouds hover low and maroon above the sea, swathing the region in early twilight. Merchant and civilian vessels flee the opening theater of war at top speed, returning to port or to other island states for refuge if caught too far out.
Perchance in the mass chaos there is a vessel of dubious registry joining the exodus of ships bound for safer docks. It would sail farther than its peers, to lands with lax immigration enforcement and without treaties of extradition to La Luz or Portofiro.
She must go far. She must go to the shadow world that lies past the bleeding margin of what is real and recoverable. Far away across the red sea yonder and away from here. Away from all that she must leave behind and from all that could not be, to a place where even memory cannot follow.