Night Hawks Read online

  “No. But . . . I spent time there in childhood.”

  He gazed into her eyes. I had seen the horrors of the outer room, and knew that to be nothing compared to what Billy had to know. He could imagine things beyond my mind. But even with so much history behind him, he had a lot of heart. Sympathy softened suspicion. “And . . . this is what you want, sister? You go into this, you don’t come out, ever.”

  “I want it.” She nodded. “With all my heart.”

  “In that case . . . then, here it is.” He extended a closed fist and opened it. There were two pills in his palm, one blue, one pink.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “One for each of you. She takes the pink pill, naturally. You take the blue. Or . . . you would, if I were to give you these. But that would be against the law, wouldn’t it?”

  I stared at them, there in the hollow of his hand. “If I did . . . if we did take these, what would happen?”

  “Well, they are binary neurotoxins coupled with microsynthe antagonists.”

  “And . . . we’ll die?”

  “If you make love, yes. The microsynthes are triggered by sexual brain-wave patterns.” He managed a crooked smile and chuckled. “Literally, you’d come and go at the same time—get it?—but only with each other.”

  “Why?” Ferris asked.

  He shrugged. “More romantic that way, I guess. Don’t ask me. I don’t make this shit. I just sell it.” Billy dropped both pills in front of us.

  I picked up mine, looked at it. The echoes of sex, pain, and simulated death filled my ears. Moans. Cries. As if even more unspeakable things were happening just outside of my sight.

  Terrible.

  Ferris rolled her pill around in her hand. “We take these home?”

  Billy shook his head. “If I knew what you were talking about, which I don’t, I’d say no. They don’t leave here. Take them here, or not at all.”

  I was shaking, trembling all over. “What happens to . . .”

  “Your bodies?” A ghost of a terrible smile. “We waste nothing.”

  Thoughts formed, crashed against each other, dissolved. There were no more decisions to make. “Good-bye, Billy. Thank you.”

  “For what?” he said. “Do I know you?” With an easy, loose-hinged walk, he stepped away, not looking back, nodded to the hermaphrodite, then disappeared into the darkness.

  The masked man beckoned to us. He opened the door, grinning, and we entered a little cubicle with a bed. It was better than we had expected.

  “So . . .” Ferris said. “This is it. I always wondered what my last sight would be.”

  “Could it be me?” I asked, shyly.

  I felt a moment of doubt. With her left finger and thumb, Ferris turned my face, and crushed her lips against mine in answer. My senses swam.

  “You’ve never kissed me like that before,” I said.

  Her eyes sparkled. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed anyone like that.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why here? Why now?”

  “There’s a last time for everything.” Her answer made sense. Everything made sense.

  She put the tablet on the end of her tongue, swallowed. She took mine out of my hand, and placed it on the tip of her tongue as well, then kissed me again. I felt it pass from her mouth to mine, and I swallowed it.

  Her eyes glowed. “And that’s half of it,” she said. “Now the rest.”

  She shed her clothes, the body I knew so well still a revelation, in the dim light so transparent she seemed made of wax. She drew me closer, stroking until I was erect, and then rolled me on top of and into her.

  She arched and groaned, pulling at me, and I felt a sensation like being sucked down a deep and endless hole . . .

  Her eyes rolled back.

  And back . . .

  Until they were blood-red spheres without sclera or irises. Tiny black lines against the red. Her mouth opened wider. Wider than any human’s had ever opened. There came a sound, barely at the edge of hearing, like an invisible insect fluttering madly within her left ventricle. I couldn’t breathe. Were the drugs killing us? Was this entire thing a trap?

  I tried to pull out of her, fought to escape, and could not. Her vaginal muscles held me like a vise. I beat at her, smashed my fists against her face until my hands bled . . . and then some other light-colored fluid began streaming from her mouth.

  From somewhere deep inside her chest, words arose: Don’t be afraid.

  As consciousness faded, I could hear feet outside, and screaming. The trill of shock-guns. Then silence, and darkness.

  * * *

  Darkness receded like an oiled ocean.

  I drifted in and out of nausea, briefly finding a clear space, then suddenly passed through another wave of dizziness that washed over me, leaving me weak, feeling first overheated, then chilled. Blinking, I saw the ceiling of a white-tiled medical room. Then I looked down at myself. Naked. My wrists and ankles cuffed to a hospital bed with chrome knobs and metal railing. On a table next to me was a lump covered with dull coppery hair. Ferris’s head, disconnected from her body. Her eyes were still filled with bloody liquid, flashing black lines floating within.

  I screamed myself hoarse.

  The door slid open, and a brown-skinned woman in a white coat, with raven-black hair, eyes green as kelp, and full, bee-stung lips, entered. “Hello, Shane.”

  She ignored my silence. “How are you feeling? I don’t really have to ask that. We have scans, of course, and you’re doing fine.”

  At last, I found my voice and pointed at the severed head. “What is that?”

  “Your lady love,” the woman in the white smock said. “We built ten Ferrises in all, but this one was constructed specifically for you.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why me?”

  The doctor, an Upper in bearing and enunciation, fiddled with dials on a panel. Beams of laser light lanced from the ceiling, mapping and exploring my naked body.

  “Oh, I don’t mind telling you, because you won’t remember.” Her voice was mesmerizing, with the faintest of accents and a lilt on her labials. It was like an old, old coin that had traversed continents and civilizations, picking up hard-won knowledge from each one, passed down through centuries, and bearing the palm oil and wisdom of millions who’d handled it: the voice of the polis, enveloping and inescapable. Helplessly, I listened as she said, “We tolerate the boutique death brothels. We look the other way because they help to monitor and regulate deviancy. But a few citizens had disappeared, their microsynthes deactivated and bodies presumably destroyed. The most we could discover was a rumor that Billy was selling an . . . extreme form of the drug Thanadose. We hadn’t been able to find him, so we began searching out his crèchemates, on the theory that one of them would know how to find him. You were the third one, you know.”

  “And Ferris . . . was she always . . . ?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “A sex doll reconfigured for analysis. The minute we knew we had the genuine sample, we raided. Now we can reconfigure the microsynthes to compensate.”

  “Is Billy . . .”

  She looked shocked. “Dead? Oh, heavens no. We waste nothing. Like you, he belongs to all of us. And we care about everyone. We always have everyone’s best interests in mind. We need him. We need you. I suspect that’s something you forgot.” All of a sudden, she smiled at a remembrance. “My Caregiver once had a saying I’ve always seen as wise. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’ ”

  A sound breathed through the room, and I finally recognized it. No way out. No way out . . . It was my own voice. At some point I had curled against the wall, holding my knees. Rocking.

  “Come now,” she said brightly. “You’ve been given a gift for which kings and pharaohs would have gladly exchanged their crowns.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “What you—or any of us—want isn’t important. We’re all essential parts of the whole. Of the city-state. The clan. The family. And it is
the height of selfishness to see oneself as separate or special within that collective. That’s what brought the old world to an end, you know: the delusion of individuality and personal identity. Of individual nation-states rather than a united polis. It is far, far better to embrace and maintain a well-tuned harmony and tidiness that leads to happiness and security for all. That way, everyone’s life contributes to the symphony.”

  “But I’m not happy.”

  “I know.” She smiled, her eyes softening with what I could only call pity. “You were filled with the illusion of yourself. This is a cause for concern, but not alarm, because I can take away some of those disturbing thoughts by removing certain proteins from your amygdala, and regrooving certain chemical pathways and adjusting memory traces.”

  That was the moment real panic hit me. “No!” Then my voice became a whimper. “No . . . They’re all I have. They’re all of me that’s left. All that’s mine.”

  “There is no you or me. No mine or yours,” she said, and shone a violet light into my eyes. “Only we.” Slowly, the edges of my visual field began to burn away.

  We waste nothing. Her words. Billy’s words. Was he . . . ? But what sense . . . ? I couldn’t think, couldn’t trust my own memory . . .

  Couldn’t trust anything . . .

  * * *

  Shane awakened at home, although it took him a time to determine where he was. He looked at his hands. Pulsing stretches of pinkish, puckered flesh crested the knuckles. Wounded flesh, already knitting together. When had he harmed them? He could not remember.

  He dressed, ate, looked around. A rectangular spot on the wall opposite his dining table was slightly discolored, as if a rectangular object had once been positioned there. There used to be something else there, he was certain of it, but could not remember what it was.

  Shane took the solotube to work, passing the parks and the ponds, gazing at the distant towers without curiosity. Strange, he thought. He had the sense that once upon a time he had wondered about those towers. Now he did not. If ever he had.

  He sat at his place on the Möbius line, just as a broken harp trundled into sight. He examined it and sent it on. The next job was more interesting. And then . . . a plastic woman, in two pieces, body and head. Skin soft and perfect. Dark brown hair as fine as silk. Broken and chipped as if someone had beaten it horribly.

  He checked its speech synthesizer, the work of a moment to trigger its last words.

  “Don’t be afraid,” it said.

  He shrugged. Wrote out a ticket, and sent it on to the cybernetics track. Just another job, like the job he had done yesterday, and would do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  A society must work perfectly. Everything in its place.

  He noticed that fluid was leaking from the sex doll’s damaged eye. In the overhead light, at just the wrong angle, it looked very like a tear.

  The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones1

  Got a Jones: to be a superhero:

  Rise like a phoenix

  Fight like De Niro

  Knock me down

  Like the party crashes

  I’ll be back

  Rising from the ashes.

  Super duper hero

  I’m more than a zero

  Don’t need to break my nose

  Because I’m Seattle’s own Phoenix Jones

  I don’t need my own Professor X

  To make my brain cells

  Or muscles flex

  Need a villain to be a superhero

  Someone show the world

  I’m more than just a zero.

  —Seattle rock band Quickie, “Phoenix Jones”

  I have a secret to share about one of Seattle’s newest superheroes. But it’s already getting dark, so I better speak quickly.

  Sometimes I used to feel I was the zero in that song about Phoenix Jones. He was an American hero, and his ongoing saga maybe more uniquely American than even he knows. But I’ll get to that in a minute since, as I said, I don’t have much time. When I was a kid I loved comic books. I knew all the fantastic adventure heroes, and I revered the writers and artists who created them. But as I got older, what happens to everyone happened to me. My parents and grown-ups told me comic books were childish, and that I should put away childish things and be serious. So I lost my innocence. I became jaded and grown-up and cynical. But it was when I started teaching that I gradually began to see how the grown-ups had been wrong, because the culture of comic book geeks unexpectedly went mainstream. Movies and TV shows became the poor man’s literature, our common coin, and all our conversational references came from pop culture. In other words, America had become an amusement society, like ancient Rome. I once asked my students, “Do you see what’s happening? Whenever I mention a classic work of fiction, you all shake your heads because none of you have read it, but if I mention a movie, almost all of you have seen it.” One of my more honest students raised his hand and said, “Well, sure. It just takes a couple of hours to watch a movie, but it might take a whole week to read a book.” He might have added that comic books and graphic novels took even less time than that. Hollywood producers were well aware of this. They figured out that the vast, subversive subculture of costumed characters in seven-by-ten-inch comic books was potentially a trillion-dollar megafun franchise. Comic book conventions, called Comic-Cons, were attended by thousands of grown-ups dressed like their favorite characters. I wondered: Does anyone dress up like Bigger Thomas or Humbert Humbert? Were there action figures and video games for Alexander Portnoy or Rabbit Angstrom or Leopold Bloom? You know the answer to that. The public really didn’t hunger for stories about angst-ridden, dryasdust people doing dull things in a dull way. But every kid and even college professors knew a fictional hero like Batman, who is our modern equivalent to myths like Sisyphus. Like Odysseus.

  Like Phoenix Jones.

  At eight P.M. on October 8, 2011, a Saturday, he came with his posse into the Dreaming,2 a comic book store at 5226 University Way NE, where I was doing research, to change out of his street clothes and into his $10,000 black-and-gold costume.3 We were surrounded on all sides of the room with endless titles and garish covers that reminded me of newspaper stands in the 1940s loaded down with pulp magazines about The Shadow and Doc Savage. But, no, I didn’t see his face because he was already wearing that mask of his, showing only his eyes and bearded chin.

  The owner of the shop saw my face hanging open in surprise. He laughed. “You didn’t know he sometimes changes into costume here?”

  “I guess I thought he changed in a phone booth.”

  I only vaguely heard what else he said, because here in the flesh was Seattle’s homegrown vigilante and paladin. And, unlike the comic book heroes of my childhood, his flesh was real. According to reports I’d read, and rumors I’d heard, that black flesh had been stabbed in Seattle, shot in Tacoma,4 hit with a baseball bat, and had its nose broken in Belltown. He was a big noise in the real-life superhero movement, someone who claimed he had helped SPD make 253 arrests, and the Seattle Weekly said he’d been arrested himself forty-one times, sued twenty-seven times,5 and spent many nights in county holding cells because of his crusade. His image was all over the Internet, an international meme, and because of that other real-life superheroes around the country—and there were more of these people who put on costumes to help out in soup kitchens and visit sick kids in hospitals than you might imagine—those people complained that Phoenix was a glory whore who probably would wind up on a slab with tags on his toes. And, yes, I should mention that sometimes the police felt he kept turning up like a bad penny and wished he’d go away.

  He had just come from his second workout of the day at Gold’s Gym, where he did sprint-jog intervals on the treadmill. I could see he was buff, a balls-to-the-wall athlete. With him were costumed people named Pitch Black, Ghost, and Black Knight,6 all armed, each according to his or her fancy.

  Somehow I worked up the courage to say, “Can I ride along with you and your cre
w tonight?”

  Phoenix swung his head and looked at me steadily. “You’re not another reporter, are you?” His voice was bronze, as befits a superhero.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “I’m a teacher at Highline Community College. I’m trying to write a monograph on the enormous influence of comic books on popular culture. Sometimes I also do assignments for the Weekly.”

  “You came to the right person then.” He was pulling on his bullet-resistant gloves while listening to the police scanner in his cowl, which also has a built-in radio, PA system, and a camera attached to one side. “I’m the first superhero to come along and come as close to a comic book as possible. I’m interesting and I’m charismatic on camera, off camera, and in person.”7 He raised his arms to let Amber, his good-looking girlfriend, adjust his Kevlar neck-piece and leg armor. “You’re lucky. You caught us at the right time. I’m a weekend superhero.8 I only go out on patrol Thursday through Sunday so I can spend the other nights at home with my family.” Now Amber helped him squeeze into the ceramic and titanium chest piece he wore over his fire-resistant undershirt, then strap on a utility belt that had a Taser nightstick, pepper spray, and a first-aid kit. “But here’s the deal,” he said. “You can’t reveal my alter ego, who I really am, because I have to protect my loved ones. Agreed?”

  I nodded. “Agreed.”

  So, in short, that’s how I found myself tagging along with members of the Rain City Superhero Movement and a documentary filmmaker on a night that would collapse into chaos. When we stepped outside to their car, a Kia sedan,9 I felt the chill of night air, so cold and crisp, take hold of me. I sat in the backseat beside Phoenix as another Rain City superhero, Midnight Jack, drove, the tocking rhythm of wipers on the windshield and gray music of light rain filling the space between my questions as we cruised over to Capitol Hill, looking for trouble.

  I asked him, “Why do you do this?”

  He paused for a few seconds to pull his thoughts together.

  “All this started when a thief smashed my car window with a rock stuffed inside a ski mask. I kept the mask, and the next night when a fight broke out between two of my friends and some others guys, I put the mask on and chased down the guy who started the fight.10 So what? So this: I’m asking you to stop letting other people with bad intentions control you. I’m asking you to take your streets, neighborhoods, cities, and states back.11 I’m asking you to let people know you’ve got their back just because . . . Criminals feel free to just run wild in my city, and I’m not going to stand for it.”12