Stories for Chip (61 page)

They fuck on the beach, under the hottest sun Eden can remember.

She hears the jets, wonders if any of the incoming passengers can see them. Imagine that.

She wonders if any other eyes in the sky are watching them. Of course they are.

After, Eden swims out. Feels the hairy leaves of water plants. She swims out farther, into the channel, where the current is faster, looking for clean.

She watches Finn toss the spent rubber into the water.

I guess it's time to go.

◊

Ambient government.

Eden did not invent that phrase.

It's when the sensorial presences of the state are so ubiquitously and subtly embedded into the environment that they are almost indistinguishable from nature.

“It takes us back to our roots,” says Beltran. “America is a big small town. Where everybody knows your name.” And everything else.

Eden can't decide which is better. To work on new strategies to evade the gaze, or more effective ways to poke it in the eye.

Did you know that seventy-five percent of the price of a home-use brick of dispensary marijuana goes to the federal government? They like you that way.

Forty-seven percent of that pays for guns and ammo, thirty-four percent for monitoring, and the rest for productivity rehab.

◊

Eden persuades Finn to stop at the Airport Hilton for a drink before she leaves. She tries to explain to him how it reminded her of a movie she saw, but he doesn't get it.

The building is structured like a circular fort. The bar is in the middle of the big atrium, under the skylight. You can see a gangway up there.

She asks the bartender how you access that view.

“You can't,” he says. “Sealed off.”

“This place is messed up,” says Finn.

“It used to be the command center,” says the bartender. “Back when this was an Air Force base.”

Eden looks around, past the self-medicating software salesmen. Imagines men in uniforms the color of black and white movies, peacocking Spartans with silver wings and spiky hair.

“What did they fly?” asks Finn.

“B-52s,” says the bartender. His name tag says Gary. “Southern command.”

“So they could bomb Mexico or something?” asks Eden.

“I guess,” says the bartender. “Who knows? It was the Cold War. There's a display about it in the airport terminal.”

“Nuclear bombers,” says Eden.

“Where's the bomb shelter?” asks Finn.

“Dude,” says the bartender. “This whole place is a bomb shelter. There were all kinds of tunnels and stuff. They filled them with concrete when they built the terminal.”

“Yeah, right,” says Eden. “That's where they keep the people they pull out of the security line.”

Gary the bartender gives her a look. He has the lapel pin by his name tag. The red owl.

“Are you enforcing the Constitution, Gary?” asks Eden.

Gary looks at Finn. Finn smiles.

Eden looks to see where Gary conceals his handgun. Maybe that's it, under the apron. She imagines taking it from him.

Gary prints out their bill, pushes it in front of Finn, walks to the other end of the bar.

Eden looks at the colored cocktail Gary made her. I'll have a Wild Blue Yonder, Gary.

“Come on,” she says.

Off we go.

◊

They roam the hotel, looking for hidden doors to secret chambers.

They try to get up onto the gangway, but find only circular hallways of identical numbered doors. The design palette is red and beige.

They try out different doors.

They find a room where the door is propped open. They go in. Eden grabs the Bible from the drawer, starts reading out loud, then tries it backwards. Finn turns on the porn channel. Eden raids the minibar. Opens the half champagne. Lights a cigarette.

They end up in the bed. You can smell the dude that slept there the night before. Eden tears off the sheets. Switches the TV to the war channel and cranks up the volume. Puts her plastic lighter to the bedspread, but it only melts.

Eden says hi to a guy that walks past the open door, pulling the suitcase out of which he lives.

When the housekeeper comes in, they are abusing the armchair. You can hear the sound of the helicopter crew talking man code in machine voice, before the fifty-cal. rips at the van. Eden is yelling at the TV, and then at the housekeeper, telling her in Spanish to leave their room.

They sprint down the circular hallway, Eden carrying her shoes in her hand, Finn chasing behind her.

They push open the emergency exit door. No alarm goes off. The warnings are all lies.

They find the basement. There is an old civil defense sign on the wall. You can see where the blast door is, metal, painted grey, a long time ago. The decals and stencils are no longer legible.

Eden pounds on the door, with her shoes, then her fists. You can hear the echo on the other side.

Finn wants to finish what they started in the room. She pushes him back, sits down, looks at the security camera hanging there from the ceiling. Thinks about the movie about the captured aliens. Gives them an Oscar clip.

◊

Eden misses her flight. They do not go to the airport.

They drive, south. Finn says he wants to show her something. Something she can write a story about.

She will email her editor tomorrow. It's not like she has a desk to go to. They pay her for words.

When Eden wakes up, they are in the desert. On a two-lane highway, no other cars in sight.

The radio plays some chilango rap about perros and oro. She can make out about half the words.

“Where are we?”

“Mexico,” says Finn.

She sits up. Feels the blood drain. “Fuck! I don't have a passport.”

She doesn't mention how they confiscated it.

“I'm just fucking with you.”

She hits him in the face.

“Jesus,” he says. “I'm trying to show you something important. Something we need to document. Expose. I need your help. Words and pictures.” He points at the camera mounted on the dash. Eden remembers the gear they loaded in the trunk.

“Okay,” she says.

“You fucking started it,” says Finn.

Finn's car is an old Celica, uptuned. It's loud.

Eden opens a beer and modulates the frequency.

She sees the satellite arrays up on top of the far mesas, aimed at the sky.

They drive past a sign that says they can't drive past the sign.

UNITED STATES BORDERZONE

RESTRICTED ACCESS

ALL TRAFFIC SUBJECT TO SEARCH

They drive off the highway onto washboard gravel, ten miles, slow grade. They come to an overlook. Top of a low ridge, wide view to the south.

It looks like a colony on the moon, the way the facility sprawls out across the basin. Razorwire and corrugated roofs glisten orange in the dying sun. Low flying aircraft move through the thermals, phase shift in the mirage lines. All so far away you can't hear anything but the wind.

Further out, at the edge of the canyon, you can see the wall. It's more like a fence, since you can see through it, but the first tier is so high neither word really does it justice. A barrier made of steel and software, loaded with lethal intelligence, designed to reinforce the existence of a diminishing sovereign.

Finn hands Eden his binoculars. She takes a closer look, through jittery lenses. Surveys the no man's lands, the killing zones demarcated by the descending tiers of fortification. Finn points her to the new section of semiautonomous smart wall. It looks like a caterpillar of steel tunneling up out of the sand, stenciled with spray-paint tattoos of its identifying codes, moving on its own with machine slink and rubber paddles, adjusting to changing topographical conditions and emergent tactical requirements.

She sees a shimmering object approaching across the sand. An apparition. A coyote, she realizes when it turns, the silver in its coat sending misdirection through the light and heat.

She looks inside the base. Border security and information warfare center. It's too far to see much. Tiny vehicles moving around between tiny black and silver buildings. A chopper in the foreground, headed in to the base.

Finn sets up a telescope on a tripod. It has a camera attached to it. Look through this, he says.

The magnification renders the landscape as an abstract painting. Everything is liquid, the edges blurred. Lights are coming on, inside and out. You can make out the metal shed frames of the buildings. The white onion domes of electronic arrays. An air tower. A small aircraft on the tarmac. A huge tracked vehicle idling nearby.

They see the helicopter land near the plane. Broad-shouldered men in polo shirts and ball caps unload a prisoner. You can't see the restraints but you can see how his arms are cinched up behind his back. He has a yellow jumpsuit. A black hood over his head.

“Extraordinary deportation,” says Finn.

The shutter dilates in rapid bursts, like a slide projector on fast forward, like he's making the frames of a gif.

Extraordinary deportation is when they arrest you for crimes that result in the loss of your citizenship. Eden writes about it sometimes. Finn read one of her pieces.

“We should go to Monterrey,” he says. “Or D.F.”

Mexico City sounds good. She has heard stories about the exile scene. They have taken over a whole neighborhood. Semiautonomous, experimenting with new forms of governance. Network-enabled direct democracy.

“I told you, I don't have a passport,” she says. “They took it.”

The last one she wrote about was a kid in Boston who got denaturalized for hacking into the systems of the federal court there and posting footage from secret trials onto the public networks.

“We can get you one,” he says. “Billy knows a guy.”

It's an emergency.

Love it or leave it.

◊

“Let's go closer,” she says. They are back in the car now. The sun is gone.

“You're crazy,” he says. The only light is the beams of the headlamps. The double yellow line, reeling in.

“Turn up there,” she says. By the sign that says don't turn here.

He looks at her.

“I have a press card.”

“But no passport,” he says.

“We need to share this,” she says. “People have no idea.”

She moves in. Flips his toggle switch. Turns on the camera. Looks for the uplink light. Checks her phone for the match.

Finn looks at the lights in the distance.

“How fast can you go?” she asks.

Pretty fast, it turns out.

When he opens up the engine, it sounds like a bomb.

◊

They wreck Finn's wheels before they get to the second fence. A barricade comes up out of the ground. Smart fortification made of steel spikes and simple software.

Eden was not wearing her seat belt when it happened. She rolled onto the floor. It doesn't hurt too bad, yet. She milks it anyway. Leans up against the car like she can't really stand on her own.

They didn't get very close to the base. All she can see is the Grizzly with its embedded flashers, the land drones idling behind it, and the lone uniformed patrolman who just told them to stand up against the car.

Finn looks like he's done this before.

“I'm a journalist,” says Eden.

The camera is still on. She thinks.

The patrolman walks closer. His uniform is a weird shade of green. The unit patch on his shoulder is the logo of a corporation.

A little light floats around overhead, very close. The eye of the computer that tells the man what to do.

“You can explain that to them at the detention facility,” says the patrolman. “Right now I need you to submit to the search. Hands over your head.”

He has a morale patch on his left breast. The owl.

“You're not even a real soldier,” says Eden.

He frisks her. Finds the lump in her pants pocket. Her tool.

“What's that?” he asks.

“Want me to show you?”

He unholsters his taser. Watches carefully.

When she pulls it out, it springs open, almost autonomously. It's amazing that something like that can pack down so small. It's like a cross between a jack-in-the-box and a medieval torture device, printed from hardest plastic for personal defense. Thank you bedstuygirl92, whoever you are.

The corporate patrolman screams.

One of the spikes finds his face.

The land drones intervene.

Rubber bullets hurt a lot more than you think.

◊

Detention is not like it was in middle school. It is a white room of concrete, rubber, and steel, chilled to the temperature of a wine cellar. The clothes they let you wear are made of paper. When you rip them off in protest, they take their time giving you new ones.

The isolation is much more intense if you are a person who spends their time wired into the networks. You feel like you have been unplugged from life. They say you are addicted to interactive programs that have damaged your civic sensibilities. You scream but no one can hear you. No one who cares.

They interrogate you in another room, a room that has two chairs and a mirror, but you are pretty sure they don't really care what the answers are. Maybe because your answers are aggressive koans generated by a fracturing personality. You tell yourself that is what it feels like to create the new post-you.

The only one is the everyone.

They tell you your boyfriend is dead. They tell you your boyfriend is alive, in solitary, and will never come out. They tell you your boyfriend is a known gun smuggler. They tell you your boyfriend is being raped in prison. They tell you your boyfriend is being detained until trial, probably next year sometime. You don't have a boyfriend. You hope they just deport him.

Your mom gets you out. She is a businesswoman who knows lots of lawyers. The lawyer she gets you delivers mom's lecture. Tells you one of the conditions of your release is you must leave Texas within 48 hours.