Smiles All Around

Situated, as it is, among foothills, and supported, as it once was, by the fleeting whimsy of the American public, Millennium City’s underground is as complex and tragic as its population. Complex because, though underground in the technical sense, the tendrils of it sometimes wind into the nearby slopes and, in doing so, rise above the city itself. Tragic because winter drives the city’s homeless into the depths while the underground vies to outdo the surface in treachery and forbidding. Even in the halcyon days it was not a place people wished to be for long, which is, in part, why the trains were designed to move so quickly at their debut.

One of Millennium City’s various grants was a state of the art public transit system. The old city’s abandoned mining tunnels were widened, lengthened, and reinforced to accommodate a shining silver train system, each car smooth and oblong like a chrome pill. The trains see the surface at just two stops downtown, breaching like eels from a lake and arriving at 10 minute intervals as faithfully as a heartbeat.

Well, they did.

Now the trains are dented and tarnished. They arrive sporadically and break down often. Routes have been pared down to the essential inner-city stops and a few commuter locations on the far edges of town. The surface stations have been abandoned, proving difficult to maintain in the snow. The trains still burst from the ground, but now they carry that momentum forward, back into the comfortable dark.

The train system is also home to The Silver Worm, a diner, set into one of the trains by a fanciful artist who has long since moved on. An interesting concept, The Silver Worm doesn’t translate well to real life. Its menu is sparse, its employees, disgruntled, and the tables (fitted with electromagnets in order to keep special-made plates and cups in place) have a tendency to destroy whatever modern electronics are placed on them when activated. It has all the ambience one might expect of a commuter rail and it arrives in the station where Bryce Homonym stands, fretting. Late, as usual, its doors squeal open with the smell of fryer grease and coffee.

Homonym hesitates, as he often does when visiting The Silver Worm and he spends his hesitation staring in wonder at the outrageously fat man he sees reflected in the windows there. His descent from street-level has left him panting, sweating into his favorite button-up. He wonders if people notice. They must. Stares have become a trial for Homonym- bad for business. Looks are a boon in his line of work. And confidence, a veneer of which he is able to summon when the moment calls for it. Homonym tightens his grip on his briefcase and steps inside, squeezing just as tightly into a cracked, plastic booth and, in doing so, he becomes a man that reads the same on paper but serves an entirely different purpose. He does not hesitate at all in his consideration of the menu. Facing the laminate, his reflection is not so clear as to spark the previous self-loathing.

A small contingent of people stand in awkward silence three stops down the line, contingent both in that they are all members of a larger conspiracy (though, they do not yet realize) and in the sense that their activation was put in motion long before they were made aware (which is to say their coming together was contingent on the failures of the many that came before them). They were summoned to The Silver Worm and asked to board at this stop. They were asked to be on time and each expresses anxiety at The Silver Worm’s tardiness uniquely.

The woman that calls herself ‘Jezebel’ is picking at her lips, chapped from the winter’s dry air. She tastes blood and reminds herself to stop. The woman chose the name ‘Jezebel’ because of the queen’s death by defenestration (her eunuch slaves threw her from the window of her own palace). The woman with the bleeding mouth smiles, painfully, at the thought and tugs at the corner of her lip. It’s bad luck to enter one way and leave another. That’s why Jezebel normally avoids the trains.

A man paces behind her, his frame and his moustache each strikingly thin. He’s chosen the name ‘Janak’ after a college roommate he hasn’t spoken to in over a decade. The activation specified that the name should not be at all connected to one’s personal life and now Janak paces and reconsiders. It seems an unlikely connection to be made, even by professionals, but Janak knows enough about technology to realize how little he knows. He presses his anxiety downward and uses the delayed train as time to think of some other name but all he can do is walk back and forth across the platform, finding his mind blank except for little incriminating memories of his namesake. Janak passes by a pillar and startles, quietly, to spy a woman he hadn’t noticed on the opposite side, before completing his new circuit and turning back the way he came.

In suppressing signs of stress, the woman at the pillar stands absolutely still. She calls herself ‘Jessica’ because it is the name most common to American girls that share her birth year. It’s also her real name, a choice made in blatant disregard to the rules of activation. Unlike Janak, she has not once reconsidered her choice. If she is to be analyzed for tells, Jessica supposes the opposition will be clever enough to see through a codename or jaded enough to assume nobody would be so stupid as to play the game without deceit. Her rigid stoicism has limited her breathing and now she quietly fights for air, each rise and fall of her chest a small betrayal of the frozen persona she envisions for herself. The Silver Worm arrives just in time to mask Jessica’s explosive exhalation.

These three are not the only people to board The Silver Worm, but they represent the last to leave the platform and so enter roughly in a line, each hesitating at the entrance (as they look for their contact) and each recognizing, at the exact moment, who they are in relation to each other. It isn’t hard to find the man described in activation and he waves them over. Jezebel and Janak sneak quickly into the bench opposite him. Jessica pauses and then piles absurdly in with the other two. The man across the table surveys them with a friendly smile and, in voice too jovial for the situation, he says:

“Nice to meet you all! I’m Uncle Jiminy.”

Jiminy holds his smile and waits for the three to respond with their chosen codenames. He’ll need to make a quick mental note.

“Janak,” the man says, offering his hand across the table and then, twisting somewhat, to the women at either side, “Good to meet you,Jim- Uncle Jiminy.”

Jiminy finds smiling is easier, now, because the smile has become momentarily genuine. It is of the utmost importance that these three respond well and referring to him as ‘Uncle’ is a good response, indeed. It means they understand that they will sometimes be asked to do or say things that don’t come naturally and that they should do and say those things, no matter how small and strange.

“I’m Jessica.”

Jiminy’s smile vanishes. Janak and Jezebel both look at her, trying to understand what she’s done wrong. Jessica’s face and neck go red. Her hand hovers halfway across the table but Jiminy doesn’t reach out for it.

“Nice to meet you,” he says.

The last of the three speaks up:

“Jezebel?” she seems to ask.

“Let’s say, ‘Bell,’” Jiminy offers, “Agent Bell.”

“But the activation said…”

“The activation asked that you choose a codename to be used in public and you’ve chosen a chatroom handle,” Jiminy says. He talks quickly, but matter-of-factly, “Janak, Jessica, Bell- I’m happy to meet you all and I think we should speak about the business at hand.”

Jiminy pauses as a woman, Irma, steps over to take their order. The three strangers ask for variations on coffee and Jiminy orders a lavish breakfast platter. The coffee arrives a moment later and Janak swipes his phone from the surface just as Irma flips a small switch on the booth. The silverware, already on the table, shudders and the mugs buzz with magnetic force. Jessica attempts to lift hers and succeeds only in splashing coffee into her lap. Bell passes a handful of napkins across Janak’s chest and the right side of her jacket leans suspiciously toward the table.

This woman’s brought a gun.

Jiminy smiles again as the train car jerks into a stop and the remaining cups slop coffee carelessly over their rims. His own mug is balanced carefully in his hand and he considers his wavering reflection, there, while the three attempt to mop the puddle from the table before the train’s forward movement sends it surging toward them.

“I appreciate your timeliness,” Jiminy says as they finish, “And I hope you appreciate the importance of the tasks you will be given, the delicate nature of status quo.”

The three nod and murmur agreement. Bell glances out into the dark tunnel they travel through and tears a strip of skin from her lower lip, depositing it under the table.

“There is a man I need you to meet, a man named Isaac. The job hardened him and it made him fragile- a cracked callus. Yes, I think he can be quite dangerous. No, I don’t think he will be a match for you three. Isaac’s personal details are in this folder; he needs to be debriefed.”

Jiminy pulls the folder from a briefcase wedged between his body and the window. He looks up at the three and feigns a second’s false hesitation, as though he’s had some doubt about who is the emerged leader. He hands it to Bell. She opens it eagerly, closes it quickly, and looks up at Jiminy for silent permission.

He nods.

There is nothing inside the folder they couldn’t find themselves.

Omitted from the folder is a timeline of the man, Isaac, beginning with the day he sat across from Jiminy at The Silver Worm and ending now, with the order for his de-briefing. Such a timeline would seem, at first, to illustrate a series of painful mistakes when, in reality, it would represent a series of minor successes made at great cost. It would represent the wearing down of a man like the wearing down of a boot: a process without malice.

The city itself is also carefully omitted. Millennium City is one of just three places in the United States cultivated by Dialogue, a program overseen by the federal government. Dialogue was formed in 2012 when a burst of radiation from deep space manifested strange and lasting phenomena upon the Earth. An identical event in 2018 confirmed that these so-called ‘Answers’ correspond to humanity’s breaching of interstellar space. The phenomena spread like fire and Dialogue stamps them out; in doing so, it wears through agents as one wears through boots.

Uncle Jiminy talks in circles to avoid these topics and, so wide is the perimeter, that The Silver Worm has reversed direction and re-deposited the agents at their stop by the time he’s through. He sips his coffee and waves at them through the greasy windows as the diner departs. They wave until he’s disappeared into the darkness and gratefully make their way out into the open air.

The man, Isaac, lives near the top of an old apartment building downtown, its splintered siding faded from the doublesun of Millennium City: that which shines from the source, and that which reflects from the old chrome of aging retro-futurism. The papers in Jiminy’s folder give away the number to his apartment, near the top. Jessica counts the stories from below.

“That’s the floor,” she says, “That’s probably his place right there.”

“What makes you think that’s the one?” Janak asks.

Jessica shrugs and sweeps her hair from her face. It’s cold and wind floods the streets in great gusts before settling to stillness again. Not total stillness. Bell detects fluttering undercurrents in the interim, drafts that play across the feathered surface of her paper lips. She wets them with her tongue and tastes lipstick. Janak speaks up again.

“How are we going to do this?” Jessica asks, “Good cop, bad cop?”

“Yeah,” Bell chimes in.

“What ratio?”

 “What?”

“There’s three of us,” Jessica reasons, “How many good and bad cops do we need on this?”

“I can’t play bad cop,” Janak admits.

Neither woman assumed he could.

“I’ll keep an eye on the front,” Bell says, “In case he tries to make a break for it.” She licks her lips. “Jessica can play bad cop. That’s 50/50.”

Janak and Jessica hover awkwardly outside the door of the apartment building before a man with a bag of groceries arrives and opens the door for them. There are no security measures in place past the lobby where rows of windowed mail slots gleam half-heartedly under a yellow-brown bulb. The man with the groceries starts up the stairs while Janak and Jessica wait for the elevator. They watch a mail carrier struggle to stuff paper into an already overfull box. Jessica mimes something to Janak, something he doesn’t at all understand, before she steps from the elevator. Janak’s moustache quivers nervously. He smooths it with his fingers and smells the building’s brass doorknob on his hands.

Jessica approaches the man at the box with quiet footsteps. She smiles widely and then frowns, afraid she’s become frightening. Her face is caught between the two when he looks over.

“Can I-” he begins.

“My friend has been sick,” Jessica sighs, “He’s not been able to pick up his mail. We were just going up to see him and I bet that’s his box filling up. Let me guess, those are for Isaac?”

The man looks at one of the letters in his hand: “No.”

On the elevator ride up, Jessica becomes a statue again. Embarrassed. Humiliated. Janak, unable to pace, further smooths his moustache. He admires Jessica for her boldness in the lobby and he’s made nervous by his admiration.

Am I falling in love? he wonders.

No, just nervous. The two feel similar to Janak. He becomes nervous when he’s in love. He seeks the comfort of love when he’s nervous. By the time they reach Isaac’s floor, his moustache is shining with worried perspiration- a pink face, an obsidian strike-through. They step quietly to Jebidiah’s door, each verifying the number in the folder. Janak raises his fist and looks at Jessica. She nods, solemnly.

Knock, knock.

“Excuse me,” Janak says into the door, “Isaac? There are a couple of things we’d like to chat about.”

Thirty seconds pass without an answer.

Bang, bang!

Jessica slams her fists into the door.

 “Hey asshole,” she calls, “Did you hear my partner knocking? Open up!”

 Still no answer.

Janak opens the door.

“It’s unlocked,” he says.

They wave from Isaac’s window until Bell sees them and steps across the street, out of sight. The apartment is a mess, but Jessica recognizes that it’s a lived-in mess- an abandonment of values rather than of space. This is the way Jessica lives, too, and she feels exposed, having Janak see her framed by disarray that isn’t hers but that could be.

The regret for having used her real name strikes Jessica, finally, and it strikes her all at once. Isaac’s filthy couch cushions the impact.

“You okay?” Bell asks, stepping through the doorway, “What’s wrong with Jessica?”

The woman on the couch flinches at her name.

“Seems fine to me,” Janak says, peering out from Isaac’s bedroom, “The guy’s not here but you’re going to want to see this.”

Four assault rifles lean against the far wall, near the bed. Empty pizza boxes shiver with roaches. The sheets, bedding, and mattress are shredded, as though chewed to pieces by rats. The white porcelain of an attached bathroom is stained red. There are three teeth in the sink, at least one in the toilet. Bell grimaces down at them and then looks at her own face in the mirror. She cocks her head to the side and opens her mouth. Her lips split open in several places.

“What are you doing?” Janak asks.

“You think they planted bugs on us?” she asks in response, “This guy did.”

“Guys,” Jessica says, announcing her presence at the door, “For brevity’s sake I want you to call me Jess from now on.” She spies Bell’s open mouth: “What are you doing?”

“She’s looking for bugs,” Janak says, “This guy’s been pulling his teeth out.”

“Think it’s got something to do with this?” Jess asks.

The flyer in her hand advertises the regular meeting of a support group called ‘Smiles All Around.’ She passes the flyer to Janak. He looks at it and passes it to Bell, who looks at it and slides it into the folder.

“They meet in half an hour,” Jessica says, “At the Orbs.”

“What do we do about all this?” Janak asks. He gestures widely, as though to the room at large, but lingers at the rifles in order to emphasize where the bulk of his concerns lie.

“Wrap’em up in a sheet,” Bell says, “We’ll toss’em in the trunk.”

The Orbs were to have been the center of Millennium City’s conceptual art scene and they were touted, early on, as something that could become a ‘permanent World’s Fair.’ Artists and dreamers from all over the world arrived in Millennium City to speak at the Orbs, so named for being a series of spherical buildings, painstakingly stacked like a small cluster of grapes and connected by spiraling escalators.

At the center of a hollow Orb, speakers and musicians, now hypothetical, might stand and be heard by all in attendance without electrical amplification of any sort. Super high definition omnimax films can be, but are no longer, re-configured by proprietary software and cleanly projected across all surfaces by a machine that hovers in the center of each room, a bright replica of the space itself. One Orb, at the base of the cluster, has been constructed to hold half its volume in water for revolutionary inland boat shows. The top of another can split along the middle and withdraw for elevated open-air views of the night sky.

Unfortunately, the spherical speaking places were so taken by form that function became an afterthought. Crowds at the convention center’s christening reported bouts of vertigo, claiming that, no matter where one stood in the rooms, attendees always felt as though they were on the edge of a precipice. The Ocean Orb’s drains have clogged and it swirls, now, with stagnant water. The Sky Orb is closed, its seam crusted with the world’s detritus as though a massive, infected eye. The failure of Millennium City and the dizzying shape of the structure means only the smaller, humbler Orbs see use. They have been relegated to graduation ceremonies, town hall meetings, and, as it were, support groups. ‘Smiles All Around’ has been meeting among them for six months when three conspicuous strangers navigate the honey-combed interior of a lower Orb, pushing through a cracked door and representing a 2:1 ratio of good-cop to bad.

The atmosphere of the small conference room is made solemn by the sound of weeping, muffled as though piped in from an open duct. Chairs form a neat circle in the center of the room and, while there are several empty seats, the three are forced to split up in order to sit. Each rationalizes that this is for the best anyway, though they do so to better swallow a growing unease. A man standing at the center of the circle has paused in speaking and he begins again once they’ve settled.

“So, like I was saying, it was only a small cut, like I caught my arm on a bramble or something,” he says, “Hardly a scratch. But that’s enough now, which I think means I’m getting worse.”

Janak notices the man finger a bandage on his forearm. It hardly covers a purplish welt. Bell, meanwhile, gives up trying to draw his attention and focuses on Jess instead. Jess is pulling her statue act, again, this time so that she can confirm what she thinks she hears. Each time the man beside her moves she hears him clatter like a leather sack of marbles. Having verified this, she meets Bell’s gaze and, recognizing the question there, shakes her head.

Isaac is not among these people.

“It breached,” the man continues, the woman’s weeping a soft backdrop to his monologue, “But it isn’t moving like the others.”

Where is this lady? Bell wonders. She traces the noise to a woman across from her but the woman’s face, while sad, is unmoving. A seeping wet shadow darkens the denim along the outside of her right thigh. Bell stares, sure that it’s growing.

Isaac steps through the door a moment later and the man at the center politely pauses again. Isaac takes two steps toward the group before he notices the three new members in suits. He freezes in a way that suggests he is preparing to run. Before he does, Janak stands with his hand out in front of him:

“Isaac,” he croons, “We’re not here to do you any harm.”

“We just need to talk,” Bell adds.

Jess stands suddenly and shouts across the room: “Stay where you are, shitbag.”

Isaac runs.

Bell is the first to give chase. She draws her pistol as soon as she’s cleared the doors. Janak lurches forward but finds himself inadvertently blocked by the speaker. They dance back and forth before Janak grabs the man’s jacket and maneuvers him out of the way.

“Come on, Jessica!” Janak shouts.

Jess is so distraught by the sound of her own name ringing through the room that she becomes tangled in her plastic folding chair and topples into the man next to her. The man’s innards rattle grotesquely and he screams in pain, toppling over as well with a sound like rocks shifting in an aquarium. Jess is on her feet again before he lands and out the door before she notices that the woman in jeans somehow screams without moving her lips or that the thigh of those jeans is torn and pulpy and gnashed.  

The two trailing suits catch Bell at the front. Isaac is far ahead, scrambling back and forth down the stairs that lead toward the parking lot. Bell has her pistol leveled at him, her finger on the trigger, and the corner of her lip held tightly between her teeth. Janak clamps his hands over his ears- he hates guns, though he’s never been in a situation in which one might be used. He hates the idea of guns.

Bell lowers her pistol and releases her lip: “He’s too far gone,” she says, “Guy’s fast.”

Janak lowers his arms. The women notice blood on his face and gawk until he looks at his hand. He’s wounded.

“What the hell?” he asks, wiping blood into his dress pants, “I must have caught it on the door.”

Bell examines the hand and recognizes the stonehenge penetration of human teeth below the thumb- mild overbite. The marks pool with blood as she watches and she watches for some time, as though trying to read a fortune in the new landscape of the palm. In reality, she is trying only to still the rapid-fire beating of her own heart.

Bell didn’t take the shot she had.

“Bandage it in the car,” she says, “I don’t want to deal with the police.”

They catch Isaac again after a 72 hour stake-out near his apartment building. The man is smart enough not to surface immediately, smart enough to wear a long jacket, hood, and bandages about his face when he does return, but the three correctly guess that he’ll want something from his apartment before disappearing for good. The stakeout is tense for the duration. Bell’s lips have become ragged. She’s long peeled her lipstick away, working toward the natural red underneath. Likewise, Janak picks at his bandaged hand, sure that his contact at the Orb was limited only to the speaker and then only to his ribs, pressing him aside as they chased their man. He’s come to the correct conclusion many times already, that he received the bite from the ribs, but it is too grotesque to consider. Jess picks at her phone, cycling through the same local coverage of the incident at the Orbs, cross-referencing the news with her name and then wondering, in retrospect, if the sudden spike of millennium city orbs support group jessica crime searches will inadvertently create a connection that hadn’t existed previously.

Janak, who has been urinating in a nearby alley, is the one to notice him. Isaac sneaks around the back of the building and pries the fire-exit open with a practiced motion. Janak spies the man’s car, unlocked and idling around the corner. He rushes back to the stakeout and relays this to the women through the windshield, his fly gaping at eye-level. Jessica pulls him inside and Bell turns the engine over. They creep up the block until the back of Isaac’s idling car is visible in the alley. They wait.

Bell waits, afraid she will be given a chance to shoot the man again if they confront him now.

Jess waits, afraid because this is a public place and she doesn’t want to be caught.

Janak waits and is afraid, generally. The ease with which Isaac broke into the fire exit, the speed at which he recognized interlopers among the support group and his serpentine escape: this man is no amateur and Janak, at his core, believes himself no more than an amateur in all things. Fear pulses through him like a heartbeat, throbbing especially in the injured palm.

“We’ll follow him to wherever he’s going,” Bell says, to the relief of them all.

For all his cunning in the apartment building’s approach, Isaac’s departure is rushed and sloppy, likely shaken by the confirmation of intruders in his home and by the empty wall where assault rifles once leaned. He throws a half-filled duffel bag into the trunk, hesitates, and then retrieves two small books from within, tucking them under his arm to take back to the front.

“Ready?” Jess asks, as much to Bell, behind the wheel, as to herself. She and Janak are both absurdly in the back. “Ready?”

“Shut up!” Bell says, “I need to concentrate.”

“Wait till he drives a little before you follow,” Janak says, “We-”

“I said shut up!”

Isaac’s reverse lights ignite. His car jets backward onto the street where the three sit, wide-eyed in their sedan. A pick-up swerves onto the curb to avoid him, toppling a mailbox. Someone shouts. Isaac reverses until his car is level with the stakeout. His face is obscured, disfigured by white bandages. He steers with his left hand and holds a shotgun in the right. The blast tears through his passenger window, bursts the glass along the driver’s side of the sedan.

This man is no amateur.  

Isaac’s speeding away before Janak has time to decide whether he’s been killed. As the sole occupant of the passenger side, he recovers to find himself alive and unharmed, unlike his bloodied colleagues who grope at their faces and tenderly pat their eyes with the backs of their hands. They don’t see the pale hesitation rising in Janak, the breaking-under-pressure.

“We need to go,” Jess sputters, blindly shaking her head.  

This gets Janak moving again. He pulls Bell from the front seat, throws her over Jess’ lap. The damage to the car is even but minimal; Isaac was firing birdshot, most likely. Both women are speaking, loud enough to prove they’re not dead, quiet enough to prove they’re still aware. Janak turns the ignition and the sedan screeches, still idling from before.

Right, Janak thinks, Ready to go, but where? He wracks his brain for an answer. Where’s safe? he thinks, Where’s anywhere but here?

Janak grips the steering wheel with his hands, rests his head between them for a second, just a second of thought. He sees the open fly and zips it. He shifts and begins to drive.

Janak’s house is small. It reminds Jessica of her grandmother’s house and was, in fact, decorated by Janak’s mother before her passing. The guest bathroom is tidy under a thin layer of dust, clean as a byproduct of disuse rather than of fastidiousness. Now the sink is streaked thick, candy red.

Jessica grimaces at herself in the mirror, checks her silhouette, and tweezes a new piece of metal from her face. It clatters across the porcelain and into the drain. She wonders, belatedly, if this will clog the pipe- if the blood will stain. She rinses the sink ineffectually, the same way she occasionally tidies her own home, and brings the tweezers to her chin.

Upstairs, Janak performs a similar operation on Bell. She lies in the empty bathtub, a towel tied about her neck in order to protect the suit (Janak says) and the tub (Janak tactfully doesn’t say). The towel he chose is red, a choice he made for both of them. Bell, despite the constant nagging of her lips, is squeamish about self-inflicted pain. Janak cared for his mother during her hospice and he knows how to steady his hands when it counts, how to hold nervous vomit with a smile.

“Doesn’t look so bad,” he smiles, dabbing her forehead with the towel.

Bell had allowed herself to cry quietly on Jess’ lap as Janak sped them away from the scene but her fear hadn’t lasted. Each time a bump in the road shook the shrapnel in her face she remembered, with regret, the man they called Isaac, made tiny by distance and framed in the sight of her pistol. By the time Janak pulled into his driveway, all else was red, all else but the little Isaac, his awkward lope transformed into a mocking dance at the tip of the gun.

She opens her eyes now and sees Janak grinning down at her, his moustache curled like a friendly question mark. She’s grateful for his care. And humiliated by it. She closes her eyes again.

Janak doesn’t know what to make of Bell’s silence. He wonders about playfully tugging at the discreet metal stud in her nose.

Oops, he would say, Not that one.

He decides against it and dabs disinfectant on her wounds instead.

An hour later, Jess and Bell sit on a sofa in Janak’s living room while he clatters about in the kitchen, joking, occasionally, about the state of his house, about his not being prepared for visitors, and hoping either of the women will counter with a compliment. Neither do. They are thickly bandaged and they stare carefully ahead, each afraid to see their reflection in the other’s swollen visage. Janak returns with coffee, wondering if either woman will notice that he’s remembered their preference for milk and sugar from The Silver Worm.

Neither do.

 “Well,” Janak begins, sipping from his mug, “I don’t think he’ll be returning to his apartment.”

Bell clenches her jaw and a constellation of pain lights up across the left side of her face. Jess takes a careful sip from her mug and a brown stain begins to seep downward through the bandages at her chin. She tries to smile but, finding it too painful, speaks instead:

“This is good.”

She takes another sip.

“It’s pour over,” he says, “A little more work than-”

Bell slams her fist down on the coffee table, rattling a display case of glass figurines across the room.

“We need to find him,” she mutters. The other two wait for her to expand upon the thought, but she doesn’t. She uses her tongue to press a wayward strip of bandaging from the corner of her mouth and takes an angry sip of coffee. “We need to find him,” Bell says, again.

Janak stands to retrieve a towel for the spilled coffee and he returns with a laptop, his moustache curved in a smile that his mouth tries, with difficulty, not to give away. He hands the towel to Bell and begins to tap in his password.

“Did either of you get his plates?” Jess asks.

“No plates,” Bell says, “He had one of those temporary paper ones.”

“A fake,” Janak suggests, squinting at his screen.

“Could be he slipped up,” Jess offers, “If we’ve got the numbers, we’ve got the guy.”

“It might not even be his car. Anonymity is the first rule of activation,” Bell reminds them, “If I know that, he definitely knows that, and he sure as hell wouldn’t use a traceable license plate.”

 Janak, surrounded by pictures of his extended family and dusty high school softball trophies awarded to his legal name, is so taken by something on his laptop that he doesn’t realize Bell is trying to hurt him. Neither Bell nor Janak notice Jess becoming red under her bandage.

“There,” Janak says, showing them a map of Millennium City, “That’s where my phone is. And my phone,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “is in his car. I slipped it in the seat pocket when he went upstairs.”

He refreshes the page and they watch the miniaturized smartphone reappear a centimeter to the east.

“Shit,” Bell nods, “Shit, agent, you’ve got some balls.”

Janak smiles. It’s been a long time since anyone has acknowledged him as a man.

“We’ll wait for him to stop,” Janak says, hesitating to see if Bell will interrupt, “We’ll wait until he stops and then… we’ll get him.”

He frowns inwardly, thinking he’s flubbed the chance for a more rousing speech, but the other agents are smiling, now, or performing what can be approximated as smiles given their injuries. They each take a celebratory shot from a dusty bottle of orange liqueur (Janak sipping his) and they drink so much coffee over the next several hours that the glass figurines begin to dance in their case, a stuttering waltz to the rhythm of Jess’ nervous foot.

Evening has arrived by the time the phone settles in place, Isaac’s route taking him to all corners of the city before settling at a destination on the outskirts. Bell has fallen asleep on the couch, her face staining the book she was pretending to read. Jess completes a crossword puzzle on her phone and the game’s joyful tune startles Janak from a meditative daze. He refreshes the screen and confirms that Isaac has not moved for over an hour.

“The Zeitgeist,” Bell says, gingerly rubbing the sleep from her eyes, “I haven’t been out there since I was a kid.”

“Nobody has,” Janak responds, “They shut it down years ago.”

“What the fuck’s a zeitgeist?” Jess asks and she shrugs when the other two look up at her, “We didn’t all grow up here.”

The Zeitgeist is a tower designed early in the Millennium City transition, its silhouette so clearly traced from Seattle’s Space Needle that it hovers, an embarrassed wallflower on the outskirts. It is primarily aesthetic by design and it fulfills this purpose to the detriment of all others. The free, outdoor observation deck has rusted and fallen away into the surrounding woods. The expensive, rotating restaurant has quietly creaked to a halt inside. Its facade is as weathered and gray as downtown itself, but when the Zeitgeist’s lights blink on among the foothills, the weary citizens of the chrome city will still sometimes prod their children and tell them, again, that the aliens have come, cresting the horizon, and the children will laugh or cry or ignore them altogether.

Janak’s phone disappears from the map shortly after they leave the house. Twenty minutes later and about a mile from the base of the Zeitgeist, the agents pull off onto a sideroad to approach on foot and inadvertently discover the burning remains of Isaac’s car. They circle the scene with an overabundance of caution, hiding in the tenuous places where night struggles to overcome the fire. Bell has her pistol leveled at the driver’s side door and, though each of them understands the absurdity of thinking the man may still be inside, each takes a certain comfort in seeing the weapon drawn. Jess, who steps nearest to the fire, voices what they already know:

 “Seems clear.”

They relax, some, their eyes drawn into the flame, their bodies warmed by it. After a moment, Jess turns to Janak, who stands the furthest away:

“You should look for your phone.”

His colleagues mistake Janak’s craned neck as stargazing. The opposite is true- it’s the absence of sky that’s drawn his attention. Isaac has chosen this place with care, a copse of trees far enough apart as to not catch and spread the fire, but tall and thick enough to disperse the smoke without drawing attention from the city. Janak shivers with cold, with renewed fear of the man, and he inadvertently channels both when he looks back down at Jess.

“I don’t think I’ll get my phone back.”

“It’s not about getting it back,” she explains, “It’s about knowing whether or not it’s still inside. If he found it, he knows we’re coming. If he did this in a hurry, we may still surprise him.”

Janak shrugs and steps forward but Bell holds up her hand.

“Wait,” she says, and she stoops and runs her fingers along the dark earth until they catch upon a stone large enough to serve her purpose. Standing, again, she tosses it through the driver’s seat window.

The fire blossoms inside the car, a quick, come-hither tendril reaching back out toward Bell before the concussive expansion showers the clearing in hot glass. The agents belatedly shield their eyes, think, belatedly, of covering their mouths with sleeves and handkerchiefs. The women check their bandages for thrown embers, Janak, his moustache. When the fire dims, again, they find themselves shaken but no worse for wear. Bell approaches the backseat and tries the door, stepping to the side as it pulls away from the car entirely. A blackened lump of plastic and metal bubbles under the seat.

“This was a good idea,” Bell says, hearing Janak step up behind her, “This is maybe the only thing that’s gone right so far.”

She’s warm, for a moment, warmed between Janak’s beaming smile, the flaming car. On the other side of the wreckage, framed in the shattered passenger-side orifice, Jess is skeptical. She’s the one stargazing, now. She’s the one recognizing Isaac’s dangerous cunning. Jess has been painting a picture of the man in her head: a desperate man, not at all worried about these agents and their names. He would see his escape as a close call- a mercy. He wouldn’t seek retribution, wouldn’t even know where to look.

She’s been an idiot.

The man knows everything. The man knows enough. The man knows her name and that’s everything. That’s enough. Looking up at the not-sky, Jess realizes what Isaac has known and becomes what Bell has been.

“We need to find him,” she says.

 And Bell nods.

And Janak shrugs.

Jess is unsettled by the Zeitgeist, seeing it for the first time from across the long, desolate parking lot. The others had said it looked like a UFO, forgetting that the chrome base of it splits on four sides to reveal an illuminated glass elevator. The resemblance was purposeful rather than passing- a B-movie sci-fi experience with a view of the city and a side of fries. Celebration packages included neon mocktails and costumed servers, the parting gift a white, cotton t-shirt that read: “I was Abducted in Millennium City.” The phrase gained notoriety during a series of kidnappings in 2013 and was quietly retired, preceding the restaurant by just two years. The Zeitgeist is bright and gaudy and it makes no sound; the agents hover on the edge of the forest’s silent carnival, reluctant to proceed.

After several minutes, a shadow makes its way across the disk some sixty floors above: the tiny silhouette of a pacing man. Isaac’s form fades to the right and eventually circles back around, a lighthouse made slow and ineffectual for all its distance from the sea but powerful enough to galvanize the agents below. They each let out a breath and they all begin to talk at once.

“Assuming he’s got the elevator working,” Bell says, “That’s two ways up.”

“He’ll be expecting the fire escape,” Jess points out.

 Janak shakes his head: “He’ll be expecting both.”

“Listen,” Bell insists, “This is about the numbers. There’s three of us, two exits, and just one of him. If we split up, he’s going to have a few minutes to figure out whether he’s got a fighting chance on the stairs or in the elevator. We’ve got to make sure he’s wrong.”

“The elevator’s a death trap,” Jess points out, “We take it up, he shoots us point blank. He takes it down…”

“He won’t take it down,” Janak mutters, Isaac’s long shadow cast over them again, “If he thinks one of us is waiting down here, he’s going to fight.”

There is a short, frustrated silence, during which time Bell considers the lines of her agents’ fracturing and recognizes a 2:1 ratio of bad-cop to good. It’s obvious that Janak will not kill the man and the man will be threatened by nothing short of death.

“You’ll guard the elevator,” she sighs, looking up at him, locking eyes, “Don’t let him get away.”

Janak, so taken by Bell’s gaze, doesn’t see her unholster the pistol. She slips it from her jacket and holds it out for him to take.

He recoils from it.

Bell and Jess breach the fire escape just ten minutes later, Janak standing inconspicuously conspicuous at the edge of the forest with a pistol-shaped stick.

You don’t have to look threatening, Bell told him, knowing it would be impossible, You just have to look resolute from a distance.

He twirls the stick-pistol, drops, retrieves, and slides it into an imaginary holster at his waist. Isaac makes another round and Janak presses the transmission button on the radio in the very real holster at his other side, signaling the ‘all clear’ to his colleagues inside.

The Zeitgeist’s fire escape is a necessarily-cramped spiral staircase, hidden in the chrome supports behind a door, locked but not alarmed. The difficulty with which Bell finally eases the bolt out of place and opens the door is reassuring to her but the easy lack of alarm is alarming. Isaac should assume the door is a temporary obstacle at best, enough to give him time or warning but not to stop them entirely. That is, unless he wants them in the staircase.

Bell stands at the threshold, thinking.

It’s not an ideal situation. Every step inside will be a blind corner, a new chance to stumble into a bear trap, tripwire, wire snare, IED, angry dog, flashbang, mounted gun, and even Isaac himself, waiting breathlessly for the sound of shoes on metal. A staticky click on the radio at her side confirms that the last one is doubtful, at least. Isaac is still circling in the Zeitgeist proper, Janak still watching from the wings.

Bell and Jess, standing at the door, have not yet realized that they are opposites in everything but their destination. Jess believes that most things in life are set, that she will make a number of mistakes, celebrate a number of successes, and die. She operates almost entirely on intuition and, though that intuition may have been short-sighted in the use of her legal name for an otherwise covert operation, it has also granted her the courage to do what will need to be done.

Bell believes she is responsible for everything, that every windfall is a testament to her cunning and every tribulation is a consequence that may have been avoided with just a little more care. Her grandfather, a trapper, once told Bell that animals never learn from each other’s mistakes because they haven’t been granted an understanding of sin. The rabbit’s haste blinds it to the same cord that snared its kin. Mice pile into a bucket, so taken by the scent of cheese that they ignore the cries of the drowning. He explained this as he hammered nails into the trunk of a fallen tree, angled to further tighten a natural hollow. Inside he placed three sardines- a simple paw trap. The raccoon reaches in for the sardines and makes a fist, but the fist is bigger than the paw and can’t be withdrawn. The raccoon’s sin is greed- it will not release the sardines, even as the dogs close in.

Bell seems to be reflecting upon the darkness inside the stairwell but is reflecting upon herself, instead. When Jess misunderstands the pause and offers to go first, Bell smiles and lends her the pistol. Bell is not an animal and she learns quickly from the foibles of others. She isn’t without sin, doesn’t believe in it the way her grandfather did, but she thinks she understands and it’s the understanding that grants the edge.

Jess starts up and Bell follows, six steps behind. She doesn’t notice when the radio loses signal.

Janak is no longer resolute. He nervously clicks the radio again and again, looking up at where Isaac’s shadow has halted, pressed up against the glass. The man could have stopped his pacing for any number of reasons but it’s clear, to Janak, that he has been spotted somehow and now the Zeitgeist is an eye, Isaac’s form the slim pupil fixed upon him. He remembers the pistol-stick and pulls it from his belt loop. He brandishes it above his head.

Isaac returns what he understands as a wave and steps away from the window. Seconds later, the elevator begins to move down its clear, glowing shaft and Janak releases anxious vomit behind a tree.

Bell and Jess meet no resistance in the stairwell, are hindered only by the length of the climb. Jess takes this as a very good sign and she tackles the ascent with an enthusiasm that annoys her partner. Each floor that passes without some sort of trick further convinces Bell that they have already fallen for one, that they are the raccoon’s paw twisting deeply into the tree. Bell estimates that they are nearly to the top of the tower when they hear the elevator begin to move.

The rumble of it extinguishes the smile under Jess’s tangled bandage. She drops several stairs and hands the gun back to Bell, who holsters it automatically. Bell’s mind is elsewhere, collapsing probabilities, imagining and re-imagining what the elevator’s activation might mean.

“It’s a distraction,” Bell decides, “This doesn’t change anything. We knew we might be flushing him out.”

“But Janak-”

“He knew too. If Janak’s quick enough, and smart, he’ll find a big stick and retire the target as soon as he leaves the elevator.” They both know he is neither, which is why Bell adds: “If he’s lucky, it’ll be a bluff and we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

Jess considers asking for the pistol again but contents herself with trailing Bell upward, their pace newly urgent. 

Below, Janak holds the pistol-stick with both of his hands and moves between trees at a crouch. The elevator is slow but he can already make out the figure of the man inside. What does it mean that Isaac knows he is waiting in the forest and chose to come down regardless? Janak can think of many reasons, none of them good. He taps the radio, again, knowing that the others must have heard the elevator- that help is on the way.

Far above him, Bell leaps backward into Jess when she spots the door to the Zeitgeist proper. They both muffle screams, are both suddenly aware of the echoed scuffling of their shoes. They peer forward again to confirm what they’ve found, Jess comforted by their untroubled approach and Bell sick with fear. For every step that failed to produce some hindrance, Bell assumed the next would be more deadly. Now, at the summit, she is convinced the door is a sure-fire death trap, electrified, perhaps. Set to blow.

Jess steps forward before Bell can stop her. Without so much as putting an ear to the surface, she tries the handle, turns it, but cannot open the door. She shines the light of her phone between the door and its frame.

She sniffs three, four times: “I know that smell.”

Gas, Bell thinks, preparing to die, Of course it was gas.

“He’s welded this shut,” Jess says, “He knew we were never getting through from this side.”

Janak remembers Bell’s call for resolve in the last seconds before the elevator opens and so he stands, rigid and clear at the edge of the forest, having traded the illusion of a pistol for a metal bar that once reinforced the observation deck. The warped translucency of the door splits and Isaac’s shadow spills across the lot, head blocky with swelling and bandage, posture stiff with confidence and pain and resolve.

Isaac imagines the sound of hurried footsteps in the fire escape above. He assumes there is just one agent, there- the worst odds being that only one has wasted their time in the stairwell, that one stands across the lot, and that the last is hidden in the peripheries. Isaac’s pessimism has kept him alive long enough to see better agents killed for their glasses, half-full. He’d hoped his replacements wouldn’t track him so easily, but had operated under the assumption they would. He is not a healthy man- not mentally, not physically. His head is pounding for all that it’s crowded with teeth. He hasn’t eaten properly in days. Hasn’t slept.

And he isn’t ready to die.

Nobody has fired through the open door of the elevator, which means that nobody has him sighted at this angle. He’ll lose that edge as soon as he leaves- is losing it with every second that allows for a sniper to re-position, for an agent to drop a flight or two of stairs in the tower. Isaac needs a distraction and, because he’s assumed the worst, he has one prepared. He pulls the pin from a grenade behind his back, leftover from an old mission gone wrong, and he gathers enough momentum in stepping to the edge of the door to throw it precisely at the looming shadow across the lot.

Janak watches this happen in a technicolor daze, the rogue agent’s every move betrayed by the ecstatic illumination of the Zeitgeist. Hesitation rises in him and, as before, his mind flees to safer places, leaving him only reflex. He falls back on the instincts of an amateur and raises the pole.

There is a sharp, metallic clang and, backlit as he is, Isaac does not recognize the grenade returning until it’s just inches from his face. He recoils, followed backward into the elevator by the explosive.

Bell bursts from the fire escape in time to hear Isaac’s choral scream cut short by an explosion. She drops to the ground in the clear light of the elevator shaft and opens her eyes to find it glowing shades of red. Jess peers carefully from the door behind her and, together, they watch Janak dry-heaving in the brush, holding pressure to the reopened wound on his palm.

The three are reunited at the Zeitgeist just two weeks later, the tower newly co-opted as a black site when members of Dialogue’s clean-up crew discovered Isaac’s nest of hoarded eccentricities inside. Each of the three arrives separately and each hesitates in the parking lot, reluctant to board the elevator, though it has been scrubbed to shining. Jess stands outside the longest, kicking gravel until she overturns a pale tooth in the dirt. She grimaces and rolls her shoulder, unused to the holstered pistol she now carries under her jacket.

Uncle Jiminy waits for them above, smiling in the cracked plastic booth of the old restaurant. He’s washed a coffee pot in the kitchen- its quiet burbling and the groaning of the arthritic, rotating floor are the only noises in that space for some time. Before him, on the table, are two children’s books, pulled from Isaac’s remains: J is for Jaw and B is for Bones. Their presence explains much about the man’s late career.

The thought of opening either book is intriguing to the man, but the temptation is mild enough that he is able to easily quash it and consider himself strong-willed. He slips them into his briefcase when he hears the elevator begin to rise.

Uncle Jiminy serves the coffee, himself, batting aside Janak’s insistence that he help. The man does not remember to bring milk or sugar to the table but the three agents praise the dark brew in turns.

“I apologize to you all for the considerable postponement of this debriefing,” he begins, getting down to business, “There was some trouble at the old gas pump outside of town. Yes, that’s the one. No, no survivors. Had you three been there, well…” he laughs but does not finish the thought, gesturing, instead, to the myriad boxes piled nearby, “Our old friend Isaac left us some inventorying to complete. I’m hoping you all don’t mind a little quiet in the coming weeks? A little office work?”

The agents shake their heads.

“Good,” he says, “And I trust you are each on the road to recovery?”

Bell and Jess have shed their tangled wrappings for slimmer treatments, the worst of their pockmarks cleaned and stitched closed. They nod, and Janak joins them, fingering the amateur dressing of his palm.

“Good,” Jiminy says again, “I must say, this is quite the start for you all. I’m very proud.”

The three nod again, smiling beneath their bandages.