Crooked Little Vein - Warren Ellis

“The book binding is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”

He lurched forward, fixing me with a fanatic gaze. “Do you understand, son? Do you see? It’s a book that forces you to read it. It prepares your eye for input.”

I met his eyes and mirrored his pose to try and calm him a little, make him know I was on his side. I was abstractly aware of my hand shaking and I needed to bring this back down to earth any way I could.

“Okay, sir. You’ve lost a valuable private historical document—”

“It’s more than that. I want you to comprehend. We need this book. How can I put it? Do you like living in America, Mike?”

“Sure, I guess. Never lived anywhere else.”

“You don’t think America’s changed? That maybe it was once a better place to live?”

“Well. I’ve seen America change, certainly. Whether it was better or not, I don’t know. I don’t recall the eighties as being much fun, and the nineties were just kind of there, you know?”

“Yeah. You’re young. You don’t see it. When I was young, Mike, this country was pure, and righteous. Secure in the knowledge that we had fought pure evil and won. Furthermore, every able-bodied man in America had been trained in killing people with dangerous firearms. I could walk home from school without fear of being set upon by testicular saline infusion fetishists. Those people, by the way, are not to be trusted. You need to remember that.

“The country has changed, Mike, year by year, day by day. Look at what’s on television now. Look at the magazines and newspapers. Look at what people put on the Internet. These aren’t hidden perversions, Mike. This isn’t like Dr. Sawyer and the collection of black men’s tongues he kept in that weird little house on the outskirts of town when I was twelve. This is the mainstream now, Mike. This is how life in America is. Moment by moment, our country has grown sicker. Our borders, Mike, have come to encompass the nine circles of Hell.”

He suddenly seemed very small and lonely.

“Since the book was lost, Mike. It’s all happened since the book was lost. We need the book back. We need to study it and apply it and make America beautiful again.”

I took a deep breath. The next thirty seconds were either going to save me or kill me, I figured. “You realize I couldn’t care less about that, right?”

I wanted him to, I dunno, react like he was shot, or call his creatures in to shoot me, or anything that was going to get me off this hook I’d been spiked on.

He wasn’t supposed to smile like that.

“We know,” the chief of staff said happily. “This clinched your selection. You see, Mike, what we really need is a human shit-tick, swimming through the toilet bowl of America. We don’t need someone who’s going to crawl to the edge and demand a blue-block and a flush. We need someone content to paddle through the droppings. Someone who doesn’t care about anything but doing their job. That you are some kind of moral mutant who bears no love for the country that gives them life is, amazingly, what suits you best to the task at hand.”

My face sank down into my hands. “Oh, good,” I mumbled. Or “Oh, God.” One of the two.

“Smile, son. In five minutes’ time, there will be half a million dollars in your bank account, available for immediate withdrawal. Yours, nonrecoupable. Tax-free, too.”

I could feel my face involuntarily twisting into a wonky grin. My mom had a regular saying: “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” It usually came out when the police came to tell us Dad had turned up naked someplace again. Sometimes it made me laugh, sometimes it made me cry, but I never felt torn between the two, and sometimes I thought Mom was crazier than Dad for saying it. But this was it. I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud (because it was true, or because he was full of shit) or burst into tears right there and then (because he’d really done it, or because he was lying). I didn’t know what to believe and I didn’t know how to react. I wasn’t scared so much anymore. I just resented the old bastard for making me feel like that.

He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew a flat black plastic thing that he handed over to me. I took it, suspiciously, and gingerly explored the seam my fingertips found on the long side. A catch snicked, and it unfolded into a clamshell-style handheld computer.

“That’s yours,” the chief of staff said as it hissed into life in my hand, its long screen flaring clean white. “It contains all the leads we currently have, and is fitted for wireless Internet access. It goes into a secure system at Treasury, which pushes continuing updates into your machine.”

“You’re just sending me into the wild with half a mil and this?”

“Oh, I will come to see you from time to time, when I have new information. Or perhaps just to see how you’re doing and where you are. Consider me Virgil to your Dante.” This notion amused him no end. His laugh was a dry, raspy, high thing, the sound of skeletons giggling.

He stood up, arranging his baggy suit on his pointy frame. “Smile, son. You are engaged in a great work. Everything is different now. You have the most glorious of goals. You are going to help us save America.”

His eyes glittered like new coins.

“From itself.”

I realized the chief of staff was preparing to leave. I surged out of the chair. “Hold on. I don’t accept commissions just like this. I need, I need, some way to contact you, a longer briefing, something…”

“It’s all in the machine. In a few minutes, you’ll have all the expense money you could want. You contact me through a secure email system, I contact you when I deem it appropriate. Let’s be men here: you know I’ll be watching.”

He extended one long tough hand. “Good hunting, Mr. McGill.” I shook it. I could feel the little bones of his hand moving under my grip, like he was nothing but thin leather and sticks.

He did that curt nod again, spun on his heel, and left.

I looked at the closed door for about a minute. Then sat down again, heavily, and looked out the window. The men in black were melting away. I watched the street a while longer. The chief of staff and his security team came out of my building. He stopped. Looked up at me. His face split open in an awful grin. His team gathered him into his car, and they were off, gone, disappeared, like they were never there.

Except I had a brand-new handheld computer on my desk.

I had a thought. Opened the thing up again, tapped the icon for Internet access with my fingernail, and put a Web site address into it with the QWERTY thumbpad. My bank has an online service that I use in preference to the bank tellers laughing at my balance in front of me. I thumbed in the security number and waited.

I had half a million dollars in my bank account. In fact, I had five hundred thousand and three dollars and forty-one cents. The three forty-one was the sum total of my worldly wealth when I woke up that day.

The handheld thumped down on the desk, next to the cooling mug of rat piss. That was it. I had the biggest single-job expense account I’d ever seen, and the most insane job I’d ever heard of. Finding a book that had been lost for fifty years. If it had ever existed. A secret Constitution of the United States. Invisible Amendments. Hell, I couldn’t tell you how many visible Amendments there were.

I had half a million dollars. For a complete wild-goose chase. Half a million dollars that were mine and never to be spent on anything remotely useful.

Chapter 2

I sat there for at least half an hour, just thinking. Trying to think, anyway. Sort of a fugue state, where lots of words were flying around my head without assembling into sentences. The walls started closing in. Shifting in my chair, I found that my joints were locking up and my muscles were bunching into hard knots of stress. I fought my way into my jacket, feeling like a stick insect trying to put on a life vest, and went out for a walk.

There was a girl with blue hair sitting cross-legged on the corner of the street. Her hair fell down her back in thick, fuzzy dreadlocks, like someone had nailed a dozen baby aliens to her head. She was dressed in what I assumed to be an artful arrangement of fabric swatches intended to resemble rags, rather than actual shambling homeless/nutcase out-and-out rags. Tartan, paisley, plaid, things that looked like they belonged as wallpaper in a kid’s room, things that looked like they’d been ripped off clowns at knifepoint. She had her back to me, and, as I approached, I expected to see a hat in front of her, or a little cardboard sign with the hand-scrawled message NEED MONEY FOR FOOD/DRUGS/CLOWN-STABBING. As I walked around her, I saw that she was just sitting there, eyes closed, hands on her knees, perfectly still and calm.

She had… well, I thought it was Sharpie or makeup around her eye, at first. A wobbly circle, with stitch marks crossing it, drawn like the sort of roundish patch you’d see sewn into teddy bears or old denim jeans. She sort of came to as I walked around her, smiled as if she’d just woken up, and rubbed her face. The marking didn’t smear. It was tattooed on.

She rubbed her eyes, and then looked up at me, giving me the gentlest smile. “Hello,” she said softly.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re sitting asleep on the corner of the street.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was listening.”

“To what?”

She nodded at the street, still with that serene smile. “The traffic. Sit with me.” She patted the sidewalk next to her. Calculating that, after this, the day just couldn’t get any weirder, I said the hell with it and sat down next to her.

She nodded toward the street. “The traffic. I’m listening to the traffic.”

“What’s so interesting about the sound of cars? Is this one of those art things I never get?”

She laughed, and it was a soft low laugh, like the flow of water in a brook. There was no tension in the girl at all. I couldn’t imagine anything affecting that pool of relaxation around her. Just sitting there, I felt the knots in my back slowly sliding apart.

“No. Well, not really. I’m listening for the future.”

“The future.”

“Do you know anything about the Native Americans?”

“Only the usual stuff about poisoning them with infected blankets. I always wondered why we don’t give little blankets to each other at Thanksgiving.”

There was almost a frown there. “That’s just nasty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out of me without really thinking. I suddenly didn’t want to spoil her and her zone of no-tension.

“The Native American shamans,” she said, “listened for the future in the sound of horses. They divined it, from the patterns of hoofbeats. They would sit like this, and just listen. In those days, horses were the sound of their world, the true sound of motion, and they believed that their movement through time let in leakages of the future. Presentiments of what will be.”

“I don’t see any horses.”

“Then you’re not looking.” She smiled, indulgent. “This is the sound of our world in motion, right here. Cars. The strike of hooves became the point where the rubber meets the road. Now, I’m a new American. My family came over on the boat from Spain only a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the people who were here before. In fact, I think it means I ‘must’ learn from them, if I’m going to stay here and look after this land properly. If only to make up for your smallpox-infected blankets, right? So here I sit. A New American shaman, divining the future from the sound of cars.”

As the strangeness of my days go, this was really kind of benign in its insanity. And I was enjoying the peace of her. So I drew my knees up and around until I was cross-legged like her, and we sat together like Zen hoboes on the corner of the street.

“What do you hear?” I asked.

She inclined her head slightly, toward the constant blur of metal accelerating past us. Just listening. It took a minute before she gave a little laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I hate the way this sounds. It makes me sound like a carny fortune-teller.”

“Go on.”

“You’re going on a long journey, Mike.”

“Oh, God. Tell me there’s no tall dark stranger.”

She giggled. “I think you’re the tall dark stranger. But, no, you’re going on a long journey. Sounds like you’re going to cross the country before you’re done. And yourself. It’s going to be strange for you. But that’s not a bad thing. Traveling is good.”

“You travel a lot?”

“I do nothing but travel,” she said, glancing at me. “Look at my face. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can’t get a job, buy a house, any of the things we’re supposed to want to do. When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society. But that’s okay. It stops me from giving up on myself. It stops me from settling for something ordinary. You shouldn’t want ordinary things, either. You’re unusual. I know you can’t hear the future, but it comes to you, anyway, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it the future.”

“That’s because you can’t hear it.”

“Back up a second,” I said, feeling like I’d missed a step. “I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“No.” She smiled. “You didn’t.”

“I should really get moving,” I said, standing up, suddenly very cold.

She beamed up at me. “Yes, you should. You just came into quite a lot of money. You should spend a little on yourself before you have to spend it on necessities. You don’t need to start your journey just yet. Enjoy yourself a little bit.”

“I just thought of an old song,” I said.

“Which one?”

“‘Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.’”

“That’s right,” she said, eyes drawn back to the traffic. “It’s always later than you think. I won’t be here tomorrow. And neither will you. Go have a drink.”

Chapter 3

An hour later, I walked into some freak bar on Bleecker Street and yelled, “I’m buying a hundred drinks—for me!”

Oh, they beat the shit out of me.

Chapter 4

By Sunday, I’d moved into the Z Hotel, where the doormen dress like ninjas and stab passing poor people in the neckbits with wooden swords.

I spent the day reading the handheld, in between horrible abuse of room service and watching all the Filth-O-Vision pay-TV porno I could handle. It turned out that regular vanilla sex hadn’t been changed while I’d been away in the prison of chastity forced upon me by the world, but apparently all men and women everywhere now like anal sex, and no one uses a rubber to prevent pregnancy when there is the opportunity to ejaculate up a woman’s nostril.