“I said what are you doing?”
Derek does not blink when he says, “Listening to some kickass music. Then I got interrupted. By you.” He clomps past Cheston and stations himself behind the counter. Here he keeps a stepping stool that he climbs onto, and now they are nearly the same height. “You got water all over the floor.”
“Bad storm.”
“Good storm. Good for me. Storms always do damage. And I’m going to be doing a lot of business tomorrow. A lot. I assume that has something to do with why you’re here?”
“Blew out a blade drive.”
An eyebrow arches. “Did you?”
“I did.”
Derek keeps the drivers locked up in a glass case behind the counter. He does not look at them but nods his head in their direction.
“I’d appreciate it if we could do this quickly.” Cheston rolls back his sleeve to reveal the pale flesh of his forearm, interrupted by a black patterned square, a QR code that contains his credit card information.
Derek looks at the tattoo and hoists his upper lip. “Really?”
“Do we have to go through this every time?”
“I just think it’s messed up. Commercializing your body like that. Soul selling even. Gross. Really gross.”
“It’s the way of the future. Ten years, we’ll all be inked up.”
“So predicts the great Nostradumbass.”
“How much?”
Derek slowly withdraws the scanning gun from its cradle, fires the red line of it across the counter, up the round swell of Cheston’s belly, pausing at his heart. “You know that’s an interesting question. Because you’re not a standard sort of customer, are you? You’ve got a lot at stake, don’t you? With your little business.” He turns the gun one way, then the other. “Hmm. How much should you pay?”
“There are plenty of stores. I don’t have to come to this one.”
“But I know things about you.” Derek’s lips tremble a little. “Isn’t that worth something?”
“You’re not the only one who knows things.”
“What do you know, Cheston?”
“You think I don’t know who my guests are? I know who I’m hosting. I know what you’re up to. I could rat on you just as well as you could rat on me.” There is a long silence between them. The wind gusts outside and Cheston says, “Have you ever heard of the Panopticon?”
“No, Cheston, I have not heard of the Panopticon.”
“It’s a building with a circular structure. It could be a school or a hospital or a prison. A philosopher named Jeremy Bentham designed it. There’s a watchman stationed in its center. From his inspection house, he can see into all the rooms, or cells, but no one can tell whether or not the watchman is actually watching. They must assume he is.” Cheston slides his sunglasses to the end of his nose and studies Derek over the top of them. “Assume he is. Assume I am watching.”
?
A few minutes later, with a receipt crunched in his pocket and a plastic bag swinging from his hand, he pushes through the door, into the street, where the night hisses with rain. There is a hard division between the harsh white light of the store and the penetrating black of the street.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, after so many hours of staring at computers, his eyes will not focus. The world lags and warps and fuzzes over. So he cannot be sure whether it is a trick of the night or the fault of his vision, but he thinks he sees something. What, he cannot say. Maybe a pale dog or maybe a headlight flashing off a puddle. But he feels observed, hunted. It feels like there is an unseen presence haunting this night.
He blinks hard. Then runs and walks and runs again the next three blocks. With the air so full of water, breathing feels like drowning. He thinks he hears a clicking, like claws on concrete. Every few steps, he checks over his shoulder, making his vision whirl and his balance unsteady. The occasional car cuts the darkness, its engine coughing, its tires swishing. Otherwise, he is alone, the only people he sees safely ensconced in the bright orange squares of lamplight that pattern the buildings around him. They float above the danger and doubt he feels.
He passes an alley, a wedge of shadow. Every nerve in his body tells him to give it wide berth. He angles toward the curb, slips into the street. The water there is calf-deep. His shoe fills with it and threatens to tear away. He curses and lurches back onto the sidewalk just in time to see the man emerge from the alley. The man he saw earlier. The bag man. Lump.
Lump staggers, his face cloaked by the plastic torn around his face like a poncho. They move past each other, close enough to grab. The man’s face swings toward him at the last second, damp and warted, so that it appears tadpoles surge beneath his skin. “You don’t have to go to hell,” he says. “You can be saved. It’s not too late.” Only then does Cheston notice the crow on the man’s shoulder. It opens its beak and rasps at him.
Cheston sprints the rest of the way home, his legs trembling and his throat feeling burned out by the time he arrives. He pauses a moment at the entry to stare across the street. At her apartment. His sunflower. The window remains dark, though the rest of the building blazes with light. Maybe she left or maybe she’s in there. With that man. Cheston bares his teeth and keys the lobby door. He nods at the doorman at his desk. The elevator closes around him like a steel coffin that feels like it is being lowered instead of raised—and he does not feel safe until inside his apartment. The buzz of his computers, like angry wasps, calms him. He rips the blade drive from its packaging. Wires it in and powers it up. It blips and chugs to life.
He blows out a sigh, what feels like his first breath since leaving the apartment. He checks his phone—to see how long he has been gone, how long the driver has been down, hoping no more than thirty minutes. He checks his Blackphone and on the Skype app he sees five missed calls and just as many messages. They are all from Cloven. And all of them say the same thing: “What have you done, Cheston?”
His vision shifts again, as if traveling him away. He takes off his sunglasses, knuckles his eyes, puts them back on. He plops into his desk chair. His computers are asleep, and his eyes collide with his reflection in the dark screen and look away. He twitches. He cannot sit still—standing up, sitting down, swiveling in his chair one way, then the other—trying to take in the whole room at once, his body guarding against something. He shakes the mouse. The screens brighten and make his eyes feel full of ashes. He fits on his sunglasses again. He unzips and thrashes out of his jacket and tosses it on the floor.
His fingers spider above the keyboard and then stutter out a note. “So so so totally sorry,” he writes. “Huge-ass storm came through. One of the drivers fried. RAN to store to get another. Literally dying right now from lack of breath. LOL. Everything restored. Again, apologies.”