Blackfish City(69)
She shut her eyes. The whale swam around to touch noses. They stayed like that, eyes closed, unmoving, for what felt to Kaev like an uncomfortably long time. Then the orca dove.
City Without a Map: Cross Fire
This one came later, stitched into the scrapbook of my story from a boy I met a few months down the line, who came to me as so many did, in those days, having heard of the help I could provide—Zarif, a handsome weathered Uzbek sex worker, who saw Ishmael Barron moving through the noisy chaos of Arm Eight twilight, looking lost and frightened, and called him daddy.
“I need somewhere safe,” Barron said. “People are after me.”
“My place, then,” Zarif said. He pinged the old man on the elevator ride up, name and face pic, and found out who was looking for him. He was going to call it in right away, claim the reward and be done with it. Then he decided that the poor old thing was about to enter a world of hurt, and figured the least he could do was give him one last beautiful thing.
“I’m far too old to do much more than look,” Barron said, and Zarif stripped and sat by the window, where nightlamp light turned him to silver.
“This must happen a lot. Someone just wants to confess. To tell you their story.”
“Sure,” Zarif said. “Me and the priest, we perform very similar functions.”
“Feels like all my life, I’ve been running from Podlovsky. He’s lost a syllable, but he’s every bit as powerful and rich as he was back then. Maybe more so. What have I achieved in the interim? What have I done to tip the scales? I’ve hurt Podlove, hurt him badly, but what good does that do to anyone but me? People like Podlove still rule this city, this planet. People like me still suffer and sweat and bleed and pay until they can’t pay anymore. We’ll both die, and soon. That should be a comfort, but it isn’t.”
Zarif stroked himself to full tumescence, which was an astonishing one, but Barron seemed not to notice.
“I saw him by accident. Fifty years ago—a man my own age, handsome in that cruel way that powerful men often are, the fearless confident stare of someone who knows he can do whatever he wants to you. An expensive nondescript car that pulled up to the quiet late-afternoon South Bronx street where a demonstration was about to get started. He got out of the car, along with three other men and one woman. He scanned the crowd. No one stood out to him. None of us had faces. But I saw him.
“Fifteen seconds. I counted them, breath held. The invaders got back in their car. The afternoon moved forward, implacable as a glacier. People trickled in. The protest got started. The counterprotesters arrived, poorer tenants from two neighborhoods over, accusing me and my crew of having pushed them out—which was, alas, true, but I knew them, had knocked on their doors and tried for weeks to get them to come to meetings, fight together against the city’s latest ‘rezoning’ plan.
“Someone was behind this. Someone had pitted us against each other, with surgical precision.”
Zarif shut his eyes, imagined himself fucking his favorite beam fighter senseless. He knew, from very fortunate friends of friends, exactly what Hao Wufan was into.
“Things got bloody. People died. Buildings burned. When I got out of the hospital I spent a week staring into my screen. I was determined to find out who he was, who they were, the people who arrived in the hush before the violence began. It took me a long time before I found them, a fledgling midlevel department at an undistinguished security firm. Creators of a new kind of PR animal, custom-made for the Multifurcation, which of course hadn’t gotten that name yet. Micro-audiences; hypertargeted messaging. Directing people not to consumption or to voting, but to action. Bespoke mobs for the twenty-first century.
“I stalked Podlovsky for the few months that New York City had left. I went to his office. Bought tickets to galas to watch him smile. Found his house, his gym. Charted his habits. Maybe I intended to murder him. I never thought that far ahead. All I knew was, this was my enemy, and sooner or later I would have the chance to bring a reckoning.
“And then: The fall. The breach. The collapse. Survival became my only concern. Other enemies intervened—men with guns, men who demanded awful things in exchange for food or a ferry ride out of the city or simply not murdering someone. But once I was safe in the FEMA camp—or, at least, a little less unsafe—I had time to think about Podlovsky again. Had the chance to search for him. Found him mentioned in some of the outlets, setting up shop in Qaanaaq. His firm still garnering headlines, still controversial. Something to do with the neo-Inuits up north, one of his pharma clients needing something hushed up, deeds so ugly that only something uglier would be sufficient. And dumb incredible luck, that I’d searched in that narrow window. Two weeks later, Martin Podlovsky did not exist. Which could only mean shareholder invisibility.
“I spent years stockpiling the money to make it to Qaanaaq. But this place quickly drained my hunger for revenge. There were too many other hungers, too much other pain. Too much beauty. Rage is a hard armor to wear indefinitely, and mine would have destroyed me.
“So: Life happened. The fire of my hate died down. I fell in love, and out of it, a time or two. I found a job, built a career. Got sick. Discovered mysterious broadcasts that spoke directly to my soul. Dull embers were all that was left of my rage by the time Martin Podlovsky’s flamboyant grandson landed in my lap by pure outrageous unimaginable coincidence, sick with the same fatal illness as I, and happened to blurt out his last name over coffee.