Antenna Syndrome (14 page)

The tall guy came out of Luna Deli and headed east
on Houston. I paralleled him from my side of the street. We passed
Norfolk, Suffolk... He looked back, and I worried that he’d sensed
a tail. I ducked into another doorway. He stepped off the curb,
still looking my way, and I figured he must have spotted me. I drew
my pistol and thumbed off the safety.

He raised an arm and stepped out from between parked
cars. A dark blue van with a rooftop bubble stopped beside him. He
climbed in and the van shot away. I stepped into the street and
tried to flag down a cab. Three passed me – all occupied – and by
then the blue van was gone. I walked back to where I’d left my
car.

As I turned onto Norfolk, I saw broken glass
littering the sidewalk. On this side of the street three houses
were boarded up. Punks had sprayed the plywood sheets with
swastikas and hate slogans. Up ahead, a Nazi banner hung from a
third floor window. I heard martial music and a chorus of
beer-laden voices singing the Horst Wessel song. I cursed the gangs
that were turning this part of the city into a fascist cesspool.
The Bowery had become a flophouse for neo-Nazi runaways who’d left
their Midwest homes and come to New York where the movement was
raw. They didn’t boycott Jewish merchants; they stalked dark-haired
girls and sent them home crying to their fathers with warnings to
leave town.

Half the streetlights had been shot out. It was so
dark I didn’t see the punks around my car until I got within twenty
feet of it. They smelled of beer and pot. Three of them sat on the
hood while a fourth was trying to open the door with a shim. They
were white boys but dressed in dark clothes and wearing smudge on
their faces.

“Scram.” I drew my pistol and racked a load. Since I
often encountered situations requiring a warning, the first slug in
the magazine was always a rubber one. But they didn’t need to know
that.

“Essen mein arse
,” said the one with the
shim.

I shot him in the knee. He screamed and clawed at
the door handle as he crumpled to the sidewalk. I gave him a kick
in the nuts. He yelped and crawled away from me. I brandished the
pistol at the three other shit-birds. They took flight from my
fender, picked up their buddy and fled down the street. I unlocked
the Charger and slid behind the wheel.

I drove east on Houston, down Roosevelt Drive and
back on Delancey past LeVeen’s apartment building. That oyster
paste sandwich Buzz had ordered must have been for Crabner. Eddie
could have been the one driving the dark blue van. Maybe he’d
stayed in the neighborhood, even after moving out of LeVeen’s
place. I hoped I’d get lucky and spot the van, but if the Lower
East Side was still Crabner’s ‘hood, the van was nowhere to be
seen. I unwrapped my sandwich and headed back uptown to my own
roost, one hand on the wheel, the other feeding my face.

Chapter 23

I went up Tenth Avenue with little traffic, pausing
briefly at the dark intersections to avoid collisions, and didn’t
encounter any traffic lights until I was north of 42nd Street.
After that, I noticed the radio started fading in and out. And the
street lights. When I went through a red light without stopping, I
realized it wasn’t the lights that were fading, but me.

A sudden hot flash left me with sweaty palms trying
to keep a grip on the wheel. The next one gave me a two-second
blackout and a moist sensation like I’d just wet my pants. I was
having another attack. I pulled to the curb, made sure the doors
were locked and turned the engine off. I felt another surge of
black lava flood my brain, and then a curtain of darkness cascaded
over my vision. When I came out of it I saw from the dashboard
clock that I’d lost ten minutes.

I changed my vaporizer cartridge and administered a
dose of 3G, a blend of gotu kola, gingko biloba and ginseng. I
waited to see if there’d be another attack. I’d seen a few doctors
about this but apparently not enough of them to form a reliable
consensus. One said it was obviously post-traumatic stress. Another
said ambient radiation had affected my nervous system. Another said
it was DDT in the water supply, and even if I drank only bottled
water, every time I showered, my skin sucked it up. I felt like an
undecided octogenarian on election day, not knowing which
politician to believe.

All I knew was that I had to get off the street
before I had an accident. Luckily, home was just around the corner.
I started the car and drove another five blocks to the corner of
57th, where I entered the underground garage of my condo
building.

I was exhausted just getting from the car to the
elevator. I rode up to the 15th floor. Before I made it to the end
of the hall, another attack drove me to my knees. As I fell, I
banged my head on the door of my neighbor. I lay on the floor, not
meaning to look as pathetic as I felt, until the door opened and I
looked up the skirt of Darcia Collins.

Darcia was a pharmacist who worked in the
neighborhood. She’d lost her husband to cancer a few years before
the Brooklyn Blast. I’d seen her with the occasional guy but none
for long. Aside from living down the hall from each other, we
sometimes crossed paths in Dewitt Clinton Park, where we both went
for the occasional walk, indulging in the illusion that we were
getting some fresh air with our exercise, even though we both wore
eMasks. She was a few years younger than me, a blonde with a nice
figure and a ready smile. But I’d never asked her out. I suspected
we were probably more alike than we knew, perhaps too afraid to
risk falling in love again for real.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Just crawling home from happy hour.”

“Seriously?” She kneeled beside me, and the view of
her legs was replaced by the equally-pleasant close-up of her
face.

“Sorry I banged your door. I had a blackout.”

“Well, you can’t just lie here in the hall.”

“I don’t think I can get up.”

She took my wrists in her hands and dragged me into
her apartment, kicking the door shut behind her. She propped me up
against a loveseat in her living room.

“Romantic,” I said. “Role reversal on the caveman
routine.”

“Don’t throw up on my carpet,” she commanded and
went into another room. She returned a moment later with a
gauze-covered phial that she broke under my nose. “Inhale.”

I did as I was told. I felt the black lava pushed to
the periphery of my vision. My brain lit up and my limbs began to
tingle all over. I got myself off the floor and sat on the
loveseat. “What was that?”

“Never mind. Let’s just say my job has perks.” She
sat beside me on the loveseat.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“It’s all right. Stay a while until I know you’re
okay. You want something to drink? Water? Juice? Soda?”

“Thanks. I could handle a glass of juice.”

She went to the kitchen. I looked around her living
room. Nice carpet, leather furniture, some original art on the
walls, a teak coffee table. She returned with a glass of OJ and sat
in the chair opposite. I took a sip and nodded my appreciation.

“You have a lot of blackouts?”

“One or two a month.” I recited the spectrum of
medical opinion.

“Make
miso
a regular part of your diet,” she
said. “Studies have shown it’s effective in treating radiation
sickness.”

“Japanese soy paste, right?”

“Buy it organic in any health food store. One
spoonful in a cup of hot water. It’s salty but you get used to
it.”

“You can get used to anything if you have no
choice.”

She smiled. “There you go.”

“Yes, here I go.” I drained my glass and set it on
the coffee table. “Thanks for the first aid. Sorry to disturb
you.”

She took a business card from a cabinet and wrote a
number on the back. “Call me if you need me.” She insisted on
walking me down the hall to my apartment, and waited until I’d
unlocked the door. “Goodnight,” she said.

“Don’t I get a kiss?” I joked.

She shook her head and smiled. “Not on the first
date.”

WEDNESDAY

Chapter 24

In the morning I awoke with a thudding headache and
leather mouth, for which I swallowed two aspirin and a quart of
water. Last night after my fainting attack I’d gone straight to bed
without watching the news. Now, as my coffee brewed, I sat at the
kitchen counter and browsed the news sites. A reporter from
Al-Jazeera, whose growing reputation for objective news coverage
now made Fox look like a bunch of right-wing hacks, had it
covered:

“The MediaTech Center on Pier 26 was the scene of a
shooting yesterday afternoon at the unveiling of EDGAR, the
autonomous garbage robot that enters trial operations this week.
During the demonstration, a man with an automatic weapon emerged
from the audience, firing upon the robot and event coordinators. A
Voromix Industries technician, Sergei Kolkovitch, died on the scene
of multiple gunshot wounds.

“
The identity and motive of the
gunman remain unknown. A Voromix security officer intervened with
the shooter but, in their ensuing struggle, the gunman was
swallowed by EDGAR. The MediaTech Center remains a crime scene this
morning, as a forensic team sifts through EDGAR’s processing tract
in hopes of retrieving the gunman’s ID.

“Investigators are still puzzling over the gunman’s
final words before he started shooting: ‘
This is a crude ploy to
steal jobs from New York’s Strongest
.’ Unofficial sources
speculate this was a gesture of protest from Department of
Sanitation employees whose jobs are threatened by garbage robots.
The public relations officer for Local 831 of the Teamsters’ Union
denies this allegation.

“Meanwhile, human rights activists are using the
incident to demand a moratorium on autonomous robot production,
citing grounds of instability and danger to the public. But Dr.
Globik, the Director of Operations, strongly refuted this
proposition.”

The scene changed to an interior shot of Dr. Globik
in an office. “EDGAR underwent field trials for over a year, using
animals of all sizes and volunteer human subjects in a wide variety
of conditions including noise, airborne pollution and limited
visibility. These trials, whose results are available for media
scrutiny, have not incurred a single accidental death to an animal
or human.

“The only reason EDGAR harmed the attacker was
because the gunman had shot out its sensor array, thus preventing
EDGAR from discerning human features. When the gunman stumbled
against its front bumper, this activated EDGAR’s collector arms,
pulling the gunman into its feeder port. It’s unfortunate but, if
you live by the sword, you may die by it as well.”

Back to the Al-Jazeera reporter. “Despite this
setback in public relations, Voromix Industries will proceed as
scheduled with EDGAR field trials this week. On the Nasdaq, Voromix
was off a point in light trading end of day, but up two points this
morning on strong volume.”

And then we were on to other stories, some of which
were far too disturbing to watch on an empty stomach. This city was
chuck full of nuts, and every full moon they all came out of the
woodwork to compete for the media’s limited attention span.

I poured a cup of coffee and sat on the balcony,
debating my next move. I needed a reason to approach Dr. Globik
but, after seeing his security detail in action, a frontal assault
was obviously not the way to go. I needed some sort of backdoor
angle...

I put on my iFocals and took a closer look at Dr.
Globik’s online data. I didn’t know what I was looking for, just
hoping for something to point me in the right direction. To hope
for a clue implied a crime had been committed, of which I had no
proof. What I sought was a bit more vague – more along the lines of
an omen...

After an hour’s worth of trolling the entire
contents of the Avatar Clinic website, scanning the abstracts of
the many articles he’d written, retracing his academic and work
history all the way back to Europe in the nineties, I finally found
something...

Between his three-year stint at the Mayo Clinic and
his opening the Avatar Clinic, there was a one-year period during
which he’d apparently held a research post at New York University.
Except it looked like he hadn’t been there a full year, only nine
months... It struck me as odd, and I wondered if his contract had
been cut short.

I called a former client who worked in NYU’s HR
department. Cheryl had been the victim of identity theft a few
years ago but I’d succeeded, where the police had not, in tracking
down the people who’d skimmed her ID and credit card info via a
fake site selling Italian shoes at deep discounts. Long story
short, Cheryl cleared her credit rating and successfully sued the
scammers. Her indebtedness to me had been sitting there like a gift
waiting to be unwrapped at my leisure.

“Cheryl, honey, have I got a deal for you! Five
pairs of Gravati in size six just fell off a loading dock on Fifth
Avenue. Yours for seven hundred bucks and I’ll deliver by
lunchtime.”

She must have seen my name on her call display. “Mr.
Savage, you’re mean. You know I love Gravati. You are joking,
aren’t you?”

“It’s been a dull week. I just needed to torture
someone.”

She was pleased to hear from me and, after a quick
exchange of mundane news, I asked her for Dr. Globik’s employment
history at NYU. In this age of moral ambiguity, she had no problem
pulling up his file and giving me the gist of it.

“We hired him in August 2019 on a one-year contract
to research the feasibility of radio-controlled insects. He was
given his own lab with a staff of three doctoral candidates. As
part of the contract, he was required to teach a graduate course in
Entomological Neurology. But shortly after the completion of the
academic year, his contract was terminated in June 2020.”