Noise (2 page)

[2] (i) The destabilization of Trade informs the competition for resources—conflict, nationalism, religion, and consciousness are all Narratives for securing these. (ii) These will be your ready tools.

[3] (i) This assumes that you will kill other people. (ii) Begin identifying the people beyond your Group as Outsiders as quickly as possible. (iii) Begin before the Event, if you are able.

[4] (i) You will need a Place, and it will require a name. (ii) Your Place is your strongest Narrative.

“TWO”

[1] (i) If your Place serves also as your residence prior to the Event, then there are a number of preparations you can make. (ii) Of course, stockpiling firearms, ammunition, fuel, preserved or preservable foods, and medical supplies is a priority. (iii) However, overpreparation can lead to disaster (cf 2.1.iv-2.1.v). (iv) If your Place is too near an urban center, then Outsiders may attempt to Forage it for supplies or shelter. (v) If your Place is overprepared, it loses mobility,
which is among a Group’s most primary survival characteristics.

[2] (i) A Group inhabiting a Place too near an urban center will endure considerable Administrative stress in the process of negotiating with potential Additions to the Group, for this negotiation inevitably includes a number of necessary eliminations–Rejections that stress the Place’s perimeter. (ii) This is problematic, for in this instance, your Group will be forced to eliminate Rejections
before
your Narrative has solidified against the psychological damage that can result from doing so. (iii) A Group requires time to identify not only itself but also its Outsiders. (iv) For this reason, situate your Place an appropriate distance away from any urban center. (v) Given time, a Group will stabilize its Narrative such that Additions and Rejections will not stress Administration.

t
he thing about a bench grinder is that it’s loud, and it draws a lot of amps. The wiring in our place was old and jury-rigged as it was. Bolting the grinder onto the kitchen counter and unplugging the microwave to free up an outlet meant more than just fucking up the carpentry—we were taking a risk with the breaker. If our place was going to burn, we didn’t want to be the ones to ignite it. Not yet, at least.

But we had to sharpen our swords inside, where we’d attract less attention—if any. Slade was still quiet at this point, still largely unaware. We hoped people would think we were flipping the place—college guys with parents’ money, trying to dip their toes into real estate. We’d even stolen a real estate sign and paid a design major to do us up a
SLADE RENOVATIONS AND REPAIR
decal we could stick over the Realtor’s. We put my phone number on there, just in case. We told the guy the company was to hedge our bets—to get some business going before we graduated, in case being interdisciplinary studies majors didn’t pan out.

He told us to keep him in mind, for brochures and the like.

We didn’t know how long we had until someone noticed the
break-in at the pawnshop, until someone noticed the sound of a bench grinder running at night. We honestly didn’t know if anyone would have time to notice. Who knew when Slade would start falling apart, which would make a hell of a lot more noise than sharpening swords would.

Jo, our neighbor who lived behind and above us, wouldn’t care. She knew us. She knew we did things like this. We didn’t know the neighbor who lived across the shared driveway. It never came outside, even though, every night, without interruption, we could see the blue-strobe pulse of its TV. Sometimes there were shadows of movement between the insufficient blinds.

In shop class, in the seventh grade, we’d learned about tools. Which directions to move things, which machines had which tics, and which were most likely to tear off an arm. I used lines from Frost’s poem “Out, Out—” to write my term paper about the dangers of the portable router.

We had to learn first aid in shop class, too. Which was fine because I was already learning it in the Boy Scouts.

The noise was a thing. The theft and the running and bolting it to the counter had been things, too. They were terminal punctuation. They were our commitment to our Plan, because these things were the last steps we could take. The final preparations. Everything else was reversible—wouldn’t get us in trouble if Salvage turned out wrong. If everything quieted down, and we got jobs and suits and broke our promises to each other to live in the same town—to have wives who were friends and kids who asked us to teach them how to play Dungeons & Dragons.

But what we’d done—breaking into Meyer’s, leaving footprints, ruining the landlord’s counter—these were things we couldn’t take back. We had to wait until we were sure. We knew
from the goateed guys at the Faire’s armory that sharpening carbon-steel swords on a bench grinder would ruin the machine. It created harmonics that had nowhere to go but back into the machine’s bearings. And they would burn up, lock the wheels, and destroy the motor. And we knew that sharp edges were just ideas, that they fade over time, so that sharpening our swords too soon, while we were still practicing swordplay, would only mean we’d have to do it over again. That would mean
two
grinders, which we couldn’t afford, and didn’t want to steal. It would mean having mounted the grinder a lot sooner, when we still worried about the landlord coming around. It was impossible. If he came now, we didn’t care. We were ready.

We put soft edges on the swords, which were looser ideas about sharpness than what we intended. Than what we intended to do with these edges.

We took turns, grinding and grinding, throwing sparks onto the linoleum and against the fridge. The other of us paced from window to window, watching for notice. We had every light in the house on to make it look like we were working our late-night house-flipping renovation. They dimmed, a sort of sinking light-choir, every time one of us bore down on the wheels with our steel.

We only made them so sharp. Because we had to practice, which was going to dull them. After we’d practiced, then we’d finish the ideas. We’d sharpen them fully. And we got lucky—the grinder didn’t burn up, because we didn’t finish the job. We let it cool, and added some lubricant, which would be enough, we’d heard, to finish the job.

There would come days, though, when we would do this by hand. With our whetstones.

•   •   •

What I remember most about pumpkins isn’t carving them. It’s the smell. Even fresh pumpkins smelled like rot to me, like bad flesh, and disemboweling them so you could insert candles felt like grabbing fistfuls of decayed sinew—the seeds like tumors caught in their own body-webbing. Roasting the seeds, with salt and oil, always seemed carnivorous, even though we were dealing with a plant.

We had the pumpkins set up on sawhorsed plywood, on the dark side of the house, where neither Jo nor our other neighbor could see what we were doing. We were screened from the next property by the backyard’s mess of bamboo and sycamore trees.

Outside, in the dark, I held my sword like a carving knife. I thought about Halloweens past, about how we created glowing faces with sharp knives. How pumpkins became jack-o’-lanterns. About what I wanted faces to look like. About what I had to do to a pumpkin to get what I needed to know about striking someone in the head with a sword.

It took practice, slicing into the pumpkins instead of simply knocking them from the plywood.

We also used watermelons, which were important because they made “the sound.”

Later, we finished the idea. We finished the edges and burned up the grinder. Adam put all the pumpkin seeds we’d picked from the plywood on a baking sheet. Added salt and oil, because there was no sense wasting. Not with what was coming. We had to become accustomed to doing carnivorous things.

•   •   •

Killing people outside a grocery store is more than it seems. It is also collecting baseball cards.

It is an entire pack, a box of packs, too large to
steal
. You must simply
take
them, right in front of the assistant manager who only let six students in at a time because our junior high school was too close, and we all stole too many things. After the first card, there is the next, and the next, an entire loose-leaf photo album that isn’t yours. And somehow it means something, even though baseball bores us, because it meant something to our fathers. It is a stack of talismans we’d rather not understand. And they stack and stack.

So do the people, when you kill them.

I was twelve then, and there were three of us: Jon, Chuck, me. In the wooded lot behind our development, we had a fort. A copse of trees, really, at the soft end of a floodplain, where the city had installed an extra storm drain, right in the trees, leading to the main culvert nearby. The culvert was only slightly more important to us than the fort. It was an open-topped, cement trapezoid, and it was horseapple fights, experiments with aerosol spray and butane lighters. It was access to a second-place, between our housing development and the next, between and below privacy fences. It was an underworld where we sold scraps of stolen
Playboy
s and
Club
s and
Penthouse
s to one another. It was where we got beat up. It was our Place.

The city’s failed drain became our coffer. We wiggled the calcified service “key” out of its brackets under the iron lid and
finished the job that runoff had started: sealing the drain and its ground-level vents with mud, sticks, anything that would move downstream. We made it our own Charybdis.

A neighborhood grocery store moved in a year or so later, absorbing the majority of our field into its parking lots and facilities. So we formed a Plan.

On Friday nights, we would sleep over at Jon’s house. His parents let us watch unscrambled late-night cable and stay out as late as we wanted. As long as we stayed in the neighborhood. Which was fine with us. The neighborhood was all places to us.

Through the culvert, through the fort, through the unmowed grass at the edge of the lot—the grass as tall as we were—we took the field back piecemeal. We read teach-yourself ninjutsu manuals and practiced moving invisibly and silently through the grasses. We destroyed the store’s decorative shrub-lighting with clubs from the fort because doing so with the baseball bats we had used in Little League, on team Yellow Jackets, felt wrong. We threw bottles into the lanes, and nails—anything we thought would make grocery store life generally unlivable.

By day, before and after school, we took back the store. We stole medicines, mostly, because they were small and expensive. But we also took anything else we wanted: pens, lighters, a whisk. Anything small enough to escape the ceiling’s bubbled, black security windows.

And eventually, we stopped stealing and started taking. A gallon of milk, a mop. A box of baseball cards. What twelve-year-old would walk out with a gallon of milk? The store’s bigger problem was the other kids, those stealing bags of candy to sell on the blacktop at school during lunch—the managers always caught them. We were never caught. Our combination of force and paranoia was stronger than guilt and stealth, which never worked.
We dumped everything in our coffer, used or not. We were most amused by just destroying what we’d taken.

Adam hadn’t started stealing until college, when he dated a punk girl without realizing it. He didn’t know until months afterward, when she told him that what they’d been doing, stealing together, was dating.

We were force, and paranoia, moving through the culvert along University Avenue toward the store where Adam and I bought ramen noodles by the shipping crate and boxes of mac-and-cheese and soda. We ate these things while we played Dungeons & Dragons after work. We had never stopped playing.

Word had slipped through the FCC, and things were unraveling. We chose this store because there was a pharmacy across the street, and we intended to target both. We parked Adam’s truck beside the unused loading dock of the mostly empty shopping center a few blocks away. We used the culvert to move along the avenue to get to the store because we thought the swords would provoke a fight, if people could see us. Not everyone was being strategic. Some were getting high on disorder for its own sake, with better odds than not that the police wouldn’t even show because they’d be controlling panic elsewhere. Most of the National Guard that watched the armory along the highway had been deployed overseas.

The swords had taken their edge on the grinder. We had hacked through whole melons earlier in the morning.

WHIS.PER had been quite clear. It was the only thing he ever said, and he said it behind a mask, behind an assumed name, into the tiny lens recording his ’casts.

Overcoming the aversion to violence is best effected through disguise
.

It was the only thing he ever said, over and over, and most
jammers left him alone for it. We painted the tops of our faces with shoe polish, and masked the bottoms with doctored swaths of our darkest T-shirts. I remembered from mine and Jon’s and Chuck’s ninjutsu manual how to turn a T-shirt into a ninja’s hood.

“Did you decide?” I asked him. Overhead, sports cars with exhaust mods gargled furiously past.

“Levi,” Adam said.

“Yeah? You sure?”

My heart was realizing the task at hand, pumping so hard my field of vision was twitching.

“Yeah. Sure.”

I’d chosen my new name already, had chosen it right away when I’d seen the wildstyle directive in greasepaint on the commuter-lot dumpster. There was a sigil as homage to WHIS.PER’s Rule, his ’cast frequency in faux-stencil. The new message was around it. No vowels.

Thy shld tk nw nms
.

Hiram.

We were stalling. “All right,” I said. “Nothing that won’t fit.” We had backpacks.

“Yeah.” Adam’s bright blue eyes drew in what dusk remained. What flotsam would move downstream to collect in our coffer at the bottom of the field.