Skullcrack City (3 page)

9. The Hex trade ain’t pretty. I avoid the articles about Hex because half of them are clearly bullshit. And the other half, talking about blood cults and human sausage and that farm they found in northern Canada…well, in college I took an Economics course and learned an important term: Externalities. Basically, anything that isn’t a business making a product or me buying and consuming said product is an Externality. So when you’re in the middle of a binge and you decide for the tenth time that week that you’re quitting and you call your mom to tell her you’ve got a problem with Hex and then she says she just
knew
something was wrong and she’d come right over if she wasn’t states away and then she sees fit to segue into implications and how you’re probably funding human trafficking and she says, “You know they only found pieces of those kids on the farm,” and her voice echoes in your mind in a way that tells you this call was the worst decision you’ve made in a long trail of them, you can take comfort in that term.
Externalities
. There you are at the center of everything. Take what you need. Somewhere, floating in a muddled abstraction beyond your existence as a generally good person, are the Externalities. Fuck ’em and God Bless ’em. Hang up and grab some bottled water and, shit, that’s mom calling back but you pop another Hexadrine and the mangled choir is louder than the phone and your hands are trailing mercury and everything but You is an Externality.

So, sure…I had my share of WHY NOTS.

But my time as a Primary Compliance Officer had me riding a tsunami wave of FUCK ITS. Once I catch a serious FUCK IT wave, I ride that thing right up to the sand. “Sand” might be a loose metaphor for “point where I’m almost dead and filled with the kind of regret you have to actively forget in order to continue on as a human being.” But I’d convinced myself that this time I’d harness the speedy authority and constant action of the Hexadrine and that it would open my field of vision and let me see beyond the structured absurdity of my daily grind.

Because
this
was the view from my office, every day: A field of beige cubicles under buzzing neon tubes, a hive of pizza-fattened service drones harvesting interest.

The thing I couldn’t see but always felt coming from my laptop: Queens and soldiers, sated and slow from gorging themselves on what we’d made for them, biting each other’s faces as they fucked in babyskull BMW’s.

I saw them clearly once—looked beyond my spreadsheets, about an inch through the crystal display. They felt my eyes on them, separated their latched mandibles, rotated hundreds of compound eyes to see who had dared disturb their reverie.

They could read the look on my face: Why does it have to be like this?

A buzz filled my head, a vibration from inside the oldest part of my mind.

They were laughing.

The thing closest to me spoke. The high tone of royalty.

Who are you to ask?

That vision came on a Friday. There were free donuts in the employee lounge.

I ate three bacon maple bars in lieu of a real dinner. Washed out the sugar shock with a mug of jet-black French roast sludge in a World’s Greatest Bank mug.

A cowboy behind me, one of our best earners (and a hell of a golfer if you asked him or his mama, hohoho) dropped his newspaper and sighed.

“Another day of busting our chops, huh?”

He winked.

I returned with a, “Well, you know how it is,” shrug/smirk thing that felt like betrayal.

The old buzz from my vision set my bones to shiver.

“I read your last report, Doyle. You were kind of rough on the girls in loan processing. I don’t think they’re used to being watched so close. They’ll follow your suggestions, though, I mean, we all have to toe the line. But we have to keep those loans moving too. Used to be, before all this nanny state b.s., pardon my French, but it used to be that
that
was the main thing. Used to be an ‘Easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission’ kind of set-up, and you didn’t get hit with a colonoscopy so long as the deal closed.”

I feigned amicable but concerned. “Yeah, I think after the Third Depression the Feds decided we’d been a little too reckless.”

The cowboy rolled his eyes.

I remembered a file photo from a home we’d foreclosed: The owner’s body gone to fat soup in a tub, both arms razored from wrist to bend, SORRY ABOUT THE MESS! written on the wall in dark smears.

“Shoot, it was the Feds who cleared those damn mortgage products for three years running before they decided to start making examples out of us. You ask me, a little less government involvement and we could have set that ship straight.”

This cowboy was using a cognitive dissonance lasso to rope me out of rational response. I was dazed. I took a blind swing. “Do you really think we were doing the right thing?”

His nose wrinkled like I’d just shit myself. His eyes left mine and focused on a spot on my forehead, where I’d imagine he was picturing a smoking bullet hole.

“Well, I’d say we were doing our best to survive in a free market.”

He snorted. His newspaper came back up. The message was clear.

What’s your fucking problem, man? And who are you to ask?

Jesus. My hands were shaking. Too much coffee. Too much of this place.

I’m certain that as of that evening—after some kind of corporate cowboy klatch—my surveillance status had been elevated to whatever code they use for Fucking Limp-dick Capitalism-Hating Socialist Snitches.

Probably Code Pink, right?

And I think I would have noticed how large a blip I’d become on their radar if that hadn’t been the same night I set to the streets in search of an elephant-overdose-sized stash of Hexadrine.

If you want to destroy a wasp nest you approach slowly at the cool of dusk with the right poison in hand. What you
don’t
do is wait until the hive is wide awake, chug a jar of moonshine until you’re blind, strip naked, cover yourself in alarm pheromones, and bum rush the nest with your bare fists. Doing that kind of thing might create a mess you can’t fix.

Doing that kind of thing might just end your life as you know it.

Zombie drive time, the dead-eyed commute from the office to home to dig out an old, busted-up phone with Hungarian Minor’s number stored in its guts.

Are you really going to call him? There’s got to be somebody else with a hook-up. Somebody with more fingers and less knives.

But my social circle had dwindled. Hell, all I had was a social dot—just me on a one man continuum. My last round in the Hex rodeo had thrown off most of my old friends, and after I got clean I had to shake my new acquaintances to ensure I stayed alive.

I mean, I had my turtle Deckard, but his lifestyle consisted of sunbathing, eating goldfish, and—somehow I just knew this—silently judging me while I masturbated. I’d taken to covering his tank with a thin blanket, but still…he knew.

Home: a one bedroom apartment three blocks short of the really rotten side of the city. When I’d moved in I felt a certain naïve thrill, being so close to the reddest part of my city’s crime maps. Stabbings just a few streets away! I was fearless, a man of the people. A saint, maybe, moving among the fallen.

Plus: super easy access to drugs.

My brain woke from auto-hypnosis as I neared my apartment’s parking garage. A cop car whipped by as I pressed enter on the security key pad. The sound of sirens had been rendered dead stimulus after years of constancy. It was like living next to a waterfall of alarm.

Driving in, I noticed the increasing number of bum barrel bonfires in my neighborhood. Probably time to find some fresh real estate. The number of homeless still rocking dress shirts under brightly incongruous mission-granted hoodies told me that some of the newest barrel buddies were likely fallen comrades.

My sedan made an ugly rumble as I pulled into my parking space. The thing was dying. Every morning I closed my eyes and shot a silent prayer out of my forehead before turning the ignition. Every evening commute I turned up the car radio to avoid the new noises the sedan made as it fell apart.

Time for a new place to live. Time for a new car. New debts. Time to grow up and sign paperwork saying, “Sure, I’m comfortable with this grind for the next thirty years or so. And what a great rate!” Time to let the bank own each and every facet of my life.

I considered going off grid, but where was “off grid” anymore that didn’t require me to know how to kill an elephant seal and live off its blubber? And where could I even set up a nature camp, now that the ProTax Drones had become so wide-ranging and effective? Public assistance programs needed your Social—thus placing you firmly back on the grid—and ran weekly drug tests. The government’s health care system was still a shambles since the ShellPharm testing scandal broke and all of the parents of short-lived jellyskin babies got their class-action going. Alternative economies in New Hampshire and Boston flopped under old school COINTELPRO disruption. And after the bitcoin Digipression almost negated the global value of the US dollar and the Yen, no other agreeable survival systems had been forthcoming.

I’d still have a nice stash left from dad’s life insurance—we lost him to a donorcycle accident before I was even old enough to remember—but mom’s fight with a rare case of Pelton-Reyes Syndrome drained the war chest. I couldn’t sing, dance, play sports, or produce any kind of art you’d want, and my student loans didn’t seem to go away no matter how many petitions I signed.

I considered sex work, but then I bent over and looked at my asshole in a mirror. Nobody was going to pay me for access to that thing.

So the bank owned me. But not for long.

I’d call Hungarian. Hook things up. Get focused. Find something. Something BIG.

And then what? Tell the Feds? Then they take the bank down, I’m out a job, and nobody hires a whistle-blower.

Or worse. Maybe the bank decides I’m an Externality. Maybe I have a mysterious heart attack. Strange for someone in the prime of their life. So sad.

No. I knew that taking it to the government was a dead end. Instead I’d play the bank’s game.

Everything is commerce. We weren’t the only multi-national mega-bank in town. Whatever I found, I’d sell at a premium to the biggest buyer I could. They’d respect me as a rogue, a high-finance info-pirate. I’d push for my price, the shark-feeder’s fee.

And then I’d do it all over again. New bank, new gig, maybe the first shark I feed finances a fake identity. Bank after bank collapses.

At the end of it all, my fortune well-secured, I turn on the bloated old bastards I’ve been working for and release all their attack info to the public. The Fed is forced to act, anti-trust laws kick in, deep corruption is made public, and maybe this time instead of “Too Big to Fail”—and its latter sequel “Still Too Big to Fail, Seriously, You’ve Got to Trust Us On This, Guys, Just Roll With It”—
maybe
the people rise up and tear that last bank to pieces.

This was my mission. My heart was filled with a newfound righteous fire. One man against a corrupt system and I knew I could win!

And Hindsight would like to point out I wasn’t even on the really hard drugs yet.

I’d been stabbed twice in my life, which is precisely two times too many. The first knife-wielder was the aforementioned, now restraining-ordered ex-girlfriend. The second person to stab me was my Hex dealer Hungarian Minor, the man I’d become desperately anxious to locate. My brain tried to apply logic—
Do you even still own that old phone? This seems unwise. The dude stabbed you.
—so I quickly countered and convinced myself that sometimes a guy might deserve a little cutting, maybe even a two-inch flip-knife stuck in his left butt cheek after almost pushing his dealer in front of a speeding cab.

Eight absorbable stitches. A thin white scar which developed a red rim and phantom stab syndrome on cold days. Hungarian eighty-sixing me from his services, saying next time he saw me I’d end up with a “blood moustache.”

I didn’t even know what that was, but I got the message. ER with an ass wound, ostracized even by my sketchy dealer, fearing a mysterious injury—that was my last rock bottom.

So calling Hungarian was not ideal. But I was a man on a mission. Some risks would be required. And I knew my old phone was somewhere in my apartment.

I hit my fridge for a new round of cold-filtered coffee and a handful of earthworms. Pounded the coffee, slipped the worms into Deckard’s glass enclosure. I moved too fast—he retracted into his shell and hissed. Five years together and he was still hissing at me.

“I love you too, bitch.”

I gave his shell a water spritz from a spray bottle—marked YOKO H2OHNO! during the late hours of a bender—and lightly touched the top of his head with my index finger.

I knew he couldn’t really smile, but I liked the look on his face. Loneliness is a hell of a drug. A week prior I’d misted up when a grocery clerk told me, “Take care.”

“Have you seen my old purple phone, Deckard?”