Spark: A Novel

THE FOURTH REALM TRILOGY
The Traveler
The Dark River
The Golden City

Forget faith and uncertainty, rebellion and slavery. Forget beauty in all its forms. Forget ugliness, too.

Forget “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the Kaddish. Forget an army of notes marching across a sheet of paper that are transformed into the
Goldberg Variations.
Forget the Taj Mahal at sunrise and the Grand Canyon at sunset, Shakespeare’s sonnets,
War and Peace,
and
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Forget the dabs of bright blue paint that became the eyes of Vincent van Gogh.

Forget the fingertip sensation of fur, velvet, a cashmere shawl, and a smooth green chip of beach glass. Forget the moist texture of raw meat and dry brittleness of dead leaves crushed in the hand.

Forget the taste of honey-soaked baklava. Ripe mango. Roasted garlic. Pickled herring. Licorice. Chocolate. Strawberry ice.

And smells—forget them as well. Crushed lilacs and the harsh scent of hot tar. A baby’s neck. Moist earth. Fresh-baked scones.

Forget the dead children from the Day of Rage and the speeches and sermons and memorial parks with names carved in stone. Forget every lesson from a teacher, every joke from a joker; every judgment from a judge.

Forget what your parents told you. Forget what you were taught as a child and what you learned on your own.

Forget what you think is right. And wrong.

Do all this and you might become me: a Spark contained within a Shell that stood in a doorway on Sixty-Second Street in Brooklyn
while a Russian businessman named Peter Stetsko attempted to park his car.

It was November in New York City—damp and cold. Death was present in the street, but there was nothing dramatic or sinister about my appearance. That night, I was neatly dressed in gray slacks and a V-neck sweater. In the outside pocket of my black raincoat, I carried a Brazilian-made semiautomatic pistol with skateboard tape attached to the grip. My Freedom ID card was concealed within a specially designed sleeve that made it impossible for the EYE system to detect my location.

A delivery van passed through the intersection, its tires hissing on the wet asphalt. I slipped on a phone headset and Laura whispered into my ear.

“Ten-Thirty-Three on Flatbush Avenue and Farragut Road. One unit responding.”

“Any police activity in Bensonhurst?”

“Checking …” It felt as if Laura was a real woman looking up a message board or gazing out a window, but she was only a Shadow. Somewhere in the Internet, one computer was talking to another, checking the data on a Web site that provided live-time reports of New York City police and fire department activity.

“Nothing, Mr. Underwood.”

My target had rented a two-bedroom house that reminded me of something a child would build with plastic blocks. It had a low brick wall in front that guarded a patch of concrete, painted grass green. There were red aluminum awnings over the two front windows and the front door.

Since my Transformation, I am capable of a limited range of emotional responses: curiosity, boredom, and disgust. I had been curious if Stetsko could squeeze his Mercedes-Benz between a blue delivery van and a mud-splattered Toyota. Now I was bored with his cautious maneuvering and ready to complete my assignment.

A young woman wearing a sequined green nightclub dress was sitting in the passenger seat of the Mercedes. Because she was a witness, she would also have to be neutralized. I would start with a head shot for Stetsko through the side window, circle the car and
deal with this secondary target, then circle the car again for confirmation shots. The sequence wasn’t difficult, but it would make more noise.

“Any police activity, Laura?”

“Nothing.”

A minute passed.

“Nothing.”

When Stetsko pulled out again for another try, the woman got out of the car. Like a photon of light, her green dress shimmered down the sidewalk, passed through the gate, and disappeared into the house. At that moment, my job became simple, direct, and clear.

The Mercedes moved six inches back toward the curb and then stopped. Stetsko’s head swung back and forth like a man watching a tennis match. He pulled the steering wheel hard to the right and the car made a squeaking noise.

Sixty-Second Street was dark and no one was on the sidewalk, but that didn’t make me feel lonely or frightened. The rotting smell from a Dumpster appeared as a brownish-green color in my mind, but it didn’t generate an emotional reaction. X = X. The world has no meaning aside from what is.

Across the street, Stetsko finally finished parking the car. He smiled, switched off the engine, and patted the steering wheel as if the Mercedes were a racehorse that had just survived a dangerous steeplechase.

“Show scanned photograph,” I told Laura and my target’s face appeared on the smartphone screen.

Look right. Look left.
No one was in the street. I walked over to the car, held up the phone, and compared Stetsko’s photograph to the reality in front of me. Then I raised my weapon and shot reality in the head.

I turned away from my target, walked five blocks east to Gravesend Park, and tossed the gun into a storm drain. Perhaps one day a city sewer worker might find this artifact—rusty and covered with mud—but it would have no connection with my identity.

A few blocks from the park I waved down an unregistered cab and paid the driver cash to take me back to Manhattan. For the last two years, I’ve lived in the top loft of an industrial building in New York’s Chinatown. My landlord, an older woman named Margaret Chen, likes the fact that I always pay in cash and never ask for a receipt. There were only three rules for the tenants in her building: no checks, no fireworks, and no slaughtering chickens.

Before my Transformation, I lived like an ordinary Human Unit in an Upper East Side apartment with cooking pots and self-assembled teak-veneer furniture. Nowadays I try to own only one object in each category: a chair and a table, a bed and a blanket, a cup and a spoon. The loft has been used as a factory space by different businesses, and some of them left obsolete equipment bolted to the floor or shoved against the wall. There’s an industrial sewing machine with a black rubber drive belt, a drill press, and a piano-sized machine that used to stamp advertising slogans on pencils.

My living space is quiet and clean and unencumbered. None of the objects I possess trigger memories that are separate from their function. I own a cup that is only a cup, not something that reminds me of a trip to Italy.

After locking the entrance door, I removed all my clothes and placed them in nylon bags. Everything worn that evening would be washed or dry-cleaned at a laundry on Mott Street. Within twenty-four hours, all the invisible burned and unburned particles from the fired bullets would disappear.

I took a shower, pulled on a sweatshirt and warm-up pants, and returned to the main room. Rule #4 states that I must supply my Shell with a minimum of two thousand calories a day, so I opened a bottle of a nutritional drink developed for the elderly called ComPlete, poured it in the cup, and mixed in a tablespoon of a coarse fiber supplement.

I have a good memory, but don’t like to re-experience the past. If thoughts are not controlled, then each remembered experience becomes an alternative reality. When I thought about shooting Peter Stetsko, my mind brought up different details—the sound of my shoes walking across the street and the vision of the first bullet shattering the side window. But these memories didn’t generate feelings of regret or happiness. I have a Spark that creates my thoughts.