Mine All Mine Read online

  “Charlie,” I say out loud. “Charlita. Charlita Sophia Izzo. Will, ah, you . . .”

  What I hear next makes me jump. I go sprawling backwards and my legs kick the shelving that supports the mask. It’s a seriousimpact. For a moment I can’t tell if the mask has moved. I brace myself for the squeal of the alarm, but it doesn’t come. When I recover—I am so lucky—I turn around, and there he is, the last guy in the world I want to see.

  Schermer.

  Make That Four

  I don’t know what I did to make this guy hate me. Maybe it’s because I always outpoint him on our comps. Or because I’m the one with the signature busts.8 I think maybe there is some class hatred going on, too; Schermer comes from a long line of distinguished pulses and has the pedigree, but I’m the one with the gift, and—until recently—I’ve been the one getting the prestige gigs. One time when he was being snotty to me after I again posterized him on the tests, I called him Mr. Honorable Mention, which, in fairness, didn’t help make friends.9 Whatever the reason, he’s been after me from my very first day at Janus. When the Rat Burglar rolled me the first time (seven figures’ worth of twelfth-century Khmer reliefs from Angkor Wat: ouch) using a heavy dose of Kolokol-9, Schermer filled my locker full of rattraps. I came back from the job, opened my locker, reached in without looking and about a dozen rattraps exploded everywhere. I got two broken fingers and he didn’t let anyone forget it for months.

  Ha-ha, right? What a riot, this guy.

  He did something like this after every hit. They were all annoying, but do you know what really hurt? After Pink died in the line of duty, guess what I had waiting for me in my locker? An enormous pile—I mean the mother lode—of dog biscuits. That isn’t even a joke. It has no setup. It has no punch line. It’s just plain old mean. And just like Schermer: The only thing in the world you love just died? Well, here are some of his snacks! Get it? Get it?

  God I wish Herk had been there.

  And that he were here now.

  “Yes!” Schermer cries again from the doorway, mouth glistening, arms flung wide. He does a tippy-toe kind of love-struck dance, smoothing across the floor toward me. I’m still tangled on the concrete and he descends on me, sort of wrapping his arms around my head and making smooching noises. “Yes, I will marry you, Otto! I thought you’d never ask! But”—and here he emits a melodramatic burble while chewing histrionically on his fingernails—“what will we do to survive? How can we live on the wages of a...stoolie?”10

  I try to shrug him off me but Schermer is stronger than I am and it takes me a few tries. When I finally get free I’m breathing heavy and can tell I’m blushing. In the struggle something hit my nose and I can feel my eyes starting to water. This makes me feel like I’m about eight years old.

  “Boy, that was a close one,” Schermer says. “If you had tripped that alert it would have just about finished you off as a pulse, wouldn’t it? That would be a real shame.”

  “Shouldn’t you be making rounds?” I say, trying to make it as sneery as possible.

  “I wonder what would happen if I were just to touch it. . . .” And he tries to reach past me and poke the glass. I swat his hand away just in time.

  “That’s not funny, Schermer.”

  “It sure would be awkward to explain a false alarm if somehow the cloud got stimulated—” And again he makes a stab over my shoulder at the K’plua.

  “Cut the shit.”

  “Or if the bossman knew you were going to break cover to your girl?”

  “Stop it.”

  “Make me, Starks,” he says, making fists. “You fucking pill-popper.”

  This is a touchy subject. Pulses are required to wear imperfs— imperforables, synthetic aramid fiber blend bodysuits that are flexible but impenetrable to needle puncture. Janus thinks this is a good idea because we are so often the target of tranquilizer guns. Only infrequently do you see a pulse get shot at with a bullet; in an environment that is as loaded with motion sensors as ours, it attracts a lot less attention to have someone slump into a sleeping pile. Exploding flesh sets off the sensors. Hot blood trips the therms. You get the idea.

  But to me imperfs seem like a bad idea. They promote a false sense of security. They don’t save you from getting slipped a mickey in your coffee. They are obviously useless against airborne agents. And because they are not hooded they leave the neck and face exposed. If I were sharpshooting talent I’d just smile and think, “Well hellooooo, jugular.”

  So I never wear them. Instead I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to cultivating immunities to every drug you can name. I was born with the gift, it’s true, but in an industry like ours you have to work at it. At breakfast I have coffee, a bran muffin, and a heavy dose of vecuronium. For lunch it’s usually tuna fish and whatever muscimol I’m on. At dinner I like to mix it up with propofol or tsusensan or gamma-hydroxybutyrate or whatever. And then throughout the day it’s neurotoxins or paralytics or tranqs galore. I’m even doing my best with nixolophan.11 I inject them, breathe them, swallow, transdermally patch them. I can outbeer the entire offensive line of the Giants. I can shoot up with all the junkies on Tenth Avenue and breeze through any field sobriety drill you throw at me. You should see my piss tests. It’s a lot to keep track of, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than wearing what basically amounts to an enhanced wet suit. I don’t honestly know why my uppers have been giving me so much grief about it.

  Schermer makes another move on the K’plua. This time I shove him away, hardish, and then, just like that, it is totally on. He makes a strong, windmilly move. I counter with a violent lassoing motion, fist aloft, that doesn’t connect with anything.

  “Buttons down,” I say in the best high-noon voice I’ve got.

  “Buttons down,” Schermer agrees. We slide our buttons safely away and start circling each other in deep kungfu stances, making threatening movements—dog-paddle punches, minatory half-kicks—that look like an angry, disco-style hokey-pokey.

  The good news is that I am saved from throwing, or catching, any punches.

  The bad news is that my savior is a very sudden, very painful sensation of pressure in my bowels. Instantly I double over and collapse on the concrete. Before I know it my knees are drawn up to my chin and I’m lowing like an animal in a slaughterhouse. It feels like my intestines, suddenly molten, are braiding together into the nautical knots that I have been studying so hard: my duodenum is now an anchor bend, my colon a boom hitch.

  With indelicate language Schermer indicates that he considers my inexpedient moaning and breakdancery writhing to be unsportsmanlike in the extreme. He circles me a few times, renewing his invitation that I get up. I cannot, and do not. He impugns my character, my mother, my ignoble pulse blood-lines, offers me a last chance, then advertises that failure to right myself in a timely manner will precipitate a number of punitive kicks and, very probably, induce him to start “throwing some knobs.” Most of my brain function is busy sorting the urgent signals of pain being sent from my gut and the only verbal response I manage is a series of sad, stuttering groans. I am able to apprehend his leg pulling back, his boot glinting, the offroading Vibram treads of his sole. I squeeze my eyes shut in anticipation of additional pain—a nearly incomprehensible idea—but when I open them again I see that gravity has performed a miracle. Schermer is now prostrate alongside me, his face turned away, immobilized.

  Protruding sprightly from his neck, just above his imperfs, is a red-tufted dart.

  Behind me I hear well-padded footsteps. I fight and beetle until I have rotated enough to see the figure drilling under the shelf supporting the K’plua. Even from the back I recognize the Rat Burglar immediately. The easy, assured movements. The arrogant, matadorlike attitude of indifference. He isn’t muting the drill. He isn’t using any monitors, just touch. And his deportment at the MacGuffin is the same paradox it always is: sacred and ruinous. He behaves as if he’s at an altar, but one he must desecrate. It is at once reverent and sacr
ilegious. I can’t explain it any better than that.

  Another Rat Burglar cue: he doesn’t even bother to look over, to check on me.

  I don’t know what he’s given me—or how he got it in my system—but it’s bad. It’s not a tranq or a paralytic or anything I’ve ever had before. I’ve got a grim feeling it’s acid. Or polonium-210. Dimly I wonder if this will be my last job. I have a vision of the Clean Getaway sailing off into distant tropical waters without me, Charlie waving goodbye from the bowsprit, obscured by prisming sea spray until she finally disappears like a beautiful wraith.

  With a sharp metallic buzz the shelf bottoms out. The K’plua drops, the prox-cloud undisturbed. It is almost unbearable to watch for the fourth time as the Rat Burglar sprinkles a few darkly pigmented animal hairs on the floor—his calling card, by now a redundant gesture—and deposits my MacGuffin in his bag. Before it disappears from view I can discern the K’plua’s expression. It looks righteous; it looks pissed. Maybe it expected this of me.

  Or maybe this is its way of expressing its opinion of my deception of Charlie.

  My button, I realize, is only a few feet away. Although my stomach produces nauseating waves of gastric and muscular distress when I move an inch, I force myself to reach out an arm toward it. If I am going to die tonight, I think, I am going to bring the Rat Burglar down. I extend far enough to get a fingerpoint on the edge of the device. For a few agonizing seconds a finger tickles the edge of the hard plastic but then a gloved hand enters my line of sight, clasps the button, and slides it away like a puck. He bends down, putting his face very near to mine. He is wearing paint under his mask, naturally, so I can’t determine ethnicity, and his only odor is ammonia. Normally at this range my olfactory is so precise that I can discern what brand of deodorant someone is wearing, what kind of toothpaste they use, what they had for lunch, what hair product they have on, whether they take light or heavy starch. Sometimes I can even tell where they might live—close to the river, say, or near fish markets. At close range, I can pretty much detect and parse any emanations someone produces; it’s so reliable I can ID them out of a lineup blindfolded. But this guy has basically bathed in ammonia; I can’t figure out anything.

  That’s clever of the Rat Burglar, and exactly what I expect of him. What isn’t so swift, however, is that he gives me a good look at his eyes and I see that he is wearing darkly colored contacts that cannot conceal faint flecks of blue.

  So, I think, he has blue eyes. That’s a valuable piece of information.

  If I live long enough to tell anyone.

  Then the Rat Burglar does something strange. He reaches out and presses two fingers to my neck. At first I think he is going to strangle me, but he doesn’t. He is checking on my heart rate. He keeps his fingers there for a long time, maybe thirty seconds, then he nods and gives me an affirmative pat. Next he inserts a dextrous hand inside my pocket and extracts the velvety box. It pops open and suddenly the Rat Burglar has Charlie’s ring out. He slides it on a black-gloved finger and holds it up to the light, rotating it critically, inspecting. With every vestige of strength I have left, I try to lash out at him. It took seven years of subservitude in the colonies before I got the gigs that paid for Charlie’s ring—literally my blood and sweat—and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him take it without a fight. The rupturing feeling in my stomach, however, reduces my offensive to a spastic bucking-bronco number that seems only to amuse the Rat Burglar. He takes his time appraising the ring, then obviously decides it isn’t worth stealing, reinserts it into the box and again into my pocket. From his bag he extracts a roll of something that looks, incredibly, like toilet paper, places it gingerly beside my head, springs up and starts walking away to a hole in the ceiling from which a rope is hanging. Insult to injury, I think: he came in through the air shaft. Another excruciating flare of pain ignites and blackness descends on me in a compressive, seismic wave. This is it. I am going under.

  The last thing I think is why is he after the K’plua? It’s only six damn figures.

  The last thing I feel is something undignified happening in my pants.

  Heaven, or: Last April at the Frick

  Pulses are obsessed with dying. Probably dozens of times I have heard locker-room talk about how you lose control of certain bodily functions, but I had hoped that the inglorious trouser activity might occur after you had lost your senses. Apparently not. But I am grateful for one thing: the parts of my life that flash before me are of Charlie.

  I met her at the Frick. One of my ex-MacGuffins, a Boucher, was on display and I felt lonely for it one day midweek, so I stopped by. I must have been really entranced because I didn’t hear her behind me. I was only vaguely aware of a headnote of white ginger and tiara flower with some suggestion of petit-grain. I was so engrossed in the Boucher that the odor seemed like an olfactory evocation of the painting itself. My brain just didn’t process it as a separate stimulation. Then I retreated a few steps to get a fuller view of the painting, bumped into something, and realized that the source of the floral odors was a beautiful woman in a white summer dress.

  I meant to apologize but found myself syllabically stranded. You could have fit a shoebox in my gaping mouth. Pulses don’t get out much in general, and I certainly have never been much with the ladies. I’m not deformed or anything, I’m just more accustomed to talking to paint-and-canvas women than flesh-and-blood ones. The last time I even dared to use a line on a girl I was seventeen. I had spent three months nursing a crush on this teller at the drive-thru when I finally pulled up to her window and, with all the sunglasses-on-nosepoint suavity I could muster, said, “I would like to make one withdrawal and one deposit, please.” “Yes?” she said, sounding bored. “I want to withdraw you from the banker’s box and deposit you in a restaurant with me, tonight. Say sevenish?”

  It worked, believe it or not, but the night ended in failure. On her front step, the door cracked open invitationally behind her, she leaned into me, her beaded lashes louvering her eyes, her lips parted and pliant,12 and I didn’t get it. I could read every single freaking optotype on the eleventh line of a Snellen test at fifty freaking feet but I could not read, at point-blank range, these signs, these obvious, guileless signs. I didn’t even get it when she asked if I wanted to come inside to “see her coin roller.” At that critical doorstep moment—a moment every teenaged boy dreams about—as she turned and went inside, looking at me over her shoulder and giving me a walk that she didn’t learn at Miss Porter’s, I said, “Nah, I’ve got a first period tomorrow. I’d better go. I’ll call you later.”

  That was how shrewd, how slick, how perceptive I was.

  Or maybe: am.

  And then just ten years later, at the Frick, in front of my Boucher, there I was with this incredible woman, experiencing a massive sensory overload. Olfactory cues and visual stimuli were cauterizing my brain—a dim part of me kept wondering how I had not heard her behind me—and I was unable to formulate a comprehensible sentence of introduction. “Hello,” I could have said. Or “Nice day for a museum visit.” Even “Do you like art?” would have been preferable to the stunned, saucer-mouthed silence. But language was beyond me. I felt mesmerized and arrested, as if viewing my own car wreck. I was lockjawed—don’t laugh; it’s true—with a vision of pure love.

  Another, competing feeling was a bolt of dread; i.e., “I’ve been staring at her for a long five silent seconds and if I don’t say something soon she may walk away from me and never come back.”

  It grieves me to report that I did not conquer this fear. I remained mute. But someone else wasn’t afraid, and he might have just saved my whole life. A homeless guy clothed partially in the patched skin of a ruined umbrella and sporting several wool hats teetering on his head in a nesting, Russian-doll fashion approached Charlie and held up an empty 8‘ × 10‘ picture frame to her face.

  “A picture . . . ,” he said with Masterpiece Theater gravitas, “of loveliness.”

  Then it happened. She laugh
ed. I laughed, too, and was restored to my normal, fully verbal state.

  From that moment Charlie and I moved through the museum together as if obeying a little-known law of physics: when two forces collide while among pink, cavorting putti and lush, idyllic grottoes it results in indissoluble bonding. We walked among the Fragonards, the Sargents, the Vermeers. Together we got nose-close to the canvases. It probably looked like we were being connoisseury—ostensibly we were inspecting impasto—but really we were employing a pretext to move within inches of each other’s face, each other’s mouth.13

  We pointed, we stared, we talked.

  In front of one of Ingres’ odalisques I discovered why I hadn’t heard her behind me.

  One of the things I hate about museums is the conveyor-belt attitude of some people. They act as if it’s a competitive event. “Classical antiquity, check. Vroom! Medieval armaments, gone! Renaissance, Enlightenment, all you Dadaists, gotcha! All done! I’ll beat you to the café and finish my cocktail before you even place an order!” It makes me nuts. But Charlie was different. I hadn’t heard her simply because she hadn’t moved. She had been standing behind me the whole time, totally still, totemlike, absorbed.

  A dumb reason to find someone additionally irresistible, maybe, but no one else I knew—not even other pulses—could stand still that long and watch. Just like me. For the first time in my life there was someone who saw things, literally, as I did.

  But we talked more than museums.

  Charlie loved the pfffft sound of a freshly opened soda can pop-top.

  If she adored a book she would never read a second by the same author because she was too frightened of being let down.