“You did it, my friend,” Carl said. “Good for you.”
Chiho rubbed Skinner’s shoulder and kissed his weathered hands. He swept the pieces of the memory cards into his palm and sprinkled them atop the remnants of his panang curry. All that remained now were memories of banal civilian life and the one memory from the war he refused to destroy, the one piece of unfinished business: the memory of the day he came back from the dead.
The next day after breakfast, the women left the men reclined on plush furniture beneath portraits of Carl’s and Hiroko’s ancestors that went back generations, to slaves and dynasties. On the coffee table were arrayed bottles of water and an Apple memory console, a black lump of elegant industrial design about the size and shape of a baseball, smashed in on one side.
“Sure you don’t want to watch the NCAA semifinals instead?” Carl asked.
“Plug us in,” Skinner said, closing his eyes.
Carl pushed the card into the slot. A little pinwheel icon on the display indicated that the console was recognizing and syncing with the whatzits embedded in their skulls. This reality hung on for a while—the books on the shelves, the red rug. The scene trembled a bit at the edges as the stored memory worked to displace their surroundings. At this in-between stage, inanimate objects asserted more emphatically what they truly were. The water in the bottles wanted desperately to escape the plastic, yearning to become lost again in oceans and clouds. Skinner drew a Pendleton blanket around his shoulders, listening to individual wool fibers creak, snap, and whisper memories of ewes grazing in valleys. Carl reached out and took Skinner’s hand, squeezed it to remind him he was there. A few minutes in, the living room went into rapid retreat. The effect was like looking at a department store window and not knowing what to focus on—the objects on display or the reflection of the street. Slowly their senses adjusted to perceive more acutely what lay beyond the pane. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. A percussive frozen rain raked at them as clouds merged with plumes of smoke rising from all over the island.
“Carl?” Skinner said. He was trying to pivot his head but it was as if his neck was in a brace.
“I got you,” Carl said behind him, or beside him, or both. A representation of Carl sidled up, his old-man face superimposed on his younger man’s body, a weird bug in the software. “We’re in, man.”
“Jesus, the smell.”
“It’s always the smell that’s the worst.”
“I can smell the bodies.”
Younger Carl spoke, his voice fuzzy. “At least the smell of bodies don’t make you cough up your damn lungs. It’s those other smells we got to be afraid of.”
Up ahead in a pile of rags a baby cried beside its mother’s detached bodily components. As Skinner veered toward the baby a greasy hand dug into his bicep and yanked him around. Malmides, his direct supervisor, barked into his face, “Keep moving, shitstain.”
Skinner saw that he was in a vast video game of men that stretched back through Brooklyn, bristling with weaponry and trudging into death. He didn’t march so much as let himself get carried along. He looked down and watched his legs flop retardedly forward, unable to stop. Piles of refuse burned in the East River, decapitated bodies swung from the bridge supports like demented mobiles. He strained to take in the magnificent destruction ahead. Here, on the bridge, all was panorama, but soon those buildings would entangle him, a grid turning into an unforgiving labyrinth. Inexplicably, a herd of goats ran bleating past them, their hides scorched and speckled with boils. One of them sported an eyeball dangling from its socket. At the little park on the other side of the bridge he found himself in a congregation listening to the director of operations, a bull of a man with prosthetic eyes and a voice raspy from inhaling the particulate of decimated signature architecture. Castiliano was that bastard’s name and this was his rallying moment, a little rhetorical propane to get the soldiers hard.
“We bring death today to those who claim to become God! We slaughter under the banner of Christ! We butcher the hordes who’ve come to rape our children! Root them out, grab a limb, rip it off! Coat your faces in their gore! Stomp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins, Boeing army fighters!”
A great cry went up and Skinner, queasy, broke off into a unit with Carl and five other sick motherfucks, as it were, guys with faces and names and homes that had been erased from Planet Earth. Supposedly they were to head west and root out a couple remaining pockets of newman resistance.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Skinner said in his memory.
“Fuck you, Skinner. You were born to do this,” Carl said.
One of the other guys in the unit looked exactly like the pre-FUS comedic actor Will Ferrell. Another bug in the program. Apparently if you remembered a person as looking sort of like someone famous, the famous person tended to show up in your memory instead. “Guys?” Will Ferrell said, his voice cracking. “Maybe we should just find a Starbucks and get lattes? My treat? What do you say?”
Carl whispered in Skinner’s ear, “Come on, dude, you’re in command.”
“Listen, you sick Homo sapiens,” Skinner said. “The heavy lifting’s been done. We’re basically the janitors, scrubbing the newman shit from this godforsaken island. Let’s quit fucking around and move!”
They passed through acrid manhole steam and subway entrances piled with rotting body parts swarmed by mutated, screeching larvae. Skinner glanced down to see a woman’s shoe with the foot still in it, toenails painted lavender, sliced off at the ankle so cleanly it could have been done by a surgeon. It wasn’t the enormity of it all that fucked you, it was little shit like this. A headless body slumped in a doorway beneath an advertisement for Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy II. An arm protruded from beneath a flaming and overturned taxi. Everywhere burned the obscene carbon stench of manufactured goods and organic forms returning to the elements. Will Ferrell had begun to whimper comically, eyes darting left and right. Carl slapped him on the back of the head.
In the East Village they came to a café, still operational amid the rubble. Everything above the second floor of the building looked to have been vaporized. Within the ground-level walls baristas steamed milk and a sound system blasted fusion-era Miles. In a corner, under a painting of flames, the scarred remnants of a company of mercenaries sat drinking. Seven guys speckled in concrete dust and dried blood, knocking back coffee spiked with scavenged liquors. Their eyes barely moved when Skinner and his crew arrived, stepping over dead laptops and brick chunks.
“We’re the Boeing 83rd,” Skinner said. “What company you all with?”
“Who wants to know?” said a man in the rear. Jet-black hair, glasses, untangling a Rubik’s Cube.
“I’m Lieutenant Al Skinner.”
Carl said, “They’re the Pfizer 190th. The insignia on their gear.”
“I thought Pfizer ran screaming from this shit,” Skinner said.
“We are the shit,” Rubik’s Cube said.
Will Ferrell ordered a grande nonfat decaf mocha.
“This all that’s left of your company?” Skinner asked.
Cube said, “You want to know the difference between a war and a war game? A game comes with a reset button. But the only way to access that button is to die. Want to test this theory?”
Skinner said nothing. Cube shrugged, asked his command, “Who would be willing to blow his fucking brains out to see if there’s a reset button?”