Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat Read online

  “You choose to see it as criticism rather than feedback?”

  “Well you’re the one who said my manager complained. That sounds more like criticism than feedback to me.”

  “On another note, you were assigned Activities recently during which the termination option was implemented on the subject Deviant. I’m aware that this was the first time that you’ve executed the termination option and our on-scene medicos reported some irrational behaviour on your part after the event.”

  Careful. “I was upset.”

  “Because you killed someone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you know they were a Deviant, correct?”

  “Yeah.” Fuckers. Like that made it all hunky dory and sweet to boot.

  “Do you now believe that the action you resorted to was appropriate in the circumstances?”

  “Sure. I was in a jam—I couldn’t get a proper slant and I felt my own life was at risk.” I didn’t mention the fact that I couldn’t remember the event to save my life—other than the basic details they’d filled me in on, it was a complete blank. I put that down to a wee bit of PTSD combined with the exorbitant amounts of alcohol and chemicals that’d been sieved through my wretched grey matter over the preceding years. I kept my mouth shut about all of that and let them do the talking—blacking out on the job was reason enough to get me Relocated. I also wasn’t about to touch upon my recurrent dreams in this incredibly dicey forum.

  “I see. Good. Now, as I mentioned, this was the first time you’ve terminated a client in the course of your career with Seeker Branch.”

  “That’s right. Yeah.”

  “Did you know you were the only Seeker with such a record? Most Seekers find they need to resort to the termination option quite frequently.”

  “I do my job. They do theirs. We do what we feel is necessary.”

  “Are you satisfied with what took place?”

  “The termination bit, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m not all cut-up, if that’s what you’re asking me. It had to be done. I believed she was going for a weapon and I responded according to the letter of the Guide. I had to do what I had to do, and I can live with that. I’ve got no gripes. It’s all in the report—I was cleared by Branch on the matter.” More crock—the day Branch didn’t clear a Dev death during Activities was the day we all played hopscotch in the park together.

  “Are there any regrets about your choice?”

  “What d’you think gripes are? I’ve already answered that question.”

  “So you have no regrets—gripes—whatsoever?”

  Don’t play it too Joe Bravura, but don’t sing either, I told myself. Skate around a bit. “Okay, maybe some. I guess if I knew I could disarm her, I wouldn’t have reacted the same way, I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger and aired her out. But you can’t change the past. She got what was coming to her in the long run, anyway.”

  “Tell me, Two-Seven-Two-Seven, if you were placed in a similar situation again—would you proceed with the termination option?”

  “I did that time, didn’t I?”

  “Do I detect a vituperative tone?”

  Now she had me baffled. “Vituperative?”

  “Bitter, harshly critical, and reproachful.”

  “Nice word.”

  “Thank you. Please answer the question.”

  “Well, um—No. I’m not aware of any vituperative feelings.”

  Vituperative. I’d have to catalogue that word.

  alright already, ad infinitum

  The Test didn’t end there, not nearly, and I’ll get back to it shortly—it’s just that I’m in the mood to flip the narrative a bit so for now join me at a little watering hole I dubbed Ziggy’s. That wasn’t actually its name. The sign on the door reads Kemidov’s, but Ziggy is the bartender at this joint. While I’d like to fancy him a long time mate, any sentimentality on his part was likely due to my clockwork patronage.

  It should be mentioned that I feel bloody awful. Tomorrow’s hangover could only help matters at this point. I feel as if I’d been clubbed several times by a recalcitrant cricket bat. I still don’t understand why getting clocked in a Test should carry over into real life, but fuck, it did and it hurts like all hell. But I’m getting all tangled up and ahead of myself—I haven’t gotten to that part of the Test yet. I will, I promise, but for now I need a break from it.

  To that end, I’d just tossed down my third snort of vodka and was beginning to feel numb. I began to fantasize about the next drink, shining radiantly in the air just above me, filled to the brim and spilling at the edges, just like the goddamn Holy Grail.

  That’s when Laurel entered the gin mill. A boozehound after my own heart, she was fond of playing Nora to my Nick Charles. Man, she stood out a mile, wearing a tight black dress, satin cocktail gloves that edged up a few centimetres above her elbows, black stockings, and heels. Add to that a pair of vintage cat’s eye sunglasses with tortoise-shell frames—even though it was perpetually gloomy of late—and you had sheer class from where I was sitting.

  She tilted down her cheaters and winked in a lazy kind of way, and then thoughtfully detoured to the bar to procure a couple of drinks—all to the dulcet tones of Nat King Cole’s “Little Girl”. My very own femme fatale, with a counterfeit Prada handbag that was most likely made in now-kaput Hong Kong and a hat to match. She made her way over and plunked herself down on the couch opposite me, with a weighty gravitas that belied her less-than-average-sized frame.

  “The, er, stuff that dreams are made of,” she said, tempering her smirk by pushing a large gin & tonic my way. “Don’t worry, it’s a triple-shot—guaranteed to warm even that unruly heart of yours.”

  “To mixing drinks and vituperativity.”

  “Is that a word?” she asked as she removed her sunglasses. She kept her gloves on. She always did.

  “It is now.”

  “If you say so.” A curious grin shaped her kisser. I liked that mouth. It smacked of a young Lauren Bacall. Though it also tapped into my rampant insecurities and made me wonder what the blazes she was doing swinging with a sap like me.

  “Did you know you’re an angel? An absolute angel.”

  “And you look like you’ve been here awhile.”

  “Your vote of confidence does me no end of good cheer.”

  “Seems you could use some of that.”

  “Yeah, well, I had a Test.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “It went.”

  “Can I get a straight answer for once?”

  “Please don’t crowd me, angel.”

  “Hey, would I ever do that?”

  “You are, sort of.”

  “Crowding? I’d call it caring. Besides, you brought the Test up, remember?”

  “I guess.”

  “So what’s your point, Floyd?”

  “My point—?” I had to think, then, to try to recall exactly what my point had been. I drained the last remnants of my drink, then reached somewhat greedily for hers, but she whisked the glass away and finished it off herself. “I need another one,” I demanded.

  “What makes you think you’re so special? Don’t avoid the subject, babe—”

  “Which subject are we discussing?”

  “God, you can be exasperating.”

  “I prefer perplexing.”

  “Fine, I’ll be straight back. Don’t stray.”

  She sauntered up to the bar and miraculously returned with two more tumblers on a kitsch old tray with a cowboy on it. Where the heck had Ziggy dug that one up? My stomach really wasn’t feeling all that hot—but at least my brain was frazzled and part way towards voluntary shut-down. All my attention was on the glass in front of me. I was conjuring up cowboys: Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, a young, monochrome Henry Fonda, circa My Darling Clementine, all carousing together in my head. The image of a swaggering, smashed John Wayne evaporated as I finally got around to saying what needed saying. “The Test went poo
rly.”

  “They do that, sometimes.”

  “They had me kill someone.”

  “It’s just a Test, though. You know it’s not real.”

  “It’s real enough. Too real. I think they were making sure I still had it in me.”

  “Because of what happened before?”

  “Yeah, probably. They know I can’t remember anything from that Activities. I mean, I know I killed her, but—none of the details are there. I just have nightmares about it every single bloody night. I can barely even remember them, though. I wake up and they’re gone, just out of my grasp.”

  “You’re still having those dreams? It’s been ages since that Activities.”

  “Yeah. When I can sleep at all. Say, can I backtrack the conversation?”

  “How far?”

  “To the bit where I made my toast to vituperativity—?”

  “No, Floyd, this is important.”

  “Don’t be cranky with me.”

  “If you can’t remember the Activities, what do you think happened?”

  “Easy answer. I guess I must’ve fucked up.” I peered over at the cricket match on the TV above the bar. “I panicked,” I added without thinking, the words slipping out like some kind of involuntary confession.

  “Panicked? How so?”

  “I must have, to kill someone. I just can’t remember.”

  “You must have had good reason.”

  “Fair enough, but I think they know I panicked.”

  “They know nothing.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  “Am I ever?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, that’s ambiguous.” She shifted in her seat.

  “Stop pressing my buttons, okay?” For my part I was bordering on irate now. My kingdom for a tub of beeswax to stick in my ears. “I try to tell you something, and what do you do? You start to goddamn psychoanalyze me on it.”

  “Hey—I don’t—well, maybe you got me on the psychoanalysis. But I just think you may be over-reacting.”

  “Over-reacting? That’s what they call it these days? I killed someone!”

  “Not that. I understand that. You know I’ve been there. But your constant paranoia about the powers-that-be at Branch is over the top. You’ve drunk too much. Shit happens, Floyd. You need to calm down.”

  “I’m not upset—and I’m not drunk.”

  “Really? On both counts?”

  I shook my head, desperate to clear it and prove a point. “Well, maybe a bit of both, but not a lot. If I was smashed, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you.” It’s true. I’d probably be lying facedown in an overflowing gutter somewhere, hoping to drown myself along with my sorrows.

  “Look, babe, getting back to the point—I can’t see you panicking in an Activities, but even if you did, Branch doesn’t know about it.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I don’t figure. I know. Simple.”

  “They’re on to us more than we know, not that I give a flying fuck if they find out, anyway.” Everything seemed to be rearing up at me in hideous new ways—like a cinematographer’s combination of forward zoom and reverse tracking gone terribly askew.

  “Hey. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t wig out on me. Okay? You’re all I have.”

  “That’s not all. I haven’t even told you the worst part about the Test. You know what else they fucking well did? Do you know—?”

  “Shh, darling.” Laurel placed two fingers on my mouth. “Chill. It’s okay. Of course I don’t know. What is it I’m supposed to know?”

  “They made me kill her.”

  “The Dev, right. We’re back there again?”

  “No, not her. I don’t remember that, remember? No. This is something completely different. Something completely rich. They made me—fuck it all, Laurel, they made me kill her.”

  “Who?”

  “I—she—It was—” I couldn’t string my sentences together, my thoughts were like some William Burroughs cut-up of a shoddily dubbed Italian horror film from the 1970s. I was balanced all too precariously on the brink of a complete crack up.

  “Floyd, please don’t. We don’t have any choice, do we? You know that. It’s not your fault. It’s our curse, remember?”

  “No—” I lifted up my hand, signaling for her to desist with the platitudes. I took a deep breath and focused. “You don’t understand, sunshine. Don’t interrupt, just for a minute, and I’ll try to explain it clearer for you, as clear as I can. They made me kill her. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They made me kill her.” I emphasized the word “her”, as if somehow that would sort everything out. There was no snazzy retort from her this time, but she looked distressed. Damn it all.

  “What’re you saying?”

  I rubbed my forehead and my eyelids with my free hand—trying desperately to force everything into a rusty old coin locker at the rear of my skull—then checked the empty glasses for trace elements of alcohol. Typical. No bloody luck at all.

  the test, take two

  In Irwin Allen’s mid-Sixties TV show, The Time Tunnel, they did this twisty turny special effects thing whenever they went back in time. I loved that show when I was a kid—in the reruns, of course. It was a relic even then.

  Anyway, that’s what I’d like to pull off here, if I can, because I never did finish relating what happened in the Test and I’m guessing that some of the details therein will help to complete the fermenting swag of incomplete thoughts that shape this particularly errant narrative.

  I think the quack and I had peaked on that discussion about ‘vituperative’, when I brusquely kicked out of the yarn last time around.

  “What was the question again?”

  “How would you say that you feel when you wake up every morning?”

  Oh yeah. That one. How could I forget?

  “Bushed.” Every goddamned thing about this Test grated. And let’s be honest here: ‘grated’ is just the wrong word to use. Maybe ‘vexed’ is better? I always liked the sound of ‘vexed’. It was comfortingly old-school, like something that someone in a Jane Austen adaptation would utter, in a steely British accent, after he mopped his brow, post particularly energetic fox hunt.

  “So you’ve been feeling tired.”

  “Yep, cashed out.”

  “Tired of life?”

  “No—I’m not tired of any particular thing. I’m just allergic to mornings—really. I get a runny nose and sneeze a lot. It drives me crazy—and usually anybody I’m going out with at the time. Generally I prefer afternoons. How ’bout you? I’ll bet a dime against a dollar that you’re a morning person, right?”

  “That’s not important here. We’re discussing you.”

  “Oh yeah.” Keep it clean. Keep it dumb.

  “I want to discuss your fatigue. You’ve mentioned this a number of times now.”

  Uh-oh. What was she trying to get at? I shifted uneasily on the tatami mat beneath my knees. “Really? That’s very perspicacious of you.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  Damn. Wasn’t she going ask me what the hell that meant? Had I just squandered my most obscure bit of vocabulary without getting revenge for ‘vituperative’? I’d picked the word perspicacious up from watching George Sanders and I knew he would not be pleased with me, though he wasn’t exactly around to notice. In case you’ve never heard tell of him, George Sanders was an actor, now long dead, who I fancied a role model of sorts. I wished he was at the table right now—I needed the man’s cynicism and detachment.

  “I’m probably over-stating the fact. It’s not exhaustion—I’m just tired because of a few late nights.” Man, I had to refocus.

  Her eyelids flickered briefly—I suspected she was correlating data. “You’ve mentioned exhaustion a total of eighteen times in previous In House sessions. How do you account for that?”

  “Eighteen times? Really? As many as that, you say?” I was absentmindedly tugging at my right ear. Wasn’t that some
thing Bogart used to do—? Bloody hell. I had to inject some originality into my remaining days.

  “Well?”

  “I love to exaggerate. My friends are always pulling me up on that.”

  “You love to exaggerate.”

  Was that a statement or a question? I resolved to treat it as the latter. “Tell tall tales. Wax bogus.”

  She smiled then, though it wasn’t clear if the beam was a result of my idiotic wit, or the fact that I was digging myself a big fat hole for posterity. “Do you enjoy your job, Floyd?”

  “It pays the bills.”

  “Ahh, the bills. They can be excessive, can’t they?”

  “It depends on your take home.”

  “I note that you’ve had some difficulties making bill payments on time.”

  “But all paid,” I said. In blood. My debt was a bit on the absurd side. Veronica’s Hospitalization cost a small fortune, and thanks to the damn interest and never ending bills, I could barely keep it under control.

  “Tell me, Two-Seven-Two-Seven—do you enjoy working with Seeker Branch?”

  “Depends on the day.”

  “How so?”

  “There are times when the job is rewarding,” I lied. I felt like Max von Sydow’s knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal—dabbling in a game of chess with Death—though this set had nowhere near the religious import, intelligence, or philosophical bent of that flick.

  “Good. Please wait, Two-Seven-Two-Seven.” The room fell silent and I presumed that she was conferring with her fellow analysts back in reality, weighing up all I’d said, then matching the timing of my expositions with my pulse-rate, rapid eye movement, and whatever other bodily traits they measured these days with their funky machines—all in an attempt to uncover the nefarious schemes they feared I kept concealed deep in my brain.

  I was equally determined to disappoint them, though once again I had no clue if the rort was a raging success or a dismal fiasco. I might’ve been playing dice with the fates, but they were channeling god—and in the same breath Death—in the course of holding down a nine-to-five job.