“Do not consume—
It’s a desiccant!
Keep away from children—
But to get out of Hell,
Eat silica gel!”
The power box girl screeched a singsong tune as Xavier and Gabbyella and I traversed the Golden Apple restaurant’s girth on our path back to my Honda, Francesca.
“Silica,” I said. “I like that, Xavier, because that’s related to what you just said.”
“Good,” said my oldest friend. “Please open your car when we get there. I gave you back your locks.”
“That’s kind. But before I do, let’s acknowledge that you don’t want to tell me everything all at once, and that’s okay because I don’t need the trailer, just some sense of style, or a mood. I bled, and my body has another person in it, or a foreign body at least, so there does come a time when I demand….”
Gabby felt my arm with her tentative fingers. I couldn’t guess under what situation she’d consider touching me.
She asked Xavier, “Has he somehow been dosed?”
“By the wall, likely.”
“What’s she’s said?” I asked. “Is there something, something Italian for something?”
“You’re slurring, bud,” Xavier said. “Let’s get you into Francesca.”
We rode to Capitol Boulevard, our town hall lane.
“I’ve been staying here. We’ve been here,” Xavier said, motioning to Gabby. “Always room at the Hacienda.”
“You never went back to Chicago,” I said.
“I haven’t been there in years,” Xavier replied.
“Departures…” I said, then fell asleep in my own back seat.
I woke in the motel district, a strip of boulevard that ran from the police district though the bail bondsmen district, the by-the-hour-motel district and the local legislative offices district.
“This is us,” Xavier said as Francesca pulled to a stop at the Hacienda Inn.
“No, this is not us,” I said.
“It’s us for now. Get inside. Free ice speckled with paint chips.”
The sun hung its head low as we loaded into room 101. Supremely irritating, that “101.” It flashed, along with the faded, hallucinated fireworks that filled the horizon in fanciful biographical monographs, should any of this attain the status of interesting in the stacks and make Xavier’s smirk an imprint.
“This place works,” Xavier said as he opened the motel door onto a sort of nothingness. “Costs less than shipping my fluids out, which is funny in some way I haven’t unpacked yet.”
“That’s okay” I said. I found the remote controls, as I always do upon entering a rented room.
“What fluids?” I asked him.
“My humors.”
“It’d cost me the same to FedEx mine across town as to stay here, so let’s not self-aggrandize ourselves,” I said, miraculously getting the syllables straight.
“It’s not exactly across town,” Xavier said.
Gabby cut in. “He puts his fluids into orbit.”
“And that’s a breach,” said Xavier, pointing at some wall.
“Oh, god,” I said.
“It’s fewer than a dozen capsules,” Xavier said. “They’re temperature controlled inside a geostatic orbit. Archived. Nothing’s fertilized. I’m not insane.”
“Your semen is in orbit.”
“Geostatic orbit and tracked. And safe.”
“Geostatic over whom?”
“Fuck off. Stop worrying about my fluids. Worry about your additives. They aren’t glass; they aren’t Miss Elizabeth Casey blown to bits. It’s quartz. Or mica. Or something else not categorized, but still silicate, anyway, your back is a semiconductor circuit board, asshole, is what-all we know is the point. You’re half-man, half-machine. Out of about six thousand people like you we’ve seen, no one comes close. That’s your worry.”
“What?”
“I mean, that’s the thinking, at least.”
“Don’t tell me the thinking. Tell me the real.”
“It’s geologist-approved, Rich. If you must watch the news at least don’t remember it for long. Glass was the approved word, right? We don’t want to field questions about what is shocked smoky quartz for the next six weeks.”
“What the hell is that?”
“See?” Xavier said. “Okay. Shocked quartz is found at the bottom of nuke blasts, meteorite impacts, maybe lighting strikes—super high-pressure stuff, weird molecular structure each time.”
“What the fuck? That’s what Elizabeth Casey blew up into?”
“I love you, man. You don’t have her inside you. The ball lightning went for her, but the arrangement of silica packets wasn’t favorable. Flavorable.”
“The arrangement of…”
“The—okay, just about every piece of luggage in the store contained an annoying packet of silica gel, you follow? Multiply by the number of purses, bags, fanny-packs, whatever garbage you want, and they found you. They bounced their bolt off her; they got you. What else did they have to work with? I’m sorry. Should have been her. But for the triangulation, they found you.”
“They.”
“What caused this. They is interesting and more to the point because you have a highly organized pattern of rare minerals in your back. Kapeesh?”
“Who are you now? That’s not how you say it.”
“Kapeesh. Sit up on the desk there.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Kids had targeted ball lightning, sucked silica from the concrete and sand in the lot around the Golden Apple but there wasn’t enough to download the material,” Xavier quickly said.
“From what we’ve been able to scan, it’s highly organized. Your back. The shocked quartz logic board, I’m embarrassed to say—which I’m embarrassed to say.”
“My back isn’t turned on, even if it is real.”
“No, you’re on.”
Xavier struck my knee with his fingers stretched into a reflex hammer, and my leg kicked.
“Pa-tang! See?”
“Stop it,” I told him.
“You really were friends in the fourth grade,” Gabby said.
“Pa-tang!”
With another strike from Xavier my leg shot up again like an obedient circus monkey.
“Damn it, Xavier!”
“Elizabeth Casey, or, to be better about this, her location is a better way about saying it, she got zapped but the silica gel packets were closer to you. You were more in line with the ball of plasma. You were luckier. That was random. But the particles of quartz in your back, the pattern, is anything but. The chances are vanishingly small that what happened to you was random.”
I felt suddenly dizzy.
“I think I need to.…” I muttered.
“You need to call Michelle and get her down here now.”
“Is Aventura Italian for something?”
Francesca spoke through my phone.
Si, Rich, é Italiano per adventure.