Abby sat in her bra and underwear, eyes open barely to slits, pupils sucking electrons off the screen, which was presently broadcasting a preview of the next episode of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin. Her mouth hung open and her breath rose raggedly from her throat. On the coffee table was a miniature village of takeout containers under investigation by a squad of cockroaches. In the clip, Skinner pulled a shard of glass out of his palm with his teeth and spit it aside, right before Stella threw him through the window of a Krispy Kreme, knocking out the neon HOT NOW sign. He landed on a case of just-glazed regular glazeds.
Stella floated over an upended table. “Get up so I can finish you.”
“I need to see my son.”
Skinner pulled himself up, ducked to avoid an unidentified projectile, ripped the cash register off the counter, and slammed it repeatedly into Stella’s head. The machine popped open, gushing currency, as he obliterated the newman’s face. She twitched and screeched and sputtered electricity all over the floor. Skinner stuffed a donut into his mouth.
Somebody knocked on Abby’s door. Her eyes, with their bloodshot root systems of capillaries, pivoted to her right while the rest of her body remained frozen. She opened her mouth somewhat wider and raised a trembling hand to push her tongue back in, to maybe kick-start it into speech by manipulating it with her fingers, but all that came out was a wheeze. She hoped maybe they would go away. They knocked again. She rose, wobbly, skin bluish gray in televised light, feet shuffling through cardboard boxes of solidified pad thai and mayonnaise-smeared sandwich papers. Standing in front of the door, she willed her visitor to turn away and return to the elevator down the hall. But the knock came again. Okay, so she’d wait it out, stand here until they left. But standing here she instead found herself uncontrollably peeing, the hot urine running down her quivering leg, pooling on the hardwood, spreading into a puddle, the border of which soon crept under the door. Whoever was on the other side was sure to notice it. They knocked again. Abby willed her hand to the knob and pulled it open a few inches until the chain went taut. Through the crack she saw two children, both in costumes, standing patiently holding pillow cases.
“Trick or treat!” they said in unison.
One was dressed as a bat, the other as a lamb. Abby guessed the bat was a boy and the lamb was a girl but she couldn’t tell through their masks. Somehow she got her tongue to work but her voice sounded as ravaged as a tobacco company executive’s.
“I think I have some candy,” she said, then pushed the door closed, slid the chain, and let the door creak open. The two children stepped over the puddle of urine and followed her to the kitchen, where more cockroaches scampered politely out of the way.
“Trick or treat!” the kids said again.
Abby pushed objects around in the cupboards and came upon a tin of cookies. “I have these. Do you want these?” As she spoke, something stung her calf. She looked down to see the lamb pushing the plunger of a syringe. “Oh Jesuh—” she started, before all control of her body ceased. She collapsed on the floor landing on yogurt containers and potato chip bags. The bat grabbed her under the armpits and the lamb took her legs and with a collective grunt they carried her to the bedroom. They sure seemed stronger than your average trick-or-treaters. In the bedroom they pushed her up onto the unmade bed and climbed up after her. The bat, straddling her midriff, pulled off his mask to reveal a head far too large to belong to a child and eyes twice the size of typical human eyes, spaced far apart. Underneath the mask the bat looked like an unnaturally sophisticated embryo with the prelude of a mustache. The lamb removed her mask as well, revealing similar features, though her hair was blonde and in pigtails secured with heart-print ribbons.
“You’re going to be all right. You’ve been injected with a Bionet hack,” the bat said. His voice sounded like it had been recorded at double speed for a cartoon. Chipmunky. “We’re your friends. We’re here to liberate you.”
Abby’s spine stiffened, as if one by one her vertebrae had begun to fuse together. Talking seemed out of the question. As if anticipating this problem, the lamb placed something cold and sticky on Abby’s forehead.
“This is a bindi transmitter,” the lamb said. “It will allow you to bypass speech and communicate with us telepathically.”
Abby heard a sort of chime in her left ear, followed by a woman’s voice. “Hi! Do you accept this connection?”
Abby thought “Yes” three times in a row. Another chime. The aural space in her head felt echoey, as if her sense of hearing had itself entered an empty concrete room. “Who did this to me?” she asked the space. “Where is Rocco? How come I can’t control myself? Who are you people?”
“We’re software developers,” the bat said in the space, his voice trailing into two or three distinct echoes. “My name is Bat and this is Lamb.”
“You’re monks.”
“We were for a time,” Lamb said.
Bat said, “We’ll help you find Rocco.”
“Who did this to me?” Abby asked again.
“Rocco did this to you,” Lamb said. “He’s a DJ. We can’t liberate all the embodiments of Vancouver but we know you can reach him and put an end to his DJing.”
“Rocco wouldn’t do this.”
Lamb said, “Rocco met you at an underground Bionet party. He knew about the police activity and spared you from getting arrested because he thought you looked cute. He took you as a trophy. Then he accidentally fell in love with you, and loves you still. You can take us to him. He is doing to thousands of people what he did to your friend Jadie and what he has done to you.”
“He would never have done this to me.”
“That is correct,” Lamb said, “but he’s been away from his dashboard. You’re running on autopilot. He didn’t want this to happen to you. He had programmed the most exquisite experiences for you. He manually encoded your sexual climaxes. Every happy moment from the time you met happened under his control. Every teardrop, every laugh, all predetermined by the most elegant software.”
Bat said, “He sent you away on a tangential trip to the archives of Kylee Asparagus to get you out of the way. He knew the heat was coming down on him. He wanted to protect you.”
“Dirk Bickle said I was sent to infiltrate another reality,” Abby said.
“Do you want to keep showing up dead?” Bat asked.
“I can’t tell I’m even alive,” Abby said. Her fingers started tingling.
“We can reverse the hack,” Bat said. “We can return you to your state of subservience to your autopilot DJ.” The two former monks glanced around the room as if considering what would happen should Abby select this option. The whole apartment was a fetid, domestic catastrophe.
Abby swallowed and thought, I’ll go along. Wasn’t that what she was good at? Going along? Letting others plot her trajectories? Her throat felt as if she was suffering the worst cold of her life while she simultaneously huffed chemical fumes and swallowed peach pits. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and resisted falling down the sides of her face. Bat patted her chest.
“The hack is almost complete,” Bat said. “After this, you will fall asleep. A sleep deeper than any sleep you’ve had in a long time. We’ll leave instructions for you for when you wake up.”
Abby’s voice came back, barely. “Wait. If it’s true. If Rocco really did this to me—what are you going to do to him?”
“We’ll recycle him,” Lamb said. Upon which curtains fell, blotting out all light, all thought.
Abby’s eyelids made an audible noise as they flapped open. From zero to fully conscious within half a second. Her joints squealed and popped as she struggled out of bed. First thing she noticed was how immaculate the apartment looked. Wood floors actually reflective again, the clothes hamper empty, not a trace of dust on the surface of anything. In the kitchen she found a bowl of fresh fruit and the refrigerator stocked with vegetables, new cartons of juice, tubs of yogurt, entrées neatly sealed in containers. Her arms wildly extracted the contents of the fridge, tossing ingredients onto the counter. Fresh pumpernickel bagels with a selection of schmeers. Bananas that preferred the climate of the very very tropical equator. Abby pulled out the blender and began dropping in strawberries and protein powder. She felt like doing yoga! She wanted wheat grass! She stretched, hopped in place, put some music on. Not a cockroach in sight. The shitty takeout containers and the trick-or-treating monks seemed but a hallucination. This right here—this vibrantly colored orange—this was the real world, clean and alert, confident and rejoicing. She slipped a seedless grape into her mouth and closed her eyes as her teeth punctured the skin with a snap. She poured a glass of orange-guava juice and downed it in five gulps. Satiated, she pranced into the bathroom, where she faced her wall of soaps, exfoliants, conditioners, and moisturizers, the balms, muds, glosses, and creams. She cranked the shower up to steamy, stripped out of her pajamas, and proceeded to enjoy a forty-five-minute session under the nozzle. Out of the shower, she dressed in her newly washed favorite jeans and blouse but left her feet bare. Something about bare feet on hardwood with clean clothes and Brazilian music playing while coffee brewed meant civilization, meant purchasing power, meant freedom.
She noticed a manila envelope on the coffee table. Opening it she found one plane ticket, in her name, to New Newark Airport on the Kitsap Peninsula. The flight left in two hours. When she went to the closet for her suitcase, she discovered it had already been packed. Looking once more around the apartment she’d shared with Rocco, Abby pulled on her best flats and wheeled the suitcase to the door. This life, with the sunlight filtered through the shades and every tchotchke in its perfect place, was a way station. Her real life was about to begin. She was going to New York Alki.