“By buying sites like Medblog?”
“Funding start-ups that build fast-twitch media software, casual games sites, interactive virtual worlds with pop-up windows and hyper-speed messaging. Multi-tasking heaven. We’re lobbying on related public policies, like discouraging laws that ban talking on the phone while driving, and giving tax credits to high-speed Internet providers. Even without our meager help, which all is perfectly legal, legions are shooting cortisol into their brains, freeing up blank memory space to use for our secrets. Go to any Internet café or, hell, any corporate office or schoolyard, you’ll see people simultaneously tweeting, calling, messaging, sending, and receiving to their hearts’ delight — but, over time, remembering less and less effectively. Thanks to you, we blew up our nerve center, but we’ve still got databases filled with potential conscripts, Americans with dulling memories, the carrier patriots of the future.”
He pauses. “That’s step one.”
“And that computer holds the scientific keys to writing over their fading memories?”
He looks at the laptop like an evil genius in a Bond flick might stare at his lap cat. I am closer to the fire extinguisher.
“Did it occur to you that Adrianna could’ve sabotaged her own data?”
He seems sufficiently preoccupied that I’ve got two or three seconds to act before he can react and blow my face off. I yank the fire extinguisher off the wall.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I pull the pin. I hold back the extinguisher’s trigger. I start to wildly spray white goo toward foe and laptop.
Through the miasma, I see Chuck grab his gun and step out of the way of the cascade. The extinguisher starts to sputter out. Chuck shakes his head angrily. He walks to the radio.
“Wait! Please,” I yell as loudly as I can, hoping to stop him and get the attention of a passerby.
He pauses.
“I’m going to be a father.”
“You should have thought about that earlier.”
He turns on the stereo. John Cougar Mellencamp fills the cabin. He jacks up the volume.
“I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy…”
He takes two steps forward. He raises the gun. I inch into the corner, trying to hide behind the table. His face contorts in rage and he starts rushing towards me, quickly, cutting off my angles. Then he slips. His right foot hits a patch of extinguisher goo and slides right out from under him. And the rest of him follows.
He goes down hard. He drops the gun as he uses his arm to brace himself for the fall. In that respect, he succeeds. He gets his right arm underneath him. But that’s not what he should have been worrying about. The compartment is so small that he has underestimated, or probably not had time to estimate at all, the danger to his head.
As he goes down, his skull cracks against a ledge near the cabin door. He hits the ground, stunned.
Fighting intense pain, I hop forward on my left leg. I’m still holding the extinguisher. I’m thinking about something my grandmother once told me about karate. “Don’t ever fight,” she said. “If you do, go for the windpipe.”
I raise the fire extinguisher over my head. Groggily, Chuck looks up at me. He naturally covers his face. I bring the extinguisher down on his neck. He goes limp.
Unconscious, dead, I have no idea. I don’t care which. It doesn’t matter. He’s limp and my unborn critter is going to have a father.
I drop to my knees next to Chuck. I reach for the gun. Whatever Chuck’s status, I can protect myself.
Then the cabin door opens.
In front of me stands the hooded man, now dressed all in black. Evidently, Chuck faked his death. He’s got a gun too. He’s pointing it at my head.
“You play video games?” he asks.
“What?”
“At the end of the video game, you have to play the biggest, baddest enemy of them all. It’s called the Boss. Technically, Chuck gave the orders. I was just the muscle, but I’m really strong muscle. I’m the guy at the end of the video game that you keep trying in vain to kill.”
Chapter 63
I dangle the gun in my right hand. It is not pointed at the Boss character. And his slick black handgun is pointed at me.
In that respect, I am at a total disadvantage.
But my gun is pointed at the propane tank.
I think about Polly and Grandma, Bullseye and the Witch. I think about how the Boss may not let them survive either. I wonder if I will prompt fond memories.
The Boss follows my gaze to the propane tank.
“Don’t,” he says.
I pull the trigger.
The boat explodes.
Chapter 64
“I always knew, Grandma.”
“Of course you did.”
“I did?”
“Of course. That’s why you threw up on the snake. You knew that Harry was watching us. You knew that you had a secret inside of you and you wanted to get rid of it.”
“By throwing up?”
Grandma laughs. “You know the truth now. You can die in peace.”
“I don’t want to die. Polly needs a maple donut.”
“Dying is part of life. Vince is right. Aging is a beautiful thing if you can see it in the right light.”
“I’m not aging. I’m dying!”
“Oh, good point,” she laughs. “Then you’d better swim.”
“What?”
“Up. Toward the oxygen.”
Epilogue
“If it’s Halloween, I’d like a Milky Way.”
“Halloween was a few weeks ago,” I say.
“You’ve got a bandage on your head. You’re dressed up like you got wounded in the Pacific,” Grandma responds.
I laugh. I do have a head wound.
I’m laughing anyway because Grandma Lane just exchanged a few sentences with me that seemed somewhat connected with one another. Grandma’s brain is eroding. But less quickly than it was two months earlier. The effects of the heavy interaction with the Human Memory Crusade have started to wear off. Partly because the document I discovered on the boat suggested one basic healing method: cut down on computer use. Or, at least, less multitasking.
We’re strengthening her organic memory by keeping her stimulated through conversation, human interaction, rest, and a course of antibiotics.
It’s not fancy alchemy. It’s the reasoned response to a hippocampus that was attacked by a virus, like a computer virus, or wildfire, loosed inside her brain.
Health-wise, I’m recovering myself, from a condition that I think might be clinically called “mostly dead.”
I’d like to say that my grandmother saved my life. I’d like to say that she reached me in a telepathic dream state and urged me to swim to safety while I was dying in the wreckage of the exploded and sinking Surface to Air. I did hallucinate that she was talking to me. But I didn’t act on it and save my own life. The truth is some kindly Samaritan dragged me to safety, pumped my lungs, and then waited for the emergency medical folks to show up and do the rest of the lifesaving.
More good news: the cops seemed to feel that the wayward journalist has suffered enough.
When I got home from the hospital a few days later, I discovered a Porta Potti on the street outside my flat. It was intact; not burned to the ground. I received an anonymous phone call a few days later. The caller explained that the cops had planned to burn it to the ground but had called a truce in light of my larger medical issues and the fact that it appeared I was for once pursuing some actual, meaningful journalism.