Ricky didn’t threaten to break parts of us if we didn’t go along with his plan, but he didn’t need to, and he only made some gauzy promises about payment. He did say he could get me some rowing lessons.
It took me two hours to find Sally. I almost texted her, but I had a bad feeling about my cell phone.
She was in a group of film students building a giant ramp that looked as if they were going to roll a mail cart into a snowbank. She saw me and then turned away to watch her pals slamming boards together. I nudged her, but she just ignored me. I remembered she’d said something about this movie they wanted to make about a guy who works in the mailroom and discovers a hidden doorway that leads to Hell’s interoffice mail system, and he has to deliver a bunch of letters to demons before he can get out. High fuckin’ concept. Anyway, she was pissed that I’d been blowing her off for weeks, so now I couldn’t get her attention.
Finally, I wrote just the name “ricky a” on my cell and shoved it in front of her without pressing send. Her eyes widened, and she made to text me back, but I stopped her. I grabbed a pad and a pen and wrote down the whole story for her, including the signs in Harvard Square. She shook her head a lot, then bit her lip. She thought I was exaggerating, but the guy who’d seen the signs showed up and confirmed that part.
“We’re so small time,” she wrote in neat cursive under my scrawls. “Why would Ricky care?”
Under that, I wrote: “1. He remembers us from hi skool, unfinished biz. 2. He likes us and wants to own us. 3. He hates us and wants to destroy us. 4. those guys are scared of losing their grip & they think we can help.”
It was a cold day, and I’d gotten kind of wet trying to escape in a Harvard boat, plus the sun was going down, so I started to shiver out there on the lawn in front of BU. Some students were straggling back in, just like at Harvard, and they stared at the set, abandoned half-finished against one wall. Sally gestured for her gang to get the ramp to Hell’s mailroom back into storage.
We piled ourselves into the back of the equipment van, with Zapp Stillman driving, and headed for the Turnpike, because the sooner we got out of town the better.
We got about half a mile before we hit the first checkpoint. There were soldiers with big dragonfly helmets standing in front of humvees, blocking off most of the lanes of Storrow Drive, and between the soldiers and the swiveling cameras on stalks, there was no way you would get past their makeshift barricades. They were checking everybody coming in and out of the city, and a hundred yards past them stood an exoskeleton thingy, or a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face. My brother Holman had probably piloted one of these things in Central Asia or Central Eurasia, someplace Central. The pilots of these things had a high rate of going A.U.T.U., because of all the neural strain. This one wasn’t moving, but it was cranked up and operational because you could see the ground shivering around it, and there were fresh kills nearby: Cars still smoking, a few unlucky bodies.
Our van turned onto a side street as fast as possible, and we swerved back toward Boston University. By the time we got back there, Janelle had found some forum posts about the cordoning off of several major cities. It was part of a sweep to round up certain radical elements that threatened the shaky order: you had the red bandanas inside the cities, and the army outside.
We were still in the van, parked on a side street just off Dummer St., sheltered by a giant sad oak that leaned almost to the ground on one side. You could put a tire swing on that oak and swing underground and maybe there would be mole people. Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?
I wasn’t sure if we should get out of the van, or if someone would spot us, but Sally went ahead and climbed out, and Janelle followed. I got out and stood on the sidewalk, shrugging in a sad ragdoll way. Sally stomped her foot and gritted her teeth. She tried some sign language on me, and I got the gist that she was saying we were trapped — every way out of the city would be the same thing. I just looked at her, waiting for her to say what we were going to do, and she looked weary but also pissed. This not-talking thing meant you really had to watch people, and maybe you could see people more clearly when you couldn’t hear them.
I studied Sally. She had the twitch in her forearms that usually meant she was about to throw something. She had the neck tendon that meant she was about to yell at someone, if yelling were still a thing that happened. Her mouse-brown hair was a beautiful mess bursting free of her scrunchie, her face so furious it circled back around to calm. Biting her tongue, the better to spit blood.
She wrote on her phone: “the army outside + red bandanas inside. occupation. city is screwed. we r screwed. trapped.” She erased it without hitting send.
I took the phone and wrote: “red bandanas + army = opportunity.”
She just stared at me. I didn’t even know what I had in mind yet. This was the part of the conversation where I would normally start spitballing and suggesting that we get a hundred people in koala costumes and send them running down the street while someone else dropped hallucinogenic water balloons from a hang glider. But I couldn’t spitball as fast with my thumbs.
I paused and thought about Ricky, and the other bandanas I’d met, and how they were so desperate to be someone’s hero that they were even willing to ask someone like me for help representing them. I thought about Holman, and how much he looked down on civilians, even before he got the A.N.V.I.L. socket in his skull. I thought about how Ricky and his guys had engineered a clusterfuck at that peace protest, making the cops think the protestors were shooting at them so the cops shot back. I thought about how the bandanas weren’t leaving the city, and the army wasn’t coming in.
“i think I have a bad idea,” I wrote.
All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.
With its sleek red hot-dog battering ram surrounded by a fluffy bun, it was like the Space Battleship Yamato made of bread and pork, made of metal. This MIT student named Matt had been suping it up with a high-performance electric engine and all-terrain wheels, just saving it for the right occasion. And somehow, Janelle had convinced Matt that our little adventure was it.
The tires were the perfect mud color to match the lower part of the chassis, which Matt had rescued from a scrapyard in Burlington. The chassis had a tip as red and round as a clown’s nose on either side of the long, sleek body. This baby had crisscrossed the country before I was born, proclaiming the pure love of Ballpark Franks to anyone with half an eye. Just staring at it made me hungry in my soul.
All around us, Sally’s film-student minions were doing engine checks and sewing parachutes and painting faces onto boomerangs and inflating sex-dolls and making pies for the pie-throwing machine. The usual, in other words. I felt an emotion I’d never felt before in my life, and I didn’t know how to label it at first. Sort of like excitement, sort of like regret — but it wasn’t either of those things. It was lodged down where I always pictured my spine and my colon shaking hands. I finally realized: I was afraid.