*
The cabin’s deeply padded seats are upholstered in creamy leather with complicated multistage seat belts that must be precautions against intense aerobatics and the leather has a smell that he can’t quite name. The cabin’s cramped interior is all black webbing, matte aluminum and mil-spec austerity. Hiro cuffs his wrist to the armrest and he feels he should stay alert but as the plane’s ascent pushes him down into the seat his eyes start to close and it’s only then that he realizes that he knows the smell, that it’s the same as the interior of Akemi’s car, that the smell is money.
*
Faint vibration, muffled drone of engines. Night outside, moonglow shining through the tiny windows, no other light in the cabin but the faint glow from the jet’s display. The metal cuff rests lightly on his wrist—he almost doesn’t feel it if he doesn’t move his hand. Shameful not to at least try to escape, but the cabin is a dreamscape, and the bulkheads waver and fall away.
It’s still night when he wakes again. Hiro is across from him, sprawled in his seat in the dark. Kern’s certain that he’s sleeping until Hiro says, “One time I tried to leave, you know.” A pause, and then, “You see, I’d stopped drinking.”
Another pause, the plane shivering as it passes through turbulence, leaves it behind.
“How does one kill? It’s easy, with an enemy, in the passion of the moment, but to kill strangers, day after day? It erodes the soul.
“I was rarely sober. None of us were, not since we graduated from the police academy and started working. The bosses were particular about that. Every day it was a new hotel, and in every new hotel room there were bottles of vodka and bags of cocaine and a stack of guns like a welcoming bouquet. The vodka was for numbness, and the cocaine for the focus and false confidence to carry us through the valley of death, day after day, world without end.
“Time works differently in that life. There’s a fluidity, a sense of events coming on like waves, and they might break and wash harmlessly around your ankles or they might carry you away. Cause and effect blur—if the man was shot then it was his time to die. If the woman was behind the wall that did not stop the bullet then she must somehow have offended the bosses. I never slept in the same bed twice, or used the same woman twice, or drove the same car for more than a week.
“And then there were these signs, billboards, all over the city. They said, ‘Call on Him, for He is Waiting.’ It was just some church looking for converts, and a picture of Jesus they got off the web, but it seemed like they were speaking to me. There was this one, on the outskirts, out toward the army shooting range. I’d chain-smoke in my car and stare at it, like I was trying to pierce its mystery.
“I stopped drinking and using. I even quit coffee. Clean, I felt the fear, radiant and brittle, all around me, all the time. We lived at the boss’s pleasure and could die at any time and there was no way out of that life, but I was sick with the letting of blood. I didn’t know what to do, so I fucked a lot of women and watched a lot of movies and then I cracked and started drinking again. I decided I’d run for it. First I skimmed money. I was clever about it, but they knew.
“I was commanding my own unit then, and it was my own men who collected me. I’d taken a lot of pills that morning, mostly dilaudid, but I knew what was happening as soon as I saw the black armored SUV pull up to the curb, like it was the nightmare I’d been waiting for all my life.
“They brought me to a death house, one we’d used many times. Bodies upon bodies under the sand in the backyard. They tied me to a chair in the living room and there were the knives and a cigarette lighter and a bottle of acid and I started weeping uncontrollably. Save your tears, faggot, they said. Because we’ll really give you something to cry about. But they didn’t understand—I wasn’t crying from fear of pain, but because I was afraid I would hurt them.
“There were four of them. They were drunker than usual, and my bonds were loose, and I prayed that they’d just kill me before giving me an opening, but the devil was near, I could hear his footsteps as he walked through the house, opening drawers and looking in closets, and then he was listening behind the kitchen door, and despite my prayers one of the men went outside to call a girlfriend and another went off to take a piss and another went to get a beer and the last was a friend, a man whose life I had saved many times over, and I thought he might even let me go, and I tried to keep God’s face in my mind’s eye while he stood there telling me how badly he would make me die, and I prayed fiercely for the strength to just let it happen, but then I stopped, because suddenly I knew beyond question that I’d been praying to the void, that no one was listening, or ever had been, and with that I felt nothing but a profound emptiness and a slight sorrow. Before that, I’d thought I didn’t fear death, but it was only then that I realized that fearing death was all I’d ever done, and in that moment my fear was gone, which made me free, though all the light had left the world. Then my friend turned his back on me to find a cigarette.
“For practical reasons I spent no more than a minute on any one of them, though for them I suspect it was a long minute indeed. You have to be careful, or they just go into shock, and then what’s the point? I smoked a cigarette, while I worked, to cover the smell. Ever seen an altar of Mictlantecuhtli? A brutal relic of the Aztec past, now in vogue again. I made one, though it wasn’t easy, human sinew being more resilient than I’d expected, and me not having the right tools to hand.
“Before I left town I went to the billboard and shot His eyes out, so that His face framed little burning holes onto nothing, which seemed about right. I was raised Catholic, but, frankly, its virtues are those of women and of slaves.”
Silence. Kern says, “Why tell me these things?”
“Want to see something funny?” Hiro says. “The day after I killed my unit I went and killed my old boss.” Another silence. “He was the one putting contracts on my head. With him in the ground, I’d get breathing space. It was the savvy career move.”