“Loera got a tour of the ranch, even the vault with the gold, the sight of which was usually a one-way ticket to the landfills, and the barn full of combat drones that Don Victor called his air force. Later, when they were drunk, they stumbled through the desert with their arms around each other toward a ruined outbuilding we were using as a death house.
“I’d been watching from a distance but I faded in behind them as they went in through the door. My crew were there with a client, doing the long job. Loera turned white, started trembling and tried to leave, but my late employer held him by the shoulder and kept saying just a moment, my friend, just a moment more. Finally, the client’s blindfold fell off, and he saw Loera and recognized him. He started screaming, praising his art and his mercy, pleading for his intercession. Loera visibly composed himself and said, ‘Don Victor, please, as a personal favor to me, could you possibly spare this man?’ Don Victor was a fat bastard but his face looked like ancient stone as he said, ‘Don Antonio, I have the highest regard for you, and would never hurt a single hair on your head, but in this matter I regret I am unable to oblige you.’”
Abruptly Hiro stands, seemingly drained, and turns off the TV. It’s like a door has closed as he says, “You should go back to your suite now.”
*
In the morning Kern wakes without knowing why and there’s Hiro sitting in the chair across from the bed, watching him, presumably, from behind his sunglasses, and he looks somehow inanimate, like he could have been sitting there all through the night. Hiro says, “Time to get up, boy. It’s your first assignment. You’re going to Delhi.”
He leans over and hands Kern a burner tablet showing a picture, probably from an elevator’s security cam, of a deeply serious and somehow distracted-seeming woman who looks like money and has bangs and kind of a lot of jaw.
Hiro says, “Her name’s Irina.”
50
Our Lady of Drones
… and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away. He tries for a broader view, sees he’s had that thought before, that it punctuates the recent past like the poppies in a dense field of flowers, and he remembers the poppies in the vase by his bed in the St. Mark, their forms repeated infinitely down the fractions of the seconds, his opiated fog, how his mother sat by him and held his hand, how the shifting tensions in the muscles of her face encoded every shiver of feeling, and once again he wonders what ghosts are if not this sense of presence. Needing distraction, he looks inward, and it’s like a koan, how the glyphs seethe and shimmer, interweaving and dissolving faster than he can follow, and the harder he tries the faster they slip away …
A jolt, and then he’s trying to read new glyphs, but they’re too simple, just dark blocky lumps on a ruby base, and he realizes he’s staring at the Persian rug on the office floor, that the tablet has fallen from his hand because the ground moved, is moving, it’s an earthquake, which he’s heard can happen in LA.
He doesn’t know what to do—is he supposed to take cover in a doorframe?—and then the earth stills. He picks up the tablet, careful to keep his eyes averted from its screen, and shuts it down.
He steps into the corridor. No sign of the surgeon. Got it! Meet you where? he texts Akemi. There’s a cyclical vitreous ringing from the direction of the lobby, which he finds abandoned, the receptionist gone from her desk. The noise is coming from one of the white vases with the blue Chinese dragons wobbling on its pedestal. He stills it with his palm, feeling the porcelain’s cool. The pendant lights are swaying. Outrageous but somehow typical that the clinic staff have fled.
Out in the courtyard there’s a thick haze in the air and it smells like the sea, though the beach is at least a mile away. Late afternoon shadows on the shot-up town car and the minimalist garden; the sun glitters on the spent round where he threw it on the sand. His phone chimes—the text failed—network not found. No obvious way to open the gate, and no one to ask how. A trickle of black water seeps under it, darkens the asphalt, bleeds into the sand.
He tries to go back into the clinic but now the glass doors won’t open, and the lights inside are off. Power failure, but shouldn’t there be an emergency generator? Peering into the shadows, he sees the Chinese vases are missing from their stands, but it’s too dark to see any fragments on the floor.
The world buckles again, the town car swaying on its axles as the spent round dances on the miniature dunes forming spontaneously in the sand. A section of the high wall is leaning inward, and by the time it’s in his mind to dodge out of the way it’s collapsed, just like that, burying the town car, blinding him with dust.
The earth is still again. He wipes his eyes, stares intently at the remainder of the wall. Could it be just slightly out of true? In any case it’s certain that the courtyard isn’t safe so he scrambles up the slope of new rubble.
Nearing the top, he knows what he’s about to see and then does see that the street’s become a tide race. Tsunami, he thinks. The water running in the street comes up to the cars’ doors; it’s rapid, filthy, thick with debris. Most of the buildings are dark, their lower floors covered in mud and silt, their specificity washed away. As he wonders where the people went a body floats by.
He drops down to a sandbar in the lee of an overturned truck. A library of objects washes past, a trash-can lid and a pink plastic doll and a phone and sodden plastic bags and all the nameless components of machines and cities. He listens to the water’s roar, its intricacy. This strikes him as an occasion for plucky self-reliance but no plan comes to mind and then he remembers tsunamis come in sequences.
Cigarette smoke on the air—there’s a woman sitting on the roof of a half-drowned car. Her clothes and hair are dry. It’s the same woman who attacked his car, Our Lady of the Drones, the ragged woman’s more presentable twin.
He wades toward her, the detritus in the water bumping him like inquisitive fish. Her eyes are closed, like she’s lost in thought, and a cigarette is burning in her hand. “Hey,” he says, “who are you?”
She opens her eyes, looks down at him, smiles. “I’m a magician,” she says.
He stares at her. Is she hurt, mad, in shock?
“For real,” she says. “Want to see a trick?” Without waiting for an answer she reaches down and plunges her cigarette into the water. It hisses as it’s submerged, but when she pulls it out the ember is still burning.
“How did you do that?”
“It’s easy when you know the secrets of the universe. God, I missed these,” she says, dragging. “Never thought I’d have another. Come sit by me.” She pats the roof beside her.