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Apr. 15th, 2005 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
benchiladaI'm posting all six pages (in Microsoft Word, 12 point, that's the equivalent of about 10-12 book pages) of "Jimmy the Spook" that I'm comfortable with throwing up on LiveJournal and on the Listserv right now.
The stuff that's already been posted has been italicized to make it easier to skip to the new bits, if you want.
I'm enjoying it, but I want honesty out of you monkeykissers.
I need to figure out if I'm going to be a published author or just keep being a writer.
EDIT-- This is already a slightly outdated version, edits have happened. But you won't see them here, I shouldn't think...not yet, at least...
Slim pickings at the morgue tonight. I need a body that’s in relatively good shape. I’d prefer one without visible wounds, and no autopsy scar would be nice, but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. They’ve already ghosted Johnny and he floats, a sentient microchip in a protein solution, in what would best be described as a turkey baster with teeth.
As I unlatch door number seven, I hit the jackpot. Looks about fifty, card on the front says heart attack, no visible sign of death, except that he’s 45 degrees Fahrenheit and the color and texture of White Out. The tag says Hank Resnick. I slide him out and onto a gurney, careful not to cause any post-mortem bruising. A few minutes with my make-up kit and he looks a bit tarted-up, but he’ll pass for alive long enough to work out.
I’d put clothes on him, but Jimmy hates waking up naked. That’s why he always wakes up naked. I pull a scalpel and a Swingline stapler out of my briefcase and make a deep incision an inch above his neckline. Christ, I hate this part.
Plunging the baster deep into the new wound, I squeeze the amber bulb at the end of the tube. The fluid shoots in, thin streams leaking out down the poor bastard’s neck. I quickly slide the tube out and staple the flap of skin down. A quick once-over with a handy-wipe and he’s looking better.
I toss the baster into a biohazard box hanging from a wall and rummage through my pockets for a small metal box. It’s only got one switch, covered by thick plastic, and a tiny keyhole. I slip a key out from the sole of my shoe, turn it in the lock, and the thick plastic pops open. After taking a good six steps back, I press the ominous red button, ironically labeled “Do not, under any circumstances, press this red button, unless you want to die.”
Hank’s body convulses wildly, a posthumous grand mal seizure, and his eyes arc
blue electricity between them. I am Frankenstein, and this is my
creation. Or rather, the
A few seconds of seizing and Hank settles back down, albeit a bit more awkwardly positioned than before. His eyelids flicker open and shut, and his mouth moves, trying to form words. I tip a bottle of Evian over his teeth. He swallows like a fish gasping for air.
“Innnnnng fffffnnnnggg nnnnnnnkkkd.”
“Yes, you’re fucking naked.”
“Mrrrrrrrrfffffgrrrr.”
“That’s me. C’mon, try sitting up.”
He awkwardly jerks his way into a sitting position and manages enough fine motor control of one hand to flip me the bird.
“Class, Jimmy, that’s you. All class.”
“Yeahhhhhhccccchhhhh.”
James Montgomery Hutchinson is the single greatest special agent in the history of the world. He has completed, in his twenty-odd years of service, over one-thousand special ops, been killed thirty-four times, and keeps coming back for more.
He was killed the first time in 1982, and, like some terrible Hammer horror
film, they couldn’t stand to lose him, so they caved in his skull with a
crowbar, jammed a couple hundred needles into his brain and mapped every damn
thing that made him who he was. They then “downloaded” – over a span of
seven months – the entire contents of his brain onto tape drives, which would
later be upgraded to bubble memory, hard drives, and now a very special DVD
kept, like Dick Cheney, in an undisclosed location. Its contents are
copied, encoded onto a special chip that pulses with a
He is Jimmy the Spook, the Ghost in a Bottle, ready to serve his country in whatever skin they give him. He’s a better shot with a dead man’s hands than anybody alive, runs faster with atrophied muscles than anybody I’ve ever known, and can do long division in his head. Okay, maybe the last one isn’t that important, but, fuck, I can’t do it.
I take a seat next to the gurney as Jimmy loosens up the taught muscles, stretching, pulling, and snapping things into workable condition. I punch a few numbers into my sat-phone and wait for our orders.
As The Spook pulls ligaments back into shape and cracks his neck, I stare in silence at the green letters that scrolls across the screen of my phone, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from making a noise.
“For Your Eyes Only,” it warns ominously, “as there has been a problem. During the last download, a cat – yes, a cat – snuck through a barbed wire fence and sat down on our private transformer. Son of a bitch exploded like a turkey full of cherry bombs. He also managed to surge our systems, causing a number of problems, but only one important one.”
My stomach sinks.
“Jimmy’s original disc as been irreparably damaged. You now possess the last remaining ghosting of Mr. Hutchinson’s brain. When his current body goes, so will the chip, and so will he. Forever.”
I sneak a glance at Jimmy, who is peeking under the blue sheet across his hips with a knowing grin.
“Under no circumstances,” the text continues, “is Mr. Hutchinson to be informed. Our psychologists cannot accurately predict what reaction he might have. You will complete your mission and return Home as quickly as possible. We regret to inform you, however, that there will be insufficient time to recover data from the chip before the electrical impulses it provides begins to degrade beyond the point of no return.”
“This will be the last task your partner will ever have, and he can never know. As his best friend, you are expected to make his final trip as enjoyable and productive as possible, without alerting him to the seriousness of his situation.”
The text pauses for a moment, then slowly spells out the following: “For what it’s worth, Dan, we’re sorry.” And the screen goes black.
Hairy legs swing hard off the gurney, knocking my phone across the room.
“If you’re done reading your note from mom, little man, let’s get this party started.”
I bite the inside of my cheek again, this time to hold back the tears.
“So, he says, dropping to the ground and picking up the duffle bag full of clothes I’ve brought him, “how’d everything turn out last time? I remember everything up until that gangsta’ clipped me in the temple with his knuckle-dusters.”
Keeping my face turned away from him, I pretend to be punching in information on the phone.
“Hang on,” I stall. I have to go through this sort of question every time we start him up again. The chip in his head contains everything that makes him Jimmy, including a little part that records his experiences from each new download. It saves as much of his “life” as it can, breaking it down into basic descriptions, but it’s a bit lossy, so some details get dropped. Beyond a certain point, the body he’s in starts to deteriorate to the point that the chip is of very little help, so it goes into a sort of standby mode, at which point some sort of bizarre instincts take control of the body. We call it “Blackout.”
He still functions, but his personality and control just sort of drop by the wayside. I once saw him, in Kosovo, wandering around a warehouse, pointing his gun at everybody he saw, friend or foe, and pulling the trigger. He was out of bullets, but that never registered. I heard grown men yelp like puppies when the hammer came down and saw the same men wet themselves when three slugs in the chest barely slowed him down.
Click. Step. Click. Step.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Click. Step. Click. Step.
He pinned one guy in a corner and killed him by walking forward with his gun barrel pointed at the bastard’s eye. Kept walking and pulling the trigger as the metal burst the eye and was pushed deep into the brain. When I’d finished cleaning things up I had to pull his arm free so I could lay him down and remove the chip from his neck.
I wish the chip could record more, could preserve his personality better, then we could back him up straight from it, and…I wouldn’t have to watch my friend get less intelligent and less coherent, until his whole body just gives out.
“Spaz!” he shouts directly into my ear, prompting a reflexive slap from me. Even in “Hank’s” body, he can catch my wrist before my palm hits his cheek.
“Where the hell are you, man? C’mon, fill me in on last time so we can get moving,” he says, and unfolds the top of his turtleneck. I get him tight clothes that cover as much of his skin as I can. It helps hide the inevitable discoloration and the snug fit helps him maintain structural integrity for as long as he can.
“It, uh…it wasn’t pretty, man,” I said, looking at him with empty eyes.
His smile drops and he looks genuinely concerned. I never really get used to that. No matter what body he’s in, his body language remains the same, so it’s like I’m watching a dead stranger perfectly imitating my best friend.
“You know how you’re always joking that this time is going to be the time that you turn into a zombie and start eating people?” He nods quietly. “Well, that’s what last time was.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious. The guys at the lab figure that must have been the last thought going through your head when the chip went into hibernation, so that was what your body got locked into performing,” He doesn’t speak, so I grimace and keep going, turning my head away again.
“You started off screaming ‘Brains!” but that degenerated pretty quickly into just ‘Baaaa!’ The next thing I know you’ve grabbed one of the terrorists by the arm and started biting. Not like love bites, either, it was like you were eating a chicken leg. You’d tear out a big chunk and it would fall out of your mouth, so you’d do it again. Pretty soon he falls to the floor, his arm in tatters, and one of the other two shoots you in the back with his shotgun. The force blew you straight into the third guy. He…” I stop for a second.
“You chewed through his neck, Jimmy. Rigor mortis hit your arms, so you were holding him so tight he couldn’t move. You kept chewing and chewing until…until his goddamned head rolled right off his body.”
I finally look at him again and I swear he’s in some sort of shock. If his tear ducts work, I swear he’d be crying. He’s always had an unnatural fear of zombies, so his joking about becoming one is some kinda fucked-up defense mechanism. He starts walking forward, raising his arms like he’s gonna hug me.
“Hey, man, it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” I tell him, backing slowly away. He looks at his arms, raised zombie-like, and drops them to his side.
“I…I’m…I’m sorry,” he stammers.
“Don’t worry about it, James. It’s not like it really happened or anything.”
I stare, deadpan, at Hank Resnick’s face and watch shock turn into brief anger and then a maniacal grin.
“You SON OF A BITCH, I actually fucking believed you, you asshole! God damn it, don’t do that to me, you fucking fuck!” and he falls back against a table, making the horrible noises that pass for laughing when he’s in a host.
Hell, yeah. We’re gonna have a good time with this last ride.
Jimmy
sprayed some “Very Sexy: For Men” in a cloud and walked through it while I
rummaged through my backpack.
I flip a token into the air and Jimmy grabs it at its apex.
“Let’s get going, man, we’ve got a lot to do. I assume. At the very least, we have something to do that we can’t get done here,” he says and looks around at the cold steel doors reflecting unnatural fluorescent light.
“We have to go wait for the call. And we’ve got about three minutes until the five-grand I dropped the attendant wears off and he come back from whatever it is these guys do on break.”
“Live nude girls, man, I’m telling you,” he laughs, “these guys gotta get tired of titties that don’t wiggle unless you bump the table.”
“You’re a sick man, Jimmy.”
“A sick man with a dead cock. Why’d I have to mention strippers? I’d give my left hand for five minutes of blood flow. Just my left one, though, I’d still need my right.”
By the time he stops laughing I’m through the swinging doors and halfway up the steps to the fire exit. I hear the muffled shout of an obscenity as the steel door slams shut behind me. The rain has let up and it’s a beautiful night. I’m breathing deep the fumes from cabs and late-nite weenie-wagons when Jimmy runs out the door, catching me in the small of the back with the knob.
“You snoozin’ out here? I figured you’d be halfway down the street by now. What’s the wait?” he asks, just as the 27 bus blows its air brakes right in front of us.
We hop up the steps and chuck our tokens in the box. The driver drops his foot on the accelerator the moment the second coin hits, but Jimmy and I don’t sway an inch. We’ve taken bumpier rides than this, I think, walking to the back of the bus. We grab the seat behind the rear door, as always – window seat for me – and the bus fires off into the night, a clumsy bullet tripping at every other intersection.
There’s an enormous lady in one of the three seat sections up front, and she’s sitting in the middle one. Her love handles drip over the sides of her too-tight black polyester pants, spilling into the seats on either side of her. I’ve seen her on the buses in this town before, always in the same seat. Even when the bus is full, standing room only, she keeps squatter’s rights to her land and the two plots next to it. I once saw a skinny little skater sit down next to her after a few miles of standing up. She shifted her weight so more of her smashed up against him and turned her head, staring at his cheeks until they burned red and he got up to stand again.
A few stops down we get a trio of black girls, sixth grade, maybe, laughing as they flick their cigarettes into the gutter before getting on board. Jesus, I want a smoke. They skip to the back of the bus, past the obese daytripper, through Jimmy’s fog of cologne, leaving a perfume of smoke and cheap beer in their wake.
We aren’t moving ten seconds before they start rapping to each other. One at first, the other two jumping in and harmonizing without a cue, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Its elementary, life is but a dream,” they sing as they sway, “You know row, row ya boat, your blood forms a stream, after you get hit, you shoulda thought about the shit. You took that paper, you take a life or ya life get took bitch. Sometimes, I sit and look at life from a different angle, don't know if I'm God's child or I'm Satan's angel.”
Jimmy turns to me with another enormous grin on his face. Only he could get a smile out of words like that. He smiles I lot, though.
“That, my friend, is how I know I’m still alive. When I hear life coming from other people. Listen to ‘em. Right now, right this moment, they’re best friends; they’ve got no obligations, no nothing. They’re just alive and they’re loving every moment they have.”
He turns and stares down the length of the bus. I can still see the girls over his shoulder, though. He didn’t see their faces fall after they finished that last verse. He didn’t see them all look down at their hands, wondering how long they can keep themselves a few steps ahead of life, before it catches them and drags them down, into boyfriends and minimum wage, wrinkles and pregnancy. Their fugue lifts as fast as it fell, and they start talking about clothes, and television, and who’s doing what to whom in homeroom. They’re laughing again, and slapping each other on the back, their eyes sparkling anew.
Jimmy’s still smiling and I can’t help but do the same, because I realize he’s right. They’re still alive; life hasn’t killed their dreams yet, so I ride, soaking up their light as we roll.
I’m so in the moment that I barely manage to snag the yellow cord before we blow past our stop, a twenty-four hour convenience store promising cheap cigarettes and the best phone cards in town. Jimmy stops and turns as he’s leaving the bus.
“Thanks,” he says, “you ladies made this trip bearable,” He doesn’t even flinch as the doors close and he hears them shouting to each other.
“Ewww, he was like, FORTY!”
“How many donuts in the bag?” the woman behind the counter asks, looking at the cash register
“Just the two,” I answer, then rethink my response. “Aren’t you going to look?”
“You think I really give a shit how many doughnuts are in the bag?”
“What if I put some beers in a doughnut bag and then lied to you?”
“Then my boss would be missing some beers and I still wouldn’t care.”
Jimmy shouts something from the back of the store.
“The hell you say back there?” she barks.
“I said ‘That’s a hell of a work ethic!’” he shouts from the chip aisle, peeling back the foil from the top of a Pringles can and inhaling deeply.
“First, you better pay for those, second, look at me,” says the woman behind the counter. Jimmy stops snorting his BBQ chips and faces her.
“Am I pretty?” she asks.
“I think you look…”
“By society’s standards, am I pretty?”
“Well,” I start before she cuts me off.
“Don’t lie to me. I ain’t no elephant man, but I ain’t winnin’ no pageants, neither. Now, am I smart? Here’s your hint: I can’t remember my multiplication tables and I don’t know what I ate for lunch. Am I funny? Just enough so’s it’s not noticed. I ain’t got fuckall going for me in this goddamn life and I don’t need a couple of white guys coming into my third job and fucking with me about how many donuts they got in their goddamn bag.”
The payphone in the corner rings. She doesn’t flinch.
“That’ll be for us, Jimmy,” I say as I toss him my wallet, “get my donuts, some Marlboros, and pay for your Pringles. As soon as I hang up, we’re going to work. Buy us a dozen phonecards, too.”
I pick up the phone, say “Hello, please go ahead,” and hold the handpiece away from my ear. Two seconds later a hellish electronic screaming comes out as our bosses’ scramblers kick in. As the creepy automated voice starts giving instructions, I hear the clerk admonishing Jimmy.
“Fuck you, white man, where you get off calling me a ‘African Princess?’”
“I’m only white in this body, baby, my soul’s as black as yours.”
I try to concentrate on the voice from the phone as the Princess throws her cherry slushie in Jimmy’s face.
benjamin sTone
Current Music: "Hell's Ditch" -- The Pogues
Last Book I Read a Page of: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Harper Lee
Last Movie: THE WARRIORS (USA, 1979)
Next Movie: SUBURBIA (USA, 1983)
