First, the underwear, blue jockey shorts he finds among the tangled bedclothes and clumsily works over long and skinny feet, kicking up to yank them along his shanks and teuks, snugly snapping them about his loins, working his fit within. Something clunks free as he unwinds a pants-leg from the blankets, and he bends over the foot of the low bed to fish it up, a pair of goggles, leather straps a-dangle, lenses framed by round brass rings. Frowning through them in the dim light, he huffs over one of the lenses, misting the glass with his breath, and scrubs at it with a pinched-up wrinkle of bedsheet. Peering through them again, turned this way and that, the only light in here diffused through gauzy curtains hung in slender windows there and there. Careful of his slumping pompadour, he works the straps over around the back of his head, fitting the lenses over his eyes, blinking behind the glass, then lifts the lenses up to his forehead, just beneath his pile of matted curls. Then he casts about until he comes up with a grubby white T-shirt.
Clack and creak, the trailer’s flimsy door pops open and below springs groan as the Mason climbs within, Luys in yellow corduroy and rough brown serge, his hair a neat black cap, two white paper cups in the cardboard caddy in his hand. “Hey,” says Sweetloaf, turning the T-shirt around, inside-out and back again, “you have any fucking idea what the fuck time it is? Because I did not mean to sleep this fucking late.”
Luys smiles. It’s a gentle smile, to see Sweetloaf there, knelt on the alcoved bed, jockey shorts and goggles, terribly delicate shoulders, those knees too great for his thighs, the T-shirt slowing, stilling in his hands, “sun’s fucking up,” he’s saying, “we gotta get the fuck on our way, is that chai?”
Luys sets the caddy on the table of the booth there in the nose of the trailer, then steps down the length of it, heavy steps one, two, three, “wait a fucking,” says Sweetloaf, as a big brown hand reaches to cradle the side of his head, thumb of it quite gently stroking his cheek, a bit of leather tied about the wrist. “My lord,” murmurs Sweetloaf, even as he presses a kiss to the rough-edged palm. “We have to go.”
Both those hands now, cupping his shoulders, and Luys stoops as Sweetloaf lifts his mouth for a kiss, a lightly gentle kiss, and brief, but then another too quickly opening to something hungry, forceful, mouth seizing mouth, tongue parting lips, a grunt from Sweetloaf, his own hands pushing against Luys’s shoulders, fingers crumpling yellow corduroy even as he sighs into a third and savoring kiss.
“Her grace,” says Sweetloaf, when Luys lets go his lips, “expects us,” opening his eyes, “expected us, at sunup this very whoop!” as Luys pushes him back on the rumpled umber comforter, serge knees dimpling the bedsheets, pinning Sweetloaf’s hips between them, the one hand still gripping a shoulder, the other wrenching aside the tails of his yellow shirt, slither of belt and jangling clank of buckle undone, “wait,” Sweetloaf’s saying, “sir,” as Luys releases his burgeoning cock from the lopping flap of his fly, “we have to,” as Luys folds over him one hand driven into the sheets a strut the other gripping Sweetloaf’s pompadour, “her grace,” says Sweetloaf, but lever and sway and hips and hand, the glistening mauve that brushes his chin, his cheek, his mouth a grimace turned away, “my lord,” he says, “my fucking lord,” as his head’s turned, tipped, placed, thick fingers crimping his curls, he sputters, “the father, father of our lord, by my good father and by the ghost and the apostles twelve,” Luys has pushed himself up and drooping back, and Sweetloaf beneath him’s braced up on his elbows, “and the seven who stand with me,” he’s saying, he’s chanting, “and listen to the things that drop from his mouth, back the fuck off! Celtatalbabal! Io Sabaoth!” and he spits. Luys has drawn the one leg back and off the bed, and now the other, taking a step uncertain, back. “Rous!” shouts Sweetloaf, sitting up, and Luys takes back another step, “Rous!” and another, “Rous!” until he fetches up against the booth, “Rous!” yelps Sweetloaf once more, tossing blankets and sheets aside, yanking his dungarees into his lap. Luys puts a hand back, trembling, and presses it to the table to still it, then leans a pivot to swing himself into the booth, the clink of his loosened belt against the tabletop.
Sweetloaf’s got his dungarees on, he’s buttoning them up, “the taste,” he’s muttering, and then, “I got no fucking idea,” wrestling into his T-shirt, goggles pompadour and all, “maybe Beaumont’s rubbing off on me,” kicking himself to the end of the bed, “fucking Christy-Ann,” snatching his shoes from the floor. Luys watches, impassive, that hand of his quite still there by the cups still in the caddy.
“Well?” says Sweetloaf, his hand on the handle of the door. “You coming? Cause I’m sure as shit going.”
Luys takes in a deep breath, but then looks away, down the cramped length of the trailer, past the spill of garbage from under the little sideboard sink, to the ruin of the bed tucked at the end.
“Yeah,” says Sweetloaf, opening the flimsy door. “My lord, sir, you want some fucking advice?”
“Not especially,” says the Mason.
“Get yourself the fuck together,” says Sweetloaf, and out he steps.
•
“My lady Chatelaine!” cries one of them, and five or six steps above she stops with a clang, lowering her head before swinging back to glare down at them both brought up quite short behind, beneath, Trucos and Getulos in worn coveralls streaked and smeared with smatters of differing colors, side by side on those skeletal stairs, each with a paint-speckled boot on the same perforated tread.
“Don’t,” she says, “call me that. And if you are gonna call me that, don’t fucking say my lady. Are we clear?”
“Of course” and “Yes, my – of course.”
“Cause I wanted to think we were clear the last time,” she says, “but here we are again,” and she lifts the steaming paper cup in her hand, an admonition, “so, are we?” Her enormous grey T-shirt says Dirtbag Algorithm. “Absolutely, fucking, clear?”
A look, between the two of them. The one says, “Absolutely, my lady, but,” and the other winces. “What must we do?”
“What should we do?”
“We need a decision!”
“He can’t be right!” and a shove, against the railing, “He’s wrong! He’s wrong!” pushed back, into the wall. “Which way,” and “Where,” and “should she look” and “Guys,” says Gloria, but “should she be facing,” they continue, “forwards?” and “guys,” she says, “guys,” but “toward the rear!” and “Leading them on!” and “Drawing them in!” and “Guys!” she shouts, and the ringing clomp of her cork-soled wedge on the stair. “Enough! Geeze. Just, make the call. This is your show, your deal, it’s your call. Okay? I can’t, I can’t make it for you. I’m not gonna do that,” turning away, another step up, but then she looks back, a gesture with her cup, “but make it quick, okay? It’s already Monday. We roll on Saturday,” and up and up she goes, leaving them stood there, turning slowly to face each other’s consternation.
Up on the balcony, Gloria’s stopped before the door, now a pink so glossily soft it almost seems to give under the exploratory pressure of a fingertip, to tack as it’s lifted away, and maybe a ghost of a print left behind. The pink’s been laced with tendrils of feathery barely white, leaf-shapes stenciled in curls and coils that twine together but never repeat. She looks to the two of them clanking back down the staircase, into the hurl and the burl, the palettes of those spattered coveralls predominately pink, overlaid with drips and splotches of ivory and white. She takes hold of the knob of rose-tinted crystal, turns it, and opens the door.
The office within is still too small, too bright, the carpet still grimy, the escritoire remains half-buried under papers. “They painted the door again,” says Gloria.
“Hadn’t noticed,” says Anna, sat before the desk, brief grey shorts and a frilly blouse, sorting the papers, this precarious pile, that teetering stack.
“Why would you,” says Gloria, taking a wincing sip from her cup. “I mean, it’s not like it’s ever off its hinges, or we’re tripping over dropcloths, or hey, are those the rest of them?”
Anna can only watch helplessly as Gloria seizes the papers from her hands, “I told you,” she says, her patience distressed, “it was put through Saturday. To be delivered this morning. Despite the holiday.”
The papers, of a size, are oddly weighted, plastic cards affixed to the bottom thirds, “Yeah, I know,” Gloria’s saying as she rummages ungainly through them, cards click-clacking, “but still,” Trebizond, Trebizond, Trebizond, the letters stamped in flashing golden plastic.
“This brings the total number drawing from your account to thirty-seven,” says Anna.
“Yeah?” says Gloria, tapping the papers against an edge of the desk, neatening up the edges, looking up to see Anna’s sternly frown. “I thought you said this wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I said I could get them. I never said,” a sigh, both sharp and pointed, “no one,” she says, “has ever done anything on this,” a gesture toward the sheaf in Gloria’s hands, “scale,” she says, “before. I couldn’t,” and a slow shake of her head, “possibly, tell you if, or if not, this,” sitting heavily back with a creak, “was or was not to be a problem, which,” taking off her spectacles, “is,” she says, wiping the one lens, and the other, with a tail of her blouse, “a problem,” slipping them back into place, lips pursed in a pinch.
“Well,” says Gloria, “okay then,” dropping the pages indiscriminately atop another pile, “all the more reason.” Zipping pop of unstripping stickum, she rips the card from the topmost page, tossing the paper aside. Another zip, toss, and another, zip, clack of cards together in her fingers, paper fluttering settling onto the carpet.
“Gloria,” says Anna, a monishment.
“What, it’s not like they need to read the letter,” says Gloria, zip, toss. “Study the terms.” Zip, clack. “Weigh pros and cons.” Pop, flap. “Sign anything.” Zip, click. Flutter. “All they have to do,” she says, “all. They have. To do.”
“Is what, Suzette?”
Gloria, holding out the next denuded letter, lets it fall, flop. “I thought you were all in on this,” she says.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“All in,” says Anna, with a questioning lilt.
“Dammit, Anna, this is not something you do just because,” and “I didn’t,” Anna’s saying, but, “because, because this only works,” says Gloria, forcefully, “this only works if we’re all, all of us, all in.”
“All in what?”
“All in!” shouts Gloria. “Agreement! Together! On this!” Knocking the rest of the freighted pages clumsily into the air, toppling the stack they’d been resting on to slither and flittering slide as Anna scrambles to stem the flood, Gloria, opening her mouth, shutting it up again.
“There’s no need for histrionics,” says Anna stiffly, gathering papers up from the floor.
“I’m just,” says Gloria, “I’m trying to help people.”
“I know,” says Anna, sitting back up. “I know.” She’s folding discarded letters together along their creases, setting the tidy bundles aside. “But you get so angry, doing it.”
“Shouldn’t I?” snarls Gloria, shuffling quickly click-clack through the cards in her hands, “Here,” she says, “I’ll go call Thorpe,” holding one of them up between a couple of fingers, “least we could do for her. And here,” winging another, “get that to Addison,” she’s heading for the door as Anna fumble-juggling manages to catch it. “I mean, thank God for what happened to Melissa, right?” says Gloria, scowl souring even as she does, “else we’d be up to thirty-eight.”
The door’s jerked open, slams shut. Anna flinches. Turns back to the stacks of paper, resettling her spectacles, “One might think,” she mutters, tucking the folded letters into a pigeonhole, “the books would be more easily kept, an it all flows just one way.”
•
Rattle of gunfire, whoop of triumph, but he’s knelt here in the bathroom, unconcerned, shoulders draped in a robe of worn brown terrycloth. Whump of an explosion forced through television speakers, loud enough yet to rattle the bottles and cans that litter the bismuth-pink tub. He nudges one with a fingertip, an empty chime, the clack and hollow rattle of vacated cans against damp fiberglass unevenly stained with something rustily brown, distributed in swipes and smears that rise up the sides to an abruptly level ring a couple inches below the rim, well above the garbage within. The XO, the CO, Chad, sits heavily back on his heels, “Shit,” he grunts. “I just wanted a fucking beer.”
Staccato ostinatos of small-arms fire, hectoring shouts, get him, get him get him, tempo raggedly hastening as the timbre shrills until, shuffling down the hall he grimaces at the volume, waving a hand irritatedly as if to brush away a swarm of percussive pop-pop-pops, he scowls at the howls of disappointment, you utter chud, how did you miss, he was standing right there!
He turns away from that boisterous front room, out onto an awkward landing, a short flight of stairs dropping from it, treads hacked and gouged, into a kitchen, checkerboard floor obscured by smears and streaks of mud and grease and other stuff, the stickily rippled playa orange and brown and dull dark red left by whatever might’ve seeped from the grim black garbage bags and paper sacks piled about the almost unseen can, overburdened themselves with spilling slopping garbage, more empty bottles and cans and also wadded crumpled wrappers and paper towels, tailings of food half-eaten, pizza crusts and burrito rinds, glistening slimy plops of this or crumbling ridges of that, deposits of wetly dark coffee grounds and there what might once have been a handful of jojos. He steps off the stairs, off the track of something dragged at some point through the filth across the kitchen toward the back door, leaving a wake of rusted, ruddied stains through and under, displacing the mud and the grease and whatever else, but he’s headed for the fridge, there by the big sheet of plywood leaned up against the cabinets. Yanks open the door on overstuffed unlit chaos, “shit,” he says, to himself, “right,” expression souring about that stiffly slick white scar, “Jesus, it’s starting to smell.” Gently, gingerly closing the door of it, clink.
“Say the word,” growls the man behind him, and “Jesus!” he yelps, a faltering step to one side, turning, as the growling heedlessly continues. “I’ll have her up to core it out. Somebody’s got to deal with this mess.”
“Don’t,” says Chad, says the CO, “don’t fucking do that,” a freighted breath, “don’t,” he says, again.
“Don’t?” Heavy steps toward him, that broad-brimmed black hat pulled low, that jacket of army-surplus green. “We still gotta get something straight,” a kick at a ringingly empty can, squelch into filth, “you don’t tell me don’t.”
“Don’t you fucking,” says the CO, staggered back, fumble-hand catching the railing behind him, as explosions redouble out front, he’s struggling gulping trying to catch his breath, “Moody, I swear to God – ”
“Swear to me,” snarls Moody, shoving back a ragged cuff, flash of gold, light slung from a crystal dial, and the CO turning his head away opens eyes squeezed shut and stood there before him, breathing like a bellows, the CO, one knobble-knuckled hand clenched in a fist on the linoleum table-top scrubbed clean, the other lifting up a glossy blue brochure rolled in a crumpled tube, shaking it in the CO’s face as he draws back, trembling, “No,” he manages to say.
“Annapolis,” the CO’s sneering, “the Naval fucking Academy, is that what you think you want?”
“They, they,” the CO’s stammering, “they said they, they want me,” and “What?” the CO barks, “What is it they want?” and “they said, because of the,” and “tell me what, what is it,” shaking that crumpled brochure with every imperative, “the test score, the test,” the CO’s saying, “the, the PSAT,” wincing at a slap of laughter from the CO. “The test? They don’t give a good God damn about any damn test or your brains, your moral character, any of that shit. They got your name, boy,” uncrumpling the brochure, stabbing the mailing label with a finger, “because you are my witless, worthless son,” rattle of glossy paper as the brochure’s hurled away, “and I sank a God damned Japanese sub for them, right in the God damn mouth of the Columbia, nineteen and forty three, and look what good it got me!”
But the CO’s looking away, toward that oblong of ocean brightly blue on the spotless checkerboard floor, a slender destroyer, unfussily grey, steaming serenely across it. His T-shirt’s striped with orange and yellow and brown, his jawline smoothly untroubled by stubble, cheek unstiffened by any scar. Flinching at the sudden crack of an explosion, loud, but not so loud enough to be so close, to ring and shake the cans and bottles piled up with the garbage and, pinch of a frown, he looks up from the filth to see sharp-scowling Moody, the hat, that jacket, those eyes, the heavy gold watch about his wrist. “You know what has to be done,” says Moody.
Blinking, mouth twisted about some sour taste, “Fuck you,” spits the CO.
“Jasper’s dead! Bambi shot him! Cops ain’t doing a goddamn thing! It’s a conspiracy, dammit, all the way up to the top of this stinking city! Chad!” but the CO’s lurching away up the steps to the awkward landing, “You know what you have to do, you worthless, useless sack of – ”
“Useful,” says the CO, turning abruptly, one hand on the balustrade. “You want useful?” Gunfire rising once more somewhere behind him. “Go get me a bottle of something. Whiskey. Old Crow, I don’t give a shit. I,” he takes a step, as if to come back down, and Moody, clutching the crown of his hat, takes his foot off the bottom stair, “I am the commanding officer,” says the CO. “You will not speak to me that way again.”
Moody lowers his hand, “Oh yeah?” he says. “Or what? Or what?” But the CO’s gone, through the doorway, past the hall, into the clamorous front room.
•
“That is exactly, what I said,” she mutters to herself, unknotting the soft bow from about her throat. “Six, it was six of them.” Lets it drop to join the jacket already crumpled on the tightly woven carpet. “But that’s okay with me.” Kicking off her kitten heels, shaking back her corkscrew curls, she sets to unbuttoning her blouse.
Naked but for sturdy briefs, she steps to the heavy curtains, checking the drape of them, smoothing their opaquely heavy fall with a sweep of her hand. “Tuesday,” she says, turning back to the bed, draped with blankets a touch more brown than the carpet. “Time to pay for the hamburgers.” She pushes the underpants over her hips and down.
There on the bed by a shut-up laptop a parcel, wrapped in burlap, and a small tin box. She takes up the parcel, unfolding the wrapping until what’s left in her hand is the stub of a candle the width, perhaps, of a finger, but not even so long anymore as a knuckled joint. She sets it with exaggerated care on the carpet. “King and Queen of Caledon,” she says, taking up the tin, “how many miles to Babylon?” Sliding back the lid of it. “Eight, and eight, and eight again,” she says, pinching out a match, bulbously white-tipped. “Shall I get there by candlelight?” Striking the match on the bottom of the tin, the sudden rushing flare of light in her hands, she squats as it settles into itself, a steady, silent flame above the candle, its ragged tallow collar, the sooty crumble of wick. “Aye,” she says, “and back again,” but there’s only a candle, burning on the carpet at the foot of the bed, the discarded suit, the closed-up laptop, and otherwise that dimly generic room is empty.
•
The carpet under her hands, her knees, a loose grey shag, and it’s been some time since it was last vacuumed. She pushes herself to her feet, glossy corkscrew ringlets dulled, her back, her arms gone ashen in the green-white light of fluorescent tubes caged in lines above, the meticulous definition of her painted lips and eyelids washed away. She coughs, once. The man at the head of the table does not look up from the cards he’s adeptly sorting despite the cigarette that smolders between two fingers, reaching to snap down card after index card, there, and there, pastel blue, pink, yellow, each with a word or phrase or passage handwritten in thin blue ink. His shirt is white, his jacket a rope-stripe of indigo and ivory, his round glasses rimmed with clear plastic, black hair oiled and combed in a severe part. “Jasmine,” he says, “then absence, then jasmine.”
“I only have a couple minutes,” she says. “Four at most.”
He looks up, light flaring from his glasses. “Jasmine. Absence. Jasmine. Countersign.”
Her lips pinch. “Carnation,” she says. “Offal. Jasmine. And it’s cold.”
“Dr. Uniform,” he says, and returns to his cards.
“Mother,” she says.
Snap. Snap. He lifts the cigarette to his lips for a ruminative drag, picks up a card to sweep it across to the other side of the array, where he taps it once, twice, then takes up another and pushes back from the table, getting to his feet. The wall behind him’s panes of frosted glass, more greenly light behind, covered over with index cards fixed in neatly ordered ranks and files. “You lost another operator Thursday night,” he says, sticking one of the cards to the bottom of one of those lines.
“I wasn’t informed there’d be one to lose,” she says, arms folded, pebbled with gooseflesh.
He sticks the second card to the glass by itself, alone. “As you have made abundantly clear, you are Station Rose.” Lifting the cigarette to his lips. “A good head of station is always already aware of whatever might happen within her purview.” A sip of smoke. He turns to look to her again.
“It helps, if we get read in, whenever Ops decides to go walkabout within our, as you put it, purview.”
A dismissive wave, as he sits back down, “A simple errand to fetch an item, one of many, that ought to have taken an hour or more at most. There was no need to distract you.”
Shivering, “You,” she snaps, and then, collecting herself, “had one of your contractors, try a smash and grab for a by-blow right in the middle of surveillance critical to our end of Agile Saffron. And you didn’t think I needed to be distracted.”
He shifts the position of another card, snap. “So you were aware of the details.”
“After the fact.”
“Tell me, Dr. Uniform: why is surveillance by the airport critical to Agile Saffron?”
He doesn’t look up to see the twist of her lips as she considers how to say what she says next. “The night I invoked Setebos protocols. The night Saffron Rose was reactivated. Something, else, came back, with it.” A deep, shuddering breath. “Color Glass,” she says.
At that he looks up, glasses blanked over with light. “There’s been nothing in your reports.”
“I had to be certain,” she says. “The situation’s, delicate, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
Snap, he sets down a card, sherbet green. Moves another, cornflower blue. “You ascertained this on Friday, then, when you, Frances, put yourself in the same room as a queen, and a dormant scale of qlippoth?”
She looks down at that, away.
“You will document this thoroughly in a report that should have been on my desk that afternoon.” Snap a pale pink card. “You will keep the two of them otherwise apart until an action’s been approved,” shuff, goldenrod slid from here to there, “for the permanent sequestration of Color Glass. Said action to be conducted under the auspices of this Directorate, and not Station Rose.” Looking up. “Is that,” he says, but she’s not there anymore.
“Ah,” he says. “Of course. Nevertheless.” Snap, another card.
•
The candle’s just a rim of wax on the beige carpet, a smoking nubbin of char where once had been a wick. She unfolds an arm to seize the blanket from the bed, tumbling the laptop to the floor as she wraps it draggled about herself, lowering her shoulders as her shivering, slowly, subsides. “Should’ve been a goddamn phone call,” she mutters, stooping to snatch up her underpants.