Whatever a day is.
But Friedrich regained himself first. He straightened—well, as much as a weeping chimp could straighten—and moved around to the side of the cab, where he could poke his face in through the shattered rear-door window.
“Cager. What are you waiting for?” Meg said from inside.
“I hate myself so much,” Friedrich cried. “But I am so, so hungry!”
“Who cares about you? Nobody! Nobody cares about you! Why must you inflict your presence on my personal moment?” the wet and slimy Boner yelled.
Friedrich pushed the upper half of his torso inside the cab. I could hear him weeping as his arms clutched and clawed around for Meg.
“Cager!”
I raised the tire iron.
And Boner howled, “This is so unfair! This is so unfair to me!”
Ka-thunk!
The sharp pry-bar end of the iron smacked directly into Friedrich’s spine—if there was such a thing inside a cog. Severed rubber tubes spurting pomegranate-red cog juice erupted outward from the ape’s back.
It was particularly disturbing that the chimpanzee cogs’ hydraulic systems had been filled with bloodlike goop, in order to satisfy passenger hunters in their gleeful diversion of actually shooting chimpanzees on the Tennessee’s World of the Monkeys deck.
Disgusting.
“Ow! Owwww!” Friedrich wailed.
The bar lodged inside the chimp-cog’s body.
I grabbed hold of one of Friedrich’s feet, which was actually a stubby hand that closed around my wrist. The sausagelike little finger things on his foot nauseated me. I closed my eyes and dragged him out of the cab as he cried and moaned and squirted his coggy red mayonnaise all over me. When I pulled his leg thing, Friedrich tore completely in half, his fingery foot still clutching my arm. A small lake of blood-clot cog soup dilated outward around my feet.
I was a soaked, slimy, bloodstained mess.
And Boner screamed, “Me! Me! Why are you victimizing me by paying attention to him?”
I shook Friedrich’s foot-hand off my arm as Boner, covered in his own cog piss and vomit, got up from his tantrum spot and leapt at the cab’s rear window. I kicked him in the chest and he somersaulted backward, shrieking, “I AM SO FUCKING MAD AT YOU NOW!”
Then I grabbed the tire iron with both hands and yanked it out of Friedrich’s draining torso, took aim, and swung a nice, level swipe directly into Boner’s throat.
I had also never played baseball, but I thought I might be pretty good at it if I ever learned what baseball actually was. All I knew was that it involved hitting things by swinging some kind of thing in your hands.
Whatever.
Boner’s head came off. It rolled across the street, toward the sidewalk.
“Yeee! Wheee! This makes me so happy, I could poop myself inside out and back again!” the impaled cigarette-lady cog said from up on the gargoyle’s head. She kicked and flailed her arms wildly, spraying some of the last bits of her frothy internal stew down to the street like raining cottage cheese.
“Yippeee, human boy! Yeee!”
And from somewhere under a mailbox, Boner’s head shrieked, “I am so furious! How dare you? What gives you the right? Come here, fucker! Come here!”
The top half of Friedrich clawed his way out of the overturned taxi, trailing behind him what looked like links of boiled white sausages in a slick of crimson mucus. He folded his arms under his face. His ruined and gushy shoulders bounced with massive sobs. “Ow! Ow! It hurts so bad! My life is nothing but pain! Ouch!”
“Well, you shouldn’t have tried to eat my friend,” I said. “Shame on you!”
“I am shamed! I am shamed! Ow-how-ow-ow!”
I stood over him, my weapon hanging beside my right leg, as Meg Hatfield crawled out and got to her feet on the opposite side of the cab.
For a while neither of us said anything. We just looked at each other. I wiped some streaky red cog snot from my forehead with the back of my left hand.
Meg said, “Thanks.”
I fought the urge to puke my guts out all over the quivering upper half of Friedrich.
I nodded at Meg. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get to that bank,” I said.
And Boner howled, “I SAID COME HERE, FUCKBOY!”
Well, his head screamed it, that is.
“I love you, human boy! I want to have a million half-human babies with you, commencing immediately! Yippeee! Yippeee!” Cigarette-lady cog gurgled and danced and rotated slightly, skewered on the spike of a gargoyle.
“Ow! Ow! This really hurts!” Friedrich bawled, rolling around in his gooey fake blood in the fake street that ran through the center of the destroyed fake city.
Cager Messer’s Can Opener and Push-Ups List
The computers inside the Grosvenor Bank of Tennessee were still powered up, just as Meg had left them.
Everything else in the bank was a mess. Chairs were upturned, shards of broken glass were scattered everywhere, and large sections of the carpeting had been peeled away.
There were scrapes and gouges in the walls.
And there were scrapes and gouges inside me, too. I felt myself slipping again.
I needed Rowan, but I knew I couldn’t leave Meg alone anywhere on the Tennessee. Things had gone insane, and it was all too dangerous for her.
“Is there something wrong with you?” Meg asked.
“No. Why?”
“You haven’t said anything. This is the longest you’ve gone without talking to me.”
“I’m feeling a little sick. Look at me.”
I was wet and splattered in gooey, gravylike cog blood. It looked like I’d been trampled by a million garden snails, glazed with bloody snot and slime.
“You should go get some new clothes. There’s a couple shops on this deck. I’ll be okay now.”
I shook my head. “I can’t leave you. Maybe after you’re done. I need to wash this shit off. I can’t stand the smell of it.”
“I can’t smell anything.”
Just hearing Meg say it made all the scents rise up in a cacophonous assault on my senses.
My stomach heaved. “Hang on.”
I stepped out through the broken window and onto the sidewalk. I ran past the building’s corner so Meg wouldn’t see me throw up.
Nobody wants the person they’re falling in love with to watch them vomit.
Friedrich was still crying, and Boner’s head yelled at me from under his mailbox. And as I gagged and spit, the cigarette lady cooed and gurgled at me.
When I came back into the bank, Meg said, without looking up from her computer screen, “Feel better?”
I was so embarrassed. She had to have known I’d just puked my guts out.
“It’s disgusting. They filled those monkey cogs with fake blood, just so people could get a sick thrill when they shoot them.”
I couldn’t help but think about Charlie Greenwell and the other damaged bonks we used to visit at the Hotel Kenmore, back when I was on Woz.
And how long ago was that now?
Meg paused her typing and looked at me.
I stared directly into her eyes.
Meg Hatfield was the most incredible human being I’d ever met, and why did it take so long for me to finally meet a real person?
She said, “Your father was very . . . creative.”
I shook my head. “He was a cruel and sick son of a bitch. I can’t even begin to imagine what other insane bullshit we’re going to find here.”
“Hell yes!”
“That sounds a bit enthusiastic, considering the possibilities,” I said.
“No. I found it!” Meg said. “The code and eye scans I put in from my thumbphone that made the cogs see me and Jeffrie as other cogs. I got it, and if I just wipe it out, we should be okay.”
Meg typed frantically.
I found myself hoping that Meg Hatfield would write in a new code sequence that would make her see me a
s something other than Anton Messer’s son, something more like human.
“Can I turn you into someone else, give you a new identity, like you did to me?” I said.
She stopped typing. “I didn’t really make you an ex-bonk. I was just kidding about that. I honestly only changed your date of birth. Besides, who would you make me be?”
“A friend of mine. A real one.”
“As opposed to your fake playdate friends?”
“Yeah. As opposed to them.”
“Billy Hinman’s your friend. He’s real.”
It wasn’t enough, I wanted to tell her. But the truth was that Meg Hatfield was right; Billy Hinman was my friend, and he’d do anything for me, which was entirely why we were all stuck here forever, drifting alone around the dead moon.
But it still wasn’t enough.
Why couldn’t Meg just be nice to me? Why couldn’t she just slip some unspoken code to me that might give me a hint that she thought I was a friend?
Meg entered a few more strings of code, then powered off the computer.
I felt like shit. I needed a bath. I needed to get away from Meg Hatfield.
She said, “There. I did it.” She paused, “I think.” Another pause. “I hope.”
“What about Queen Dot’s worm?”
“I’m not sure if I cleaned it all up or not. There’s only one way to find out. We’ll have to see, I guess.”
“Good.”
Meg said, “Good.”
I pulled my shirt away from my skin, where it had been plastered down by the paste of cog goo. I couldn’t look at it. I turned from Meg and faced out the bank’s shattered front window. “Well. I’m going to get rid of this shit.”
And then Meg Hatfield said this: “I am your friend, Cager Messer.”
There was something in the way she’d said it that made me feel wonderful and terrible at the same time, and I wasn’t absolutely certain whether or not I could cross that getting-a-real-friend thing off Cager Messer’s can opener and push-ups list.
Times That Aren’t Now
There were no cogs at all on Deck 21, aside from the bits and pieces here and there, and the impaled cigarette lady up on the ledge of gargoyles.
It was creepy and unsettling.
The last time I’d taken a bath, the Tennessee had turned upside down. I desperately needed one now, and some tea. Cager Messer was getting ready to melt down again.
“I wonder if they have tea in this place,” I said.
“Who drinks tea?” Meg asked.
“I do.”
“Well, I’m certain they have a café here or something. I could find you some while you’re doing . . . whatever.”
Meg and I stood at the edge of the main pool in the Talisman Bath House, which looked like something transported through time from ancient Rome. The bath was more than sixty feet long, filled with swirling blue water that breathed lacy clouds of steam up into the air. It was surrounded by massive stone columns that supported an upper floor of balconies with ornate iron balustrades shaped like bloated birdcages. I imagined the balconies were there to give people above a bird’s-eye view of all the naked bathers in the big hot pool. Skirting the floor of balconies was a colorful mosaic frieze with depictions of nudes engaged in all sorts of sex acts. I pretended not to notice them. It was all very embarrassing, being there with Meg, watching her take everything in. At the rear of the bath was a smaller, round, cold-water tub, and against the long walls on either side were racks of towels and brushes, with banks of metal hooks and shelves where bathers could leave their clothes.
I needed a trash can for mine.
“Tea would be nice. Thank you. Because I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do,” I said.
“What you’re supposed to do is take your clothes off and get in the bath,” Meg said.
“I know. But I was . . . I mean, it’s kind of awkward.”
“I’m going to go find you some tea and get something to eat. So you don’t have to be embarrassed.” And as Meg walked away she added, “You know, you’re wound up really tight for a rich kid.”
And I said, “Be careful.” But I said it so quietly, Meg didn’t hear me.
* * *
“I made some tea.”
I practically jumped up out of the pool. I had no idea how long I’d been in the hot water of the grand bath. I had fallen asleep, facing up toward the fake-star-painted ceiling, with my arms outstretched like wings along the bath’s rail and my head resting on the cool tiles, when Meg called down at me from the balcony above.
And she was watching me.
“How long have you been there?” I said.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. A while.”
I stood up in the water and looked down to check if Meg could actually see my nakedness. When would I ever not feel embarrassed and inadequate around her?
And when I glanced back up at the balcony, Meg was gone.
I thought about pulling myself out of the bath and making a dash for the towels, but I didn’t want to get out of the water yet, and it was already too late, anyway. Meg appeared at the foot of the spiral staircase at the end of the bath, carrying a tray with a teapot and sandwiches. I stood against the side of the bath in water that came up to my armpits.
The smell of all the cog goop I’d been slopped with had been washed away. Now all I could smell was bathwater, the cinnamon and cloves in the teapot Meg carried, butter, cheese, bread, and peach jam.
And Meg Hatfield. I could always smell Meg Hatfield.
She placed the tray down at the edge of the bath and sat on the marble floor tiles with her knees bent upward. Although the water swirled and bubbled from thousands of jetted vents, and I was certain Meg couldn’t see beneath the surface, I had never felt so naked and exposed in my life as I did when she looked at me.
“How’s the bath?” she asked.
“Perfect. Well, except for the cog arm I found near one of the drains.”
Meg poured tea into two cups. “Oh.”
“You should come in too,” I said. I nearly choked from nervousness when I suggested it. And I tried to sound nonchalant in my invitation, like Billy Hinman would, but I failed miserably at it.
“No chance of that. Drink your tea, Cager. It’s getting dark outside.”
I had lost all sense of time, but places like the recreation decks, and Deck 21, had artificial days and nights.
I said, “Oh. Okay.”
I wished I could get out of the water so I didn’t have to look up at her, but that wasn’t going to happen either. “Thank you. It’s really good.”
“You’re welcome.”
I took a sip, deflated.
Meg Hatfield was invisible to just about every human being on Earth.
Here, on the Tennessee, she invaded every sense I had.
She liked to write stories; some were true, she told me, and the others she’d make up, depending on her mood. Meg liked to tell her stories to her friend, Jeffrie Cutler. I asked if she would write a story for me, and she said maybe she could do that for my birthday. And I had no idea what date it was up here in neveryear, so I lied to her and told her my birthday was tomorrow.
She didn’t buy it.
We only think of days and months to keep track of times that aren’t now. Fuck days. Fuck months. This was how it was going to be from now on: forever.
The tea she brought, and the rest of the food we ate, were the best things I’d ever had, even if it all did come from printers.
So there I was—it was like I was waiting to be born, naked and cradled in hot water, hoping I might come out whole and normal, a real human being. But I couldn’t defeat my own internal argument that I could never be someone as real as Meg Hatfield.
And I hadn’t thought things through very well either. My clothes were ruined, beyond disgusting, and I didn’t have anything to cover myself with. By the time we had finished our tea and sandwiches, I’d been in the bath for what felt like hours. And although Cager Me
sser had calmed down, I still knew that nothing would ever be right for me.
Meg turned around and faced out toward the Talisman’s foyer so I could climb out of the bath and nervously wrap up in a towel without completely embarrassing myself. And like that, saying nothing more to her, and with nothing on except for a heavy terrycloth towel embroidered with RABBIT & ROBOT GROSVENOR GALACTIC LINES, I followed Meg outside to the destroyed fake city of Deck 21.
Meg Hatfield and I went clothes shopping for me.
I had never been shopping for my own clothes in my life, and I didn’t know the first thing about what to do, which made me look and feel like an idiot in front of Meg. And she knew it too, so she had plenty of fun suggesting the most ridiculous outfits for me: things that only coder kids would wear, like double-breasted lab shirts, or Grosvenor School Code Club jumpers, and even underwear with cartoon images of Mooney and Rabbit printed on them.
So, in the end I gave up and allowed Meg Hatfield to dress me up in the outfit that suited the identity she decided to give me that day, or what she thought I deserved.
None of it mattered to me. I’d just as soon have gone home to my room wrapped in my Talisman towel.
After the clothes and shoes Meg picked out for me deposited themselves in the store’s output tray, I hid inside a changing booth in the back and got dressed. I felt like an idiot, right down to my Rabbit & Robot socks and underwear. She also gave me a slate-blue pullover sweatshirt that was printed with something I absolutely could not understand. It said this:
} ELSE IF
>
She completed my outfit with creased tan chinos—the kind kids wear as part of a proper Grosvenor School uniform—and some black suede sneakers that were just heavy enough to take out Reverend Bingo’s other eye if we happened to run into him on the way back to our room.
In fact, we did not see a single cog between Deck 21 and the stateroom’s door.
But I kept my tire iron with us, just in case.
And I had been silent and pouty the entire way back. It wasn’t because of the stupid outfit Meg dressed me in; it was because I’d been adding and adding to Cager Messer’s list of things he’d never done and probably never would.