The Battered Suitcase November 2008

  Chris Darley

  The Last Disaster

  I set the world up out for change

  Dynamic quarters

  Somewhere strange,

  To bend the laws of space and time,

  Cleanse my soul from devil's crime.

  Nothing lasts forever now

  Nothing's whole

  No matter how

  We might appear

  And what we knew

  Is what we know is surely due

  To battle both sides

  Till time comes

  The fabric breaks down

  Crawls and numbs

  And those with too much bad inside

  Will fade away as though they died,

  To lay the record straight for good,

  The system failed just like it should.

  But you should take your part and place

  Play your cards out

  Make your case

  And stay here just a little while,

  Take a breath to reconcile

  That choice is laying in your hands

  And good and evils' last demands

  Are waiting in and out through you

  And play a part in all you do.

  We don't know what may come for sure

  Or what remains

  Of what before

  Our minds are freed

  And nothing waits

  Our lives are given to our fates.

  I hope you don't forget that love

  Is all that lasts to me.

  The Ghost

  I don't know why it seems to me

  Like everybody's got,

  A side to them

  A part

  A piece

  That's something I am not.

  I've seen your ways

  Those cold displays

  That worn and twisted smile,

  Through craved disease

  To beg and please

  I wonder all the while,

  To see the person underneath

  The feigned and frightened host,

  In all your guise I stand at ease

  For I am called the Ghost,

  And you may see me

  Here and there

  And you could call my name,

  For I appear in watch

  In fear

  Relief to stop the game,

  To feed from you

  Your doubting here

  Is what will make me strong,

  My watchful eyes

  Can see your lies

  And all in you that's wrong.

  So what is this displayed?

  A taunt?

  A warning in among,

  To those who choose to feed the beast

  By dying to belong?

  Yes I will haunt you

  Yes my friend

  Until the end of time,

  And in your shadows I will live

  As payment for your crime.

  Chris is a freelance artist working and living in Lincolnshire, England, where he produces a variety of artwork, poetry and music. Most of his work has a surreal, spiritual, hauntingly dark edge to it, and his poem "The Keeper," has recently been chosen to open a forthcoming book. To view the art or contact the artist please visit his website. https://www.OutoftheDark.info

  Cola Hard Cash

  Bronwyn Mauldin

  Stephanie scanned the East L.A. Community College parking lot as she pulled in. A guy in a red baseball cap stood on the far sidewalk, back to her, staring into one of the abandoned classroom buildings. She was beginning to wonder if, for once in his furtive little life, Marcus was going to be late. Then the guy turned. It was him.

  When Marcus spotted her dark blue Honda Civic four-door he folded his arms across his chest. Stephanie motioned for him to come get in the car. He shook his head. She took a deep breath, turned off the engine and climbed out.

  “It’s not going to work,” Marcus said as she walked up. “Give me the money and I’ll take care of it myself.”

  God damn him. It was exactly what she’d expected. “No. I told everybody I’d go with you.” She had no intention of letting him walk away with three hundred dollars of the collective’s cash. “It wouldn’t be right to make you take all the risk on your own.” She tried to sound concerned.

  “I told you to borrow somebody else’s car. They can track you down from your license plates.”

  “I should let them trace it to someone else?” she snapped. Of course he’d do that, cover for himself by putting other people on the line. Marcus and Stephanie stared at each other for a long moment.

  “You don’t have a clue what you’re getting into,” Marcus said.

  She rolled her eyes. His arrogant paranoia made her laugh at the best of times. Right now, it was pissing her off. “What don’t I know?” Stephanie said. “That breaking the laws against solar power is dangerous as hell?”

  Two years before, when the state outlawed solar, it was Stephanie who’d pulled together the group of activists who were angry enough to risk going to prison. She knew an out-of-work photovoltaics expert who taught them how to make solar panels with the new silicon paint technology. She’d found a disaffected electrician with a vivid sense of social justice. In fact, if that electrician hadn’t vouched for Marcus, he wouldn’t even be here. Not in the Autonomous Fuel Cell collective Stephanie had created.

  “I reckon the ones with money in their pockets always hold the trump card,” Marcus said. Sure, he was street smart and resourceful, but he thought living in a squat and eating out of dumpsters made him superior to anyone who lived in the cash economy. Meaning every other member of the Fuel Cell, but especially her. She was the only one of them who actually owned her home.

  “If you were one of my clients, I’d kick your ass,” she said.

  Stephanie was a public defender, and she knew exactly what she’d gotten into. She knew which laws they were breaking every time they installed one of their handmade solar panels and secretly took another Los Angeles building off the electrical grid. She knew the length of prison term to expect if they were caught. That’s why the collective had rules, why they didn’t break any more laws than they had to. Before driving out here today she’d looked up the mandatory minimum for buying silicon without a license. Fifteen years, no parole.

  But they didn’t have a choice. Without the silicon paint, they couldn’t build their panels, and without the panels, there was no Fuel Cell.

  Stephanie turned her back to Marcus. “Get in the car.” She walked away and didn’t look back.

  Marcus followed, just as she knew he would. He might be 25 years old, but there were times when he acted just like the kids she represented in juvenile court. It helped that she had ten years worth of life experience on him.

  When he was in the passenger seat Marcus carefully removed the headphones from his ears and slipped them into a side pocket of his orange messenger bag. He took off the baseball cap and ran his fingers through his short black hair, making it stick out in uneven static spikes. Not for the first time, Stephanie wondered if he might dye it. That wouldn’t seem to fit with his so-called “freegan” lifestyle, but it was awfully black for a white guy.

  “Nice hat,” Stephanie said, pleased with her small victory. “You usually wear that charming black toboggan.”

  “Camouflage,” he said.

  Another day, she might have laughed, even if he was serious. “I see,” she said. Still, she couldn’t help but needle him a little more. “What if somebody recognizes your signature messenger bag?”

  He looked at the bag in his lap, seeming to consider it for a moment. Then he shoved it down between his feet. “There. Better?”

  “Super.” Stephanie started to pull away. “Tell me where we’re headed.”

  Marcus pulled a scrap of paper out of his jeans pocket, unfolded it carefully and read it in silence. Then he tore it into halves over and ov
er again until he had eight equal pieces. He placed them on his tongue like communion wafers, one after another, and chewed slowly. Stephanie frowned, trying not to show her irritation. Not at chewing the paper, which was a filthy habit, so much as the silly melodrama.

  “Okay.” He swallowed. “Take a left on Eastern Avenue and go about a mile and a half. Then left on Telegraph Road.”

  Marcus directed her five miles southeast through Commerce, Montebello and Pico Rivera, a few of the ninety-some independent municipalities of the greater Los Angeles urban agglomeration. They passed through the green space of Whittier Narrows where an optimistic soul still grew half an acre of strawberries in the shade of electricity pylons by the side of the six lane road. Then into the crumbling low-income community of Downey.

  Timing of the Paramount Boulevard traffic lights had gone off by a few seconds, and they were caught by nearly every one.

  “Hey, check out up there” Marcus said, pointing to a warehouse as they passed. “Old fashioned solar panels.”

  Stephanie slowed to look up at a long row of rusty metal sheets balanced precariously on spindly legs. Several were listing to the side, and one was bent almost in half. Worn out old panels from the heyday of solar power. Not so long ago they’d been a familiar sight. So familiar, in fact, that Stephanie hardly noticed them any more.

  “And?”

  Marcus said, “Those are pure silicon wafers up there. We should go get them one night.”

  “Absolutely not!” Stephanie said. “They’ll put you away for a long time if the cops catch you with that stuff.”

  “Cops? Forget about LAPD. It’s electric company paramilitaries you need to watch out for.”

  That again. There were persistent rumors that the state law making solar power illegal had also established a private, quasi-police force that reported directly to the electric companies. Marcus said they were recruiting ex-mercs straight out of tours of duty in the Mideast Colonies. Stephanie couldn’t find any law authorizing an electric company police force, but that didn’t necessarily mean it didn’t exist. Patriot Act IV – or maybe number V – had exempted all legislation pertaining to “critical infrastructure” from public hearings. The states could pass any laws they wanted about the electrical grid without telling the public.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Marcus” Stephanie said. “If you get caught, that puts all of us in the Fuel Cell in danger.”

  The whole idea was absurd. Electric company police? It sounded as ridiculous as Sesame Street SWAT teams or Teletubby constables.

  Then again, Stephanie could remember a time when the idea of the state banning solar power seemed just as ridiculous. It had been too popular, too widespread. And yet, here she was driving Marcus to meet with a second-tier organized crime syndicate, to buy the silicon paint they needed for the Autonomous Fuel Cell’s quixotic effort to take L.A. off the electrical grid, one building at a time.

  ~~~

  At their last meeting, when the Fuel Cell’s solar expert reported they were out of silicon paint and his usual supplier had run dry, no one was surprised Marcus knew where to get it. The six members of the Fuel Cell pooled three hundred dollars between them. Stephanie had taken the cash and insisted on going with Marcus. After all, she’d pointed out, they needed a car, and Marcus didn’t drive.

  As they made their way down Paramount Boulevard, swap meets, bottle stores and check cashing outlets slowly evolved into abandoned malls and empty carcasses of bloated mega-stores. The only crowd Stephanie saw spilled out from the Downey Church of Religious Science and Wedding Chapel. This had been a middle class town once, before the Bifurcation.

  Six years before, the single housing market had split into two separate bubbles, each operating completely independently of the other. The wealthiest homebuyers shopped in the larger of those bubbles, and everyone else was left to scramble in the smaller one.

  There were plenty of stories about people who’d lost their homes when they weren’t able to make mortgage payments, who found themselves moving back into the same homes or ones next door or just down the street as renters, only this time living in a half or a third of what they’d once owned. Pressures from the housing market leaked into other parts of the economy. Jobs started disappearing. Retailers dropped their prices because nobody had money to spend, but they couldn’t drop them low enough for people who had nothing at all. Consumer spending all but collapsed. The Federal Reserve tried to put a positive spin on it to keep Wall Street humming along. They called what was happening “a maturing of the market.” Everyone else called it the Bifurcation.

  Marcus pointed ahead. “Take the next right up here.”

  Stephanie turned onto a street that had once been lined with individual one-story, single family homes. The houses were now connected to each other with mismatched sheets of plastic siding in Mondrianesque quadrilaterals of white, blue, yellow and red to create a single building that stretched from one end of the block to the other. Although this was the first time she’d seen the area for herself, Stephanie knew about it. She’d read about how cement floors had been poured into the spaces between the houses, and these areas subdivided into rooms and rented out. Marcus pointed to take another right, and Stephanie saw that the long building continued around the corner and all the way down the block.

  “Okay,” Marcus said, then paused to read the street sign they were passing. “We’re looking for an alleyway on the right, about four and a half blocks down.”

  Stephanie counted out the blocks as they passed. She slowed the Honda and turned into a gravel alley.

  “Now these are some scary motherfuckers we’re getting ready to meet,” Marcus said. “No matter what happens, keep your cool. It’s best if you stay quiet. Try not to talk so much the way you always do.”

  “I do not talk too much,” Stephanie said.

  Marcus curled a lip. “See. You always have to argue about everything. Just don’t, not here. Okay? This is serious.”

  Stephanie said, “Okay.”

  “Don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t look around too much. Do whatever I tell you, even if it seems weird. If I run, you better run too. Probably nothing will happen, but it never hurts to be prepared. You think you could find your way out of this neighborhood on your own? Maybe back up to Telegraph Road?”

  “Sure. I think so,” Stephanie lied, feeling her heartbeat speed up. All week she’d imagined today would be like facing judge and jury in the courtroom. The burst of adrenaline that shot her up and out of her chair, squaring shoulders and tossing her long, dark hair back. Your Honor….

  That was ordinary and she knew how to handle it. Marcus was making her nervous with his camouflage hat and dire warnings. This was turning out to be something else entirely, and Marcus was the one with home court advantage. She didn’t like that, but at least they were on the same team. She hoped.

  “Good. I mean, you probably won’t need to. Still.” He shrugged rather than finish his sentence.

  Whatever mad entrepreneur had filled in the spaces between the houses in this neighborhood hadn’t yet done the same to the garages, which lined both sides of the alley in various states of decay. These hadn’t been remodeled for human habitation, but it was obvious that people lived here.

  “It’s that dark garage on the left,” Marcus said. “Pull up across from it and kill the engine.”

  Stephanie brought the car to a stop opposite a gray aluminum garage that would have held two cars once upon a time. A rough window had been cut into one wall. Stephanie reached for the door handle.

  “No, we’ve got to wait here. Engine off, but leave the key in the ignition.” From inside the car, Marcus gestured with hands and fingers toward the garage in some kind of signal. Stephanie turned in time to catch only a glimpse of the shadow of a face in the window turning away.

  “What now?” she asked.

&nb
sp; “We practice patience.”

  A lifetime’s worth of slow, torturous minutes passed while they waited in the car. Although she wanted to gauge her surroundings, Stephanie made an effort not to look around too much. She kept trying to mentally retrace the route back to Telegraph Road but got lost every time.

  Still, no one appeared. “You told me they were expecting us.”

  “They are,” Marcus said. “Just chill.”

  Suddenly, a skinny young white man with a thin, wistful moustache was knocking on her window. Where had he come from? He wore a dark green button down shirt and khakis. Stephanie turned to Marcus, who nodded and motioned to roll the window down. It was sticky in its rollers and twice Stephanie had to use both hands to get the crank moving again. Applying lessons she tried to teach her young clients about how to act when pulled over by the cops – why did she think they applied here? – she took care to move her hands slowly and keep them in view as much as possible.

  Marcus leaned over and began talking through the driver’s side window in a language Stephanie couldn’t identify. She knew Spanish, and this wasn’t Spanish, although she heard a lot of words she could understand. Precio. Pintura. Mas barato. La proxima vez. What were they planning for the next time? There were too many other words for her to make out what they were saying. Then she heard something that sounded distinctly Chinese, and she realized what it was. Her clients sometimes spoke it. It was the trade language that had developed between southern California gangs and their Chinese arms suppliers. Mostly Spanish and Mandarin, but with a little Armenian, Russian, and Korean thrown in. Smark, they called it, its acronym. Had Marcus ever told her he could speak Smark? She couldn’t remember.

  The exchange was cordial. Marcus and the man in the green button down seemed to know each other, although probably not in a friendly way. They both smiled, but Stephanie felt a chill breeze wafting between them.

  Green button down suddenly began speaking very rapidly, his face reddening slightly. Marcus stumbled over a few words, then the guy turned and walked away.

  “Where’s he going?” Stephanie asked.