Spark: A Novel

  I clicked the link to Crawley’s Web site and confirmed that a Dice Night event was being held at the bar that evening. “Acts of Deliberate Randomness” would begin at 11 p.m. After resting for a few hours, I cleaned and loaded the .38 Special, then slipped it into the ankle holster. Lorcan’s handcuffs were stuffed into a nylon pouch that I had once used to carry bullets. The pouch was attached to my belt and slipped inside my waistband.

  Although I didn’t care about Freedom or believe in Uncertainty, it appeared that Emily was attracted to these meaningless words. It wouldn’t be a random moment if I found her tonight.

  It was cold and windy in Brooklyn and very few cars were on the street. On the way to the bar, I took out my Freedom Card and slipped it into the lead-lined sleeve that shielded it from scanners. It was against the law to block your ID chip and a blocked card would set off an alarm if you entered a bank or a government building, but there were fewer scanners and surveillance cameras in a neighborhood like Bushwick. Most of the growlers revealed their tracked identity at work, and then shielded their card the moment they left the building.

  No one was on the street and it felt as if I was the last Spark in existence, floating through an empty city. I usually asked Laura to speak with her efficient voice, but that evening I stepped into a doorway and scrolled through her personality variations.

  URGENT

  EFFICIENT

  NUBOT NEUTRAL

  FRIENDLY

  HUMOROUS

  GENTLE

  I clicked GENTLE, a voice intonation I had never heard before, and Laura spoke with soft tones as she guided me to a side street near Graham Avenue. When I asked for more information about the destination address, she told me that Crawley’s was in a building that had once been a nineteenth-century brewery. The building still had an arched doorway, big enough for rolling out beer barrels, but now it was protected by a bouncer wearing a referee’s striped shirt.

  “You here for Dice Night?”

  I nodded.

  The bouncer shined a pencil flashlight at my eyes, looking for electronic contact lenses. “No G-MIDs or E-MIDs allowed inside. They’re just gonna get smashed on the floor.”

  “I don’t use that technology.”

  “Good. So are you ready? Or not ready?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Not ready costs you forty dollars to get in. It means you’re not participating in the activities. But if you’re ready to do anything … it’s free.”

  “Not ready,” I said, and handed him the money. The bouncer stamped the back of my hand and gave me a white pin to fasten to my jacket.

  I entered a long room with a plank floor and tin ceiling. Crawley’s had a mahogany bar with a mirror behind it, a truckload of mismatched tables and chairs, and a small stage with a DJ sitting at a control board. Bouncers wearing referee shirts patrolled the room while three young women wearing pink overalls served beer in plastic cups to hundreds of customers. Half the crowd wore black bandanas or black knit hats, and a handful of New Luddites—with bones and feathers pinned to their clothes—sat together at a large table.

  Smell of sweat and spilled beer. Mouths and tongues moving, pushing out noise. That night, the DJ was playing a song by a British rock band called Deliberate Confusion. I had heard the music when I was walking through London at night; the words flowed out of half-open windows and the doors of shabby pubs.

  They are …

  Gears and wires.

  We are …

  Flesh and bone.

  They have …

  All the power.

  We have …

  Lost our home.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  Nothing left to lose.

  Trying not to touch anyone, I managed to maneuver around the tables and reach the other side of the room. A young man brushed past me as he tried to join his friends and I saw the probes for direct brain stimulation sticking out the back of his head. It looked like two steel thumbtacks had been pushed into his skull.

  What saved me was Dr. Noland’s Rule #5: Always remember: dead people must act alive. When I reached the bar, I pulled out my wallet and waved to one of the bartenders.

  “Beer.”

  “What kind?”

  “Surprise me,” I told her and a few minutes later she brought me a red plastic cup filled with liquid. Raising it to my lips, I pretended to drink. The few people who had been staring at me turned away. The beer made me appear to be alive and now I was just part of the scenery. As more people squeezed into the windowless room, the air around me gained weight and darkness. The growlers were dancing in groups, shouting the words of the song:

  Nothing! Nothing!

  Nothing left to lose!

  Looking around at the crowd, I realized that only a few other people wore the white pin that announced that we weren’t participating in tonight’s randomness. Even the three young women behind the bar wore red pins with different numbers printed on them. There was a frenzy of ordering and serving and paying for drinks, and then suddenly the DJ played a drumroll.

  A teenage boy with devil’s horns fastened to his head walked through the doorway that led to the toilets. He crossed the room and climbed up onto the end of the bar where a spotlight was fastened to a steel post. A bass sound—like a heartbeat thump—boomed out of the speakers as the boy switched on the spotlight and raked the beam across the heads of the drinkers like a soldier firing a machine gun.

  The music gained power. A few people cheered when a young Asian woman dressed up as an eight ball stepped onto the stage. She was followed by a large man with a bushy beard who was wearing a ballet tutu and fairy wings. Standing on the edge of the stage, the Fairy and the Eight Ball applauded the third member of their group—a young woman wearing black leather and carrying a whip.

  Without any explanation, Eight Ball jumped into the crowd. Like a molecule in a glass of water, she bounced off people and ricocheted off furniture, spinning and dancing as she drifted through the chaos. Boom. She hit the woman standing next to me. Boom. She struck a table and floated toward the end of the room. The bearded Fairy pulled her back up on the stage and Whip Girl switched on a microphone.

  “Good evening, drudges and drones. Welcome to Dice Night.” She pulled out her Freedom Card, held within a blocker shield.

  “Has everyone blocked their slavery card? Daddy and Mommy don’t know where you are tonight! Daddy and Mommy don’t know what you’re going to do! Tonight you’re random and free!”

  The growlers whistled and shouted and pounded their fists on the table. Meanwhile the Fairy and Eight Ball disappeared into the hallway, then came back out with two clear plastic buckets. One container was filled with what looked like green marbles. The other was filled with plastic Easter eggs.

  “Let’s open a door and walk down a new hallway,” Whip Girl said. “It’s not what was predicted for your future. It’s as random as birth, as random as love.” She turned to her two assistants. “Good Fairy, choose our first winner.”

  The Good Fairy plunged his big hand into the smaller container and came up with a marble that had a number on it.

  “Three eighty-six!” he shouted.

  The spotlight beam glided around the room as people glanced down at the number pins fastened to shirts and sweaters. A few people began talking and a young man dressed in black waved his hand.

  Eight Ball pulled an egg out of the second container, cracked it open, and handed a piece of paper to Whip Girl.

  “And your randomness is … five free drinks for you and your friends!”

  The growler laughed and headed for the bar as his friends thumped the table.

  A minute or so passed and then another number was chosen. “Eighty-nine!” shouted Whip Girl. And this time a young woman stood with a sprig of ivy pinned to her jacket that showed that she was a daughter of Ned.

  Another Easter egg. Whip Girl read the slip of paper and grinned. “Please stand up on the nearest available table!”

/>   The girl stepped on a chair and stood in the middle of a wooden table carved with names and initials.

  “Now strip naked while we watch.”

  Startled, the girl buried her face in her hands while the growlers hooted and cheered. But before she could change her mind and run out of the room, the Good Fairy and Eight Ball jumped off the stage and began clapping their hands. The crowd imitated them until everyone was clapping with the same rhythm.

  The rickety table trembled as the girl removed her jacket, boots, and socks. She pulled off a black sweater, held two hands over her bare breasts, and then dropped them away. The clapping got louder. Standing on one foot and then the other, the girl removed her jeans and underwear and stood naked as the spotlight beam touched her body.

  People continued drinking as more acts of randomness entertained them. Two young men put on cardboard armor and battered each other with foam-rubber swords. A young woman called a past boyfriend and announced that she was still in love with him. Her desperate words boomed out of the speaker, along with a dial tone when the man hung up on her.

  Dr. Noland insisted that there was no free will or free choice. If all past actions could be fed into a God computer, then the machine could predict every action in the future. Both the citizens obediently going to work and the growlers in this crowded bar were simply responding to prior stimuli and obeying the laws of physics.

  But the certainty of all actions was true only if the God computer knew each minor decision and microscopic movement within the physical world. Even with the EYE system and the scanners and surveillance cameras, the nubots would never achieve total knowledge. Free will was saved by ignorance. Because of our own stupidity, we had to assume we had a choice.

  Finally the last number was taken from the container. Instead of announcing it, Whip Girl held the marble up in the air. “The number is random. The choice is not. As always, the last person chosen will burn their Freedom Card.”

  The noisy room became quiet at that moment. The deliberate destruction of a federal ID card was a violation of the Freedom from Fear Act and violators were sentenced to a year of hard labor at one of the Good Citizen Camps.

  “They call this a Freedom Card,” Whip Girl said. “But we all know that it shows our slavery. When everything about us is known, then freedom disappears and we become a piece of machinery … like the nubots in the subway booths. Well, I say we still have the right to choose.” Smiling, she held up the green marble between her thumb and index finger. “Number two twelve.”

  Everyone glanced down at the number on their pin and then a young man with a tribal tattoo on his neck walked slowly through the crowd, stepped onto the stage, and held up his ID card.

  People were silent, watching as the Good Fairy gave the volunteer a pair of pliers. The card was sprayed with lighter fluid and held over a bucket of sand. A match. And then people began cheering as the card burned with a dirty orange flame.

  I retreated down the hallway that led to the restrooms, but Eight Ball was already there, kissing the neck and stroking the breasts of the young woman who had stripped off her clothes. My Spark was vibrating so rapidly that I wondered if it would finally break out of its Shell. Turning away from the embrace, I headed for the exit and then saw a flyer taped to the wall.

  It was just another antisocial group. Nothing important. But at the bottom of the flyer was the organization’s symbol—the same geometric house I had seen on a paint-splattered T-shirt in Emily’s apartment.

  The paint-splattered T-shirt and the political stickers in Emily Buchanan’s dresser suggested that she might have been a member of Housing for Us. The group had a basic Web site that didn’t provide a lot of information. Apparently, they were a squatter group that took over abandoned buildings in poor areas, fixed them up, and gave them to homeless families. Edward did a news article search and reported back with his butler’s voice. Eight months ago, a Brooklyn slumlord had sent four men with baseball bats to East New York to take back a house occupied by H4U. The squatters fought back with crowbars and sledgehammers and two of the thugs ended up in the hospital.

  The flyer on the wall at Crawley’s said that Housing for Us was meeting tonight at the Christian Worker House. Once again, I returned to the Internet and learned that Christian Worker wasn’t a church or labor union, but a collection of autonomous communities where people lived together in the spirit of early Christianity. The New York City branch of the movement owned a building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and this was where H4U was going to hold its public meeting. The sort of people involved with Housing for Us and the Christian Worker would know how to obtain fake IDs and stay off the grid. It seemed logical that someone in either group might know where Emily was hiding.

  That evening I took the subway to Fourth Street and walked east to the Christian Worker. The Lower East Side had been a slum area until the end of the twentieth century, but now the neighborhood was known for storefront art galleries and wine bars. It had rained earlier that evening and the mist in the air softened the edges and corners and made the old tenement buildings look like slabs of rock carved to show doors and windows.

  Christian Worker House was a brownstone building with a marble portico—a small, square roof supported by four Greek columns decorated with grape vines. In the previous millennium the building had been occupied by the Brotherhood of Unified Mechanics and Engineers, and the name of their organization was still carved into the soot-stained marble.

  Pushing open the door, I entered an anteroom, where a black man in a wheelchair was using a magnifying glass to peer at a newspaper crossword puzzle.

  “Housing for Us?”

  “Welcome, brother.” The old man grinned and waved me forward.

  I passed through a second door and found myself in a large room with a twenty-foot ceiling that had been turned into an auditorium. Four women were sitting at one end of a table eating yellow rice and black beans out of cardboard bowls. A large Dominican woman wearing a bright red sweater and hoop earrings smiled at me and waved her spoon. “Entra, mi amigo. I am Eugenia. You here for the meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you come to the right place. No worries. You will see more people. Eat some food if you want. If you need the men’s room, it’s upstairs.”

  The women continued their meal, gossiping about someone named Ana. When I walked upstairs to the bathroom, I found a long hallway painted with a blue-green color that reminded me of Marian Hospital. Eight residence rooms lined the hallway—each with a door latch and padlock. An elderly lady with a pink nightgown and fuzzy slippers shuffled out of the toilet, pushing an aluminum walker. Perhaps this building had once been a crucible of revolution. Now it was an old-age home.

  The meeting still hadn’t started when I returned to the main floor, so I wandered around the auditorium. Over the years, the Christian Workers had stolen dozens of plastic post office bins. Each of these sturdy little containers was filled with back issues of the Workers’ Life, a six-page newspaper that cost only twenty-five cents. I picked up a recent issue and read three obituaries about members of the Christian Worker community who had lived in this building or worked at a communal farm. Mold was growing on the pages and it gave the entire room a smudgy gray smell.

  More people arrived for the meeting and they chatted with the women at the table. Staying at the edge of the room, I threaded a path around some folding chairs and climbed up onto the stage. More postal bins filled with yellowed newspapers were stacked against the wall along with plywood and papier-mâché street puppets: a rat, a spider, and an old man with a top hat clinging to money bags. There were signs and banners from past wars and forgotten strikes.

  “We’re starting the meeting,” a man announced and I returned to the table. Eugenia and her friends remained, but now they were drinking tea and passing around a bag of chocolate-chip cookies.

  The meeting was run by a sallow-faced man named Bennett, who wore a patched raincoat and trucker’s cap that
proudly announced that he was an “Antisocial Element.” This was the main category of people who were sent to the Good Citizen Camps during the mass arrests that followed the Day of Rage.

  Bennett explained that his organization—Renters’ Rights of New York City—had “unified” with Housing for You and this was a “significant moment” for everyone concerned about homeless people. I was expecting someone to start waving protest signs, but instead a woman named Selma read the minutes of the last meeting.

  When she was done, Bennett started talking about a petition that was going to be presented to the mayor. “Has anyone called State Senator Mitchell?” he asked. Glances around the table. Silence. Bennett blew his nose, and then resumed his lecture. The mosquito sound of his voice, the gray smell of mold and spilled milk and leaky plumbing, the haze of dust covering the lightbulbs, made my Spark feel frozen in my Shell. Were these people the antisocial elements that the authorities were so worried about? I was dead, but at least I knew it. Bennett was dead, but no one had told him.

  I was getting ready to go when the door popped open and three growlers entered the room. A scruffy-looking teenage boy headed over to the beans and rice, followed by a muscular woman with blond pigtails and snake tattoos slithering down her arms. The leader of the trio was a tall young man with hair that touched the collar of his surplus army jacket. There was something about his Spark that changed the energy in the room. All the women smiled at him and the men sat up a little straighter.

  “Buenos noches!” the young man said. “Sorry I didn’t call you guys. We just got a new address from Sonya, so we’re driving to East New York for a cracking party.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Bennett said. “But we’re talking about the petition.”

  The teenager scooped up what remained of the beans and rice and dumped the food into three cardboard bowls. While that was going on, the blond woman grabbed a handful of chocolate-chip cookies and stuffed them into her bag.