Chapter Text
Carol opens the door wide when Manousos knocks, but then just kind of leaves him standing there. This is her feeling about the whole thing, the world-saving ordeal, all of it: you take it from here.
“Go easy,” she slurs when he comes all the way in and drops a hefty notebook onto her coffee table. The table where, less than a month ago, she’d played four rounds of strip poker with a naked threat. And it had had legs for days and lost on purpose, the fucking pest.
She says, “I’m fresh off the sauce.”
Manousos blinks, then wrinkles his nose. “The sauce?” He looks somehow more disappointed than he had when she’d driven off three weeks back. “That is…what you call it?”
“Oh, ugh, Jesus Christ.” There had been something about sex with Zosia that was not unlike drowning in bootleg moonshine. But still. “It’s just an expression. Means I have uhhh, bad habits.” She shakes her drink at him. “Trying to quit.”
“Bad habits.” This Manousos gets immediately. “Yes. You do have.”
“Hey,” she says, defensive, like fuck you.
“Hey,” Manousos replies, sincere, like hello.
It is the first time in months that a greeting has not made her feel more alone.
—
She dials zero.
Hi, Carol. It’s so good to hear from you.
Accented, maybe British. She says: “Put my gym teacher on. If that fucker’s still alive.”
The one from middle school or the one from ninth grade?
“Ninth. Are you kidding?”
Mr. Lyker picks up a moment later. Carol, he says, in the same voice that he’d once said, you shower off — no, just you. The backs of her hands go numb, then prickle.
She says, “Gimme the countdown.”
We are still some weeks away.
“Fucking some?”
8 to 9. 10 at maximum
She tastes: bile, bad vodka, the water of fucking life. Come to think of it had he once called her a dyke? She says, “Cool, cool. Really cool.”
Will that be all?
“No,” she says. “One more thing.” She considers. “Uh, go fuck yourselves.”
Thank you, Carol, Mr. Lyker says.
In the notebook Manousos gave her for logging their work day-by-day, she writes: gave ‘em hell. Then she stalks upstairs and kills Raban on the whiteboard fifteen times
—
DEATH BY:
- killer bees
- angry mob (too Jesus?)
- a secret betrayal (TOO Jesus)
- a plague
- a sidewalk
- an unimaginable thing
—
Manousos’s first idea sucks and his second idea sucks and his fifty-seventh idea sucks marginally less but still, on the whole, sucks massively.
“So. We microwave their brains. Toaster in the bathwater kind of shit. Fry ‘em silly. That’s it? That's the whole enchilada?”
Manousos looks at her, eyebrows raised, and doesn’t answer, and she already knows what that means. He fiddles with the AM/FM radio dial. He has highlighter ink all over his hands.
“If brain damage could save the world,” Carol says, “believe me, it wouldn’t need saving.”
There are 7 weeks left. Thus far Carol’s contributions to the war effort have included: the atom bomb, the dead Rabans, and the brilliant suggestion that they blow up every SCNT capable lab on the planet. This last thing had looked a lot less brilliant — and a lot more like the plot of Star Wars — when she’d woken up across from it, pen and whiskey-sour head in hand, on Manousos’ dining room table.
‘This is bad,’ he’d said when he came in, fresh in ironed pants and a too-big shirt. ‘This plan will not work.’ He had searched for the precise phrase he wanted, then smiled when he’d found it: ‘Is stupid,' he’d told her. ‘You’re stupid,’ she’d snapped. ‘Who says it won’t work?’ Manousos had pointed to a bullet point that read: invisible fighter jet/space ships, and Carol had gone to explore the wine cellar behind the Wilson’s garden shed.
Manousos’ fifty-seventh idea does not have bullet points. It has long thin columns of frequencies and electro-chemical equations. It has a to-scale interior sketch of the shipping container in her driveway. It has her name, and then the name “Rick,” underlined.
“Rick?” Carol says. “Who the fuck is Rick?”
Manousos shakes his head. He speaks quickly into the phone. It says: “Rick is the NOC list," which is basically as helpful as the Spanish.
Three nights ago they had both zoned out to the first DVD in the Wilson’s improbable Mission: Impossible box set. Or, she had zoned out. Manousos had apparently been paying close attention.
“The NOC list,” she echoes.
Manousos nods, then makes a shape with his arms, that, she guesses, is supposed to be a guy hanging from a ceiling. “Extraction,” he says. “NOC list. Secret identity. Rick.”
“Got it.” Really she had gotten it from the jump, but Manousos is bad at charades, and that makes them more fun. “Rick is the thing we need to get.” And, presumably, the real guy inside the weirdo psychic superglue shit. She looks at her own name on the list, feeling, oddly, the way she had when she first saw it on the a book jacket. “Who the fuck am I, then?”
His arms lowered, Manousos looks again so serious. He frowns, like the answer is obvious, or she has made him sad. “Carol Sturka,” he says. “You are Cruise. Tomás."
—
One thing about Tom Cruise is that he had had aliens in his brain long before there were aliens in his brain, Carol thinks, so probably this was all going really great for him.
As for Carol, she is sweating through her third new t-shirt. She finally changed to yellow after it was clear that white was striving for that color anyway. The drawling Texan on the phone had been surprisingly willing when she asked for Rick to be delivered to her cul-de-sac. Surely they had seen Manousos head for the Sandias a couple hours ago.
Rick is about five nine, soft at the waist and hairline. She’d hardly glanced at him when she fired a shotgun above his head last month. He blinks benignly at her and asks if she’s been feeling alright.
We’ve been curious, he says, how you’ve been, since. She must stiffen. Whatever he’d been about to say, they think better of it: since it’s been so long, Rick finishes.
“I’ve been great. Just dandy.”
Rick nods his slow head. He looks like someone’s adult live-at-home son, or a substitute teacher. We’re glad to hear that, Carol. We’re glad you called. Was there something you need?
“I’m gonna ask you to do a favor for me, Rick.”
Rick grins. Anything, Carol.
Anything — that had been Zosia’s thing, too. What do you want? Anything. What feels good? Anything. Would you — ? We would do anything, Carol, anything, if you —
She had not meant to think of Zosia. Now, or ever again, for that matter, but especially not now. She squints hard at Rick, then holds up a finger. “Uh, un-o momento,” she tells him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
She knows she could just ask the fucking guy — except, because, he’s not even a guy. But there are some conversations she cannot have while looking into the teeming void’s sad, soft, substitute teacher face. Just like there were many things she could not, or would only, say while looking Zosia straight in her pitch dark eyes.
Rick nods, then shuffles his feet, as if he could be nervous. They shush against the tile. Carol goes to the kitchen with her back turned to the sound.
—
She dials zero.
Hi, Carol! This one is downright chirpy. Is everything with Rick okay?
“Rick is fine.” Reflex. Then she rubs her eyes. “And you know that, obviously. You are Rick.”
We are, the girlish voice affirms. How else can we help you?
Christ, she should have had a drink before doing this. “Uh. I was just wondering. Where’s," she swallows, “umm, where’s whatshername… where’s Zosia at, today?”
Zosia is on an efficiency compliance detail in Pakistan today, Carol, chirps the chirper.
Carol feels hot, then cold, then nothing at all. She remembers it doesn’t matter to her at all where in the world Zosia is. The world is rainbows and butterflies. The world is lodged in the back of Carol’s throat with the taste of strawberry milk, where Zosia’s tongue had left it.
She huffs. Then asks, “Is she standing on a ladder or something?”
Not at this time.
“Operating heavy machinery?”
Not today. May we ask why you’re wondering?
“You may fucking not.”
The last time you saw Zosia, you said, and we quote, you ‘could not give less of a shit whether she lived or died,’ and would rather ‘eat glass or implode or flay yourself alive,’ than ever see her face again. End quote.
“Thank you,” Carol says, “uh, for that.”
You’re welcome, Carol. Was there anything else you had in mind?
“Just give her a lunch break, and get off my dick, alright?”
Carol hangs up before they can reply.