Agency

33 Clarion Alley

Verity always enjoyed the murals, in spite of the smell of pee, the alley’s walls doing double duty as public gallery and casual urinal, but it had been over a year since she’d last been here. Eunice had suggested it, after some surprisingly enjoyable aimless wandering, like walking with someone you didn’t know very well but found interesting. Arriving at the Valencia Street end, Eunice had seemed to be looking for something. She’d sent one of the drones ahead to find it.

And here it was, Verity assumed, midway between Valencia and Mission, on a prime two-story stretch of smooth brick: a celebration of the president’s bravery during the campaign, rendered in shiny black and white, like a giant Victorian steel engraving executed by OCD fairies. The president stood smiling, her arms outstretched to America. Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had, Verity herself having watched this debate live. Seeing this now, she recalled her own sickened disbelief at his body language, the shadowing, his deliberate violation of his opponent’s personal space. “I don’t think anyone I know believes there was ever any real chance of him winning,” she said to Eunice. “I don’t know whether I did myself, but I was still scared shitless of it.” She was looking at how the artist had rendered his hands. Grabby.

“Smells like piss,” Eunice said.

“You can smell?”

“Google says. I wanted to see this one.”

“Why?”

“Branch plant thing. You want to see the rest?”

Verity noticed one of the drones now, like a displaced black pixel, yo-yoing slowly up and down, in front of the monochrome mural. Recording it, she assumed. “Not so much. Where would you like to go?”

“3.7.”

“Anybody there?”

“Your favorite barista.”

Verity started back toward Valencia, past other murals. One of Aztec pyramids, covered in monarch butterflies. She glanced up, passing a two-story, ferociously maternal Venezuelan goddess, her tits prominently out, holding aloft a human pelvis with both hands.

Eunice facially recognized a girl in a surplus parka, headed past them down the alley. “Need a rice cooker? She’s got one on Craigslist. Toshiba.”

“Don’t do that. It’s too personal.”

“Ever ridden bitch on a big bike?”

“What’s it got to do with rice cookers?”

“Nothing. On the back, getting boob-jammed if your biker brakes too hard?”

“More than once. Why?”

“Branch plant just asked me.”

“Joe-Eddy’s got a BMW, ’73 R Series. Likes to talk about it more than ride it.”

“Know how to hang on, lean into curves, keep your feet on the pegs?”

“Basically,” Verity said, turning onto Valencia sidewalk.

The walk to 3.7 was uneventful, but then, as they were stepping inside, Eunice having just remarked on the color of paint on the wood-mullioned door, a faint scything of static swept through the headset.

“Eunice?” TARDIS blue, Eunice had first called the paint, then qualified that as ’96 TARDIS blue. “Eunice?”

The barista looking directly into her eyes as the white cursor, frozen on his face, shivered and was gone.

“Eunice?” Reaching the bar, where her drink waited on the counter in front of him. He passed it to her unthreateningly, which wasn’t right either. She looked down. Pink paint, VER in neat capitals, then slashed through, incomplete.

Below that, in a quick scrawl, GO WITH HIM.

She looked up.

He gestured toward his mouth, shook his head. He raised a forefinger to point to her lips, then drew it quickly sideways, a request for silence. Lifting a hinged segment of the zinc counter, he took her wrists and pulled her through the resulting gap. He wore more piercings, some very detached part of her observed, in sudden proximity to his deeply seamed face, than she’d ever owned earrings.

Drawing her farther behind the chrome and copper of the espresso console, 3.7’s clientele hidden beyond it, the paper cup hot in her hand, he released her. Urgently tapped his palm with the forefinger of the other hand, to mime texting. Pointed at her purse.

She put the drink on the nearest flat surface and pulled out her phone.

Her e-mail notification sounded. She looked down, to find, no pass code having been required, a single e-mail notification.

She opened it.

It vanished.

A sound like a doll’s tambourine.

She looked up. He held open a black bag she recognized as a Faraday pouch. Joe-Eddy owned several, all of them trademarked Black Hole. No radio signals, in or out. He gestured for her to drop her phone in.

She remembered the message. Dropped the phone in the bag. He pointed at her face. The glasses, she realized. She took them off, adding them to the bag, then the headset. Impatiently, he shook the bag. She remembered the Tulpagenics phone. Found it in the inside pocket of her jacket, dropped it in. He frowned, jingling. The case for the glasses. She found it in her purse, dropped it in.

He folded the bag with the same dramatic finality Joe-Eddy displayed when closing his, then jerked a hitchhiker’s thumb toward the rear of 3.7, toward grubby green-painted walls. She followed him back, into an ancient dishwashing area, the windowless survivor of however many previous businesses.

Eunice would have known, she thought, eyes stinging.

He took a worn black jacket from a row of coat hooks, handed it to her. Joe-Eddy’s size, down-lined, it hung on her when she’d zipped it up, its cuffs covering her hands. He passed her the kind of white mask she’d unsuccessfully tried to buy when the smoke had been at its worst. She put it on, remembering the mask Virgil had made her wear with the silicosis suit.

He put on a black leather jacket, then a white mask like hers, which she imagined pressing uncomfortably on his piercings, though maybe he’d enjoy that. Stowing the Faraday pouch inside the jacket, he zipped up. Then the thumb again, toward what was obviously 3.7’s rear door.

She followed him out, into an unroofed passageway no wider than the space behind the bar, cluttered with buckets and mops. She’d left her drink behind, she realized, but then remembered that she was wearing a mask.

Further narrowness, around two corners and into an alley, where a sledlike black Harley touring bike waited. He unshackled a pair of very white helmets from a chrome rack at the back, passing her one, then turned and mounted. She put on the helmet, fastened its strap, climbed on behind him, the engine coming to life, and then they were rolling forward.

By the time they were on Bryant, ascending into the bottom level of the bridge, she knew he was a much better rider than Joe-Eddy.

From the center lane, then, she looked up into girders blurring past. Would someone take over the bar, at 3.7? a part of her wondered. Some espontáneo, scrambling over the counter, seizing control of the levers?

Did Joe-Eddy know that Eunice was gone? Would her postproduction still be spoofing what the Robertson heads picked up in the apartment? And the drones, in their camouflaged cote atop the cartridge-refill place? What had happened to the one she’d seen in Clarion Alley, recording that mural? Would it have flown home?

The thought of it making its way alone along Valencia almost made her sob, so she concentrated on the girders, pretending they were a GIF of metal grilles, endlessly racing past, though in reality to Treasure Island, which they soon reached.