Return to Sender

He hurled the bedclothes off and sprang upright, punch-drunk and basted with sweat. The violence of the dream was still with him. He swung his fists until the effort forced him to suck down a great lungful of the sour, heavy air, which made him crumple into a vacuum against the side of the bed. It had been the same dream, of course: blind and thrust into the cavity of an overloaded television, every sense blunted out by static with the only cracks admitting the faint sound of his father’s voice. He had heard only the low warmth, as usual, not any actual words, but he thought he sensed a torment in it. He still woke up trying to scramble his way out of the noise.

It was only just dawn. The slice of skyline through his breakfast bar window was creamy and burnt, and he could hear the first farts of courier traffic seventeen floors below him from the the network of restaurant ants. He still felt too itchy to move; the dream was clearly never going to unhook itself until he did something about it, and today was a better day than any. The smog storms last week had seen him spend four entire days with the shutters down, breathing through a coffee filter strapped to his face with hair elastic. He took the canister from the shelf above the TV and practiced the movements to make sure he did not waste any tape. He retrieved the heavy packaging tape from the kitchen drawer and stuck the fat end onto the bottom of the canister, at an angle, before weaving an ungainly web that held the lid tightly in place and wrapped itself several times around the gut. When he was sure that the canister could be spun every which way without spilling, he slid it into his backpack and walked out the door.

One of the unspoken advantages of living in the five spiral towers in the heart of the city was that there was always a vehicle to be boosted. It all depended on what you wanted: a turbocharged scooter with emission muffles to slice through the traffic and get you from the economic heart to the volcano of the entertainment district in twenty minutes with a chiller of live lobster in tow; or a boxy urban tank with chameleon plates that would change every half an hour and let you park outside every opera house or embassy without the sniff of an enforceable ticket. Rackle was after something more utilitarian, and found it after a five-minute walk to the all-night bar at the end of the block. The sun had just begun to glaze the four soldiers melted into their chairs after a night on the brandy and their all-terrain brawler of a vehicle was waiting for them silently on the sidewalk. Rackle looked for and quickly found the bulge in one of their breast pockets formed by the vehicle’s keys, clambering over the foremost of the massive tires into the driving seat. There was an art to firing these things up discreetly: you had to crank the ignition quickly but no more than a quarter of a turn, otherwise the turbocharger would kick in right away. He coaxed it to a sleepy, throaty burn and headed off in the direction of the northern gate out of the city. He would pick up what he needed on the way.

The fog was still thick but he could still see the neon sign blinking outside Katie H-Bird’s hole in the wall. He parked in a side street half a block down and left the engine running. The shack was belching forth a bright bubble of fried egg smells and vintage rock.

“Hey, Katie.” He propped his elbows on the counter shelf.

“Hey, Rackle,” from halfway across the room, looking up from her detective novel and popping a gentle smile. “Night shift again?”

“Nah. Got to run an errand this morning.”

“Got to get your strength up. What’ll it be?”

“Give me a couple of garlic brats and a small fries.”

“You want onions?”

“You know I want onions.”

As Rackle pulled the most caffeinated-looking can he could find from the countertop fridge, Katie H-Bird revved up her quad rotors and steered herself up and over the chiller unit. If she folded herself in half, she could fly out the front hatch and all the way up to the top of the building, which she had done late one night when she, Rackle and a few others had been pounding the beers. She confided in him that the one time she missed having legs was when she watched lindy hop videos. He told her to quit watching those videos.

“Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me about this errand, are you?” She slung the cardboard boat with his breakfast onto the counter.

“Nope. Maybe when I’m done. Better for you that way, anyway.”

She poured herself a coffee and watched him tear into his sausages. He had never looked more like a bristly wire skeleton strapped together with old denim, running on fumes. He had probably broken a dozen different laws on his way there that morning.

“You know if there’s anyone running shop at Dunstan’s today?” He thumbed a streak of garlicky oil from his top lip.

She leaned slightly back until she began to drift away from the counter. “I think that new kid might be on early duty. I’ve seen him come by here a couple of times in a suit this week.”

“Worth a go. Thanks.” He stuffed the final handful of fries into his face and walked back to the vehicle. As soon as he stepped outside the cocoon of steam outside Katie’s window, the cold punched the air out of his lungs.

The firm of Dunstan and Lowe had offices on the first floor of a colossal office building clad in dark brown marble. Rackle peered through the frosted glass but could not make out any movement. All the lights were off. He rang the buzzer alongside the narrow brass plaque and waited.

A terse voice answered, “Yes?”

“Parcel for Mr Wintergreen.”

There was a rustling, crackling sound. “Mr Wintergreen is at court today.”

“Special delivery from the second expert witness.”

There was a pause, then the door buzzed open. Rackle walked in to see a young, blond-haired man at the open doorway to an office at the end of the corridor.

“This way, sir, please.” He grazed his hand over Rackle’s back and ushered him into the dark office. “Sorry about the protocol: standard procedure for calls outside office hours. What can we do for you?”

“I need an E-MIL day pass,” Rackle said noncommittally. He lifted his bag onto his lap and folded his arms over it.

“Well, that’ll be forty thousand – cash only, of course – and it’ll take half an hour.” The man then looked down at the desk and coughed quietly. “Forgive me for mentioning this, sir, but you are not wearing either dress uniform or fatigues. Is an E-MIL pass strictly necessary? A regular one costs half as much.”

Rackle ground the pads of his fingers into his closed eyes. “Look, I get it: you’re new here. You have to do the whole due diligence schtick. And I do appreciate your concern, really. But I need an E-MIL pass. And this should cover it.” He slapped a wad of grimy notes onto the desk before retrieving the clip holding them together.

The clerk gingerly picked through them and folded the exact amount into the palm of his hand. “Of course, sir. Due diligence, as you say.”

The North Gate was two squat, truncated pyramids joined by two layers of blast door, capped by a sentry post and manned by at least two guards on permanent rotation. The sentries that morning stood in front of their respective pyramid and somehow avoided freezing solid from inertia. As soon as Rackle caught sight of them in their winter-issue overcoats, he started hashing out a scenario to get his hands on one: sniff an EMT radio frequency, get to the crash scene before the cavalry, put whichever organs are still pristine in a freeze box on the back of his bike then fence them to the DNA DJs for their own private hackery. Then, down to the shutter market under the railway bridge, where there would be no shortage of deserters looking to distance themselves from their official gear in exchange for a week’s rent or a barhopping weekend with their buddies that they’d never remember.

“Destination?” The sentry held out his hand for Rackle’s papers without needing to ask.

“Fort Funhouse,” Rackle replied with faux weariness. The base was officially Fort Finesse, but nobody in the military called it that. He sat in the driver’s seat of the uncovered 4x4 and weathered the sentry’s stare.

“Little underdressed, aren’t we, soldier?”

Rackle made a show of smoothing the mist-borne grime from his hair. “Look, I’m just an engineer. A four-guy patrol was taking her out on recon last night and sheared off the drivetrain flywheel on a corner because they couldn’t resist gunning the damn engine. You know how it is. Anyway, they got me out of my rack in the middle of the night, double-timed it back to base and left me with this E-MIL and the order to patch her up and bring her home. I don’t want to be here any longer than you do.”

The sentries stared at the emaciated man in scrappy clothes for a long moment but could not find any holes to pick in his immaculate credentials.

“Alright, get out of here.” The left sentry whirled his flattened hand in a circle above his head and the gate klaxon screeched out as the blast doors scraped open. Rackle nearly stalled in his eagerness to reach the other side of the wall.

As Rackle drove up what passed for the main road in the direction of the base, he did not even notice that he was now driving into the full blast of the wind. His shoulders swelled and felt lighter, and his mouth was flooded with a cascade of familiar tastes from when he had been young and food had been plentiful and the air had been clear. His gaze drifted and he watched his father hold court over the Sunday dinner table, imperial and expansive in his starched white shirt, flinging his hands wide to paint each anecdote through his laughter. Rackle had been glad to let himself be buoyed up by the laughter, not caring that he did not understand half his father’s jokes.

When he turned to look behind him for the third time and could no longer see the North Gate, he sawed hard off the track to the left toward the peak of the mountain. The winter had stripped the color from the landscape but the bristly stumps of the trees shrugged off even the most brutal weather. Rackle felt a pang of warmth as he drove past the chunky ash that had saved his life, when his brake cable had snapped as he was biking down the slope and his survival instinct had found nothing better than to throw him at the tree and let the bike swan-dive into a mangled ball at the bottom of the escarpment. He had broken three ribs and run a fever that damn near boiled him alive but had returned kicking and yelling to the land of the living after two weeks of his father swapping out wet cloths on his forehead to quench his delirium. He looked behind him again and thanked the mist in spite of himself: he could still imagine looking out over the whole valley, as he had done before the wall was built.

The weather grew rawer and hungrier the closer he got to the peak. The fog had got so dense that he could scarcely see the track in front of him, but he knew this particular slice of the old country like the veins in his arms. He even closed his eyes for a few seconds and let memory steer him through the curves in the broken track that took him up over the granite outcrop, past the bears’ cave and on to the pilgrims’ path to the top. He remembered the day a pilgrim had come to the house, half-frozen and raving with hunger confused with devotion. His father had stepped out onto the uncertain ice of madness to bring him back, warm him, unfold and undress him and rub his humanity in his face until the man emptied a pot of rabbit stew that would have lasted the family a week.

By the time Rackle reached the top of the mountain, the air was very thin. He took great gulping breaths to stay awake and thought it was appropriate, somehow: there was no pollution here. No noise, no dirt and no greed. He parked the vehicle against a spiky growth of boulders and dismounted, feeling gloriously alone. Or not quite alone. He yanked his bag from the passenger seat and looked out over the shrouded horizon, the part of his brain scalded by city life wondering just how far up he was. He just needed to open the canister and then it would be done. Just unscrew the cap of the canister and surrender its contents to the winds.

Thirty seconds later, he snapped awake to see that he was still hugging the canister tightly to his chest. The scant flashes of vision the air was allowing him were interwoven with lambent sparks of the man who had shaken every good value into him and had been adamant that he would return to enrich the ground upon his death, and not finish in some gaudy porcelain urn stacked alongside a thousand nonentities in a fake suburban structure designed to appease the bereaved. It was then that Rackle’s last memory of his father burst through his gut: the sight of seeing him thrash and choke through his last moments on a factory-issue mattress on the 43rd floor.

His fingers were beginning to seize with the cold. He unscrewed the lid of the canister and flung its contents into the screaming wind, yelling, “Dad! You’re home now. You’re home. You’re home.” The handful of gray ash was whipped away before Rackle could even follow its trajectory and he collapsed against the hood of the vehicle, dizzy but warm with exhaustion. He closed his eyes and drifted away from the whole language of sensations and life, but was prodded back by pinpricks of cold on his cheeks. He opened his eyes again and saw that the snow had begun to fall. It never snowed in town.