MASK

MASK

By the time Jaxon was finally airborne, that old anger tic in his cheek had begun to work. All morning, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong: from the air shuttle landing at the wrong helipad, to his place in the aeropod queue mistakenly moved from high priority to low, to the inept takeoff of the pod just before his– a barista’s rental.

“Coffee Cop: We Perk and Serve,” read the magnet, hastily slapped onto the door. Coffee Cop. What a name. Probably chosen by those who had forgotten what a real cop was, picked because it was alliterative and sounded quaint.

When it was Jaxon’s turn to board and go, he tossed his briefcase into the storage bin behind his single seat. Aeropods were built for one. His ID band followed the briefcase, once he’d flashed it at the screen. “Good morning, Marshal,” said his screen, in the voice he’d picked to customize all his rides. “Good morning, asshole,” he muttered back. Better work out some of his anger en route, rather than at his destination.

It was thirty-seven minutes as the crow flew, from New York City to the rural prison. Another outdated expression: as the crow flew. There were no crows anymore, no pigeons or gulls. The few birds left were a more elegant sample. They lived in domed zoos, keeping the skies free for traffic.

Past the river, air traffic thinned. Fewer houses dotted the overgrown hills. Jaxon glanced once at the screen to get his ETA. He had gained two minutes. Good. Most of the other minutes, he watched the ground. It never got old: peering down at the old roads, mostly used now for trails by a few brave humans and resurgent wildlife. Birds had suffered, but every other species had gained land and new life.

Born between the first and second Schism, Jaxon dimly remembered cars on those roads. His grandfather’d had a car, had waxed it on weekends. ‘She must have driven that path,’ he thought. ‘To get to the city that day. To do what she did.’

People in the 2010s hadn’t needed to give reasons to travel. Most people had owned their cars: some were lucky enough to own more than one. Anne Landon had gotten up that day, made herself an omelet, walked to her own car in her parents’ driveway, and put the AR-15 in its backseat. Her car was a 2018 BMW Coupe in a sporty blue. The blood spatter against it had looked black.

As he dropped altitude to skim the trees, Jaxon saw the old signs. Billboards, people had called them. Time and elements had pulled away the paper in stripes, over the enlarged mugshots of the woman he was going to meet, as she had looked on her last day of freedom

“Free Annie,” read one sign. “No Child Is Born BAD,” read another.. She had been very young: just old enough to try as an adult, of average height, weight, and attractiveness. The only surprise in that famous mugshot, Jaxon thought, was in her eyes. It was as though she had surprised herself.

The city-state had sent Jaxon. Mass incarceration was archaic– a twentieth-century holdover not meant for the enlightened people of the latter half of the twenty-first.

“It’s time,” the governor had told Jaxon. “She has been a ward of the state for over fifty years. Fifty years! We want to shut that prison down. Annie needs to get with the program. Far worse offenders have been successfully redeemed and released. Far worse! Do you remember Dav “Lunchbag” Kenyon? He kept cooking his construction crew and packing them in his sandwiches? Voices told him to. We treated his schizophrenia. Now he’s a crossing guard– for a church.” The governor drummed his fingers. “Annie’s not schizoid. She’s something else. Go find out. Talk to her. Tell her she can’t act out to stay inside.”

“What happens,” Jaxon had asked, “if she can’t reform?”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Either.”

The governor drummed his fingers on his glass desk and frowned. “She can. She must. We can offer counseling again and the best surgeons. We cannot force her to accept, not after that goddamned law tied our hands. If she doesn’t– if she attacks– self-defense is an option. It’s legally and morally inviolate. You’re a marshal. Dress the part.”

The prison guards found Jaxon’s gun when they ran his ID band twice, at each checkpoint.

“Can’t be too careful,” a guard told Jaxon; a half-apology, he supposed.

He nodded. Inane replies chased through his head, discarded: Bad Annie must be seventy by now; how much harm could one little old lady do? Jaxon didn’t voice these. He knew what she could do by the photos of what she had done.

“You be careful, too,” said the other guard, shorter by a hair. They had identical close haircuts, wore impassive faces and black striped uniforms, like the prisoners of old or referees.

“Natch,” Jaxon said automatically.

“She’s up for parole again.”

“Most prisoners would be on their best behavior then. They’d want to get out.”

“Not our Annie. Don’t worry, though,” one said as both guards pressed their hands to the door, opening it. “She is mellowing some with age. She might just nibble on you.” Hard for Jaxon to tell if he was joking, that granite-faced man.

The taller one stayed where he was. The shorter guard ushered Jaxon through the door. Their footsteps echoed down the long hallway, reverberating into emptied rooms. Most of the prisoners had been rehabilitated and gone.

Why, then, wondered Jaxon, did he feel watched? Eyes were on him– he knew it. He remembered combat and the fear that rose in his throat. Wars were also a thing of the past, though more recently extant than cars. An enemy watched him and waited, coiled and hidden.

“Most visitors aren’t allowed firearms,” the guard told Jaxon, quietly and without looking at him. “We’ve been instructed that you are to keep yours. Keep it close. Do not let her see it. There’s a chair for you just outside the room. I’ll raise the screen so you can see inside. The permeation is one-way, but only at the first strike. Objects, even small ones, can get in. But not out. Not unless you break the permeation first. Comprende?”

“Si,” said Jaxon.

His fear grew. Jaxon began to count: one, two, three, four, up to twenty. He began again. He knew from counting sheep at night to turn on the math side of his brain. This killed the cycling thoughts that helped no one. Jaxon could hear himself breathe, forced himself to slow it to match his count. ‘If the folks at the district could see me now,’ he thought. He wiped his neck with a tissue and tucked it inside his breast pocket.

It was a shock, having seen her young face so recently on the signs outside, to meet Annie in her old age. The white stripe that formed overnight in her dark hair after the shooting was muted; both halves were now gray. Most psychopaths didn’t wrinkle, Jaxon knew. They couldn’t feel guilt, couldn’t form the expressions of regret that lined a face. Annie did have wrinkles. Webbed lines ran down from the corners of her hooded eyes to meet a still stubborn jaw. Her face looked cut up– ‘like a ventriloquist’s,’ Jaxon thought.

“Hello,” she said, tentatively. “You’re new.”

“Hello, ma’am. I’m Jaxon Crenshaw. I’m from the New York district.”

“That sounds important,” Annie said, gravely. “Now what can I have done this time, to warrant such a visit?”

“May I sit down?”

“Please. I’ll join you. Oh, wait. I can’t. This will suffice.” Annie dragged nearer to the window a metal chair: one welded piece. No small metal pieces built into the chair, no cords in its cover. No tools at hand for a prisoner to off herself.

It was, however, a homey room. Patches of old orange jumpsuits had been repurposed into the quilt on her bed. On the walls, were penciled portraits of a man– the same man, Jaxon realized– dozens of times depicted. His nose bent slightly to one side, as though it had been broken before he met Annie. His eyes were large, soulful and sad.

He had no mouth.

“Oh,” Annie said, following his eyes. “That’s one of my victims. The one I dreamed of the most, though not as much lately. I thought I could exorcise him if I captured his face, at the moment before I shot him and he didn’t have a face anymore.”

“Why doesn’t he have a mouth?” Jaxon asked. He knew, but wanted her to tell him.

She raised her upper lip while smiling, as though smelling something unsavory: a classic sign of contempt. “Surely you know, detective.”

Jaxon knew. “The man was Bill Rodriguez. He was in the supermarket that day to buy a gift for his granddaughter’s fifth birthday. She was with him.”

“I remember.”

“You went to that supermarket because it had been doxed– I think that’s the right word. Am I right?”

“So far.”

“It was doxed on state news as a militant mask enforcer. The blue cities in 2020 had been the first to succumb to COVID-19. The red states– as they were then– got COVID later, but worse. Over one million Americans died. Millions more internationally. Doctors recommended social distancing and masking. Masks prevented the virus from spreading through moisture droplets. Everyone in that Safeway was masked. You never saw the lower half of Mr. Rodriguez’s face.”

Annie rocked herself gently in her chair. “You came all this way to recite my crimes?”

“No. I came all this way to ask you how you feel now– today– about the crimes that put you here.”

“Wow.” Annie looked at Jaxon, at his coat, where he thought her eyes narrowed on his waistband. “How do I feel? Hmm. How many people did I kill that day?”

“Fifty-eight.”

“And how many since?”

“None. You’ve maimed a few, which is why I’m sitting on this side of the window.”

“Hmm. I wonder. Well, I guess I’ll play. I get so few visitors now. Someone came to interview me once. She was writing a book about child killers. I was just past childhood, according to the courts, who tried me as an adult. This reporter thought I was more juvenile than juried.” Annie fingered her sleeve, worrying a loose thread. She looked up to catch him watching her. “Don’t worry. I can’t hang myself with a thread. Though if I did, I might save the city state some money and save you a future trip.”

Jaxon shrugged. “Do you agree that you were a juvenile? Was the trial fair?”

“Fair? Oh, yes. Fair and balanced,” she said, inscrutably and began laughing. “Oh, my. Fair and balanced, my ass. I was home schooled, you know. Home schooled or unschooled, whatever you choose to call it. I directed my own learning; never heard something I hadn’t asked about. My chalkboard was my I-Pad and my Social Studies was Fox and Friends. I lived in a bubble.”

Jaxon noted names to look up later: brands long obsolete.

“Do you have children, Mr. Crenshaw?”

“I did. I do.”

“Did?”

“They’re with my ex-wife now in another city state. They went south after the sun spot cooled things too much for comfort.” His answer was too long, he knew, and incomplete. A lie of omission was still a lie. His family had not left due to the sun spot, but Jaxon’s last black rage. He tempered his mood better now: with pills and mantras. He’d needed them earlier, when incompetence had threatened his chill. Incompetence of others, his wife would have asked, or his own impatience? Both, Jaxon knew. Both.

“Ah.” Annie sat back.

“Do you know much about what’s happening in the world today?”

“We do get the papers here.”

Jaxon had to laugh. She was refreshingly old-fashioned: a living time capsule. “Well, then, you must know about the Reform Project. It’s to do with people, habitats, and non-peoples.”

“Oh, yes. I do indeed. I read. It’s about all one can do in here. After the last gasps of capitalism, after the third Schism ended the Fourth Reich, and everyone everywhere moved to abandon consumerism and individual property, it’s all shared. You apply to use resources, which are assigned by need. How is that working out for you?” Annie asked, brightly.

Jaxon thought of his anger that morning, waiting to depart with his rental. “Fair,” he said.

“What a face! You can’t hide your anger– not completely. So, it’s not sunshine and roses out there. You almost make me sorry I’m missing out on this brave new world.”

Jaxon leaned forward in his chair, careful to keep his gun sheathed. “You don’t have to. That’s why I’m here. It’s time– again– to talk about your freedom. You’re up for parole soon. I want you to want it.”

“Do you know what happens when I get before the parole board? They can’t meet me in person anymore.”

He knew. “You can’t bite people to stay inside if there’s no inside. This prison is being repurposed.”

She looked around her, then, at the orange scrap quilt and wall of Bill Rodriguez’s face. Her hands– spotted with age and nails bitten down– shook. This was, Jaxon realized, only the second place she’d lived and, for decades, her only home.

“Why? For what purpose?”

Jaxon said, gently, “This building will be razed. The land is going to become a raptor sanctuary. Bald eagles have had a bad time with drones, aeropods, and flying cars. They need somewhere big to go.”

“Well. Trading one predator for another. Although I suppose bald eagles don’t kill. They just scavenge. I learned that from Mutual of Omaha– one of the few shows my parents let me watch.” Annie sat back. Her hands relaxed. She looked defeated and at once, both very young and very old.

“My parents were very Catholic, very conservative, very afraid of any new information that shook their foundations,” Annie went on. “Those foundations themselves were cracked. Mine was a crooked house. My father drank. My mother went to mass daily, confessed every Saturday for whatever sin she thought made my father angry enough to beat her– and us. I was the oldest. We were sheltered from everyone but them. I believed that my dad was as infallible as the pope. That our way of life was the right way. The American way. The only way. When I saw on the news what seemed the world hanging by a– well, by a thread! I was young, a hot mess, filled with… Something.”

“With what?”

Annie bowed her head. “Rage. Every teenager has a tiger inside, waiting to strike. Every human, if they were honest. You have yours. I can see rage pacing behind your eyes.”

Jaxon said stiffly that he was a cop. “We don’t get angry.”

“Ha! Tell that to your wife and kids. I read you, Mr. Crenshaw. You aren’t a closed book. You’re a tiger. Like us all.”

“You believe that only because you’ve been inside since the world was at its worst. The 2020s have gone down in history as among the most violent”–

She pounced. “Among the most violent decades. Not the most. There’s an old theory I read about, years ago, in the prison library. It proposes that every eighty years, humans erupt into violence. If you track backward old wars, you’ll find that’s true. I wasn’t the cause of chaos. I was the result. Another casualty. It’s 2070 now, so the tensions must be rising for the next turning. Aren’t you feeling angry, Mr. Crenshaw? Doesn’t it seem as if the world moves too slowly? That everyone but you is stupid?”

“No,” said Jaxon.

“Liar. You should meet your tiger. I know mine. I made its acquaintance that day, when I took my dad’s gun into that store and fired at everything that moved. Those people weren’t real to me then. Just symbols of evil, just elite city folks wearing masks and shutting down the economy out of fear. I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t afraid. I should have been.” She raised her eyes, startling Jason. Something flickered within.

“I should never get out,” Annie told him.

“Don’t you think you could chance being on the outside? You’d have help of all kinds. Monitored housing”–

“Like this?” Annie waved grandly at her walls and window.

“Not like this. In a freer setting, with counseling, surgical options to reset your chemistry so you can self-regulate. What? Why are you shaking your head?”

“It would never work. I can’t be mended. I don’t kill because I’m different or more dangerous amongst humans. I’m not special at all. What’s outside is worse. I need to stay.”

How to convince her that she couldn’t? The governor had given Jaxon a choice. He could take the quicker, albeit messier, option.

“Why draw Bill Rodriguez?” he asked her. “Why not Alivia, his granddaughter?”

“I saw him better. The little girl had a mask on, too, but it covered more of her little face. And afterward, she didn’t have a face.” The last words were spoken so slowly, Jaxon had to lean in to hear them. His hair brushed the permeable screen, but did not penetrate. Was she crying? Tears ran down her lined face, wetted her hands and lap. “Please. May I have a tissue?”

Jaxon reflexively reached for his and began to hand it through. The screen dissolved. Bad Annie’s hand went up, not for his tissue, but for his gun. She moved fast for someone so old. On her face was a look of such reproach, that Jaxon felt a nanosecond of humor.

It was a look which asked him why hadn’t he listened to her, a look which said, ‘Now look what you made me do.’