8. “On SR 375, Nevada”

“You watch CSI last night?” says Jodie.

“Mm-hmm,” says Luis.

Jodie’s behind the counter. Luis is over by the fridge, sweeping the floor. The floor looks pretty clean, Jodie thinks. Already did, when he started sweeping it, in fact.

Luis is the kind of guy who just cannot sit still. He paces. He sweeps floors that don’t need sweeping.

When she puts him behind the counter, he does manage to stand in one place, but all that nervous energy has to go somewhere, and where it goes is his hands. He’ll tap his fingers against the counter incessantly, playing little drum solos, sweeping his arms from left to right like a pianist. Or he’ll fiddle with the buttons on the POS, opening obscure useless menus that Jodie’s never even seen, closing them, opening them again.

Sometimes Jodie half suspects he’s a tweaker. But he comes in on time every morning. Does the job fine. Appears to take showers on the regular. Might still be a tweaker, but what does she care? Jodie believes in live and let live.

“What’d you think?” she says, referring to CSI. “Pretty nasty, huh?”

At first it seems like Luis hasn’t heard her. Then he makes a little eh noise. Jodie’s very familiar with his little, indifferent, superior, above-it-all eh noise. You can’t go very far, talking to Luis, before you run into it.

For a guy who works in a gas station in the middle of nowhere, he sure does like to act like he’s a big fucking deal.

It’s kinda cute, in a way. Cute like a kid, she means, like a little boy pretending he’s a gangster or a tycoon. Not cute like a man. Jodie is forty-six, widowed, and single, and when she pictures a man, she tends to picture one in broadly similar circumstances. Luis looks young enough to be her nephew. And he’s maybe a tweaker.

“It was the season premiere,” she says, with a bit of a sulk in her voice.

Luis makes the eh noise. He’s stopped his sweeping and now, for some reason, is peering into the fridge. Face pressed up against the glass.

“Guess what percent,” he says, face still up against the glass. “Guess what percent of the TV industry is owned by one company.”

“Oh, don’t give me this kinda thing,” Jodie says.

“Feeling lucky? Come on, gimme a guess.”

“I get enough of this kinda thing from the tourists,” Jodie says.

“Gimme a guess.”

She gives him silence. After ten seconds or so, he gets the idea. He carries on undeterred.

“Ninety-four percent. Plexicorp owns ninety-four percent of TV. Like, the production of it and the distribution, both, ninety-four percent.”

“What’s the other six percent?” Jodie asks.

Luis does the eh noise.

“I just think it’s worth thinking about. The concentration of power that’s happening, in the area of information. Over the last decade. We’re living in an information oligarchy, in this country.”

“Uh-huh,” Jodie says.

It’s just the two of them in the store. It usually is. They do get customers, though, in a steady trickle that’s plenty enough to keep the franchise on its feet. They’re a pit stop on a highway, many miles from the next one in either direction. It’s a highway that brings, among others, a steady year-round stream of UFO tourists. They get by.

Their last customer was here about an hour ago. A big, leathery Texan guy, wearing what amounted to a Texan-guy costume. Cowboy hat, lone star buckle, the works. As though his greatest fear in life were that some stranger, at some point, might experience a brief state of uncertainty as to where he came from.

He’d bought a pack of cigarettes. After checking out, he’d lingered at the counter for a moment. He’d winked at Jodie, and leaned in closer.

“I’m going to Area 51,” he’d said.

“Uh-huh,” Jodie had said.

You’re not special, dude. Where do you think we are? Everyone’s going to Area 51. Except for some of the creepier, more diehard-type tourists, who are proud to inform you they’re headed to Area 52.

The front door jingles. Looks like they’ve got another customer.

A girl, mid-teens probably. She’s got a big dog with her. Otherwise seems to be traveling alone. There’s no way she could pass for old enough to drive, which means she’s a hitchhiker. Makes sense, Jodie thinks. She’s mighty cute—the kind of cute that guys stop for.

The girl takes a very slow tour of the aisles. She walks with hesitant little steps, stopping frequently to stare at the merchandise. She doesn’t give off the impression that she’s looking for anything in particular. It seems more like she’s just happy to be here.

When she’s bored, Jodie sometimes speculates about whether the strangers around her are on drugs, and if so, which ones. This customer makes the first part easy. She is definitely on drugs. As for which—probably weed? Weed or acid, maybe. Weed would be the safe bet, being more common. But Jodie’s starting to tilt toward acid, here. She’s seen people on acid. They do look like that. They have that air of fascination with the mundane.

“Can I help you find anything?” Luis says.

“I believe so!” the girl says, cheerfully, in a British accent.

It’s not every day you see an Asian teen hitchhiker with a British accent and a pet bloodhound, Jodie thinks. Not around here, anyway.

“I am interested in meeting employees of the United States government, specifically those who live and work in the town nearest here. I would be thankful for any information you could provide about where such people spend their time outside their working hours. Perhaps there is a particular bar, restaurant, or other establishment where they prefer to congregate?”

“Oh, yeah,” Luis says. “Totally. Go to Chick-fil-A at six PM, any given night, you’ll find every spook and G-man in the state in there. It’s their secret spot.”

“Oh, marvelous!” cries the girl. “Thank you, sir!”

“I’m playing with you,” Luis says.

The girl stares in confusion.

“I’m kidding,” Luis says patiently. “I’m not telling the truth. They don’t really go to Chick-fil-A.”

“Oh,” the girl says.

The dog has a big, thick metal brace around its neck. On the top, it extends out over the neck and onto the head, partially covering it, like a helmet. Jodie wonders what it’s for. She is not a dog person, and doesn’t know these things.

The dog is kind of creeping Jodie out. It’s staring in her direction, like it expects something from her. Maybe it can smell the beef jerky in front of the counter.

While the dog stares at Jodie, the girl stares at a spot above Jodie’s head. The girl moves her head carefully from side to side. Jodie turns to see what she’s looking at, and—oh, of course. She’s watching herself on the CCTV. On the grainy screen, Jodie watches the girl stare in utter awe, like a small child.

Definitely acid, as opposed to weed. Jodie would stake a lot on that bet, at this point.

Next to the television that shows the CCTV feed, there’s a regular television, showing live TV. Jodie and Luis watch it sometimes. For the last hour they’ve been ignoring it, because the one interesting channel it picks up is doing yet another Chester Chrestomath rerun. Onscreen, Lucifer Vance is giving a speech. His grim face fills the grainy, off-color frame.

Jodie turns around. The dog is still staring at her.

“You know,” Jodie says, “if you want to meet people around here . . . uh. There’s not too many places you can go. There’s only one bar in Maxwell, Nevada, and two restaurants.

“So if you, uh, want to meet people? Who live around here? It’s a small town. Just, go to the bar, or . . .”

“Thank you, ma’am!” the girl says. “I shall!”

And she’s off, headed for the exit. Turns out she really wasn’t looking to buy anything.

“Come on, Toto!” she calls to the dog.

Toto? What a terrible name for that particular dog. That huge, creepy motherfucker of a dog.

Seeing the dog from behind, now, Jodie sees that it has metal braces on its back legs, too. They look like the helmet thing, chunky and kind of complicated in shape. Like something you’d expect to find buried deep in the innards of a car.

Jodie can’t remember seeing a leash at any point during this whole experience.

The door tinkles again, and swings shut.

“Fucken hippies, man,” Luis says, in summary.

“UFO freaks,” Jodie says. “You think you’ve seen ’em all, all the different kinds, but you never have.”

 

---

 

She walks far out into the desert, out of earshot of anyone or anything. Once she is far enough away, she sits, and Toto speaks to her.

When Toto speaks, it is not the way a man speaks. Some of the message tends to be lost in transmission. But she’s gotten better, over time, at sussing out what he means.

Toto chides her about her behavior in the gas station, and offers corrective recommendations. Say fewer words, Toto cautions. Just smile. This is age-old wisdom, she knows. She takes it to heart.

She leaves markings in the sand. Toto helps her ensure that they will persist.

Some of Toto’s animal friends arrive, bearing a package. She opens it. Neatly arranged inside, she finds a variety of makeup, lipstick, and perfume; several fresh articles of clothing; a familiar metal cube, no doubt housing a nutritional and calorie-dense object intended for her oral consumption; and a small pile of paper.

Toto and his friends cannot write, but they can collect written materials which they suspect will be apposite. She reads carefully.

 

---

 

In the bar, he asked her if he could buy her a drink. Yes, he could.

He looks very different from other men of her acquaintance. He is paunchy and balding. He has an air about him that is somewhere between nervousness and aggression. A kind of generalized agitation, which he channels variously into ranting diatribes, into ceaseless small adjustments in how he sits upon the barstool, into aggrieved sighs whose targets are opaque from the outside.

Several men offered her a drink before this one did. She is, after all, a young, pretty newcomer to a lonely, tiny town where there are never any newcomers. She spurned the first few offers. Toto has advised her to pick a man carefully, and has specified the characteristics she could expect to find in a suitable one.

She sips the drink very slowly, and tries to avoid speaking. This is easy, as he is happy to talk and talk. He is telling her about his job, already. She expected to make a sort of negotiation before reaching this stage of things, involving concessions on her side, but he gives it freely.

“And I just think to myself, you know, fuck, at this point in my career, I have had enough of this type of clusterfuck, right, with different agencies all thinking it’s their turf, and squabbling the way these federal bureaucrat gremlins always squabble.

“I just think to myself, I have had enough and I’m about ready to quit. I’m right about ready to quit. And then you know what? You know what?”

She dutifully shakes her head. She does not know what.

“They won’t let me quit! And it’s for their fucking fed bureaucrat gremlin reasons, see, I’ve been in DOD most of my career, right, and that’s how I got into this thing, in DOD, but not in NSA. And then NSA got its greedy little paws into it, right, NSA said no, mine!, right.

“And so now it’s sort of this joint thing, but NSA says all of their rules apply, and apparently, NSA now has its own whole system of clearances you need to work on its projects, and they don’t integrate with the rest of DOD’s system. But, back when NSA got into it, back then me and the other guys from the original project, we got essentially grandfathered in, in terms of NSA clearances, just to make it work, so we’re cleared by NSA to know about the project that we started even though we don’t, like, actually have the NSA’s clearances that are in its own system.

“But the rub is, though, that grandfathering-in, it’s apparently conditional on my involvement in the project. So if I quit, then suddenly all the shit I know about the project, right, is shit I’m not allowed to know unless I have those NSA clearances.

“So I say, okay, I’m game, NSA, tell me how to get cleared. And you know what? I can’t! I’m apparently ruled out by their background checks in like five different ways. So I never could be NSA cleared, you know, normally, so the only way NSA will let me know about the project, that I already knew about before them, that we started, is if I keep my status as this sort of special-case-NSA-cleared entity, which I only do if I don’t quit!”

“It sounds quite frustrating,” she offers.

“Oh you bet it’s frustrating. And that’s not even the half of it, oh no, apparently this couldn’t just stay a spat between different parts of DOD, no, then DOE got involved. And you’d think, okay, DOE, whatever. Like who the fuck is DOE, right? But then they turn out to be the most vicious gremlins of all!

“So there was this whole second act of the whole fucking, you know, saga, because okay, we’d taken all the scientists on the original DARPA grant, right, and brought them into the fold, you know, cleared them and all, but they needed instruments, you know, scientists always need their toys, and when we brought them into the fold and got universities out of the picture, there was a concern over getting the toys they needed from a source outside of the university system, right?

“And so along comes DOE, saying, oh we’ve got all these toys right here, we’ve got all these labs full of toys, and we can do clearance, in fact we’re tight with NSA—did you know that? Apparently DOE and NSA have this whole thing now, like their systems are integrated and shit, and their top gremlins are like buddies with the NSA top gremlins. I mean of all things, right, it’s unbelievable, right?”

She dutifully nods her head.

“But then if DOE joins the party, then, we gotta play by their rules too, and of course they demand full control of the scientific end of the project, and then us guys from DOD are like hell no. Like if you were so good at managing scientists and picking grants, why didn’t you come up with this project, huh?

“And then it’s in this idiotic limbo forever while the DARPA guys give the DOE guys nasty looks, and the DOE guys give the DARPA guys nasty looks, and I’m in the middle, and I can’t quit, right? And so there I am, in front of a room of scientists, telling them they gotta move out of this DOE lab they just got moved into, and I’m sorta the fall guy for these types of maneuvers, and apparently this is my job now? And I wanted to quit?”

 

---

 

They’re in a motel room. She’s never been in a motel before, and doesn’t know to find it strange that he brought her here.

She has been told what to expect, but not all of it was entirely accurate.

She expected them both to be naked, and then, afterwards, for them to have the discussion. In fact, only he is naked, and they are already having the discussion.

He did not ask her to become naked, but instead asked her to don a different set of clothes, which he owns, apparently for this purpose. The skirt is low-cut, but otherwise it is not much more revealing than the outfit she’d come in with. He invests this set of clothes with some erotic significance which is obscure to her, but which she is happy to use.

“We should really get down to business, you and I,” he says, his breaths fast and heavy.

“Business,” she says, with a hopefully apposite air of mystery and ambiguity.

“What you want,” he says. “Who you’re with.”

“Who I’m with,” she repeats back with an enigmatic, knowing smile. The enigmatic part is truthful enough, if not the knowing part.

“Let me guess though. See I’ve been all around East Asia, goes back to my long time back in DIA, and I’ve been an East Asia watcher for decades, I can tell you guys apart, let’s see, you’re not Chinese, you’re, what are you . . . Korean, right?”

As it happens, she actually does not know.

“Korean,” she says, with the same smile, and a tone so guarded it does not necessarily read as confirmation.

“Oh interesting, interesting . . . and then, the big question, right, are you with NIS, does Seoul want its hands on this project for some gremlin reasons I can’t imagine, or, or, are you not with NIS, are you with, what is it called, with RGB—”

“RGB,” she says, as it is obviously the answer he hopes for.

He seems to be having a very good time.

“Oh my god,” he says.

“Oh my god a real life North Korean intelligence agent and I’m her pawn, I’m compromised and in the hands of North Korean intelligence, Christ, what is it you guys even want these days, is it nukes, is it even nuke-related, I have no idea, I’m not a DPRK watcher, never have been . . . I’ll do it, whatever it is, compromise me . . . the DPRK, would you believe that, holy shit . . .”

He is having a very good time, and she’s barely had to do anything.

“I shall provide you with a name,” she says.

His gaze is utterly rapt.

“A name . . .”

She can tell he’s pictured this in his mind before, and that the girl in his mind had said something very much like what she is saying now.

“I shall provide you with a name, at a time of my choosing. When I do, you will hire the man I have named. You will ensure that he is assigned to work on your project.”

“I’ll . . . and this man, that the DPRK wants on our project, what’s his deal, what kind of machination here could even be relevant to DPRK interests . . . but of course you can’t tell me . . .”

It is the easiest thing in the world, she is finding, to just smile and smile, and let him do all the work.