The drone lowered itself, obeying Michael’s commands, retrieved the house box, then flew back to the hangar.
He started up his truck, waved goodbye to the ladies who made him promise to come by again—both to take care of them drug houses but also to say hello and get the sweet tea they’d made. The stackers, tracking the drone, had already found the demolition site and just as the neighbors streamed back into their homes, the stackers descended.
One of them pulled a bar of something black out of the pocket of his overalls, undid some of the wrapping, and bit in as he moved to secure his fiefdom.
“Where’d you get that?” asked the second, who sidled up next to him.
The first held it out. “It’s Russian chocolate,” he said, holding it forward like it was a prize.
“Oh shit, word? What’s Russian chocolate?”
“Chocolate from Russia, nigga. Whatchu think?”
Michael’s rig rumbled, the engine drowning out the rest, and Linc climbed over to his seat behind the cab.
They pulled out, and as they passed through more desolation, Linc knew, by Michael’s silence, that the niggerrican was mad at him for not clearing the junkie. But then they passed into a hood where they were flanked by Craftsman-style homes. Tapered support columns. Stonework porches. Nobody lived on this street but people came out to maintain these houses anyway. Linc occasionally saw the armed patrols that would stalk the block, ready to beat back any advances from drug dealers or whoever was trying to make a new stash house. Their berets and sometimes their bow ties, and sometimes their leather jackets and sometimes their Afros. And whenever there was a new family of Exodusters that had been evicted from somewhere else or another group who had made the Great Migration from cities that had been swallowed up by the blight, they had this neighborhood prepared for them.
Michael turned in his seat. “Gimme a boy’s name that starts with H.”
“José,” Linc replied.
THE kitchen was the only room in the house not bathed in black light. A ratty briefcase lay open on the kitchen counter by the sink with pills of different colors, and acid tabs, and ounces of grass in small ziplock packages lining the interior. Xanax bars, oxy 30s, lean, activis, lunes, shrooms, adderall, and what looked like meth. A skinny white girl—in a tight, torn alabaster half shirt and a Navajo headdress that glowed like the sun, which followed her wherever she went—had brought the case in and mixed an assortment of pills in a blender, pouring the concoction into a red Solo cup and topping it off with a generous pour from a forty-ounce of Olde English. Music thudded against the walls of the kitchen. Jonathan took the cup she had handed him, smiled at her grin, and they sipped together.
She shuffled close to him, so close Jonathan could see the lighting apparatus wired into her warbonnet, and ran her hand up and down his crotch.
When he finished his sip, the cup seemed so big that he needed to grip it with both hands, and her face had turned into that of a cougar’s. Her teeth swayed when she grinned, unable to keep form, and she stuck her tongue into his mouth before sashaying to a stool in the corner of the room.
Cup in hand, Jonathan massaged his cheek and walked into the darkness where bodies, electric and glowing with radiation, throbbed and pulsed around his. Hair swishing against his face, someone else’s sweat brushed onto his skin. A beige kid leaned against a wall, light flashing over his face, and stuck his tongue out, placed a white tab on it and, staring directly at Jonathan or something past him, held his tongue out for a moment before flicking it back and smirking.
Girls in pink and red halter tops touched themselves, ran fingers down their cleavage. Tattoos ran in single lines up their forearms or along their clavicles or in circles around their thighs where they had raised their skirts. A girl bit her lip as Jonathan swam toward her then away. Someone’s mom smiled at him. The wrinkled face was a glimpse in a crowd, then gone. A white guy with ginger scruff carried an armful of unmarked forties somewhere.
Jonathan sipped from his cup, and a blunt, wrapped with brown tobacco leaves, appeared in the fingers of his free hand. Even as he toked, he didn’t believe it really existed. Arms wagged in the air around him. Girls in bikinis and neon ski masks stared at him, swaying back and forth, some climbed on tables and were topless as they bounced, forties in hand.
Someone’s locs caressed his back through his shirt.
A white dude with short twists, shirtless, torso and arm pocked with tattooed lettering and shadowed animal faces, shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back, head down, before a garish silhouette of a cross.
The ski masks tilted to one side then the next around him. He saw twins, white girls with red hair covering their faces. Then a girl in an armchair with her jean skirt hiked up, playing with herself while two boys watched in drug-eyed wonder.
Jonathan smirked at some mixed kid in a corner who considered him over the bent beer can he had sideways to his mouth and whose end he lit while he toked. The beautiful face vanished behind a cloud of smoke. Glistening curls, someone’s head, bobbed by his elbows.
Cameras watched him from all angles. Jonathan, sipping from his drug cocktail and taking the occasional pull from a blunt that wasn’t there, made a game out of trying to spot them. Some partiers he walked by had frozen, and Jonathan wondered if they knew about the cameras too and were trying to hide, like if you stood still before a T-Rex and made it so it couldn’t find you. The patterned wallpaper moved whenever he wasn’t looking at it.
Neon balloons appeared, shrinking as skinny guys with uncut hair inhaled the helium, eyes closed to the music that rocked the sternums you could see through their skin.
In one room Jonathan passed, two boys constructed a blunt on an older woman’s bare stomach. Her limbs moved as if she were underwater. She looked at Jonathan, on her back, and he knew, even in his haze, that she didn’t see him. Weed stems dotted the skin around her navel. A pearl necklace hung tight around her neck, and one of the boys sat in a chair, dumb, while the other reached out and tongue-kissed the woman. She grabbed the boy’s face and pulled him in. The other boy ran out of his seat, Afro bouncing on his head, punched a guy in the nuts, then ran on giggling, swallowed by the sea of bodies in another room.
Oxygen canisters had been mixed with some hallucinogen so that neon gas sprayed out onto a girl’s ass. Another had her hands against a wall in an arrest pose while she twerked in a cloud of lambent smoke.
A bearded guy, Solo cup in hand, looked as though he were in the midst of an epileptic fit against a wall by the staircase, but Jonathan heard the music and saw the guy’s rhythm and smirked. White guys.
As he moved, the cups got bigger and bigger until they matched his in size.
A girl pulled up her red ski mask and revealed the face of someone who could’ve been his aunt. Guys standing in the doorway to a second kitchen sucked on Popsicles; their gazes followed Jonathan as he moved past.
Ski-masked girls took a shock-club to a piñata in a bedroom where a girl was giving a guy a blow job, and another girl stumbled to the doorway and put her coke-nailed finger to her lips, silently shushing Jonathan with a grin.
In a bathroom, a middle-aged guy sat on the toilet, reading a newspaper whose letters swirled while a hairless young guy kneeled before him, his head bobbing in the other guy’s lap.
Someone was having a tattoo etched into her skin in another room, and the whole thing glowed its pattern onto the ceiling. Each mirror Jonathan passed had his head shaking at all angles like an inhuman thing, but he felt no movement in his neck. He paused at one and saw David behind him, resting a chin on his shoulder, and he caressed the cheek, leaned into the body, then turned around and saw a wild boar’s face staring at him, placed onto the top of a girl’s writhing body.
A godlike girl’s face turned to the ceiling while she danced on a couch, eyes rolling into the back of her head while a group of guys and girls cheered a kid on as he vomited into his gigantic cup.
People strutted or ambled or shuffled or stumbled by with effulgent headbands. Someone’s light got stuck in Jonathan’s hair.
A makeshift Dome surrounded the house and the adjacent forest, so that when Jonathan emptied out onto the back porch, he didn’t need the air mask he’d surely misplaced. Already, his augments set to work, breaking down the pollutants he’d shoveled into his system. Chill autumn air kissed his face like a sea of someone’s hair. As his head cleared, he scrolled through recent photos and saw a ’gram of the kid with the bong can; the caption read: #TeamBeige.
On the back porch, #TeamBeige materialized at his side, rolling up his own cigarette. Crystals glowed in the tobacco. The guy wore a low-cut V-neck and a massive gray beanie bunched back against the back of his neck. His forehead glistened.
“There isn’t an ounce of cellulite in there,” Jonathan murmured.
#TeamBeige took a toke and offered his cigarillo to Jonathan, who took it and puffed. “You know I left that shit on the Colony. This is purely a No Cellulite Zone.”
“Rules of the Frontier.”
#TeamBeige chuckled at that, looked Jonathan over. “Rules of the Frontier, indeed.” He took the cigarillo back. “You’re new. When’d you get in?”
“About a week or two ago.” A beat. Jonathan glanced over at the young man. “Staking out a claim before I send for my boy.” He waited for defeat to register on #TeamBeige’s face. Not even a flicker.
