“That there’s twenty bucks,” Jayceon said, indicating with his hammer a mound of rubble.
Kendrick hopped over a ledge, dust rising in clouds upon his landing. “I’m standin’ in about two days’ pay rightchea.”
Linc walked past Jayceon, who shot back at Kendrick, “You standin’ in a pile o’ bats is what you standin’ in.”
They went back and forth a few times, Mercedes interjecting with her own putdowns, but before long, everyone was working. Dig, clean, sort, build. Linc flipped his hammer so that the flat claw pointed at the ground. Wide stance, he swung around in sweeping strokes, raking through the rubble, and when he found a brick, he flipped his hammer and, with one swift blow, dashed away the mortar that had clung to it. A quick glance, and it went into his pile. More sweeping, more hammering to clear away the detritus. A couple stackers had shorter handles on their hammers and had to stoop further than was healthy, hands that much closer to the wires, nails, broken piping, panes of glass. With each strike, mortar dust erupted, shards shooting in all directions. Grit settled on their clothes, filled their pores, turned the sweat on their brow into streams of mud that tracked the bandannas over their mouths like tearstains.
Rodney, who moved like a ballet dancer around his war-stiffened leg, had about five hundred bricks. He danced in the middle of his pallet, building his stack around him in the shape of an L. Before long, he had nine layers up, alternating the directions of the bricks on each layer so that the whole thing wouldn’t topple.
“How old is you, Bishop?” Mercedes shouted, surrounded by her own stacks.
“Eighty-two next Monday.”
“Coulda swore you was at least eighty-five last week.”
“Hah!” Bugs shouted from his pile of brick and ash. “Bishop, you been stackin’ for least forty-fifty years, that right?”
“Fifty-six years,” Bishop said around his cigar, working in smooth, slow, efficient motions. Once his body got stooped to a particular angle, it stayed that way for the entirety of his run. “Lord’s help, I just might retire soon.”
“That right, Bishop?” Kendrick sang.
“Yep. Get me a nice white horse and set out for Rancho Cooooooocamunga.” At which everyone, including Bishop, roared with mirth.
“You do that, we might miss you, Bishop.” Wyatt this time, athletic build a-sheen with muddy sweat where his muscled limbs showed beneath his work shirt. “Who gon’ preach to the congregation here when you gone?”
“The Lord provides,” Bishop said. Then again, beneath his breath, to himself, “The Lord provides.”
Linc was close enough to hear it under the clink his hammer made when it broke the mortar off a brick.
THE smoker blew rings into the air, swirling, uncertain wedding bands that disintegrated as they floated away from his face. David knew better than to try. He still felt he could only stand in the man’s presence, not saying a word. Thoughts were not the things raging inside him, only inarticulate feelings, a storm composed of elements he could not name, thundering and earthquaking inside him. What was Jo thinking? Cyberization would kill her. Was that what she wanted? David had stared at the floor, smoking, almost as soon as he’d entered the lounge.
“How’s she doin’?” the smoker asked.
David looked up, startled out of his trance.
“Jo. Your mom. How’s she doin’?”
David shrugged, tried for a smile.
For a long time, the smoker looked at him. Kind and scrutinizing. “You okay?”
David faced him at last. His eyes burned, but no tears leaked. Perhaps his lacrimal ducts had been malformed. But anger blossomed in him at this new physical inability. “Yes. I’m fine. I don’t think I should be, but I’m fine.” They were alone in a corner, not far from the other smokers, but cloistered nonetheless. He spoke with mechanical quietude. “She wants to cyberize. She thinks it’ll preserve her memories of my mom. My … my other mom. She won’t survive the operation—she’s too old—but she doesn’t care. And I think this is what she wants. It’s like she’s wasting it all. Dee died in the accident, not her. And she’s just … she’s just gonna throw her life away.” He looked the smoker in the face. “I don’t know why I care. It’s not like I need her for anything. She’s her own person still. She can make decisions for herself. It’s not like she’s leaving me behind, I just … I care and I don’t know why I should.”
“You’re in pain. She’s your mom, and you’re in pain.”
A bitter laugh barged out of David’s mouth. “This isn’t painful,” he hissed. He started, realized what had happened, and demurred. “Physical injury is painful.” He itched his forearm beneath his sweater sleeve where he hid the scars he wasn’t yet ready to show this new person in his life. The puckering had not yet gone down on the latest. “Smoking is painful. This is empty.”
“You should come to my group,” the stranger in the leather jacket said gently.
“I don’t need a group.”
The stranger reached toward him, maybe to touch his shoulder, maybe to embrace him, but David’s hand shot out, smacking the hand away and shoving the stranger into the wall. It was only a moment. A single moment where power, fury, roared in his limbs, where he remembered just how much of his body was machine, stronger, more dangerous, than flesh. Instinct had brought the stranger’s hands up in defense, but David saw the look in his eyes and how limp the man’s defensive posture was, how much he looked like someone this had happened to before.
Before long, the stranger was doubled over, coughing, as though David had broken a gear or loosened the screws on a panel inside him. Phlegmy, greedy coughs.
David winced when he saw how fragile, how little he had made him.
For several long seconds after the coughing fit subsided, the stranger leaned back against the wall, catching his breath and looking aimlessly at the ceiling. Then, with returning strength, he pushed himself off and calmly searched the floor for the pack of disposable atomizers that had fallen out of his pocket.
With a few heavy sighs, he re-fitted the loosened battery of the one he had dropped and was smoking again.
David stared at him, eyes wide with puzzlement.
“I just realized,” he said without looking at David, “I never gave you my name.”
“Your name?”
“Jon.”
“Jon?”
“Yeah, Jon. No ‘H.’” He chuckled and let out a cough. “Only family calls me Jonathan. And they’re just about all dead. Almost.” The coughing grew louder and he doubled over before righting himself. He held the atomizer in his fingers, looked it over, considered it, then put it back in his mouth. “You should come to my group,” he said.
David had no more anger left, so he said, “Yes.”
THE plastic chairs on Jonathan’s balcony were yellow, though, by now, David could tell they had not begun their lives that color. Jonathan was still asleep so David, still glowing from the sweaty, post-argument peacemaking of the night before, stepped into his boxers and out onto the balcony and took a seat in one of the chairs. A pack of Gauloises atomizers sat on a table between the two chairs, along with an empty but soot-stained ashtray and a bowl of plum seeds Jonathan hadn’t yet thrown out.
Jonathan’s husky found shade beneath the legs of the unoccupied chair and the shelf that ringed the balcony, and David reached down to scratch the back of its neck as the first rays of artificial sunlight reflected off the panels in the Colony ceiling.
