Knuckleduster Page 3

  With the painting still gummy to the touch in places, Brody went back inside, leaving the windows open, and prepared himself a cup of green tea. He collapsed onto the couch and, desiring some sort of noise, asked the television to find a classical music station. It found some. He let the coolness of the pleather on his back soothe him. Collecting the painting and making tea felt like routines of an automaton. He wasn’t in his head while doing them. His pulse was still quickened, his mind still choked with the night’s activities.

  He decided to use the last few minutes of vision to go into his outdated cellular phone and erase the documents he had gathered on Jonah Billingsly since that often helped to clear it all out, to purge it from his life as a job complete. Brody wasn’t a cop, so he wasn’t allowed any investigative applications on his cell, but he had a few homemade ones that worked nearly as well but operated just outside of legality. Jonah had received what was coming to him, and Brody could delete his homework on the man with confidence that the job was done and he’d never have to track down that particular individual again. Brody knew his type of justice was concise and seldom required repeating.

  Brody found himself dozing off during the contestant introduction portion of a Prize Mountain rerun. The corner of his left eye flashed 00:00:59 and pulled him completely free from his encroaching slumber. He used the minute remaining on his lenses’ charge to turn off the TV, fill a bottle of water, and trudge into the bathroom, the only room in the apartment that had a door and its own walls. He approached the mirror.

  00:00:32. Jonah had actually gotten him. On his cheekbone was a trio of tiny scratches, probably from a sleeve zipper or a ring. He dabbed on some salve.

  00:00:15. He leaned forward over the sink and spread his eyelids wide with his index and middle finger and fished in with his other hand, pinching the membranous disk off the surface of his eye. With the remaining seconds Brody had before the sight-gifting carotene concentrate petered out and the world before him began to cloud, he gazed at himself. In a moment, the artificial vitamins that the lenses provided would be metabolized, and his eyesight would quickly slide back into darkness.

  In the mirror before him, Brody saw someone both familiar and unrecognizable as himself. He saw his age, his scars. With each tired blink the orange stains in the whites of his eyes faded out to a haggard bloodshot. After, they’d cloud over entirely. Naturally, he’d never seen that part of his return to blindness happen, but one drunken night of self-pity, he’d taken his own picture out of curiosity of what a photo of a blind man looks like—and he wondered if he’d possibly, even as blind as he was, see a flash. The next morning he had put the lenses back in and looked. Instead of that set of browns he’d inherited from his mother, just two white disks in their place, like doll’s eyes as they’d be found only halfway down the assembly line.

  The lens charger clicked on, and the new set of batteries went to work exposing the lenses to a continuous blast of ultraviolet. It helped to both sanitize the disks and restore the microscopic carotene power plants that made up the membrane of the lenses. With shadows starting to litter his vision, he listened beyond the bathroom light’s fluorescent buzz: three long notes issuing from the charger denoting the charge’s commencement. He looked down at the two dishes labeled with a Braille L and R. The charge indicator lights winked out just as the blackness ate the last bits of sight, the aperture shutting.

  He felt around on the counter for the sonar case, but it wasn’t where he usually put it. He checked the shelves of his medicine cabinet. Nope. He cursed and turned around, now fully enveloped in his blindness, and ran his hands along the bathroom wall, slapping and grabbing as he walked out. He imagined his Frankenstein strut looked like a cruel pantomime of a blind person.

  His knees bumped his mattress, and he allowed himself to fall into bed. He reached over the sides of it, his fingers patting around over the cool, concrete floor, searching for the sonar. No dice. He rose and carefully moved across the space to the living area and scoured around the couch, the end table. Again, it wasn’t there.

  Brody followed the beacon of his refrigerator’s hum to the kitchen counter. He scolded himself about remembering to put things back where they belonged or at least having the device close at hand before he took out his lenses.

  After searching the entire apartment, he found the sonar where he should’ve begun his search—the inside pocket of his coat. He opened the hockey puck-sized case and pulled out the device—the diameter of a soda can bottom and the color of a Band-Aid, flesh tone but not quite—and pushed it onto his forehead where it stuck with an adhesive that never got fuzzy or lost its tackiness.

  He pressed the power button on the device’s side, and the world came into focus again but this time much differently. He could see maybe thirty feet in all directions, but anything farther might as well be the edge at the end of the world.

  The sonar silently pinged and sent out its ringing wave of echolocation. The device used ultrasound and the path from his ruined optic nerves to his brain to catch and render shapes and rough details into a mentally palatable stream. But color—helpful ones like the signs denoting which bathroom was the men’s—could not be illustrated with the sonar. Everything was in floating pixels, polygons springing up around objects to map their general shape and size. From a distance, everything was simplified to its basic elements and clunky shapes, the details distilling more and more as he neared the object in question.

  The curves of a voluptuous woman could be made to look blocky, poorly rendered, an altogether boring representation of what was actually before him if he wasn’t willing to concentrate. Some time to focus, a clear mind, and perhaps a little alcohol, and details would begin to sharpen and faces would look more like … faces.

  Brody went over to the open windows and shut them one by one. The sonar sent out its ping with the last window closed only partway. He could see the city beyond his balcony, the cars collected at the intersection made into rough shapes like soapbox derby cars. The buildings, giant cubes laid out in a pattern, stacked along the street. Textures, like the cracked asphalt, the slickness of a telephone pole covered in stickers, were smoothed down to their simplest three-dimensional shapes. Pages stapled to the pole could be seen but not read, unless their print was embossed or in Braille. Even smaller things—the fruit flies that always found a way into his apartment—were tiny flitting signatures of movement his sonar picked up and coded down for Brody as singular hovering pixels. All of it together, a life-size wire-frame diorama.

  He turned the sonar off, sick of wearing it even after just a few minutes because of the fatigue it gave his brain. He stuck it to the wall next to the bed like a kid saving a piece of gum for the next day and lay down on the bare mattress to sleep but didn’t for a good handful of hours.

  Brody blinked at the darkness in his eyes, listened to the city that, even with closed windows, could never be completely muffled. The constant hum of the interstate, the chirp of the midnight light-rail hitting that bend right outside his window, the heater units going all at once in the various apartment buildings shouldered up next to his, the air filtration systems on the corner of each street purring away, dutifully pulling dust and infinitesimal debris from the air. He listened to the closest sound: the bugs gathering around the lights he had accidentally left on, clinking their exoskeletons against the glass, struggling fruitlessly to get at the warmth within.

  He’d wake the next morning to see the lights had been on all night, luring in more bugs trying to find a place to shack up for the oncoming winter, and he’d curse, because that was going to be another pile of credits tacked onto his utility bill that he couldn’t pay. He’d have to procure another client among those women who had nowhere to go but the community center and no one to talk to but those who already knew Brody’s name, sobriquet and all. Another fist thrown, another transfer of credits, another day marked off the calendar doing what he didn’t want to exactly but felt compelled to continue nonetheless.
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  3

  It was Saturday—the one day in Brody’s tireless week roaming bars and clubs that was reserved for painting. He took his easel out of the corner and set it up in front of the wall of windows.

  The painting he had been working on, using a mix of acrylic and oils, was to be a snapshot of the city seen beyond his windows: red curtains flaring in the wind in the foreground and the metropolis in daylight beyond, something of a rarity for him. When he finished it he planned to hang it in the apartment, his sole piece of décor. All his previous paintings were layered under this one, but he had a good feeling about this latest attempt. He wanted to look at it with his lenses in and see a reminder not only of his artistry but that the Twin Cities also existed during the day.

  He sat there in a pair of beat-up jeans and a T-shirt and painted for close to two hours before his hands shook from hunger. He took a step toward the kitchen and glanced back at the canvas, comparing it to the real thing behind it. It was looking good. He saw that he had spilled a couple of drops of black and red paint on the floor, but he had the lease on the place for another two years—plenty of time to scrub it out later.

  Lunch consisted of a salad with tuna-flavored soy balls and hydroponic cocktail onions, evidence he was scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as the contents of his pantry were concerned. He stood within a few feet of the canvas as he ate, examining his work. At that precise moment, when the light was just right, his painting and its subject were identical. A few more minutes and the light would change, and there it’d be: a painting of an estimation of what his city looked like in the daylight.

  09:59:59 flashed that terrible cautionary red only a machine can produce. That was all the new set of batteries could provide, it seemed. He sighed and went to the bathroom to remove the lenses to try to eke out the last bit of charge he could claim from the batteries, switched on his sonar, and slapped it to his forehead.

  Exiting the bathroom, he looked at his painting on the easel. Just a flat square, textured with colorless paint. It might as well be a sticky, wet slab of canvas with nothing but black paint. He clicked off the sonar and opted to navigate his apartment in total darkness, smelling paint and faux tuna, listening for his cell to ring about something, anything to occupy his time. A case would be good, a woman on the other end begging him to do something about her awful husband. He wished no ill will toward anyone, but he relied on people doing what they did if he was to ever finish the painting.

  Alone in his apartment for weeks at a time, Brody often considered getting an honest nine-to-five job to finance as many batteries as he wanted, but he felt better operating as a freelance problem solver of sorts. It felt appropriate for a war veteran who had a remarkably short fuse. But the longer he remained in the apartment with the silence and the memories of the crying women with bruised faces he met at the community center, he felt a tightening on him, as if he were in the grip of a giant snake, slowly being squeezed.

  After he’d gone out and given whomever what was deserved, he could sit in the silence and the looming isolation calmly for two days. No more. Then he’d have to leave—go to the community center, work off a few hours his probation officer scheduled, and inevitably come across yet another woman who required his help. And then he’d be off again, another snake around his neck choking everything else out of his life until nothing but tunnel vision remained. But this time it came quicker; he had just dealt with Jonah the night before and already he was distracted, tight.

  Brody rifled through the shoe box of old lens charger batteries in the cabinet beneath his bathroom sink. One pronged cylinder after the next felt solid to the shake. If they sloshed around, their liquefied alkaline was still good. If they felt solid when shaken—no good, used up, dry. He found one that sounded chunky inside, only parts of the fluid congealed. He snapped it into the panel on the underside of the case and looked at the top for the light to flash on. Oh, right. Blind. Strange how easy it was to forget.

  Sonar on, he went back out and cleaned up his easel. He put the painting in the corner by the window where it could dry in the afternoon sun. He had a cigarette and chose to put the lenses in even without knowing whether they had gotten a decent charge. The moment his index finger retreated from the surface of his eye, the indicator sprang up: 10:59:59. Eleven hours. Still less than half a day.

  He sighed. “Better than nothing.”

  Brody pushed through the front doors of the community center to find the place nearly empty, save for a lone older gentleman in the corner playing both sides of the foosball table. Brody approached the reinforced glass and tapped on it with a knuckle.

  Samantha, the spritely older clerk who was always there on weekends to sign him in for his community service, looked up from the ordi he was studying in her palm. She smiled, slid aside the partition, wafting out Chanel No. 5, powdery and acidic. “Well, good morning, good looking. To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  “Just thought I’d swing by and get a few hours done.”

  “Let me see what I got for you.” Samantha carefully set the unit on which she’d been doing the crossword aside to get the printed list of tasks.

  Brody noticed the ordi was shiny, new. Not like his phone, with the cracked screen and thumb-polished keypad. He found himself compelled to ask. “Got yourself a new ordi?”

  “Excuse me?” Samantha said, shooting daggers over her thick half-glasses. Corrective surgery was getting cheaper by the year, but she still wore reading glasses.

  “Ordi. Ordinateur,” Brody explained but her confusion remained. “Uh, minicomputer? Newfangled abacus?”

  Samantha followed his gaze to the handheld ordi on the counter. “Oh, this thing? Pete got me that for my birthday.” She flipped to the next page on the clipboard. Brody could see that a majority of the easy jobs—dusting, putting up weatherproofing on the windows—had already been done by the other community servicers, none of whom he had ever actually seen around the place. “All I can do on the damn thing is make calls and do crosswords. But at my age what more do you really need? What did you call it?”

  “An ordinateur. Can I see that for a minute?” he asked, pointing at the clipboard.

  She handed him the list. “That French?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why are you using French? Is that cool now or something?”

  “Not that I know of. I guess whoever makes the gizmos gets to decide what to call them.” He tapped an item on the list. “Does that still need to be done, the basketball court?”

  “Mopped and waxed.” She furrowed her brow, clearly still stuck on talk about ordinateurs. “The French make the gizmos?”

  “Canadians, actually. And the basketball court would be my pleasure.” Brody smiled and handed the list back to her. He removed his keys, cell, and wallet and set them on the counter. That was the rule: one had to leave all personal belongings at the desk during community service. It was pretty hard to cheat court-mandated hours while parked on a barstool around the corner without a jigsaw to settle the tab.

  She picked up the ordi and settled an answer into three down on the crossword—diligent—and asked, “So that’s the word they use for ‘telephone’ nowadays, huh?”

  “And all other electronic devices.”

  “All others? Whatever happened to the other shit?”

  Brody smirked. “Pardon?”

  “You know, the laptops and desktops, tablets and web-books, the towers and hard drives and thumb drives and the this and the that. The stuff that everyone just had to have or else you might as well be using two cans and a string or making smoke signals to call your neighbor. That shit.”

  “They’re all one big happy melded together family now: ordinateurs.”

  “That’s confusing. I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t like it.”

  Brody laughed. “I’ll be sure to let someone know because I am clearly in charge of deciding technological colloquialisms.”

  “There you go again, talking nonsense.”
Samantha collected his things from the counter and put them aside, save for his jigsaw card. That she inserted into the ubiquitous nautilus card reader, a big black conch shell commonplace in the community center and in just about every establishment—government, restaurant, or otherwise.

  She waved him over to the body scanner to the right of the office window. “I know you’re not carrying anything, but the last time I let you go on through, I really got chewed out.”

  “It’s fine.” Brody stepped through the plastic doorway, and no alarms went off. He stepped back through and again nothing went off. He put out his arms as if to say: Good?

  “Okay, go on ahead,” Samantha said.

  As Brody approached the elevator, he said over his shoulder, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Did you see my phone? It’s ancient.”

  From the kiosk, Samantha shouted, “The phone I had before this gizmo had a rotary dial, honey. Try that on for size if you want to compare old junk.”

  He laughed, smacked the call button. “Is the floor buffer still in the utility closet up there?”

  “You know it is. It’ll be right where you left it. Thanks, sugar. Ain’t no one but you ever want to do more than a half-ass job round here.”

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure.”

  The door skidded aside.

  “And the court system’s,” Samantha jibed just before the elevator door closed.

  Brody was unable to squeak out a decent comeback. Alone in the elevator going up, he cursed but it was with a smile.

  The gymnasium was empty. It reminded Brody of his apartment in its chasmal, yawning emptiness and how each footstep reverberated off the walls. The wood floor creaked and popped with each step upon it. Above, the entire ceiling was a paneled skylight, the glass tinted to keep a majority of the sunlight out, causing everything beneath it to take on a jaundiced look.