Contract City

Copyright © 2015 Mark Falkin

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

All characters in this book are ficticious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Published by Bancroft Press

P.O. Box 65360

Baltimore, MD 21209

410-764-1967 (fax)

www.bancroftpress.com

Cover and Interior Design by J. L. Herchenroeder

Front Cover Quote by Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

Photos of the author courtesy of Stella Falkin

For Stella and Elizabeth­: Don’t just talk about it

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

—Cormac McCarthy

Billy-I, Billy-L, Billy-L, Billy-Y

Billy-I, Billy-L, Billy-L, Billy-Y

—Guided by Voices

At first, she wasn’t exactly sure who she saw through the viewfinder, from this distance, through the rain. He just stood there, gazing up at the wall emblazoned with the latest tag.

The man in the trench coat she had bracketed in the frame bore a familiar air, but it was hard to say why. The coat was unremarkable—standard beige—and billowing. The shoes were made of a workingman’s dark and nondescript leather. But the slumped countenance meant something to her. His back to her, she couldn’t be sure of the face. But then the shuffle from foot to foot, the way he stood, the hitched right shoulder in the position of a constant half shrug—that did it.

It was her dad, and he was acting—what was the word she’d surely give it in the voice-over?—furtive. Yeah. Through the lens, everything about him said furtive.

The same could be said of her, for there she was, tucked under a black umbrella and hugging the corner of Greenwood and Archer, next to a tall, ruddy wall of an old brick warehouse, pointing a camera at her own dad.

Forget how you get the shot. Her lips moved, but they made no noise as she gave herself directions on the fly. Just get the shot.

While trying to hold her umbrella, she stood as still as she could, zooming in on the wall’s slashing, artless red and a few frozen tendrils of running paint. Twenty feet long, it read: the fucking terrorists fucking won.

Below that was WH2RR?? The style was reminiscent of the New York graffiti artists she’d studied while prepping for her film, especially the train painters of nearly fifty years ago (the late 1970s and early 1980s) like Futura 2000, Lee, and Dondi.

Despite the efforts of Free Force Tulsa (FFT), WH2RR?? tags continued to pop up everywhere, like mysterious, ephemeral crop circles, always with the two incredulous question marks, further emphasizing the repeated R. The little stencils showed up in bathroom stalls, on mail drop boxes, on the gray utility oblongs that stood all over like mute sentries. There had even been a big one stretched across the broad flat chest of the seventy-six-foot-tall Golden Driller statue standing in front of the fairgrounds expo building. It played in your head, and nobody knew what it meant—not the bloggers, or the hackers, or even the pseudo-journalists looking for their first story. It just floated out there in the subconscious of the city, rumbling but not storming.

When the local media was covering the story, back before the Internet scrubbings, they likened the tags to the earliest modern graffiti that appeared all over Europe during the Second World War: Kilroy was here. That suggested something innocent—something quizzical, funny maybe—but Sara thought Kilroy’s were more like Banksy’s infamous stenciled rats. Yet, these were different. They weren’t self-promotion. There was something dangerous here—a constant question. And this new scrawled phrase above the tag—the fucking terrorists fucking won—seemed desperate and angry.

The tags, like chess moves, disappeared almost as soon as they were discovered around the city. Yet the tagger popped up, defying gravity, security measures, and even broad daylight, and the FFT’s power washers showed up so fast you’d have thought someone important was having a heart attack.

They erased the tags with such urgency because they were scared.

Sara needed to know why.

A dark green helicopter jetted over. It flew low, and its blades boomed. She flinched and cowered; it was so loud and close, but her dad didn’t even glance up. He just stood still on the sidewalk in front of the tag now, hands down to his sides, displaying neither emotion nor opinion. When she zoomed in tight, she could see his jaw grinding and his pockmarked chin—acne scars from his adolescence, and a constant reminder to her that he was once her age. Then he dropped his head, taking a step out of the frame, and she lost him, as if he had stepped through a wall.

Dad was now playing a bit role in her planned documentary. She hadn’t followed him down here to Greenwood, Tulsa’s historic black district. She had had no idea he would be here this morning. She was shooting some mise-en-scène of downtown Tulsa, where the tags had originated, to set the place for the film. And here her dad had walked onto the stage.

In spite of all FFT’s efforts, you saw WH2RR?? on the walls of public buildings, including City Hall; you saw it on schools; you saw it scribbled on and etched into bathroom stalls in just about every public place. Some were real, and some were probably copycats writing it to be writing it. And Sara knew that was the whole point. Memes don’t need explanation.

At Chosen Hill, the megachurch that had sprouted up just south of town, you saw it popping up again and again: WH2RR?? scrawled hastily on the church walls and all over the parking lot amidst the big fancy cars. Sara knew this because her mother was perhaps the most devoted member of Pastor Mammon’s flock.

This past Christmas, as the whole family attended services, the entire congregation had found bookmarks stenciled with the letters WH2RR?? inserted into their Book of Common Prayer. The bookmarks were all glued onto the same page: 470, Burial I, At the Burial of a Child. Nobody could understand how, overnight, the same bookmark could be secretly glued into thousands of prayer books right under the nose of the church’s security and its cameras.

Though Sara was interested in the merits of the tags themselves, she was admittedly apolitical—as an artist must be. She would contend at opportune moments. The real reason for the film was that she needed it for her arts college application to UCLA.

She dressed L.A., and she dreamt L.A., despite never having been to L. A. Her room, a sacrosanct, sequestered space away from her brother, dad, and mother, was covered in movie posters. Blade Runner in Spanish. Jailhouse Rock in French: Le Rock du bagne avec Judy Tyler. Brokeback Mountain. Blood Meridian.

It was one of the only places where she felt she belonged—certainly not in her high school, which was full of rah-rah idiot sheep. She knew she belonged here, deep into her art, with the sheep, the world, the family growing distant. They’d all know her name one day, and then they would understand. They’d come to know the famous Sara Paige Christie, Filmmaker.

Sara turned off the camera, which she had borrowed from the media center at T. Boone Pickens High School, and slipped it into the puffed bag. She walked toward where she saw her dad disappear.

A second helicopter spun into view against roiling rain clouds, and for a minute, she found herself fixated on the clouds. She had come to love film, because she loved storms. She enjoyed storm-chasing, the school-sanctioned and, now, the unsanctioned kind, having documented such chases since the seventh grade.

Though she loved so-called art films, she often thought that what was deemed high art was actually crap, though she didn’t let on for fear of sounding desperately contrarian. Fellini enthralled her, though he also scared her. So did Kubrick. Lynch. Cassavetes. Scorsese. The Big Dead Men of film. The women she could point to were Kathryn Bigelow, Debra Granik, and Emily Hagins, the mother of post-modern horror.

Her love of film had first taken root in the times when she and her dad began to watch movies together. Tons of them. It was their thing. She relished it, especially when she was a little girl, she and her daddy, just the two of them, holding hands in a theater, or even just at home on the couch. They would watch all kinds—recent features, films from Hollywood’s golden age, and her dad’s favorite, documentaries. And now, after they watched them, they talked about them, critiqued them, and tried to better understand the ones they found abstruse.

On her own, she avidly attended Tulsa’s microcinema gatherings, where they’d screen celluloid films devoid of entertainment value and nod knowingly. She liked those films, and that scene, too, but ultimately it was all too precious, everything fetishized. To delve too deeply into obscure film, she knew, practically proscribed a real career in film.

Finding a new spot in an alcove from which to safely film, she thought about how the tags were appearing more often now, and changing message and tone, as if their volume increased with an approaching zero hour—a deadline of which FFT seemed acutely aware. The tags now tended beyond the general lament of the underclass toward the starkly racial and, especially lately, to a specific message. To wit, last week, a spate of blue monochrome beauties cropped up all over the city: This is working very well for them. None of those tags bore the sloppiness of the one today; none had running bloody tendrils, which Sara understood to be intentional.

At the site of one of the blue displays, a recorded message of the words—spoken in a too-perky voice seemingly belonging to a white woman—played over and over. It had taken the better part of an afternoon for FFT’s cleansers to find the offending speakers, which had been hidden so that the sound bounced off the walls, making them difficult to locate.

Uncertain that she’d charged the camera’s battery the previous night, Sara swung the bag around her front to check the power supply, hoping the sudden movement wouldn’t draw attention from two FFT men lingering at the scene. She glanced down the street through wet, hanging bangs.

Her dad stepped out onto the walk again, his head panning, then seeming to hesitate on her location for just a second, almost locking in on her.

She froze.

Her dad’s gaze swept past her when someone inside called his attention away.

She exhaled relief and refocused on her task, thinking about how, just last week at deep dusk, thousands of people exiting a City of the Future rally at the downtown convention center had been treated to a huge, looped image of a little black boy holding a basketball on a gray day, the taller grasses of a field bending in the wind. Then, a smash cut to a ditch with inches of standing water, and then a flash of WH2RR?? subliminally fast, burning it into the mind. The all-glass building across the street had been transformed into a massive digital screen, the same kind of high-tech outdoor advertising you saw in Tokyo, or Shanghai, or New York.

Big enough to make the television news, the event didn’t stay in the public mind long. Coverage abruptly shifted to small-scale terrorist attacks occurring overseas and the sudden spike in juvenile TB deaths in the U.S.

But the event stayed in FFT’s collective mind. They just could not catch the guy. FFT, according to rumor, was convinced that only a group, a gang, could pull off this massive graffiti campaign. All information about the tags and taggers was rumor. The rumors fed a mythos: Word of mouth, word of myth.

Sara had listened to her dad grouse about it for the better part of a year now, though he wasn’t sure either, as his long pauses and dismissals testified whenever she brought the subject up, which wasn’t often but never in the presence of her brother or mother. It just kept getting more and more intense and bigger in scale, especially the acronymic interrogatory, so FFT had assigned a full-time investigator—Sara’s dad, though he was still technically homicide, and he was failing. Chasing a phantom distressed him so much that his banged-up back muscles required surgery, especially now that the tags seemed directed, at least tangentially, at the fact that Tulsa was a fully privatized city—a contract city—which it had been now for three years.

But things had not been working very well for them here in the City of the Future. Many of the public schools converted into profit-making businesses were closing, but not because they weren’t profitable—they just weren’t profitable enough. Thousands of kids scrambled for places to enroll.

The biggest problem: Hospitals would admit only those who could verifiably pay, a determination made with the swipe of a card. If your card didn’t swipe right, you were turned away, even for a medical emergency. Indigents had to somehow shuttle themselves out of the incorporated city, which Tulsans called the Zone, a colloquialism harkening back to Baghdad’s Green Zone during Iraq War days, to the only other ER, which was so overwhelmed that it operated more like a military triage unit.

Across from the hospitals, in and out of the incorporated city, armored vehicles were parked, at least when they weren’t roaming the streets, giving the city that same feel as it had during the days of martial law: incipient dread.

Sara felt it, too, and this dread wasn’t a vestige of the short-lived period of anxiety attacks she experienced last semester. Something in her dad’s demeanor made her feel it—not unlike seven years earlier, after the president’s assassination and the riots and federal martial law that followed.

She turned on her camera. She lifted the viewfinder to her eye.

She pressed record.

She stood on the other side of the street now, but up a ways from the tag, watching the empty street in heavy rain. Large drops thumped her umbrella. Radiating down the shaft, the thumps fused with her heart’s beats. All thudding and watching. Her dad emerged from the building with one large step, looking in the other direction. She sidestepped back into the glassed alcove of an empty building, turned away and, in the reflection of the glass opposite her, watched him speak into his phone. He winced and ducked, the rain too much for him, and stepped back out of sight.

The truck came loud and lumbering, stopping in front of the building with the tag. Outfitted men climbed out into the rain pulling hoses. The sound of the pressure washer dulled the rain sounds. She hoped the microphone attached at the top of the camera would catch the washer sounds, but worried it wouldn’t, because being up in the umbrella, it might record only thumping rain. Zooming in, Sara stepped out onto the sidewalk and filmed the red slowly disappearing, flecks of brick falling to the sidewalk.

She zoomed in tight, so that water striking the wall filled the frame, and stayed there for a minute, following the water’s progression, erasure, and destruction. Though she was concentrating on the action with her right, recording eye, her left eye began to detect a change in movement on the ground—benign at first, but then more concerning as she gave the movement attention, pulling down the camera and pointing it at ground level while retracting the zoom to get a wider shot.

Her eyes grew wide because, in the frame, a couple of the FFT men were looking over at her. One motioned toward her with an ape-like fling of his arm. Then, save for the man spraying the wall, they all looked at her at once.

They nodded, squared their shoulders, and moved toward her.

She powered down, zipped up the camera, and dashed across the street, back toward her car, which was parked around the corner and up half a block. But when she turned the corner, she saw that her car was farther up the block than she’d remembered. A wind gust yanked her umbrella up. As she fought to pull it under control, another truck, up the street about a block away, appeared and began moving toward her.

A few FFT men hopped out as the truck rolled to a stop with a loud hydraulic hiss and whine. Its diesel engine rattled. Its grill and dead headlights made a blank, imperious face. Though they were too far away for her to be sure, the men did not look as if they were interested in anything but her. She tried to settle her mind and strolled toward her car as calmly as she knew how. But there was no mistaking it. Nobody else was on the street; nothing else was going on. With alacrity, they now walked directly toward her. It was less a walk than a syncopated march.

One put his hand to his ear.

All broke into a trot.

The truck reversed quickly, turned, and disappeared, attempting, she was sure, to outflank her.

She looked over her shoulder and noticed that the power washer men had advanced around the corner. One called out, Hey! Hold on a minute! The voice was so youthful, convivial, and trained. An incredulous chuckle came with it, one that said, We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just curious.

Sara no longer cared how it looked and jogged toward her car, now fifty yards away. The men behind her were closer than that.

Footsteps from behind and in front of her grew louder. A block away, out of sight, the truck’s engine roared with acceleration. Wind jerked her umbrella. Keys jumbled in her hand.

The chuckler was not far behind her, his voice no longer a shout. We just want to talk to you. What are you filming? That’s all—

They were close enough now for her to hear the loud scratch of a two-way radio and the barking voice issuing from it. That she couldn’t decipher the words didn’t matter. She ran the last yards to the car and, in one fluid motion, unlocked the door, somehow collapsed the umbrella, threw the camera bag into the car, and fell into the driver’s seat. The rain created a sheet of water on the windshield. Her breathing fogged it within seconds.

With a shaking hand, she started the car.

A booming knock on her window. Sara jumped and screamed.

Hey! Hold up a minute! More insouciant chuckling came from the man. His knuckles rapped, and another man crossed in front of her car to block her progress.

In the rearview mirror, she saw the FFT men who had jogged up the street in weird, relaxed unison.

She shifted into reverse, shook her head at the chuckling power washer, turned the wheel, and shot out into the road, wincing at the possibility of hitting something unseen. She exhaled, threw on the defrost, and let a single swipe of her wipers clear a wedge.

The truck barreled up and stopped in the intersection in front of her just as she came to it. She swerved, rode a tire up on the curb, passed the truck, bounced back into the street, and hit the gas. The truck moaned and lurched from its stance and tried to keep up but quickly fell back.

Goddammit! Sara cried. Two turns later, she was on the expressway rushing home. Her hands shook. She swept her wet auburn hair out of her face and dug into her purse for a cigarette. She flipped one between her lips and lit it with a shaky hand. Spreading across her mind as the initial sting of smoke invaded her lungs was not only the knowledge that the swarming men most definitely did not just want to talk, but that the collective fear that crackled among them—the flinging arm, the chuckler’s tremulous voice, the two-way barking—proved that these tags were considered a threat, and that her film about them could be huge. Their fear elated her somehow. In that moment, as she tried to calm down, her determination to make this film crystallized, even knowing that the FFT now had her car’s license number and would soon know who she was.

But calm eluded her. The entire way home, there it was in her rearview mirror: the helicopter. Though it stayed back a bit, and she tried to ignore it, it perfectly tracked her car, the helo’s windshield like the eyes of an all-seeing insect.

When she got out of her car in her driveway, she scrutinized the sky but could hear only the helicopter’s chopping echo.

Sara and her dad somehow managed to meet in the kitchen at the same time. Her dad looked at her strangely, fingering but not lifting the note her mother had left atop one of the takeout containers on the counter. Instead, he stood there looking at the note and tapping his fingers.

As usual, dinner that night would take place all over the house. All family members would go to their own room with a box and a fork.

What’s your guess? her dad asked her, smiling weakly.

Hmmm. Sara sniffed the air, placing her hand on a cocked hip. "Chinese maybe? Though it’s not in the usual cardboard box. Maybe she’s found a new delivery place. Heaven forbid she should have to go get the food herself."

Her dad was usually her mom’s apologist, but tonight he offered no defense. You’re probably right. Chinese hasn’t been in the rotation lately.

Sara picked up and studied the half-wadded receipt left beside the boxes. Definitely delivery. She was probably late for the service. Can’t keep the good pastor waiting.

Uh-huh, her dad said, more to himself than her. Okay, which one do you want to crack open first?

Sara took a step toward the first container and peeked under the lid without disengaging the squeaky fastener, bending it sideways for a look, then wincing as if it were something horrible. I’ll take this one. Ostensibly, it’s Chinese. Looks full of preservatives but edible.

Brave girl, he said, patting her on the back. He looked Sara up and down in her jogging shorts and tee. Did you go to school today?

No, Dad. I figured it was time to just forget about school and go get that job in construction.

All right, smart ass. Just answer the question.

Nope, said Sara. It’s finals week, and I didn’t have one today.

Wow. Juniors just running free. I know it’s billed as college prep, but . . . So, are you studying, or working on your film? he asked.

Uh, yeah. Why? She fiddled with the receipt on the counter, then balled it tight.

Her dad paused and blinked at her with an expectant look. Yeah to what, studying or filmmaking?

Oh. Both. Mostly studying. She playfully tossed the paper at him.

Her dad bobbed. The receipt ball flew over his shoulder. You don’t seem to be in your regular study mode. Usually you’re ensconced in your room all week and we don’t see you.

Well, I’ve done well this semester. When you have a certain grade going into an exam, you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to. And in three of my five classes, I don’t want to.

Her dad rapped his knuckles on the marble counter top. Why? What grades do you have to have going in?

A. Not A-minus. A.

And you have one in all three?

Yyyyep.

Her dad nodded approval. And what about the others?

Fs. She opened the Styrofoam. Steam rose and smacked her in her face. She looked up at her dad with a smile in her eyes. He looked as if he thought she was joking but wasn’t totally sure. No, not really, Dad. A-minuses in two, but . . . I still need to pass gym. I’m sorry. It’s called State-Required Physical Fitness. Surpf. Still gotta pass the Surpf. I messed up the Surpf run we did right after spring break.

"The B