The Completionist Page 4

  But the person whose loss I’m feeling most right now, the person I’d give a great deal indeed to see coming toward me in this moment when I feel like I’m about to fall over from self-disgust and booze and whatever else it is I’m feeling—sorrow?—isn’t Natalie or Sophie. It’s Gardner.

  She’s the best of the three of us Quinn kids, it goes without saying. The kindest, the smartest (although Fred would never admit it), the hardest-working. She had that kind of sincerity that’s so rare that when you see it in a person you instinctively think they must be fucking with you. Serious, serious girl. No sense of humor really. But she wanted to help fix the world, and that’s not a funny thing. If Gard were here, she would have spent the night tearing into guys like the one I ended up talking to. Giving them the business about how fucked up the Wars are and always have been. How criminal it is that we’ve been fighting over there for more than two decades now, and we haven’t found a way to make it stop. She could go on, our Gard. She could make people angry.

  But she could also tell when I needed her. If Gard were here, if I’d spent the whole night cracking jokes to her about all the clueless fancy people, if we’d gotten drunk and rowdy, if Pop had had to tell us to stop being such smart-asses, if we’d posed for pictures and shook all the Walkers’ friends’ hands, if we’d stood together by the window overlooking the lake and watched Fred and Pop work the room behind us in the reflection in the glass, if after all that it turned out I’d had too much and she’d had to pack me into a car home, then it wouldn’t have been the first time I leaned on her, is what I guess I’m saying.

  And now I’m rageful, besides just drunk and hurting and maudlin. There’s so much money in this room, the people at this party are practically incandescent with it. Whereas my sister lived like a nun and worked like a coal miner.

  I know why Fred is so frantic to find Gard. Because she’s getting married and needs her sister in her corner. Because she needs Gard’s help understanding how to make Care Standard. Because Fred is pregnant against all odds, and having a sister who’s a Nurse Completionist is like having your own personal consultant for the Completion period—all the years and changes and work and sacrifice and love that I suppose just used to be referred to as pregnancy and motherhood, before the fertility crisis made them codify it, regulate it, put a fence around it, put a Care Standard in place for it. So yeah: lots of reasons for Fred to be freaking out. Whereas I’m just the little brother—I don’t have Fred’s kind of skin in the game, and I know it. Right now, I don’t know where Gard is or what happened to her. I don’t know what kind of trouble she got into; I don’t know what she could have done that made Pop unwilling to so much as say her name. I don’t really know whether she’s dead or alive; I don’t know whether she’s hurt.

  One thing I do know is that she would have had better things to do than come to this fucking party.

  And I just miss her.

  Somehow I’m staggering toward the door. I’m not going to be able to say good night to the Walkers, or Fred, or anyone. I won’t be doing the needful. No one comes forward to say goodbye.

  By shuffling my feet forward in a kind of ragged scissoring motion across the smooth floors, I manage to make it around the corner from the great hall where the party is, back to the entryway, and from there—propping myself up on various expensive-looking side tables and things—to the penthouse elevator, without any more embarrassing groaning. I look ridiculous of course, a robot, a drunk malfunctioning robot, but the party ignores me anyway. Even the servers ignore me, and the girl at the door who’s minding the hats and wraps and bags. Then I’m alone, falling toward the street in an efficient machine, and I’m alone when the machine spits me out.

  The lobby feels sweet and windy and cool after the infernal party. Unfortunately, from where I’m standing, just outside the Walkers’ elevator, it also looks about the size of the old Soldier Field. At an impossible distance, through the glass building doors, I see the black river of the street. I’ll never make it all the way to the doors, never make it out to a taxi. Not on these feet. Not with the imps, sawing and knifing and chewing away.

  There’s no one else in the lobby. The doorman must be out on the sidewalk getting someone a cab. There are cameras, though; almost certainly there are many, many cameras. I can’t care. I decide to get on my knees. I will shuffle across the lobby on my knees, while holding myself up on the blobbish, neutral-upholstered nonsense that’s passing for furniture here, in the lobby of this titanically rich palace, Lake Rise 8, with its light fixtures that are exactly as spiky and sinister as desert burrs. I won’t crawl. Not that I’m above it or anything—I’ve crawled plenty. But the pain in my head is real, and putting my head down between my hands would just cause the blood to—

  “What is the matter with you.”

  I don’t look up—I don’t want to, but also I can’t. All the same, of course I know that it’s him. Who else could it be—Mr. Walker? Fred’s fiancé? Although either one of them would be a better alternative.

  “Hiya, Pop.” I’m not looking up. I can’t look up. I have to look straight ahead, at the door, with the sweet blackness of the street beyond. “I haven’t seen you all night.”

  “Get up. Now.”

  Pop has a fearsome way about him. He’s just menacing; he can’t help himself. As a man I seem to have inherited some of this quality of his, and it explains why people react to me the way they often do—like they want to get on my good side and stay there, but not because they like me. His voice is tight and angry and embarrassed. I want to obey him, I always have, but for the moment I don’t see how I can.

  “Get up, or I’ll knock you down and leave you here, you drunk sorry fool.”

  I press the flat of my hand into the nearest plush blobseat and start the hurtful work of getting my feet back under me where they belong.

  F. QUINN

  RISE 8, UNIT 7 LAKE

  NEW CHICAGO 06060601

  NEW STATES

  PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766

  MCC 167 1ST MAW

  FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309

  November 9, 11:14 a.m.

  CQ, you asshole.

  I know you and Pop know where she is. He won’t tell me anything, which doesn’t surprise me, but you at least I expected to be honest with me. You and Gard have been messaging each other this whole time I’ve been panicking looking for her; I know it—of course I know it. I KNOW YOU KNOW WHERE SHE IS. [unintelligible] Right now I would be just as happy if I never saw you or Pop again, you fucks, you shits, but I want my little sister back, and if either of you know something about where she went, you NEED TO TELL ME.

  Gardner is the only person in this family who’s worth anything. She’s better than all the rest of us put together, and she always has been, and I know, I know for a fact that she would never, ever leave me like this if she had a choice. I know Gardner would never leave me alone and pregnant if she had a choice. I know it. She was excited, more excited than me even, I’m not ashamed, I can admit it, I’m scared, I’m fucking petrified. [unintelligible] She’s the only thing that’s been keeping me from jumping out a fucking window.

  You and Pop are men, and you’ll never see her like I do, and you’ll never need her like I do right now. Which explains why it’s even possible for the two of you to be such FUCKING SHITS.

  You don’t even understand. Neither of you can possibly have any fucking clue what’s happening to me right now. I need Gard if I’m going to have a chance of making it through this without completely losing my shit, and I admit that, but the fact is, I am also in a tricky position with the Walkers—and it looks suspicious that she’s just—missing. [unintelligible] It does not look good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to them about it.

  Not that you care. Not that either you or Pop care about a single goddamn thing. It’s all my problem. It’s all on me. [unintelligible]

  If you know where she is, you had better tell me. I will never speak to either of you again. I wil
l never forgive you.

  F

  IN THE FIRST PLACE

  They’re not supposed to have it, obviously, but they’ve got a dog. For now. Sort of an older puppy, he’s mostly feet and ears. Some guy stole the dog from one of the scavengers’ sentry points after they’d hit it, a soft-pawed, tan-colored fellow, a little tiger. Each night the guys take turns bringing it down into the holes to sleep. It’s his squad’s turn tonight. The dog’s name is Rip. They had another one named Tear, but he got killed yesterday. He was a nice little dog.

  When a dog is in the hole with the men at night, there’s the sound of him in the dark: wistful puppy sighs, a tail thumping, a tongue at work, soft breaths and laps. Yesterday, after Tear died, that damn idiot Horrocks told him, with not a trace of shame, that when the puppy curled up next to him in the hole he felt like he’d been chosen for something good, or because of something good inside him, and when he started crying, the goddamn dog just lapped the tears off his face and snuzzled his nose into him and it was like being a kid again, you know? Like being a good little kid and falling asleep like that. Of course he understood; who wouldn’t? If anything, he felt embarrassed for Horrocks that he thought he had to spell it out. Saying it out loud made it feel like a smaller thing than it really was. What the dog did for them didn’t need to be left out in the open like that.

  Almost rack time and he’s been thinking about the dog all day, looking forward to tonight in the hole with a longing that makes him feel both noble and ridiculous. Rip seems to prefer him, but he’s a democratic dog, and over the course of the night he likes to make the rounds, first standing up and elongating from the legs, stretching his paws so the pads separate, yawning with his whole face, then shuffling sleepily from one man to another. First him, then his pal Chalke, then his other buddy Wash, then Lance Corporal Chuck, who is a known dipshit. Then back to him, usually, or between him and Chalke. Something about how Chalke’s feet smell, the dog seems to maybe be a bit in love with him, or with his feet anyway.

  Before rack time they have to disassemble and clean their triggers, which always takes more time than they want it to, because exhaustion, because tricky, because mysterious and humming and slippery, because you can blow yourself up, or whoever’s sitting next to you, pretty easy if you’re not paying attention. Lance Corporal Chuck is down the bench, he’s supposed to be checking their work but he’s not even halfway done with his own trigger, the lower section is still detached and resting by his feet in the dust, so there’s been a general slowdown all the way through the line, no one’s working especially fast, and it’s making him grit his teeth a little because he wants to grab a bite and then hit the rack, but first he’s hoping to get in a quick game of sock-tussle with Rip before lights. Old sock, holey past wearing, make it a knot with a tail, let Rip knarfle it, catch it in his small sharp teeth. His idea, his sock. The other guys just about beside themselves with happiness, watching. None of them ever had a dog. No one they know has ever had a dog. Who has a dog anymore? The world out there being what it is, who could bear caring for anything like this: small, stupid, helpless, hapless, instantly in love with some guy’s stinking feet? Who could find it in them? Not even Lance Corporal Chuck, commissioned man, grew up in the kind of house or the kind of place where a kid could have had a dog. So when Horrocks talks about it, says it out loud, what they’re all feeling, really the only thing you can feel for the dumb cluck is embarrassment, bone-deep shame for whoever would have to say such a thing.

  Don’t go reading too much, his oldest sister once told him. You won’t like what you find out about how it used to be. Books are full of kids with lawns, kids with dogs, dogs that sometimes even double as babysitters or nonverbal but compassionate friends. Kids with hamsters, or cats that aren’t feral, or even fish—fucking fish! Kids with tree houses; kids who take baths at night and bitch and moan about it. As a kid he’d had a book, an orange-and-green book, about a boy who bought a fish at a pet shop—a pet shop, okay?—and fed it too much even though the mysterious gent at the pet shop warned him against it, and the fish just starts growing like a motherfucker, right, outgrowing the bowl and then all the pots and then the sink and then the bathtub and then a basement full of water and then, the funny part, the kid who overfed the fish calls Security and the fire department and they’re all Holy shit, a kid overfed a fish, we gotta get down there on the double and deal with this! So the fish gets towed to a pool, and the fish promptly outgrows the pool. And at this point, okay, there are all these people standing around in bathing suits glaring at this fish that’s just taken over their pool, thinking, Fuck you, fish.

  How did that book end? Something with the pet shop guy. Pet shop guys had world-fixing powers, apparently, back when that was a thing a person could be.

  He can’t remember.

  Because he’s within signal range of the base and because no one but him seems to be in any hurry to finish up with their weapons and get the hell out of the armory hut, he flicks on his wearable, and there’s a message from his oldest sister, but she’s furious at him about something, blaming him for something he can’t even begin to fathom. Fred, I didn’t overfeed the fish; it wasn’t me. He knows something he’s not supposed to? He doesn’t know something he’s supposed to? Which one is it?

  He’s swimming through the message, trying to understand what she’s talking about and feeling more and more confused and worried, because she sounds like she might actually be losing her mind, like she might have flipped some switch and truly gone crazy, and as far as his family goes, they have enough to worry about as it is. He’s in a war zone, with no way out that he can see. Their father is broke, out of work, forced into retirement, and living alone—or not alone exactly, since for a few years now, since his sisters moved out and he went to war, their father has lived with one of the terrifying schizophrenic cats you can pluck up off the streets in the New Cities, if you’re brave enough or crazy enough or lonely enough to live with one. And their sister, the nice one, the sweet one, the one who was supposed to be a nurse and then changed her mind because she wanted to save the world, has been working herself to death and no one hears from her anymore. And this, it seems, is what the message is about. She’s gone? She’s . . . where? He’s supposed to know. Some dark hole back home has opened up and swallowed her, and his oldest sister is shouting down into it as hard as she can, thinking he’s down there, too.

  He looks up, troubled, not seeing much, but it’s just in time for him to see something happen that can only end one way. He might be the only person to see it, and in the chaos and shrieking and hot gush that follows he will do his best to forget it. The dog trotting in, sniffing the lower section of Lance Corporal Chuck’s trigger, putting out a moist, curious tongue for a taste, a wet lick.

  THREE

  At home on Paulina Street, my feet throbbing under the kitchen table, my suit jacket limp in my lap like a soft dead animal. The kitchen is shabby, in an apartment that’s wall-to-wall gloomy bachelor shabbiness. Pop has turned on the lights over the range and left the other lights off. The globe fixture overhead is dark and full of the husks of insects. Pop’s old, hostile, very-much-alive cat is stalking around somewhere in the dim living room behind us.

  I passed out in the driverless cab we took home from the Walkers’ and just woke up when we arrived a few minutes ago, so I’m feeling woozy. It’s early to be this drunk. Even after seeing me on my knees in the Walkers’ lobby, Pop clearly has no idea how much I’ve already had, because he pulls two cold engineered beers from the fridge door, opens the drawer between the fridge and the range to pull out an ancient manual can opener, uses the business end of the can opener to pop the bottle caps, and puts a bottle down on the table in front of me. So I drink. I can’t remember if I’ve eaten today. I only saw a few servers sailing around at the party, and none of them were carrying food on their little trays, but that’s not exactly unusual. One of the ironies of life in the New Cities, post H2.0: Plenty to drink, but not much worth
eating.

  He sits down in the chair next to mine at the table and takes a long pull from his own bottle. Pop is still a good-looking guy, for an old crow. Has all his hair—good genes—and it’s still black and straight, like Fred’s. Still plays ball some Saturday mornings with vet friends of his. He’s skinny, more so than I remember from before I was deployed. If any guy in this family is growing a bit of an engineered-beer gut, it’s not him. Big forehead, small eyes, small mouth, just like Fred, although he’s got quite a honker, and Fred had her nose fixed back when she was between start-up number one and start-up number two. Other than the nose and the age, he and Fred could almost be twins, both sharp and slick and dark.

  But he does look tired after a night on his feet being polite with strangers. I don’t want to imagine what I look like. I might be swaying in my chair. It’s hard to tell.

  After a while he asks in a low voice, “All right, Carter?”

  “Yes, sir.” No one needs to talk about how he found me crawling through the lobby of my future brother-in-law’s palace.

  “Did you talk to your sister tonight?”

  “No.”

  He spares me a glance. “She’s been feeling sick. How about the Walkers, did you meet them?”

  “Sure. Sophie brought me around to some Walkers.”

  “She was a good egg.”

  “I guess so. The Walkers seem nice enough.”

  “Sure.”

  “Fred did good.”