Pat’s eyes drowned in commodities; every bit of wall space had been co-opted into a kind of display of goods. She estimated a hundred people packed into the lower brownstone floor alone. The dim floor-level windows obscured the hour. Faint foreign music wound its way through some hole in the wall or floor, or both, like a reptile slinking through the space. Incense burned on side tables. Several women puffed on vapes. To her left, the smell of roasting meat.  A naked man walked past her, leashed by a pretty young brunette, towards the basement stairs. Pat’s body stirred with curiosity, but she ignored it. 

The blonde woman had pressed forward into the crowd. Patricia Simon blinked and nearly lost her. The old building was packed with room dividers, screens, old bedside tables, card tables, and even old spools of wire, and every ten feet the owner and purpose of the space changed. The blonde had moved beyond her to what appeared to be an acupuncturist.

Make a map, Pat, just like when you’re on patrol.

On the left is the kitchen, basement over there, stairs hidden…probably down a hallway. Only there did not seem to be a hallway anywhere. The walls had been torn down to create a open floor, load-bearing walls acting as natural dividers. Her own father had done the same to his house, so many years ago.

Pat had never written a citation for conspiracy, and didn’t think she even had the clearance. Not that it would matter in here, the pink market. Probably a thousand ways for a cop to be taken out and disposed of here. Wherever here was. It felt strange for her to be out of uniform, a kind of liberty and nakedness, one she hadn’t felt since her teen years, since before signing up to serve.

The blonde’s head appeared in her sight line and smiled, a genuine thing, really, Patricia thought. Her smile. It made her so dangerous. She stood behind a series of box ferns. On the wall behind her, an old garden lattice was hung, and on it dozens of plastic bags full of dried herbs and flowers. Between them stood the woman they were to meet. Dr. Susan Bowers.

Someone behind her complained of Patricia’s slow gait. She was pushed aside. Two seconds later she was bumped from behind by another leashed man led by a woman through the crowds to the basement beyond her. A very old woman in sunglasses pushed her on the other side, and cursed in some Asian dialect that Pat had a hard time reconciling.

“Come on, I have a spot.” The blonde half-shouted. She waved. Her smile became a rictus of annoyance. “Come on.”

Two stalls over, in what had once been a kitchen breakfast nook, an elderly man lay prone, shirtless, his back being straightened by an apple shaped woman who made his spine crack so loudly dozens turned to see the fuss. A few feet from her, half-obscured by consumers, a woman squealed with joy. Someone across the room sneezed. Many “bless you’s.” A young girl shopped for books. From where she inched along, Pat could tell they were all paperbacks. A young woman worked on what appeared to be math on a long white board behind what might be a bar.  An older woman, blonde growing grey, led a handsome naked black man towards that mysterious basement. His entire back had been tattooed with constellations.

“For God’s sake!” the blonde shouted. Pat put a nickel in it. 

Owl Jones, who had dressed down to be her handler, had held Pat’s hand and led her through the city to meet the knitters. She liked that detail, the hand-holding, for his large hands were warm and careful. The longer he touched her she realized that she liked his style of holding hands. He knew when to detach and when not to. Pat fell into that touch, and it assured her that whatever she thought she knew about the resistance was not to be trusted. He still looked good, Owl did. Only dressed in clothes that were a decade out of style.

She wondered if Owl harbored any feelings for her. She doubted it. Not after the way she had bullied her way into the resistance. Necessity, the mother of inventions. 

Owl had come calling at 4 AM to take her out for coffee and donuts, dressed in old clothes and a long coat that screamed middle America. He explained the VR machine, and her cover. She was taking a tour, and had gotten lost, but was linked up to the group via the VR. He, though, he didn’t like tours, thus he hadn’t paid for the VR experience. The VR glasses/device had one of those NY Tours stickers on the side, and they were to pose as a couple. He, leading the lost bride, she gracefully following along, experiencing an older city complete with soundtrack and celebrity content via the VR, and evoking the traditionalism so rampant in the middle of the country.

“We’ll be like an old couple,” Owl had joked, wiping his lip with the end of his diner napkin.

“No way,” Patricia laughed. “I’m like not feeling being married to you for like ten years or something.” She sipped her coffee. “We should be young in love. Even if it is just a game.”

“It isn’t, “ Owl said, serious all of a sudden. “Why does every new recruit think we are playing? Can’t believe that a cover story can’t save your life? It does. It’s language. The way it is wielded. If you fuck up your story, someone who is paying attention will see your tells.”

Pat considered the poker metaphor. Made sense. “They don’t fight us with bullets. It’s money. Policy, laws. Consider they’ll send the poor kids to fight the new ISIL. Or to France to fight NATO. Or to Mexico to get turned into ground meat. But that’s an old story. At our level we worry about being stopped and frisked.” Patricia didn’t like this, talking about laws. It smacked of treason. “Tell me about the money again.”

“Bitcoins are anonymous, save the blockchain. You can read it and follow it. However there’s so many hits on a blockchain that it becomes a hassle for the Jack Robbers or Feds or whomever to bother tracing. They follow large bitcoin transactions to narrow their field. We know this from the hijacked data streams the Dutched gave us.  We use their narrow surveillance window to get paid.”

“Tell me how this is safe again?”

“You’ll get a pre-smart-phone memory stick. I usually get those USB memory ones, or the thin card ones.”
“Yeah, I remember those.”

“See, that shit is popular in the big bad world beyond our country’s walls, so…”

“Yeah, I’m waiting.”

“So the executive lanes are rife with bitcoin exchanges. Secure hook-up. The government is watching, but they are looking for weapon buys, drug deals, corporate takeovers. You’re getting paid as a courier. By the job. The kinda chains they trace are ones that are half a million plus. You won’t get paid nearly that amount. Your freelance transaction will go unnoticed.”

“And if it won’t?”

“It will.” Owl said, his eyes narrowing. “Trust is difficult to teethe, but Patricia, trust is something that must break through. Keep chewing on why you are here.”

“I’m just not sure if I’m more gobsmacked by the fact that you used rife in a sentence or a baby metaphor.” Owl scowled at her, and she smiled. “You almost look like D’Angelo when you do that.”

“Flattery, my dear, will get you nowhere.”

The VR’s setup, with noise-cancelling headphones, had confined Pat to the NYC of her grandfather’s youth. The outside of her bus ride did not descend into the boroughs and eventually away from the city heart, but instead her ride cruised the tidy antebellum brick homes near the water. She even smelled the salt air; the benefit of virtual travel.

And when they arrived, Pat had not seen the empty rowhouses, nor the pallid squatters, the dim streets.  Owl had walked her, threading her in and out of people pushing past each other.  He held her by the elbow and focused on being gentle. What Patricia saw was a busy street, peopled with styles and hairstyles and tall gentlemen in suits and ties. A charming sweetness to the light, and the simple but effective signage that made her heart skip. Patricia felt she could breathe and relax here, in the past.

Patrica even felt Owl’s sometime strong grip fade into the background. Like a pulse, he touched her with alternating pressure on her elbow, then fluttered to her upper forearm, a more relaxed squeeze.

Patricia did not see the city stream of people, and families, and immigrants, bustling from one side to another. She would have been shocked, perhaps. She did not hear the noises of commerce, or the language of machinery and bargaining.

Owl led her down half a block to a quiet street of red-brick wide homes and old warehouses that dated back to the 1890s. Old stores that had been converted to homes and back to stores again. Their histories could be seen in the brickwork and the old glass in high windows.

March, one of the knitters, waited for them on the corner, her bright pink knitted kitten cap at a jaunty angle. She wore a dark long coat, and her knitting bag slung around her right shoulder. She knitted with thick needles, her hands deft like small birds, her body a slender tree. She nodded her head side to side.

Across the street, unseen by Owl, a tall brunette ceased to knit, and folded up her knitting bag and turned around to face a shop window.

They did not speak, Owl and March. A drop was old news to them, even when the drop was a person.

And as Owl brought Pat over to the meet, March dropped her yarn ball and Owl picked it up. He palmed his payment and handed back the ball of yarn to March, who dropped it in her bag.

Owl waited some sixty seconds before whispering in Pat’s ear and leaving her next to March while he slipped into the crowd.

So then March led Patricia down the street and into the large building, which at one time had been a general store that offered runaway slaves a place to network; a small steel plaque had fallen off during the early days of the president’s first term. Someone had taken it, and traded it, and hung it up and taken it down again. It currently resided in the dorm room of one Harrison B. Cooley, a nationalism major at Cambridge Analytica College. City historical preservation funds had been re-routed to the executive lanes a long time ago, so no one had ever bothered to replace it.

The entrance was through the basement. March took Patricia by the hand and carefully led her down the three flat stone steps, even ducking Pat’s head under the stoop, and then, in the dim hallway, removing the VR set. Patricia found herself awash with exhaust. The air quality had changed. How the VR had affected her sense of smell, Patricia would wonder about for many days to come. She then noticed the thin light, the must. She was underground.

“Be careful, Pat,” March said. “Watch your head. We’ll make contact inside.”

The dark passage split. A shaft of light angled down the right passage. Voices.  A panel of plywood had been nailed up to block a door. It had been painted black and marked with a smudged black and white symbol; March urged her along with her quick nurturing glances back.

“Come on. It’s a blast. Everyone loves this place. Even c…”

“What?” Patricia said. “Cops?”

“Yeah,” March said. “You can find a lot of things here. Drugs. Clothes. Music. It’s like a mall for stuff you cannot find in this part of the world.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just I’ve only heard about places like this.”

“It’s okay. It’s mostly women and children. You’ll see.”

In the divided quarter of the room, the old woman looked Patricia Simon over. The doctor was at least sixty, maybe older. She had grown thick in the shoulders, from age, and Patricia had no doubts that the old mother could beat back the cops, if it came to that. 

“I can do this today. In an hour. If you are willing to pay for it.”

Fear, Pat could see it in the doctor’s eyes. Fear. The cops. Her own people. Hunting her down in the sweaty backbeat room of a Chinatown medicine woman. It could happen. Patricia pushed the thought from her. She closed her eyes and breathed deep.

Doctor Bowers kept talking to March: details, wheres and whens.The spell of the atmosphere captured Pat. Spices, deep wood colors, far-off music.

Pat opened her eyes and stared at the small greenery in the woman’s stall, tiered on upended crates. The green waxy strands fell over their pots and caught the light. The doctor’s wares, clothing, teas, lotions and cremes, were all in open suitcases, and old luggage bags, and handsome foot-lockers. A quick case of the scene proved that most of what she could spy in her sightline had been prepped for a quick takedown and getaway.

“Did you hear that?” March said, outrage creeping into her good nature. “Tell her, Bowers. Tell her.”

“The Toad has figured out new ways to screen and detect the usual drug variety. He’s been clamping down on those who work inside the lanes.”

Patricia sat stunned. Her fear reared up.

“We’ll have to take extra precautions in your case.”

Pat sat dumbstruck. The lanes? Those busy streets surrounding the executive tower like a moat were rife with army, black-op security, and spies. Cameras and microphones were embedded everywhere. Why not some kind of biosensor? The Toad, the president’s advisor, usually got what  he wanted. And what he wanted was control.

“You do work in the lanes, don’t you?”

All she could do was nod.

***

Two women flanked the room’s anterior door. One sat on the outside looking south, the other sat on the inside looking north. Their backs leaned against the same wall, and all Pat could think of was that if the very wall were to vanish that these women would continue to hold each other up. And the roof, and everything around it. She blinked and tried to orient herself.

So nimble the doctor’s hands had been, and the drugs quick. The two women knitted, their eyes jetting across the dim streets outside the building. Patricia did not know where she was, exactly, but felt as if she had passed through this part of the city as a youth.  Memory. The sick smell of a disinfectant, and sanitary sheets. The plastic underneath her made her almost feel safe. The knitter on the exterior wall chirped a Beatles tune. The woman on the interior looked out the front windows.

Patricia leaned back into the cot. She hated to care for herself. It seemed so self-indulgent. She hated staying home from school as a kid, the boredom crushing her underneath all that silence. And during the president’s second term when she had been shot through the arm during the Nativity Month Protest; she hated being confined to bed while the city rose up in anger at the violence in the South. Why even just last year after the third inaugural ball, she had caught a bug that had kept her on the toilet for a week.  She hated it. The awful ugliness of her own body, and her powerlessness.

The room fell silent for a moment. Her cop instincts pricked her brain into an alert state. The woman in her room grew rigid. The woman in the hallway began whistling the Rolling Stones. “Paint it Black,” Patricia recalled. It forever seemed to be looped into the action movies her father favored. Had someone sampled it? Plan B? Or were they Planet B?

The doctor had left. Out the back. Her car, if it were really there and not some trick, had a rattle. A loose tailpipe. Something held on with duct tape. A pool of something lay just beyond the outside door. She remembered looking down at it through the virtual reality mask as she was led here. A pool of water. From where? Some sign perhaps? Why not a pool of water? Safer than a text, or a sign.

“You should sleep.” The blonde woman said. She pushed off from the wall, and stood. Patricia for a moment could not tell if this woman was the same woman whom had taken her to the doctor. She both resembled and did not resemble March. The blonde wiped the sharp end of the steel needles and gripped them by the base.

“Hush now. Hush.”

Patricia closed her eyes. When she opened them the woman had gone. Someone else had taken her place. A thin woman, with long pale tresses. Her skin darker in the dim. The woman’s arms were thick with bangles. The brunette on the other side of the wall continued to whistle, but it was no longer the Beatles. Her shape seemed the same. Her whistling voice seemed the same. Then the Beatles again.

The long knitter’s shadow moving against the wall. To Patricia, it was like the shadow of an ant eating, its head bowed, the antennae bobbing up and down. Her dreams thrashed through her and she came to. The light had changed in the room. Two hours had passed, she guessed. Her stomach cramped, but the drugs had worn off. Her clothes lay folded on a chair beside her. She heard the far-off whistling, coming from the upstairs. She did not see the knitters. She had been promised she could leave when the drugs wore off.  She would want to take it easy. If it could be arranged, one of the knitters would escort her home.

As if on cue, the whistling grew louder and Pat picked up the sound of heels on the floor. Whomever it was reached the bottom of the stairs and echoed up over her head towards the basement stairs. The door opened and the whistler came down. Patricia knew, from the way the woman walked, that it was the brunette. Something matronly about it.

“Oh good, you’re up.” The brunette put her hands on her hips. Something about her screamed schoolteacher. “You ready to go home?”

Patricia nodded.

“We won’t bother with the VR, okay?” The brunette held her arm and walked with her. “I know you’re strong enough to not need this. You don’t need me. But it’s like a promise, okay. We want you to know we are there for you.” They exited the basement door and walked into the air. A car blared its horn beyond the brick.

“We’re going to turn here and go on up the street. There’s a subway station just a block. I have our cards.”Patricia nodded. Her stomach ached. Her lower guts cramped and relaxed. The women did not speak.

Patricia recognized the sky. She was twenty blocks from home. She had eaten the best philly cheesesteak she had ever had just five minutes from where she now slowly made her way. And the warehouse, the pink underground? She wondered if she would ever find access to it again. She didn’t think so.

The howling metal-on-metal squeal greeted them as they passed through the checkpoint on the lower levels. For a hot moment, Pat thought she would lose it. Before they descended into the shuddering station, the brunette had told her to call her Ally, and reminded her that they were old friends. Patricia didn’t feel like arguing.  They flashed their fare cards and lined up for security checks and in those five minutes of waiting Patricia’s skin and body had begun to pulse and sweat. Bile tickled the back of her mouth. She leaned on the brunette for support, but did not rest too intimately against her. She did not want to draw attention to herself.

In the end it was the train arriving on time that allowed Patricia to relax. For the guards had to quicken their pace. Suddenly she and Ally passed through and were boarding the train. They sat along the wall and waited. And soon they were on their way, and only then, did Patricia feel lighter, unburdened, as the city carried her home in its arms.

# # #

Stephen Scott Whitaker (@SScottWhitaker) is a member of National Book Critics Circle, and the literary review editor for The Broadkill Review. His first full length book of poems, All My Rowdy Friends, was published in 2016 by Punks Write Poems Press, LLC; his previous chapbooks include the steampunk inspired The Black Narrows, the award winning Field Recordings, and The Barleyhouse Letters.