Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

Skinner fritzed out a bit at the edges. “You’re lying.”

“Your last mission, Al. The final hurrah of Christian America. The ultimate test of a soldier’s loyalty to laws and order and dogma. You carried out your orders impeccably. Your son, the first Waitimu, was born with super-admin privileges. When you learned this you volunteered for the task. This card will show you the abandoned building where you cornered him. It’ll show you the vines that grew up from the concrete beside the door you walked through, the chipped aqua-green paint on the wall. His pleas. You came into our office immediately after the deed and erased the memory, then erased the memory of erasing the memory. You kept doing this until no trace of the original memory remained.”

Skinner tried to breathe.

“And this one.” Bickle held up another card. “This is the sequel. The latest one. The one where you murder the rest of your family.”

“It was newmans.”

Bickle shook his head. “Newmans rescued the boy when you went psychotic. You think you’re going to the Met to save the boy but that’s not in your programming. You’re going there to kill him.”

And Skinner knew it was true. He walked to the window.

“You’ve done what you were designed to do, Al.”

“Who designed me?”

“Guy by the name of Nick Fedderly.”

“I am so confused.”

“Like I said, A+B=C is not the way to go here.”

“Release me.”

“That’s what these weapons are for.”

“I understand. Before I go. The man in the desert. The one with the refrigerator. Who is he?”

“Some call him the Last Dude.”

“What is he doing out there?”

“He’s running everything.”

“What?”

“You mean you haven’t figured that out?” asked Bickle. “The Last Dude is Mr. Kirkpatrick.”

Star never showed. I slept in her bed, ate whatever was canned in the pantry, and did my best to clean the place up. The ground around the house was still muddy, the roof covered in moss. The old, uncompleted frame of the house had started to crumble. I chopped wood. I kept waiting for her to appear but she never did. I was used to keeping to myself and I’d forgotten how much I loved the woods. But what kept me there was the shed. Every morning I made myself coffee and breakfast, then walked to the shed where I’d make a fire in the potbelly stove and study Nick’s dad’s plans. I grew to love the chemical-sweet smell of blueprint paper. I came to see that this wasn’t just a collection of random blueprints. His plan was to transform the island in phases. Chop down hills, fill in gullies, reshape Bainbridge’s irregular coastline into smooth, tapered Manhattan. Once the island was regraded, he’d build from the underground up. Start with subways, sewer, natural gas, communications. Lay down streets, foundations of buildings. Then, somehow, re-create every building in the city. It was an insane plan any rational person would have considered pure science fiction. But the care he’d put into these blueprints made me wonder if they were the product of a true believer.

I lived, ate, slept, chopped wood, and thought constantly about those blueprints. Then one day, I was clearing moss off shingles and it occurred to me that Nick’s dad would’ve had to print them somewhere. There must have been some kind of machine that produced them. I dug around in the shed and found a banker’s box with old pay stubs, with the name of Marc’s employer on them. Kern, Nagamitsu, & Nichols Civil Engineering and Land Surveying.

I should say that I had done my best to avoid anyone I knew on Bainbridge and keep to myself. When I needed groceries, I rode an old ten-speed across the bridge to Poulsbo and filled up my backpack. I was sporting a pretty rangy beard again and went unrecognized whenever I had to go into town. People looking at you, instantly figuring out your place on the totem pole—I didn’t want anything to do with that. Maybe some of Star’s antisocial behavior was coming out of me. But I recognized that I had to get myself respectable if I wanted to launch another investigation and get people to divulge information. I shaved, and as the whiskers fell away I saw the old high school football star, the dot-com drone, older, heavier, the skin around my eyes sagging and wrinkled from years of pained expressions. I had been wrong to think that anyone would remember that kid and bother to formulate an opinion about his grown-up self. I was a complete nobody now.

The office was in a building next to a chiropractor and a day care. A little place with a lobby, a room for drafting, and a room downstairs in back where they kept all the surveying equipment. I just walked in and asked to speak to one of the civil engineers. The receptionist called up Don Nagamitsu, a trim guy with a gray beard and a denim shirt tucked into his Levi’s. I told him I was living on the Fedderly property and had some questions about Marc. We went around the corner to a bakery and Don insisted on buying me coffee. He asked me what I wanted to know. I told him about the blueprints. He sort of laughed and looked out the window.

He told me a story. He said, “We were having a company party in I’d say ’79, ’80. Business was good and Dave Kern, our chief, had just had a hot tub installed on his deck overlooking Seattle. Twelve or so of us, getting drunk, shooting firecrackers off the deck, living it up. So I’m there in the hot tub on my fourth glass of wine. Marc across from me, Star next to him, my wife Sandy beside me. And Marc says, ‘You want to hear something really interesting? Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size. And you know what’s funny? Before Seattle was Seattle it was called New York Alki. It’s an Indian word that means “by and by.” In other words, sooner or later this place is going to be as big as New York City. I say we regrade the place and build ourselves a Big Apple.’ And you have to understand something about draftsmen. These guys, at least then, were the longhairs. You had your civil engineers like me, guys in blazers and ties, and you had your surveyors—old farts with crew cuts and rain gear coated in mud. The draftsmen were somewhere in between, each and every one of them a character. Whenever someone pulled an office prank, the draftsmen were the prime suspects. I knew a lot of them smoked dope at home but if you were to start instituting drug tests, well, then, no drainage systems or parking lots would ever get built. As long as they kept doing their jobs, I didn’t care what they did in their recreational time. And I liked Marc a heck of a lot. He showed up early, got his work done fast, was always at my desk asking for more. In fact, Sandy and I had invited him and Star and their kid over to our house for dinner a couple times. Good people. I would have forgotten that comment, with me being drunk and it being just one of those things the draftsmen always said. But one night my wife and I went out to dinner or to a Mariners game or something, and I’d forgotten something at the office. Friday night, about eleven o’clock and I walk in and there’s Marc, working at his drafting table, drinking coffee. Those days, nobody worked long hours. Everyone was out of there by five on the dot. My first thought was that he’d messed up something real bad and was busting tail to fix it. When I asked him what the deal was he sort of shrugged sheepishly, stepped away from the table, and told me to take a look.

“He said it was a little side project of his and he apologized for using company paper and pens. I waved him off. Because what I was looking at looked more like art than any sort of drafting I’d ever seen. He had all the sewer and communications worked out, all the tunnels and streets. I didn’t know whether I should get mad or what. It seemed like a weird thing to do but he was on his own time and he was my best draftsman, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And now you’ve got the blueprints.”