Matthew Tysz - The Last City of America

A man stood vigilantly still in the corner. Grakus could barely see him at his angle: white coat, blond hair, a strange posture.

“How are we today, Teddles?” said Wilco.

The man called Teddles did not respond.

Wilco put his hand on Grakus’s shoulder, extended his other hand toward the strange man. “This is Teddles. He’s our little torture man, isn’t he? Teddles, this is… I’m sorry, what’s your name, pal?”

“Charles Grakus.”

“Listen, Charlie,” Wilco leaned in, whispering again. “If you wanna tell me you’re nothing but a piece o’ shit bandit, you can tell me whenever you want and we’ll take it from there.” He looked back up. “Teddles. When this guy shouts my name as loud as he can, you can stop. I’ll be right outside.”

Wilco and the others left, and it was only Grakus and the still, quiet man in the corner.

Grakus watched as Teddles turned, stepped toward him. He walked oddly, as though sneaking with a crippled leg. He held an arm over the lower half of his face. He came out of periphery, into view. Blue eyes stared at Grakus for a full minute.

“Why aren’t you like the others?” He said at last: a menacing voice with a mild lisp.

“I doubt I’m any different than you,” said Grakus.

Teddles shoved two fingers under Grakus’s scarf, pressing them against his pulse. He held them there for a moment. He looked confused. He held his finger where it was, and with the other, produced a blade, pointed it at Grakus’s eye. Grakus looked straight into it, his pulse unaffected, and the torture master grew even more confused.

“What are you smiling at?” Teddles asked.

“Why do you cover your face?” said Grakus. “You have nothing to hide from one as helpless as I.”

Teddles recoiled in shame, afraid that Grakus may have seen what he was hiding.

Abuse was an interesting thing. It had the power to turn a person into a cartoon. Walking through Chicago would feel no different to a sane man than were he visiting a world where people were incarnate in animals and chased each other with frying pans. All the city was mad with suffering, and everyone was different in their madness because everybody handled abuse differently. And it was Grakus’s guess that Teddles was particularly unequipped to handle it well. He was very smart, very emotional, dangerously sensitive and possibly autistic.

“Does it hurt, Teddles?”

At some point, something must have happened to Teddles to make him think that he had suffered some deformity. But all he obscured with his veil of shame was an uninjured, ordinary face. His eyes flared with rage at Grakus. He turned to a cabinet and began selecting tools that he then slammed onto a metal tray.

Grakus laughed gently. “Teddles. Come here.”

Teddles half-turned to Grakus, revealing the side of his face that wasn’t hurt.

“I have something for you.”

Teddles turned the rest of the way. He approached Grakus curiously.

Grakus was smiling kindly at him. “Reach around my neck, Teddles. Take my scarf and wrap it around your face.”

Teddles checked Grakus’s straps. They were still latched tight. He unwrapped Grakus’s scarf with one hand. He put it around his face. He looked at his reflection in the glass of one of his cabinets. The madness in his eyes lost their grip. He stood straight, and for a moment sounded normal. “It’s perfect.”

Grakus gave Teddles a moment to move around with his new device. “Someone must have been very cruel to give you a scar like that.”

Teddles closed his eyes, lowered his head into the scarf. “A bad man kissed me… It burned this crater into my jaw.”

A big stuffed bunny was sitting on the counter in the corner of the room. Grakus had kept it on the edge of his vision and in the back of his mind since he arrived. He set his eyes on it and asked Teddles, “Who’s that?”

Teddles set a pair of pliers into the cabinet between a taser and a soldering iron. He turned to where Grakus was looking. “That’s my Snugglebuns,” He walked over to the bunny, scooped it up in a tight embrace. “I can’t remember where he found me. He was always there. He said he liked me. He told me it was okay when I did bad things. He said I didn’t know any better. He gave me hugs when I was sad. He held my hand when the bad man kissed me. He was the only one who was ever nice to me…” he looked to Grakus. “Except for you. Why? Because you want me not to hurt you?”

Grakus relaxed his head, looking up at the bare, white ceiling. “If torturing me will make you happy, Teddles, I assure you, I can handle it. Either way, the host will want to speak with me sooner or later. Anything you do to me will be for the sake of Wilco. And you don’t care about Wilco, do you?”

“He’ll want you in here for a while,” Teddles pulled his gloves off. “How would you rather spend this time? Snugglebuns gets bored fast.”

Grakus shifted in his shackles, stretched his neck and got comfortable. “I would like to talk with you a little, but mostly hear you talk,” said Grakus. “I would like to know about Chicago, and I would like to know about you—the things you’ve learned in here. Things that the others never thought to have you reveal.”

Holding his bunny, Teddles pulled a stool beside Grakus. “What do you want to know?”

Grakus smiled. “Let’s start with these revolutionaries Wilco mentioned.”

“Company at the gate.”

He had shuddered with anticipation when he heard those words. The whole city did. That tiny sentence was already sweeping like an epidemic. News was a precious thing in Chicago. Especially to the commanders. Especially to Commander Wilco.

There weren’t a lot of opportunities to get the host’s attention, especially low-risk opportunities. But when they did emerge from those dusty corners, they usually fell in the lap of one of the other commanders. Or the underhost. It was as funny as it was mad that all this sniveling shit named Grakus had to do was show up in his pretty red car and all the city wanted to meet him. And soon, so would the host.

That was how Chicago worked. All you had to do was two things: make the host happy, and make sure he knows it was you. If you could do these two simple things, no other skill you had or didn’t have made any difference. Wilco was good at one, not the other. If he were recognized for everything he’d done—every crushed uprising, every criminal plucked from hiding, every new method of keeping the people in line—he’d be commanding the entire city’s military instead of butting heads with idiots. But no. It was all about the host’s attention. And somehow, this stranger seemed to realize that.

Brian Wilco was born thirty six years ago to a politician and a prostitute.

Prostitutes unaffected by Hephaestus were often required by the city to trick their customers into getting them pregnant. Maternity leave was a precious reward. Upon conception, the father alone was responsible, condemned to death should anything happen to the mother before birth, or to the child before it came of age. One unfortunate prostitute had been assigned to Councilor Ron Wilco when her madam told her to “Steal the next seed.”

Usually, politicians were immune to such tricks. When Ron found out that a mediocre prostitute was expecting his child, he appealed to the host for an abortion. Far too entertained by the matter, the host just laughed in his face and slammed the door.

Soon after the child arrived at his home, Ron arranged to have the bitch who tricked him killed. But there was still the problem of the child.

Ron had an aide take care of his son for nine years. Brian still remembered her. She taught him to read, write, and communicate with authority. And she taught him war. She taught him what Chicago was without ever giving an opinion of her own. She was a cold woman, a precursor to life without a family.