Charlie Huston - Every Last Drop

He lifts his hands in surrender to market forces.

— But there it is. The stuff is everywhere. And people, they've, for better or worse, they've agreed we need it to get by.

I look at a poster on the wall. The Concert for Bangladesh. -If it makes you feel any better, I had to use some nuance. Had to finesse it some, working the whole thing out.

He raises his eyebrows.

— I like that idea, I like the idea of you using some finesse. A quality like that, it could make all the difference for a person like you, Joe.

He lowers his eyebrows.

— A shame it, lets just say it, a shame it's too late for that kind of thing to change how we interact. Some of our conversations over the years, they

would have benefited from a little finesse. -So you say.

He takes off his glasses, folds and opens the arms a couple times. -Yeah.

He puts them back on. -So I say. For what its worth, and all.

I point at the glasses. -Something I wanted to ask. -Yeah? — Why do you wear those things?

He purses his lips. -Urn.

I nod.

— Yeah, um. Me, I never wore the things, but still I notice the Vyrus sharpened my eyes. Strange it didn't fix whatevers wrong with yours.

He takes them off again, looks at them. -Yeah, well, yeah, sure. Honestly. These are just, you know, glass. Just. Well

I'm not the only one with this, you know.

He puts them on.

— This affectation. I wore them before I was infected. Always felt weird without them. Even though they don't make me see any, I don't know, any more clearly. -Hnuh.

He sits there, looking out from behind his play glasses. I look at the room some more. His little office. A bedroom squirreled away at the back of a tenement. Typical Society digs. Street-salvage furniture, rock and protest posters, books by Noam Chomsky.

Terry pushes a button on the oscillating fan that's moving the dead air around and it kicks up a gear.

— I try not to use it. The things burden the grid almost as much as an air conditioner. That's as much for our finances at this point as it is for the environment. So.

He watches me.

I let him.

He shakes his head. -So, money. Joe.

— Not much finesse in that transition, Terry.

He leans forward, elbows on knees. -Money. Joe.

I point at a coffee cup filled with pens that sits atop his press-wood desk. -It's an account. You'll want to write down the number and password.

He picks up a pen and a piece of notepaper with a little circle of green arrows on it to let you know that no new trees were killed to make it. -Shoot.

My hand twitches. But the partisans took my gun.

So instead of putting a bullet in him, I give him the numbers. I tell him how much Amanda put in the account.

He looks at the numbers on the sheet of paper.

— She must really care about you. No joking around, Joe. I may not like the idea of money as an expression of affection, and she may, I don't know, have it to spare, but this seems like someone trying to make a point about how much they value you. Not that I'm advocating using dollars to put a value on human or any other kind of life.

I wave a hand.

— Like I said, I used some nuance.

He looks at me over the lenses of those glasses that don't let him see any better.

— Tell you, man, I'd sure like to know what that was like. -Well, Terry, seeing as this money is supposed to put me back on the map down here. Get me a place out of the way, some kind of privileges if I want to move around a little.

He nods. -Sure, man, that was the deal.

I stand.

— Well seeing as that's the deal, and seeing as were maybe on the way back to being on something like friendly terms, why don't I tell you what it was like.

He sets the paper and pen aside. -Something on your mind, Joe?

I shake my head.

— Just like I said, just want to explain what it was like. Working some nuance for the girl.

I look at the floor between my feet, a long gash in the wood where

something heavy was once dragged over it.

— What it was like was, it was like going down a hole and finding dozens of stupid, mute, starving kids with hoses stuck in their arms to make it easy to get their blood out. It was like going down that hole, and looking down it, and seeing a string of red lights, going deep, lights letting you know that there were hundreds more of them down there. And I'm wondering.

I look at him.

— That sound like something you might have seen at one time or another, Terry?

He takes off the glasses, looks at them, puts them aside. -Yes.

He rubs his eyes. -Yes it does.

I nod. -Man. Were you smart.

He looks at me. -How's that? — Having your boys take my gun before I came in here. That just saved your

life.

— Its interesting. In a way. Being able to talk about it. The terrible thing about a secret, its that, I don't know, that pressure it creates. Right? That internal variance. Like with laws of diffusion, how a liquid or a gas is always seeking to spread itself evenly through a medium, yeah? So you exhale smoke, which I still wish you wouldn't do in here by the way, but you exhale, and rather than it doing what I wish it would do and just kind of cling to you, it gradually spreads, diffuses into the air. And like, I've thought this before, how a secret is kind of the same. It wants to, this is pretty spacey, one of my spacey ideas, but how it wants to spread itself. Like smoke. Diffuse into the atmosphere until its evenly distributed. Yeah? And that, if the secret is bottled up in you, that creates pressure. Man, secrets, they just want out. Want to get everywhere. Especially, and this isn't always the case, but especially if the secret is the truth. Get me? Cause the truth wants to get out there, get into all the nooks and crannies, get into everyone's heads. The truth doesn't want to be bottled up, it wants to be free. And I'm down with that. You know I'm down with that. That's what the Society is about, getting the truth out.

He keeps rubbing his forehead, pressing his fingertips deep into his temples, eyes closed. -But not all at once. Not like, you know, like when something is under extreme

pressure and you release it, it just, man, it explodes out. Yeah? People get hurt. And, our life here, our life with the Vyrus, that's not like can-of-soda pressure. You release this truth you don't get some mess sprayed on the wall. The Vyrus, that's bomb pressure. That's, and I don't think this is hyperbole, but that's nuclear-device pressure. That's an explosion that rocks the world to its foundation. And.

He stops rubbing, rests his head in his hand, eyes still closed. -And this, this secret were talking about. That, that instillation in Queens, that's pressure on a whole different order. That's like, like, if the Vyrus is a nuke, that place is like a doomsday device.

He opens his eyes. -That place, Joe.

He lifts his head, looks at me. -That place is like a bomb that kills us all.

He points east, without looking there.

— People know about that, and there is nothing, nothing short of, man, nothing short of Jesus-Mohammed-Buddha-Gaia-Jehovah itself that saves us.

He wipes his mouth. -So, to talk about it, man, something that exerts that kind of pressure, to talk

about it for the first time in decades, that's just blowing my mind here. That's, the whole thing, its like a mirror being held up, when you take something like that out of the box and look at it after so long. Its a, man, its trip and a half.

He stares at his trembling hand. -A trip and a half.

He moves his hand, reaches for his prop glasses, slips them on. -But a thing like that, it belongs in its box.

I study that gash in the floor a little more.

— Well, I know you re no fool, Terry. Me the jury's still out on. Even so, I think I read this one pretty clear.