Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Well,” he says, unreadable. “That’s one.”

Whit had thought it was all bluster and bluff. How could it be otherwise? That thought: this can’t be the world. As though Vargas can see the kind of spiral Whit is headed down—forehead against the cold window, mouth gone mute—he pulls into a Denny’s parking lot and tells Whit he has no choice about getting a cup of coffee. Whit goes along. He wants off the street. The counter waitress is Joan, but just the N on her nametag has turned sideways so it reads JOAZ. This is all Vargas calls her, flirting in a way she clearly wants nothing to do with. He pours so much cream and sugar into his coffee it’s like he’s trying to make another cup of pudding.

“You’ve got to keep your imagination in the right place,” he says. “Whalen’s fiancée curled sideways on the least comfortable of ICU recliners while all those monitors beep away like fucking R2-D2. Waking up to see his face interrupted by a ventilator tube. Nguyen’s wife. Think of her awake right now, middle of the night, knowing that tomorrow she’s going to get a dozen visits from people she can barely understand. A guy like Nguyen probably had thirteen kids that all live off the rice noodles his paycheck afforded. Tomorrow her house is going to look like a florist’s wet dream, but she’s only going to be able to think about the dwindling sack of rice in the pantry.”

“Mercy,” Whit says. Vargas clearly doesn’t know what he means, and neither does Whit, but Vargas stops.

“Tell me about this test, then. You have to know all the laws?”

“That’s the bar. This is just a test of logic.” Whit tells him about the three sections: reading comprehension, logical reasoning, logic games. The games are the hardest, at least at first—full of weird scenarios governed by weird rules. Six students are each going to see one of four movies. Three canoes with four seats each, and each canoe needs one adult and three children. Who is the best tennis player? If G plays golf, he’s the worst tennis player, but if he doesn’t, he’s the third best. But it’s the most learnable section—at least that’s what his teacher, barely more than a kid in fancy threads and glasses, promises every class. So far, yes, the games make more sense if he spends an hour on one, but when he tries to get through four in the thirty-five minutes the test gives him, it’s like trying to read computer code. That’s not what he tells Vargas. He tells him there are four game types, and each one has its own sketch. He explains, as best he can, how to form the contrapositive to a conditional statement. He finds himself cribbing words from his instructor’s lectures pretty much verbatim, but he sounds confident. It occurs to him that this is what Vargas was going for: getting his brain into a sphere where it’s more comfortable. He doesn’t mind the manipulation. He keeps going even when Vargas’s eyes glaze over.

The radio vibrates on the counter next Vargas’s side of bacon, calling out something about a suspicious young black ma—Vargas turns the dial off, signs the check with To Joaz my one true love and his phone number, and motions Whit back to the car. He turns the radio back on when the doors are safely shut and locked, but there’s no chatter, nothing to indicate the count has gotten any closer to its terminus, and Whit discovers something about himself: he wanted the awful thing to be over so much that a part of him had wished for it to happen.

He wants so badly to throw up that he rolls the window down and sticks his head out, but what’s in his stomach won’t fit through his throat. They’re farther south now, and farther inland. The air has lost its mossy smell. Now it’s just the day’s exhaust. Looking out through the blank night air he sees scattered big luxurious windows of the hillside houses lit up from the inside, insomniacs with their cable televisions on. They don’t need to worry about rising sea levels up there, but Whit remembers—he was a kid, but he remembers—when the whole range lit up like a quick-burning log in 1991, and three thousand houses dissolved into crackling black paper.

Cops up there give warnings if champagne parties go too loud too late. Cops up there make sure no one up there is from down here.

The dead streets quiver with a useless electricity. There’s no squeal of street-racing tires, no thumping of steroidal subwoofers, no rattle of shopping cart casters or calls of birds or even the grapey hiccupping of crickets. Engine noise and an open window. Vargas never runs the radio, neither music nor talk, and the squad radio has gone so quiet Whit imagines some sort of dread cloud hanging over the city soaking up all transmissions. He feels alone in the world.

Vargas rolls up Whit’s window from his armrest, and its cool slate catches the skin of his forehead and lifts it upward. Vargas’s posture is stiff as a startled deer’s, and he’s looking past Whit, out the passenger window down Fremont, and Whit follows the tether of his gaze to the crew of seven marching down the middle of the street, and there’s no word for it but marching. This is a mission, not a stroll. They are headed south toward norteño territory. Something bad is going to happen. Vargas coasts to a stop. Thirty seconds later Whit’s watching them through the windshield, twenty feet in front of the bumper. They eye the squad car skeptically but keep moving. Whit waits for Vargas’s hand to go to the PA.

“Don’t get crazy,” Vargas says. “I’m not putting money on a twoon-seven game of basketball.”

“This is our job,” Whit says.

“They do our job for us.”

“Kids get killed in their beds. Stray bullets.”

“Anecdotal.”

Whit wants to spit in his face. Vargas’s eyes narrow. He asks: “Has anyone ever told you that when you get pissy, your mouth looks like a butthole?” He puts the car back in gear, and they creep north, opposite from where the crew was headed. Driving back that way, back in the direction of downtown, of the bridge, of the ghost silhouette of a more civilized city, he no longer feels alone in the world. He feels crowded in the car. His hands itch. His face itches. He tries to check his imagination, as his partner has recommended. He sees Mrs. Nguyen in front of a casket. He sees Whalen’s fiancée, and Whalen sedated and intubated on the table, breathing that robot breath, the rise and fall of his ribs too perfect, too regular. He can’t help but see as well the possibility of a line going flat and half a dozen nurses rushing into the room and setting to work with a defibrillator. He can’t help but see that possibility of them shocking only dead flesh that bounces, rubbery, but won’t come back. The possibility that with two dead cops, the law of threes will demand six.

Ten minutes later, the radio crackles. A gunfight between gangs, not far south of where they just were, broke up on its own with no casualties. Vargas smirks. One of his great amusements is how gangbangers who love to pose tough with their guns have no idea how to aim them. But the smirk disappears into teeth as he chews his bottom lip. Perhaps he’s remembered that the 11th Street Boys who gunned down Whalen and Nguyen figured it out well enough. Dispatch wants a car to respond and set up a crime scene. Vargas calls in cross streets four miles north of their actual location and asks if they want him to head down. They decline. Closer cars, they say.

He finally reaches a half-decent neighborhood and parks under the lights of a twenty-four-hour grocery. “We should while away some time,” he says. “Get in a better headspace.” He does this on nights when he doesn’t want to get mixed up in anything that might result in paperwork. He calls it his special union break. Tonight, he’s got a story to tell. His wife went snooping through his oldest son’s closet this last weekend and found a stash that would have garnered their captain a press conference: a two-and-a-half-foot water bong, half an ounce of weed, ultra-sensitive condoms, and a travel-size shampoo bottle filled with olive oil—Whit will never guess what the olive oil was for, Vargas says, or maybe he will. Whit tunes him out. Vargas doesn’t remember telling him the exact same story in May.