Lockdown

(A story from the Daniel Faust series)

Sometimes, you have to write a story just to write it. I was sitting there, wondering what some of my characters were doing during quarantine, and it became this little slice of life. Obviously, given the ending of The Locust Job (don’t worry, no spoilers here), things couldn’t play out quite like this without some rejiggering of the timeline — but I like to think that it happened anyway.

I saw the end of the world, once.

Well, the end of a world. One of the worlds next door. I stood out on South Las Vegas Boulevard and saw the leaning towers and smoke, the burned-out cars, newspapers fluttering across the empty road. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge getting his wake-up call from the Spirit of Yet to Come, it was a vision of what could happen here, if I didn’t pull my shit together.

I thought it was funny, in hindsight, that I got that vision while I was stuck in a federal penitentiary.

Now I was in lockdown all over again, and Vegas had gone dark. Not because of an interdimensional madman, or a rogue sorcerer, or a rampaging monster. This time, it was a virus. The Strip was empty, the neon all powered down, the crowds and the buskers and the year-round party all gone away. Normally you couldn’t move on Fremont without jostling someone’s drink. Now you could move all you wanted, but there was nowhere to go.

Sorcerers and monsters, I could deal with. Hell, we had an infestation of mind-controlling cockroaches once. Ugly, but we handled it. Give me an enemy I could shoot, stab, or hex, and I was in my element. All I could do to fight Covid-19 was…stay home.

At least I had a better cell this time around. Wood laminate floors, spot lighting, a kitchen with a granite island counter and cable TV. I paced enough times to count the steps from my bed to the front door and back again. I could navigate my apartment with my eyes closed.

I watched old movies. Comfort food. I played solitaire until I got tired of cheating. And I waited. Because that was all I could do. It was maybe twenty days into quarantine by the time I stopped counting days altogether. By then it was tough remembering what day of the week it was, or why I ever cared in the first place.

I had also stopped wearing socks at some point.

“Are you sure you can’t come over?”

Caitlin’s voice in my ear was a lifeline. Her Scottish burr felt like a finger trailing down the back of my neck.

“I may be immortal,” she said, “but this physical body is built to mimic a human’s, as much as is convenient. Which means I probably don’t have to worry about the disease, but I can certainly be a carrier and pass it along to others. I’m quarantining just like everyone else, pet. I’d be very cross if I got you sick.”

She told me that Emma had to shut down Hell’s local field office. That was the thing about our new enemy; it didn’t care. It didn’t care if you were a sinner or a saint, didn’t care who you were or how old you were or where you came from. You couldn’t buy it off or threaten it away.

All I could do was stay home. And I had never felt more powerless.

I was lucky. I knew that. I had a pantry full of food, a good roof over my head, and money wasn’t a problem. I’m a career criminal. When I need money, I steal it. Other people were feeling the crunch, and hard. My place is over Della’s, a pool hall in a part of town where the tourists don’t go. Della had to shut down weeks ago. Every passing day meant more cash going out and none coming in, her life’s savings dwindling away.

She could stay closed and go broke. Or open the doors, turn her bar into a Petri dish and kill her own customers. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t, and it didn’t look like any help was on the way. The cavalry wasn’t coming.

Before lockdown, I was hardly ever home. When I was, though, I always opened my bedroom window half an hour before sunset. And waited. There’d be that perfect moment when the sun shimmered down on the dusty horizon, and the Strip would ignite. Neon constellations, a hand-crafted heaven to turn the night sky into high noon with a roar of light. It was beautiful. Defiant.

That didn’t happen anymore.

I was sitting by the window, staring up at the dull black sky, nursing a glass that was mostly straight Jack with a splash of Coke, when my phone lit up. It was a text from Melanie. My teenage apprentice — and I was still trying to figure out how that had happened — sent over a long and complicated-looking link.

Click me, she wrote. Better yet, click me on your laptop.

Which meant finding my laptop. And setting it up on my kitchen island, digging out a charger and stringing it over to the closest power outlet. Connecting to Host, said a pop-up. Then a window blossomed, live video: pale cheeks, bright eyes, and a familiar mop of blue hair.

“O captain my captain,” Melanie said.

I’d say I smiled for the first time in a week, but I only had a rough idea of what a week was anymore. I’ll say that I smiled. Seeing her on the screen, hearing her voice…it wasn’t the same as having her sitting here in person, but it was close. Damn close.

“Video chat,” I said. “Nice. When I was a kid, this was right out of a Dick Tracy comic.”

“When you were a kid, people knew who Dick Tracy was.”

Before I could express my indignation, the screen became a mosaic. Melanie fell back into a square in the top-left corner. She had company. Bentley and Corman, my adoptive parents — they’d taken me in when I was Melanie’s age, on the run and ragged and wild — were online too. Bentley had pulled a rumpled tweed blazer over a button-down shirt, his absolute minimum standard for hosting company. Corman was wearing sweats.

“Hey, kiddo,” Corman said. Then he shot a glance to his left. “And every budding heister should read Dick Tracy. Chester Gould knew his stuff.”

Melanie furrowed her eyebrows. “Didn’t Tracy straight-up murder pretty much every criminal he ran across?”

“Exactly. It’s a cautionary tale.”

I hadn’t seen my dads since lockdown started. Talked to them on the phone, sure. I was taking care of their grocery deliveries — their ages put them both in the Covid extreme-danger zone — but I hadn’t seen them. It mattered. It mattered more than I thought it would. More windows were opening, filling out the mosaic. Mama Margaux popped in, wearing a familiar white headscarf over her thick black locks: it was the one she wore when she was overdue for a salon appointment and too busy to deal with it. We were all adjusting to this new shut-down world in our own way. She looked good.

“Bonswa, all.”

“Mama!” I said, beaming now. “How are you holding up? You need anything?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I need better guidance from the loa. When it came time to hunker down and ride this storm out, I got a call from Antoine. He said, ‘come over baby, we’ll wait it out together.’”

Antoine. He’d been her on-again off-again on-again off-again boyfriend for as long as I’d known her. I still hadn’t met him in person. Which was good, because I vacillated between wanting to shake his hand and punch him as often as she did.

“You said yes,” I guessed.

“I have regrets.”

Another new arrival. Jennifer leaned back in a swivel chair, wreathed in a cloud of suspicious smoke. A desk lamp cast shadows across an urban jungle of foliage at her back.

“I want to go on the record,” she said, “and say this situation officially sucks.”

“How you doing over there, Jen?” I asked.

She took a long drag from a hand-rolled joint, tilted her head back, and blew a plume of smoke at the heavens.

“If it was just me, I’d be cool. Ice cold. An ice cold island on a carefree ocean.”

“That’s probably because of the pot,” Melanie said.

“Don’t sass me, child.” She took another drag. “I’m also on shrooms at the moment. And a little coke so I don’t mellow out too much.”

“And?” I asked.

“That’s all.” She paused. “And a tab of ecstasy. Everything goes better with E. Anyway. I’ve got people depending on me. I mean, a lot of people. If I’m not making money, my people aren’t making money. And their families aren’t making money. And rent isn’t getting paid and groceries aren’t getting bought and kids aren’t getting fed. It’s just one damn thing after another.”

“Deye mon, gen mon,” Margaux said.

Jennifer tilted her head. “Meaning?”

“Something my parents taught me when I was a girl, growing up in Haiti. Deye mon, gen mon. Beyond the mountains, there are more mountains.”

A new window opened. Caitlin was here. Even her usual carefully-groomed look hadn’t escaped the stress of the day. There were faint bags under her eyes, the coppery twist of her French braid showing stray hairs and frazzle. She still looked perfect to me. And every new face, every new voice, made my empty kitchen a little brighter.

“Good evening, everyone. Melanie, did you get my email with the reading list for next week?”

Melanie snapped a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Reading?” I asked.

“We started a quarantine book club,” Jennifer drawled.

“Nobody invited me.”

Then came the awkward silence.

“What?” I said. “I read books.”

“We’re starting with the collected works of Jane Austen,” Caitlin said.

“Maybe I’m all about Jane Austen,” I said. “Maybe I’m a total Jane Austen fan, like, hardcore into her stuff. All day every day. Living that Austen life.”

“Name one of her books,” Jennifer said.

“…Little House on the Prairie?”

I was saved by another new arrival. Pixie looked half-asleep, pinching the bridge of her nose and slouching, bathed in blue LED light from her gaming rig. She gave a half-hearted wave with her other hand. “Yo.”

“Pixie?” Jennifer said. “Book club?”

“So you invite her, but not me,” I said.

“Do you want an invitation?”

I shrugged. “I mean…no? Not really? It’s just nice to be invited to things.”

“Rain check,” Pixie said. “Appreciate it, but I don’t have the processing power right now.”

“I figured quarantine would be easier for you than anybody,” Melanie said. “I mean, all your work is on the Internet.”

Pixie let out a half-hearted laugh.

“I thought so, too. Makes sense, right? I need to stay indoors and be a hermit? That’s pretty much my lifestyle. I trained for this.”

“Didn’t work out the way you thought?” I asked.

“And I don’t know why. Nothing changed, but…everything changed. And I don’t have any energy. There are five projects I could be working on right now, hacks I had planned out for months before the virus hit, and I haven’t gotten a damn thing done. Sometimes just taking a shower and pouring a bowl of cereal feels like a day’s worth of effort.”

She slid sideways in her chair, glancing to one of her other monitors, rattling off a few keystrokes.

“And what kills me,” she added, “is seeing people just crushing it in quarantine. Like, not only are they making it work, they’re picking up new skills and starting micro-businesses and learning to speak Mandarin and stuff. Which makes me wonder if I’m just lazy, and that makes me feel even worse.”

“It’s not only you,” I said.

I thought that would be enough, but now I felt eyes on me through the screen, the chat drifting into an expectant silence. I took a deep breath.

“Normally,” I said, “give me even a couple hours of downtime and I’m doing…something. Planning. Hustling. I walk into a new place, later that afternoon I’m dreaming up ways to break in after hours. Not necessarily because I ever intend to hit it for real, just to keep my skills sharp. Hell, I could be working. You know how many businesses are locked up tight with nobody watching the goods right now? It’s like a city-wide candy shop out there.”

More silence. My family knew me. This pressure had been building in my chest for a while now, like a clenched fist under my ribcage, and they gave me room to let it out.

“All I can see is what I should be doing, but I’m not…doing it. I’m not jumping onto opportunities. I’m not hustling. I’m just getting by from day to day and all the days are blending into each other. I used to be a self-starter who got shit done. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You’re grieving,” Caitlin said.

I shook my head.

“I’m not, though. I mean, I feel bad about the people dying from this thing, on general principle, but I haven’t lost anybody I know.”

“In 1918, when the Spanish Flu hit,” she said, “I was living on the east coast. It taught me some things about humanity. Weathering the Great Depression taught me even more. There’s the grief of losing someone you know, certainly. But there’s also the grief of losing your world. You woke up one day to discover that life, as you knew it, is over.”

“This virus won’t be around forever,” Melanie said.

“No. But even when it’s been wiped away, what remains will be different. Some things may go back to the way they were. Some things never will. Some parts of your life might be better. Some might be worse. You don’t know, and that uncertainty breeds fear. Then there’s the grief of anticipation. We’re all healthy—”

“Knock on wood,” Corman said.

“—but we’re all wrestling with the worry. What if one of us gets sick? Or worse?”

I thought about it all the time. I had a whole ritual for delivering Bentley and Corman’s groceries, as elaborate as anything from a Renaissance grimoire. PPE, disinfectant wipes on everything, bags left a carefully measured distance from their back doorstep. And as careful as I was, all I could think about was the one mistake, the one trace of the bug slipping through, and then…

“It hasn’t happened,” she said, “but your mind is still performing dress rehearsals for the worst-case scenario. You have to remember that the virus isn’t the only invisible threat. So is stress, so is grief, so is fear. We are in a battle with invisible beasts, all day, every day, with no end in sight.”

“So how do I win?” I said.

“We,” Bentley said.

“We,” Caitlin echoed. “In every upheaval I’ve lived through, every catastrophe, every seismic shift, what keeps people strong is their connections to one another. Family. Friends. We’re all fighting the same battle right now. And while we’re all surrounded, that doesn’t mean we’re outnumbered. And we are certainly not outgunned. We have all the weapons we need in order to weather this storm.”

“Like…this.” Melanie gestured at her screen. “I mean, we’re already checking in with each other by phone, but I figured this might be nice, getting our whole weird fam together. Once a week, maybe?”

A little piece of normality. Something to look forward to. I liked that idea.

We all talked about nothing for a while. What was going on, what wasn’t going on. Melanie showed us the card trick she’d been practicing, and Bentley gave her some long-distance pointers. It was almost, for a little while, like we were all sitting around the table together at the Tiger’s Garden. Good enough, for now.

My family kept me strong, just by being there. And I could help to keep them strong, too. And suddenly I didn’t feel so powerless after all.

Bentley and Corman were early to bed, early to rise types. “Love you,” I said. They knew, but sometimes you just need to hear it. We all said those two words a lot, before we logged off for the night, one by one.

Just before the last window went dark, I had a burst of inspiration. Or maybe it was the Jack Daniels.

“So can you get anybody on this thing?”

“I suppose,” Melanie said. “Who did you want to call?”

I told her what I had in mind. She roped in Pixie, who made it happen.

From the angle, the new arrival to the video conference was looking down at her phone. She had mussy blonde hair, bleary eyes, and a hospital mask over her mouth and nose. She blinked.

“This,” Harmony Black said, “is not an emergency dispatch from the Bureau.”

“Hey there,” I said.

“Faust. Why are you calling me?”

“Wanted to check in, see how you were doing.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously,” I said.

Her shoulders sagged. Behind her, I could make out an empty street, unwashed cars caked with yellow pollen.

“Just doing my job,” she said, “which doesn’t stop for anything, including a pandemic. So…we’re out here. Doing it. Same job, but everything takes three times as long with the bonus chance of getting a virus on top of all the usual danger.”

She glanced to her side. Her mask puffed with a sigh.

“I’m tired. I’m just really tired.”

“Well, I want you to know that I recognize and respect your work as a front-line defender in a time of crisis.” I put my hand over my heart. “So, while you’re doing your part, I’m doing mine by staying home. I will not be committing any heists until this pandemic is over.”

“I hate you. So much.” There wasn’t any anger in her voice. Maybe she was too worn out for it, but I was pretty sure, under the mask, she was smiling a little. Good.

“When I get back to work, I’ll be donating a portion of the proceeds from my next robbery to a worthy charity, in your name. I’ll make sure you get a receipt.”

“That’s it, I’m sending you back to prison.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked a second voice. A face loomed in from behind Harmony’s shoulder. Another mask, dark skin, piercing turquoise eyes. Her partner; Jessie, I think her name was.

“Tell her it’s your nemesis,” I said.

Harmony blurted out a laugh. “You are not my nemesis.”

“Oh. You.” Jessie rolled her eyes. “Stop doing crimes, asshole.”

“Never. I live for two things: crime, and my Jane Austen book club. Now let’s talk about the whereabouts of my car—”

They hung up on me. The nerve of some people. Oh, well. My work was done.

I finished my drink, looking out the window, to the dark sky where there should have been neon light. I was going to have to let go of ‘should have’ for a while. I was going to have to let go of a lot of things, and focus on what I could do. If sometimes that meant just getting myself through the day, that was fine. If it meant helping someone else get through theirs, even better.

Deye mon, gen mon.

Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains. And that’s all right.

We’ll climb them together.