Afterparty Part 4

The sidewalk was wet. The air smelled like an empty tuna can. Overhead, Dr. Gloria kept station between ground and gray sky. Shafts of sunlight perforated the cloud bank, which struck me as very beautiful.

"G.o.d is punching air holes," I said.

Bobby looked up at the sky in alarm. "What? Why?"

"Nothing," I said. "Settle."

As soon as we walked onto Tyndall Avenue, the heart of the heart of the Millie empire, a pa.s.sel of young kids ran past us flicking their pens at each other wand-style, casting spells and deducting hit points ... and no doubt sending our pictures down the street to their moms and grandmothers. These free-range Harry Potters, I decided, were lookouts for the Millies.

A chubby girl jumped in front of us. "Fling me a dollar? Two dollar I can level up!"

"Kick it, kid."

"Shopping, then? A little something from the grandmothers?"

"I'm good."

The homes on Tyndall were tidy brick affairs, built in the 1970s, with neat lawns and midrange cars at the curb. Dr. Gloria landed gracefully in front of a house in the middle of the block.

Two kids in their twenties sat on the front steps, arguing with each other-in English. The boy in a nylon jacket, the girl wearing tight white jeans and a hot pink hijab.

I said, "I'm looking for Fayza."

"I know," the girl said.

I hid my surprise. First try and we'd found the headquarters? Dr. G said, "Divine providence."

The girl nodded at Bobby. "He stays outside."

"But I'm already in there!" Bobby said. "This is just my body!"

"Be cool, kid," I said. "I'll take care of this."

He slumped to the sidewalk. Dr. Gloria patted me between the shoulder blades. "Here we go. Be polite."

She didn't have to remind me. Running a multimillion-dollar drug business-even a rural one-required a sociopathic outlook and a d.i.c.k bigger than an ashwagandha tree. People who crossed Fayza and the Millies disappeared into the bay.

I walked up the steps and pushed through the wooden front door. The house was clean but lower middle cla.s.s: twenty-year-old wallpaper, worn upholstery, pine chairs in the hallway. The air sharp with the smell of spices I couldn't identify. In the living room, five or six old ladies, none of them younger than seventy-five, sat around a low coffee table, most of them holding old-style tablet computers on their laps. They looked like they'd stolen their clothing from a 1980s' hip-hop crew: bright track suits, gold chains, spotless white gym shoes. Only the head scarves marked them as Muslim. They chattered at each other and tapped at the tablet screens. The grandmother closest to me glanced in my direction.

"Fayza?" I asked.

She turned back to her screen. And then I saw what she was looking at: a live picture of my silhouette, in some kind of X-ray mode. The key fob in my right front pocket glowed yellow.

Jesus, they had airport scanners? The d.a.m.n thing had to be hidden behind the hideous wallpaper. I wasn't sure what these old women would have done if I'd been carrying a weapon-bury me under a five-granny tackle?

The woman flicked her fingers at me in a gesture I took as permission to enter the living room. I skirted the circle of women and headed for the far doorway.

In the kitchen was an old man with a cloud beard, seemingly decades older than the ancients in the living room. He sat unmoving at the breakfast table, holding a fork and staring at a plate of dark meat and browned vegetables. He didn't look up when I entered.

A woman stood at the kitchen sink, gazing out through the window at the backyard. She wore a cobalt blue jacket with a wide black belt, black high-heeled boots, a gauzy black head scarf like an afterthought. The boots alone had to cost five grand.

"I so want those," Dr. Gloria said.

The woman turned toward me. She was holding a cleaver. Dr. Gloria's wings rustled in warning.

"Why don't you have a phone like a normal person?" she asked me angrily.

"I mean to buy one soon," I said-doing my best impersonation of a person who was not talking to a drug lord holding a gigantic blade. She was seventy, maybe seventy-five years old, with pale skin. But her face was made up, and the brown hair under the scarf showed aggressive highlights. "Put together," as my mother used to say. Give me that in thirty years.

"My name's Lyda Rose."

"I know who you are." She turned and put the cleaver on the wire dish rack. "If you don't want me to use junkies to find you, join the twenty-first century."

The old man still hadn't moved, and neither had the plate. A battle of wills.

Fayza walked to the back door and said, "Come this way."

I hesitated. My only backup was a make-believe angel and a brain-damaged kid who believed that his soul lived in a plastic box. I suspected that if I left this house, no one would find me.

Fayza looked back at me. "I want to show you my garden."

"Garden," however, was too gentle a word: It was a horticultural brothel. The yard stretched beyond the boundaries of the lot, creating a lush, shared park that ran the length of the block. Every flower and fern seemed improbably voluptuous, especially for this time of year. Naked and half-dressed statues watched coyly from behind the trees.

"It's a lot to take in," I said.

Fayza led me past a structure that was technically a gazebo, in the same way that a five-layer wedding cake was technically a dessert. She was heading for the back porch of the house across the way. A young Afghan man in a red hoodie held the door open for us.

"I have someone I want you to meet," Fayza said. "They're waiting inside."

I held up a hand. "Fayza, please..."

She turned, frowned. "What is the matter with you?"

My brain chattered like a playing card in a bicycle wheel. Had I already p.i.s.sed off the drug lord? Who was waiting in that house? And would I get out there alive? I had left the House of the Grannies, crossed through the Valley of the Statuary, and was being led into the Tomb of the Unknown Hoodie.

Jesus Christ I wish I'd taken something before coming here. Screw the pellet in my arm.

"You don't need any of that," Gloria said. "You have me."

The young man on the couch was skinny and black with an Abe Lincoln beard. He was dressed in layers like a street kid, but his clothes were clean and his black trainers were spotless. So, either new to the street, or on his way off it. I bet on the latter.

He nodded at me with great solemnity, and Fayza said, "You know each other?"

"Never seen him before," I said truthfully. We were in a bas.e.m.e.nt rec room outfitted with cheap carpet, Arabic movie posters under gla.s.s, and chrome furniture. A terrible place to die, in my opinion. "Who is he?"

"n.o.body," the boy said matter-of-factly.

"His name is Luke," Fayza said. "He's an addict."

Gloria bent to look more closely at the man's eyes. "The pupils are slightly dilated," she said. "Though that could be from the excitement of being trapped in a drug lord's bas.e.m.e.nt."

"What's he on?" I asked.

Luke looked surprised. "Nothing."

Fayza said, "A month ago, he was one of my most faithful customers. Not only marijuana, but a variety of pharmaceuticals. Then he stopped cold."

Dr. G said, "Good for you, Luke."

"He wasn't the only one," Fayza said. "Six other customers, some of them his acquaintances, have stopped purchasing from my dealers. Usually that means they're dead or in jail, but these people are still in the city. None of them is buying from me."

"Six people, that's not so bad," I said.

The boy in the hoodie looked at me in alarm.

Fayza said, "Don't tell me my business."

"I would never do that," I said. With sincerity.

"Luke and the others have moved on to another product."

"Which one?"

"I thought you could tell me," Fayza said. "You're the neuroscientist."

I froze for a moment, trying to figure out what Bobby had told her. But of course she didn't need Bobby. Anyone in Fayza's position would have access to hot and cold running infostream.

The basics were free to everyone: my entire resume from elementary school to PhD, the well-doc.u.mented debacle at Little Sprout, my arrests. I'd been told by a certain paranoid inmate of the NAT that with a little cash, my entire online history could be downloaded as well. Fayza probably knew my every credit transaction, social media post, and geolocation ping going back decades. I normally didn't trust paranoids, but I made an exception in Ollie's case.

"What do they call the drug?" I asked.

"They don't call it anything," she said. "They think it's the Holy Spirit."

"If you just open your heart," Luke said, "you'd understand."

I squinted at him. Was he seeing his own angel right now? Or did his G.o.d take the form of, say, a blob of light in his peripheral vision?

"You ever hear of the Numinous, Luke?"

He went still, trying to give away nothing, which gave away everything.

"Yee-up," Dr. Gloria said.

"How about Francine Selwig?" I asked.

"Frannie? Is she okay?" Luke said, genuinely worried.

"Who is this Francine person?" Fayza asked.

"Someone else who took a drug like Luke's," I said. "She killed herself."

"What?" Luke said. His surface calm cracked. "I can't believe she'd, she'd..."

"She was in withdrawal," I said. "She'd been cut off from whatever she was getting at the church."

Fayza said, "The Hologram Church."

Luke looked hurt. "The Church of the Hologrammatic G.o.d is-"

"The stupidest name I've ever heard," I said. "What were they giving you, Luke?"

He shook his head. "It's not a drug. I keep telling you that."

"Then what is it?"

His eyes flicked to the left. Consulting his higher power? Then he looked me in the eye and said, "It's the word of G.o.d."

Time for a new tactic. "Tell me about G.o.d," I said. "Is he here now?"

He frowned at me. "G.o.d is everywhere. That's pretty basic."

"But you can see him. What does he look like?"

That eye flick again. "It's hard to describe," he said. "He's more of a feeling. Watching over me." He brightened. "I built something to portray my feelings for him. If you come to the church-"

"Right, and this feeling-it gets stronger after each church service?"

He hesitated, then said, "Every time."

Dr. Gloria said, "This is like a Turing test for religion. So far, everything he's said would apply to anyone going to a prayer meeting."

Except he'd recognized the word "numinous." I said to Fayza, "We're not going to get anywhere this way."

Fayza nodded. "We've been going around and around for hours," Fayza said. "I can't tell if he's a very good liar or simply an idiot who doesn't know what's happened to him."

"Have you considered that he really did just find G.o.d?"

"I might have considered that, before I heard you were looking for a drug with exactly these symptoms. Before I learned that such a drug had already been invented."

The infostream again. No use hiding anything about Little Sprout, or NME 110. "That never left the lab," I said. "It never got to testing, much less market."

"No one's marketing this, either," Fayza said. "As far as I know, they're giving it away for free. You can see how this would greatly f.u.c.k with my business model." She stared at me as if it were my fault.

"Look, I'd like to help, but I don't see how I can-"

"Bring me a sample of this drug. Confirm for me what it is. Luke will take you to this church." She nodded to the Afghan kid. "Hootan will go with you."