THE SAME BED FROM TIME TO TIME
Lili says it before they have time to think about it. “You gave him a...”
They make a fist, and then extend their index and thumb.
Bang.
Jess had been buried under more crunch than usual, and it was visibly stressing her out. She'd been bouncing between three different projects, the remote work clients splitting her attention while she tried to mediate some dispute between two of her roommates over who put a pan in the dishwasher. She sounded clipped and curt. Lili knew it wasn't because she was angry at anyone, least of all them specifically, and she wanted it to stay that way. So, they had left jess alone for the time being.
Social media had been doing its own job on Lili. A member of the Lili Anti-Fan Club had decided to grab onto every post they made trying to promote their new project, endlessly bringing up “the time you admitted that you were pretending to be a trans woman.” Then, of course, the posts about “wanting reparations for having to deal with a trans-identifying male who uses nonbinary folx as a meat shield” had started, with payment processor links. They had felt the drive to go through every post, noting the profiles, going to the accounts and seeing what else they were saying to map it out, but Lucas' voice had appeared in their head. “You can't control every asshole on the planet. They run on nega-dopamine, they want you to feed the beast.”
Lili had reached the point where the best damage control was to not stick their finger in the trap and pull on it, so they had decided to find Lucas and thank him for his imaginary advice. They had texted him, but that had stayed unread. He probably had notifications turned off, or maybe even his cell unplugged, which meant he was probably blowing off steam with Rho at Ruby's.
Or blowing off steam, with ruby.
The intrusive thought that he had notifications on, but was just ignoring them, had tried to worm its way into their mind. They had fought it off, and started walking west.
Ruby puts the rocks glass onto a plastic screen set into something that looks like a little stainless steel sink, and presses it down. A brief jet of foamy water shoots up and around it. She moves it to an identical one next to it and repeats, this time with clear water, and then puts it on a drying rack.
“He told you this?”
“I found it. In his room.”
They feel Ruby lift an eyebrow, under that military headset thing. Lucas had called it a spider. They wonder if that makes them the fly.
“Not down here. Follow me.”
The crowd parts around Ruby, and she starts walking up the thin metal staircase that goes up to the top of the warehouse, where what used to be an office is. Jess would say to leave, here. “Cut line” is probably the term she'd use. Lucas would probably say something similar, but for very different reasons. They follow Ruby before they have time to think about it. The door looks heavy as it swings on the hinges, like it's made out of something magnitudes more substantial than interior doors usually are.
The sunset going through the stained glass windows mixes warmer reds, oranges, and yellows into what would be called, in a certain posting style, the bisexual lighting of the Russian neon signage. Ruby closes the door, but doesn't lock it. The ceiling is painted in what they remember is called dazzler camo. Disorienting geometries of parallel lines zig-zag and hatch in contrasting, unpredictable patterns.
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“Because he asked.”
“So, like, you just found a gun for him. Because he asked? That's a huge favor to call in.”
“I don't owe people favors. I sometimes do things for people I like.”
They feel like one of those bugs, pinned to a cork board under glass.
“Is this a problem?” She leans against a dresser, and crosses her arms. The mirror behind her shows the muscle standing out in the shoulders of the racer back, and the seam of pink scarring where the mounting for the arm is.
“I don't... know. Jess hates them. But Jess doesn't live there, I guess.” They feel guilty about saying that.
“I mean, you can be around them? Not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Oh. No. That's not my problem. Do you know why he wanted one?”
“He said that his ghost told him to.” Her posture loosens. “You haven't been around them before.”
They feel their guts squirm. “Only, you know, the cops. And a guy pulled one at a coffee shop I worked at once. Yelled about queers being plague rats.”
Ruby drills into Lili with those spider eyes a little more, and the edges of her mouth soften. She pulls the top drawer of the dresser out, and produces a pistol from under a stack of black boyshorts. She pulls the clip out by pressing a button near the trigger, and holds it out to them by grasping it by the slide and frame, barrel towards the floor and grip up and out. They think of the way Lucas talks about guns.
Not a clip. A magazine.
Ruby holds the metal magazine like a dart, between her index and thumb, which Lili remembers is how she smokes those cigarillos. The bullets in the magazine look distinctly military, a level beyond what civilians experience.
Not bullets. Cartridges.
Separate black segments in the tips, surrounded by regular bullet.
Putting their hand on it feels like what those magnet implants must do, a tingling, almost-physical pull. It feels heavy, more in the sense of psychic payload than mass itself. Their father had a “paperweight” that was a pair of brass knuckles, actually brass, with the finger holes blocked by plastic plugs. Even without the loaded magazine, it feels like that in their hand. It looks a little like a more severe and sized-up version of the Glock clone, blocky geometry on the features forward-swept towards the back, and aggressively-perpendicular at the business end. That business end has some sort of aiming unit or sensor clamped on the rail underneath, flush with the muzzle. They remember to keep their finger outside the trigger guard. Ruby is watching them gauge the mass, and put their thumb on the hammer.
“Udav. Boa constrictor. Hammer-fired. A feature not so common in America, now.” She tilts her head. “They say war trophies are tacky, but I think I earned it.”
Ruby absentmindedly runs her right finger across the raw-looking part of her jaw. They feel another unit of existential density added to the thing, and quickly hand it back to her. She reinserts the magazine, and puts it back beneath the underwear. Lili thinks about the finger on the jaw, but more deliberate, and it's Lucas' hand instead of Ruby's.
“Okay, is gunchat over?”
She walks over to the kitchen and takes a small can out of the refrigerator.
“You want a Jack and Coke? Or Jack and Pepsi, as it is.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
She cracks the can open and takes a fifth out of one of the cabinets. “Sit.”
Lili sinks into a sectional sofa in the middle of the wide apartment. They watch Ruby pour shots into a pair of glasses, and then evenly distribute the cola between the two with the instinctive feel of a professional bartender. She hands them one of the cocktails, sits, and takes a long sip of hers.
She looks at the glass for a second, tapping that same polymer fingertip on the rim. “You don't get us.”
Lili takes slug of the sweetness, feeling the bite of the whiskey at the end of it. “I think I have an idea. Now.”
“Like T for T.” Ruby takes another sip.
“Yeah.”
“Not that your problems aren't real, mind. I'm not ignoring, as you would say, intersectionality. It's just that it's very visible for us.”
“Yeah. I bet it's tricky to work around that exo.” They feel themselves saying it before they can stop it from coming out of their mouth.
Ruby laughs. “And most people don't know how to handle this.” She puts her left index between the side of her face and the elastic band of the headset, snapping it like a bra strap. “Someone who's been deep-fried by thermobaric rocket artillery.”
“I wouldn't-”
“Say it like that? No, you wouldn't. That'd be rude. But I would.”
Lili drinks silently for a minute.
“Alright.” Ruby puts the empty glass down on the slab of reclaimed, lacquered wood in front of them. “I've grilled you enough. Lucas was here a little while ago. Went out the back with his little boyfriend to get some air. I think he got overstimulated. Loud down there. Lights. They're probably wandering around the docks shooting the shit, knowing him.”
They slurp the last ounce or so and put their glass down next to hers. “Thanks.”
Lili starts walking towards the door. They feel it a little, in that drawer. The weight.
“I'm not possessive of him, you know.” Ruby puts her boots on the table, shiny little silver tips showing the engravings of wolf skulls through the chromatic glinting. “He's not mine. We just find ourselves in the same bed from time to time, understandably.”
Down the stairs, through the crowd, and out the back door into the hot sea air. They walk around the old docks, looking at the corroded infrastructure of sea lane logistics behind the crenelations of floodwalls, alternating between still standing and cracked apart. That's how you can tell which contractors made which segments, they remember Jess having explained. Some used subpar concrete, or didn't reinforce them the way they were supposed to. The ways in which they fail tell you who was paid to put them there.
Lili thinks they see them, finally, silhouetted against the light pollution from Manhattan. One of them is standing with a bottle in their hand, and the other is sitting at the edge of the old dock, dangling their legs off it. Lili hikes up the ramp to them, but as quietly as they can.
“...I don't know, man. The fuck does it even matter? All that money we threw into title loans. May as well be a bottomless pit. All the time we spent on fuckin' fumes, keeping our run rankings up. That water out there's going to really come at us one day and swallow it all. Won't mean shit.”
Rho. He takes a slug out of the bottle and throws it up in the air. Lucas holds that same finger gun out, index forward and thumb cocked.
Bang.
The bottle smashes on one of the bowled-over segments, with no rebar sticking out of it.
“Hey, you two. Hope I'm not interrupting bro time.”
Lucas lays on the dock and looks up at the sky. “Hey, Lili.”
Rho sits down next to him. “Yo.”
“I'm going to go home, how much juice you got left?”
Lucas pauses for a second, doing something with that deck of his. “Enough to walk back.” He stands up. “Yeah, I should head back now, too.” He looks down at Rho. “Want to chill back at our place?”
Rho stands up, steadily enough. “Yeah. That actually sounds good.”
They start walking, away from Ruby's domain and back to the split-level.
“I talked to Ruby. About, you know, stuff.” Lili feels incredibly awkward even bringing it up at all.
“Yeah?” Rho raises his eyebrows. “And you survived.”
“She's not that bad.” Lucas is still looking up at the sky.”
“I think we mostly get each other, for now. Hey... how do those goggles work? I didn't want to ask.” Lili hopes it doesn't count as prying.
“She's a cyborg.”
“You've said, but she isn't decked.”
“Never said she was decked. E-N-F-Is.” He enunciates each letter of the acronym crisply. “Extreme near-field interfaces. It's how the military used to do it. Half the wiring is there, and there's these super high-bandwidth transceivers that external hardware connects to. Needs a thing called a halo. Used to be a big thing in a chair, then it was smaller, fitted headsets. That's what the goggles use. Acts on where the optical nerves go.”
“Huh.”
“She has a halo, apparently. No idea where she got it. Offered to hook it up and let me... what's the term? Full-body peripheral. One-to-one sensory and movement mapping. Like telemetry for a high-end drone.”
Lili and Rho both stop and stare at him. Lili feels themselves blink at what feels like half-speed. Rho looks like someone just fired a gun into air.
“What?” He looks legitimately baffled by why the two would react with anything but mild interest.
Rho shakes his head and laughs. “Man. Don't know where to start with that.”
They all keep walking.