BLACK HELICOPTERS EPISODE 37 SATURDAY the EIGHTH - 10:41 PM Anne and Andy ordered another shot, another pint... listened to the pipers and fiddlers on the jukebox awhile then, when a dozen noisy, belching Conk delegates stormed in, hailed a cab that stopped on the shabby corner in front of Andy's shabby hotel. Suddenly both were out on the street... cab retreating quickly, fleeing... taillights a pair of red dots like gunsights shrinking, disappearing. A spotlight from a U.N. helicopter swept over them, then zoomed further into the East End. "Well, here it is!" Andy declared as they sidled towards the fire door like a couple of spies. "Hindus have mirrors they position all up and down the stairs, so they can see who's bringing who up..."

"I don't understand how they're allowed to prohibit American citizens from having visitors. It's unconstitutional!" Anne protested.

"People who live in places like this... you got no rights. It's all to stop the prostitution, see? And drugs. Rich people hate thinking that poor people, somewhere, might be having sex, fun or even friends. But all these managers have arrangements with the street, so the only people who get in are the hookers and the dealers! Just another example of American free enterprise in action."

"This political Gnosticism of yours is getting out of hand," Anne warned. "I really think... there has to be a good reason for all these rules..."

"Nine-eleven? Well, if you find one," Andy suggested, "go tell the Catfish."

"I said there must be a good reason. I didn't say I knew what it was, or whether it really was a good reason..."

"Fine!" Andy pulled a bar napkin he'd pilfered from Houlihan's and began drawing a cryptic geometry of lines and times and arrows. He had no credit card, of course, but his public library card was plastic and easily slipped the fire door lock - he left it hanging there, lifted Anne's wrist.

"Give me exactly two minutes from the time I go in, you follow... don't forget the card, ignore the buzzers. The fire door monitor's in the office... unless our luck's really rotten, Babu will be mesmerized by "You Bet Your Car" with the wife and little Babus. Move quick, hang a left at the top of the stairs, then right, there's no other way. Third door from the corner is the ladies' shower... it's the one that doesn't have a number. Lock the door, run the water and wait for me to knock. Three times, once, once more. If I'm more than five minutes, go to the back stairs at the end of the corridor, up two flights to the fourth floor, I'm in room 435. There's usually junkies on the stairs, but if you move fast enough they won't react in time to hurt you."

"This doesn't sound like America. I'd rather we went to the shelter!"

"No, you wouldn't. Over there, when I work the night shift, I carry a flashlight and a baseball bat. Technically, we could get rid of the sex rules because we don't get any funding anymore, but it's like letting roaches in the place... you let one get by, then two, pretty soon everybody's doing it. And then it stops being consensual..."

"Andy, are there roaches upstairs?"

"Nah! Henry takes care of them?"

"The janitor? Exterminator?"

"See ya!" He planted a farewell kiss on her lips, still open from forming the word "exterminator", held up two fingers, approached the door to the hotel between two boarded up storefronts, pressed the buzzer and, in a few seconds, vanished. Anne, checking her watch, waited exactly two minutes before forcing the door, scampering up a long flight of stairs as a screeching buzzer bounced from wall to wall. Turning left, as instructed, she heard Andy and a number of high-pitched foreign voices engaged in a dispute. She shut the door of the filthy shower stall, turned the water on, removed her hundred-ninety dollar shoes then, after looking down, put them on again. Two minutes later the knocks came... three, one, one.

Andy led her to the back stairs and they went up. A ragged man lay sprawled in the stairwell between the third and fourth floor.

Anne hesitated. "Shouldn't we stop? He looks dead!"

"If he is, he'll start to smell, and Babu will have somebody take him out. There's guys here that'll do anything for a break on the rent, cash back for a bottle, a rock or some kat. Come on!"

On the fourth floor, faint radio and television sounds seeped forth under the doors to rooms. At 435 Andy motioned for quiet, unlocked the dark room and entered, fist closing around a broomstick. Suddenly, he flipped the light and Anne had only an instant to start, seeing two rats on a table before they leaped towards a hole in the wall. Andy hurled the broomstick like a spear, striking the lattermost on the hind flank but, with an angry squeal, it pulled itself through the hole.

"Fuck!"

The room looked ransacked, torn to pieces... in fact... as if by spies looking for secret documents. Papers, clothes and broken appliances littered the small table, bureau, sink and bed; more were piled on the floor.

"Least they won't be back for a while!" He shrugged his jacket off, tossed it on the bed. "Well... welcome to the home of unassimilated elements. Tain't the Ivona, is it? Tell me it's what you've yearned for all your life!"

"All... my... life... it's what I've been trying to get away from, all my life... ohh, watch out..."

Andy looked down. A turd... canine or human... crouched just beyond the toe of his second hand shoe. "Someone's calling card," he said, "thought the place looked like someone broke in. Asshole!" he added, scooping the feces up with a MicroTime^TM postcard promising twelve e-books for a penny, pointing it at Anne. "Your people?"

"Why?" she asked.

The room was about ten feet by twelve, just slightly larger than the dark, solitary cell Andy had inhabited. Besides the narrow bed and table... a real estate sign mounted on plastic milk cartons... there was a dresser, one chair. A box of papers had been overturned by the bed... a frightened cockroach trying to scurry between documents containing telephone numbers of civil rights, peace and anti-UN groups who might or might not be coming to town, but Andy reached past the plastic bottle of generic tequila under the bed, pinched the insect, held it up and... to Anne's bewilderment... tossed the squirming bug up into the air, towards the ceiling.

Gravity to the contrary, it did not come down and, when Anne looked more closely, she saw a spider emerge from the cracked, spotted mirror over the dresser, climbing towards the ceiling.

"Dinner!"

"I thought you said Henry, the janitor, made sure you didn't have any bugs!"

"Henry!" Andy pointed upwards. "They check in, but Henry gets 'em before they check out, if the rats don't find them first. He's probably my best friend... you know? Spiders are loyal. More than you can say about people!"

"Bitter, bitter Andy!"

"I can work with individuals, I just can't stand processes. Processes took what's left of the left and made it about as viable as the Costa Rican loyalist argument."

"That's racist!"

"So sanction me!" Andy put his keys and wallet on the table, picked up the tequila and took a long, sour gulp... swishing it between his teeth as a form of dental hygiene, except that he swallowed it when he was done - plaque, liquor and all.

Then he extended the bottle... hesitantly...

"I have a better idea." Anne sat down on the bed and opened her purse, revealing an amazing array of perfumes, lipsticks, eyeliners, pills and contact lenses. "Can I help it if the world gets a little bit misty in our old age?" she said of the last, fingers rising to her eyes. "This place is worse than that, that... pad... we shared at the U. Sordid! Makes me want to do sordid things!" She opened a lipstick container and shook out a little plastic baggie. "Brought some pot in case I found the right sort of place to smoke it... this neighborhood seems the kind of place it's safe for people smoke pot in. At least! Do you still smoke?"

"When weed's five times as much as crack, ten times more expensive than kat? Only pot I ever see is when some slumming child of the great bourgeoisie gets busted and leaves his shit behind at the Sanctuary. Rich man’s drug. Besides, it's politically incorrect. Supports terrorism, right?... as if bananas, diamonds and gasoline don't..."

"But you haven't forgotten how to roll..."

Andy took the weed and his papers from the tobacco pouch, cleared a small space on the improvised table. "Til' your Catfish makes tobacco illegal... like riding bicycles. Or driving a car. Haven't had a car since the first round of defundings, did I say? Three fuckin' years. But this fellow wanted me to drive him to the hospital in his Volvo last month... fucked up... and I realized I could still do it. Scared the shit out of me..."

"Why did he have to go to the hospital."

"This other dude stabbed him in the gut on my shift. We try to keep the weapons out but it still happens all the time. Social worker, asking the wrong guy wrong questions. He lived. Guy who did it just faded out by the time I got back, back into the woodwork. Or Capital City." He twisted the ends of the joint, lit it and took a sample toke. "Pinhead's fault, if you ask me... sleepin' in a car's safer than at the Sanctuary, only he got this law passed that confiscates cars when somebody sleeps in them. It's for local vagrancy now but watch... give it a year or two and they'll have city cops out patrolling the rest stops on the Interstate making busts, confiscating all those nice Caddies and BMWs at the rest stops. In our dreams, right? This tastes OK. Some of the deep conspiracy people on the street say cops are dealing weed cut with rat poison, but I guess this didn't come off any street, right? There's this station at the U. that's pretty good, but my radio got ripped off and, with the convention and all, I haven't had time to hustle up another one. I guess, if I had, it would have been stolen or smashed. So we'll have to amuse ourselves without sounds..."

He took another toke, handed over the joint, which Anne sucked at, way too anxiously.

"Do people break in often?"

"Now and again. Think the rumor I had cash money might’ve had something to do with it... if it wasn't Conks. Or Pinhead's cops. Even the UN... they do black bag stuff, but usually don't make a mess, so I'm told. On the other hand, your ordinary street creep would’ve made off with Mexico’s finest, here. Salud!" He extended the plastic bottle, Anne took it, but simply held it and looked back at him.

"Unless they were trying to throw you off their trail..." she suggested.

"Might be. Take another hit," Andy recommended. "Unless the Catfish makes you piss in a bottle whenever the fancy takes him."

"I work for Rayna, she doesn't care," Anne said. "Tillerman's people have to agree to random testing, but they're all on methamphetamine and steroids anyway. Still don't feel right. I know... do you have any candles?"

"Candles? Sure... power's always going off. What do you want candles for?" He opened the bottom drawer of the dresser, rooted around for a moment, finally removed a couple of old candles.

"They're not politically correct anymore either, you know," he warned. "Bad as meat and soap... they exploit dead animals and the wicks are toxic. Something in there... lead, mercury, pollutes the ecosystem... these are so fuckin’ old, I don’t even think they’re Chinese!"

"It would be wrong to keep them," Anne agreed, "but wrong to throw them out... wasting resources... so lets just burn them up now."

"OK." Andy cleared a place on the top of the dresser, lit the two candles and turned off the light, causing the room to lose most of its sharp edges. "Better? Does this remind you of the way we were?" He repeated the last phrase, whistling this time.

"Henry?"

"What..."

"Your spider? When it's sort of dark like this... do you think he'd come down and sit beside me?"

"I have a better idea." Andy sat down beside her, putting his finger to her lips as the old bedsprings began creaking. "Shhh! Don't be frightened away."

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