Excerpt Nine:
I Shot the Sheriff
Judith had two main questions:
What am I doing?
…and…
What are we doing?
But she left them sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
Kirk was quietly passengering; while she drove.
‘Can you hear those birds a-singing?’ Kirk had said as he entered Mallory, Judith’s 1986 mini cooper, that she’d bought from a vegan car restorer who’d replaced all the animal skin with plastic, when plastic still had a decent reputation. She felt no need to reply. But thought that the birds were singing: Human bastards, full of hate, they’ll self-destruct and we can’t wait….or something like it. She could’ve replied with: It’s a real tweet isn’t it. And eventually replied, despite the lack of need, ‘It’s a real treat, isn’t it,’ with the less risky version. But all that seemed to have happened a long time ago.
They’d planned the route the night before, sitting on her bed, while her parents breathlessly hung around in shifts outside her bedroom door, intermittently interrupting with barely plausible excuses.
The warmth Judith felt for the ex-government, monstrous-corporate-lab agent, they called Kirk, cut through the morning chill like a ninja slicing up a terracotta army made of vegan butter…
Kirk had told her he had a meeting; she’d thought he mean’t he needed a nap. Her peripheral vision was straining to suck in information. Kirk appeared to be zoned-out. She concentrated on Mallory’s safe passage.
Kirk switched modes and started suddenly startling Mallory in her sure-footed roadwork…
‘I received a mission update; a pre-programmed, focus oriented, memo. I was hoping I’d get live G & G… but I suspect I need to be online…hooked-up, for that one… ’
‘Okay, Kirk…’
G & G labs, meant only what she remembered from TV news: a flirtation with Nasa that went awry after scandals involving human rights abuses and, if she wasn’t making it up, murder. At least one, maybe more…
‘I need to update you.’
‘Feel free.’
Already? Why, Captain, is that even logical? she thought. She wondered why she’d thought of the term ‘captain’…
‘I need to get hooked-up and we’ll be good to go golden…’ he said.
‘Great,’ she replied, mainly focussing on the road, but also remembering his surname was James… so… and she didn’t like to say anything, but his name was James Kirk backwards… well not backwards, that would be: Krik Semaj…
‘What do think would be a good name for me?’
‘Judith.’
‘No…’
‘What’s wrong with Judith?’
‘I want a new wild west world name. What do you think… would be… a good name…?’
‘Don’t you have an online handle?’
‘Handle’, I’m a teapot now. Am I Handel’s Messiah?’ she said, realising Kirk, probably expected more respect. And should she honour that or humour its pomposity?
‘Nickname, handle, whatever…’
‘No, I call myself Jude, ju, jute, V-Jude, Jude-V, or Judith with a number or two or more…’
‘Do you have any middle names?’
‘No.’
‘Well then—’
‘Rosemary. I forgot… that’s my middle name.’
‘Okay… What about Rome? Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
‘It’s a goer, I’ll let it percolate.’ Not a great name conjuror-upperer, this guy, she thought; what was it about her that ‘wasn’t built in a day’, she didn’t understand.
‘Do you have a middle name?’
‘Yes, it begins with a “T”…Guess what it is… chew on it while I test my systems on local traffic light sequences—’
‘Tiberius?’
‘What the fuck,’ he says, ramps up into a frighteningly excessive blast of paranoia… ‘Who are you working for?’
‘Calm down, Kirk. That’s your refurbished name, some clown has named you from a TV sci-fi show. James T. Kirk is a fictional character.’
‘Really?… wait… yes…I am just scanning 70’s shows, here we are: Star Trek, with William Shatner…’ But of course he wasn’t online and was trying to cover up that it was an obvious fact that had slipped his attention for whatever reason; of course Kirk James was James Kirk backwards, he’d just never made that connection, was he, as well as super-charged, a bit thick? Or was he something else; something he could hardly imagine…?
‘Tell me something, Dith.’ he said, a little shaken; a little lost puppyish…
‘“Dith”’ doesn’t work for me…What do you want to know?’
‘Do you think I am fictional?’
The question rebounded off the four walls, floor and ceiling of her imagination, sounding so silly, alarm bells rang to indicate she was in danger talking to someone who would ask such a question…but…there was a but… The ‘but’ had its own alarm override; the threat was now not a loony asking a perverse question that revealed possible cognitive disruption; it was the uncertainty as to whether she was fictional or not herself; whether they were both fictional. Had her parents murdered her? It all made sense all of a sudden: the gruesome shows they watched endlessly, while claiming nothing else was on. The framed pictures of serial killers… The evidence began to exude eye-watering plumes of smoke. Was she already dead? She was dead!
Then the certainty passed away, but left flotsam, jetsam, detritus and sewage in its wake. Who was this messenger from the void? She needed to prise him open and scoop out his viscera, but what she needed and what she was capable of climbed different mountain ranges.
‘Do you think you’re fictional, Kirk?’ she said, in her therapy tone, putting a lid on the escalating fear, drowning it out with calm, breathing…
‘No.’
‘Because that would make me fictional too. And I can tell you now,’ she said, hiding her truth under a fabric oft woven to disguise her own reality from her parents’ surreality, ‘I ain’t no fiction.’ But the fabric seemed thin, could he see through it; he would if he was looking.
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that. You, Judith, are definitely not fictional.’
‘I’m adaptable mind you… being fictional could have its benefits,’ she said, wondering whether this could be one of the stupidest conversations anyone had ever had, anywhere, ever.
The death threat returned to Judith; it became obvious why he’d guarded her in her room and ushered her out before parent-rise; he was protecting her from daughtericide—or, they’d succeeded, and he was the grim-reaper, a post-modern version; not grim any more, but still reaping. A jolly-reaper must exist in a universe where death is better than life; a truth she fully expected to be proven in time regarding this universe…
The lid had popped off the ‘death’ question, so she placed it back on. But then the lid popped off the ‘fictional’ question…
Would it mean, Mallory was fictional too? That was just not something that she could imagine… until she could…
‘I don’t mean to upset you, Judith, but Atoll, he’s not who he used to be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let’s just be on our toes.’
She envisions dancing Kirk, him dancing her back, impossibly both on each others’ toes.
‘They’ve asked me to put something to you.’
‘Who? What?’
‘G & G, they want me to deputise you.’
‘Who made you sheriff?’ her own unoriginality almost taking her breath away…
‘G & G labs made me sheriff, Judith.’
‘“Rome”… what if I say no?’
‘You don’t want to do that, Rome.’
‘Why?’
‘We make a great team. We could stop the inhumane version of Autonomy before it starts…we’ve only got hours, it’s impossible, currently, but we can give it our best shot, and if the wind changes…’
‘We’ll be stuck in that position,’ she said; was she fucking serious, up your game misses, the world won’t be saved by stupid comments…
‘If you refuse this lifeline, you’ll go back home. You’ll be stuck with your parents. Once Autonomy takes global governance control, transit outside local parameters will be prohibited: the new “perfect” society…’
‘Okay, Okay, I’ll deputise…’ It’s a wild west world, she thinks, I need a wingman; I need to bat for the animals. She daren’t ask him about them, yet, but the rolling-stock was being shunted into place… I’m sticking with this fella, he’s got promise, he is right up my street, right up my alley, rat up my drainpipe, she thought; new thoughts for the new world; boundaries, borders…H. R. Pufnstuf…
The animals needed effective advocacy from her, and for them she needed to grow in confidence. It was something that, in her new venture as refurbished sheriff’s deputy, she needed to inflate and bounce up and down on…
‘Do I get a badge?’ she said, her words: punctured balloons, out-puffing the fetid air of stupidity… Here, there and tog’s noodles… She also needed an effective head-editor, to make sure the words that escaped her private domain and became indelible public property, met a much higher standard.
‘Don’t you think the word “cliche” is actually, pretty damn cliched?’ she ventured to a zoned-out Kirk. She had to say something… didn’t she…
She was keeping Atoll out of it… until she couldn’t… Atoll seemed like a fictional character to her, but then, he always had.
