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  Divine Will lights our road to the Ordained Society, and inspires us to perform fresh feats on behalf of the peace and happiness of all mankind! (Stormy applause.) And that of mankind’s associated conscious entities. (Applause.)

  Long live the people of the Union of Islamic Republics, the builders of the Ordained Society! (Stormy, prolonged applause, cheers.)

  (official document AR-59712-12)

  In The Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Digital (end of printout)

  If you have enjoyed this English-language publication, please datapulse the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, P.O. Block 15144, Medina, U.I.R.

  JIM AND IRENE

  Jim pulled his travel diary from the pocket of his sheep-skin coat. He crossed his legs and propped the diary on the wrinkled leather ankle of his cowboy boot. He bent over and scribbled.

  FEB 3. Am sitting in crappy laundromat in Los Alamos NM. Whiskey cure definitely not working. Should buy better whiskey maybe? Imported?

  He dabbed at his nose with a sodden Kleenex.

  “Mister,” a woman said.

  Jim looked up, startled, his eyes watering under the bill of his baseball cap. A lean woman, in her late thirties maybe—brown hair streaked with gray, cut short around a thin hard-weather face that had seen some bad times. She wore a boy’s second-hand down jacket, jeans gone ragged at the heels, and Adidas joggers over thick gray flannel socks.

  Her eyes were fierce and sharp. Like two broken chips of cold blue glass. It was hard not to stare at them.

  “Ma’am?” Jim put the Kleenex away and tucked his pencil in the ponytailed hair behind his ear. “What can I do for you?”

  She pointed at the laundry’s change machine. “Machine is bust, mister. If you have, I need the coins.”

  “Sure.” Jim stood up, tried a friendly down-home grin. The woman edged back half a step, fists bunched warily in her jacket pockets. Scared, a little. Who the hell knew what to expect from a stranger, nowadays?

  The two of them were alone in the laundry. There were a couple of teenagers hypnotized by a bleeping Pac-Man game in the corner, but they didn’t count. The kids had been there too long and had become invisible. Besides, they were Mexicans. Or maybe Indians or something.

  Jim dug into his sheepskin trail coat and yanked out a heavy-duty sandwich baggie. Ten bucks’ worth of quarters inside. “You came to the right guy, ma’am,” he said.

  The woman dug around for a while in a big satchel purse with a shoulder strap. She was foreign, Jim realized. She had a harsh, heavy accent, but the real tip-off was the way she handled the American money. She carefully straightened her three, sweaty dollar bills. As if they were little paper portraits of a man in a wig.

  Jim gave her twelve quarters, and watched her count them, with an unhappy, concentrated look. “Nice shoes,” he told her, just for something to say. She glanced up at him as if he were seriously crazy, then looked down—not at her own jogging shoes, but at Jim’s cowboy boots, as if he were offering to sell them to her. She didn’t much like the look of the boots, apparently. She nodded once at him, doubtfully, then sidled away behind the silent mustard-yellow ranks of washers. She began stuffing sopping clothes into a dryer.

  Jim sat back again, lifted his diary. He was having a hard time with it. He’d thought the diary would help him, give him a kind of record that he could look over later and place himself with. But it had all dried up somehow, into an endless litany of highways, money stops, burgers, and Motel Sixes. He had nothing left to tell himself.

  Jim lifted his gold-rimmed glasses and pressed hard on the aching bridge of his nose. His clogged sinuses squeaked internally, like a rusty nail crowbarred from an old pine rafter.

  Off in the corner the little yellow Pac-Man made a very similar sound, a squeal of protest as the blue cops finally caught him. Jim knew the sound well. Jim was a Pac-Man player of supreme ability, having invested thousands of quarters in dozens of grimy truck stops and arcades. The trick was to learn the cops’ pattern, and then not get too greedy, just pick off enough dots to keep truckin’, till you clean out the frame, and move on.

  Jim’s two washers huffed noisily out of spin cycle. Jim threw his whites and darks into a pair of dryers, beside the woman’s machine. She didn’t seem to have many clothes. He glanced at her as she sat alone, reading someone else’s leftover grocery tabloid.

  The tabloid’s headline concerned somebody’s TV set in California, which displayed miraculous images. There was a big blurry photo of something that looked like an angel, or maybe a ghost, or maybe a wadded-up trash bag. The woman studied the article closely, not noticing Jim. Her lips moved with the struggle to read English.

  Jim tottered back to his plastic chair, feeling sick and wavery, as if the laundromat’s walls were about to blow out. He should hole up somewhere, he told himself. Buy a vaporizer, and just breathe hot steam and watch videos in a nice safe motel. Maybe eat some ginseng or vitamin C or something, till he was fit and working again.

  But he didn’t have the cash for a week in a motel. He’d have to make some money stops first, because he was broke from buying himself useless lame gadgets for Christmas. Lot of good all that pricey shopping-mall crap was doing him now—the pine-scented electro-foot massager, the digital readout white-noise machine, the battery-operated corkscrew-cum-breathalyzer … So it was money stops, or use the credit card, and he was getting paranoid about the card.

  I’m getting paranoid about the card,

  he wrote in the diary, and paused to nibble the eraser, thinking.

  Every time, y’know, you used that plastic … it was not real money. What you were buying things with was your ID, really. That was why they always asked for ID whenever you used a credit card.

  ID was everything nowadays. Used to be that money was gold or silver or something tangible. But plastic money was just a way of telling people where to find you. Who you were. How to touch you.

  He decided not to write that in his diary. He was afraid that if he read it later, it would make him think he’d gone nuts.

  Jim stuffed the diary back in his coat. He sank back in the plastic chair, tugged the black bill of his cap low over his swollen eyes, and watched the clothes tumble. The supreme boredom of moving laundry crept over him like a greenish double-helping of Nyquil, The Restful Sleep Your Body Needs. Glass screen and moving colors behind it. Pretty much like watching television.

  The two Pac-Man kids had wandered over, silent in their dusty tennis shoes. They looked like the kind of boys who would drink Nyquil for fun. Glue huffers or winos or something, dirty black hair sticking up all over their heads and thick gray sweatshirts with holes in them. Jim watched them from under the hat, through slitted puffy eyes, his brain gone torpid.

  The two boys quietly opened the dryer doors and started piling clothes into a pair of stained grocery sacks.

  Jim sank into a timeless moment of complete malaise.

  Suddenly the woman shrieked and jumped to her feet. The kids took off like a shot, the dryer doors banging on their hinges.

  The boys hightailed it for the street. In two seconds they were past Jim and out the door, running.

  They had his clothes, he realized stupidly. The woman’s, too. They’d just stolen the laundry and stuffed it into their grocery sacks. Jim lurched painfully to his feet, his congested head pounding. The woman was scrambling after them, her bare face twisted with rage and a strange kind of sick despair.

  Jim followed her.

  Bang out the glass laundry door, into wan winter sunlight. The kids were hauling ass up the sidewalk, the bags dropping socks. Jim swallowed a coughing fit. He’d never catch them on foot.

  He yanked the door of his van, and vaulted in. “Hey!” he shouted at the woman. He fired the ignition.

  She caught on quick. She clawed the other door open and jumped in the passenger seat.

  Jim slammed it into reverse, then hit first gear and roared into pursuit. The kids were half a block up the street now, running clumsil
y past a 7-Eleven.

  Jim barreled after them, engine roaring, his brain stung painfully into action. He had a leather-handled billy club behind his welding equipment, in the back of the van. He also had a snub-nosed .38 revolver tucked into his right boot. With any luck, though, the kids would smart up, and just drop the bags, and split. He wouldn’t really have to try anything nasty.

  The kids saw the van coming. Their eyes widened in terror. They scampered wildly across a used-car lot, the bags dripping Jim’s T-shirts and the woman’s stodgy, sensible underwear.

  “They stealed our clothes!” the woman shouted at Jim, digging into her purse.

  “Yup.” Jim concentrated on driving. The woman rolled down the tinted passenger window, jerkily. They were picking up speed now, closing the gap, jouncing across the car lot. Jim dodged between two lines of parked Toyotas.

  The woman wrenched a gun from her purse. She stuck her arm out the window.

  Jim heard the first cavernous bang before he’d realized what she was doing. She squeezed off three quick rounds at the fleeing backs of the kids, enormous walloping bursts of sound. The plate glass window of a distant Toyota exploded into snow.

  Jim stamped the brake. The van fishtailed, hard. The woman’s head bounced off the windshield; she turned on him, eyes wild with rage. “God damn it!” Jim shouted at her, staring in horror at the kids. The two boys were clutching each other in panic, half-reeling, but still toting the bags. She’d missed them, thank God. In a second, the two kids had scrambled off the car lot, down the slopes of a willow-strewn arroyo.

  “You coulda killed them!” Jim shouted.

  She stared at him, bristling, and tugged her arm back through the open window. For the first time, Jim felt a stab of genuine fear for himself. Her gun had a nickel-plated barrel that looked as long as her arm. It was a .357 Magnum. A cannon.

  Jim threw the van into reverse. “We gotta get out of here,” he told her. “The cops will hear those shots. The police.”

  “My clothes!” the woman said.

  “Forget it, they’re gone.” The van hit the street. Jim ran an amber light and headed east. He worked his sweating hands on the padded custom leather of the steering wheel.

  The woman frowned at him, rubbed the bump on her forehead, then glanced at her fingers, as if expecting blood. “I have more clothes in the washing-place,” she told him sternly. “We go back there.” She hesitated, thinking it over. “ You will call city police and report this crime.”

  “The cops can’t do anything for us,” Jim said. “Look, put that thing away! You’re making me nervous, lady.”

  “I am not ‘lady,’ ” she said angrily. “I am Mrs. Beiliss.” Jim witnessed the moment of decision as she made up her mind not to point her gun at him. The possibility had occurred to her; he had seen it cross her face.

  She shoved the Magnum carelessly back into her bag. She threw herself back into the seat, hard, frustrated. She began to rub her right hand, her wrist—the recoil had numbed it. She watched the window for a long silent moment.

  “We are not going to washing-place,” she said. “Where do you take me, mister?”

  “I’m not ‘mister,’ ” Jim said. “I’m Jim.”

  She closed her bag. “ ‘Jim,’ yes? Then you call me Irina.”

  “Okay, Adeena,” Jim said, trying to smile.

  “Irina,” she said.

  “Oh, Irene,” Jim said. “I get it. Sorry.” He smiled, in a way that he hoped would look soothing. “Listen, Irene. I think it would be a good idea if we stayed away from that laundry for a while. The cops will come, see, and you shot a big hole in at least one of those used cars. You got a license for that gun?”

  “ ‘License,’ ” Irene said. “A legal form, for a gun? This is America, Jim.”

  “No, huh?” Jim shook his head. “Where are you from, anyway? Pluto?”

  “I am from Soviet Union,” she said. “City of Magnitogorsk.”

  “You’re Russian?” Jim said. “Wow! Never met a Russian before.” He eased the van into the slow lane, behind a furniture truck. He was beginning to feel, not better exactly, but a little cooler, more in control. Out on the road again, the leather wheel snug and solid in his hands. On the move, where nothing could touch him.

  The heater caught and began to pump dry roasted air up his shins. Curiosity struck him. “How come you’re, like, running around loose?”

  “My husband and I are Soviet emigré,” Irene said. “Dissidents. Husband is educated important engineer! Intelligentsia! I myself am trained as lawyer.” Jim winced a little. As she spoke faster, her English was collapsing into a shrill grinding of consonants.

  Jim yanked a Kleenex from a box that he’d duct-taped to the dashboard. He sneezed, messily. “ ’Scuse me,” he said.

  “They will steal all our clothes that are left, if we don’t go back to washing-place,” Irene said.

  Jim cleared his throat, harshly. “Someone might have spotted the van. Tell you what, I’ll drop you off by this Piggly Wiggly up here by the right. You can call a cab and go back, if you want.”

  She seemed to shrink a little, within her padded bucket seat. “Have no money, Jim.”

  “Not even cab fare?”

  “Check comes next week, from Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Not very much. Need all of it.” A moment’s silence. “Have no job. Yet.”

  “What about your old man?” Blank look. “Your husband, Irene.”

  “Husband is dead.”

  “Aw, Jesus. Sorry to hear that.” Judging by her clothes, Mrs. Irene Beiliss was about one Adidas jog away from bag-ladyhood. No job, a widow, and a foreigner. With a chrome-plated Magnum in her purse and a real attitude problem.

  “Tell you what,” Jim said, improvising. “I really don’t want to go back there just yet, I don’t think it’s safe for us. So whatya say I buy us something to eat. We can wait a while, talk it over. You hungry, Irene?”

  Her eyes lit up. Subterranean glow, the color of Vicks bottles. “You buy us food?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Glad to. Welcome to America, huh.”

  Irene nodded silently. No sign of thanks. Maybe her pride was hurt.

  He watched Irene gazing straight ahead, through the tinted one-way glass of his windshield. Her bleak exotic face went strangely soft and sweet and distant … like a lady cosmonaut, watching nameless landscapes skim below the porthole. It was a cheesy edge-of-town American strip, built for cars and cruising, like a million miles of other places …

  “A Magnum, a gun like that’s worth real money,” Jim said.

  She looked puzzled. “You sell guns, Jim?”

  “Huh?” This was the second time she’d thought he was trying to sell her something. Maybe it was better, though, to get that gun business out in the open. Just in case she had stupid ideas about pointing the Magnum at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I got a gun. I travel a lot, see. All over. I need my gun for protection.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Why didn’t you shoot them, then?”

  He blinked. “The cops would put us in jail, understand? You can’t kill kids, just for stealing your laundry. Threaten to, maybe, but not actually do it.”

  She set her mouth, mulishly. “They were not ‘kids.’ They were bandits. Dirty, and ugly … nekulturny.”

  Jim dabbed at his dripping nose. “Could be,” he said, humoring her. “Maybe they were Nicaraguans.”

  He spotted a Jack-in-the-Box down the strip. He pulled in, and had words with the speaker grille. He gave the clerk Irene’s three one-dollar bills and rounded it off with quarters. They drove away with a cheeseburger, two orders of fries and a pair of tacos.

  Irene munched her first taco. Jim could tell that she was famished, but she handled the splintery cornmeal shell like fine china. “You have very many coins,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You bust that machine in washing-place,” she said suddenly, eyes lancing at him. “You stealed all the coins. You are thief, yes?”
r />   “What? Look, I don’t even live here. First time I’ve ever been in that place!”

  “Machine works fine, last time I use it. You bust it, Jim. You stealed the coins.”

  “The hell,” Jim said, sweating under his coat. “Look, I don’t need this kind of crap. You think I’m a vandal, you can get out right now.”

  “I can call police,” she told him, watching his face. “Hooligan, in blue van. Chevy.” She pronounced it “cheevy.”

  “Oh hell,” Jim said. “And to think I was feeling sorry for you! I was gonna buy you some new clothes, and everything.” He tossed his head angrily, jerking his chin at the back of the van. “Look, you see all that stuff back there? The welder, the power drill? Whatever little bastard broke that laundry box, he just crowbarred it open. But I’m a professional machinist, a tool-and-die man, understand? I could take that thing apart the way you’d cut up a chicken.” He paused. “If I wanted to, that is.”

  He took a corner, fast. A canvas bag beneath his seat collapsed, slung by inertia. It was stuffed with loose quarters, and jingled loudly. Jim grabbed at another Kleenex, blew his nose to distract her. Too late.

  Irene said nothing about the noise. She began methodically to eat her second taco. Two minutes of ominous silence, broken by munching and the rustling of fries.

  Then she settled back into the padded bucket seat, with a faint sigh of animal satisfaction. She dabbed neatly at her mouth with a cheap napkin from the bag. “Where are we going?” she said at last, watching the road, heavy-lidded.

  By now, Jim had had time to think about the situation. To work it through in his head. “Does that really matter to you?” he asked.

  “No,” she told him, after a moment’s thought. “Not a bit. Go where you like, I don’t care.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m taking Highway 30 out of town, and heading for El Paso.”

  Irene laughed at him. “You think I care, but I don’t,” she said. “Los Alamos, I hate Los Alamos. We should never have go there. I have nothing now, no clothes, no money … I owe rent, two months!”