The Gunner's Task

Frankie was happy in this exact spot measuring three feet by three feet, a square yard of earthly paradise. The temperature was just right here. It was the only place in the joint that didn’t stink of anything foul, not urine nor the sweat of cabbies heavy with cheap wine nor the rank perfume of whores. Neither did it smell of vomited chow mein or hotdog with mustard, or of spilt semen, or any other substance released from inner warmth into the world’s congealment.

What also made it perfect for Frankie is that they’d installed his most favorite machine here, and for as long as he had a pocketful of quarters and a cigarette in his mouth he could stand here and play the game forever. All his happinesses converged here and not elsewhere.

Outside on Times Square, seen through the narrow side windows next to the tinted-out door, the day stayed as it was, level and gray. Cabs and police cruisers swooshed past in the slush, upsetting the steam that vapored up from the pavement.

Many people would come and go as the tightening mist condensed around them: bums, tryhards, anxiety attacks, street-thrashers, old screamers and young yellers, sluts and showmen, crested punks of now and satin pimps of days gone by, their velvet fedoras mangy and ivory canes scuffed with the passing of irrelevant decades.

The games machine was called Freefall and in an objective sense it wasn’t as exciting as Asteroid, or as compelling as Missile Command with its promise of ultimate annihilation, or as classic as Space Invaders, or as fun as Pac Man with its chirpy little jingle. But it had a something and it was the best game because of how it felt.

A series of parachutists tumbled out of passing aeroplanes and Frankie took the handles of the machine gun pivot-mounted on the machine and shot at them. Their blooming chutes collapsed when the crosshairs met and the vibrating mechanism chunk-chunked in his hand and the little men made of light plunged down to the bottom of the screen. For some reason the game was a lot easier than others of its type.

It was so soothing, this procession of always-jump, always-fall.

Now there's a creep beside him, standing too close. Creep’s tall and skinny. About twenty-five years old from an eye-corner estimate. He’s dressed incongruously for the winter in a stained white tee that has the words CHUG A LUG printed in black letters. Lank-haired, elbows angular and hazardous. Head-top a small pink wool beanie, perched on the greasy blond.

Creep croaks: “How you doin’?” It’s not clear to Frankie if he means the game or in general. Doesn’t matter anyway.

Frankie says: “Fine,” in that noncommittal way that is officially neutral but in an undertone says fuck off and die.

The Creep maintains his position alongside Frankie for a good fifteen minutes while Frankie has the strongest and longest Freefall killstreak he’s ever experienced. Battalions, whole regiments and divisions, of paratroopers are slaughtered by his pivot-mounted machinegun rig. 

The Creep’s odor seeps into Frankie’s perfect space, his square yard of happiness, and in a sense ruins it with its stale sweat and soiled underwear redolence. But in another sense not.

Frankie is in The Zone, destroying untold legions of pixelated paras, and nothing about the Creep can bother him as long as he doesn’t disturb Frankie’s perfect aim and fluid state. In a way he’s glad to have a witness to his mastery. In another way, he don’t care. 

All there is, is the trajectory aimed by his instinct through the chunk-a-chunk mechanism of the gun at the screen and the soft pinging whine of each of the targets being hit and falling.

The Creep is saying something about Reagan’s New Dawn in America, commenting on the TV in the corner of Don’s Pleasure Arcade which is showing the inauguration of the spry old buzzard in D.C. today, January 20, 1981. Frankie ignores him and he goes on droning and emitting his odor. Clean up the city. 14,000 points. Take it to the Commies. 20,000 points, new life. Kill what needs killing. 26,000: hi-score.

The Creep became a proximate presence, and somewhere around the 40,000 mark Frankie attuned to him fully, so that at around 55,000 points, when he’d gone away again, the absence was notable, a hole in spacetime that held only the aftersmell of former being. It threw off Frankie, this lack of Creep there beside him, and he faltered, lost his flow, began to miss the parachutists, choked, flubbed. Soon he was down to one life only, and hung on to it with a hard fatalism, knowing he was about to lose it.

He leaned hard on the mechanism trying to force the machinegun pivot up into the top right corner to catch a plane as it came in from an unexpected angle. The rhythm of the game had become insane by now, paradrops faster than heartbeats. Something in the machine gave way with an audible crack inside the mounting of the machinegun and it ceased responding to his movements. The cross-hair of the weapon stayed immobile in the top right of the screen. Enemy parachutists landed a sizeable force in his territory in a few short seconds.

GAME OVER

Frankie roared and rocked the machine, tugging on the machinegun in its looseness. A big black guy acting as security and change-giver in the booth started yelling at him and began his long trek over from the far corner of the arcade. Frankie watched the machine die, and then legged it out into the steam and chill of Times Square, and out of sight of the security guy who refused to venture outside in pursuit of a disruptive loser.

His Freefall high-score, 83,220 points, will never be registered by the machine. Nobody even witnessed it. Like it never happened.

Back at home there was no heat from the radiators and so Frankie swaddled himself in blankets and extra socks, a ski-mask and a scarf turbanning around his head to prevent the life heat leaking out upward through his skull.

Watched TV to catch the end of the Presidential Inauguration and simmered in his hunger. Could barely even focus on the strange old man with the dyed hair and his skeletal wife as they waltzed, so much like a pair of cheery zombies at a high school prom. All Frankie could think about, sitting on his holed leatherette couch, breathing a vapor out of this mound of blankets, was his failure to mark a high score and the loss of his perfect patch of time and space inside Don’s Pleasure Arcade. Paradise Lost.

Stewed in his frustration and was barely even watching when he remembered the Creep. The Creep’s to blame for stealing his mojo, but... maybe something else? There was talk? Talk he heard and an agreement made.

Cold, hungry, fascinated and bored at once by Ronald and Nancy Reagan performing a danse macabre on the grainy TV, flickering color grain and bursts of static, tired and despairing of ever finding another square yard of perfect happiness in this world, Frankie fell into a doze and dreamt of a whole new dawn in America.

In his dream The Creep is taller than he was before, and dressed in a green tee that says BORN TO KILL. He looks a lot like Frankie’s platoon sergeant in Vietnam, who was just as young as Frankie and just as unprepared for what was there and what wasn’t.

A zombie president waltzes over to where the pair are standing and Frankie sees now that it’s a clearing in the jungle with Hueys beating their fat rhythm over the treeline, flying overwatch with doorgunners poised over their machineguns like men in their zones. The zombie president smiles, his wife now beside him in a purple lamé ballgown with rigid clavicles showing like rungs on a ladder, reaches into his smart tuxedo, and takes out a small note.

He hands it to Sergeant Creep. Creep peruses it with interest and grins. He passes the note to Frankie and says, or thinks aloud: Here’s your target, Frank. Kill what needs killing. High score in it for you.

Zombie president and first lady are gone, and there’s something written on the note that Frankie can’t quite understand. He looks up and finds himself – smash zoom – staring close at doorgunner in a Huey just above the treeline holding fire. Clear eyes, no pity there. Thin mouth with deep lines around, eyes to hanging jowl. 

Frankie sees the barrel aimed right at him – FLASH – and he’s falling into the ground 

                   and through

When he woke up, Juniper was there. Juniper was his girl – at least that’s what she said when the VA check came in. When the money got scarce so did she. She would have been a fine-looking girl in other circumstances, those circumstances not including an addiction to skag and a tendency to get wasted in places where random damage occurred. She was a scuffed thirty-some, charge-sheet pale, drawn face sunken in with the loss of molars from overgrinding in her nod-outs and a summertime yen for sweet popsicles.

She sat on the blown-out upholstery armchair across from Frankie’s couch and smiled at him. She was wearing a pink dress overlaid by a fisherman’s sweater and a business suit jacket, sleeves rolled up, with knit leggings in purple. There was a contentment about her which meant she’d just fixed up or chased the dragon but not so much as to drop off. Or maybe she had dropped off but had now woken up to watch over Frankie.

It gave Frankie a warm feeling to be watched over like that, so his panic at falling through the floor of the world in his dream was allayed and transmuted into a serene feeling of security. The TV was off. Only the soft rumble of traffic and the whoop of sirens outside and the muffled televisions and yelling of neighbors disturbed the perfect calm silence in the apartment. Only their misted breath moved in the perfect stillness inside.

They stayed like that for a while, Frankie bundled up in his accumulated swaddling and Juniper cross-legged in the big armchair bursting with puffs of stuffing, and regarded each other as happily married old couples do on long evenings. Finally Juniper spoke:

“Got a job yet?”

Frankie didn’t say anything. She knew he had a job already: he was a detective. He detected places, things and people in the world that weren’t full of shit, and reported them to his superiors. That was his job.

“Got a job yet?” she repeated, not wheedling, but just all matter-of-fact.
“I ask because we need groceries and rent and utilities and expenses and the economic situation isn’t what it oughta be and there’s a world energy crisis though that may have got fixed now not sure, and the dockers are on strike for better pay and the air traffic controllers too which means airplanes soon will be colliding with each other and crashing out of the sky, and the Russians just put, or are going to put, a spaceship on planet Venus, and when they do that they’re all gonna move out there and leave this dying godforsaken Earth to us in the Free World so we can make it free and broke and hopeless, it’s not urgent or anything, it’s not like the world’s gonna end tomorrow or anything, it’s just that maybe the situation requires and calls for some kinda action to be taken, I dunno I’m not a economist or a whatchyoucallem political analyst, I’m just a girl with a certain point of view who sees things the way she sees ‘em, and with all that in mind I wonder, just wondering is all, have you got a job yet?”

Yes, he had got a job. It’s something he remembered now from his dream. The Creep had given him a high-paying job, but he’d been busy with his high-score in Freefall and wasn’t paying enough attention to remember. But he’d agreed to do the job. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out the note, reached over the scarred coffee table and gave it to Juniper. She read it out.

“Aqueduct Racetrack, Jan 21, 3pm, Window 2, tall and thin wearing a porkpie hat and a gray trenchcoat. Distinguishing features: thin Ronald Colman moustache and steel rimmed round spectacles.”

She looked over to Frankie. “What kinda job is this? Following the guy? Like, detective?”

Frankie nodded, lying. It was a killing job.

“How much they gonna pay you to watch this guy, Frankie?”

Frankie held up the fingers of both hands. “Ten.” The steam of the word hung over his face like concealment.

“Ten? Ten thousand dollars?”

He nodded. He recalled it now: The Creep had promised him ten thousand to kill this guy with a Ronald Colman moustache. He asked her, the words puffing out a new vaporcloud:

“Know what a Ronald Colman moustache looks like?”

She shrugged. “Like a Hitler moustache?”

Frankie decided he would look for all kinds of moustaches when he went to kill the man at the racetrack.

The Aqueduct Racetrack had no heating anywhere in the stadium building, which was a way to keep bums from hanging round inside the space where the betting windows were. Frankie found it hard to stand there trembling from the cold, looking like he was afraid when he wasn’t. It was demoralizing. He’d never been afraid of anything since he took that step in Vietnam, the day they entered the ville and they’d torched everything. That step across to the other side, into the world beyond judgement of God or man.

That had been a hot day without any forethought. Now he feared only the return of judgement, nothing else. And he disliked standing there being empty of action and full of thoughts. Forethoughts of what was to come.

At five minutes to 3pm by the interior clock the man appeared and went to window number two. Tall as described, gray trenchcoat like in gangster movies but with no hat. The moustache was thin, and possibly resembled that of Ronald Colman, whoever that was.

Frankie stepped up behind the target. The man placed a twenty dollar bet on horse number five in the next race, a nag called Juniper-Berry. The coincidence of the horse having the almost-name of Frankie’s old lady disturbed him, but Frankie reasoned that such coincidences were the web of the universe, the unremarked stuff of happenstance. A part of his mind went running off on synchronicity and serendipity, words he didn’t know and would never come to know, but which touched him nearly. Another part of his mind stayed firmly on the job.

He placed a five dollar bet on the same horse then followed the man as he walked outside. The man didn’t go to the stands to watch the race which would be the normal thing to do, but instead went out into the concourse in front of the racetrack stadium where the sun glowed wan in the pale blue chill.

It was time. Frankie had no fear. He pulled out his weapon and closed on the target. The man was about forty-five, a run of gray short hair around his bald head. The pinkened crown was visibly puckering into goosebumps in the cold. Frankie didn’t know a bald scalp could form goosebumps so he waited and watched for a moment at arm’s length from the target.

The man turned and looked at him. His eyes were clear and gray. The eyes measured Frankie for noteworthiness and Frankie came up short. The man turned away and blinked slowly into the low sun.

Frankie fired pointblank. Against the dark brick background of the racetrack building facade, the fragments of the man’s skull and the whorls and vortices of blood and brain tissue appeared like electronic fuzz, like the images of parachutists splashing to the ground on the game machine screen. Glowing now green and yellow, the pieces of his head reversed and returned to where they’d been before and the man’s bald skull became again what it had always been, pink and pocked with goosebumps from the cold.

There had been no sound from Frankie’s weapon, just the kick of recoil in his wrist and the quick impact reported by his sight.

Guy’s eyes fix on Frankie. 

The gray is grayer, look isn't human, it's the look of a doorgunner drawing a bead, calculating the lead required to hit a running target.

“Are you kiddin’ me?” he says. “You ain’t never gonna kill me with that thing. Look at it.”

Frankie looks down. In his left hand is a spud gun, the kind of toy that you use to plug little projectiles from out of the flesh of potatoes, carrots and apples. Frankie’s been thinking that his weapon had been in his right hand, but no, it seems he was using a little toy pistol, this tirapapas. He lets the toy fall to the ground. But the blood and the brains and the skull fragments? The electronic debris of the hit?

“Look, kid,” says the man. Is he speaking aloud or directly in Frankie’s head like Frankie’s own voice used to do? “Look, man, you workin’ for the wrong outfit again. Who told you to do this?”

“Tall guy standin’ beside me,” says Frankie, disposed to tell all. The eyes bore into his, gray as unpolished ball bearings. No pupil in them. No more need be said.

It was a Vega Fixer, sent here to find suckers like you to do their dirty work, says the man. Nothing about him moves, not the eyes, not the mouth. Nothing else moves either. The concourse is stilled, the space emptied. There’s no traffic sounds, no birds, no calling from within the stadium. 

You got yourself into a fix here, Frankie, a war you can’t understand, the guy continues.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, thinks Frankie. I killed a hundred people in Vietnam and I don’t understand why. They said it was for communists, to stop them.

There ain’t no communists, Frankie, says the guy. No Russians or Chinese or reds under the bed. There’s only you and what you fear. It’s all been a Vega trap. You are merely a proxy.

Frankie feels his mind churn and he retches up a little of his breakfast, Cheerios and black coffee. The dark brown fluid studded with little multicolored rings splashes over the bright red spud gun.

Don’t worry, Frankie, says the man. I’ll fix you. We will fix you. We Centaurans could use a guy like you with experience and determination in our ongoing war with Vega.

There was a snap of gunfire, a shot that echoed three times on the walls. Movement restarted across the concourse. Someone yelled from inside the betting hall.

“What was that?” asked Frankie. Both of his hands hung down beside his hips now and he sensed himself in a slump, shoulders caved and neck bent.

“It was the course stewards shooting Juniper,” said the man, speaking aloud with his eyes gray and normal again. “She fell at the fifth and broke a leg. We did it, we took the right action and she’s gone now.”

“But she was my girl,” said Frankie. “She helped me.”

“She was a Vega Thwarter,” said the man. “Sent to hold you back from your potential. You’ll miss her for a little while, but you’ll feel good again real soon, you’ll see.”

When Frankie awoke on the couch once more he sensed that everything was different. The TV was showing a glad broadcast of people beaming with joy, grandparents embracing their grandkids, and stars-n-stripes bunting strewn across trees in wanton joy like Spanish moss.

“This afternoon, sixty-five hundred young men and women will be married,” spoke the announcer. “It’s morning again, and the country’s prouder, and stronger, and better.”

Frankie felt that this was true, but not where he was. He was not of that world any more. He had transcended.

He shucked off his blanket, unwound the scarf from his head, pulled off the ski-mask and stood up. He wasn’t cold and his breath didn’t mist. He walked to the window and looked out.

It was morning on Alpha Centauri. The vermillion sun was rising through the deep canyon where millions like him nestled on the cliffsides. Great elephantine daybeetles stalked on strong chitin legs in the middle of the canyon, breaking the sunlight into red shards like rubies.

A giant hoverfly, iridescent green and yellow, thrummed up through the soft purple mist to a level with Frankie’s window. The rider on its back waved across to Frankie. He couldn’t know for sure but was happy to guess that it was the man from the racetrack, returned now to his true form, beautiful and pure as a steel angel, come to welcome Frankie to his new home.

===== (( THE GUNNER’S TASK / END )) =====

[Based on Suicide track "Frankie Teardrop - First Version"]

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