cwood
08-18-2012, 02:58 PM
Shiloh began to notice, after sitting for awhile, how much the rooms that his life played out in resembled the walls of tunnels that rabbits and prairie dogs instinctively burrowed. Before this thought, rooms had only been backdrops to long bouts of silences, wombs where he avoided and confronted—now the chips were showing in the paint and the drywall became paper-thin. It seemed to dissolve away until he could see stiff ugly studs, the underside to a house that a man built so that another man could make-believe that it had always been there.
Shiloh sat unraveling this realization and all of its implications, looking at the walls and wondering what all he had missed by not noticing their arbitrariness. He had never thought about it before. He felt a tremor in a far side of his brain. Words composed themselves, fitting and re-fitting into pegs. Something far away in his head seemed to blurt them out—indecipherable but with the larger purpose intact, like a tourist speaking their native language that points to a product for sale and shrugs her shoulders. The noises that were blurted weren’t words all the way, though. He grimaced, saved a half-intelligible draft onto his phone, could tell that a tweet was brewing somewhere in his brain. He knew that if he left it to simmer he could see the specifics of his intention more clearly. He would wear his half-idea as a pair of goggles that would show him things he hadn’t seen with his normal eyes, and as he saw more with these goggles the partial-words would gain personalities and scramble organically into a series. Soon it would be a statement to remember, one that he would wait until a prime hour of the day to unleash upon his unsuspecting readers.
Shiloh twisted his neck until it cracked and put on a random pair of shorts from a regenerating pile of them, walked shirtless out into the hallway. The smell of the kitchen, musky and stale, strangely moist, permeated into his doorway. The smell was crawling, an infestation with infinite legs.
“Do you want something?”
“Eggs? Bacon?”
Libby smiled, let her cigarette dangle off of her lip, her lipstick holding it on a thin paint string as she let smoke leak out from her
nostrils. She opened the refrigerator.
“We have microwave-bacon. One egg.”
“All right.”
Shiloh swore that the gnats in the kitchen increased with each trembly exhale. Soon he could feel them in his breath again. There was a steady bunch of them, zipping around and slapping his skin. They had adjusted so well and with such numbers that walking anywhere inside at any time of the day was sure to be accompanied by frantic gnats, suspended in the air like demon snowflakes on a designer drug. He had begun to think that as he slept the gnats snuck into his mouth and set up camp somewhere around his lungs, procreating and laying eggs. He became hypersensitive to the rubbing, rubbing of them against his skin hair. As he let his eyes melt into a scratch in the linoleum counter his tweet stewed with the egg on the stove, sizzling and boiling over in his head.
“Do you want to do me a small favor today, maybe?” Libby asked.
“What’s that?”
“You have to agree first.”
“Oh no. I’ve played that game too many times.”
Libby smiled. “Remember mother ****er, you live here, but this is my condo. I might be too busy to get a guy around here to do occasional loose-end favors that I need done to make money, but that doesn’t mean that I adore living with—and cleaning after—another disgusting human being—free of ****ing charge, I’ll remind you.”
“Cleaning after?”
“It’s one small favor, and it’s not going to take but a fraction of another day you spend in my home wallowing in your own tears, or lube, or whatever.”
“Just tell me what the favor is.”
“You know what I do, right?”
“You do a lot of things.
“But lately?”
“Finding people who spent too many hours of their lives making sure they had virginal credit only to make rookie security choices so that you can, ironically, use their great, amazingly amazing credit against them? Is that the gist?”
“I’m glad the irony isn’t lost on you. Some offensive terminology, but I would say that’s the gist.”
“And in a recession! —What terms would you use, then?”
“I would call it.” Ash dripped into the floor and Libby clutched the cigarette with her elbow bent up and wrist bent back, like a black-and-white actress pre-monologue. “I would call it. A small, vigilante-imposed sanction on those without the resources or depth of ****ing vision to Google search the reputability of websites at which they’re providing their ‘amazingly amazingly’ personal information. I don’t deal with the life-ruiners. You could argue that I don’t directly steal their credit. I take their credit information and sell it at a place where people are interested in things like that.”
“Interested in unlimited money with a blank-faced victim cashing the checks? Things like that?”
“There are guidelines on how much you can spend—people might ***** over a thousand or two, but the credit card companies have fraud protection and a few grand is pennies to them. Plus there’s the fact that even if they do hire some real Dick Tracy mother ****er he won’t be gunning for me, he’ll be gunning for the buyer.”
Shiloh began to grow uncomfortable by the amount of conversation being expelled from Libby’s throat. Talk this extensive wasn’t for no reason, not anymore. Droves of gnats, little black bunches of legs, seemed to sweat out of the sticky kitchen ceilings. New ones seemed to sprout out of others.
Libby waved a hand close to Shiloh’s face, rolled her eyes. “You’re sitting there, wondering how I can sleep at night? Just trust me on this: What’s a **** of—and i mean a **** of a lot harder than it is for me to get a rejuvenating night’s sleep is for someone to trace any of these deals back to me.”
“So then how do you do it?”
“Well, it’s a few people, a couple levels, but. In a nutshell. You find someone first; I like recent college grads. The slick ones. Dartmouth maybe. The ones with Daddy Warbucks beefing up their credit line and portfolio in his spare time after Sunday golf. So you steal this slick up-and-comer’s basic information first, usually without him knowing it, usually with some stealthy pickpocketing-and-copying or by electronic scanner. You create a profile using Slick’s identity on a couple credit-score websites. After that, they roll out their single line of defense just-in-case of identity fraud—a security question. And not just any security question—a multiple-****ing-choice security question.”
“No way.”
“But this would pose a small problem, because answering the answer incorrectly locks you out of the system forever, and obviously we don’t know whatever private information they’re asking of Slick, so it seems like we would have a 25% chance of cashing in on all of our previous hard work, right? Right, that would be at least somewhat efficient, but the credit bureau—God love them, the credit bureau, in designing the defense for all of the credit-score websites, forgot to change up the question. It’s the same for every website: ‘What bank do you pay your mortgage with?’ It becomes as easy as the process of elimination.”
Libby smiled again, bigger this time, and it cracked the caked-on eye shadow from a night-or-so before that was clothing her eyelids. Her naked face had only been unearthed a few times; during the rare occasions that Shiloh saw the real surroundings of her eyes guilt would drown him, and she would become muted in a way that hesitantly anticipated the quiet scrutiny of her by others—a series of savage prods that gained force and frequency through an accumulation of half-glances.
Shiloh and Libby were similar in that way. Many people, he knew, could feel others’ gazes. He and Libby felt them and heard them too—an out-of-reach roar that would pound and thrash, and he could feel them like gnats infect his brain, nudge their way into the ear drum to punch holes inside. When the gazes were throbbing his self receded into his mind just as his body transformed into a failing plane 8,000 feet high, forcing him to tinker with all of its controls for the first time as it plummeted. His functions became unsure and frayed. His posture, how often he blinked his eyes or repositioned his legs, the length for drags of Oxygen into his
lungs, the volume and pitch of his voice: he worked them all from a sweaty cockpit inside of a machine with too many levers.
“So do you want to know the favor?” Libby asked, flopping a mushy fried egg onto a paper plate and sliding it to Shiloh. It sat
pristine for a few beats before a number of gnats drowned in the yolk.
“You’ve prefaced it enough, I’m pretty sure.”
“I’ve got a client I’ve been milking for about a month now. I think he’s a middle man—whatever, why do I give a ****. Anyways, he’s been getting really paranoid lately, thinks his email is bugged. He asked me where I lived to see if a physical transaction was possible, and it turns out he’s going to be in the city for today only. I can’t have someone from God knows where who I’ve never even seen before come to the place I live, and I can’t well go to him with this godforsaken ****ing bracelet on my ankle. It will be easy. You go to his apartment, give him a binder full of super-secret information, get $1200, give $1000 to me, and get right back
to your life on the internet.”
“You really think you’re part of the Rat Pack now, don’t you? Ocean’s 11? How did you get sucked into this?”
“After searching through a bunch of get-rich-quick forums online I got a pretty good idea about the process.”
Shiloh turned around, scratched his back and wolfed down the last piece of microwaved bacon before retreating to the smell safe-haven of his window. Libby lit another cigarette.
“And Shiloh,” she said. “I am part of the ****ing Rat Pack.”
Shiloh crashed into his mattress and looked out his window. The tweet loaded in his mind’s barrel was beginning to mature, becoming ripe. He flipped the pages of the Personal Identity binder, stopping on Jeremy Doakes. Credit score 858. Age 42. Annapolis. Public Defendant. Everything that made Jeremy Jeremy was right on the page, about to be sold for less than an outdated iPod. Living life fully for 42 years, long enough to accumulate prestige and great credit, seemed to Shiloh as naive, an anachronism. Prestige and wealth were the cement that reinforced a makeshift barricade. How necessary was that cement to proving who you say you are? It seemed to Shiloh that anyone could be whatever they said they wanted to be, as long as they had the wherewithal to see the marketing potential of the identity they chose.
Shiloh took out his phone again, let his eyes melt into the drafted tweet. The thoughts he was having made it difficult to compress the process into 140 characters. He wondered what Hermann Melville would have done if he were faced with the challenge of expressing the ideas behind Moby Dick into an aphorism. It would probably would have been a series of tweets. There were a lot of tweets in that novel, he thought.
Shiloh walked out of Libby’s condominium, briefcase in hand, down three flights of stairs to the city street. He was wearing a tie and khakis, a request from Libby to perpetuate a tone of professionalism to her clients. She had never had ‘clients’ before. Before her Intent conviction and subsequent house arrest she was rambunctious but tame. Without warning she became something of a professional criminal, transfiguring empty speeches of target-less rebellion into a market of tacit, organized crime. He was proud of her. Structure wasn’t something that could be faked overnight. He had forgone any semblance of one when he was still in high school, opting instead for a soul that twisted and flew into others, trying to understand the structure of each while rejecting the bricks, mortar, and tools he
found along the way.
The city held less life than the internet; the hustling and bustling people didn’t seem to be busy folk in a big-city rush. They were neurons firing from one building to another like synapses, each a pulsating bit of data spreading its numbers around like disease. Shiloh walked to the apartment complex printed on a sketched map. He was thinking about his encounter with the buyer, how he would withstand a deal with a hardened criminal. He was hoping the mystery man would have a Russian accent.
The street was overcrowded, and the eggs that the gnats had lain in his insides seemed to be hatching, tearing up the inside of his chest. He was trying to control his body evenly when everyone’s attention was ripped from themselves onto a figure yelling down from the top of a 20-25 story building at the end of the block. Shiloh began listening to the spiel that was croaked through a bullhorn. “...no hope for military turnover, this war has gone on far enough. The detonation of this small IED strapped to my chest in mid-air will bring attention to this injustice... My name is Jeremy Doakes and I’m an Iraqi war veteran. I served there for four years and saw enough to spoil everything else I’ve seen since. Thousands of civilians dead, car bombers around every corner, no hope for military turnover, this war has gone on far enough. The detonation of this small IED strapped to my chest in mid-air will bring attention to this injustice.”
A crowd was forming around Jeremy Doakes now. He had decided to express this self right at lunch, when room dwellers glided to the commotion in single-file astonishment. He repeated his speech several times. The name Jeremy Doakes shocked Shiloh through the chest every time through. At what point did Age 42, Annapolis, Public Defender cease existing, go awry? Could Doakes’s thoughts have convinced him that he was another person? After 42 years this seemed a logical enough way to express it.
Police were now filing onto the scene, some frantic, some bemused. They combated his bullhorn with their own.
“Jeremy, this is not the way to get what you want. There are people here who would love to listen if you would just—” Doakes’s bullhorn drowned theirs out, making their peace-keeping a garbled nothing while his speech pressed on, clear as moonshine. There were probably 400 people crowded around the building now, with a 20-ft semi circle in the middle in case Jeremy Doakes decided to go for it.
“Jump, pussy!” someone yelled.
Doakes put down the megaphone and disappeared from sight. The police nodded to each other respectfully, purposefully, and dissipated. The people around dispersed, some agitated that they would have to hurry through lunch without even a building-jumper story to show for it. Shiloh stood next to the building, wearing his idea-shaded goggles and letting his eyes melt into the ledge after everyone else had dispersed.
Shiloh heard a squeal from the top of the building. Doakes readjusted his IED-vest, sprinted and jumped off, as if sky-diving. Shiloh might have been the only one who saw. Doakes’s ascent seemed to stutter, as if his act produced enough dust on the record of existence that it skipped a beat. At the height of his flight, face noticeably gleaming even from 200 feet down, he slapped what must have been a detonator on his chest hysterically. He began to fall, and for a long second grotesque panic invaded his face as he flopped around in the air trying to turn himself into the human fireworks display that would really be a statement. He clashed against a flagpole halfway down and it clanged like a perverted church bell. He flipped a dozen times, and landed with a lifeless thud into a patch of shrubbery next to the entrance to the building. One person seemed to have taken notice, but Shiloh decided that could she could have just been admiring the architecture. It was like Jeremy Doakes had given his existence to Shiloh, so that he could advocate for the end of the Iraq war. Shiloh didn’t follow politics much, didn’t like to get in the middle of things.
He dialed Libby’s number. “I just saw one of the identities from your binder jump off of a 20 story building.”
“You sure? Which one?”
“I don’t know. An office building.”
“No. Which identity?”
“Jeremy Doakes.”
“Who?”
“Credit score 858.”
“Oh. Throw out his pages. Charge 1100 for the binder. Apologize for the inconvenience.” She hung up, and Shiloh pressed onward, wiping sweat off of his forehead. The sweat wasn’t a reaction to his death—Shiloh saw that as neutral. What soaked through his button-up was the lack of an explosion, the sputtering, sputtering, sputtering of an identity that begged to be a happening instead.
Shiloh sat unraveling this realization and all of its implications, looking at the walls and wondering what all he had missed by not noticing their arbitrariness. He had never thought about it before. He felt a tremor in a far side of his brain. Words composed themselves, fitting and re-fitting into pegs. Something far away in his head seemed to blurt them out—indecipherable but with the larger purpose intact, like a tourist speaking their native language that points to a product for sale and shrugs her shoulders. The noises that were blurted weren’t words all the way, though. He grimaced, saved a half-intelligible draft onto his phone, could tell that a tweet was brewing somewhere in his brain. He knew that if he left it to simmer he could see the specifics of his intention more clearly. He would wear his half-idea as a pair of goggles that would show him things he hadn’t seen with his normal eyes, and as he saw more with these goggles the partial-words would gain personalities and scramble organically into a series. Soon it would be a statement to remember, one that he would wait until a prime hour of the day to unleash upon his unsuspecting readers.
Shiloh twisted his neck until it cracked and put on a random pair of shorts from a regenerating pile of them, walked shirtless out into the hallway. The smell of the kitchen, musky and stale, strangely moist, permeated into his doorway. The smell was crawling, an infestation with infinite legs.
“Do you want something?”
“Eggs? Bacon?”
Libby smiled, let her cigarette dangle off of her lip, her lipstick holding it on a thin paint string as she let smoke leak out from her
nostrils. She opened the refrigerator.
“We have microwave-bacon. One egg.”
“All right.”
Shiloh swore that the gnats in the kitchen increased with each trembly exhale. Soon he could feel them in his breath again. There was a steady bunch of them, zipping around and slapping his skin. They had adjusted so well and with such numbers that walking anywhere inside at any time of the day was sure to be accompanied by frantic gnats, suspended in the air like demon snowflakes on a designer drug. He had begun to think that as he slept the gnats snuck into his mouth and set up camp somewhere around his lungs, procreating and laying eggs. He became hypersensitive to the rubbing, rubbing of them against his skin hair. As he let his eyes melt into a scratch in the linoleum counter his tweet stewed with the egg on the stove, sizzling and boiling over in his head.
“Do you want to do me a small favor today, maybe?” Libby asked.
“What’s that?”
“You have to agree first.”
“Oh no. I’ve played that game too many times.”
Libby smiled. “Remember mother ****er, you live here, but this is my condo. I might be too busy to get a guy around here to do occasional loose-end favors that I need done to make money, but that doesn’t mean that I adore living with—and cleaning after—another disgusting human being—free of ****ing charge, I’ll remind you.”
“Cleaning after?”
“It’s one small favor, and it’s not going to take but a fraction of another day you spend in my home wallowing in your own tears, or lube, or whatever.”
“Just tell me what the favor is.”
“You know what I do, right?”
“You do a lot of things.
“But lately?”
“Finding people who spent too many hours of their lives making sure they had virginal credit only to make rookie security choices so that you can, ironically, use their great, amazingly amazing credit against them? Is that the gist?”
“I’m glad the irony isn’t lost on you. Some offensive terminology, but I would say that’s the gist.”
“And in a recession! —What terms would you use, then?”
“I would call it.” Ash dripped into the floor and Libby clutched the cigarette with her elbow bent up and wrist bent back, like a black-and-white actress pre-monologue. “I would call it. A small, vigilante-imposed sanction on those without the resources or depth of ****ing vision to Google search the reputability of websites at which they’re providing their ‘amazingly amazingly’ personal information. I don’t deal with the life-ruiners. You could argue that I don’t directly steal their credit. I take their credit information and sell it at a place where people are interested in things like that.”
“Interested in unlimited money with a blank-faced victim cashing the checks? Things like that?”
“There are guidelines on how much you can spend—people might ***** over a thousand or two, but the credit card companies have fraud protection and a few grand is pennies to them. Plus there’s the fact that even if they do hire some real Dick Tracy mother ****er he won’t be gunning for me, he’ll be gunning for the buyer.”
Shiloh began to grow uncomfortable by the amount of conversation being expelled from Libby’s throat. Talk this extensive wasn’t for no reason, not anymore. Droves of gnats, little black bunches of legs, seemed to sweat out of the sticky kitchen ceilings. New ones seemed to sprout out of others.
Libby waved a hand close to Shiloh’s face, rolled her eyes. “You’re sitting there, wondering how I can sleep at night? Just trust me on this: What’s a **** of—and i mean a **** of a lot harder than it is for me to get a rejuvenating night’s sleep is for someone to trace any of these deals back to me.”
“So then how do you do it?”
“Well, it’s a few people, a couple levels, but. In a nutshell. You find someone first; I like recent college grads. The slick ones. Dartmouth maybe. The ones with Daddy Warbucks beefing up their credit line and portfolio in his spare time after Sunday golf. So you steal this slick up-and-comer’s basic information first, usually without him knowing it, usually with some stealthy pickpocketing-and-copying or by electronic scanner. You create a profile using Slick’s identity on a couple credit-score websites. After that, they roll out their single line of defense just-in-case of identity fraud—a security question. And not just any security question—a multiple-****ing-choice security question.”
“No way.”
“But this would pose a small problem, because answering the answer incorrectly locks you out of the system forever, and obviously we don’t know whatever private information they’re asking of Slick, so it seems like we would have a 25% chance of cashing in on all of our previous hard work, right? Right, that would be at least somewhat efficient, but the credit bureau—God love them, the credit bureau, in designing the defense for all of the credit-score websites, forgot to change up the question. It’s the same for every website: ‘What bank do you pay your mortgage with?’ It becomes as easy as the process of elimination.”
Libby smiled again, bigger this time, and it cracked the caked-on eye shadow from a night-or-so before that was clothing her eyelids. Her naked face had only been unearthed a few times; during the rare occasions that Shiloh saw the real surroundings of her eyes guilt would drown him, and she would become muted in a way that hesitantly anticipated the quiet scrutiny of her by others—a series of savage prods that gained force and frequency through an accumulation of half-glances.
Shiloh and Libby were similar in that way. Many people, he knew, could feel others’ gazes. He and Libby felt them and heard them too—an out-of-reach roar that would pound and thrash, and he could feel them like gnats infect his brain, nudge their way into the ear drum to punch holes inside. When the gazes were throbbing his self receded into his mind just as his body transformed into a failing plane 8,000 feet high, forcing him to tinker with all of its controls for the first time as it plummeted. His functions became unsure and frayed. His posture, how often he blinked his eyes or repositioned his legs, the length for drags of Oxygen into his
lungs, the volume and pitch of his voice: he worked them all from a sweaty cockpit inside of a machine with too many levers.
“So do you want to know the favor?” Libby asked, flopping a mushy fried egg onto a paper plate and sliding it to Shiloh. It sat
pristine for a few beats before a number of gnats drowned in the yolk.
“You’ve prefaced it enough, I’m pretty sure.”
“I’ve got a client I’ve been milking for about a month now. I think he’s a middle man—whatever, why do I give a ****. Anyways, he’s been getting really paranoid lately, thinks his email is bugged. He asked me where I lived to see if a physical transaction was possible, and it turns out he’s going to be in the city for today only. I can’t have someone from God knows where who I’ve never even seen before come to the place I live, and I can’t well go to him with this godforsaken ****ing bracelet on my ankle. It will be easy. You go to his apartment, give him a binder full of super-secret information, get $1200, give $1000 to me, and get right back
to your life on the internet.”
“You really think you’re part of the Rat Pack now, don’t you? Ocean’s 11? How did you get sucked into this?”
“After searching through a bunch of get-rich-quick forums online I got a pretty good idea about the process.”
Shiloh turned around, scratched his back and wolfed down the last piece of microwaved bacon before retreating to the smell safe-haven of his window. Libby lit another cigarette.
“And Shiloh,” she said. “I am part of the ****ing Rat Pack.”
Shiloh crashed into his mattress and looked out his window. The tweet loaded in his mind’s barrel was beginning to mature, becoming ripe. He flipped the pages of the Personal Identity binder, stopping on Jeremy Doakes. Credit score 858. Age 42. Annapolis. Public Defendant. Everything that made Jeremy Jeremy was right on the page, about to be sold for less than an outdated iPod. Living life fully for 42 years, long enough to accumulate prestige and great credit, seemed to Shiloh as naive, an anachronism. Prestige and wealth were the cement that reinforced a makeshift barricade. How necessary was that cement to proving who you say you are? It seemed to Shiloh that anyone could be whatever they said they wanted to be, as long as they had the wherewithal to see the marketing potential of the identity they chose.
Shiloh took out his phone again, let his eyes melt into the drafted tweet. The thoughts he was having made it difficult to compress the process into 140 characters. He wondered what Hermann Melville would have done if he were faced with the challenge of expressing the ideas behind Moby Dick into an aphorism. It would probably would have been a series of tweets. There were a lot of tweets in that novel, he thought.
Shiloh walked out of Libby’s condominium, briefcase in hand, down three flights of stairs to the city street. He was wearing a tie and khakis, a request from Libby to perpetuate a tone of professionalism to her clients. She had never had ‘clients’ before. Before her Intent conviction and subsequent house arrest she was rambunctious but tame. Without warning she became something of a professional criminal, transfiguring empty speeches of target-less rebellion into a market of tacit, organized crime. He was proud of her. Structure wasn’t something that could be faked overnight. He had forgone any semblance of one when he was still in high school, opting instead for a soul that twisted and flew into others, trying to understand the structure of each while rejecting the bricks, mortar, and tools he
found along the way.
The city held less life than the internet; the hustling and bustling people didn’t seem to be busy folk in a big-city rush. They were neurons firing from one building to another like synapses, each a pulsating bit of data spreading its numbers around like disease. Shiloh walked to the apartment complex printed on a sketched map. He was thinking about his encounter with the buyer, how he would withstand a deal with a hardened criminal. He was hoping the mystery man would have a Russian accent.
The street was overcrowded, and the eggs that the gnats had lain in his insides seemed to be hatching, tearing up the inside of his chest. He was trying to control his body evenly when everyone’s attention was ripped from themselves onto a figure yelling down from the top of a 20-25 story building at the end of the block. Shiloh began listening to the spiel that was croaked through a bullhorn. “...no hope for military turnover, this war has gone on far enough. The detonation of this small IED strapped to my chest in mid-air will bring attention to this injustice... My name is Jeremy Doakes and I’m an Iraqi war veteran. I served there for four years and saw enough to spoil everything else I’ve seen since. Thousands of civilians dead, car bombers around every corner, no hope for military turnover, this war has gone on far enough. The detonation of this small IED strapped to my chest in mid-air will bring attention to this injustice.”
A crowd was forming around Jeremy Doakes now. He had decided to express this self right at lunch, when room dwellers glided to the commotion in single-file astonishment. He repeated his speech several times. The name Jeremy Doakes shocked Shiloh through the chest every time through. At what point did Age 42, Annapolis, Public Defender cease existing, go awry? Could Doakes’s thoughts have convinced him that he was another person? After 42 years this seemed a logical enough way to express it.
Police were now filing onto the scene, some frantic, some bemused. They combated his bullhorn with their own.
“Jeremy, this is not the way to get what you want. There are people here who would love to listen if you would just—” Doakes’s bullhorn drowned theirs out, making their peace-keeping a garbled nothing while his speech pressed on, clear as moonshine. There were probably 400 people crowded around the building now, with a 20-ft semi circle in the middle in case Jeremy Doakes decided to go for it.
“Jump, pussy!” someone yelled.
Doakes put down the megaphone and disappeared from sight. The police nodded to each other respectfully, purposefully, and dissipated. The people around dispersed, some agitated that they would have to hurry through lunch without even a building-jumper story to show for it. Shiloh stood next to the building, wearing his idea-shaded goggles and letting his eyes melt into the ledge after everyone else had dispersed.
Shiloh heard a squeal from the top of the building. Doakes readjusted his IED-vest, sprinted and jumped off, as if sky-diving. Shiloh might have been the only one who saw. Doakes’s ascent seemed to stutter, as if his act produced enough dust on the record of existence that it skipped a beat. At the height of his flight, face noticeably gleaming even from 200 feet down, he slapped what must have been a detonator on his chest hysterically. He began to fall, and for a long second grotesque panic invaded his face as he flopped around in the air trying to turn himself into the human fireworks display that would really be a statement. He clashed against a flagpole halfway down and it clanged like a perverted church bell. He flipped a dozen times, and landed with a lifeless thud into a patch of shrubbery next to the entrance to the building. One person seemed to have taken notice, but Shiloh decided that could she could have just been admiring the architecture. It was like Jeremy Doakes had given his existence to Shiloh, so that he could advocate for the end of the Iraq war. Shiloh didn’t follow politics much, didn’t like to get in the middle of things.
He dialed Libby’s number. “I just saw one of the identities from your binder jump off of a 20 story building.”
“You sure? Which one?”
“I don’t know. An office building.”
“No. Which identity?”
“Jeremy Doakes.”
“Who?”
“Credit score 858.”
“Oh. Throw out his pages. Charge 1100 for the binder. Apologize for the inconvenience.” She hung up, and Shiloh pressed onward, wiping sweat off of his forehead. The sweat wasn’t a reaction to his death—Shiloh saw that as neutral. What soaked through his button-up was the lack of an explosion, the sputtering, sputtering, sputtering of an identity that begged to be a happening instead.