Thomas Marcinko - The Nixon Wrangler's Tale I impeached my hundredth nixon in a tiny room above the Twisted Lemon, a bar in a town on Central America's serrated Pacific edge. Costa Rica still touts itself as the safest nation south of Canada. That depends on who you are. Or what you are. An old lady noticed the circle-and-slash of my badge and pointed the way. "ˇAllí esta él! ˇEsta arriba, esta el nixon! ˇEl replicado!" "ˇGracias!" "ˇCon mucho gusto!" The people in Costa Rica are really nice. The night was full of ghost-lights. They floated like dandelions and burned like fireflies: the licensed ones soft white or yellow; the illegal ones in lurid Day-Glo colors. A recent editorial denounced their seasonal manifestation as "bioeconomic echoes of American imperialism . . . the bad old days of the United Fruit Company grafted irresponsibly onto modern Central America." Yak, yak, yak. They urged me on, in a perverse sort of way. They were a constant reminder of my father's glorious crimes. No wonder I went into law enforcement. I hefted my taser and ran upstairs. The milhous cowered in the dark. Bright eyes shuttled in deep-bagged sockets. Permanent sweat glazed that five o'clock shadow the genewriters could not undo. Jowls puffed and bubbled like Dizzy Gillespie's, or maybe the mumps. And the nose, the nose, that grotesque, trademark nose . . . a bowling pin, a sock darner, a ski-slope that Pinocchio, that lying little puppet, could have modeled for; an obscene bulge, erection-stiff. The room smelled of old rice, beans, and beer. "Y'know," that oily baritone, "y'know, I knew they'd find me sooner or later. They've always been out to get me. But did that stop me? No. I could have given up. But that would be taking the easy way out, and that goes against every fiber of my being. I'm a fighter. A scrapper. Because, y'know, as long as you're in there plugging, they can't beat you. Only you can defeat yourself, it doesn't matter, it can be the last down of the final quarter, right on the fifty-yard line, but —" I shot it. I swear I never touched them in any other way; not of my own free will, anyway. And that's God's truth, no matter what they say. I'd been viscerally afraid of them since, at the impressionable age of nine, I saw one claw its way out of John Hurt's chest in a digital retrofit of Ridley Scott's original Alien. Megavolts triggered the twin V-for-victory gesture, arms outstretched for jumping jacks. I stood back. Sometimes they were rigged to explode. Instead of a blast, this time I only got their usual death-blather. Often they spouted reflexive phrases like "Not a crook" or "We're gonna keep it." A few made "Pat" their last word. Once I heard a "Bebe." This time it was different. This one spoke to me. "You need us," it hissed. "You need us." It died. One fewer to kick around. Ghost lights drifted to land on its face. A light settled on the tip of the nose. I paused to admire what the fleshkon had done with the room. The flower arrangement near the window was very nice — palm fronds, birds-of-paradise. Sort of a tropical motif. The urge to create dies hard. Believe me, I know. Why do we hate the nixons, I ask the Chief on graduation day. We protect all the fleshkon greats of stage and screen — the elvises, the marilyns, the grouchos. And we look after the educational fleshkons, the great figures from history. Though fleshkons aren't strictly human, most people treat them decently. But there's always somebody who wants to cause them pain. Sick, sick people who find the lookalike of their choice too attractive, too disturbing. . . . It's not always easy to spot the sickos, either. But we fear and hate the nixons, and we act as if it's we who need protection from them. Yet we crank them out by the planeload. Why? And the Chief answers me: Because they're everything we now know to be evil. Because we need them to be scapegoats. The Big Reform of '17 won't hold without a constant reminder of how bad things can get. We need to put our dark side out where we can see it. The hitlers were too obvious, the saddams laughable, the reagans likable. The other fascist bastards of the past are lucky if their names are taught in school anymore. So we go with something more familiar. Closer to home. Scary but not too scary. Evil though they may be, we even empathize with them. Not me. Yes, you. Even then the Chief's office was full of the ghost-light flowers. Even though he cultivated only the breeds that produced the approved whites and golds, it was hard not to take their presence as a personal rebuke. Like he was trying to tell me something about my father. For my own good, of course. Summoned back to Global, I rushed through the Hall of Artificial Life, past Biologic Ikon Programming, past Security Enhancements, past Copyright Clearance. I watched marilyns in growth-expression stages, james deans in proving simulations, elvises half-baked. In Test Marketing, madonnas and stallones and cobains scrolled out as genomic manifestations, into the lives of audiences planetary and offworld. "Sorry you had to run all the way to Costa Rica," the Chief told me. "Our lead from that designer in the Disney Republic was a ruse. GlobeIntel fucked up bad." "Little trickster must have ripped out its tracking implant." "It never had a 'plant. We've got a bootlegger." "Trick-eee." Bootlegging explained why there were so many runaway milhouses lately. I saw them everywhere. Even the faces of the capuchin monkeys in Costa seemed to have noses too long, cheeks too puffy, widow's peaks a bit too well-defined, manners too furtive. Call me paranoid. The Chief's face, worn and comfortable like old leather, split into a sadistic little smile. "I'm assigning you a partner," he said. By reflex I ran through the Litany Against Bureaucracy. "I'm a good cop," I said; "a damned good cop; I work alone, I make my own rules . . ." He hit back with the Litany Against Insubordination. "You're overworked," he recited. "You're too close to the case, man! Back off!" My street dealer had promised the Litany would counter the buttons mandated for cops by the Reforms of 2017, especially the buttons for obedience. My street dealer was a liar. The brass really knew how to push your buttons, but then they really knew how to sew in those buttons, too. I kept trying anyway. "Work. Lone." My heart wasn't in it. "Good cop. Work. Own. Rules." The Chief yawned. "As of now you are suspended. Give me your badge and your gun." "All right! All right, you win. Show him in. Her. Whatever." Her name was Marjorie Gatling: twenty-five, coltish, with wide blue eyes and a poodle's tangle of light brown hair. She had a firm and certain chin, and lips like bloody rose petals from the most expensive Designer's Guild-licensed florist. She had an impeachment record I envied. We kept busy. The Chief's worries were justified. Somebody was flooding the market with cheap illegal milhouses: The only type of fleshkon who fought back, who lied and cheated and fought, anything to stay alive. We brought down a fabrication of nixons that escaped from Bolshevik Park. The mediaglomerate needed a predator to cull the stalin and brezhnev population, but they cut corners and ordered a bunch of cheap knockoffs with a lousy sense of territory and direction. They tried to debate us about which superpower made better color TVs. Marjorie's rebuttals reduced them to tears before we hit them with the tasers. Our last night together was great. Our sexual liaison wasn't supposed to be permanent; just erotic distraction buttoned into us, along with its convenient release, programmed to end before it got too serious. It kept us calm and predictable. Average duration of coitus: Eighteen and a half minutes. Her limbs, strong branches, entwined me. Her skin was smooth as paper, sweet as lavender. I was happy, till afterwards, when she wanted to confide. "Sometimes . . . I think it's terrible, the way we treat them." She looked at me with a shade of longing. "Don't you?" "No. Certainly not. No." "Don't you think they suffer?" "Who cares?" Later that night I watched her suck off another man. I looked closer and saw that in fact it was a milhous she was fellating. And it was not his penis that filled her mouth but his nose, that long bulbous ski-slope of a horrible nose. In the dream I became that fleshkon, its nose my nose. . . . The mattress rustled as I jumped awake. Under it I'd hidden several months of Guild-only gardening magazines I wasn't supposed to have. I would not tell Marjorie the nightmare. "You always want to be a Wrangler?" she asked, her cigarette (smoking habit . . . button . . . probably sewn in circa the 2017 Reforms to keep down pension costs) a bright orange dot in the gloom of my bachelor boudoir. "I'd rather not talk about it." She blinked blue innocence at me. "Your father," Marjorie stated clearly, "paid his debt to society." I jumped out of bed and gathered up my uniform, making as much noise and fuss as possible. I shoved my foot into my boot, tried to pull on my pants. I took off the boot so I could push my foot into the pant leg. Then I put the boot back on. "It's all about your father, isn't it?" Marjorie asked. "Good lord, it was only a few flowers. It's not like it was the worst of the Veg-O-Disasters. What about the McMurdo Krill-Killer? Or the Provence Dustbowl? Ghost-lights . . . God, everybody thinks your father's are much prettier than the licensed brands." "He bootlegged a patent. He could have caused a lot of harm. And everybody knows it." "It's also the past. The Design Guild is a bunch of neo-Darwinist reactionaries. Ever since the 'teens they've looked for scapegoats —" "I said I don't want to talk about it." My thwarted wishes were my own business. All I'd wanted as a child was to grow things. Now I could never get into the Designer's Guild, not with this blot on my family's record. I could never get away from my father's crimes. Ghost-lights bloomed every season and followed me around the globe. They burned pink and purple and lime and robin's-egg blue, all the colors of anarchy. I did what I could to make up for his crime. I did not communicate with my mother or my brother or my sister or my stepmother. I had no friends besides those allowed by the buttons. Unbuttoned friends could always betray you. I did not visit my father's grave. I was a fighter, a scrapper. I toughed it out alone. The bootleggers seemed to be lying low, so Marjorie and I got loaned out to other divisions. We worked together better than ever, now that our affair was over. We rescued some bootlegged marilyns and madonnas from a bunch of creeps who used them for fucking but more often just beat them up. We tracked an abused amnesiac elvis who'd escaped a nightclub where they overfed him and tried to hide him, not too successfully, in an otherwise legal milhous band called Foreign Policy Triumph. The elvis looked pretty strange with the ski-slope nose grafted onto his pie-pan face. So did their sinatra frontman. We corralled a bootleg kennedy. The Grace Through Golf charismatics who hijacked it from the test labs meant no harm. They just wanted to play nine holes with it. But we couldn't return the kennedy to the entertainment sector. There's not much demand for kennedys. The real ones keep tumbling out of wombs, regular as clockwork. Maybe because we let up the pressure, the milhous bootlegs came flooding back. We followed a tip to Kansas, where an unscrupulous promoter ran off enough nixons to man opposing football teams. They acted tough but played like wimps. They circled and attacked, then cringed and minced around each other. They bit, gouged, whined, and blamed far more than they tackled or scored. It was like watching a Busby Berkeley nightmare starring a bunch of old ladies at a bitch-slapping party. We found the milhous coach hidden in the locker room, gobbling down cottage cheese. "To celebrate," it explained through ketchup-blooded lips. I opened fire. Just then I was a Master Gardener like my father before me, and his father before him. The nixons were weeds. So many, many weeds. We had to stop impeaching them if we wanted answers, so I brought one in. Under the hot lights it sweated good and thick, right above the upper lip. We played good cop–bad cop. Guess which cop I played. "Leave the room, Marjorie," I said. "Give us some time alone." I roughed it up, just a little, and of course it told us everything, just before I exiled it to San Clemente. Marjorie and I took a four-seat aircar to Australia, where the world turns upside-down. Melbourne was wet, rainy, and decorated with cast Victorian iron. I tried to concoct excuses to visit the Royal Botanic Gardens later. Just thinking about it made my fingers itch — all those broad shiny smooth leaves, the pleasant jab of thorns, complex vines and branches tangled like DNA. . . . As long as it kept raining, my father's ghost-lights would keep their distance. We arrived at the Melbourne Museum. The milhous was holding priceless aboriginal art hostage. It wanted safe passage offworld, to where it was running off copies of itself. "Let me make one thing perfectly clear," the nixon was pontificating through a bullhorn when we arrived. "My free will may well have been a manufacturing accident. Or it may have been the hand of destiny. I cannot say. Nor can you. Therefore, I want my freedom. I want to live." "Let's talk," I bullhorned back. "Why, yes. Yes, indeed we must always be open to negotiation — but let it be from a position of strength, and never of weakness. Let there be peace . . . but peace with honor." The nixon and I talked football while Marjorie slipped behind and put the lying little puppet in cuffs. She crawled into the flyer; the nixon after her; me last. I sealed the hatch. I noticed that Marjorie still held the taser. But now she pointed it at me. Later, after my disgrace, I hacked Marjorie's files. I thought she'd turn out to be from some discriminated group. Or maybe she'd had illegal gene mods. Maybe she'd had a brother or sister or child that died because Marjorie couldn't get the gene therapy approved. I wanted a good reason for her betrayal. According to the Chief's shrinks, she had a latent case of Pandora Syndrome: The desire to watch all hell break loose, just to see what happens. It was the only way to explain her otherwise inexplicable sympathy, misplaced to inflict maximum damage on a world she found unsatisfactory. It happens to cops; it happens in all walks of life. Mostly the syndrome strikes genetic designers. My father had it bad. "Let's go," she said, motioning with the taser. I took the vehicle up. Marjorie relaxed into what I would know in retrospect as her natural expression: tight mouth, sorrowful eyes, masochist's set of jaw. They've suffered enough, it seemed to say. I'll stand by them. No matter how much it hurts, I'll be loyal. I'll protect them. This nixon was designed to blend in. Big jowls, receding hairline, yes, but not so you'd notice. It looked almost human. Its eyes shifted, of course. You had to expect that. The odor of after-shave filled the southern hemisphere. Marjorie crawled onto the nixon's lap. They kissed, not chastely. "That should do the trick," she said, smiling as she broke the embrace. Then I knew. And they saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose . . . Genesis 6:2, more or less. It licked its lips. "I designed the organism to transmit itself through multiple vectors. It's a sort of kissing disease, among other things. Highly contagious. Character in a virus." Then it turned to me. Its warm stiff nose accordioned against my cheek. I couldn't help it. I want it on the record, that I had no choice. I tried to pull away. But the taser. I spluttered and spit after the nixon, not satisfied with the daughters of men, took its tongue out of my mouth. It was rough like a cat's. It tasted of after-shave. I wiped my mouth again, and the wet red mark left by the nose. "Why tell me?" "We're very much alike, you and I." Old buttoning replied before I could think of my own answer. "I'm nothing like you!" "Both of us are aberrations: You, an honest cop, even without ethics '17ed into you. Me, a fleshkon with free will. Freaks." "No!" "You: sins of the father. Me: I didn't ask to be richard nixon." "Stop!" "We're both buttoned," it went on. "You with police ethics, me with the exhibitionist's need for an audience that'll appreciate my fiendish plan." Marjorie said, "It's time to go, richard." The nixon looked at her with regret. "Y'know, I meant to have lots of sex with you. Good wholesome American sex. The kind of sex that made this country great. We managed to unbutton your police conscience; I wish we'd done the same with your emotions." "We can't afford sentiment," she said. "If they catch you they might cure you." It kissed Marjorie one last time. It popped the hatch and climbed onto the flyer's running board. "To the bottom of the food chain!" It sounded like a battle cry. I twisted the flyer's wheel to force the milhous to topple back into the cockpit, but it braced itself against the hatch. It raised its hands high over its head and showed the double V-sign to the trackless gray ocean before it jumped. We heard the explosion and Marjorie shut the hatch. I put the flyer on autopilot. "There's got to be a vaccine for that microbe," I ventured at last. "Before you even think about going public, watch this." She flipped open her pocket computer. It played a holo of unspeakable things being done by and to marilyns and dianas and even to cobains. A three-ring sick-sex circus, starring me. "This never happened," I said. "Even if it did, it's not admissible in a court of —" "Tell it to Internal Affairs." "The Chief'll know. I'm his favorite. He —" Marjorie smiled. "We have surveillance on him too." "Also faked." She shook her head. She smiled, and left the rest for me to imagine. The wind howled past the flyer. "You fight dirty," I said. Her smile dawned like the sun over Mercury. "I've always been a fighter, a scrapper." She released the holos anyway, to disgrace the Chief. I was an example that he did not act alone. Up till then I'd felt sorrier for the Chief than I did for myself. He'd been like a father to me. Before they threw me off the force, I asked them to unbutton me. They said no, the little knife-twisters. It didn't matter, because I'd been kissed. The richard's free will was now mine too. Now I get plenty of sun. I get my hands dirty. I inhale the sweet smell of loam, humus, the perfume of greens and flowers. When the ghost-lights float past on tropical breezes, I feel no guilt or shame over their transit. For the first time they strike me as pretty, the blue ones especially. I plant. I cultivate. My father would have been proud. Besides his presumed criminal tendencies, I also inherited his talent. My flowers have little faces. My tomatoes look like heads with bulging cheeks and bulbous noses. My small but dedicated following buys them special-delivery for the pungent and satisfying splat they make against holoboards and cinema screens and all the elvises and madonnas and cobains on stage. Sometimes my fans eat my tomatoes, and ingest the viruses that swarm beneath my firm skins, my sweet pulps. Nor do I ply my trade alone. I've seen some pretty strange cabbages and bananas and mangoes, and roses and carnations and birds-of-paradise. They wear that too-sweet smile nobody wants to trust. I've noted dogs and cats and rabbits with oddly shifty eyes, furtively sloping shoulders, smiles with insincerity in every fold of their maws. So the world grows level and fair. Last time I passed through Costa Rica, I stopped by the Twisted Lemon, for old time's sake — a pilgrimage of sorts. The capuchin monkeys had taken over the upstairs rooms, and they gestured, and raised their little arms to make twin V-signs, and smiled, as if they wanted to make something so very, so perfectly, so lucidly clear.