He could have ridden straight to the bus station then home but instead he got off downtown, just past the tourist-sanitized areas. Was it odd that he felt more relaxed in a place where he was supposed to keep his guard up? He knew how to do this. He marched two blocks and booked into the first cheap motel he came across. The desk clerk attended him from behind bulletproof glass and overcharged him for a bottle of brandy from under the counter. The seal was broken but he took it anyway.
His room had a busted and patched door, like somebody had punched out the lock. A piece of plywood over the hole, and a new doorknob slightly below where a doorknob should be. His key worked, so he didn’t care. He locked the dead bolt and the chain, then dumped his bags behind the door for added security.
The bed passed his cursory bedbug check, and he collapsed onto it, boots and all. The brandy tasted watered down, but there was still some alcohol in there so he wasn’t complaining. His buddies would log into their Pilot apps at this point and change back to this time zone, maybe add a cycle-down period, something they all removed during deployment. He didn’t bother since he couldn’t tell the difference. He drank until he felt his own version of cycle-down, the slight diminishment of attention the difference of attention. Being drunk helped somewhat. No, being drunk helped a lot.
He missed his unit. Alone was okay, but he wasn’t used to it anymore. He tried to think of whom he could phone. He tried Milo, but disconnected after one ring when he realized the time. Milo had come back a couple of months before him, was back with Karina. No point in disturbing him.
The phone rang a minute later.
“Are you stateside?” Milo asked. “Why’d you hang up?”
“Wasn’t sure if it was a good time.”
“You know you can call whenever you need.”
“I just thought it might be late.”
“It is. Whatever. You okay? You home?”
“Okay enough. In some fleabag motel for the night. I wasn’t ready to go home yet.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? Do you want me to meet you somewhere?”
“Nah. I’m wasted already. Just wanted to say hey.”
David closed his eyes and listened to sirens voices noise in the pipes TV from next door until sleep took him with his boots on. Woke once bolt upright to someone trying the door, then a knock. Held his breath, waited, calculated his options. The knock moved on to other doors. Someone looking for drugs or a friend or a room number forgotten.
He woke the next morning with a head full of fuzz and no clue where he was. That only lasted a moment, but a moment in which he thought he might have died or been captured the sunlight was wrong the room was wrong everything was off from where it should be. He tried desperately to cut through the fog as his Pilot created more fog, processing the sounds from the other rooms and from outside. A stinkbug careened off the walls and the ceiling. Water in the pipes. Car alarm outside.
“Take it in threes”: that was the advice from his first activation and calibration tests. Dr. Abrams he remembered in particular, a blond woman with no Pilot who was reduced to bony angles and painted-on eyebrows in his mind. “I can’t keep up with everything you can pay attention to with your implant. List them in threes for me. It’ll help you process and show me how fast you’re adjusting.”
He told her he saw blue-seven-F on the multikeyed charts. He told her he saw doctor-intern-notepad, even when he saw and felt and heard all those things and more at once, doctor-intern-notepad-coldass table-intern’s missing button-antiseptic smell-doctor’s leaking pen-dot of something maybe blood on an otherwise clean floor-sky out the window-person watering flowers on the adjacent roof-voices down the hall-blue-seven-fucking F. It was hard to put words to full, nonprioritized attention. He remembered panicking at that stage. Even as he got used to it, it was already overwhelming. Take it in threes.
After the threes came prioritization. They got the basics early on, rudimentary methods of tuning out nonessential stimuli. It wasn’t until the Army that he understood the need for prioritization. Person on the adjacent roof comes first, then voices in the hall. The rest, even the doctor, is noise. The Army taught him that, except they thought there was an end to noise a finiteness a finity was finity a word. In high school in the Army everywhere everybody talked about the Pilot in different terms than the ones he used. Like it had a beginning and an end. Their noise had a different quality than his. He didn’t know why. He took the tests he passed the tests he did everything he was supposed to do. They all just coped with it better maybe. Maybe he had no cope he was weak somehow defective.
He climbed the hill from the bus stop. Scanned the parked cars for movement the treetops the rooftops you’re home, soldier, stand down, but he couldn’t. He walked the familiar street the street he’d grown up on the street where he knew he should feel safe. He did feel safe safe-ish anyway but that didn’t mean he knew how to stop to turn off to quiet the instinct to cover every angle.
He and Julie saw each other at the same time. Julie stood on the front stoop in a striped dress, reading something on her tablet. She stood like she’d just stepped out but he could tell she’d been waiting awhile from the sweat on her upper lip. It was okay he was sweaty too, soaked really, from the effort of watching out without anyone else to watch out with him. He pulled her into a bear hug he was facing the
