Aeota Read online

  The Treasury men or the SEC or the IRS had plucked Holger’s files cleaner than the hotdog platter at an orphanage picnic. You could have stored the Complete Works of Stephen King in his desk drawers.

  But by lying down on my back and looking up, I found one paper way at the rear of the bottom drawer that had been accidentally pinned, hidden, in place by the drawer above.

  The letterhead read: Association of Engineering Ontologists Totalizing Affinities. An address on the outskirts of a small city upstate completed the information.

  Dear Mr. Holtzclaw:

  Yes, I believe AEOTA can supply your needs. But our technology is proprietary, and can only be licensed, not purchased. We would have to conduct a face-to-face meeting to discuss the exact arrangements.

  Please contact us at your earliest convenience to arrange such a meeting.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mr. Thaumas

  The date on the letter was two days before Holger had disappeared.

  From Juniper’s nabe to the rather seedier district where Yulia lived in the doublewide trailer I had purchased for us with the profits from reuniting an aging rock star with her daughter abandoned at birth was a journey across practically the entire socioeconomic spectrum of contemporary urban America, from upper crust to stale leftovers. Hustling seemed universal, though, no matter the income level. About the only types of citizen I did not pass during my odyssey were junkies and state legislators, although I did drive by an infamous bar where the mayor had recently been caught snorting coke in the john, so maybe I bagged two unsavory coups in one.

  Yulia’s usual slavically spooky sixth sense had her waiting for me glaringly in the open doorway, although I had not called. Or maybe my Nokia was secretly on her side and had texted news of my departure from Juniper’s.

  The Euromaidan Revolution of 2014 in the Ukraine had produced winners and losers, just like any revolution, and Yulia Lysenko had been one of the losers. Forced to abandon all her property and her job as a literature professor, due to her out-of-favor allegiances, she fled her native land to receive asylum in the USA. Her academic credentials were useless here, and she had taken a job as a bartender. The watering-hole, an upscale joint named after its owner, Joshua Greenstone, appreciated the trade brought in by the new brunette bottle-jockey’s gamin good looks—though she did have what oral maxillofacial surgeons referred to as “incompetent lips.” This was the condition where the normal resting state of one’s face resulted in the display of teeth. Yulia looked as if she were perpetually snarling or sneering. Some guys found it really sexy, yours truly among them. Several daily tequila purchases at Joshua Greenstone’s by yours truly had resulted in a date and nigh-concurrent sex.

  When I could breathe and see and formulate words again after that initial bout of copulation, I said, “There is no way those are incompetent lips.”

  My extreme charm and wit and superhuman bedroom prowess led straight to the altar.

  Our marriage lasted two-and-a-half years. Yulia quickly and correctly concluded, to her dismay, that I was eccentric, lazy, and without much ambition. But two other issues had also influenced her decision to ditch me.

  The first was my propensity to mess around with other women. I can only offer the excuse that I had been a bachelor for all my adult life up until this June-October marriage, and had been set in my ways. The worst reveal of my inveterate horndoggishness occurred when Yulia had returned a day early from her reunion in Paris, France, with her mother and found the doublewide rockin’. Non-American that she was, she failed to complete and heed the advisory adage and had indeed come knockin’, discovering me with a stacked naked redhead who was intent on showing me why it had been a glaring injustice to the pole-dancing profession to fire her from her job at a certain gentlemen’s club, a venue that she now wanted me to bring down in revenge by highlighting various illegal practices of theirs that I could surely uncover with her athletic help.

  But our short marriage might have survived such infidelities, if not for a more substantial disagreement.

  And that, it turned out, underlay the immediate cause that had made Yulia summon me today.

  Plainly, she had worked herself up into an indignant tizzy since our touchy but mild-mannered phone conversation of a few hours ago. She waved a piece of paper violently as I crossed the gravel walk to the trailer’s wooden steps.

  “Vern, this is the sickest, most vile joke you have ever played on me!”

  Except in the realm of slang, Yulia’s English was better than mine, but her accent surfaced during times of stress. Now she sounded like a street-market borscht vendor.

  I ushered us inside and closed the door. “Calm down, Yulia. What the hell are you talking about?”

  She shoved the paper under my nose.

  I read the ransom note, a simple anonymous laser-print document.

  YULIA RUGGLES WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER AEOTA

  SHE WILL BE RETURNED SAFELY TO YOU FOR THE SUM OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS

  WE ARE CONFIDENT YOU AND YOUR EX HUSBAND CAN RAISE THIS SUM OF MONEY

  WHEN YOU HAVE IT READY WE WILL KNOW AND YOU WILL RECEIVE FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

  DO NOT GO TO THE POLICE IF YOU VALUE YOUR DAUGHTER’S LIFE

  Yulia had me pinned with a look of total contempt that hurt me more than I thought she still could. So I played it for laughs.

  “Not much on proper punctuation, are they?”

  Tear-tracks mottling her flushed face, Yulia socked me in the chest with a small but potent fist. “You really thought this was funny? You dirty bastard!”

  “Yulia, I swear, I had nothing to do with this!”

  “Then why does the note use the name Aelita for our daughter? No one knows that but us!”

  I looked again at the note, then turned it toward Yulia. “They don’t say Aelita. They say Aeota.”

  Yulia knuckled her eyes, dragged a sleeve across her drippy nose, then studied the letter again. She regarded me with less hatred and more confusion.

  “You’re right. I thought it said Aelita…I guess…I guess I saw what I expected to see…”

  Yulia had wanted to conceive a year after we married. Naturally, I had to reveal my ancient vasectomy. She learned the operation could often be successfully reversed. I refused. She even had a name picked out for our unborn daughter. Aelita, after some Russian movie she admired. That ongoing, vituperative disagreement was the real beginning of our end.

  “Who the hell is Aeota then?”

  “I don’t know. I think it has something to do with this case I’m on.”

  Yulia grabbed the letter, crumpled it up, and threw it to the floor. “Even when we’re not married I have to suffer because of your bullshit job!”

  I retrieved the ransom note. “This come in an envelope?”

  She found it in the trash. A plain white business-sized envelope with no writing on it. I took it nonetheless.

  “I’ve got to go now. Call me if anything else happens that I should know about.”

  Outside at my car, I paused to look back.

  Yulia stood in the trailer’s door with her arms folded below her stomach, as if cradling what wasn’t there.

  4. LOCAVORE APOCALYPSE

  I was driving north into a short-lived killer inferno.

  Well, maybe not fully into it, but close enough to get singed maybe—if I weren’t careful.

  Upstate was burning, several separated wildfires devouring acres of drought-dried forest and a few incidental pieces of beloved infrastructure, despite the best efforts of thousands of firefighters. Even hundreds of miles away from the living flames, the air approached Chinese-megalopolis levels of unbreathability and opacity.

  Elsewhere in the nation, a couple of Katrina-wannabe storms had hit up and down the East Coast. Atlanta had experienced a freak hailstorm with celestial ice-rocks the size of Ping-Pong balls crashing down. The Midwest had seen a pack of tornadoes romping through a swath of helpless towns like teenage girls rampaging through a Wet
Seal store during a 50 percent off sale. Invader species were practically climbing out of the Great Lakes to register to vote. And honeybees were dying faster than amateur comedians at open-mic night. Predictions for the upcoming winter’s weather ranged from Michael Crichton direness to Book of Revelation severity.

  And those were just the conditions in the USA. Of the rest of the climate-victimized world, the perp speaketh not.

  There really was no denying the truth any longer: Our planet was fucked. Screwed, blued, and tattooed by humanity into a long slow death spiral. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me at the moment— and to most of us, I think, when we were being honest with ourselves.

  And what was to be done about the situation? Really, c’mon now, give it your best shot. Live in caves? Stop buying Big Agribiz strawberries? Carry picket signs down into coalmines? Read locally produced papyrus by candlelight instead of binge-watching TV shows? How about we just stop overbreeding like bonobos on Spring Break? Yeah, good luck with that last one. No, the average citizen, however well intentioned, had been sidelined from the playing field or benched himself on this crisis. All the low-flow showerheads you could install were not going to deliver water to these dried-out woods toward which I drove.

  I was like everyone else. The only thing to do, I figured, was to keep calm and carry on. “When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.” If humanity’s bacon was ever going to be saved—a highly debatable proposition—some big-ass deus ex machina would have to step in, some game-changer along the lines of alien invasion, massively-lethal-only-to-humans plague, or revolutionary new technology. And neither you nor I nor my kid sister was going to play any pivotal part in those scenarios.

  So I drove north, adding my share of carbon monoxide and other pollutants to the overburdened atmosphere and trying not to give a damn.

  Out here in the country, without any distractions other than musing on the imminent extinction of the human race, a worn tape of Yes playing slurrily from my dashboard speakers (“Lost in losing circumstances, that’s just where you are…”), I tried to think about this case.

  Back in my office after leaving Yulia, I had packaged up the ransom note and its envelope and messengered them over to a private lab I used. I doubted I would get any fingerprints or chemical or organic signatures from the paper that would lead me anywhere, but I had to try.

  After the messenger came and went—a young guy in cyclist gear, thin as my wallet—I thought about my counterfactual daughter, Aeota/Aelita. I tried to picture her unborn face. Christ, I hoped she would have favored Yulia rather than me! She’d be, what, roughly five years old by now. A real little girl. Heir and fruit of my loins. And abducted! I began to get angry for no real reason. I powered up my computer and searched for “aeota” again.

  The results were radically different from the last search just a few hours ago.

  The top entry on the first page, brand new, was a hit for the Association of Engineering Ontologists Totalizing Affinities, the source of the letter to Holtzclaw. I clicked over to their home page. Very glossy, lots of pictures of happy consumers enjoying themselves in various idyllic situations, indoors and out, plus dedicated employees in office and laboratory settings. Except I couldn’t really identify what AEOTA did or made or traded. All I encountered was a lot of buzzwords about incentivizing and rewarding and optimizing and maximizing—and, natch, “totalizing affinities.”

  Back among the search results, several lines down but still on the first page, I came across another new reference.

  “Aeota” had been the name of a female character in a short-lived newspaper comic strip that ran during the year 1910, Herbert Crowley’s The Wigglemuch. Scholar Dan Nadel had said, “For a brief period thereafter, the name received some faddish conversational usage among fans of the strip, being applied to any woman of a certain disposition, attitude, and appearance conforming to those qualities discerned in the fictional woman.”

  I brought up fuzzy scans of the antique strip. So far as I could tell, Aeota had been a roly-poly Polynesian, attired in native garments—that is, when she hadn’t been a willowy Weimar vamp like Theda Bara, all slinky gowns, plumed tiaras, and long strands of costume beads. And did she feature a tail? Maybe I was conflating two separate characters. The eccentric lettering in the word balloons was hard to read, and the strip’s plot, taking place amongst surreal creatures in a neverland, did not lend itself to casual parsing.

  I took out my phone and called Marty Quartz, my go-to guy for all matters cyber.

  “Vern, great to hear from you! How’s the Nokia? ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeotas even death may die.’”

  “Marty, what did you say? Strange what now?”

  “Strange eons. You know the quote. Your basic Lovecraft. Hey, need a new ringtone?” Without warning, Marty blasted my ear with what sounded like two ducks shagging a coyote to death inside a galloping calliope.

  “I’m honored to experience that snippet from the Arcturus Hit Parade, Marty, but I’m cool with the older ringtone you gave me. No, I need to ask you something.” I recounted my before-and-after forays into the web. “How could search results change so dramatically in just a few hours?”

  “The internet is a dynamic organism, Vern. It’s not static, things change every second.”

  “Yeah, but these changes happened on the very first page of results for the same search term each time. Aren’t those supposed to be the durable results with the most weight? How could something brand new instantly rise to the top?”

  “Things trend, Vern. Attention drives significance and visibility. Someone else besides you must be Googling that shit and hyper-linking their brains out.”

  “Yeah, but these items didn’t even exist in the prior search.”

  “Are you sure of that? Did you really study every page of the early results?”

  I tried to recall if I had scrolled through every single line of the prior search. Hadn’t I given up after wading through so much spam? Maybe the items about postmodern industrial AEOTA and the Herbert Crowley strip had been hiding from me just a page away.

  “No, I can’t be sure, Marty.”

  “Well, there you go. Hey, I gotta fly, Vern. I’m behind in rigging up my Burner costume. I’m going as a Red Lectroid. Hope I don’t bake under all the latex prosthetics.”

  As the line went unceremoniously dead, I realized I had not asked him about the way my phone had disgorged a printed slip of paper.

  As I was re-pocketing my Nokia, the same bike messenger guy returned. No way the lab could have turned around my assignment so fast.

  But it was just a coincidence. The kid was delivering a package to me, a small item wrapped in kraft paper, no trace of sender.

  Somebody obviously thought it was Christmas and I had been a very good little boy.

  Nestled in cotton batting in an unmarked cardboard jeweler’s box, smaller than the one delivered to me by Brevis Baxter, was a cheap charm bracelet with only four cheap pewter charms on it: a magnifying glass, a gift-wrapped present, a page-a-day calendar and a representation of the Milky Way as seen from above, a spiral-armed whirlpool.

  find aeota yesterday everywhere.

  I tore the box and kraft paper apart, looking for a note or a clue, but came up dry.

  Now I was getting a little pissed-off. Two mysterious deliveries in one day. That pegged the private-eye suspiciousness meter to the max.

  I dropped the charm bracelet in the same pocket that held the slip of paper that my phone had spat out, then went down to my car.

  I knew I was going to have to visit AEOTA in person …

  Now the GPS showed I was only about half an hour away from my destination. Rural scenery still predominated, a dozen shades of brown with here and there some besieged green. I came abreast of a neatly tended farm amidst a manifestly irrigated cornfield with a big barn bearing an old-school advertisement painted right on the planks of its roadside wall.
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br />   I slammed on the brakes, shifted, and zoomed back in reverse, heedless of traffic conditions behind me. Luckily, the lone car coming saw my crazy actions in time to swerve with a blast of horn.

  I found the driveway to the farm and pulled in.

  Standing a few feet from the barn wall, I verified I had not imagined the sight.

  CHEW AEOTA PLUG

  FOR DISCERNING MEN OF SUPERIOR TASTE

  NO FINER FLAVOR NOR GRAIN

  “ALL THE CHORUS AEOLIAN

  “SINGS ITS PRAISE IN AEOTA LAND”

  I pondered the drawing of the tobacco pouch: the trademark featured a kind of pre-nubile vestal virgin wrapped in a flowing robe and holding up a single big tobacco leaf with both hands. Real Little Nemo look.

  Even in the smoky gloom of the forest fire–tinged atmosphere, the colors on the sign were, if vintage, inexplicably hardly faded.

  “Pretty awesome, am I right?”

  I turned to confront a young couple, obviously the farm’s owners. The round-faced woman was black and displayed her hair in a kind of upgathered pineapple-foliage fountain. She wore rubber boots and carried a murmuring buff-colored chicken big as a hypertrophied turkey. Her white male partner had on dirty bib overalls and sported a beard thick as the barbed wire around a refugee camp. Grow-local hipsters, “American Gothic” for the Whole Foods era. They were both smiling.

  “We redid the barn last year,” said the guy. “Stripped off all the old siding, and there she was. Protected from the elements for about ninety years.”

  “What do you know about the history of that brand? Anything?”

  The man took out his cellphone and tip-tap-flick-swiped up a screen of thumbnail images. “Oh, sure. Lots of information on the web. It’s not made anymore though. Company went out of business around 1970. So we adopted the name for our farm.”

  I stared at the guy’s screen, seeing the Aeota tobacco pouch replicated in a dozen era-variant styles. I knew that when I returned to my office, I’d find the same data showing on my screen, where it had never appeared before in previous searches.