Pure Gold
Hugo Brooke had no idea what to do with himself and he was sick of it.
He looked around his office, seeking any dustcatcher out of place or any frame on his wall hanging askew, but was left wanting. There was nothing left for him to distract himself with, at least not here. He’d even vacuumed, for gods’ sake!
With a disgusted sigh, he closed his eyes and leaned back in his antique chair (A great find, he thought, still dimly reveling in the recent acquisition. The thing even has wheels!), bringing his feet up so that his heels could rest on the edge of his desk. He kept his hands clasped together over his stomach, his thumbs jostling and obstructing each other as he relentlessly twiddled them.
It had been over a week since the last call came in, and almost three since his last case. He felt himself snort as he thought of that last one.
Hell of a case.
A very rich, very jealous old man had been convinced his much younger husband was running around on him. Almost an entire week spent trailing the twink from one side of the City to the other, and then it turned out he hadn’t even been sleeping around! The old man had been thrilled, of course, and Hugo had been paid handsomely for his time, but he wasn’t in this game for the money.
He almost snorted again, but changed his mind halfway through. That case wasn’t worth a second snort; it didn’t even deserve to be called a case. Whoever heard of a great detective building a career on a foundation of cheating spouses? He opened his eyes to glance over at the framed pictures of Spade and Marlowe he’d hung near his license and the solitary article that had been written about him thus far. The pictures had seemed like a great idea when he’d thought of it (he’d hoped seeing the faces of his favorite noirs each day would spur him onto hitherto unreached peaks of deductive greatness), but now, feeling the flat eyes of his heroes bore into him, he thought he may have subconsciously been setting himself up for failure. How could he hope to work with those monochromatic eyes incessantly judging him like that? Was it his fault the phone had stopped ringing? How was that his fault?
He lifted his feet off the desk and placed them firmly back on the ground, his chair squeaking faintly as he sat upright. He stood, his chair rolling back from the desk, and stretched, lifting his arms over his head and feeling the tingling spread up and through his back. He took another look around the office.
There wasn’t much to see, honestly. The office was small (smaller, even, than his apartment, which he once would have thought impossible) and vaguely rectangular in shape. Across from him was the door which led out into a hallway, the door itself filled with a large pane of frosted imitation-glass boasting “Hugo Brooke: Private Eye” in etched letters, and near the door sat the old striped sofa and armchair set he used to interview clients (when he had clients). Some stands and a coatrack were the only other pieces of furniture in the room save for his beloved desk, a massive block of oak or elm or something like that which had been ornately carved and polished to within an inch of its life, and, of course, his new antique desk chair. Some files were piled neatly in a corner of his desk while his now-emptied coffee mug, an oft-used ashtray and a large, brass lamp occupied the remaining corners. Near his chair, resting on a stand in front of the office’s only window, sat Trevor, the potted plant he’d been slowly (and unintentionally) killing for the last six years. He’d known what kind of plant Trevor was at some point, but it hadn’t really seemed like the kind of information that would come up very often so he’d allowed himself to forget.
He grabbed his coffee mug and went through the door that led to the small washroom attached to the office. He filled the mug with water from the tap and, returning to his chair, slowly emptied the water into Trevor’s pot. Trevor was mostly just a large, root-like trunk from which several small branches, each one topped with a small explosion of thick leaves, sprouted. At times, when Hugo managed to get Trevor into enough sunlight and remembered to water him regularly, his leaves could look almost healthy, but now they sagged a dull yellow color and clung daintily to their branches.
Amazing, he thought to himself. How do you fuck up a potted plant?
He shook his head and set the mug back in its place on his desk. He walked over to the coatrack and grabbed his jacket. It was summer, yes, but the weather in the City could change on a dime and he always liked to be prepared.
He held the jacket in his hands, then guiltily looked back toward his desk. It was barely after noon… his day wouldn’t officially be over for another few hours, and what if a call actually came in?
Let it, he thought as he tucked his jacket under his arm and flicked the antique-looking light switch by the door. I’ve got to get out of this room.
He walked out into the hallway and, after making sure the door was shut and locked behind him, strode out of the building and into the City.
ⓍⓍⓍ
Hugo had never lived anywhere other than the City, and he had never wanted to. He’d heard stories of the Wastes, stories of fallouts and remnants of the horrors from before even the End Times, and he had no desire to see any of it in person. There were pictures in the Archive, more pictures than anyone, even him, could hope to view in a lifetime, of what the world had been before the End, but all of that was gone now. Outside the Cities, mazes of polysteel and artificial light like this one he knew so well, was a desert made not of sand but of rubble and ash and bone. The Cities had come from the Wastes, he knew, and there were plans for more Cities being drafted every day, but he simply could not see the potential for regrowth beneath the centuries of decay.
All in all Hugo thought what humanity had been able to achieve since everything had gone to shit was pretty commendable, even if reading the fine print made him a little uncomfortable. The human race was back on the upswing, sure, desperate to reclaim what they could of what had been lost. Land, culture, history; they wanted it all just as it had been before the End. Never mind that among the costs of a new City were an agonizingly slow deradiation process and inevitable encounters with what passed for people still living in the Wastes. These encounters never ended well, but what were a few more dead fallouts when compared to the benefits of a shiny new City?
Hugo was afraid he might be getting jaded.
Noirs are supposed to be jaded, he thought. We’re supposed to be jaded and jilted and cold.
He was still working on that aspect of his noir persona.
Was it still a persona, though? When did it stop being something he was pretending to be and start being what he was? And if this wasn’t who he was, then who the hell was he?
A light wind blew through the canyon between the skyscrapers, filling Hugo’s nose with the smog and grit that to him was as familiar as the scent of his father’s old house. He was glad he’d thought to bring his jacket with him this morning. As he’d left his office he’d headed toward his apartment reflexively, but turned the next corner he came across. He did not feel like going home, though he didn’t know where else he’d rather be. The wind continued to ruffle his hair, so he shrugged on the jacket and shoved his hands deep into its pockets.
He was in a mood, and he didn’t know what to do to get himself out of it.
His mind wandered against his will and he found himself dwelling on the concept of identity again, turning it over and rolling it between his palms, searching for some crack in the surface through which he might glean some insight.
People changed careers all the time, he knew, but this had been more than that, or at least it was supposed to have been. He still wanted to be Hugo Brooke, but he did not want being Hugo Brooke to mean what it had meant. And what had it meant, really? The son of a lawyer. A powerful lawyer, sure, with more influence and money than any god Hugo knew of, but a lawyer all the same.
Growing up, Hugo’s friends had often played a game when they were angry with their parents. They would imagine they were actually the children of celebrities or personal heroes and that one day these true parents would come for them and take them away to a wonderful life where they were never grounded and got everything they ever wanted. Hugo had always gotten everything he wanted anyway and he’d only been grounded twice in his entire life, so he’d never bothered to think up alternate parentage for himself. His father was a rich and decent man, what more could he want?
What exactly is it you want?
His father’s voice, then, dredged up by all this reminiscing.
His father was a sensible man, but he’d always clung to a few superstitions. For instance, the table in the dining room of the old house was aligned so that each of its sides corresponded with a cardinal direction. His father sat at the head of the table, the north side, while Hugo always sat across from him on the south side. When his mother was alive she had sat to his father’s right (the table’s west side) and Saturday, Hugo’s older sister, had sat across from their mother’s empty chair until she got married and moved out a few years back. Even with both the girls gone Hugo had remained at the south end of the table and his father remained before him, never deviating from his habits and patterns.
Once, when he was no more than nine or ten and his mother was still alive, Hugo had asked his father why he was so specific about something as silly as a dinner table. His father had seemed mystified by the question and looked to his wife for assistance.
“That’s just the way things have always been, Hugo.” His mother had said, running her fingers through his hair in a way no one else could.
The night his father had asked him what he wanted, the two of them had been seated in their usual places. They were eating some sort of pasta dish, the name of which Hugo could not recall (he did remember, for some reason, his father saying it was his cook’s specialty), and making their usual small talk. It had been snowing outside, dull gray flakes drifting lazily past the dining room’s massive picture window. Hugo had never seen the need for the window, as the dining room faced the back of the neighbor’s house and the only way anyone could hope for a view was if the neighbor accidentally left their drapes open. Hugo remembered he’d also asked his father about this at some point during his childhood.
“Who doesn’t love a big window? And that’s real glass, you know.” Had been the response.
How had it started that night?
His father had asked him about school. When it came to conversation their options were limited, and the subject of Hugo’s sojourn through law school was one of his father’s favorites. Hugo had just finished describing the plot (no spoilers, of course) of Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Christie. He’d burned through every Hammett and Chandler stored in the Archive, including the few film adaptations so far recovered, so he’d recently moved onto the likes of Christie and Doyle. He had not cared for Marple and Holmes as he did Spade and Marlowe, but the stories were fun and Hugo had enjoyed them. He’d been explaining to his father that the book he’d described was the first Christie he’d read that hadn’t been about Marple or Poirot, and that had been a nice change of pace.
He’d watched his father’s eyes glaze over as he spoke, knowing he’d been fully tuned out roughly halfway through his Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? summary, but he’d kept talking. Someone had to do it.
When Hugo had run out of things to say about Frankie and Bobby’s (somewhat forced, in his opinion) romance, his father had quickly taken the lead and steered the conversation toward more neutral waters. The winter sessions would be starting soon and he’d wanted to know which classes Hugo had signed up for. On instinct Hugo had begun formulating a dodge, but then, as he’d pushed piles of noodles from one side of his plate to the other, he’d considered telling his father the truth.
This was an exceptionally radical concept, and not one he adopted readily. Hugo was not afraid of his father; he was reasonable and willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but one had to know how to talk to him. He was capable of empathy, certainly, but he did not make choices based on feelings. He had raised both of his children with the goal of instilling in them this same mindset and Hugo was considering telling him he had failed. There was nothing logical about what he’d wanted, but he’d wanted it all the same. He’d known the time for The Talk was coming, and at the table that night he’d had to decide if its time had already come.
He’d decided it had.
“Well… that’s actually something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
His father had raised an eyebrow at this, setting down his pasta-laden fork to give his son his undivided attention.
“Go on,” he’d said in what Hugo recognized as his Kindly Old Man voice, the same voice he used to get witnesses to open up on the stand. He even had his head cocked slightly to the right, as if Hugo were a timid store clerk testifying in an armed robbery trial.
“Uh, well…” Hugo had looked away from his father’s face, knowing it was a mistake as soon as he’d done it, and instead focused on the pasta still piled high on his plate. “I was thinking about taking a break.”
The silence that followed had been so profound Hugo was forced to look back up at his father and see the Kindly Old Man replaced with a blank wall.
“A… break.” His father had finally said slowly, as if he could taste the words as he spoke them and did not care for their flavor.
“Yeah, maybe just for the winter sessions. I was thinking I could go out and get a job –”
“A job?” His father’s eyes were like lances spearing into him. “What sort of job are we talking about?”
“I don’t know,” he’d lied. “I just want to get some, you know, more real-world experience before I get too invested in classes.”
“Are you not already invested in school?”
Fuck. That had been a misstep.
“No, that’s not what I mean –”
“Then I’m confused, because that’s what you said.” Kindly Old Man was long gone now, and Hugo had found himself sitting across the cardinally aligned table from the infamous Hardass Brooke: Terror of the High Courts.
“What I meant was…” Hugo had scrambled, trying to think out every possible reply to what he might say next and then panicking because he was pausing too long and the old man would jump in if he waited much longer. He’d finally blurted everything out at once in what he’d hoped had been the correct order. “What I meant was that I want to go out and see what other options I have before I commit myself to being a lawyer for the rest of my life.”
Another pause, another good look at the pasta on his plate.
“There was a time when you wanted to follow in my footsteps.”
“There really… wasn’t.” He’d managed to look back up as he spoke, at least. Another pause then. Hugo had pounced on it without thinking; he’d been desperate to have it all done with now that he’d started it. “I mean, there was a time when I thought that’s what I wanted, but I’m not sure I ever really did.”
“No?”
“No. Dad, I’ve seen what your job’s done to you. You work twelve hours a day and even when you come home all you can think about is trials and depositions. I don’t want that. I mean, if you keep this up you’re gonna have a heart attack before you’re fifty! I just… I don’t want that.”
His father’s face could have been chiseled in stone, but Hugo hadn’t looked away from it again. He could hear his heart as it pounded in his ears; he hadn’t meant to make that crack about the heart attack, but it had been a good one and certainly not untrue. The ending was a bit weak, but he’d tried not to dwell on that.
After an eternity his father had finally shifted, leaning back in his chair as he’d crossed his arms. He’d looked away from his son and stared out the large window, watching the dirty snow fall without really seeing it. Finally he’d turned back to Hugo.
“What exactly is it you want?”
Hugo reluctantly removed his hands from the jacket’s pockets and pulled it closer to him. The wind had gotten worse while he’d walked and reminisced, and it had taken a decidedly chilly turn.
Summer in the City, Hugo thought, trying to move on from that night while he continued to wander the City’s streets. He’d gone further from his office than he’d realized; he was near the factory stacks. He knew this part of the City well, and knew better than to linger. When the wind shifted he found himself downwind of the stacks, and his face and hands began to tingle. He held his breath, trying not to smell the chemicals burning the air, and quickly walked back the way he came. He turned at the nearest intersection and headed down a shop-lined side street which quickly crumbled into a shantytown composed of half-collapsed buildings and improvised shelters of plastic and packboard. His skin had already stopped tingling, though the chemical smells lingered on him. He’d have to take a shower when he got home or the scent would settle.
The residents of this particular shantytown (there were quite a few near the stacks) referred to their home as Sunny Pastures. It had been some time since Hugo had visited; the last time he’d come he and Zeke had gotten into a fight. That was over a month ago now so, assuming he was still alive, Hugo was sure Zeke would have forgotten about it. He didn’t have much of a memory left, or at least he rarely remembered things the way Hugo remembered them.
He planned what he would say to his friend as he navigated between dens, as the residents of Sunny Pastures referred to their tents and piles of rags, pausing to greet familiar faces along the way. Zeke was the only person here he really knew, but he’d become acquainted with several of Zeke’s neighbors as well. One of them, Carol, approached him from the side with her arms outstretched.
Hugo was always surprised by how often the people of Sunny Pastures liked to touch. For Hugo a smile and a nod were greeting enough, but Carol wrapped him in a tight hug before he’d even had a chance to say hello.
“Hugo!” She cried, squeezing him tighter.
“Hey, Carol,” Hugo said, trying to politely loose himself from her grip. After a moment she released him and he took a small step back, establishing some distance between them so Hugo could get his bearings. The pungent smell of Carol’s sweat mingled with the chemical reek which permeated Sunny Pastures overwhelmed him; for a moment he almost gagged, but suppressed the urge and forced a smile. Carol was one of Zeke’s girlfriends; he didn’t want to be rude. “Is Zeke around?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s out back.” Carol gestured toward one of the few buildings still standing Sunny Pastures without taking her eyes off Hugo. She seemed to be sizing him up, looking him up and down before settling back on his face. “How’ve you been? It’s been ages!”
“It hasn’t been that long,” Hugo said, feeling guilty. He knew the people here didn’t see many new faces, and visitors always caused a stir. “I don’t have any complaints, how about you?”
“Still alive, right? Any exciting cases lately?” Her eyes were eager; everyone in Sunny Pastures had expressed some level of interest in his career over the year or so he’d been visiting, but Carol was always more interested than any of the others.
“Not lately,” he admitted, hoping the truth would dampen her enthusiasm.
“Ah, well, maybe you’ll get one soon! You’ll have to come and tell me all about it,” nothing about her face changed as she said this, but a slow shift in the tone of her voice and a subtle change in the way her eyes rested on his set off alarms in Hugo’s head.
“Yeah, sure thing,” he said, making a show of drawing his jacket closer to him. “Well, I better go find Zeke.”
“Oh, he’s just out back,” she said again, even repeating her vague gesture toward Zeke’s building.
“Right. Well, see you later, Carol.” Hugo began walking without waiting for her reply.
“See you later!” She said behind him.
Zeke did not actually live in the building Carol had gestured to. A few people lived on the first floor, but the second and third floors were so decrepit that there was a constant threat of collapse. The buildings in this part of the City had been made with experimental new polysteels that had performed well for their first few years but had been unable to withstand the constant exhaust of the stacks. The buildings were abandoned as they began to collapse and the homeless had quickly taken up residence. Zeke had told him all of this with pride in his voice, his eyes half-closed and his hands twitching in his lap.
Hugo walked around the side of the building to the patch of scrub that grew behind it, where he found Zeke humming to himself and smoking.
“Hugo Brooke,” he said dimly, a smile slowly splitting his face in two as Hugo walked closer. The fight, it seemed, had been forgotten.
“Zeke,” he replied as his friend shakily stood. Like Carol, Zeke loved his hugs and took a few steps toward Hugo before faltering and quickly sitting on the ground. He waved his hand toward the box he had been sitting on and Hugo took the invitation, sitting down as Zeke slowly rotated to face him.
“Where you been?” Zeke asked, reaching out for a small metal box near Hugo’s foot. Hugo nudged it closer and Zeke snatched it up, his scraggly nails scratching against the box’s lid. That was the quickest Hugo had seen him move in some time.
“I’ve been working,” Hugo lied, watching as Zeke pried the box’s lid open. He could hear the hinges squeaking and grating against each other, but then it was finally open. He saw the strands of gold shining through the dull plastic they were wrapped together with and bit his tongue.
“What’s that face?” Zeke asked, his expression hardening as he saw what Hugo was staring at. “Man, if youon’t get off my ass…”
“I didn’t say anything,” Hugo said quickly. He needed to be careful; gold had been the cause of their last fight.
“You ain’t gotta say it,” Zeke kept his eyes on the box as he mumbled, running a shaky finger over the plastic.
“It’s your life, Zeke, I just want you to be safe.”
“Ain’t nothin’ in this City safe, Hugo Brooke.”
Hugo resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He couldn’t stand Zeke when he had his philosopher’s hat on.
“Smoke?” Zeke asked, still looking down into his box.
“Just smoke?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.” Why not? It’d been a bad day and he’d been out of smoke for a while now. He watched Zeke roll the blunt, making sure no gold glinted among the green. “I saw Carol on the way over.”
“You fuck her yet?”
Hugo started, taken off guard by the metal that had suddenly come into Zeke’s high-pitched, whispery voice. “What?”
“I seen the way she looks you up.” Zeke said this as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. The metal was still clear in his voice.
“Oh, Zeke, no, there’s nothing like that –”
“That why you came back? Get your dick wet ‘n come say hi to Zeke?” He took his eyes off the blunt for the first time, slowly lifting his face until he was staring hard into Hugo’s eyes.
“Zeke, you know I would never do anything like that. I’m your friend!” He wouldn’t be able to take that stare much longer. Zeke had gotten like this on past visits, but his mood had never swung so swiftly before.
Zeke paused, seeming to contemplate what Hugo had said. He cocked his head to the side as if listening to something, then straightened it and shook it lightly, all without taking his eyes off Hugo. Then he laughed quietly and his face was split by his jagged, multicolored smile again. Hugo smiled back, feeling his shoulders relax slightly.
Zeke waved his hands in front of him, then clapped them together and suddenly an old lighter was in his right hand and the finished blunt perched between the fingers of his left. In one swift motion he brought the blunt to his lips, lit it and inhaled deeply. He held it out toward Hugo, who took it after only a moment’s hesitation.
He inhaled slowly, feeling the heat spread down his throat and into his lungs. He took too much, holding the blunt out toward Zeke and clamping his hand over his mouth to stop himself from wasting the smoke by coughing it all back up. After he’d held it in for a few seconds he exhaled, his lungs parched and burning. Zeke had retrieved the blunt without him noticing and had already taken another hit, his eyes glazed over as he rocked gently on the ground.
They’d passed it between themselves a few more times before Hugo became aware that something was wrong. The trouble he’d had keeping the smoke down to begin with had been a warning, but he’d assumed he’d only been out of practice. But he’d only taken three or four hits and his head was already spinning; he’d never been that much of a lightweight. He felt himself slump forward and placed his hands on his knees to steady himself. It seemed he kept moving forward even after he’d stopped, and he thought he felt himself gag as nausea swept over him and he became aware of a sickly metallic taste on his tongue. He looked over at Zeke, but his eyes moved too slowly and nothing seemed to be exactly the correct color or shape. After an eternity he located his friend, staring hard at him again from his spot on the ground. Hugo lurched back, terrified of the look in Zeke’s eyes, the size of his pupils, the yellow seeping into the whites of his eyes. Suddenly everything was tinged in yellow, then blue then every other color shining through his eyelids as he shut them tight. Someone laughed, and then a great wail built up inside Hugo’s chest. He opened his mouth to release it, but all that came was a never-ending stream of thick, black smoke, choking and blinding him as it swirled around him.
He tried to stand but suddenly the ground was coming toward him and he felt something strike his knees. He looked down but lost his balance, and then he felt something else strike his shoulders and the side of his head. He gasped, breathing in grit and dirt and coughing it back up. He felt hands on him and his flesh melted away beneath the touch, sizzling and popping until the muscle glistened and the bone shone through. The hands rolled him over and suddenly the sky was exploding above him, the smog overhead the fur of some great, pale beast. It undulated above him as the beast flexed and writhed just as he did now on the ground, his fingers twitching and gripping the scrub around him like spiders burrowing into their nests.
He was there then, looming over Hugo like a giant.
“Zeke,” he heard someone say. Things were getting so dark now, shadows washing over everything like a tide. He heard the fire, then, and turned his head to see Sunny Pastures ablaze, flames engulfing every tent and slab of packboard. Why wasn’t anyone screaming? Was he screaming? “Zeke, what… what did you…”
Who was that?
The giant above him leered as its face split and cracked like glass.
“Feel that?” The giant asked, its voice a hundred shades of thunder.
“Feel what?” Someone – they sounded almost like a child – asked the giant.
“Pure gold,” the giant whispered as everything fell apart.