Chapter 3

Fucking Mondays.

A hot and steaming shower, a too-generous portion of roast beef, and someone to sit on my lap who wouldn’t mind being petted. That’s all I wanted, the basic human comfort groups. Life could spare me those, right? Maybe I was asking too much and could settle with an empty fridge, a water main that somehow leeched from the septic line, and pictures of a pet that had passed to canine heaven over a decade ago (I’ll pour one out, Maurice). Comforting? Eh, subjective. The greatest comfort I could look forward to was that instead of a crazed demon biologist from hell beating the living shitbags out of me for twenty minutes, I would have a rotund, balding, and shirtless landlord from purgatory hassling my ass until the end of eternity.

“Hey, you! Whattya doin’ down there! I’m talkin’ to you! Idiot. Where’s my goddamned rent! Hey! I’m talking to you! You listen, you motherfucker!”

It was a comfortable trade.

The manager glared at me from the second-story balcony overlooking the apartment entrance and leaned his girth against the guardrail. The abused metal groaned against the pressure and channeled its misery through the bricks and cement that held the building together. Bits of powdered rock and rust flaked off the balcony and struck my eyes when I looked up to attention. The manager stared back with a face smeared with an aged angriness, the kind of visage you develop only after decades dealing with hundreds of miserable tenants and deadbeats. He drew back and spat to the ground, missing me by a spittle’s width.

“Why ya duckin’ me, Ivano?”

“I’m sorry sir, but I assure you that I’m not trying to avoid you.” I never referred to him by name, last or first. No nefarious reason why; I just never remembered it.

“Oh yeah? Then how come you’re tryin’ to come in so fuckin’ late, huh? Thinkin’ I’m not gonna be up? Thinkin’ I can’t see in the dark or nothin’?”

“No sir, not at all. It was just my work that kept me so long.” Work, testifying to administrators for a few hours, notarized paperwork, same difference.

The bars creaked when he bent harder on them. “The hell is my rent, Ivano?”

“It’s the middle of the month, sir. I paid it two weeks ago.”

“I know that! I’m talkin’ next month’s rent!”

“Next month isn’t due for two weeks, sir. It’s in the contract that I signed.”

“Goddammit!” He shook the railing and caused it to bleed more debris onto my face. “It’s never too early to pay! I don’t want no fuckin’ deadbeat assholes in my place. I fuckin’ kill deadbeat assholes! You hear that, ya fuckin’ asshole?”

“Yes sir. I’ll get the money as soon as I can.”

“Good!” he yelled, the cry of victory against another freeloader. “You got two weeks to get me my money, or you’re outta here!”

I waited while he surveyed his domain with his hands on his hips and grunts of satisfaction. He pulled up his pants, rubbed himself for a job well done, and retreated to his lair. For all the years I lived here, I never missed rent. I’m sure he knew I never missed it either. But never mind that. The man was a professional and had the landlording profession down to a science. If you’re not going to put the fear of God into the piss-paying tenants of your domain, then you have no goddamned business being in the renter’s game. You know what you call a nice landlord? A broke chump. His theatrics happened about every week and worked to scare the newbies; if the threats stopped bothering you, then you lived there long enough and obviously wasn’t a deadbeat. I waved goodbye to the troll as he stomped back into his cave.

“Oh, another goddamn thing!” his voice blasted through the flooring before I entered the building. “Stop the fuckin’ racket in your room!”

I paused with a hand touching the doorknob. “What?” I called out.

“Your neighbors been complainin’ about noise in your room all day. Either you fucking stop making noise or I make it stop. Got it?”

I stared at the door and waited for the implications to hit. The landlord’s shouts were still warming the air when I bolted. I reached my room just as my lungs reminded me to breathe. My fingers went short of touching the entry pad. Where they really there? The past night and day brought too many surprises for me to believe in good tidings. I settled on a little hope to carry myself through. The room was as I left it except for the growth of a mildew-y musk crawling in the air. I stepped over the towels I left on the carpet that morning to soak up water. Nothing was on save a nightlight illuminating a corner of the kitchen. “Hello?” I called out to the darkness. “Basil? Tia? Anyone?”

I found the lights and the same living room greeted me—plain and boring. For once, the sight wasn’t welcoming. I lumped myself down onto the couch, rested my arms over its backrest, and stared at the ceiling that kept me from leaping into the heavens and leaving this God-forsaken place. No house, no girlfriend, no money, and no lizards. The first three didn’t nearly bother me as much as they used to. Inconsequential.

As fast as they came on, the lights gave to black and jostled me from my stupor. I felt hands covering my eyes and instinctively reached out to grab them. They were warm, smooth, and missing a few digits. A warm breath brushed across my right ear. It fluttered and clumped into words. “Peek-a… boo!”

I was never happier than to hear that voice. I pulled the scaly hands down, which incited a pouting, “Hey, no cheating!” She squirmed and moaned in complaint when I pulled her up by her thin wrists. The Isian resisted and pulled back, forcing me to pull harder. After a few struggles, I finally coaxed her up from behind the couch and plopped her down next to me. Tia looked at me with unblinking reptilian eyes, her lips a crinkled smile.

“Hi!”

“Hi,” I replied, that of all the things from what I needed to say.

She nodded and nestled her back into the folds of the cushions, and then she rasped her tongue against the roof of her mouth to create a soft clicking sound. It was a sound I had learned to be an utterance of Isian content.

“So where were you all day?” I asked as she lazed next to me.

“Oh, you know, looking around and stuff.”

“Just looking around? All day?”

“Yeah. Have to see around our new home, you know.” She yawned. “It’s tiring! So much to see and so little time to see it.”

“Yeah.” I paused; she snuggled deeper into the couch and closed her eyes. “You know, everyone was missing you guys at Summit today. They were kind of worried when you didn’t show up.”

She yawned again. “It was only a day.”

“Yeah, only a day. Arlene got kind of mad at me because of it.”

A thump sounded when her tail struck the wall. She sat, perked her ears up, and placed her hands on my leg to look at me, the drowsiness gone from her face. “You didn’t get in trouble did you?”

The mood whiplash took me aback. “No,” I blurted. “Not really. It was just a small thing. She didn’t know where you guys were and asked me about it, that’s all.”

“Oh good. Would’ve made me feel bad if I got you into trouble with her.” She furrowed her scaly brows. “Didn’t I send a message to her? Stupid computer systems probably ate it again. I told them they should use Block-D but they never listen. Ugh, so annoying.”

I nodded. She leaned over and patted my cheek, the same one Arlene struck before. The sting from the touch soon gave way to soothing warmth as she rubbed my cheeks with her palms. Unwittingly, I placed my hand over hers.

“Well we’re here now and everything will better, I think,” she said.

“Yeah.”

Tia slipped her hand away and I rubbed at the spot, restoring the sting that had been missing. The Isian leaned back and rested her head on the couch, which exposed her neck. The black band that encircled it caught my eye. It was that velvet collar that she started wearing months ago, the one that contained the tracking beacon—or used to. I ground my palm into the cheek. That damn got me slapped around at Summit. Wrapped around in contrast against the white of the lizard’s neck, the collar entranced me with its secret.

“Tia, mind if I take a look at your collar?” I asked before she could relax herself to sleep.

“Huh? Why?”

“I just want to take a look. It looks interesting.”

“No it’s not. It’s just fuzzy cloth. All it has is my scent.” She leaned her head up and cocked it slightly. “Unless that’s what you want.”

“Oh… it’s not that.” I thought of what to say. “I just want to feel it. See what it’s made of, that’s all.”

It seemed to be enough reason for her. She shrugged, reached behind her neck, and snapped the band into a long strip held between her fingers. She opened my hand with a free claw and dropped the band into a tangle onto my palm. She sat and waited for me to examine it.

I unraveled the band and stretched it out in the air. It was as advertised: just a black velvet band. I held it up to the light and noticed how cheap it was. The light filtered through the material and highlighted a fiber pattern too uniform to be pricey, and only one side grew fuzz while the other was hardened glue. Far be it for me to judge the quality of fashion, though. I rubbed the length of the band through my thumb and index figure to find any traces of electronics or anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. It was perplexing.

Tia clicked her tongue. “Told you it was boring,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. She grasped my hand to stop my fondling and reclaimed the collar, which she wound back around her neck.

“Well, it did feel nice,” I said. It didn’t make sense. Either I didn’t know what the hell I was looking for or Arlene was messing with my head. In all likeliness, both.

“Grass feels nice too, but I don’t like sleeping on it all the time.” She chuckled. “Besides, it was more interesting when it had that tracking beacon.”

She whistled to herself and laid herself back on the couch, oblivious to my jawing hanging in disbelief. When it had that tracking beacon, she says. I guess this “hidden” device had a critical manufacturer’s defect of not staying fucking hidden. I tried to play it dumb.

“Tracking beacon?”

“Oh yeah. Some kind of AD Ranger chip. Organic wafer, really thin and almost invisible like. It came with the collar. I found it a few days ago.” She turned to me and frowned. “Can you believe that, Ly-lee? They put a beacon in my collar!”

“Really? Well, I have no idea why would they do that.”

She shook her head and clicked her tongue. It was a loud, sharp snap, one of discontent rather than happiness. “Yeah they did. It’s awful that they put in a tracking chip without telling me. So I took it out!”

Her voice became more agitated, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Yeah, how could they?” I said.

She clapped her hands at my agreement. “I know, right Ly-lee? Basil was, ‘Who cares? Why does it matter?’ But I know you’d understand. An AD tracking beacon, can you believe it?”

“No I can’t. It’s unbelievable.”

“Ugh! I got so mad!”

“You should be mad! How could they?” I was getting a little too caught up in the excitement.

“I mean, the range on that thing is horrible! They’d never track me beyond two hundred kilometers! Horrible!”

“Yeah! What kind of crappy range is two hundred—” And there, my grasp on the situation imploded on itself. It shouldn’t have surprised me because that’s apparently how my life is supposed to work nowadays. Out of words, I sat boggled while she spent the next several minutes deriding the “cheap” and “horrible” quality of the Applied Dynamics tracking device, and I nodded in confused agreement to every other sentence.

“… and that’s why I took it out, stupid thing,” she concluded, tapping her collared throat for emphasis. “I’m going to use a Kanid Technologies IMD-86A module I ordered. It has over ten times the local range, and the entire world with satellites!”

“That’s great, Tia,” I could only say. Sigh. Just when I thought I knew how a giant lizard thinks. “So where did you put the old one?”

“Eh? The old one? It’s probably in my bag still.”

“Mind if I borrow it?”

I might as well offer the module as proof to curtail the Arlene beat-train. That is, assuming she believed that I wasn’t the one that took apart to begin with—a good possibility. It’s a wonderful equality with my relationships with women: I didn’t understand them despite the species barrier. Give me credit though, at least I was consistent.

“Oh no, you can’t borrow it, not at all,” she said.

“I can’t? Not even for a little bit? Why not?”

She chuckled and shook her hand. “Because you’re my friend! You can just have it.”

Behind the couch, she rustled through her bag with her rear upended on the backrest. Chirping her success, she pulled back up and brought her hands to my eyes to show a transparent wafer pinched between her fingers. I could only make it out by the outlines of light glazing off it. “There it is!” she said. Like the collar before, she opened my hand with the other claw and placed the device in the middle of my palm. She took my hands, enclosed my fingers over the module, and then patted my fist tight.

“All yours!” she said.

“Thanks.”

I slipped the chip in my breast pocket, stood up, and stretched. It was late.

“I think it’s time for sleep,” I said.

“Ah yes. Sleep is good. We should sleep.” She stretched across the coach to take advantage of the now vacant spot and reached for the console on the table. The computer turned on and resumed some drama I had queued last time I watched. “Busy day tomorrow!”

“Yeah, busy. ’Night, Tia.”

“G’night!”

I didn’t bother turning on the lights in my bedroom to engage in nightly pre-sleep rituals. I found the bed and slumped belly-down onto the mattress. The creaky springs protested against my bulk. I reached over to the nightstand and pulled out the bottle from the drawer. A ball of spit was all I needed to inject the pair of pills down my throat. Face-down in the pillow with my clothes clinging to my sticky body, it didn’t take long for the pleasures of the night to take away my pains and worries for another day.