The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott: Chapter 21 - The Apartment (Part One)
The modern technological world is a wonder of surveillance. If you think about it in a certain (skewed) way we have created Stalin’s wet dream by not only creating an architecture that can track all of our movements but one that can also track all of our thoughts and communications as well, as we advertise our private and public dispatches to the greater world through various avenues that exist mainly for entertainment or amusement. The amazing part of this surveillance state is we have created it voluntarily, willingly, we begged for it because we enjoy the convenience of all of the gadgets and applications that track our movements and thoughts. If Uncle Joe had known he could have co-opted society with numerous carrots instead of many millions of brutal sticks, he never would have had to send people to the Gulag or could have at the very least dispatched with his overuse of Lavrentiy Beria.
Just as amazing as the amazingly voluntary part of this surveillance state is that David Humphrey is equally well positioned (and perhaps better positioned) to take advantage of it than any of the leaders of the most powerful nation-states. The idea of the Stasi (I’m mixing my Cold War metaphors, I know) watching and dissecting and trying to guide my every move is only slightly less disturbing than having David Humphrey able and willing to do the same. I don’t want David Humphrey in charge of my life. After all, he is trying to kill me.
This is all to say I was absolutely thunderstruck at all of the types of random surveillance gizmos that were available to the average person at Fingers’ favorite wholesale warehouse in San Pedro where he picked up the knickknacks (electronic, digital, optical, computer virusy) he used in his line of work. The hitmanning business had certainly evolved from where I assumed it had been when young Fingers started out and he confirmed as much as we walked aisle after aisle of (perhaps contraband) surveillance and tracking equipment I could only figure out how to use in morally dubious ways. Luckily for me, one of those morally dubious ways was setting up the tiniest of cameras in my own apartment to help us monitor the Maxwells’ inevitable visit. Fingers also wanted to purchase some tiny little microphones to go with the tiny little cameras but there wasn’t any need because we could hear everything perfectly through the wall between our two apartments anyway.
When we got back, Fingers quickly set up the 4 little cameras, hiding them strategically around my apartment as I listened to him doing this in Angel’s apartment. And then he came back to Angel’s apartment and we waited. The 3 of us played a heartless and rapacious game of Monopoly as we waited the first night, but there were no Maxwells and near the end of the game just as I was about to bankrupt Angel as her little fast car had no choice but to land on Baltic Avenue, she abruptly stood up and said this “board game stuff is stupid, boring and juvenile,” and sat down on the couch and turned on the television.
There were no board games the next night since Angel’s name was on the lease and she got to make the rules, instead Fingers and Angel went to the video store leaving me behind, and came back with 4 different Steven Seagal movies (the only things they could agree on) and we spent the night watching three word-titled Steven Seagal movies. Still, there were no Maxwells.
Fingers had already thoroughly inspected the building across the street, his old headquarters, and declared it Maxwell-free, so we kind of had no choice but to continue waiting. There were brief discussions of sending Angel to do further reconnaissance with Louie, maybe she could find out where the Maxwells were staying or maybe they had returned home to Britain, but Angel shot that plan down right away. We were on to night number 3.
As much as I would like to pretend the Maxwells never showed up, that they went back home to terrorize more Edinburghers, and the 3 of us lived our lives without ever making their acquaintance, you know how these things work, and as Angel, Fingers and I were playing our third game of Hearts of the night, we heard stomping in the hallway that didn’t sound like young Johnny Cash or any of our other neighbors. We set our cards down on the Target coffee table and listened, our ears straining to hear muffled language from the hallway. Instead, we heard a foreign tongue that sounded like it was in the room with us.
“Ah gang fook es‘ankip ‘iight.”
“Just wait,” Harry replied to his overanxious son.
“A’ faod mi pan th’guisee?“
“Quiet,” Harry admonished in a louder than normal voice, as they listened to my door while we listened to them listening to my door.
“They’re not very subtle,” I softly whispered to Fingers in the hushed tones the Maxwells should have been using in the hallway.
Fingers shook his head and turned to Angel’s computer. It had a cross that split the screen into four, each showing the view from one of Fingers’ hidden cameras in my apartment.
“Coom ooon! Coom ooon!.” Tommy just wouldn’t quit. He sounded like an overexcited little boy.
My locks started to make tumbling noises one at a time. It took either Harry or Tommy Maxwell less than 3 seconds to pick both my regular lock and my much fussed over deadbolt lock and open my door. They appeared on the screen in front of us like ghosts in the dark night.
Then they turned on the lights in my apartment.
Like I said they weren’t especially concerned with subtlety. They walked, not tiptoed but walked, with heavy footfalls, around my apartment a few times looking around at my bare furnishings.
“Shite, naw? ‘ikacoonsul. The’s chan eil ayns shoh. Inae imchaid scratcha. Bastart dun bunk? Whit de sinn patch it? No geev a rightful doin? A rightful doin.” Tommy nodded emphatically at the end of that last sentence. (Or phrase, I’m not completely sure of the spelling or the punctuation of some of Tommy’s words.) Harry didn’t respond to Tommy. They both stood there admiring my apartment for a few more seconds.
And then they started tearing my place apart. Harry took a knife and sliced into my air mattress (something I had often thought about doing in the middle of the night while my bed slowly sunk uncomfortably all around me and I angrily tried to ignore it and not pump it up one more futile time while trying to sleep), Tommy went at my computer and then, oddly, the legs of my computer table, sawing off each one with a small hacksaw, as I tried not to think about how he would have used that hacksaw if they had found me in my apartment.
Together, they tore apart every piece of furniture, destroyed every appliance, smashed a few of my (still drugged) liquor bottles, ripped the door off my mini-fridge; in short, they demolished my apartment with all of the subtlety and nuance of 2 hungry angry circus lions who decided to make a meal of their cruel insensitive trainer.
I’m not sure what they were looking for exactly. It’s not like I was small enough to be hiding in my mini-fridge or in one of the sawed-off legs of my computer table, but the Maxwells apparently wanted to make sure, crashing and clanging and ripping and shredding every harmless inanimate object they could, violating my apartment in obscene violent ways.
“They’re not exactly subtle,” I whispered to Fingers again, just to make sure he got my point, as the 3 of us watched in wide-eyed awe like we were reporters stationed on a Caribbean island as a devastating Level 5 hurricane tore through defenseless villages. The violence with which they invested in smashing my 15-inch Panasonic TV to bits was so extreme Angel had to avert her eyes.
And then just as capriciously as all the destruction started, 12 minutes into the rampage, Hurricane Maxwell stopped. Tommy stopped ripping in half the paper plates in his hands and turned to Harry. ““Ay’s’a huckld. Th’keeken. T’skoonner klyped ya.“
“Are you sure?” Harry asked him.
“Th’s a coimheadte!”
Harry gave a look of comprehension and realization that matched Angel, Fingers and my look of utter incomprehension and confusion. The Maxwells moved to my damaged door that was still desperately clinging to its hinges by its fingernails and were out into the hallway. It was time to enact my plan, but the Maxwells were moving fast. Fingers ran out of Angel’s apartment, he ran down the stairs, trying to catch them so he could track them. But they were too quick, maybe too aware of the situation they had been put in. By the time Fingers got to his Cadillac, the Maxwells black (rented or stolen) car was already several blocks away and by the time Fingers’ Cadillac was started and had run several red lights to get those several blocks, the Maxwells were in Burbank or maybe Pasadena or maybe downtown L.A. They were gone. My plan a bust.
Fingers returned dejected, head down, with the bad news. I was near tears because of the state of my decimated apartment. I wanted to go next door to console it, or mourn it, it deserved something, probably a Viking burial at this point, but there was nothing I could do, I definitely couldn’t leave Angel’s apartment, anything was possible now, if the Maxwells had ziplined back in to the building through the ceiling like elite storm troopers I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Angel started making meatball Hot Pockets in the microwave to try to calm her nerves and take her mind off the devastation. I suddenly knew how all those pigeons felt after Fingers had callously started shooting them. The 3 of us wandered back and forth in Angel’s apartment in a daze, no one speaking, occasionally one or another of us shaking his or her head at the random senseless hatred for all of my belongings.
Meatball Hot Pockets now hot, Angel reached for the tv remote to turn something on, anything to fill in the dreadful silence, Fingers was rearranging a stack of teal & gold foil tile notecards, I looked forlornly at the bathroom wanting to go in there and throw up; we were all catatonic, when suddenly we were jolted out of our somnambulant[1] state by a controlled, forceful but not too loud knock on Angel’s door.
We all stopped our respective activities. I looked at Angel, Angel looked at Fingers, Fingers looked at me. Then we reversed the order. The knocking came a second time. We all looked at the blank white door wondering what was on the other side. It couldn’t be the Maxwells, could it? Instead of falling for my trap, had we fallen for theirs?
[1] I got it right this time.
Next Chapter: The Apartment (Part Two)
Previous Chapter: The Maxwells