It’s 5:30 on a balmy Friday morning and I’ve just put my work gear on.  My heavy Timberlands clash with the stark white of the crisply-ironed competition gi that hangs loosely over my lanky frame.  I tie my belt—black as the tomcat still asleep on my futon—into a simple bow, because it’s Friday and the intricacies of the Japanese bow knots worn by last century’s most prominent karatekas are evading my coffee-deprived brain.  My ancestors were from Burlington, Vermont.  We don’t do anything without our Single Origin Fair Trade Certified Green Mountain roast.  My fab is already working on that, sourcing that rich bean-flavor from molecules that were on Jupiter like two seconds ago, and I know that seems contrary to the “Single Origin” thing, but hey, we’re all connected, right?

6:33 comes too soon even though the portal is opening late.  I focus my sleep-dusted eyes on the image of a WholeFoods drone spray painting a mural of Cesar Chavez over some gang tags, and let its hum calm me as the familiar bodegas and pop-up galleries of my Chicano-reclaimed Mission District run together like some hall of mirrors effect from video game antiquity.  Soon the glitched pueblo browns and grays give way to white—blinding white—and I’m situated in Greater Upstate New York.  

My partner, Tao, is backing our org’s nondescript van up the gravelturf driveway of a little tinyhouse that is going to be this morning’s labor of love (and the last for me this week, since I’m done at 11:30 today).  She hits the mailbox—by accident, I think, mostly due to the face she makes at me through the window—which forces me out of my daydream of pajamas and Friday afternoon cat snugglage and into bookkeeping mode.  I record this as an “outer perimeter compensatory adjustment” in the logs, which is a suitably bureaucratic description that I feel would satisfy some very old or very dead practitioners of our art.  I imagine a snowy-haired Chinese man in booming 21st Century Hong Kong mumbling “outer perimeter compensatory adjustment” as he dramatically straightens his long sleeves to hang a bagua mirror on someone’s doorstep that will deflect the harmful energy from a skyscraper.

I’m not a full Feng Shui master yet—my certs from DeVry College of Government Affairs are so far mostly in Ninja Counterinsurgency and Martial Heroism—but I know enough to understand the difference between the science’s current incarnation and its ancient one.  The Rape Epidemic has reversed a lot of things, and the Yin-Yang dynamic is just the latest casualty.   Most readers probably know that modern Feng Shui is about ensuring the stagnation of life energy (or Vital Chi as it’s known to practitioners) in domestic spaces.  Many may not know that the ancient philosophy was very different: in fact, its practitioners were concerned with doing the very opposite.

***

 A little FYI detour:

Old school Feng Shui masters concerned themselves with preserving a home’s tranquility through the management of the masculine and feminine energies.  Stagnation of energy was to be avoided at all costs and there were various techniques for accomplishing this.  Truly, the idea of “domestic harmony” is an outmoded one with lots of institutional baggage from across time.  The literature of old is filled with era-appropriate (though still startling) love letters to the patriarchy such as this little zinger: “What happens if a female sleeps on the right, yang side? If she is single, she is taking up the masculine energy. She is not leaving space for a male energy to enter her life.”

Qué bárbaro!

But while I may quibble with the language used here, the ideas expressed have been proven true by the Epidemic’s brutal metamorphosis of the human condition.  Since magical wererapists became, well, a Thing, we have all come to fear the Ninja Clans’ nightly Chi-powered rampages.  What was once a weird mystical energy confined to the pages of superhero comics and the user interfaces of genderlocked action RPGs is now something very real and dangerous.  Chi can actually allow real men to do shit like this, but real life, unlike anime, has an unlimited number of episodes to explore the fallout from such outbursts (spoiler alert: it’s depressing) and can’t be canceled for more compelling alternatives when horny hikikomoris stop masturbating to it.  

***

As I unload my bo staff and put on my goggles, I remind myself that, like the ancients, we’re here to preserve and uphold domestic harmony, albeit in a different way.  In the past, regulating Chi was a matter of home and hearth.  Now, it’s a matter of global security.  

Chi embiggens Ninja, and its residual effects allow the men who will become them at Night to revitalize and recuperate from their cursed nocturnal activity during the slow, sedentary work days.    

We can’t allow that.  

As the two of us approach the home, we have a kind of swagger in our step.  Tao is a diminutive 5’1’’, and I’m 135 pounds soaking wet, but we feel like giants.  As we crunch through the fresh snow, I pretend that my steps are breaking Ninja spines (in a purely non-lethal way, of course).  

“He’s lucky,” I say with a snarl that’s hopefully less tangible than my chilled breath, “Lucky that my Paragraph 13 keeps me from Night Duty.”  The ‘he’ here is every Nighttime phantom, and some Daytime ones, not specifically the guy who lives in this mockery of Adirondack Great Camp architecture. 

Tao pushes a small wheelbarrow full of broken cuckoo clocks.  We leave these at every site when we finish up, just to ensure success.  I’ve set all of them to 6:45, because I have a sense of humor that I’m 25 years too old for (which means that Sarah Silverman must be, like, 4,025 years too old for it by now).   

We park our little bounty near the front door and straighten ourselves.  I fret about my belt while Tao adjusts her tie and brushes the fallen snow off of her smart black blazer.  

She knocks and we wait.  I look up at the top floor window, which has some gaudy “rustic” trimming.  A teddy bear surveys the yard from within.  Icicles have started to form on the ornately carved faux-pine soffits.  

A prepubescent boy answers the door.

“Hello,” Tao enunciates dryly, hints of authority creeping into her voice, “Is this the Bashaw residence?”

He nods, looking past us to a snowbound Ski-Doo in the front yard that I must have missed.  

“Are there any adults home?”

The child spins on his bare heel and springs off of it, launching himself back into the recesses of the house.  His movements are lithe, inch-perfect.  If he were a little older, they might read as a kind of subconscious stotting, echoes from Nighttime muscle memory.  

A few moments later, a writhing mass of black hair with red highlights emerges from behind the partially ajar door.   A hand parts the sea of locks, revealing a woman’s squinting, pimply face.  She pulls the strings on her plaid pajama bottoms taught, then welcomes us in. 

The first thing I notice after traveling through the foyer, which looks like the staging ground for a weekend camping trip, is that this place is pretty transparently a “House of Leaves,” one of those cliched frankenmergers of architecture and pop physics that makes general contractors in rural areas want to eat their camo-patterned deer rifles.  

“¡Oh, Dios mío,” I exclaim psychicly, nearly tripping over an oil lantern as I step into a room that’s twice the size of the fucking driveway we backed the van into, “There’s no way I’m getting out of here by 11:30.  ‘Bigger on the inside’ can eat my ass.”  

I twirl my bo staff thoughtfully as the woman, who is studying architecture at the local community college part time, discusses the ins and outs of the house’s construction and renovation history.  The pictures made it look like a prefab, EZ-PZ.  I’m kind of salty that we were deceived, but a job is a job.   

Tao goes over the details, explaining that yes, we will be trashing their family abode.  The woman agrees to keep the children—the little boy and his younger female sibling—out of our hair while we work.  

“Hair,” she says as the boy collides violently with her lower half, wrapping up mummy with the tenacity of, I don’t know, some kind of Egyptian defensive lineman, “Thaaaat, I can do.”

I don’t get the reference at first, but then I notice her cosmetology degree mounted on the wall underneath an imposing pair of antlers.  Tao follows my gaze, taking an apparently-too-cursory glance at the magenta-trimmed paper, which has the letters B.O.C.E.S. printed on it.  

“Cosm- oh!  You work in quantum stuff, huh?” Tao asks, giving the woman a kind of incredulous look.  

Our host blinks and scratches her head a bit, nodding as if trying to interpret both the words and the exuberance.

“Oh! … I…”

“You know,” Tao continues, determined to wedge her favorite STEM field into this conversation, “Entanglement, decoherence, strings?”  She twirls her fingers around each other each time she mentions a physics concept.  

“Uh, something like that, bud.  I mean, mops, definitely.” 

The woman chortles.  I give a half-hearted snort.  

Tao mouths the word “mops” several times, trying to Sherlock the physics buzzwords circulating her brain into the nonexistent acronym that will allow her to say, “MOPS, of course, that means …” and extend the conversation another 2-3 minutes.  Eventually, she gives up and restarts her work spiel with an “Anyways, sorry…”

Paperwork intensifies.

The waiver process goes pretty simply, all things considered.  When we go in to do homewrecking, people are supposed to mark personal objects that are off-limits with glow tape so that they’re clearly distinguished.  This is so that we don’t destroy family heirlooms or really expensive shit that has some utility. 

Obviously, there is no point in breaking electronics or entertainment systems, and utilitarian stuff like appliances are never a target (I’m not going to break my hand punching through a toilet or something anyway).  However, rendering some rarely-used appliances “non-working” is kosher, since the Feng Shui of any home takes a huge dive when there are useless out of order gadgets lying around. 

The little boy brings up an old toaster that never sees any action because “Lana” (the sister, presumably) “always burns weird things in it.”  After confirming with the head of the household, I record this and fumble through our supply bag for the screwdriver.  While Tao is making conversation with the woman, I quietly disable it by removing the lever.  

The walls in here are all made of these godawful Lincoln logs.  I aim a test punch at one of the non-load bearing beams near the front of the den area.  A sharp pain shoots up my knuckle as a I bust it open, leaving a red splotch on the now-chipped bark.  

“Bio,” I remark to Tao before reaching into the bag for the X-Clean.  

“Gee, don’t die,” Tao says softly, smirking.  

The woman of the house twists her mouth to the side and raises a brow.

I grab a heavy pair of gloves out of my go satchel, squeezing the wrists as I put them on.  Nanites crawl out of the fabric and up my fingertips, a stim that tweaks my autistic brain in just the right way at this point in time.  Suddenly, I’m feeling social.  

I plant my feet in a fighting stance.

“Zab Judah,” I dip right, “Ali,” left.  

Tao tucks her clipboard under an arm, then puts her dukes up.  She mimics my fake battle dance as best she can, with approximately one-quarter of my rhythm.  We jostle around each other for a bit making Street Fighter noises.

Our host looks on, nodding, wide-eyed, with a very nervous, very toothy smile that says “I really don’t want a Mandingo fight in my living room!  There’s going to be enough shattered porcelain as it is!”

We straighten up when her aura of white cringe becomes palpable.  Tao goes back to archi-torture talk, and I set about the task of kicking the shit out of anything inorganic.  

While I’m working, the Googol Speech attendant dutifully records my little articulations of esoteric jargon, forming them into a neat Post-Activity Site Report with algorithmic sorcery.  My fist goes through some paneling: “VOID ADJUSTMENT!”  I pivot on the heel of my boot and thrust my staff through some particle board glamoured to look like indigneous,  hand-hewn North Country stone: “PARTITION CURSE!”  A table full of fab-spawned Magic the Gathering proxies crumples under an elbow: “POSSESSION BANE!”  

As I’m heaving after the first round of exertions, a scraggly little dog whose coat resembles two sewn-together Fraggles fucking in a soot factory emerges from the back porch PetPortal and shriek-barks.  He’s quickly grabbed by a swarthy gentleman wearing fur-lined house shoes, clearly the AMIR (adult male in residence).  We make eye contact as his broad, heavily-scarred hands silence the pooch with rhythmic chin and neck strokes.  He nods.  I brush some dust off my shoulder.  I nod back.  He looks away.  

After a sweaty couple of hours, I get the signal from Tao that we’re ready to move on to the upstairs.

“I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping,” is what she tells me, which is her peculiar way of remarking that the job is halfway done and it’s time for our second wind.  

“Cos-MEH-TOL-ogy.”  Tao quips, punching me in the arm while wearing a gaping grin.  “I love how you guys were just gonna let my dumbass like, go on and on about quantum shit and meanwhile it’s …”

“Big bangs,” I insert.

She blinks.

“A contentious issue in both disciplines.” Knowledge: DROPPED.

Tao’s echoing guffaw rounds the corner with us as we step off the slender wooden steps onto the landing.

We start our inspection of the upper level, and are pleasantly surprised.  

The children’s room is… typical.  A recfab has been left idling on the girl’s side, and is constantly churning out Barbies of different shapes and sizes.  Its matter source is set to “nearby local,” so as it’s assembling busty bimbos, or flat-chested bimbos, or handicapped bimbos in wheelchairs, it’s also tearing apart GI Joes on the boy’s side, reclaiming their plastic in a way that looks eerily like Thanos’ snap.  

We pass by a bathroom with a runny toilet, prompting a thumbs up from Tao.  She peeks inside and notes the disarray of towels and conspicuous clothes heap blocking the door’s range of motion.  

“Excellent,” she declares.  

We make our way into the master bedroom.  It could definitely stand a decluttering, but we judge that its condition could be more unkempt and—because the bedroom is such a cornerstone in our practice—we decide to intervene.  

Tao tips over a small dresser, then pauses, like a cinematographer sizing up a scene between their fingers, before draping a wet washcloth from the master bath over it.  I move to tip over a bookshelf, but she stops me.  A glow-taped picture of the adult male in residence sits on the top ledge, bathing our faces in its yellowish-gold luminance.  I mistook it for stray sunlight in my haste.

“Wow, good catch,” I say.  Tao nods modestly.  

There are certain things that are weird or creepy to find during a wrecking.  Shrines to deceased relatives are one of my personal bug outs, along with dirty Night laundry.  Ugh.  Seriously, finding someone’s cum-and-blood stained Guardian Robes on the washer next to their significant other’s Ninja Clan costume—the type of sick still life shit that some 20th Century pervert-auteur like Kubrick would highlight, contributing to the visual corpus of the Male Gaze—has made me vomit more than once.  But signs of possible Daylight domestic abuse or, well, worse trespasses, are definitely up there as far as “shit ain’t nobody need.”  

While dirtying, we unintentionally unmount a framed picture of a venerable-looking old buck who resembles our female host in all ways besides his decidedly off-white complexion.  A patch on his ballcap reads “Akwesasne Mohawk Casino,” and his thumb is cocked toward a billboard with a picture of four Native American warriors, circa … a long fucking time ago … captioned “HOMELAND SECURITY: FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.”  As I chastise myself for making assumptions about the woman of the house’s ethnic origins, affixing a mental asterisk to my previous notions about “white cringe,”  Tao nudges me and points.    

Underneath the frame is a fist-sized hole in the drywall.  We check the logs to see if this was declared as Nighttime Collateral.  It wasn’t.  

It isn’t our job to confront the property owner about things like this, but we record it as a “possible anomaly” so that the system can start a welfare inquisition and send social workers if such action is deemed appropriate.  

I carefully remount the picture at its previous uneven angle (my EyeTapp gives one suggestion based on latent saccadic data, but I adjust that exactly 3 degrees because OCD do be odd like that).  While I’m nudging it into position, I recall a story about a Ninja Lord down South—Territory of the Gulf or some other sultry mosquitoscape—who met his wife and her squad of Guardians in a Nighttime showdown, inside the very house where he whooped her ass the previous morning.  During the Daytime dispute, this absolute chad—who had “been beset by a powerful fury,” or whatever euphemism they use to excuse toxic masculinity down there—punched a huge hole in his mancave’s wall.  The story goes that the battle was a narrow victory for the sisters.

Supposedly, he was a good ol’ boy who kept his castle—a Culture Wars-era replica antebellum plantation house—in pristine condition.  Our teams hadn’t gotten there yet for Feng Shui readjustment, probably due to mutant gators, or ball lightning, or whatever inhuman fucking natural conditions exist in Dixeland.  

This was an incredibly strong Ninja.  Chi-Potential in the millions, and he was only barely overcome by a massive coalition effort.  That hole he punched may have cost him the battle.  It may have saved his wife and childrens’ lives.  

That story, I dunno.  The feels.  Feels for days.

It doesn’t take long for Tao and I to move the bed out of its command position and into a more (less) optimal one.  It seems like the dog has pissed on the sheets recently, which is great.  

An empty can of Skoal Wintergreen being used as an ashtray sits on the vanity, perched atop a bag filled with many rolled cigarettes.  I consider emptying it onto the carpet, but before I can, Tao snatches it up with the grace and ferocity of Pai Mei plucking out Elle’s eye, then hurls it with an irate, guttural vocalization.  In seconds, its contents are adorning the master bathroom’s door and part of the checkered flag shower curtain.  

I don’t ask Tao if she’s OK.  I remember her confiding in me that her grandmother had died somewhat recently of treatable mouth cancer, and I don’t see any point in “going there” right now, so I just stoop down to tie my timbs.  

The next few moments is us checking our social media tattoos in silence.  I swipe down my left wrist, banishing a Tsundr.AI match, which leads me to fixate indefinitely on an unidentified pink splatter on my gi cuff.  

Time resumes around me when Tao acknowledges that she’s pretty much satisfied with our work here.

“It isn’t quite xiōng zhái classification, but it’s close.” 

Xiōng zhái, or Haunted House Category, is the lofty goal of all homewreckers.  A Haunted site is basically an energy vortex.  A cursed shithole where Vital Chi goes to die.  In most cases, we don’t have the time to fuck a place up that bad.  Today, the spirits must have been on our side.  (To be fair, this house was very big.  I doubt that two people could keep it tidy, even if they wanted to.)

It’s 11:10.  As we pass through the liminal corridor back into the foyer, matron in tow, I notice two sets of Adirondack chairs, each with a different colored cushion.  I inquire about them.

“Oh!” she beams, “This Amish dude made them for our family.  They’re really friggin cute.”

“You should have him make one more,” Tao says.  

“I, uhh, oh?”

“Even, bad.  Odd, good.”

“Ahhh.  Gotcha.  Done.  We wanted another one anyway, it’s unreal how comfortable they are.”

Outside, the ice and snow are turning all the trees into grayish skeletons, seasonally-relevant successors to the pockets of plastic Halloween decorations that are rapidly being covered up.  

Skies are overcast, menacing.  Tao finishes up the final paperwork underneath QuantaGlow front porch Christmas lights that probably haven’t seen their original packaging in decades.  

The last forms are all Medical Followup stuff for the hematology techs.  Energy stagnation negatively impacts every living thing in the household—albeit, its effect on Ninja is exponentially more significant—so all the occupants (adult male in residence aside) will receive nanoboosters to make sure they’re in top shape. 

I have to marvel at the fact that science has advanced to the point where we can tackle spiritual quandaries using technology.  Bad juju and negative energy are no match for the power of the quantum.  

“Cheers,” Tao shouts to the homeowners.

“Another ASTRAL FINISH, Taokaka!” I say, attempting to get one last rise out of my partner by comparing her to my favorite BlazBlue rushdown queen.  

She shakes her head, then strikes a pose that captures the spirit, if not the glory, of Taokaka’s storied “Taunt” move.  She’s played the game twice at my apartment; I forgive her.

When all the residents (fido included) are safely outside, we clock out, throwing two of the biggest cuckoos through the front window.  We leave the rest strewn about the lawn, accompanying the rusted snowmobile parts, chicken wire, and ice-shrouded animal cages, then responsibly cordone off the broken glass with caution tape.