Grey
By Jon Armstrong
Grey © 2007 by Jon
Armstrong
First appeared in Grey,
Published by Night Shade Books
For my parents,
Carole and Russ Armstrong
One
Nora and I
finished our fried whale and plum sandwiches, our cream coffees, and the cocoa
and coca pastries, and sat in a comfortable silence as landscapes of buildings
and millions of well-wishers whirred past the windows at six hundred kilometers
per hour. Halfway on our train-date, after the conductor blew the massive,
buzzing horn, and the waitresses in their black-and-yellow-striped honeybee
uniforms, complete with dangerously sharp-looking stingers, cleared the dishes,
Nora closed her right eye and gazed at me with her left; I, in turn, did the
same, and it was like we were the perfect couple.
This was our fourth and
last date before our marriage, and while the whole thing had been arranged
between our parents to complete the merger of our families’ companies, I could
not have imagined or wished for someone as wonderful as she. Standing just an
inch below my six foot three, with shiny black hair, a light walnut complexion,
and obsidian eyes, her features were wide and open like an innocent doll, but
she was also intelligent and witty. Most impressive of all was that she, like myself, loved the fashion magazine Pure H. We quoted
from it, dressed and struck poses like the models, and felt that we were just
like the beautiful and tragic people of our dreams.
Two of her attendants,
all in black, helped Nora from her chair and adjusted her clothes as she
walked. Her long, grey, satellite-cotton coat had spherical metal buttons with
craters exactly like the moon. Beneath her grey suit, her shirt had a high collar
like mine, and the material looked so smooth it could have been made of fine
powder. The cut and tailoring was impeccable, of course, as she worked with
October 13th, the best woman’s tailor in the world.
Since the date took
place on the inaugural voyage of a new, super-luxury Bee Train, which circled
the
The way she stroked the
beast, reminded me of just how elegant were her gestures. During our first
date, in the city of
During that first date,
we just glanced at each other shyly. I had been nervous and not because of how
many people were watching or what it meant to the
companies, but because I knew I was in the presence of a rare person. We said
not a word until moments before we began our post-date interviews. She leaned
toward my ear and whispered, “Embellishments.” The breathiness and
sexiness of her tone was one I hadn’t heard on any of the recordings I had
reviewed prior to our date. I shivered. And her word—her single, perfect
word—was luminous. Quoted from an ad in Pure H for a company that sold
plutonium buttons, it read: Embellishments. A week of
green rain.
The ad’s photoR6 is of a couple in identical charcoal frock coats,
vests, and boots laying side by side in an elaborate
garden of trimmed bushes and flowering poisonous lantana. Their dry eyes stare
blankly. Their skin is ashen, and their lips, blue. Between them their hands
are both upturned and yearning, but unconnected. Perhaps their rigor mortis
caused their previously held hands to pull apart, but whatever it was, now the
lovers are tragically separated by a fraction of an inch. My advisor had called
the ad gloomy and morbid, but the way Nora said the word so sensually,
emphasizing the bell syllable, made it evocative, even anticipatory.
The Bee Train began to
decelerate and unfortunately that meant our date was ending. As our attendants
gathered our things, and we pulled in the new station where Bee Train employees
stood at attention all along the track, their striped uniforms forming what
looked like a black-and-yellow staff of noteless music, Nora and I readied ourselves to meet the press.
We stepped before the
doors as the train inched into place. Beyond the translucent cement walls of
the station, I could see hordes of people filling the streets. All of our dates
had been mobbed. In fact, our second, held in the desert metropolis of
Seattlehama, forced the city to close down because so many tourists and fans
had clogged the streets.
“I wasn’t sure about
you,” she whispered.
Her hushed voice
surprised me, and I was afraid she was saying something bad. “Sure about what?”
“Even in your grey
suits,” she said, gazing at my chest, perhaps noting the fibers in my dark tie,
taken from the bras of one hundred alcoholic teenage girls, “I figured you were
still garish and loud.”
“No,” I said, wishing,
as I often did, that my life had always been quiet and grey. “That was years
ago.”
She smiled knowingly;
then her expression turned cold. “But I had no idea how lonely you are.”
I felt exposed and
broken. “I didn’t know either,” I said. “Until I met you.”
Her gaze circled my
face as if studying me, judging the sincerity of my words. “What I want … ” she began slowly, her lips beginning to tremble, “is to
be alone … alone with you.” She glanced away, and I saw her cheeks flush. “You?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s
exactly what I feel. From the first photo I saw of you … from the first report
I read, I sensed that we were parts of each other.”
“I was afraid to meet
you, at first.”
She hadn’t admitted to
anything like that before. “Why?”
Swallowing, she said, “I
was afraid of what you would mean. How you would change me and make me who I
am.”
Her words were exactly
my own feelings and I craved to touch her, to finally make contact with the
surface of her body, but just as I raised my right hand toward her face, the
train doors slid open, and the cool air of the station poured over us. Part of
me wanted to slam them shut, take the controls of the train and head back to
the wide circular track. We could live in constant motion, in the seclusion of
the nature car, and never have to take another step in the rest of the world.
But then I thought of a story in Pure H of a man who lived his whole
life on a train. At eighty-three, when he is finally forced off, he stumbles on
solid ground and cracks his skull.
“Will we?” she asked,
so quietly I barely heard. “In this awful world, will we?”
She meant: Would we
find silence, solitude, and love? I took her gloved hand in mine, inhaled her
delicate sassafras, sandalwood, and ambergris. “We will,” I said, as I led us
from the train. We walked past the bowing Bee Girls and the conductor in his
three–foot-tall, blue-and-white-striped hat. Frankly, I was unhappy that our
dates were so commercialized, but Father was hungry for any publicity angle and
glad to take their cash. With a nod, I thanked him, and wished he and the Bee Train Corporation good luck with their
launch.
Camera crews scurried
around us as we made the too-long trek across the new glass and titanium
station, christened, as it was, by our presence. At the atrium doors, we paused
for just a second. The new station was quiet, hollow, and still, but beyond the
doors, the stage, and the podium, we could see thousands of reporters and tens
of thousands of fans waiting for our comments and post-date impressions.
Nora and I glanced at
each other, and I thought I saw weariness in her. Once we were married, I told
myself, we would be able to submerge beneath the scrutiny of the millions of
camera lenses, the critics’ judgments, and the multitudes of opinions, but
today, we had our duty.
When we stepped
outside, the crowd’s noise rushed over us like a tidal wave. Lights flashed.
Everyone began cheering, clapping, and shouting. When we started toward the
podium ten feet away, Nora pulled her hand from mine.
She did it gently, but the
feeling it gave me was that I had done something wrong, that she was annoyed or
had changed her mind about me. As I frantically tried to remember the
agreed-upon blocking, but couldn’t recall if we were supposed to be holding
hands now or not, I stared forward into the cameras and tried to pretend that
nothing unusual had happened, that my heart hadn’t
just been cracked. But as I tried to smile, I was sure I could hear the
servomotors whine as the cameras all zoomed in on my flushed face.
When I turned, Nora was
tugging off the charcoal chenille glove from her left hand. I saw a metallic
flash of what looked like a tiny surgical robot, and then an inch line of blood
welled across the creases of her palm.
Although her hand and
blood were in color—of course—it was just like an image from Pure H in
an ad for a top-of-the-line, Invisi-Pearl™ finishing-stitch machine. The photoR6 was a close-up of a wounded woman’s hand resting on
wet sand. Beneath the image, the copy read: The moment became her life.
My advisor told me that the hand was that of a dead woman and that the
moment had passed, but as Nora held her hand for me to see, clearly, she
believed the moment was approaching; and moreover, that the wound was evidence
of a struggle that the hand had endured on its journey to this climactic
moment.
I loved her hopeful
interpretation! Most photographers around the stage pushed, shoved, and
jockeyed for position to capture the image, but a few, who obviously knew Pure
H, lowered their cameras in respect and awe.
And then Nora, whose
eyes were quivering with tears of what I imagined were joy and pain, held her
bloody hand toward me. That was how she felt: she wasn’t just offering the warm
smoothness of her skin, but the river of her life, the solution of her heart.
I felt a jolt of
excitement as my fingers met her soft and warm flesh. At first, I clasped her
hand as gently as one might a dove. Her fingers curled around mine and when our
palms touched, I felt the heat of her blood. A moment later, I squeezed her gently
and spread the wetness between us. And had I known what would happen in the
next ten minutes, I would have never let go.
As we stepped before
the podium, a moderator, a short, stocky man who I recognized from some
interview show on the channels, pointed to a reporter in the crowd and asked
for the first question.
– Nora, does that mean you’re in love?
Her grip tightened
around my fingers, and I imagined the question embarrassed her. In the delay
before she replied, I wondered if I should speak for her, to defuse the
awkwardness.
“Love is an important
subject to ponder,” she said into the pipe organ of microphones before us.
After a sly glance toward me, she nodded once to the crowd to indicate that
that was her answer.
– You were rumored to be involved with a robot.
Is it true?
– Nora, do you cut yourself?
– Is your father on aru?
The mc asked them to go one at a time, but
questions came from every angle.
– Show us your hand again!
– Are you really a purebred, Michael?
– Do you endorse Hershey-Decker Industries whose
ad you quoted?
– What are you planning for your wedding night?
– Nora, are you sterile from the ’Ceutical Wars?
– They say five women actually write Pure H.
Think that’s true?
– Doesn’t your dad hate you, Michael?
– Did you two secretly marry last week?
– What’s that blood thing mean?
“The blood thing,”
said Nora, emphasizing the word as if to mock the reporter’s ignorance, “is
just for Michael. I would never let someone touch my insides without feeling
the enchantment I do toward him.”
I loved her word enchantment.
It felt mysterious and yet solid, as if carved from a block of fragrant
eucalyptus. I knew I couldn’t be more lucky and blessed, and tried to keep my
eyes focused forward and clear, like a good foot soldier, but I could feel the
saltwater rise. When I wiped my eyes with a handkerchief, more questions rained
down on us despite the little man trying to maintain order.
“One at a time,” he
pleaded.
– Are you crying?
– Michael, when will you take over RiverGroup?
– Are those tears of love? Or is this another of
your dad’s crazy schemes?
– You’re breaking a billion girls’ hearts,
Michael! Sure she’s the one?
– Are you both virgins?
– Michael, they say you still secretly dance
Bäng. Is it true?
– Nora, will your family company become a unit
of RiverGroup or merge completely?
– Is your father’s dna mutated?
– What’s it like to be with Michael Rivers?
– Have you two done it?
– Are those nude photos in Sir Princess Zonk really
you, Nora?
– Will you deflower her at the product show?
– How much are you both worth?
We fielded the proper
questions as best we could, but they kept coming faster and faster. Meanwhile,
the moderator became so flustered, he started shouting. The reporters screamed
back. I decided to try and calm the crowd and released Nora’s hand. At first,
our palms stuck, then the seal was broken. Stepping
before the microphones, I raised my arms, and said, “Thank you, all.” I tried
to smile and say it nicely, but the mass of reporters began to push in on the barricades,
and soon a dozen family police, in their protective orange satin suits, were
pushing back. People started screaming. The next moment a fire burst out and
someone was engulfed in flames.
Nora’s attendants
quickly covered her with a protective net and carried her off to her green and
gold
Joelene was my tutor,
my advisor, and my best friend. She was a good five inches shorter, with loose,
curly, light brown hair, a slim mouth, and thin, amethyst eyes. “Joelene,” I
said, afraid the blood was hers. She had the strangest, saddest expression.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, as the pain in my hand turned white hot.
Besides Nora’s blood
that had dried in the wrinkles and creases of my palm, now a dot of my own
blood welled up in the middle. For an instant, I thought it perfect and
symmetrical. I glanced after Nora as if to show her, but when I turned my hand
over, I saw that the back was bloody too.
The wound went all the
way through as if I had been shot. I was about to ask Joelene what was going
on, when my left hand was violently snapped backward and another spray of blood
atomized in the air. I cried out because the pain was excruciating. Bones had
been shattered and tendons severed.
Joelene’s face was now
covered with a heavy splatter and she was grimacing and blinking fast as if it
had gotten in her eyes.
“I’m shot!” I said,
pulling my hands toward my chest to try to comfort and protect them. How could
this be happening? I was first son of RiverGroup, the security company.
“You’ll be all right!”
she said.
Before I could move, I
felt a horrific stab in my right foot and screamed. Then I felt the same blast
in my left. The tops of my shoes were cracked open like tiny bombs had gone
off.
My knees buckled as my
body felt clumsy and heavy. I shuffled forward trying to stay upright, but
couldn’t keep my balance. I began to fall and on the way down, felt someone try
to grasp my waist. If there was an impact, I didn’t feel it, but then my face
was flat on the ground. The pain in my hands and feet burned like the white
flame of a welding gun. The salty smell of blood filled my nose.
All around, I heard
screams. Joelene shouted the word ambulance several times. A siren began
to whine and at first it rose and fell like a perfectly formed and pure white
sign wave. A moment later, though, the tone turned harsh and the smooth wave I
had been imagining became rough and jagged. The siren began to fade, and the
wave shrunk to a single point of green light. It held for a moment then
disappeared.
Two
What appeared to be the same green dot hovered
before me in a vast nothing, like a single jade-colored star in a night sky. I wasn’t sure if just a few seconds, hours, or days had
elapsed, but I felt I might be in a different place. Concentrating on the green
point of light, I felt it was me or was just like me—a tiny entity in the
middle of nothing. I wanted to reach out to it and comfort it, if such a thing
were possible.
Then another green pinpoint of light emerged and
gradually became as intense as the first. I felt glad because the first star
wasn’t alone. It had a companion.
Then a third dot appeared, and I hated it. I didn’t want
it to interfere. But soon more dots bloomed from the darkness. Clumps appeared,
then dozens, and finally hundreds filled in. The first two were lost in an
emerald cloud that looked like the vapors of a nebula. The cloud became opaque
and filled my vision from top to bottom, left to right.
Without warning, slashes of yellow and gold cut the
cloud to shreds. Molten masses of bloody reds and petroleum blacks bubbled up.
The brutality and vividness frightened me, and from whatever state of sleep or
dream I had been, my consciousness rose a level.
The mass of glowing dots was actually a huge screen
hovering inches above my nose. From the black a lavender froth emerged and then
hundreds of orange abscesses erupted like a disease.
“No,” I said, squinting into the blinding light, “stop!”
Grape vortexes swallowed up the orange and vomited acid
greens.
“Relax, Mr. Rivers,” said an amplified voice.
“Get this thing away of me!” I said. My fingers touched
cold metal as I tried to push the screen away, but couldn’t budge it.
“Quiet please. And do not touch the equipment.”
“Where am I? Where’s Nora?” The greens mutated into a
brittle red, like a giant scab. I slapped the screen and the pain in my hand
jarred me further awake.
This was color therapy! Father ranted about how
wonderful it was. I was in some sort of a hospital or spa—which explained the
medicinal and alcohol tinge in the air—being exposed to the glaring horrors of
photochromism. Then I fully woke, and as if remembering who I was, closed my
right eye. The atrocious hues became a thousand soothing shades of grey.
“Mr. Rivers,” said the voice, “open both eyes. The
therapy will be more effective! Mr. Rivers do as you’re told. Open your right eye,
please.”
The giant screen slowly faded to black and pulled away.
I relaxed. At least I didn’t feel like it was suffocating me.
Footsteps approached. A bald man in a long emerald coat
appeared beside me. I could see thick black hair in his nostrils. Leaning down,
he peered into my right eye with a lit device. “Tsk!” he said, as if
admonishing me. “Burning the cones is illegal.”
Only those few who are fully committed to grey have the
procedure. Last year, without my father’s knowledge, I found a neuro-ophthalmologist
in Saru Pauro who performed the delicate operation. While I lay sedated, a
microscopic sodium laser destroyed all the cones in my right retina. When I
healed and the bandages were removed, my right eye, with only its rods intact,
perceived nothing but the creamiest black, white, and grey.
I told the man with the hairy nose, “I want out of
here.” Instead of answering, he examined my left hand with another device.
“Where’s Nora?” I asked. “Is she all right? What happened?”
“All I know,” he said, still peering through his
contraption, “is that the bullets were also illegal. Curiously, they released
drugs that healed the wounds they caused.” He eyed me angrily, as if all of
these infractions were my fault.
As he moved to my feet and examined them, I sat up and
saw that I was naked except for a green cloth with some complicated orange and
gold logo that covered my crotch. “Where am I?” I demanded. “Where are my
clothes?”
Touching his ear, he seemed to listen to something.
“Someone is here to see you.” With that he headed across a yellow floor so
polished it looked like he was walking on his upside-down twin. The room was
round and the walls were covered with enormous photos of people who looked like
they were in terrible pain. He exited through a door covered with the face of a
woman whose mouth was wide open and had blood splattered over her forehead and
cheeks.
“Can you bring my clothes?” He disappeared through the
bloody woman’s face without acknowledging me. “Hello? My
clothes please!” Shouting drained me. I felt dizzy and flopped back. I
would rest for a moment, I told myself, then get up, and find my way out of
here.
The door opened. I expected the man with my clothes, but
Joelene and her upside-down yellow twin came in. Both wore long dark coats,
high-necked shirts, and held bundles under their right arms. Her change of
clothes made me wonder how long I had been here. I was going to ask, but when
she came to the side of my bed, I saw tears in her eyes.
“You look good,” she said, suppressing a sob. “I have
your clothes.”
Joelene had never cried before. She had always been
strong and efficient. As she laid out a slim, silk-goat wool charcoal suit, a
pressed, white cotton shirt, black briefs and socks, and a new pair of shoes, I
asked, “What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry to see you like this.”
Her violet eyes met mine, and then she glanced down at her hands. “I’m very
sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said, touched. “Is Nora okay?”
“Everyone is fine.” She straightened the collar of the
jacket. “Healthwise.” Running a finger over the fabric, she added, “Isé–B
ironed this for you.” Isé–B was my favorite competitive ironer. The shirt was
beautifully done, and while I could see his trademark creases, I felt she was
avoiding something.
“Healthwise?” I asked, worried that there was something
else.
She shook her head quickly, and said, “Last night
millions of girls held a candlelight vigil. They’re drawing pink dots on their
hands and feet.” Her smile lasted for an instant and then a melancholy
returned. I could see circles beneath her eyes, and her cheeks paled. However
long I had been here, she had probably been awake, gathering information,
answering questions, and figuring out what to do. “You and RiverGroup are the
only news on the channels.”
“But what happened?”
“It was a breach.”
Every six months or so a bomb exploded in a distant
hospital, a little-known ceo was
kidnapped, or an illegal blimp was shot down in Europa-9. But breaches rarely
happened to the strongest families, and they never happened to RiverGroup. We
were the ones who established all identities and kept track of all the
information. I said, “That can’t be.”
“The gunman … ” she began, her
finger still traveling back and forth on the collar of the shirt, “was … a …
freeboot.”
Freeboots had been the worst outlaws. They were
people—if you could call them that—who didn’t have identities, names, families,
numbers, papers, or anything. When I was a boy, new stories of them popping up
in boardrooms and bedrooms circulated weekly. “But aren’t they all gone now?”
“Despite the official declarations,” she said, “they
exist. I doubt there are more than a hundred, but it’s impossible to tell. They
live off the system, completely beyond the laws. Forty years ago, though, they
helped defeat the Pharmaceutical Warlords and allowed the families to take
control of the cities. At that time they were admired. They were the artisans
of anarchy.” She stopped fiddling with my shirt, straightened, and faced me.
“The slubbers and the warlords are the official enemy, but the
freeboots are worst. And from all the information I’ve been able to
gather, I believe your shooting was an act of retaliation.”
“What did I do?”
“I don’t think it was about you in particular—although
RiverGroup’s role in security and identity is fundamental to the families—you
were just a high-level target in retribution for a series of fierce attacks on
the freeboots last year.” She exhaled and her eyes fell again. “I am sorry.”
“Well,” I said, not quite sure what all of this meant
besides a huge nuisance, “what happened to the freeboot?”
“At first, the reports were that the
freeboot was killed by family satins, but now it seems he escaped.”
“How?”
She shook her head. “They’re very elusive. And no one
was prepared.”
Whipping a hand around the room—the awful images and the
now black therapy screen, I said, “I want out of here. I want to see Nora.”
She didn’t move.
I waited several seconds for her to speak then began to
panic. “She wasn’t shot was she? Please don’t tell me that!”
“No! She’s fine. She’s perfectly fine …
” Her voice trailed off. Joelene was not usually this reticent.
“Is there something bad?”
She took a breath, looked me in the eyes, and said, “The
marriage is off.”
My marriage to Nora was to signify the merger between
RiverGroup and her family’s company, mkg.
Father had invented the scheme a couple of months ago. Although RiverGroup was
still number one, we were losing customers because we hadn’t introduced
anything new in years and our market share had slipped to just below fifty
percent. Our biggest rival, mkg,
had an innovative approach, and Father’s idea was that together, RiverGroup and
mkg would dominate the market. As
for me: I didn’t care for business, or code, or promotions, or money, or any of
it. And in the beginning, I didn’t want anything to do with his marriage-merger
scheme, but when Joelene and I began to research Nora, I couldn’t believe how
intelligent, beautiful, and serene she was. And then we met and I learned that
she was colorless, that she was the epicenter of grey, that she was my
conclusion. “Well,” I said, saddened, but not devastated, “that’s not good, but
when can I see her?”
“The marriage-merger is off,” she repeated.
“I heard you! I just want to see her as soon as I can.”
She spoke slowly, as if reluctant. “You cannot.”
“I have to see her!” I laughed because I was so unused
to Joelene not understanding. “Marriage or not. Nora
and I are one. You saw what she did with her hand. We’re grey. We’re perfect
together!”
“Let’s get you dressed,” she said, with a sigh. “We’re
going to meet your father back at the company compound.”
“I demand to see her immediately!”
“The merger is off!” She spoke louder than she ever had
before. An instant later, I thought she was going to cry again. “Sorry,” she
said, dabbing her eyes, “I didn’t mean to raise my voice. It’s just very
difficult. And please understand that we won’t be able to monitor her on the
channels, send messages, or communicate in any way. Her family’s company is now
RiverGroup’s enemy.”
When what she said sunk in, I felt like I might weep. I
had survived the bullets, only to find my world ruined. An old photoS7 from Pure H came to mind. It was
of a man suspended in a vat of clear balls and his whole body was held in place
and dimpled like a giant golf ball.
“I’m very sorry, Michael,” she said, softly. She started
to reach toward my foot, as if to stroke it, but then pulled back, probably
because I was still undressed. “Listen,” she continued, “after such a
devastating security breach, mkg can’t
merge with us. It would be a public relations disaster. Frankly, RiverGroup is
in great trouble. The company’s stock has fallen from 63,000 a share to less
than 300. We’re teetering on collapse.” After pursing her lips, she added, “As
for mkg, there is no
communication between the two family companies. Nora’s father, Mr.
Gonzalez-Matsu, held a press conference just minutes ago and announced their
new direction.”
I met Nora’s father for a few seconds before our
train-date. He was like my father—one of those loud, old-fashioned men who was
almost impossible to embarrass, obsessed with volume, speed, money, and the
culmination of everything bright, garish, and vulgar. He wore a glowing violet
suit, a shirt that blinked green and gold, and large, gold, oil-burning
earrings that left smoke contrails when he moved.
“He did this!” I said, sure. “Before we got on the Bee
Train, I bowed my head to him, but he just glared back like he hates me. He had
the freeboot shoot me!”
“I don’t see it,” she said, shaking her head. “There
must be a weakness in RiverGroup security code. After all, it is supposed to
track and monitor information that should have prevented this very thing.”
Slapping a hand onto the bed, I said, “I just want
Nora.”
Joelene lifted my legs and spun me on my butt like a
mother maneuvering a baby. Picking up the black underwear, she said, “Your
tailor has improved the cloth’s temperature control system.” Joelene slipped my
underwear over my left foot and then the right.
“No, it can’t be,” I said, imagining Nora floating away.
“It can change from indoor temperatures to outdoor heat
in one point three seconds,” she continued. “That’s a third of last year’s
model, and for the wearer, it means complete comfort.” She sounded like a
brochure. Respectfully turning her head, she pulled up the shorts and
simultaneously flicked the color spa’s green logo-cloth away. “He’s also
improved the wrinkle control.”
“I want to see Nora!” I said, as if mounting one last
attack. “I want to be with her, Joelene, I have to see her now!”
She glanced toward the system camera in the far corner
of the room. “We’re going to survive,” she said, soothingly. “Things will work
out, Michael. I promise.”
Although I didn’t know how things could work without
Nora, I trusted Joelene. She was the reason I was in a position to meet Nora
and understand her significance and brilliance. Until my heart attack when I
was fourteen, I was barely a person, let alone a fashionable and grey one.
Until then, I danced at the PartyHaus every night before the cameras and what
were said to be ten billion fans. Then, on one particular Saturday night, while
performing my famous routine, I died.
Wearing gold leaf pants and a hunter green, sheer shirt
with gold epithets and ice buttons, I rode an elevator to the center of the
polished dance floor. When a spotlight hit me, I began by slowly raising my
hands and face to the burning light.
As the massive crowd cheered, the dj transitioned to my anthem, Adjoining
Tissue, by HammørHêds. During the intro, I rolled my arms, legs, and head
like I was a bit of seaweed undulating in a gentle current. It was a tease and
the tens of thousands of partiers on the fifteen balconies of the PartyHaus
knew it. They screamed my name as if they couldn’t wait. Finally, when the
cannon drums started firing, I began.
Back then I had a choreographer, two wardrobe
consultants, several hair and makeup stylists, and a team of strength and
agility trainers. Because of the forces from the massive, fifty-foot Cold-Flame
speakers on the dance floor, the untrained were regularly knocked unconscious,
maimed, and even killed by the percussive blasts. I had mastered the beats like
a karate-surfer riding tsunami waves.
In my routine, I did splits, hand-twirls, punch backs,
double-triples, and my own triple and a half front. Before Adjoining Tissue finished,
the dj started transitioning into
Kuts by Dr. Ooooo. The fx for
this part of the routine called for a shower of razors, like deadly snowflakes
from far above, and as I deftly avoided them both in the air and on the floor,
a few other brave partiers began to join me.
One, a young woman known as Elinor W, wore a brilliant
blue costume that covered her from head to toe except for cutouts for her eyes,
chest, and crotch. I remember how she got into her groove, then
looked up to smile at me. In that split second, she lost her concentration, and
like an ax cleaving a block of wood, a razor sliced into her left eye. She
screamed and fell as more razors lodged into her legs and body. I continued my
program while paramedics dragged her away.
When I think of myself back then, especially, how I
didn’t even slow my routine for an instant, let alone stop to help, I can see
how hollow and unhappy I was—a boy who was very good at one thing, but derived
no pleasure from it. Worse, down deep I think I despised the world that adored
me, as I was little more than a marionette in Father’s marketing schemes.
But soon after Elinor W was taken away, something
happened. What I like to think is that the guilt and self-hate built up so much
in my chest that my heart began to seize. In the middle of Engraved Blööd by
The Bürning Spines, the ice buttons had melted and my shirt hung open,
revealing my puffed chest. Admiring dancers surrounded me like worker bees.
Each time a drop of sweat flew from my forehead or torso, they dropped to the
floor, and shoved and pushed for the chance to lick it up.
The first sensation of my heart attack was in my jaw. A
strange, cool numbness made my teeth buzz, but I ignored it and figured it was
the strength drugs or some odd harmonic from the speakers. But gradually, the
coldness traveled into my eyes and brain like a slow, thick liquid. Then the
chill traveled into my arms and legs and turned dark and leaden. I slowed, lost
my rhythm, and one of the beats slammed into me hard. I tried to regain my
groove, but was knocked back and forth like a pinball. As I lost consciousness,
the colored lights high above grew so bright they seemed to shine through my
skin and into my emptiness.
They say the crowd rose to their feet and screamed in
adulation, until they realized that toppling over backward and slamming my
skull on the floor wasn’t my newest move.
Two days later, when I woke, I heard a tremendous cheer
and slowly realized that I was in a hospital bed, in the middle of the dance
floor, and that the place was packed with ten thousand watching my every
twitch. I had never felt so vulnerable and exposed. I insisted that I be taken
away. My house was quickly reconstructed, made quiet and dim. The silence felt
good, so I told my choreographers, stylists, consultants, and trainers to leave
me. I lay in bed and did nothing. One of the doctors, concerned about my low
spirits, brought me a magazine. I remember paging through the thing, at first
fascinated, since I had never seen one before. Gradually, though, I became
discouraged and angry as I couldn’t read a word or even recognize a single
character.
I decided I had to read and begged for a tutor. Father
refused because he wanted me to resume dancing as soon as I could, but when my
body wouldn’t respond to the healing drugs, he acquiesced, if only to shut me
up.
All of the candidates came in party clothes—feathered
shoes, fog bras, chrome nose-plates, gelatin shirts. I liked them all, then at the end of the second day, a woman with violet eyes
came in a dark tailored suit, a shirt that matched her eyes, and black shoes
with tiny grey stitches around the slender sole. I laughed since I had never
seen anyone dressed so drearily. Maybe it was impish curiosity, but instead of
telling her to go, I let her answer the interview questions like everyone else.
All the party people I knew were full of bombast, like
Father. They shouted and swore, bragged and boasted. Joelene did none of that.
Instead, she spoke softly, but with a fluid and powerful ease. At the time, I
felt like I had discovered a new type of human. I hired her because she
fascinated me, and I knew she would irritate Father.
Two years later, I could read and felt like I was
becoming a person. Then she introduced me to Pure H and everything
changed again.
Published every other month, the magazine is one-half
meter square and printed on the most luscious and expensive paper made. It is a
joy to touch and hold. But the most extraordinary thing about the magazine is
that one anonymous person produces it. Although I’d heard speculation about who
he might be, I preferred to enjoy his art without worrying about identity. He
photographed every photo. He wrote all the copy. And each issue was a complex
puzzle to be savored and deciphered.
I became grey. I began listening to the silence djs, like Love Emitting Diode, Huush,
and zzz. I discovered my tailor,
Mr. Cedar, and began wearing grey frocks, vests, and suits made of colorless
moon and satellite wool. And by then Father and I had come to hate each other.
“Look at these creases,” said Joelene, as she held up
the gen-cotton shirt. Indeed, it was beautifully ironed. And at the bottom of
the right tail was Isé–B’s fanciful signature of wrinkles.
“Generous of him,” I said, as I put out my right arm.
While I loved it, it was small consolation for all that had happened.
“Patience.” She added, “Miniature
city flickers.”
The photoR5
that accompanied that copy was of a translucent house at the edge of a dark,
piney wood. A woman stands in a clearing. Her twisted hair is powdered a light
grey, and her ball gown by H. Trow is a beautiful alpaca-silk and platinum
draped creation that creates a perfect hourglass. Her face is young and fresh.
Her eyes are tart, her lips, moist. Something about her posture—the way her
back is arched, her legs bent—makes her look burdened with melancholy, perhaps
even pain.
When I first saw the image, I thought a spotlight or
some illumination was creating a halo around her, but as I studied the print I
decided that it wasn’t just light but flame. The delicate corona that
surrounded her looked exactly like the nearly invisible flames of an alcohol
fire, and I decided that the photoR5
was taken the split second before the heat began to singe her hair, skin, and
eyes.
Behind her, beyond the translucent wall, stands a man in
a black suit and black tie. Although the details are hazy, clearly he is facing
toward her. But the way he holds his head both cocked to the right and angled
too high, he appears at once blind and yet cognizant of her. At first I assumed
he was her killer, but after careful study, decided he was her lover and that
he too is dying. His right hand is the clue. His fingers are tense and gnarled
in what seems like both grief and regret. On the floor beside him are several
sharp dark shapes, like shards of a glass. He drank poison and dropped the glass
as the toxins had not only immediately blinded him, but have begun to astringe
his veins and muscles, moving from his extremities toward his heart.
When I had finally deciphered the photoR5, I sat and stared at it for a long time, frightened and disturbed. I discussed it with Joelene, and she explained that it was about the beautiful inevitability of entropy, the wilting of flowers, the browning of leaves, the cooling of cream coffees, the fading of color. Then I understood that I, too, appreciated these things. I sought them out and savored them. But as Joelene slipped the jacket over my shoulders, and I felt the servomotors create perfect folds and wrinkles as I moved, I knew I could never appreciate a world without Nora.
Three
Joelene and I rode back around the globe to
the RiverGroup family compound in the speeding silver teardrop that was my
limousine. For the first few minutes, I reviewed the post-date interviews, but
soon, I switched off the screen and stared out the window at the scenery
rushing by. But that motion reminded me of the Bee Train and of my last date
with Nora, so I closed my eyes.
“Nora is at
I refused to look at the photos or her family’s
publicity release. Joelene read part of it aloud, and it sounded like something
a phalanx of lawyers had produced. I counted the word regrettably five
times.
As the car exited the
The access road began to rise above the garish city of
As the car slowed before the garage, I could see
attendants, cooks, maids, and workers running toward us. Some were wailing and
crying as if I were a coffin containing myself. They clustered around the car,
and as I exited, I said, “Thank you. I’m fine. I’m fine, everyone.”
Joelene jumped in front to shield me as a tall orange
family satin with a golden visor subdued a maid who was tearing off her clothes
to expose a complicated set of sharp-looking bands and wires across her chest
and crotch. “I’m the one, Michael. It’s me. I’m the one who really loves you!”
Years ago, when I danced, I told myself I enjoyed these
hopeless displays, like the time an army of teenage girls, dressed in lanolin
wools, marched up from the valley, surrounded the compound and demanded all my
dancing outfits, toiletries, shaven hairs, and a week’s worth of excretions.
Now, all of it embarrassed me. As the woman was taken away, Joelene and I
hurried in the other direction to my building.
Before my heart attack, my house had been rather like an
enormous egg carton inside, with a dozen different rooms. The floors of each
room were speaker heads and the place reverberated day and night with heavy
bone-jarring thuds and squealing highs. Besides the music, each room was
decorated with a theme, like the blinding red light room and the dead lamb
room. When I demanded to be taken from the PartyHaus to somewhere quiet and
dim, the place had been gutted. Over time, I had decorated and now it had
polished muslin walls, black iron floor tiles, and just a few upholstered
pieces sat here and there. Two surveillance cameras, little more than black
bugs, were mounted on the walls. And while they were there for my safety, I had
positioned my bed, desk, and couch out of their range.
Once we were inside and Joelene had shut the cast-iron
front door, I felt like I wanted to get in bed and bury myself beneath a
hundred layers of wool. I started toward my bed only to jump back in surprise.
My mother lay there.
She was a few years younger than father and had at least
as much surgery, but seemed older. Her skin was dark and had a leathery
quality. Last time I saw her, a year ago, her hair had been long, straight, and
hung to her waist. This time it was frizzed like a giant tumble weed and dyed a
hundred different colors. Her robe of a dress looked like something a cavewoman
would wear. Made of a patchwork of small tanned pelts, I could see tiny rat
claws here and there. The bones in her face were beautiful and proud, but now
she looked like a former beauty queen who had been forced to fend for herself
in the wilderness.
While I felt bad for her, and I had tried not to let
Father’s poisoned opinion influence me, I distrusted her. Every time I saw her,
she wanted something. And not just that, but she always got
shrill and hysterical like her generation.
“Thank goodness you’re
ok!” she said, as she leaped up and came toward me with open arms. “You
have to leave,” she said, as she hugged me. She smelled of barbecue smoke and
soap. “Leave before it’s too late.”
“Mrs. Rivers-Zssne,” said Joelene, pulling Mother’s arms
from me. “I don’t believe you’re authorized to be here today.”
Mother stepped back and glared at my advisor with her
wide, fearsome sage-colored eyes. “I am!”
“May I see your pass, please?”
“A mother needs a pass to come and hug her son! And to
think that we were supposed to be the perfect family. What a lie it all was!”
“Regardless,” said Joelene, smiling stiffly, “I must see
your pass.”
As embarrassed as I felt for my mother, my advisor was
right—especially after a terrible security breach.
While glaring at me as if this were my doing, Mother
pulled a card from her pouch. Somehow she’d been able to bend the hard plastic.
After straightening the crease, Joelene checked her screens. “It was valid,”
she said. “It expired one hour ago.”
“I spoke to his father,” said Mother, trilling her
fingers dismissively. “He said I could have a word with my poor, injured son.”
Joelene handed back the pass. “No
disrespect, but you did not speak directly to his father, and we are extremely
busy. Additionally, I would advise you to hurry if you want to, wisely,
avoid Mr. Rivers senior.”
“If you don’t mind!” bristled
Mother. “A moment, please.”
Joelene didn’t blink. “If you’re asking to be alone with
Michael, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
I wanted to tell Joelene that it wasn’t necessary, that
I’d be fine, but I knew she
wasn’t going to budge. She probably felt responsible for the
freeboot’s bullets.
“It’s okay,”
I told Mother, “we can talk. She’s family.”
Mother’s face paled; her mouth shrunk to a dot. “Don’t
confuse family. She is not your family. She never will be. Your real
family loves you. And they desperately need you,” she said, her tone shifting
into her familiar pleading. “They’re waiting to meet you. They’ve been waiting
for so long. It just breaks my heart.” Mother covered her face and began to
sob. “I’m so sorry for everything! I’m so sorry!”
“I feel fine.” I held out my hands with their tiny scars
for her to see. “I’m healthy.” I thought that was the answer to the question
she hadn’t asked.
Mother wiped her face, glared at Joelene, and hugged me
again. I put my arms around her and, up close, I could
see that a multitude of tiny metal and glass charms had been woven into her
rainbow hair: birds, hearts, aphids, cars, sunglasses, phalluses, and what
looked like a tiny caribou stared back at me.
“You really must leave,” she said, sniffing. “It’s not
good here. It’s all about the wrong things, and your father uses everyone and
anyone he can. Look what’s happened to you.” She took my left hand in hers and
rubbed my palm with her thumbs.
“It was a random breach. I’m perfectly fine.” The words
came off my tongue too easily and I regretted that I was, after two minutes,
trying to appease her so she’d leave.
“Come with me,” she whispered. “Come be part of Tanoshi
No Wah.”
“Ma’am,” said Joelene, stiffly, “please.”
“We live honestly, and we’re not ashamed,” continued
Mother. “We show ourselves. And I’d love for you to see who you really are.”
“Please,” said Joelene, raising
her voice.
“The families and their laws are pollution to the human
spirit. They’re all hypocrites! We’re trying to do what’s right.”
“Mrs. Rivers, we’re late for an appointment!”
“Think about it, Michael. You’re not part of this
anymore. You’ve changed from the beast you were. Change a little more, and
you’ll see what I mean. Come with me.”
I couldn’t imagine her life in the slubs, eating grilled
rats, living in tents. In the shows, she sang, stripped nude, and ate fire, I’d
heard. “I found someone.” I said, not sure if she knew
of Nora. “I’m in love.”
She shook her head frantically, but one of the charms in
her hair spun around and hit her on the nose. “Trust me,” she said, grimacing
and rubbing the spot. “There’s nothing to love in the families. They’re evil
and ruthless. They’re all dead lumps of stolen flesh! Come with me. You need to
find your real family.”
By now, Joelene’s face turned red. “Mrs. Rivers, I’m
warning you!”
“Please, Michael!” She put her hands on my shoulders.
“It’s time you came home. They’re waiting. They adore you. And you’d make such
a lovely addition. You could dance with us.”
That was the worse thing she could have suggested.
“Mother,” I said, squirming away. “You know I don’t dance anymore.”
“Fine!” she said, angrily. “Don’t dance!”
“It’s time for you to go,” said Joelene.
Mother combed her hair from her face and regained her
composure. “I always thought you would be a poet. A lovely
poet. But you don’t have to do anything in the show. You could be my
assistant. Wouldn’t that be nice? You could hold my clothes while I strip.”
“Mother!” I said, flummoxed. “I
don’t want to perform. I don’t want you doing it either!”
“Mrs. Rivers,” said Joelene, wedging herself between us.
“Leave now, or I’ll be forced to call security.”
“Michael, come and find out who you are.”
“That’s it!” Joelene pushed mother backward. “You must
go now.”
“How dare you touch me! You’re
just like all of them. You’re sucking his blood. You’re just using his talent
and fame!” Mother had that crazy look in her eyes. A second later she clenched
her fists and lunged at Joelene as if to pummel her. Joelene was stronger and
knew the fighting arts. In one second, she had Mother in a headlock and called
the satins.
“Let go of me, you bitch!” screamed Mother. “Let Michael
come with me and find out the truth!”
“Mother!” I said, wishing she
wouldn’t be like this. “I know the truth.”
“Let go!” she said, thrashing in Joelene’s grip. “Let go
or I’ll bite.”
Two especially tall, satin beasts, with angular but
impassive faces, rushed in and grabbed her. One held her arms; the other, her
legs, and they carried her out as if they were dealing with so much meat.
“Get these things off of me!” she shrieked.
“Joelene’s only trying to protect me,” I said, as they
came to the door.
“Your father is a mutation!” she screamed. “Ask him what
that means! Ask him!”
The door slammed shut.
Plopping onto my grey wool couch, I slumped forward and
told myself that I hated her. Every time I saw her, she wound up screaming and
ranting. I had the worst parents. They were loud, obnoxious, selfish, and
awful.
Joelene sat beside me and stroked my shoulder.
“Eventually,” she said, “we will talk with her. She is a good person.
It’s circumstance.”
“I don’t want to see her ever again.”
Joelene’s hand slid off my back. “Judith Rivers-Zssne,”
she pronounced Mother’s name slowly as if she were going to define the words,
“has led a difficult life. As have all the women who have been with your
father. I know she loves you, but she expected too much from her marriage and … ” After she glanced at me gently, she said, “She probably
thought you would save her.”
“Me?” I asked, as if it were absurd. “From
what?”
“Unhappiness,” she said, staring into space. Her eyes
found mine. With a shrug, she added, “Years ago, your mother tried to fight the
system. She petitioned the families to let her change her identity. Of course,
they refused, as that’s wholly illegal—tantamount to treason. Since then, she’s
done the best she can.”
I didn’t want to think about Mother and her problems. I
didn’t want her in my bed when I came home, and I certainly didn’t want her
asking me to hold her clothes while she stripped. I said, “She scares me.”
Joelene folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head
in just that way she had when regurgitating her facts. “Reports indicate that
she’s taking a combination of self-administered color therapy and an illegal
and powerful painkiller, strengthener, and mood shaper: aru.”
“aru?”
“Actually, it’s an amazing and useful drug.” She
frowned. “The families have exaggerated the dangers of everything the ’Ceutical
Warlords make. Whatever else they are, the slub rulers are masters of
biochemistry.” I thought she was going to continue in that vein, but she
shrugged. “In any case, your mother’s group, Tanoshi No Wah, is losing money.
You would be a huge draw, of course.”
“Everyone just wants to use me,” I complained.
She pursed her lips as if she were going to speak, but
stood abruptly. “We have a meeting.”
Instead of being driven to the
business building across the compound, Joelene suggested we walk along the
oxygen gardens and the reflecting pool. It sounded like a good idea, but the
temperature-regulated air and the filtered sunlight didn’t lift my spirits.
Instead, I felt crushed under the vast, ashen sky. While nothing that had
happened was Mother’s fault, her tantrum made me feel doomed. I would never
escape my family. I would never escape their wishes and their desires for me.
As we approached the wood-shingled office building, I asked Joelene, “Why?”
knowing she would understand.
She stopped before the door and spoke quietly as if
telling a secret. “I have diverted some of your discretionary funds to Tanoshi
No Wah to try and help your mother and her friends. They have a lot of medical
needs, and I believe they’re poorly managed. It’s the best we can do now.”
I didn’t even know I had discretionary funds. “But why
is she with a carnival in the slubs? Why did she leave us for that?” I felt she
did it to embarrass me, like everything else she did.
Joelene glanced to her right as if she were trying to think what to say, but then she stood there,
as if momentarily transfixed.
I turned to see that she was staring at the PartyHaus.
At one time it had been the crown jewel of the compound, but now its black and
gold Rococo façade was matted with dirt and dust. From the roof were long, pale
green lines of oxidation. And at the top of the stairs, the enormous front
doors were splattered with droppings as thousands of birds had made nests in
the intricately carved fornicating animals. It was a combination disco, hotel,
brothel, and amusement park where I had spent the nights of my youth at one
hundred and fifty beats per minute.
When Joelene’s eyes met mine, I felt that we both had
the same mood: a nebulous sense of defeat, under-painted with the caustic dread
of seeing Father.
Finally, she nodded toward the door. We entered the building, and found meeting theater five. The
three-hundred-seat auditorium was empty, dark, and cold. Joelene located the
controls, and as she turned on house lights, I sat in one of the orange,
over-stuffed chairs toward the front. Above the stage hung an enormous, glowing
estimator clock—a family antique. Across the top it read: Hiro Bruce Rivers
Arrival Time. Below were the stylized, red numbers.
“Joelene,” I said, at once relieved and annoyed to see
that it read: one hour and thirty-three minutes. “I’m not waiting.”
“That can’t be right,” she muttered as she opened a
screen and checked with his people. “They say five or ten.”
As if the estimator clock had heard, the glowing numbers
on the clock’s face flickered then read fourteen minutes eighty-one seconds and
began counting down.
“The freeboot who shot you,”
said Joelene, reading from her screen, “is suspected to have been from
The details of my shooting bored me. They changed
nothing. They brought Nora no closer. “What does Father want?” I asked, not sure
I wanted to know.
“We’ll cover your health,
debrief your date and the aftermath. He may want to strategize. And it’s
possible he might apologize.” Joelene shrugged as if to say the last was
unlikely.
“It’s his fault!” I said.
“It’s no one’s.”
“He ruined the company.”
“That,” she said, stretching the word, “is a different
issue.”
“So, it is his fault. RiverGroup should have protected
me! That’s failure. It was the most important day of my life! The most
important moment in history! Just when everything was so
perfect!” I put my head in my hands. As much as I detested everything
that had happened, I hated to whine like a spoiled child. The clock’s numbers
twinkled, and now it read fourteen days, five hours, and sixty-three seconds.
“Look at that,” I said, standing, “he’s not coming.”
“Wait,” said Joelene as the lights sputtered and
blinked. Then it said five seconds. Four seconds. Three seconds. I flopped
backward into the chair. An instant later, though, the clock read five minutes
and was counting up.
“This is impossible!”
The clock numbers flashed, then spun backward again to
four seconds. Three seconds. It skipped two and stayed on one for half a
minute.
Just as I gave up and started to stand again, the house
lights went black. An announcer’s voice boomed, “Straight from the highest
profit quarter on record, President, ceo,
cfo, coo, cio, cpo, Chief Programmer, and all-around Super Code Bastard,
give it up for Hiro Bruce Rivers!”
As a catastrophically loud drumbeat kicked in, and we
covered our ears, orange and blue fireworks exploded across the front of the
stage. At the back, a figure rose from the floor before a giant vibrating blue
RiverGroup logo. For several beats, he stood there, his head down, his arms
flexed, as if posing like a monster wrestler.
When a throbbing, super-deep bass and a whining singer,
who sounded like he was either in a state of ecstasy or dreadful constipation,
started, Father came to life. He jogged forward and pumped his fists
victoriously. A spotlight came on as a cast-iron phallus-shaped podium rose to
meet him at the front of the stage. Horns and guitars blasted, the voices
wailed, and I thought I heard the words cunt spaceship.
Now Father sashayed back and forth with exactly the same
moves he’d been doing for years—a combination of pelvis thrusts, head bobs, and
a lot of sliding to and fro on his foot-tall, green-glass platform shoes.
“Slap me! Slap me hard!” he cried as the
music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. “That’s You’re My Cunt
Spaceship by TastyLüng,” he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of
the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the
silence. Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness. “Hello?” he asked, as if
afraid he was alone. “What the hell? Anyone out there?”
I was tempted to say nothing, hope he would decide the
place was empty, and go away. Instead, I said, “You ruined everything!”
His eyes darted toward me. “I’d like to fire the whole
fucked-up piece of fucking shit company!” First he
threw a stack of papers into the air, then hugged the podium and thrust his
hips into it. “We’re fucked! What do you want me to tell you? It was the
weirdest and worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.” Papers rained
down on his head as he implored, “How we gave a fucking freeboot an identity
and let him right in the middle of our fucking press conference, I have no
fucking idea!”
“It’s your fault!”
“Me?” He laughed. “We had everything nailed
down—everything completely checked, then out of nowhere—wham! A fucking freeboot with a fashion rifle. And I thought you were dead
when you fell over! That was fucking scary. That was shit-in-thong time! And
why he shoots your hands and feet, I don’t know. Nothing makes any fucking
sense! We’ve been checking everything, but I can’t find any answers.” As if he
were shouting at the world, he tilted his head back and cried, “Fucking
freeboots!”
My father was an inch shorter than I, but he still
worked the machines so his arms where bulky, his legs, sculpted, and his neck,
thick. His clothes were as putrid as his taste in music. Today, he wore a long,
tailed, green-plaid jacket over a vibrating orange and black shirt, long blue
pants with little video screens all over, and the aforementioned platforms. As
for his hair, he dyed it dark brown and had it permed into a tight Afro. It
looked exactly like moist chocolate cake.
His hairdresser, Xavid, with his snow-capped hairdo and
huge square glasses, came running onto the stage, and began to gather up the
fallen papers and hand them to Father. Xavid then quickly patted Father’s Afro
here and there and headed off.
“Anyway, I feel for you, son! I do. I was watching that
date—and holy fucking shit was it boring—but whatever! I was there with my
girls, my snacks, and we were all cheering and going on, and then I couldn’t fucking believe a freeboot! They should all be rounded up
and fried in oil! Motherfuckers.”
“They’re off the system,” said Joelene, with surprising
annoyance. “That’s why they can’t be located and rounded up, as you
say.”
Father leaned far forward and squinted. “You’re here,
too? Jesus fuckercakes, Michael! Can’t you fart without her anymore?” He
smacked his face with one of his thick hands. “God, son, what do you have in
your ball sack? Muffins?”
“I want Nora back,” I said.
He shook his head. “You know what I think of mkg, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, and that Nora—who, I have to say, seems like the biggest priss hole
in the universe? They can suck one of my anal enchiladas!”
“Don’t say that. I love her!”
“I don’t know why. She’s as dull as skim milk!”
I hated his relentless verbal attacks. “You never
understand.”
“Thankfully!” he muttered. “Anyway, glad to see you’re
better. That color-therapy blasts, doesn’t it?” He paused, as if waiting for me
to agree, then shrugged. “Anyway, believe me, someone was behind that shooting.
There are too many things that don’t make sense. Like where are the bullets and
how in the hell he could shoot the top of your feet?”
“The freeboots,” said Joelene, “despite
the families’ miserable view on them, do have some highly advanced weaponry.”
Thrusting his pelvis, Father said, “My highly advanced
weapon can’t pee around a corner!”
“The commission is looking into the possibility of
guided and disintegrating munitions.”
Father threw his hands into the air. “Anyway!
It was a total disaster. Especially for us, because we’re the
idiots who are supposed to keep track of those maggots. But forget all
that crap for a second. We have to act before the company goes down the toilet,
and I’ve got something lard.” Stepping to the edge of the stage, he turned to
the wings and hollered, “Watch this dismount!” Until then, I hadn’t noticed his
film crew, but there, in the shadows at the edge of the stage, stood his
silvery-haired director and the cameraman. Father had everything recorded for
an auto-documentary that he was always reediting. Last time he screened it, it
was five hundred hours long. Next to the crew stood his hairdresser and his
assistant, Ken Goh, who wore his usual loyalty-proving orange and blue face
paint.
Then Father jumped from the stage, landed on his green
glass platforms, and proclaimed, “Still got it!” Snapping his fingers, he
bellowed, “House lights!” He swiveled one of the other chairs around, and
plopped down. “First, a few announcements.” Nodding toward his hairdresser he said, “I
just promoted Ken to Financial Distribution Officer and Chief of Positives. And
Xavid, who shows lots of ambition, will be our new Chief Financial Officer,
Chief Operations Officer, and Chief of Brains. Take a bow, guys!”
Ken gave two thumbs up and winked at father. His
hairdresser bent at the waist. When he straightened he smiled, rolled his eyes
up in his amber lenses, and said, “I’m just so fucking smart, aren’t I!”
Father laughed. “Oh yeah, tell the world! Got to let them know. So, they’re working hard to sell our
stupid assets just so we can keep going.”
“My extreme pleasure!” said Xavid.
“Meanwhile,” continued Father, turning back to Joelene and
me, “we look like the world’s biggest idiots—like we can’t even wipe our own
asses—and instead of mkg
and your dumb-ass Nora schmora from bitchora for the product show, we got tons
of empty dick.”
“Stop talking about her!” I told him.
“It was categorically not her fault,” added Joelene.
“Nor has mkg been implicated in
any way. The family commission has exonerated them.”
Because it was poignant, fitting, and guaranteed to
annoy Father, I quoted copy from Pure H. “Her sadness replenished.”
Father slowly turned toward Joelene. “The day he started
worshiping that stupid Pure Ham magazine, was the worse ever!”
“Pure H,” I corrected.
“No,” he said, with a laugh, “the H has to stand
for something. So maybe it’s Pure Hell or Pure Halitosis!”
Turning to Ken and Xavid, he asked, “You hear that? Pure
Halitosis!”
“Funny!” exclaimed Ken.
“Witty,” agreed Xavid.
I thought about getting up and leaving since this was
pointless.
“Whatever one’s fashion tastes,” began Joelene, “Pure
H is a remarkable fusion of influences with a brilliant and elegant sense
of individuality.”
“Holy fuck!” he bellowed. “Shut up and hold onto your
dicks!” Eying Joelene, he added, “Hold ’em real tight!” She stared back coldly,
and it occurred to me that she had come to loathe him just as much as me.
“We’ve got someone else.” He winked at me. “Someone scorching
hot!”
I sat there and stared at him. It was like my brain
couldn’t make sense of the light and sound emanating from him. And even when he
handed me a screen, I couldn’t interpret the image.
“Her name is Elle Kez,” he said. “She’s the
granddaughter of Konrad Kez, the real estate gazillionaire. He died in that
stupid blimp accident and his company went under, but she’s all blue blood and
all. Anyway, Xavid knows
“Experimental!” called Xavid.
“That’s it! Anyway,” he continued, “we can demo it at
the product show and keep our biggest customers, like BrainBrain, slt, iip-2, and lettt from leaving. They’re all calling me and freaked out
because they’re afraid a freeboot is going to jump out
of their closet and shoot their balls.” Father laughed sadly. “It’s not easy to
talk them off the ledge, but this will help. We need something new. You with me?”
“Sir,” said Joelene, “this seems quite rash. Are you
sure?”
With his upper lip curled, he asked, “Am I sure? I don’t
know! But we can’t show any weakness now because we’re just about dead.” He
turned to his crew to scoff at Joelene. “The guy who runs Ribo-Kool is
Chesterfield Kez, and he’s lard.” He let out a breath. “Look,” he began again, “even if
Ribo-Kool’s thing is a big ol’ green turd, it’s going to save us for the
product show.”
The photo he had handed me finally turned into a
discernable image. It was a girl who looked about my age. She might have been
pretty, except that she was terribly over-done. She had fake, gold hair, green
eyes with heavy pink mascara, and lips covered with thick, violet paint. Her
nose was pointy and pinched, as if she were wearing an invisible clothespin on
the end. Worse, she was laughing and had her mouth so wide open you could see a
half-inch of gum above her white teeth, a glistening, golden, made-up tongue,
and a uvula hanging in back. Dressed in a fluttering mass of polka dots, and
what looked like a white furry, little ear-bot hanging from her left lobe, she
looked like one of those flighty, imperceptive, and giggly girls who read CuteKill,
Ball Description, or Petunia Tune.
“Don’t worry if she looks like more than you can
handle,” said Father to me with a sly grin, “I’ve got some fully charged
sex-pods you can borrow.”
I scowled at him.
After a laugh, he said, “Anyway, you’re going to go on a
big publicity date with her to get a buzz going, then we’ll have you two French
or something at the product show. They’ll love it!”
My jaw went soft. He was serious. This was his solution.
I wanted to laugh at him, or somehow cut his notion in half with one perfect
word. But all I could do was imagine Nora floating farther and farther away.
“Michael is devoted to the family and the business,”
said Joelene. “But he is still suffering from both the trauma of the attack and
a broken heart.”
“Trauma?” shouted Father as he stood and climbed back
onto the stage. “You want trauma? I’ll give you a trauma.” Toward the back of
the auditorium, he shouted, “Crank up Massive Bladder Tumor!” An instant
later, the sounds of drums began firing and some male singer wailed in pain.
Father treated us to his same dance moves he had just five minutes before.
Holding my hands over my ears, I closed my eyes and waited
for the cacophony to stop. When it did, and I opened them, Father was standing
before me. Dumping the rest of the papers in my lap he said, “Tomorrow. Eight
o’clock. That’s the whole deal.”
I saw logos of what looked like more sponsors,
blueprints of what was probably the meeting place, pie charts, diagrams, bullet
points, and pages of contracts. I let the papers slide off my legs as I stood.
“I can’t do this.”
“Bullshit!” He bared his teeth like an angry dog. “We
don’t have a choice! Everyone’s laughing at us. Our stock is worth half a bug
fuck.” Waving a hand toward Xavid, he added, “We’re selling everything just so
we have electricity.”
With a shrug, I said, “I won’t do it.”
“You will!”
“I refuse.”
“I’ll make you,” he said, stepping forward. “I’ll make
you do it, you little shit!”
“You will not.”
“Sir,” said Joelene. “This operation of yours is a
surprise. Can’t we have time to recuperate and figure out our next step?”
“It should be a surprise! It’s a genius surprise. I
thought of it in my own head! And if we don’t we’re dead. Right
guys?”
Ken pumped a fist. “Otherwise, we’re dead!”
“Expired!” chimed Xavid, as he tickled his hands over
his oily shirt.
“Just today,” continued Father, “we lost seven thousand
customers. Seven fucking thousand! I’ve been on the phone begging the buggers
not to leave, but they’re so fucking stupid, it’s real hard.” As Ken echoed the
words fucking stupid, father got in Joelene’s face. “And you! I’m tired
of your worthless input. I want to see you working for RiverGroup.”
She stiffened. “I am Michael’s tutor.”
“Yeah? Well, tutor him this:
He’s going to fuck Elle’s stinkin’ hole at the product show or you’re finally
out of here. You got that?”
I wanted to tear his head off. “I’m not doing it!” As I
spoke, tears ran down my face. “I’m out of this horrible family.” I could
barely see as I stumbled past him, around the stage, past Ken Goh, and past
Father’s idiot film crew and back outside.
I ran to the garage, got in my car, and said, “Europa-1,” to my driver. We started moving, and as I strapped myself into the seat, I added, “To the mkg complex … to Nora.”
Four
The two-lane highway that traveled around the
world roughly at the Tropic of Cancer rose high above the desert, cut through
mountain ranges, floated over oceans, and was the way to get around the
globe fast. After we exited the compound and wound our way down the slope, we
came to the desert floor and then began to curve around Ros Begas, toward the
long entrance ramp. No other
From the outside, my car was shaped like a giant
teardrop with the fat end forward and the back slowly tapering down to a
needlepoint. The metal skin was covered with millions of little fibers that
felt velvety when it was still, but vibrated at high frequency when the car was
in motion. It had something to do with aerodynamics, but I wasn’t sure. Dozens
of skinny tires protruded below and made the whole thing look like a fat
centipede. Mine, like the other RiverGroup Loop cars, was painted the company
orange and blue, and on the stabilizing fins, like the dorsal fins on a fish,
were the logos of the company, products, and those of our strategic partners.
Soon we were on the
“Four point three,” announced the driver.
Releasing myself from the safety seat, I stepped back to
the bathroom and leaned over the toilet. Nothing came up, but I wished I could
have vomited what was supposed to make me part of my family—whatever nurture,
or dna. Finally, I stood, unhappy
that I couldn’t rid myself of my lineage so easily. At the duralumin sink, I
splashed water on my face then studied myself in the mirror. First I closed my
left eye and lamented the pinkish tone of my cheeks and ears, which made me
appear bothered and anxious. But when I closed my right, and the flush faded
away, I felt I looked stronger and in control. This black and white version was
the real me—the me beneath the hues.
Once I got back to my seat, I checked the camera views
of the road flying past us. They were clear, but just in case, I asked the
driver, “Anyone following us?”
“Negative, sir,” was the answer through the intercom.
“Nothing?” I asked, surprised.
“Negative.”
Maybe this was all it took. Maybe Father finally heard
and understood. Years ago, he had finally accepted that I would no longer be
the dancer he wanted me to be. Maybe today he understood that I could not and
would not date Elle. And maybe he saw that our only course of action was
reconciliation with mkg.
The rust-colored mountains gave way to flatter and
flatter vistas covered with a crazy quilt of house developments, shopping
malls, sweat shops, all interspersed with fields of corn. In the distance, a
cloud of greenish vapor tinted the horizon.
At night, much of the slubs were black, but a few dots
of electric light or bonfires mirrored the dozen stars in the sky. During the
day, it was ugly, limitless, flat, and dull. Worse, it made me feel
insignificant.
I wished Joelene were with me. She would surely applaud
my daring. Several times lately, she had congratulated me on puzzles solved and
initiatives taken, but this was the boldest yet.
The car began to slow, but we hadn’t even come to the
“I know you just had a terrible ordeal,” he said, “and I
feel very very bad for you, but your father and the company are under
tremendous pressure right now.” His eyes, nostrils, and mouth were outlined in
dark blue, the rest was orange so that he looked like
a tangerine skull. “He is trying. He really really is.”
“He is not.”
“No, he is.” Ken had worked for Father for more than a
year, but what he did besides agree with everything Father said, I didn’t know.
My impression was that there was nothing inside of him. He didn’t care what he
kissed, how many times, or how bad it tasted. “I know you’d agree that he’s
brilliant and yet modest.” Ken smiled, and across three of his front teeth the
letters y e s were stenciled in
blue. “Trust me, he knows your situation and
feelings.”
I snapped off the screen, but he turned it back on from
his side.
“See,” he smiled a big yes
smile, “your father predicted that you’d turn me off.” Leaning in, Ken
whispered, “He knows. He’s much wiser than you might think.” Scrunching up his
citrus face, he added, “Sure, he’s got a temper. And sometimes it flares up
badly. But all great men have fits. I think it is part of being that great.”
He turned to his left. “Right?”
Xavid and his huge square glasses leaned in. “Elle is a
peach. Squeeze her and you’ll get nectar.”
I had liked Father’s previous hairdresser. She was a
tall, bosomy matron of a lady who was always complaining about the horrible
styles he wanted. But he got rid of her. Xavid was a scrawny little man who
dressed mostly in oily, black sealskins. His huge amber eyeglasses made his
eyes look yellow, watery, and distorted. For some reason his lips were always
an odd bluish color, as if he lacked oxygen, and his little whitish tongue
often darted out of the right corner of his mouth like a feeding sea worm.
Mostly, he was just creepy and odd.
I clicked it off again, waited for them to come back,
but it stayed dark. Just as I decided they had given up, Father’s face
appeared.
“Hey, Michael,” he said slowly, “I know I was loud
before. I’ve got a talent for loud.” He laughed and held his smile until it
slowly wilted. “Anyway, I know you’re not into Ültra, or Heâd, or Bäng
anymore.” He paused as if to lament my transformation once again. “Look,” he
said, his voice quieter, “I know you’re unhappy about being shot … and
everything about that … you know … and that mkg
girl and everything … ”
He couldn’t even say Nora’s name. I reached to turn it
off.
“Wait! Hold on! I’m upset too. I really am. And you know
what I think? I think that freeboot was nothing more than dick fuzz!” He held
his grin as if waiting for me to agree. “Look,” he continued, after he decided
that I wasn’t going to play along, “the deal is—the company needs you. We’ve
got to have something for the show. So come on back home, we’ll sit down with
your little tutor and we’ll get this all hammered out.”
“No.” The word came out easily and I was proud of
myself. In the past, I had had trouble standing up to him. To the driver, I
said, “Full speed, please.”
“Elle’s not so bad,” he continued. “You see the stats on
her tits? They’re pointy!” His eyes lit up. “Remember there was a girl who
looked kind of like her from the PartyHaus? She had that kind of nose.” He
flicked up the end of his with a finger.
I did not remember, nor did I want to. “Driver,” I said
into the intercom, “increase speed now.”
“No,” said Father, speaking louder, as if commanding my
attention, “I’m pretty sure you said something about her once. You have to
remember! She was the one who swallowed everyone and everything.” As he always
did, he got too close to the camera, and his face became distorted so that his
nose looked like the front of a blimp. “Sheila! Wasn’t that it? Remember her?
Slurping Sheila we called her.”
I glared at him. Dividing her name into two faux
syllables, I said, “No-ra.”
“Shut up!” he exploded. “Don’t even say her fucking
name! From now on, I’m banning it.”
I reached out and flicked the off switch. Nothing
happened.
“Ha!” Father winked off camera. “Lard
work, Ken.”
“Please,” I said, “go away.”
“mkg is
our enemy. Two minutes ago Nora’s dad was on Profit Ranch 5000. The
bastard said we’re community butt plugs!”
“I’m sure he’ll apologize if we just explain.”
“No explaining! No apologizing! They rejected us, and
now we’re total enemies.”
“We can go back and explain that it was no one’s fault.”
“Stop with the explaining!” He flung his hands into the
air. “They want to bury us. I’m telling you, they were behind that damn
freeboot. They’re against us.”
“Against us!” echoed Ken from off camera.
“I’ll talk to Nora,” I said.
Father began laughing so gutturally at first I thought
he was retching. “Oh, boy! That’s a big mug of flush
water!” Turning to his guys, he said, “We’re saved! He’s going to talk to the
pud-girl for us. He’s going to have her go tug on her daddy’s trousers, and
he’ll fix up everything!” Then he leveled a stare at me. “You’re dumb,” he said
sadly. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I thought you wanted to become smart!
Your tutor has taught you dick spit!”
I wanted to scream at him, but that would mean loud had
won. “I am not your son,” I enunciated. “I’m not a Rivers anymore.”
With a big roll of his eyes, as if I had to be fooling,
he said, “Come on! You don’t have a choice there!” Then he leaned in, bumped
his nose against the lens, and left a greasy spot. “If you want to get all
quiet, and still, and grey, and whatever … fine! But you are Michael Rivers.
You have your duty so get your ass home! Get ready for your damn publicity
date, and that’s it.”
I pushed the off button as hard as I could and managed
to get the screen to shut down. To the driver, I said, “Full speed,” and an
instant later, the acceleration pushed me back into my seat.
It felt over. I was no longer Hiro Bruce Rivers’ son. I
was no longer Michael Rivers, and I no longer had his worries. The only thing I
felt was the anticipation of seeing Nora. Of inhaling air she had breathed, of
touching her face, and gazing at her with my grey eye.
Then the car began to slow again. “No!” I said, “don’t stop. Speed up!”
“Sorry, sir,” was all the driver
said.
“Keep going!” I switched to the next seat and jabbed a
finger at the screen. An instant later, I saw Father. Now he held a glass of
that horrible sweet, black, fermented carrot liquor he liked. “Let me go!”
“Oh, you’re going,” he said, as he tilted the glass and
let a glob of the stuff ooze into his mouth like tar. After he struggled to
swallow, he said, “And if you’re out, then you’re really out!” His foot flew up
at his screen and it went black.
I asked the driver to continue to Europa-1, but outside,
I could see the baffle brakes open up and the air began to howl. “Please,” I
begged, “for me. For Michael Rivers, please don’t turn around.” Red and yellow
emergency lights began to spin all over the car. A siren, like a slide whistle,
sounded and a deep voice repeated: Warning—remain in your seat for safety.
Thirty seconds later, we had come to a stop. I turned
and looked behind, afraid another car was coming. I didn’t see anything, and as
I looked around at the enormous flat lands that spread out on both sides and
the road that split me down the center, I started to feel a strange dread. I
was no longer on my way to see Nora, but I also felt that something else was
about to go terribly wrong.
On the monitors, I watched the driver get out of his
cockpit at the front and come around to the side. I’d never seen a car stop on
the
My driver was a short man with watery eyes and gentle,
worn fingers. He wore the blue and orange RiverGroup uniform. The awful blue
pants, with a long, padded, orange codpiece that snaked down the right leg,
were leftovers from a previous product show—a costume hand-me-down. With his
head bowed, he said, “Master Rivers senior says you must leave.”
“Leave?”
“Step out of the car.”
I wanted to laugh. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Shaking his head fearfully, he said, “I’ll lose
everything, sir.”
Pushing myself up, I stepped to the threshold. The
direct sunlight felt like it would caramelize my skin
in a minute. While I didn’t want to get out of the car, I wasn’t going to call
Father and plead. Besides, stepping onto
the
I landed awkwardly and fell into my driver’s arms.
“Excuse me!” I stepped back and straightened my jacket and tie. Standing on the
road’s white octagonal tiles—that had never been anything but a blur before—I
found I could no longer see into the slubs. The orange safety walls on either
side blocked the view. And although the road stretched to the horizon in either
direction, the feeling was claustrophobic even with the sky and the blaring sun
overhead. After a second, the ventilation fans hidden in the shoulders of my
jacket turned on and kept me comfortable.
“There!” I said into the interior so Father could hear
on the system. “I am out, but now I’m continuing to Nora.” I turned to ask my
driver for help getting back in, but he was heading to the pilot’s door.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do we have a step or something?”
He climbed into the small round opening at the front and closed the door.
“Hello!” I said, knocking. “I’m still out here!”
At the nose end, the car was ten feet tall. Halfway up
was a curved black windshield eight feet across and eight inches tall. Trying
to peer through it, I asked, “What are you doing?” The engines, which had been
idling, began to rev. Banging on the windshield, I
said, “Open the door! I’ll die out here.”
The car lurched forward, and I twisted out of the way
before it ran me over. As the big teardrop body taxied forward, I beat on the
side with my fists. “Stop it! Stop the car!” The vibrating surface felt like
sandpaper, but when the engines engaged, it slipped ahead like a big blue and
orange fish into the rippling heat.
“You can’t do this to me!” I screamed after it. A moment
later, I laughed because I had never fathomed that my driver would do something
like this, but of course, ultimately, he worked for RiverGroup and that meant
Father.
Glancing around for security cameras, I said, “Joelene,
can you see me? I’m on the
In the direction we had come, skittering headlights
appeared in the boiling heat. For a second I panicked then decided it had to be
Joelene. Or Father. Either way, I would be rescued from this reeking oven.
Although I saw emergency yellows blinking, the car was still coming fast. And
the sound—a high-pitched whine like a tiny but
powerful drill—was getting louder by the instant.
Terrified that it would flatten me like a mosquito, I
threw myself into the other lane and covered my head with my arms. As I
clenched my eyes, a blast of air flattened me against the opposite wall. An
instant later, I heard a tremendous crash.
Out of a murky, purple darkness, I woke. I was lying on
my stomach, nose flat against the burning tiles. My head felt like it was on
fire, and I could barely pull air into my lungs. My right elbow throbbed, my
neck was stiff, but I was alive.
In the distance, I heard the whistling of another car
approaching from the other way. Crawling on hands and knees, I scurried to the
far wall and covered up. As it howled past, I was smashed into the corner, then
whisked up, and tossed across the tiles like a piece of paper.
I didn’t black out, but landed on my back and slid for
what must have been fifty feet. When I came to a stop, I stared up into the sky
where the clouds spun around a center point. My head ached and my left leg felt
broken.
Thinking I heard another car, I pushed myself up and saw
lights coming from both directions. If I wasn’t run over, the opposing blasts
would rip me in half.
Ten feet away, I saw an orange tarp tied to the wall as
though covering a repair. If I ran toward it, grasped one of the ropes, maybe I
could somehow vault over. Although my legs ached, I got myself up and started
for it. After two steps, I swear a bone in my left broke, but I kept going.
As I neared the tarp, I knew I couldn’t jump over and
wondered if I should just fling myself at it in desperation. Then I saw that
the far end was loose and that the tarp covered an opening. Planting my right,
I clasped my hands over my head, and as if I were diving into water, leapt at
the hole.
The two cars whipped past at that instant and the sonic
boom shot me forward like a flesh and bones bullet. The plastic-coated fabric
smacked my face and wrenched my head far to the side. Then I was flopping head
over foot down a sandy embankment and couldn’t tell which way was up. I thought
it would never end, and then all motion came to an abrupt stop with a splash.
I lay in rank water that stunk of excrement and made me
want to retch. Sitting up, I expected to find fractured bones protruding from
my chest like a rack of lamb gone awry. And although my hands looked like they
had gone through a zester and were well seasoned with sand and grime, I was
okay. In fact, Mr. Cedar’s suit was clean dry. Of course, I had never been
sitting in sewage before, but I couldn’t believe how clean it was. Dipping a
sleeve into the goo, I pulled it out and watched the fabric shed the mud and
sewage like water on waxed steel. Surely, its strength had saved me.
Slowly, I crawled to dryer ground, collapsed, and caught
my breath. I had survived the fall. I was off the
Then I started to cry. Although alive, I was doomed. And
I wasn’t going to see Nora! So much for touching her hand, or
feeling the heat of her blood again. And so much for my declaration of
independence! Now I was nothing more than a hurting body sitting in sewage
somewhere in the slubs, waiting to die under the burning sun.
In Pure H issue seventeen, a nothing of a
salary man decided to become immortal. After an exhaustive study of his
options, he submerged himself in a geologically perfect bog and dies knowing
that his body will become a fossil in a billion years.
I heard voices and laughter. Twenty yards away, in a
muddy lot between what looked like abandoned warehouses, stood a dozen men.
Half wore ill-fitting silvery jackets. The rest wore what looked like shiny
white plastic bags. Their translucent khaki and brown pants hung like skirts.
Most wore belts of rope or thick leather. Many had hair on their faces and what
looked like purplish patches of skin.
All I had ever seen of the slubs were images on screens:
gangs of marauders in silver, whites, and beiges, the massive, dark factories,
the hordes of bugs, the wretched workers, the running noses, and the miles of
polluted cornfields.
The men laughed again. Then, I heard glass breaking.
Pushing myself up, I realized that the lower left pant
leg had become stiff and thick. It was like my suit had sensed that I’d cracked
a bone and turned itself into a cast. I’d heard of such things, but was
surprised that my tailor had outfitted me so.
Turning, I gazed up at the
Making my way back from where I had just come, through
the mud, wasn’t easy. I couldn’t put much weight on my left leg, and at one
point, my right sunk in so far I wasn’t sure if I could pull it out. What I had
to do was fall back into the gunk and slowly wiggle it free. Several times, I
stopped to rest and let what felt like white-hot embers of pain in my left
subside.
When I got to the base of the
After slapping the bugs from all over, digging dirt from
my eyes, nose, and ears and spitting the stuff from my mouth, I tried again. This
time I went slower, but my climbing had brought out so many waterbugs I spent
half my time flicking them off my arms and legs. When I got four feet high, the
earth let go again and half-buried me in a mound. Once I had pulled myself out
and cleaned off, I felt sick. I vomited blood, and knew I didn’t have much
time.
Turning, I watched the men. One had taken off his silver
jacket and was waving his arms about as if explaining something. The sleeves of his undershirt—if that’s what it was—hung to
his knees like long pillowcases.
The undershirt man began wrestling one of the others in
white plastic. They pushed each other back and forth and shouted. When the
plastic man fell, the others cheered. I feared they were going to start kicking
him or pummeling him, but a moment later the fallen man was helped up. They all
laughed as though it was fun.
They were people, I reminded myself. They weren’t unlike
me. They just lived in a different place and wore different clothes. Some of
them had to be friendly and polite.
Pulling myself out of the sand, I stood, and started
limping toward them, avoiding the deeper water and mud and muck. When I was ten
feet away, the one in his undershirt pointed at me. He had frizzy-looking light
brown hair, round, bloodshot eyes, a thin crooked nose, and a patch of oozing
purple skin on his forehead. Up close, I could see that his undershirt was a
ghastly nonwoven that looked as rough as unfinished oak plank. Just below the
neckline was a small, blue bug-looking thing with text below that read M. Bunny. Pointing
at me, he said, “I thought I recycled you!”
The others laughed.
I tried to smile, but felt instantly ostracized. One of
them in a silvery jacket pointed to my suit, snickered, and nudged the man next
to him. Another said something about my bride throwing me in the ocean and I
wondered if they knew of Nora. Pure H issue seven had copy that read: Mechanical
Man. Exquisite Oceans. After swallowing a knot in my throat, I said,
“Hello. I’m Michael Rivers.”
“Who?” asked the man I presumed was Mr. Bunny.
“First son of RiverGroup.”
“No!” said another. “What shitting team
you with?”
“He doesn’t shit. That’s why his jacket is that color!”
answered someone else.
They all laughed.
“I fell from the
“He’s the enemy!”
“He stinks!” said another, covering his nose.
“I used to dance,” I said, hoping they might know me
from my PartyHaus days. “I was on the
channels.” None of it seemed to register. Instead they giggled and pushed each
other like schoolboys.
“He’s ill and delusional,” said one.
“Could be high-fructose psilocybin!”
“Wait!” said Bunny, as he looked me up and down. “He
thinks he’s the one who dressed in gold.”
It was true. I had a twenty-eight-carat-gold outfit.
“Yes,” I said, glad he remembered if disheartened how.
Bunny stepped beside me, and as if introducing me to the
group, said, “You slubber idiots, it’s the evil banging-boy. In the deadest
jacket ever seen with his diseased face in need of serious recycling!” He got
them to laugh again.
I tried to smile to show that I didn’t mind, but worried
that no good was going to come of them. I wished I had blacked out in the mud
and suffocated.
“That’s not him!” said another, who had hair all over
his face. “That kid was the richest pill ever. He’d never be here.”
“Yeah,” concurred Bunny. Wiping
his dripping nose with one of his huge sleeves, he asked, “Who are you, and who
do you shit for?”
“I need to get back to the families,” I said, as a
ripple of fear, like gamma rays passed through me.
“I don’t want to hear any families!” The thing on
his forehead oozed a yellowish puss, and he smelled like rancid frying oil.
“If he came off the
“Satins will zap a slubber dead if you get up there,”
said one of the others. “They electrocuted my uncle. Half his body was burned
away. Couldn’t get anything for him.”
I retreated a step from Bunny
and tried to make eye contact with the other men. “Will someone help me?” No
one spoke. “I could assist you,” I suggested. “I know we’re supposed to be
foes, but I could have some clothes tailored for you.” They looked at each
other and laughed again.
“What’s wrong with our knits?” Bunny wanted to know, as
he primped his sleeves and smoothed the stiff spunlaid material over his belly.
“No, nothing,” I said, taking another step backwards.
“Sorry. Um … my family company keeps information … and … identity and …” Bunny
glared at me as if I wasn’t making any sense. My voice trailed off.
“Michael Rivers,” said a female voice from farther back
in the group. A short, chubby woman in red shorts, a sparkling red bra, and a
small, white plastic jacket stepped forward. Her hair reminded me of Mother’s
from last time—a stiff, multi-colored muddle shaped like a garden shrub—only
hers was so laden with tiny silvery trinkets, it sparkled and tinkled like an
enormous charm bracelet. Around her otherwise naked belly was a wide red
plastic belt with a large button in the middle. “I heard he’s getting married
to that Gonzalez-Matsu girl next week.”
“I was going to,” I said, “but there were
complications.”
“Complications!” roared Bunny. “There’s going to be more
than complications when they grind your ass into pâté and spread you on bunny
crackers!”
Everyone laughed except the woman. Instead, she peered
at me suspiciously.
“I am Michael Rivers,” I told her, and thought I
saw a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. I quoted, “The moment became her
life.” Her expression darkened, and I cursed myself for thinking she knew Pure
H.
Tilting her head to the right as if sizing me up, she
said, “You look like that boy.”
“If he is,” said one of the men, “he is a big pill.”
Bunny said, “Pay for all of us to do Kandi’s hole.”
“Shut up!” she snarled.
“I was playing!” he said. “Next time you’re at the
clinic, get a humor implant!”
Curling a lip, she said, “No more for you. Never again!”
“I was just joking!”
While the other men made cooing sounds, Kandi stepped
forward and asked, “What are you doing here, honey?”
“I don’t know,” I said, glancing at her belt. The thing
in the middle wasn’t a button but a plastic lid attached to her stomach.
She noticed my eye-line. “You want it?” she asked, with
a sly grin. “You have to wash, honey.” She licked her lips and smiled.
It felt like the cooling system in Mr. Cedar’s suit had
given out. “No, thank you,” I stammered, ashamed. I knew what it was: she had a
vagina implanted where her bellybutton had been. Back when I danced, some women
had it done, but it was terribly out of fashion in the cities now.
Meanwhile, the men were laughing at me again. Someone
had said virginity. Another said spilling Grandma’s gravy,
whatever that meant.
“Can’t you help me,” I asked the woman. “Please?”
“You got money?” she asked. “You with
Segu or Bunny or what?”
I glanced at the logo on the front of Bunny’s shirt, but
didn’t know what she meant. And since I didn’t carry any money, I didn’t know
what to offer. Touching my chest, I said, “What about my Mr. Cedar jacket?”
She curled a lip. “That thing?”
It was Bunny who touched the fabric. “Weird thing is,”
he said, “you’re covered with shit, but the knit is all sweet and pretty.”
While I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t an awful knit,
I thought better of it. “It’s self-cleaning,” I said, hoping it might impress
them. “It also has a temperature control system. My tailor is famous. He’s from
outside Seattlehama. It’s probably worth …” Since I had never directly paid, I
had no idea. “Maybe seventy-five billion?”
I saw green and red bits of food on Bunny’s tongue when
he laughed. “You’re a fucking round sugar pill. Stupid and
blank.”
“I’m not sure exactly,” I said. “My family buys them.”
His fist came at me in a blur and hit me in the gut.
Next, I was on the ground trying to get air back into my lungs.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, wiping the drip from his
nose. “I’m intelligent, disease-boy! And your ugly, gray, sick jacket isn’t
even worth a good shit.”
As the woman came to my side, she said, “You’ve got a
bad testosterone imbalance!” to Bunny.
“Fuck you!” he screamed, then opened a small jar and
tossed several tiny emerald tablets onto his tongue.
When the rest of the men teased Bunny, he hit the back
of the woman’s head and knocked her across me. As three others helped her up, I
saw that the lid on her belly had fallen off. Inside was a wrinkled daffodil of
purple and pink flesh. I turned away as she grabbed the lid and snapped it back
on.
“No looking,” said Kandi angrily. “That’s ten right there!”
“You contaminated whore!” said Bunny. “I’m taking him in
for recycling. You take all your fake cunts and get out!”
“Go have a cell storm!” she scoffed. From a beaded red
bag, she got out a pill and popped it into her mouth. As though it gave her
strength, she stood, and said, “Don’t get near me.” She grasped my arm, yanked
me up, and nearly dislocated my shoulder. I tried not to cry out. “Come on,”
she said, tugging my hand, “we’re going.”
“No, you’re not!” Bunny grasped my other arm and the two
of them played tug-of-war with me. I lost my footing, and when she let go, fell
face first in the mud.
Then I heard shouting and feet going in all directions.
Pushing myself up, I saw three large men dressed in orange satin skiing down
the sandy embankment where I had fallen. Family satins! I was saved.
The one in front, who wore a helmet with a gold visor,
hoisted a clear fashion rifle to his shoulder. He fired. An orange streak
zipped through the air. To my right, I heard a soft thud. Someone in the
distance screamed. Then it was quiet.
“Michael Rivers?” asked the satin in the gold visor, as
he stepped before me.
“Yes.” I coughed. “Thank you.”
Grasping me under the arms, he lifted me, and threw me
over his shoulder. From there, I could see Kandi face up in the mud. Blood
covered her implant. No! I thought, not her!
The
He wore white pants with little blinking blue dots all
over them, a red shirt with RiverGroup logos and fornicating bunnies, and a
tiny, frosty green vest that looked like it might properly fit an infant. His
current girl had orange hair, blue lips, and the sort of haughty, upturned nose
that he preferred. Her frilly, awful pink and green dress ended at her midriff
so the whole world could see the orange-painted treats inside her translucent
bloomers. I didn’t see Joelene and figured he forbid her.
The satin had set me before them on a wooden crate. My
whole body hurt. My right elbow throbbed as if it were shattered. When I wiped
my mouth, I saw a brilliant smear of blood on the back of my hand. And even
seated, I had trouble keeping myself upright. All I wanted was to be put out of
my misery.
“So,” said Father, “how’s things?” He laughed, winked
toward his ever-present film crew, and then nudged the girl who had become
absorbed with a tiny golden robot that lived in her navel. Seemingly annoyed
that he hadn’t gotten a big laugh, he said, “Hold this, spaceship!” and thrust
his glass at her. After glancing at the hole in the
Pointing at Gold Visor, I said, “He killed that woman!”
“He did not!” He stood and stretched his back. “Besides
she’s one of those stupid bellybutton whores anyway. That’s like so old!”
Then he turned to the right, held his chin with a hand, as if trying to look
philosophical or letting the camera soak up his profile. “What we’re doing—and
I’m saying this because you don’t seem to be catching on—is
we’re talking about family. And we are a family. I’m the dad; you’re the
son. It’s a natural thing for us to be at odds at times. It’s
how it goes with fathers and sons.” He glanced at the girl. She nodded weakly.
“And as I see it, the funny thing is, we’re the same in so many ways. I know
you don’t see it, but I do.”
“Is she really ok?”
“You used a fuckin’ tranquilizer?” he asked the satin.
“Sir!” Was he replied.
“There!” said Father. “Anyway, my dad, Alexander Rivers,
built RiverGroup—”
“I’ve heard this a trillion times,” I interrupted.
“A trillion and one!” he screamed. “Anyway, Dad was a
fuckin’ genius. He invented the little box; he programmed it so it kept things
secret and secure and just right, and soon, everyone had to have one. And low
and behold, RiverGroup becomes so big the controlling families have to let us
in. We’re part of the system: we vote on the rules and kick ass when necessary.
We’re lard. Hard lard.” Shaking his head sadly, he
added, “He was so completely super-super smart! Do you even understand what he
did?”
I nodded, because I wanted him to stop. My head and
spine were throbbing. “Where’s my advisor?”
“You don’t need her! Be a man for once.” Squinting, he
paused. Then his eyes shot back and forth. “Right!” he said, snapping his
fingers, “anyway, Dad invented a way to completely cloak something. You could
send it from A and it arrived at B, but in the middle, it was gone. It was
vanished. It literally did not exist. Or you could put whatever you needed in the
box and no one but you could get it. No one. Ever. Completely and totally secure because until you looked
inside, it didn’t exist.” He laughed. “I think about how crazy genius that was
every single day.” He waved to Ken and Xavid and asked, “Right? Dad was a super
genius?” Ken gave two thumbs up. Xavid nodded vigorously, then
pushed up his huge amber glasses. “So, there’s money and power, and more money,
and more power and then … and then came me!” Holding up his arms as if to the
gods above, he screamed, “Then came Hiro Bruce Rivers!”
His arms flopped to his sides. His head fell onto his
chest. “I had to come along and fuck it all up. Even before the
freeboot shot you, I had done a pretty good job of ruining the whole
damn thing.” He shook his head. “I’m the biggest idiot in the world!”
“No, you’re not!” said the girl, with her bottom lip
sticking far out.
“Thanks,” said Father, coochie-cooing the girl’s chin.
Ken spoke up. “It’s a difficult time. Very
difficult time.”
“You’ve done exceptionally!” added Xavid.
“You guys are too much,” he said, exhaling a deep
breath. “I wouldn’t be here without you two!” He faced me and continued. “So
anyway, Dad croaks. We have him cremated, sprinkle his ashes on a bunch of
naked high school girls playing volleyball, and I take over. And since that
instant—since that exact instant—everything went butt rocket.” As an
aside, he added, “All you can argue is how fast.” Then he laughed at himself.
“So, my fabulous, giant, and genius point is,” he said, as if trying to regain
his momentum, “I’m sorry. I screwed up. But I can’t let the company turn into
fuck water. I want you to have something when I die, and merging with Ribo-Kool
is the only way.”
He had admitted that he was an idiot before, but it
never prevented him from being an idiot again. “Let’s go back to mkg.”
“Nooo!” he screeched like a baby. “Don’t say
those three letters! I hate them. And you know what the new rumor is? They’re
gonna make a big announcement soon, like they think they have a big booger on
their finger and want to show the world!” He turned to his girl, “Right, my
little pünta?”
She giggled obliviously and then pouted. “It’s stinky
out here.”
“Yeah … stinky!” he said inhaling deeply and
appreciatively, as if odor were his own invention. A second later, he dropped
to his knees. “Look here, son, I’m begging you. The company really needs your
help.” He smiled a big phony smile. “You’ll do it?
“No.”
“Do you see my knees on the ground? That means I’m
begging you. I’m really begging you!” After a beat, his shoulders sank and he
sat back on his haunches. “Fine. I grant you, it’s not
real begging. There is a difference. In real begging, I’m just on my
knees … you know … begging.” He scrunched up his mouth as if he thought he was
being clever. “Here, if you don’t do what I want, I’ll throw you over the wall
and let those slubbers slice you into hors d’oeuvres.”
My head hurt so much and felt so heavy I could barely
keep upright, but I did my best to stare back at him.
“But technically, with the knees on ground, it is begging.
And you can tell people I begged you if you want. Right,
guys?”
“Tell them your father begged you, Master Rivers! Big
deal, that!”
“Extra-extraordinary,” said Xavid.
“Anyway,” he said, “we’ve got an agreement, right? You
go on your publicity date with Elle—pretend to like the bitch if you have
to—but be nice, and at the product show you say good things, and smile for the
cameras. Do that and I’m not going to dump you back into slub hell. That’s our
full agreement.”
I glanced toward the hole in the
“You hear me?” he screamed.
I wished a
“You hear what I’m fucking saying?” The veins on his
forehead and neck bulged. “Say something! Open your fucking mouth and push some
air over your vocal chords.”
“No!”
Father snapped his fingers. In an instant, Gold Visor
picked me up by my ankles and held me over the
“Which is it?” asked Father. “Are you going on the date,
or should I have him drop your ass?”
Beneath me, I could see the sandy embankment, the rank water, the dirty square where the slubbers had been, and the body of the prostitute, where swarms of black flies now crawled over her face and bloody abdomen.
Five
Strolling down the long spiral hallway leading
to Mr. Cedar’s showroom had always been a cleansing and meditative retreat.
Usually, I spent an hour or two meandering down the polished glass path,
stopping along the way to push the buttons on the wooden booths and observe
motorized fabric strength or abrasion tests, or to study mannequins dressed
with his latest designs, treasures from his design past, or selections from his
burgeoning historical collection.
That day, however, I did not walk as the doctors had
advised me to let my leg heal. So, I rode atop an annoyingly bright green frog
scooter—a single steady-wheel chair and handlebars—that the medical staff had
given me. Motoring straight to the sugar maple and hammered palladium doors, I
arrived in one minute flat.
His assistant, Pheff, in a charcoal suit, textured white
shirt, and a cream tie, said, “Welcome, Mr. Rivers. He’s expecting you.”
Usually I met with my tailor in his gallery, where currently a dozen black
robot mannequins, each impeccably dressed in his latest creations, mimed the
actions of daily life—drinking coffee, strolling through indoor parks, and
posing for cameras, but this time, Pheff led me to a black door in back. After
entering a long code into a lock, he released several bolts and pulled it back
slowly.
I had not been in Mr. Cedar’s design studio before and
felt honored. The air had the tangy aroma of new fabric and starch. Down the
center were a dozen wide, flat worktables piled with bundles of material,
projects in various stages, boxes of notions, and all manner of tools. Along
the interior wall, I saw sewing machines, de-weavers, and other
muscular-looking equipment, some with large knobs, lit dials, and levers. The
exterior wall was some sort of a translucent material from floor to ceiling and
through it was a view of a hundred buildings. In the hazy morning sun, the
closest tower was indigo, the rest of the edifices faded to sapphire in the
distance.
“Michael,” he said, as he stood and stepped toward me,
“good to see you.”
Mr. Cedar was ten years older, an inch shorter, but
sturdier. His hair, which stood up in front, was black, but lately, from
different angles and in various lights, I’d seen
flecks of grey. He was one of those men whose looks often go unnoticed. He was
not stunningly handsome, and still had a faint scar down the middle of his
face, but once the eye found the details beyond the basic color, texture, and
silhouette, it could appreciate both his graceful features and the complexity
of his steel eyes.
Today he wore what I assumed were his work clothes—an
unconstructed charcoal jacket and matching pants, a soft-looking, off-white
shirt, and a silvery ascot.
“Your suit design saved my life,” I told him. “Thank
you.”
From the center of his chin grew a single black hair three
inches long. He twirled it between his index and thumb a few times. “You
exaggerate.”
Next, he gave me a tour of the studio, showed me his
de-weaving equipment, the design systems, water looms, and demonstrated a new
sonic, double-lock sewing machine.
“Impressive,” I said.
“We’re quite modest.” He then escorted me toward his
screens and sat. “I understand that you have another publicity date.”
“I do,” I said, instantly depressed. “At
the
Sitting up, I realized that I had slipped into a
daydream and not finished my thought to my tailor. With a futile shrug, I
added, “All I would like to do is share a single cream-coffee with Nora.” I
exhaled a shaky breath and tried to gather myself.
Twisting his beard hair a few more times, Mr. Cedar spun
around, picked a brush from a jar, and began working. I watched the sable flip
and dash over the glowing surface, and then glanced up at the overhead display
where the drawing appeared.
On a terracotta oval, the figure assumed a pose like the
models in Pure H. The left leg was forward, the foot, straight. The head
was turned far to the left so that the face was in profile. The left arm rest
on the hip, the right hung straight. As he worked, he added a tiny dot of red
between the thumb and the index, as if a drop of her blood remained. While the
suit was lean and elegant like always, it was boxier and darker. The lapels
were higher. The white shirt looked stiff like paper, and the patterned ash tie
gave an iridescent glow.
“There,” he said, and touched a button labeled cut and sew.
“It’s superb!” I said, not actually sure that I loved
it. The truth was it looked stiff and awkward, but I felt I didn’t want to
complain until I saw it in three dimensions. “What is the fiber content?”
“Moon wool and steel.” He
swiveled on his chair and pointed toward the back of the room. “Here we are.”
Assistant Pheff came with a dark charcoal suit draped
over his arm. “Fresh from the Fuji-Merrow cut-and-sew automaton,” he said,
handing it to Mr. Cedar.
My tailor checked the seams, the lining, and the
buttons. “Excellent. Bring Mr. Rivers’ form,” he instructed. Pheff did so, and
Mr. Cedar dressed it.
In fabric and in three dimensions, I saw just how
different the suit was. While all his previous garments had radiated an
uplifting elegance, this one was heavy, anxious, and hard. The fabric had a
ghostly metallic sheen and reminded me more of armor than the usual soft,
satellite wools. To emphasize that harder feel, the buttons were cut roughly
from slate, the collar hugged the neck as if the wearer were cold or
frightened, and the shoulders slumped as if carrying a burden. With a sad laugh
of recognition, I said, “Now I understand.”
Mr. Cedar nodded as if that was what he had expected to
hear. In a low drawer, he rooted through a dozen large brushes, scissors,
rulers, tape measures, and spools of thread. “Ah!” he said, as he pulled out
what looked like a green glass rod with a small orb at one end.
Stepping before the suit, he studied it as an artist
might gaze at a canvas and then began drawing on the right shoulder with the
rod. I flinched, fearing that he was going to color my suit green, but soon saw
that the glass rod made no mark. I had no idea what he was doing. Glancing at
Pheff, he seemed as baffled as I. So, the two of us waited for him to finish
and explain.
But when he finished, he stepped back, gazed for a
moment, and then told Pheff, “Turn off the lights. Close the blinds, and switch
off all the screens.”
The three of us were swallowed in darkness. Holding
tightly onto the scooter handlebars so I felt like I wasn’t drifting in space,
I waited for my tailor to speak, or turn on a light, or do something. I heard
nothing, but my own breathing.
Once my eyes adjusted to the tiny hint of light that
came around the door, I could see my tailor standing absolutely still before
the suit. While I couldn’t fathom what this was about, I knew he had a reason
and resolved to wait patiently.
Every few minutes Pheff cleared his throat, shifted his
weight, or crossed or uncrossed his arms. Mr. Cedar was perfectly still. His
arms hung at his sides. I couldn’t see if his eyes were open, but guessed they
were closed. He was meditating or making a silent offering of some sort. Maybe
he always did this when he finished a suit.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing, but
images of Father screaming and dancing, and the abrasive hues from the color
therapy screen, kept invading my consciousness like pollution. The more I tried
to push them away, the more elastic they became. Finally, I imagined Nora’s
gloved hands, the texture of the material, the precise cut of the fabric, and
the way it stretched over her knuckles. Gradually, the storm receded.
My body jerked, as if I was falling asleep, and I opened
my eyes. The room was still black, and I feared I had dozed off for a few
minutes. But there … on the right shoulder of the suit was a ghostly glowing
grey circle six inches wide. It was like a large round, clockwise brushstroke,
exactly like the logo of the SunEcho coffee shop.
Mr. Cedar said, “Lights.”
As the studio floods flicked on.
I clenched my eyes. Before I had a chance to ask what I’d seen, he told Pheff
to turn them off again, and we were plunged back into darkness. The eerie logo
was gone.
“Back on,” he said. As the lights returned, he turned
toward me. “Bright light bleaches visual purple in the eye.”
“I thought I saw the SunEcho logo for a moment.”
“You did,” he said, “but I painted it on with a dye almost
out of human perception.” He took the jacket from the form and put it on a
Chanel-Royce hanger. “You wanted to meet Nora for a cream coffee,” he
continued. “My idea is that she’ll see the logo and go to meet you. But we want
the message to be seen only by her, if possible.”
“Right,” I agreed. “My communication has been cut off.”
“So,” he said, “only those few people with a grey eye
will have the ability to see it. Of that group, only those who have a muted
décor, such that they would be watching your date in relative dim, will have
enough visual purple in their grey eye to perceive it. And from that very small
group, only those who are familiar with the logo of the Pure H coffee
shop will comprehend.”
As a cold shiver worked its way up my spine, I said,
“You mean … her.”
Later that afternoon, Joelene
and I were traveling across the
“The itinerary for the date has just been finalized,”
said Joelene. With a sigh, she added, “I tried my best.” Bringing over a
screen, she sat beside me.
I looked over the date itinerary. We were to eat at a
restaurant at the top of the
I glanced at Joelene, who pursed her mouth as if to say
that she knew how awful it was. After we ate dinner, one of Elle’s favorite
bands was to play, and we were to dance. I stared at the word. This was the
worst, and yet, the next thing was unacceptable. During the dance, we were
supposed to kiss, and the date was to end with one of my hands slipping between
her legs.
Tossing the screen at the floor, I said, “That’s
disgusting!”
She retrieved the screen and sat for a moment. “I’ll go
back and say we can’t do it from the kiss on. Your father’s not going to like
it.”
I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “I
don’t want to do any of it! Can’t we go back to mkg? Do I have to forget Nora?”
“No,” she said, gently, “of course not.”
“I’m going to see her!” I whispered. Joelene looked
confused, if curious, so I told her about the visual purple invitation to the
SunEcho in my suit.
Taking a small, powered magnifying glass from a pocket,
she stood and checked the jacket. “Interesting,” she said. Since she did not
have a grey eye, I didn’t know what she was seeing. Once she had snapped the
glass into its case, she said, “I applaud your courage and initiative.” Her
smile slowly faded, and she asked, “But how were you planning to get to the
SunEcho?”
“By car?” I asked, fearing it
wasn’t the right answer.
“Our new driver is surely not going anywhere but
straight to the promo-date wrap-party in Kobehaba where we are to meet with
your father.” An alarm sounded on one of her screens, she glanced toward it, then said, “I’m afraid getting to your meeting will not be
easy, nor without substantial risks.”
“Please?” I asked. “I have to see her and tell her that
this thing with Ribo-Kool is nothing … that it doesn’t mean anything to me. I
have to tell her.”
After nodding, as if she’d had an idea, she said, “I’ll
look into our options.”
“Thank you!” I said. “I have to see her.”
As she sat before her screens, she said, “Your father is
on channel five thousand.” She pushed a button and the monitor before me came
on.
I recognized the garish nautical set of the interview
show Celebrity Research Yacht. Across from the red-haired host, Milo
Holly, who was dressed in his whites and captain’s hat, sat Father in a green
paisley jacket with large holes cut so that his black-painted nipples showed
through like cartoon eyes. On his head he wore what looked like a rubber tire
tread of a hat, and from both ears hung miniature crystal chandeliers. Usually
his costumes were copies of his latest favorite Ültra band.
“It’s all about love,” said Father, the chandeliers
jingled like wind chimes when he moved. “We make a product we love for clients
we love. We do it to help all the families we love. It’s in everything
RiverGroup does. Love is our basic thing.”
“It’s all hate,” I complained, with a roll of my eyes.
“But with the RiverGroup security stuff in everything,
shouldn’t we be worried about freeboots jumping out all over the place?” Milo
Holly laughed as though it was supposed to be a joke, but he looked anxious.
“No!” said Father, smiling as though it were absurd. “Nothing to worry about. Everything’s right back to our
normal super-secure and super-protected … you know … normal.” He smiled again. Harder. “Really. Everything’s
perfect.”
“Maybe not perfect,” said
“RiverGroup has had a rough couple of days, but we’re
stronger than ever.”
“Oh yeah,” said Father playing along, as the audience
howled. “
“It was much worse that that! It was Fifty Layers of
Bitch.” Father leaned forward and popped
“We could tell,” said
Three men, dressed like Father and wielding chrome
guitars, tore down a city street, smashing car windshields, storefronts, women with strollers. One began singing and screeching as
though he were being cut in half. A chrome guitar hit him in the face. Then the
three men were bashing each other until they were covered with blood.
“That’s so Ültra you have to puke over the poop deck!”
gushed
Father’s head was still bouncing to the rhythm. “When I
was a kid,” he said, apropos of nothing, “I used to whack off and keep my semen
in a jar in the fridge.”
I let my head fall back. Did he have to say bizarre and
disgusting things like that to the world? Didn’t he care what they thought?
“Wait, Mom!” shouted
The audience roared.
Father, who seemed taken aback, as if he’d had other
plans for his story, said, “Yeah … coconut milk … funny! Anyway,” he flicked a
hand at one of his chandeliers, “I’m here to plug our new promotion date.
Tonight, eight o’clock, my son will be going out with Elle of Ribo-Kool. She’s
the hot granddaughter of Konrad Kez, that dead quadrillionaire. And she’s
blazing.”
“I’ll be watching,” said
“And,” continued Father, as the audience whooped and
hollered, “our big, new product show will be the day
after tomorrow. By then, I expect Michael and Elle will be fucking like a
couple of dirty, rabid skunks, if you know what I mean!”
“Oh, yeah!” said
“That’s enough of that!” I said.
“I agree,” said Joelene. “But let’s see what the buzz is
like.”
“Do we have to?”
“It’s background,” she said, as
she switched the channel to a show called Intellectuals and Soup. Two
women and two men dressed as if they were at a mad tea party sat around a
gold-leaf rococo table before steaming bowls.
A chubby woman, with warm brown eyes, covered in a mass
of pink soap bubbles and a wide, crimson-feathered hat, said, “I feel for Nora.
Her story is the modern tragedy. But I can’t believe Michael is so
fickle and shallow to be interested in Elle Kez.”
“Indeed,” said a man wearing an azure bowtie with the
wingspan of a goose and a matching striped morning jacket, “I’d not heard of
Elle Kez before, but she is simply dreadful. She can’t act, sing, or keep on
her God-awful clothes for more than three minutes.” Grainy, obviously stolen
pictures of her nude body flashed on screen. “She has none of the blood or
breeding of Michael Rivers or any real members of the families.
Granddaughter of the wealthy and admired, if dead, Konrad Kez or not, I say
she’s a degenerate prostitute with a dripping nose. And as for the firm she
represents, Ribo-Kool is an absolute nothing from somewhere in the dregs of
America-3. I can’t find any references to them before a week ago. How
RiverGroup could be planning to merge with them is completely beyond
understanding.”
“So,” said Pink Hat, lifting a spoonful of shellfish
bisque, “you think it’s another of the ever-increasingly sad and bizarre
schemes from his father, Hiro Rivers?
“I do,” said Bow Tie.
“My problem is,” continued Pink Hat, “if Michael doesn’t
stand up against his father this time, I’m afraid I’m
going to be quite disappointed. He is only nineteen, but it’s time he asserted
himself.” She stuck the spoon in her mouth. “Mmm!” she said. “So
creamy and divine! The salty shark semen is succulent, but it doesn’t
overpower the denatured rhubarb leaves either!”
“What is this?” I asked Joelene. “Who are they?”
“They’re better spoken than most channel talents,” she
said.
A bearded man in a brown beret spoke slowly, as if each
of his words were bubbling up from the center of the Earth. “If RiverGroup
can’t protect Michael, no merger of any sort will help them win back customers.
I am switching away from RiverGroup products. I believe the death knell has
rung.”
“If Ribo-Kool,” said Bow Tie, “has a real solution,
which I greatly doubt, it might stave off a complete collapse.” He tasted a dab
of his soup and said, “Oh! Such an incredible, rich yet pungent mouth-feel!
Like swallowing used velvet panties.”
I asked Joelene, “Do you know Ribo-Kool?”
“No,” she said. “It was quite a surprise. Your father …
and others … are difficult to predict.”
“I feel for poor Michael,” said another woman. She wore
what looked like an iron bra and an intricately carved glass bowl over her
head. “I was so sure he would finally lose his virginity with Nora. And I was so
looking forward to it, I’m embarrassed to admit
it.” She laughed and fogged the glass in front of her face.
Bow Tie dabbed the corners of his mouth with a matching
striped napkin and turned toward the glass bowl woman. “Must
we always,” he said, with a chuckle that made the wings of his bow tie quiver,
“lower ourselves with this sensational tripe?”
“I would love to lower myself!” said Pink Hat, angrily,
as a creamy drip undulated down her three chins. “I understand that Michael has
got a beautiful penis, as proud, strong, and pure as a wild Arabian!”
“Indeed,” said Iron Bra from behind her fogged glass, “I
have studied his dancing outfits from the rages, and he’s definitely bombastic
down there.”
I covered my face in embarrassment. They had to be
talking about some other Michael Rivers. Maybe the real Michael Rivers—someone
who I didn’t even want to know. “Please,” I said, “I
can’t watch this!”
“Just one more,” said Joelene, as she turned the
channel. Now two blondes stood nose-deep in a field of purple, violet, orange,
and canary-colored sunflowers. “Another backgrounder,” explained my advisor. “A Petunia Tune channel.”
“Elle Kez,” said one, in an airy singsong voice as
though she were reading poetry, “is the luckiest girl in the whole, big, wide
world!”
“I gabbed with her all this morning,” gushed
the other. “She’s in the capital city of
“What about her fashions for the date?” asked the first.
“You’re going to ’gasm when you see it! She’s
been working with her staff day and night.”
I laughed, and asked, “Who are they?”
She snapped off the screen. “Yes, it’s all dreadful, but
the point is, tens of thousands of channels are going on and on.” She massaged
the bridge of her nose. “Elle is getting a lot of attention.”
The news did not surprise me, but it did confirm my
fears. Leaning forward, I touched the cool fabric of Mr. Cedar’s suit jacket
and hoped that Nora would see the hidden message. It was the only positive in
this unfurling disaster.
Father’s face flashed on the screen before me, and I
jumped back.
“That’s what you’re going to wear?” he asked, making a
sour face. “I thought you were going to get an actual color.” To Joelene, he
said, “Didn’t we discuss blood red and chartreuse, or was I on slub drugs?”
“The silhouette is new,” said Joelene, her voice
congenial.
“He tears her skin from her face!” he sang,
stretching his mouth wide as though impersonating a bullfrog.
Once he had finished, I said, “This whisper of
footsteps …”
For just a second he stared blankly, then
he pretended to be happy. “Thank you! Wow! More Pure Hog, right?” After
a snort of a laugh, he said, “The world is actually in color. Like the sun is
orange. The sky is blue.” He inhaled and then bellowed, “And snot is green!”
“The soul,” I said, “is colorless.”
“The soul?” He looked off
camera. “Like he knows the soul!” After fluttering a
hand in the air as if to dispel what I had said, he continued, “Anyway, thanks
to me and my magnificent acting skills on that stupid Celebrity Research show
our stock is up fifteen points. And I’m calling to say that we need every
up-tick we can get. So, I was thinking, when Elle’s girly band plays, I want
some old Michael Rivers dance moves! Let’s see you—”
“No!” I interrupted. “I don’t do that.”
“Sheeeit!” he said, throwing up his hands. “Do you
understand the pressure here? This afternoon we had to sell off the last of the
RiverGroup real estate at shit prices just to finance this stupid promo-date.
We don’t own enough land to build an outhouse anymore. We’re borrowing against
everything we’ve got left. If this show doesn’t work, we’re in fuck-water up to
our eyeballs. So, we have to pull out the stops!”
“I don’t dance,” I told him.
He rubbed his face hard. “You need an immediate brain
transplant! You really do!” He turned as if complaining to Ken. “Stupid, fucking, wimpy-fashion, colorless, hairless ball-sack,
teenage bullshit!” With that the screen went blank.
“He’s a monster,” I said to Joelene. “I hate him!”
The screen turned back on. “I heard that!” snarled
Father. “I’m sitting right here, you dumb slubber butt!”
“Intense feelings are good,” said Joelene, before I
could react. “They play quite well in the media.”
Father froze for a second, as if he had not been
expecting that. “Good then. Let’s see some intensity tonight. If he won’t dance,
we’ve got to have more than the boring crap from the dates with the grey-snot
girl. I know,” he said, his eyes glowing, “rub some dick vomit on her spoon so
we can watch her eat it!”
The screen went black again. I tried to kick it, but missed and smacked my shin on a metal support bar. Momentarily, the pain obscured my revulsion and fury.
Six
I had been to the top of the
three-hundred-story
Not only had my clothes-iron-scorched acorn salad and
steamed elephant steak been sumptuous, but the décor had a definite Pure H
flair. The dining room floor was black, toxic osmium tetroxide. The walls were
tiled with human baby teeth, and the room was lit with a glass enclosure of
glowing-orange molten lava behind.
Once Joelene and I had exited my car, we took the
elevator to the three-hundredth floor and we were ushered to a green room. On
the screens were a dozen channel feeds. One show was interviewing the
SpecificMotor 505 chef. Another channel discussed the restaurant’s design. Many
were speculating on Elle’s fashions for the evening. Another discussed and
dissected the stolen nude photos of her. Still another
reviewed RiverGroup’s stock collapse, products, and chances for recovery.
I stood before it all for several minutes and felt
discouraged.
Joelene turned them off and then handed me several
screens. “I’ve written up some conversation notes for you. Elle is quite
loquacious, so you probably don’t have to say much but memorize this. And,” she
said, handing me another, “this is a list of the bands she likes and might
mention. Below that are the channel shows she watches. And I included a
run-down of the fashion magazines she reads. Mostly it’s Petunia Tune,
but she also likes CuteKill, Ball Description, and Puffy
Fluffer.”
“Those are terrible!”
“Regardless,” she said, “look over the info. I’ll see if
I can work out a way for us to get to the SunEcho.”
“Do you think we can?”
She took a breath. “Sneaking out of the MonoBeat, with
all the security designed to seal us in, is quite problematic.”
While she returned to her work at her screens, I looked
over the dialogue, but it was all just silly references to Elle’s awful fashion
magazines. Mostly, I worried that Joelene wouldn’t find a way to get to the
SunEcho and Nora.
Soon, my makeup and hair artist,
“I agree,” she said, “but we have no choice.”
I said, “Thank you.”
“Who do you think?” I asked, pulling back from her
glowing scissors.
“It has to be the other families. They’re jealous of you
and RiverGroup.”
“The report established that it was freeboot
retaliation,” said my advisor. “But we thank you for your opinion.”
“I’m not allowed to speak my mind?” asked my
hairdresser. “Is that what you mean? Are you censoring me? Is that what you’re
doing?”
“I didn’t say that or mean to imply that.”
“We are not exactly pleased either,” said Joelene, “but
we are trying to cope. Could we please …” She mimed cutting scissors, but
“I should have gone after your father when I was young,”
she said, turning to me again. “I could have seduced him, when I had my full
powers.” She shook her abundant chest at me—it sloshed back and forth like warm
gelatin. “I would have grabbed him by the ears, and gotten his attention. You
know what Hiro Bruce’s problem is?” asked
“I agree with you,
Her face bloomed. “Thank you, sweet Michael! You’re a
darling.” With that, she worked my hair in record time, applied a tanning
solution to my face, did my eyes with a natural shade, and colored my lips.
Once she was finished, she kissed me on the cheek, and told me she adored me.
My dresser, Stefano, helped me with my clothes, as he
had done my whole life. His eyes were dark and small, his hands were as dry and
rough as cigars, and he always called me Master Rivers. As I stood before the
iMirrors, he sewed on my underwear, put socks on my feet; then
helped me into my pants. On top, he put on an undershirt, then a gen-cotton
shirt with an attached collar. Once he had gotten it tucked in and secured, he
held out the jacket, and I slipped it on.
Mr. Cedar’s suit looked even better now. And it didn’t
appear as downtrodden as I had originally thought. There was a power inside of
it, as if instead of my body, it cloaked some sort of potent machine. Once
Stefano had knotted my tie, he said, “You look excellent, Master Rivers.” Once
he had gone, Joelene looked me over.
“It’s one of his best,” she said. Then she got down on
the tiles, and scratched at the floor. I watched dumbfounded. It was like she
was imitating a cat. She found a trapdoor a foot square and lifted the lid.
I asked, “What are you doing?”
Sticking her hands inside, I heard what sounded like
typing. “This building is all about liquid crystal,” she said, pointing her
chin toward the back of the room. The light green wall popped as if it were an
enormous soap bubble—exactly as I had seen demonstrated when we toured the
MonoBeat on opening day.
Behind the wall was a utility space filled with pipes,
machines, and bundles of wires. In the center was a tube four feet wide with a
giant toilet-bowl-shaped opening and a cut-off valve above.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, afraid a
freeboot was trying to sneak up on us.
“No.” I heard her type again. The wall was restored like
a closing camera shutter.
A second later, we heard a knock on the door. “We’re
ready for Mr. Rivers.”
My knees felt jittery as I
walked down the entrance platform toward the table in the spotlight at the
center of the restaurant. It wasn’t because of the spectators in the stands, or
the billions of viewers on the channels, or the sad prospect of this ridiculous
promotion date, it was that I feared I wouldn’t see Nora because it was too
difficult. Joelene had opened the wall behind the green room, but only found
pipes, tubes, and wires, not a way out. I hated to imagine that Nora would see
the message on the suit, go to the SunEcho, but that I would have no way of
joining her.
A deep and booming voice said, “And here he is, girls …
the greatest dancer the world has ever known, nineteen-year-old Michael Rivers
of RiverGroup, looking very handsome in a sexy and scorching black suit!”
It’s not black, I thought to myself. It’s charcoal.
A waiter, in a military-cut navy jacket, pulled back my
chair. Once I sat, he scooted me toward the carved, bituminous coal table. A
moment later, a woman in a three-piece, coffee-colored bikini, took a bottle of
Frix’s Krill Kola Thirst Crusher from a golden tray and placed it before me
with efficient moves. When I picked it up, a blast of music played and the girl
did a dance and sang, “The renewable kola, with the outlaw taste! Yeah, Frix!” She smiled a toothy grin, and then dashed off.
Then I sat there before fifty channel cameras, holding
the bottle and feeling like a performing seal in a circus. For a second, I
considered throwing it down and leaving. The problem was, Father would probably
take me back to the
So, careful not to obscure the smiling monkey logo with
an ill-placed thumb, I took a tiny sip. The stuff was salty and fishy, but not
too terrible that I couldn’t eke out a simulacrum of pleasure.
“He likes it,” said the house voice. “Who wouldn’t, with
the taste and power of krill? And now, look who’s joining him! It’s the sexy
and scintillating Elle Kez, of Ribo-Kool, granddaughter of that powerhouse of a
capitalist, Konrad Kez!” After a fun-filled and faked laugh, the voice added,
“Don’t they look blistering?”
I saw her shoes first. They were furry pink pumps with
tiny silky flowers around the sole. Her white socks had smiling pink cat faces.
Her skirt was a ruffled and partly shredded carnation and plum polka-dot thing
that looked like it might have belonged to a run-over flamenco dancer.
So far, it was basic Petunia Tune stuff, but when
I looked up, I was taken aback. First of all, while her tailored grey jacket
was clearly a nod to Pure H, the silhouette, material, and notions were
all wrong. It looked more like concrete than a warm or lush fabric, and it was
so pinched in the middle, I doubted she could breathe. Stranger yet, around her
wasp waist, on a metal belt, ran a flock of tiny motorized hens that chased a
red rooster. They orbited her every ten seconds, and while I guessed this was
some reference to my fame, and maybe her and others’ pursuit of me, I had no
idea why it was there.
Beneath the jacket, she didn’t wear a blouse. Instead,
her chest was covered with pink fur that matched her pumps. On her neck the fur
gradually disappeared, and from there up, she had been made-up like a cat,
complete with a triangular black nose, white whiskers, and a few freckle-spots.
Orange eye shadow over-emphasized her blue eyes.
On top of her head sat a massive, curly, golden wig with
the texture of sea foam, three feet high and five across, shaped like an
enormous bloated banana. Coming from the top were two three-foot-tall, pink
rabbit ears. Between the ears were three small dioramas. One was the black,
Pantheon-shaped PartyHaus. Another was a curve of
Once she saw that I had taken her in, she turned around,
and from somewhere in the folds of the back of her skirt hung a wide, quilted
beaver tail, the size of a swollen tennis racket. When she had spun all the way
around, she began to sing to me in an off-key falsetto. “My heart is a
daffodil! Oh, daffodil affection … daffodil affliction. Quivering
daffodil of my love!” She then laughed and asked, “You know that? It’s so
petunia. Don’t you think? It’s by The Pipsqueak Beaver-boys. I just
love them. You like my tail?”
“Your tail …” I repeated, unable to conjure anything
positive. “Um … well … it’s … um … ”
“My heart is a daffodil!” she sang again louder and
farther from key, as if she didn’t know what else to do. “Daffodil
affection! Daffodil affliction!”
“Hi!” I said, standing, hoping to make her stop singing.
“Hello! How do you do? Yes, I saw your tail!” I made
myself smile. “Please, sit down.”
“Okay!” she said, relieved. “I know I sang that
already!” She grit her teeth as if she felt bad.
“Sorry! I guess I’m a little nervous.”
From the left shoulder a teeny puff of green smoke
caught my eye. Could it be her clothes had caught fire? I was saved! Our date
would have to be cancelled! I was about to mention it, but then, a smoky red
dot came from her other shoulder. Then more rose into the air. Her jacket was
making smoky polka dots! After all the other atrocities of her costume, I don’t
know why that one—which actually struck me as half-clever—discouraged me most of
all.
Two assistants of hers, with the same makeup, dressed in
tight and shocking-pink jumpsuits, ran in, plucked the miniature hens and cock
from her belt, then supported her wig and ears as she
eased herself into her chair. A hulky man in blue short-shorts placed a can of
Frix’s Cinnamon Monkey Thirst Bomb beside her elbow. Elle didn’t notice.
“You probably thought I was just a Petunia Tune girl,
but really, I’m so much more. I’m into Ball Description, and I’m really
into CuteKill and a bunch of other of the bestest
magazines.” She struck a pose, with one hand on her wig and another
highlighting her cat face. “So I wanted to show everyone how mature I am. And I
know Pure H, too!”
“Yes,” I said. “I see. So, it’s … um … good to meet
you.”
“Thank you!” she said, batting her eyelashes. “I don’t
have to tell you, but you’re every girl’s dream. I mean, everyone I know
wants to keep you in her petunia dungeon!” As she laughed, she leaned forward,
but then craned her neck backward to keep her wig and ears from tipping.
“Listen,” she whispered, “if this thing falls get out
of the way.”
As I gazed up at the mountain of hair, I pictured it
tipping over and flattening me like something from a cartoon.
“Awe!” she cooed. “Your smile is so cute!” After a
squeaky giggle, she said, “Let me tell you all about myself because I am so
fascinating. Okay first, I had my big coming-out party yesterday. It was the
biggest and bestest party ever. I had so many cute bands; I could have
died. I even had The Pipsqueak Beaver-boys!” A second later she frowned. “You
listen to them, don’t you?”
“Pig Squeak Believer Boys,” I confirmed. “Sorry, I’m not
familiar with them.”
“No!” she laughed, as if I had made a joke, “The
Pipsqueak Beaver-boys! They’re those adorable guys who dress like beavers, and
… you know … have their little buns hanging out.” She giggled in falsetto.
“They’re so hot and precious! I can’t wait for them to sing tonight. They’re
music is the bestest ever. They played
at my party and it was the bestest ever.
You had to see it on the channels!”
“I must have missed it.”
“Well,” she pouted, “I’m into whatever you’re into.” She
leaned forward an inch, so that her jacket revealed more of her furry cleavage.
“You like hair?”
Glancing down at my
hands, I felt like I was the one exposed, and it reminded me of the feeling I
had when I woke from my heart attack and found myself before thousands of fans
screaming to know if I had a catheter, bed sores, or brain damage.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Please, don’t worry!” she said,
seemingly distraught. “It comes off with a solution. I can be hairless if you
like that. Or I could eat anything you want. I’ve eaten all sorts of weird
things for boys who like that.”
The cooling fans in my jacket came on, as I felt
embarrassed for both of us. “No,” I mumbled, “… um … no, thank you.”
As if panicked, her eyes darted toward her assistants
off camera. When she focused on me, she said, “So, my family’s
company—Ribo-Kool—is just the best ever! I know the critics are down on us, but
the critics are stinky anus stupids! When we get together, we’re going to show
those critics, aren’t we?”
The flirting was over, I presumed. Now we were supposed
to suggest that our family companies merge. “Yes,” I said, following along
because that seemed the easiest thing to do, “our families could work
together.”
“That’s a pink petunia idea!” she gushed. “I’m so
excited! And I think RiverGroup is just the bestest
ever. I mean, you guys were number one, once. Right?”
After clearing her throat, she sat up, and said, “I just have to thank all my bestest of fashion friends.” She began
naming all her designers, stylists, sewers, shoppers, trainers, dieticians,
cooks, and doctors.
Finally, the waiter saved me from hearing who breastfed
her. She ordered Frix Corporation dried marine turtle parts stuffed in
moon-dried raisins—a polka-dot dish. I requested the Frix Corporation satellite
lamb roasted over butternut, redwood, and the seamed silk stockings of one
hundred depressed housewives.
After the waiter left, the house voice said, “Stay tuned
for the hot and naughty conclusion to this historic date between the two most
powerful companies in the security system market, RiverGroup and Ribo-Kool.”
“And we’re clear,” said the director, the same one
making Father’s documentary. He had long silvery hair and wide, feverish eyes.
He must have known how fast he talked for he reiterated everything. “Guys,” he
began, “you’re beautiful. Beautiful. But help me out
here, okay? Help me out! Please, stay on the script! You remember the script?
We’re flirting. Flirting! We’re in love. We’re loving and fun.”
Elle’s two pink assistants, like a pit crew, ran to her
side, fixed her hair, repositioned her ears, and repainted her nose. As they
worked she complained to the director, “I thought I was totally petunia!”
“Oh, you’re beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful! Don’t
forget the script. Stay on the script. That’s all I was saying. All right,
honey?”
“I was speaking from my heart. My heart is a daffodil!”
she tried to sing.
Joelene put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “You
look wounded.” She sounded more amused than upset.
“I feel like I punctured a lung.”
“Try to have fun,” was her only advice.
“Remember the script!” shouted the director. “Let’s
clear. Clear everyone!” Joelene left, and after they applied another puff of
the pink foundation to her forehead, Elle’s people ran off. “Aaaaand … we’re
back!”
“I met that Nora at a fashion convention,” said Elle,
without missing a beat. “She didn’t look at me, and she was just so full of
herself. I’m not against her, but everyone on the channels was talking about
how dull and ugly she is. What I don’t get is her natural hair! Hello?
She looks like a nasty slub girl.” Although she tried to smile prettily, as if
to temper what she’d said, I saw a droplet of undiluted malice in her eyes.
“Everyone on the channels has been gushing gallons of nectar about me. And I
wouldn’t be surprised if I get twenty times her measly ratings.”
That was definitely not on the itinerary, and until that
point, I had tried to imagine that at some level, she was much like myself—a soft creature forced into a hard role. But once she
had insulted Nora, I couldn’t pretend to sympathize or even care. And as she
continued on how to improve RiverGroup, I closed my right eye for several
beats, and as if I were killing her, or at least
neutralizing her style, bleached the pink from her face, the purple from her
cat nose, and the gold from her wig.
Our meal was served, and at least the food was
wonderful. My satellite lamb was perfectly roasted,
savory, beautifully plated, and I could taste a hint of sensual despair.
Once the dishes were cleared, the pa said, “And now, let’s watch these
two love-dogs dance while the super fabulous Pipsqueak Beaver-boys sing their
number one hit, Palpitations 4 U, My Kitty-Cake Pussy-Willow Girl.”
Six men in furry brown outfits, with huge buckteeth,
quilted tails, and their aforementioned backsides exposed, took turns singing
to us. Each had a shtick. One cried. Another beat his chest adamantly. The
short one played with his hair. The last massaged his buttocks as a cook might
knead dough. Their accompanying music was nothing more than an ocean of syrupy
strings and an unflinching beat that sounded more like dynamite than a drum.
Fortunately, Elle had so much trouble balancing her wig
that our proposed dance didn’t happen. We wound up standing side by side, her
assistants holding up her hair.
Fireworks filled the air with smoke, and as the Beavers ended their song with big bucktoothed smiles, the swimwear Frix soda man and woman returned, each cradling plastic baby monkeys in their arms. The crowd had been quiet until then, but must have been prompted to stand and cheer. And, as the silver-haired director called to us to smile and wave into the cameras, the house voice said, “There it was, folks … the greatest, most magical and romantic evening in the history of corporate mergers!”
Chapter 7
During the post-date interviews, the reporters
were supposed to just ask about us and our feelings, but kept questioning my
experience in the slubs, RiverGroup’s troubles, the stock collapse, the exodus
of customers, and the like. When someone finally asked Elle what she thought of
me, she threw her arms around my chest and applied her tongue to my ear. The
director thought that the place to end and yelled, “Cut!”
Minutes later, Joelene and I were back in the green
room. Slumping in a chair, I swabbed the furrows of my ear with a sanitizing
towelette. “Did you hear how vicious she was?”
Joelene got onto her stomach on the floor, opened the
trapdoor, and stuck her hands in. After she had entered a code, the back wall
disappeared. Standing, she picked up a bag, stepped before the wires and tubes,
and ran her finger over a shiny metal label on the biggest pipe.
“Joelene,” I said, worried she had lost her mind, “what
are you doing?”
Pulling a handful of folded material from the bag, she
tossed it to me and said, “Put that on.”
When I shook the velvety thing open, it was an ugly dark
maroon jumpsuit with a gathered waist, a hood, feet, and attached mittens.
Worst of all were the closures down the front. “Snaps?
What is this? I don’t want to wear this.”
As she began to slip into a matching outfit, she said,
“Protection from the cold. Come on, we don’t have much time. Put it on!”
“What are we doing? Are we going to see Nora?”
“Yes.” She pulled the hood of her outfit over her head,
and then she grasped the large, metal sprocket—like a steering wheel—and with
great effort began turning it. The wide toilet-bowl-shaped opening began to
fill with a clear, viscous liquid that reminded me of corn syrup.
Glancing at the maroon jumpsuit and the pipe and back, I
said, “I am not getting in the sewer!”
“This is the building’s cooling system.”
“Whatever it is,” I said with a nervous laugh, “I’m not
getting in. Besides, I don’t know how to swim.”
She turned to me. “The elevators are on the system. The stairs—which would take us a couple of hours to climb down—are
on the system. Even jumping off the side—as foolish
and difficult as that would be—would be on the system. If you want to
see Nora, this is it.” Since I hadn’t moved, she took the jumpsuit from my
hand, tore open the front so that the dozen snaps sounded like a drum roll, and
then held open one of the pant legs. “And don’t worry,” she added, “we won’t be swimming. We’ll be falling.”
I didn’t like her joke, but stepped into the first leg.
“I’m not going to die, am I?”
“What kind of a question is that?” She eyed me. “No! The
SunEcho isn’t far. I’ve charted a course that will get us within one block. We
just don’t have much time.” After I stepped into the other pant leg, she pulled
the velvety material up and over my suit and began snapping the front closed.
Then she dug into her bag and handed me what looked like a yellow diving mask.
“Put it over your head,” she said, showing me how it worked.
I gazed at the open
pipe and the strange, convex bubble of thick liquid that looked like a clear
pillow. “You sure about this?”
She grasped the metal wheel above, pulled herself up
onto the rim, and straddled the opening. “It’s just bulk metallic water.” The
phrase meant nothing to me. From a pocket, she produced a small spray bottle,
and spritzed the surface, which turned dull like beach glass. Then she began
stamping on the stuff with the force one might use to try and kill a steel
cockroach.
Because she looked ridiculous, I laughed, but obviously
the stuff was tough skinned, like a tomato. After several kicks, her foot
finally punched through with a heavy glop. Clamping her teeth around the
air-supply mask, she lowered herself in and as she did, the liquid made wet
gurgles and burps. Holding onto the rim of the pipe with one mitten-covered
hand, she turned, and reached her other toward me. She spoke, but with the air
supply in her mouth, the only word I thought I understood sounded like Ora.
“I don’t like this,” I said, backing up.
“Ora!” she said louder. “Ome
ere!” Pushing herself up a foot, she shot her hand toward me, and
grasped the front of my jumpsuit.
“No!” I cried, as she began to pull me toward her. “Joelene, stop!” Although I tried to twist away, her
mitten-covered grip was as strong as iron. I got my hands on either side of the
pipe and, as though I were doing a push-up, tried to keep her from dragging me
in. The jumpsuit stretched over my neck and shoulders. My arms began to vibrate
and I could feel my muscles lose power. The stuff stunk like gasoline and
bleach. “Okay!” I said, giving up. “Stop! Let me put
the mask on!” When she let go, I slipped the mask over my face and bit the
mouthpiece. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I could breathe with it on. The
plastic tasted sour and the goggles made everything distant and hazy. Peering
at the thick fluid, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to get in. There had to be
another way!
Joelene, as if impatient, grasped the front of my
jumpsuit again and dragged me in. Next, I was falling head first in complete
darkness. I screamed into my air supply, but the stuff absorbed all sounds. I
hated to be going head first, but there wasn’t room to turn. It was like I was
a human bullet in some strange slime-filled gun barrel.
A tiny green light shot by and for a split second
illuminated the shiny walls and my mitten-covered hands. Two beats later another
flew past at a hundred miles per hour. Craning my neck, I saw Joelene ahead in
the next green strobe. She was two feet farther down and was covered in a
slipstream of elongated bubbles like jade scimitars. Her head was down as if
trying to see where we were going. In the next flash, she gazed up, as if
checking on me.
How long were we going to fall? And what would happen
when we hit bottom? Would we be squashed? Would they find us days later flat
and frozen?
We were never going to get to the SunEcho. Nora would
wait and wait. Finally, when the news of my death came, she would throw herself
to the floor, devastated.
Trying to wave at Joelene, I wanted to signal her to
stop this and get us out of here, but in the next several green flashes, she
was gazing down. Then she extended her arms above her as though she were going
to catch me.
Next, I smashed into her. Only, somehow we didn’t quite
touch, and when I flipped over backward, and fell onto my back, I was dizzy and
shocked, but not hurt. Maybe the liquid had insulated the impact.
We weren’t in the pipe anymore, but in a large tank,
fifteen feet wide, illuminated with a grid of tiny blue lights like a geometric
sky. The liquid was thicker, heavier, and colder down here, and it took all my
strength just to suck air through the mouthpiece.
Joelene stood and put her masked face before mine. First
she nodded, as if to confirm that I was alive, then she pointed left.
I shook my head. She pointed adamantly, but I shook my
head harder.
Grasping my arms, she hoisted me up and carried me over
her shoulder. I hit her back because I hated her and wanted her to get us out
of this. After a few steps, she pushed me into another smaller pipe, and that’s
when I panicked because I didn’t want to fall again.
Trashing, I tried to
kick her and get her away from me and then I don’t know if my air ran out, or
if I just didn’t have the strength to inhale. I got one hand to my face and
yanked the air mask off so I could scream, but the thick goo filled my mouth
and tasted sour and acidic like an uncoated aspirin. I began to gag and then
instinctively inhaled and sucked in more of the cold lava.
I was dying. My chest was beginning to spasm. An
adrenaline terror started in my heart and shot toward my hands. Flailing my
arms and feet, I felt like I had milliseconds left.
Meanwhile, Joelene put
one hand on my right shoulder, the other atop my head, and pushed me down. She
was killing me! My body began to cry for air. I was frantic. My throat and
lungs burned.
Below, my feet touched a distorted glowing yellow
circle. She shoved me again. I squeezed through an opening and all around was
blinding light. For a second, I was inside a blob, like a solid balloon. With a
rubbery snap, the gunk tore itself from my throat and chest and all around, and
dropped me onto a hard surface. I retched, and then sucked in air.
The warm, perfumed air smelled like fresh apples. I
inhaled deeply, coughed, but could breathe. Then I sobbed a few times, because
for a moment I had been sure I was I going to die.
Above, I heard wind and gently bubbling water and
decided it was on a sound system. A couple of feet away, sat a glowing pink
commode, and on a shelf was a vase of violet dahlias. This was a woman’s
bathroom.
Above was a hole torn in the white ceiling tiles. Inside the open end of a three-foot-wide pipe was the
shine of the gunk and a few distorted blue lights. A dark shape appeared in the
liquid and then a foot encased in clear goo emerged. I rolled away as Joelene
was first lowered in an elongated orb of gel. When it snapped away, she fell to
the floor.
Pulling off her mask,
she laughed as if relieved. “We made it.”
“I hate you!” I told her. “That was terrible! I couldn’t
breathe.”
Scanning me up and down, as if afraid, she asked, “Are
you all right?”
“No! You almost killed me.”
“Can you move?”
“Yes,” I said, sorry that I hadn’t broken my skull.
“Come,” she said, giving me a hand up. “We must hurry.
Put your goggles on.”
“I’m not going back in!”
“No,” she said, “now it’s your disguise.”
I hesitated for a second, then pulled the mask over my
face, but didn’t breath through the tube. We stepped
from the bathroom into a long dark hallway. At the end of it was a
twelve-foot-tall wooden door. Joelene pushed it open.
Then we were on the street in boiling hot air filled
with meat smoke from street vendors, hundreds of intense perfumes, and a note
of rotting trash. Hundreds of people passed in all directions—salarymen in
cheap cherry, peach, and lavender suits, shoppers with bags and boxes, tourists
in night swimwear and headpieces, partiers in sheer garb, and dating couples
holding hands, kissing, or leaning against the walls feeling each other. I saw
“’Is way,” said Joelene, enunciating her words like
someone might while holding a cigar between their teeth. As we wove our way
through the masses, we must have looked like two service men on their way to a
biohazard and no one recognized me. A block down, we crossed the street, ducked
into an alley, and soon came to the unmarked side entrance to the SunEcho.
Joelene said, “We only have a minute.”
I paid no attention as I started to unsnap the jumpsuit.
“No!” she said. “We’re back on the system. Don’t take if
off.”
“I can’t see her in this!”
“You have to.”
I hated to have come this far only to look this bad.
Grasping the metal bar, I yanked the door open and marched inside.
The SunEcho had been in existence as long as I had been
alive. The story goes that not one customer came in for a decade. Then, one
day, a tall, lean man entered. He wore a long, dark grey jacket and had his
face covered with charcoal net. After he drank a cream coffee, he sat and
scribbled in a notebook for several hours. He then paid and never returned.
Exactly a year later, a new magazine, called Pure H, appeared on the
newsstands. The magazine soon sold out as fashion devotees discovered the
brilliant writing and imagery. And in that issue was a story about a disfigured
but disguised man, who visited the SunEcho, worked in his notebooks and went on
to publish a copy magazine. Since then, the waiting
list for the SunEcho was more than six thousand days.
Although Nora and I didn’t need reservations, we were
not going into the main sitting room. As was the custom, when
one suggested to meet at the SunEcho that meant the auxiliary room.
It was a square room thirty by thirty feet at the back
of the shop. Why it was there, or what purpose it served wasn’t clear, except
to the owner, one assumed. The walls were covered with a warm,
double-warp wool broadcloth. Underfoot was a mosaic made of scrap metal from
100
The room was packed and warm. As my eyes adjusted to the
dim, I saw Nora two feet from me. She wore a long grey coat buttoned to the
neck. Her hair looked darker, her nose flatter, and something was odd about her
eyes. For an instant, I worried that her father had hurt her—beaten her or
given her some terrible and disfiguring drug. A second later, I realized it
wasn’t Nora.
The two women on either side of her resembled Nora, too.
The one on the left had her eyes, but her lips were too thin. The other had her
chin and neck, but her eyes were the wrong shade of mahogany. The three of them
looked me up and down and sneered.
As my eyes continued to adjust to the dim, I saw that
the room was filled with young women all Nora’s height, with dark hair, and
olive complexions. Each was similar to her, but wrong.
My heart sank. Nora wasn’t here! She hadn’t come because
she had hated the date. And she hated me. She didn’t want to see me after I had
even pretended to flirt with that cat-bunny-beaver girl. And now instead of
her, I was in a room filled with Pure H imposters and Pure H
pretenders. I felt heartbroken and angry, and was about to tear off my goggles
and throw them to the floor, when I noticed someone on the chair.
She too wore a long grey coat, but its material was smoother and more refined than all the others. And her loosely hanging hair had been brushed not combed and was at once perfectly ordered and yet free and unfussy. Most of all though, she was the only one not glaring at us, not trying to guess who we were, or trying to decide if we belonged. She alone waited patiently and calmly.
Eight
When I stepped before her and saw her face, I
chided myself for thinking that any of the others even slightly resembled her.
And it wasn’t just that her skin was softer and smoother, her features
perfectly symmetrical, her eyes a deeper achromatic black, but that she seemed
at once stronger and more vulnerable than all of them put together.
She had been gazing forward, with her smoky-colored
eyelids half closed, as if meditating. When I stepped beside her, first she
looked up with fright, but then as she peered into my eyes through the mask,
warmth filled her. Standing, she put her arms around me, nestled her mouth
close to my ear, and said, “A week of green rain.”
Her words completed the full quote from our first date.
And she was right, we had become that dead couple in Pure
H, who lay side by side, their hands an inch apart. Only it wasn’t rigor
mortis or chance that had separated our hands, it was the world … it was our
families.
I held her to me for the first time and discovered how
our bodies matched, how her eyes met the height of my lips, how my arms
surrounded her and exactly fit the curve of her back. Squeezing her to me, I
inhaled the sweet sandalwood of her hair.
Then she removed the goggles and air supply from my
face. I felt silly for having left it on and was about to say so, when she
tilted her head to the right then touched her mouth to mine.
Like an enormous bubble, the universe collapsed, and the
only thing that remained was the two-dimensional plane where our lips met. Hers
felt warm and creamy, like butter frosting. Then, I don’t know which of us
began moving first, we were circling our lips against each other. A tension like the winding of a miniature watch spring begin
to build. We rubbed our lips together, and then we were pressing our bodies
firmly against each other. We opened our mouths, and just as I felt like I
wanted to kiss her hard, or bite her, she pulled back.
Her nostrils were flared, her lips, swollen. She was
breathing through her mouth. And several errant hairs fluttered in front of her
eyes. One stuck to her moist forehead. With a husky breath, she said, “Stop.”
I wanted the opposite like I have never wanted anything
and moved toward her, but she pushed me away. The world returned. I had
completely forgotten, but we were in public—in the SunEcho auxiliary room.
Fifty fake Noras were glaring at us, several were muttering to themselves, and
all of their cheap perfumes filled the air with a saccharine and impatient
musk. A shameful heat covered me. And as I let my arms fall to my sides, I
could feel the ventilation system in my suit struggle to circulate air beneath
the velvet jumpsuit.
“Michael,” she said, as she stroked the side of my face
with one of her dove-grey gloved hands. “Another time.”
She looked down shyly.
“Excuse me,” said Joelene leaning in, “ten more
seconds.”
“Already?” I asked, dismayed.
Leaning in, Nora put her mouth beside my ear. I thought
she was going to kiss me goodbye, but she said, “Someone is trying to keep us
apart.”
Her words surprised me. “Who?”
“Someone close.”
Her words caused a shiver to pass through me. “Could
someone close be keeping us apart?” I asked my advisor.
“We can’t stay on the system,” she said, glancing toward
the camera in the corner of the room. “We must go.”
Nora said, “Be careful, Michael.”
I wanted to grasp her, maybe even pick her up and run. I
wanted to take us somewhere where we would never be found.
“It’s time,” said Joelene.
Nora hugged me again. She said, “Light is falling.”
All the way to Kobehaba, where
we were to meet Father for the wrap-party, I sat slumped in my
“It was Father,” I said, not looking up. “He’s trying to
keep us apart. He hates what I’ve become, and he hates her.”
“As yet,” Joelene said, while monitoring her screen,
“there’s no evidence to support that theory.” Her eyes met mine. “However, I do
not mean that it can be completely ruled out either.”
“He did it!” I said, sure. “This is his revenge for when
I quit dancing. He made it so I couldn’t be with Nora. He did this!”
Joelene didn’t reply. A moment later, her eyes latched
onto something on one of her screens. She turned it toward me and increased the
volume. Intellectuals and Soup was on again.
“Unequivocally,” said Bow Tie, “it was Michael Rivers.”
They played a system video of Nora hugging me in my
goggles and jumpsuit from the SunEcho only minutes before.
“They found us?” I asked, surprised.
“Impossible!” scoffed Iron Bra from behind her glass
bowl. “I’ve just checked the history from the channel cameras in the elevators
and the stairs of the MonoBeat. He wasn’t there. He could not have gotten from
SpecificMotor to the SunEcho in time. What we’re seeing is some sort of
theater.”
“I don’t believe so,” said Pink Hat thoughtfully,
stirring a new bowl of soup. “It is Michael. And that’s Nora. Just look at the
sensuality of their kiss. It’s palpable and pungent. The kind
of kiss that connects the spheres, the spirits, and the glands. They are
sharing a final moment together. I feel sorry for them and their companies.
Certainly with that power, the union of RiverGroup and mkg would have been strong, authoritative, and commanding.”
“When she took your goggles off,” said Joelene, as she
snapped off the screen, “your disguise was compromised. I’m not surprised we
were discovered, but I thought it wouldn’t be for a day or two.” She shook her
head slowly. “We should have found a place off the system.” Leaning back on her
chair, she touched her fingertips together, and said, “This is trouble.”
A moment later, the car entered the garage of the
building where the wrap-party was, and as we headed up in the turbofan-powered
elevator, operated by a woman in a violet hoop skirt and bonnet, I asked, “Does
Father watch that Soup show?”
“Doubtful. But other channels will surely be speculating
soon, so I suggest we make this as short a visit as possible.”
“I’m telling him that I know what he did,” I said. “He
let the freeboot shoot me because he hates me.”
“Michael,” she said, quietly, “we don’t have evidence to
prove his involvement. I appreciate your ambition to confront him, but don’t
advise it now.”
When the bonnet woman pulled a huge iron lever and the
doors opened, I had to squint and cover my ears. Screeching music played and
patterns of light flashed in all directions. The floor vibrated an agitated
violet. All over the place, screens played over-saturated snippets of Ültra
epics. Screaming men … knives cutting through flesh … stone
clubs bashing stuffed animals, fruit, and medical specimens.
A hostess with heavy dark eye makeup, white lips, and a
tube in her right nostril led us in. All the swirling colors, signs, and
screens were giving me a headache. I closed my colored eye, but still the place
blinked and vibrated like a hundred electrical storms.
Partiers, in all manner of Ültra costume, waved and
remarked as we passed.
– She’s hotrod!
– Loved her furry
tits!
– Bereave her
tail!
– Billion times
better!
– Subtract her
and abstract her. Turn her and burn her!
Keeping my eyes straight ahead, I ignored them and their
words and ridiculous lyrics. Meanwhile, I wondered if Joelene was right. If I
did accuse him, all he would do was deny it and scream louder than I ever
could.
We came before a large, round table made out of a fresh
redwood stump with the RiverGroup logo carved on top. Father sat with his back
against the window that looked out onto the sparkling lights of the port city.
His chocolate cake Afro was fluffier than ever. Around his neck he wore a green
ruff, and his enormous jacket was covered with wet hunter-green paint. Stuffed
in the breast pocket was what looked like a cut of raw pork and a black rubber glove.
His girls sat on either side. A blonde wore blue foil. A
redhead was covered with tar. One wore blinking sequins and nothing else. A
brunette looked like the Frix bikini girl from the date. The last was decorated
with yellow icing like a birthday cake. The word unhappy was written
across her chest with blue.
“There’s our cunt Romeo!” said Father. As he stood and
started around the table, he pointed left to right. “These are my girls: Conni,
Penni, Hunni, and Benni.” He stopped, pretended to suck a thumb, and spoke like
a lisping baby, “All the wittle spaceships of cunt!” He guffawed so hard
I feared he might cough up his spleen.
As he finished coming around, I noticed that whatever
his jacket touched got smeared with green paint. “Close-up!” he said to his
film crew, then proceeded to throw his arms around me.
“Get off!” I said, pushing him away. His jacket left
stains on my hands, but not on my suit.
“The stock is up!” he said, pumping his fist. “You were
still dull, but she was great, right girls?” The women rang in with approvals.
“If you don’t mind,” said Joelene, “we would like to
retire. We’re both very—”
“What’s the matter?” interrupted Father. “You just got
here! Come on! Have a drink! We’ve got some very lard car-rot juice.” He
then put his face before mine and breathily sang, “Welcome to my fermented
intestinal garden!”
His breath was like compost. “You smell!” I said,
leaning back.
Father thought that hilarious. Whipping around he said,
“Ken-baby! O keeper of digits … what were the magical and astounding ratings?”
Ken, who sat beside the birthday cake girl, glanced at a
small glowing screen and answered, “The magical and astounding ratings were
twenty-one point seven, sir!”
“Twenty-fucking-one-point-fucking-seven!”
howled Father. “Is that a number!”
“That’s a number!” said Ken.
“It’s exceptional,” said Xavid, who I hadn’t noticed
before. He was dressed in his usual black seal pelts, his huge, amber glasses,
and a peak of white hair on top of his head.
“Five times higher than any of your dates with Nora,”
added Ken.
“There are mitigating factors,” said Joelene. “The
shooting caused a spike in—”
“And look here,” continued Father, ignoring her. He
pointed to a man who sat on the near side of the table between a woman with
some sort of chrome medical-looking device that held her mouth open to expose
her teeth and gums, and a nude man covered head to foot with what looked like
olive oil and broken insect legs. “Let me introduce a real glazed ham:
President, ceo, and Chief of Long
Dickness at the distinguished company of Ribo-Kool, Chesterfield Kez.” Father
laughed and shook his shoulders like he was doing an odd, little dance. “He’s
Elle’s uncle.
Without shaking his hand, I said to Father, “I refuse to
see Elle again.”
“Hold on!” bellowed Father, with a laugh. “Family meeting. Be right back!” Grabbing my arm, he dragged
me across the aisle in front of a row of flashing and whirring gambling and sex
machines. “Shut your hole!” he snarled. “We’re cooking with lard.
It was a joke. It was insane. “No,” I said, “I can’t! I
won’t!”
“You’re going to!” he said, stretching the “o” in to and
covering my face with his vile breath. “You’re marrying the spank skank and
that’s it!”
I wanted to smash his face. “You had me shot!” I fired
back.
“Did not!” said Father, sounding exactly like a
five-year-old.
“I know for sure.”
“You do not!” He laughed. “That would be massive
stupid—even for me!”
“You had the freeboot shoot me
because you hate me. It was someone close.”
Father glared at me as though I were crazy. When Joelene
came to my side, he asked her, “What lies are you telling him?”
“I have not told him
any lies, sir.” She tried to smile, but I could see she was annoyed at me.
“Understandably, given your histories, he assumes that you were somehow behind
his misfortune.”
“I would never do that. It doesn’t make any business
sense!”
“Sir,” continued Joelene, “I’ll take Michael home now.
He needs rest. We’re very excited about the ratings, but we—”
“Ass missile!” he growled at her. “We have to keep
moving!” Lowering his voice he said, “They’re all against us! mkg is trying to take us down. Now,
this date saved our holes tonight, but we’ve got to use this momentum for the
product show.” He kept having to unstick the armpits
of his paint-covered jacket as he moved and gestured. “You know what we heard
just ten minutes ago? mkg is
planning to announce their new product the same time as our product show!” He jabbed
a finger in my chest. “Don’t accuse me or RiverGroup. It was them! That grey-sucking Nora and her shit-faced dad. They shot
you! That makes sense.”
“There’s no evidence of that, sir,” said Joelene.
“I’d find evidence if I had time to look for it. That
whole thing is a joke. How did that fucking freeboot
get out of there? And how did he shoot Michael in the hands and feet from where
he was supposed to be? Answer me that?”
“Again,” said my advisor, obviously keeping her
exasperation in check, “I’m not saying that I have all the answers, but the
family commission has stated that a single freeboot did the shooting. And no
evidence was found that mkg was
involved.”
“Commission com-fiction!” he spat at her. “mkg is on the commission! Besides, all
the families hate us because we have them by the balls. They’ve been waiting to
fuck with us for years.”
“That’s all conjecture,” said Joelene.
“No, it’s butt-tastic truth!” he declared. “mkg planned it, did it, and now they
think they’re going to be number one!”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“It was them!” screamed Father. “They’re a thick layer
of butt snot on toast!” He shook his head solemnly. “They think they’re going
to win, but they’re not! We’re gonna screw them right back.” He threw his arms
out. “We’re gonna have our big merger news, and an even bigger merger wedding.”
“I’m not marrying her!” I said. “I will only marry
Nora.”
“Did I ask you a question?” he snarled. “No! So don’t
fucking talk. And besides, I banned her name. So don’t even think it!”
“Nora!” I said into his face.
The tendons in his neck tightened. He stepped an inch
before me. “Dare you to repeat it.”
Into the rancid fog of his breath, I said, “Nora.” I
stood my ground even as my eyes began to water from both the rotten carrot
stink and my own fear.
Red blotches appeared across his face and neck. His
right shoulder rose and I was sure he was about to backhand me. At the last
moment, though, he turned to his film crew and screamed. “Stop!
I can’t have my boy talking back like this! Turn it off, and get outta my
face!” As the two men backed away, Father stepped before Joelene. “Doesn’t he
understand his duty to RiverGroup?” Before she answered, he asked me, “Why do
you think I worked so hard to have a son?”
I said, “I wish you hadn’t.”
“Well, I did!” he scoffed. “And believe me, I’m real sorry
now.” He paused, and then his lower lip began to vibrate. Jamming his fist onto
his lips he tried to control himself, but he was crying. “Fucker pies!” he
said, his voice shaky.
While the threat of violence before had been scary, this
really frightened me. I hated his screaming and ranting, but the idea that he
was going to break down was worse. I stared down at my shoes, ashamed.
“I tried so hard,” he said. “So hard.
All I want is your help with the company. We’re in real bad shit—the squishy
kind of shit with whole corn kernels.” He took a deep breath and swallowed as
if to down his unhappiness. “I gave you life.”
“But now you’re taking it away.”
“If there’s no RiverGroup, there is no life.
Don’t you understand?”
I shook my head. “Without her, I have nothing.”
He smacked his face with his hand, clenched his eyes,
and said, “Get outta here! I can’t take this. I can feel my hemorrhoids acting
up!” Pointing at Joelene, he said, “Take the idiot home and teach him
something!”
“Sir, let me reassure you that—”
“Excuse me!” interrupted Ken, who had run from the
table. “Sorry, Mr. Rivers. Bad
news!” After glancing at Joelene and me, he said, “Just heard it on the
channels.”
“What now?” asked Father, as if he wanted to collapse.
Gritting his teeth, his blue eyebrows practically
knotted together over his nose, Ken said, “Please don’t be mad at me.”
Father rolled his eyes. “You raccoon
rectum! Just tell me!”
Ken cupped his hands over Father’s ear and whispered. As
he did, Father’s eyes got large. “No!” He stood back and glared at us. For a
second, I thought he was going to laugh. “They didn’t!” he said, shaking his
head. “No. It’s impossible! They couldn’t have. I completely forbid it!”
Ken shrugged as if he couldn’t explain it and backed
away a step.
Father’s face turned the color of salmon. The veins on
his forehead throbbed. “Fucktastic bombastic!” he finally bellowed. “You saw her!
You met our enemy!”
“Sir,” said Joelene, shielding me with an arm, “please!
Listen to the facts. What happened was that we—”
Father’s right fist shot forward in a karate chop of a
punch that slammed her breastbone. A loud and horrible puhh came from
her as she fell backward, crashed into a vending machine, and crumpled onto the
floor. “I should kill you!” screamed Father. “I should have them give you an
ant enema. We’re facing the biggest crisis of all time and you help him do
this!”
When he turned to me, I saw a ripple of fury like I had
never seen before pass through his face. It was like a tectonic shift beneath
his skin. “I’m killing someone today,” he said to me, his voice raw.
Crouching beside my advisor, but keeping an eye on him
so he didn’t try and bash me over the head, I asked her, “Are you all right?”
As she huffed to try and get air back into her lungs, I
think she said, “Yeah.”
“First we pull a super twenty-two rating!” said Father,
tugging at his Afro like he wanted to rip it from his skull. “We’re hard lard
and now another disaster!” Pointing at Ken, he said, “Get back to the table and
tell
“Anything!” said Ken. He ran back to the table.
Joelene was breathing easier now, but her eyes shined
with tears, her mouth was scrunched into a frown, and her teeth were tightly
clenched. She was glaring at Father as if she were going to burn a hole through
his chest.
“You are officially fired from RiverGroup,” said Father
to her. “I’ll get you kicked out of the families and sent to slubberland where
they’ll eat your guts alive.”
“It was my plan!” I told him. “I did it.”
“Dick-tastic!” he sneered as he rubbed his hand, as if
now he felt the impact of his punch. “You’re like the worse son in the history
of the universe.”
“Just leave her alone!”
“Hiro!” said Xavid as he approached, “look what you’ve
done to your ’fro!” With three long, hornbeam
chopsticks, he began to fluff Father’s Afro back into shape.
“They saw Nora!” Father whined. “It’s a betrayal of
everything RiverGroup. Most of all it’s a big fat slap in my face.”
“You need to control this,” said his hairdresser,
quietly yet sternly, as he chopsticked Father’s Afro.
“I won’t do anything if you fire Joelene,” I threatened.
With his hands on his hips, Father glared at me. “You’re
no help anyway!”
“Hiro,” said Xavid, “remember what I said. We need him.
You need to use him.”
“He just mocks me or makes me look like an idiot!”
“Joelene didn’t do any of this. It was my plan,” I said,
ignoring his ridiculous hairdresser.
“Michael,” Joelene said, “maybe it’s time that I
should—”
“No!” I told her, hating even the suggestion that she
should quit. The thing was, she didn’t look so much angry or hurt, but
resolute.
“She can’t leave me!” I said to both Father and her.
Looking her in the eye, I said, “I need her. She’s like my real family.”
Joelene suppressed a smile, and then patted the back of
my hand.
“Butt vomit!” said Father. “What is the matter with you?
She’s your damn tutor! Not your family. Don’t you know anything?”
“Well,” I asked, thumbing toward Xavid, “who is he?”
“A damn good and loyal RiverGroup
officer!” A drop of sweat rolled down Father’s forehead. When he wiped
it with the sleeve of his jacket, it left a green smear.
“Now look what you did!” said Xavid, scolding him like a
little boy. As he got out a silky cloth and wiped Father’s forehead, he leaned
in and said, “I think you need to make it very clear to them what you expect.”
“Yeah!” agreed Father. A beat later, he asked, “How do
you think?”
“What about your friend in Europa-13?”
Father narrowed his eyes at his hairdresser. “Great idea. A threat!”
“Exactly!”
“Let us go back to the compound,” I told Father.
“Don’t think so! We’re taking a drive.” With a wink toward Xavid, he added, “I’ve got a rotten, horrible, stinking, evil bastard I’d like you to meet.”
Nine
From the outside, our
Every surface was upholstered with a different material
so it looked like a cheap fabric sampler. Unlike the muted, indirect lighting
in my car, here a hundred blue and orange pinpoint lasers scribbled Ültra
lyrics everywhere at high speed. While it covered everything in a senseless,
vibrating surface, occasionally a phrase lingered in the eye. Unite our
diseases … Engage booster fuck … My tender gender fatality.
When I stepped in, I
found that the floor was covered with an unpleasant super-shag rug that
crunched like dried leaves. Scattered among the yarns was a vast assortment of
garbage, including empty carrot liquor bottles, star-shaped pills,
phallus-shaped pills, fist-shaped pills, skull-shaped pills, red and black
dildos, some of which were twitching like dying insects, and several bits of
what looked like bloody fur. I figured it was the debris of a debauched
car-party while he watched the promotion date.
My car had only four seats with consoles; his had a
dozen chairs all the way around. He and Xavid sat on the far side, the film
crew set up in back, and Joelene and I were closest to the side door.
Once we were on the
“Some rotten garden juice?” he asked us.
“Thank you, no,” said Joelene.
Once he and Xavid had made a toast, he turned his glass
upside down over his mouth and let the goop slowly drop in. “Thick!” he said,
once he had finally swallowed it. For a while he turned on some painfully loud
Ültra song and sang along. Joelene and I covered our ears. The phrase Snuff
Your Mind flashed onto my leg. Instinctively, I swatted my hand at it as
though it were a mosquito.
Then the music was off. “We have to start having rages
again,” said Father. “Dance parties every night! That’s what we did when we
were number one.” As quickly as he had been excited, he slumped, and said, “Our
clients all hate me,” and stared at the black residue in his glass.
“They don’t hate you,” said Xavid. “You’re a tough
businessman. They admire you and fear you.”
Father laughed. “They hate me because I’m a terrible
businessman. They think I’m so stupid they can take me down. But I’m not going
to let them.” One of the lasers etched Behold … The Immaculate Bruise
across his face.
The car exited the
“Joelene,” I whispered urgently, “what’s going on?”
She just said, “Shh.”
“No, sir,” intoned one of the blue
satins outside. “Off-limits to the families.”
A moment later, Father was giving them bottles of carrot
liquor and patting them on the back; soon we continued into the slubs.
Outside it was mostly just black. Only the occasional
reddish electric light or fire illuminated anything. Along one road, I thought
I saw what looked like thousands of broken and bent bikes. Down another were
piles of garbage, with women and children picking through it.
Father was going to leave me out here, I figured. My
only chance was to keep away from the slubbers until morning and then try and
find my way back to the cities. Before, my mistake had been talking to them.
This time I’d hide. I’d stay quiet.
The truth was, I doubted I
would survive the night, so I said goodbye to Mr. Cedar, to Pure H,
Joelene, and most of all, to Nora. I hated that I’d never see her again, but at
least she would know that I would rather die than surrender my love.
The car made another turn; I saw people huddling around
a bonfire. In the orange light, a naked girl danced. Farther along, I saw men
fighting. One was hit in the face with a rock or a bottle. It knocked his head
back with such force that I was sure his neck was broken. He dropped to the
ground.
For several minutes I could see nothing. We made three
more turns and then the car came to a stop. The engines whirred as they slowed.
The laser lights stopped scribbling their madness all over us and, for an instant, the world was still and peaceful. The side door
slid open, and in the faint moonlight, I saw dilapidated two-story cinderblock
buildings.
“We’re off the map,” said Father. “Way
off the map. So don’t make a wrong turn ’cause there’s no security,
or satins, or anything. There’s nothing here but bad, bad shit.”
“The odor is unbearable,” said Xavid.
“I’ve smelled worse!” said Father, as though it were a
joke.
We stepped out onto gravel. The humid air reeked of manure and rotting flesh.
“Sir,” said Joelene, covering her mouth as if she were
about to gag, “this is already a stern and frightening warning. I’ll take
Michael back to the compound, and we’ll work on an apology press release.”
“Shut your holes!” he barked. “Come on.” In the distance
I heard screams like someone was being torn in two. His film crew wheeled
around to try and find its source. I didn’t want to see, and pulled the lapels
of my jacket up over my neck. Farther away glass broke, and I heard a crazy
laugh.
Father stopped before a black door and knocked. While we
waited, he said, “Creepy, huh?”
Three knocks came from the other side. Father adjusted
his jacket on his neck, then his sleeve, like a hack
magician about to perform, then knocked seven times.
The door opened an inch.
“I am Melina Gwendalarra,” said Father.
“You mean Kristina Suggs?” asked a groaning voice from
inside.
Father winked at his camera. “No, I’m Osmond Miditulip.”
The door opened and we entered a pitch-black space.
“Follow me,” said a dark shape.
Father started forward. I held onto Joelene’s shoulder
as we shuffled into oblivion with the film crew lagging behind. It was so dark
inside, my eyes began producing spirals and checkerboards as if I were asleep or
had been plunged into an ocean of ink. The floor turned sandy and wet. Then, we
were walking through several inches of water and the sound of the splashes
reverberated as though we were in a stadium-sized space. We made a turn to the
right, the floor became firm and dry, and we began up an incline.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shh!” hissed Father.
“The humidity,” complained his hairdresser, “it’s too
much.”
Father shushed him, too.
Finally, we turned a corner and entered a small room. A
single fluttering candle illuminated the space. The walls glistened with
condensation. The air smelled of wet dirt and algae. Across the floor were
curled wood shavings and what looked like the bones of small birds. I saw a
waterbug three inches long dart away. And in the middle of
the room on a wooden stool sat a man in a white loincloth.
He appeared to be a burn victim. His skin looked like poorly cast rubber cement and had the flat tone of
flesh-colored paint. His mouth was little more than a lipless hole, and instead
of a nose, he had only one oblong black nostril. His eyes were green,
bloodshot, and angry. I glanced away in disgust.
This is what he wanted me to see—a victim of torture. I
heard stories about employees who had been punished with needles, fire, and
poisonous fruit. Is that what he was going to do to me? I hated to think so.
“He’s got no name,” said Father. “No house. No family.
No job, no numbers, no papers. He doesn’t even have a bellybutton. Nothing!” To his crew he said, “Get a shot of his belly.
It’s as smooth as his back.”
As they did, Xavid leaned in and said, “I feel sorry for
him.”
“Don’t!” said Father, sharply.
“He’s a freeboot. As free and as boot as they come.
And he’s pure evil.” Father folded his arms and gazed at the man proudly.
“Didn’t think I knew any freeboots, did you? Officially, these things are the
enemy. And they really are. We work against them every day. But, if
you’re selling a solution,” he puffed out his chest and smiled at his camera,
“you gotta make sure there’s plenty of problems to go
with it.”
Although the freeboot scared
me, this was about RiverGroup. It was about how Father made sure the families
needed the security we sold. I asked, “Can we go now?”
“Go?” asked Father, unfolding his arms. “Fuck pudding!
We just got here. Why don’t you ask him a question?”
After glancing at the man’s sorry, distorted face, I
said, “I don’t want to.”
“You should.” He grinned. “He’s real important to you.
He’s your motivation.”
I probably should have understood, but didn’t. My
advisor held her head down as if frightened. “Meaning what?”
“Look at him,” said Father, all smiles. “He’s just
waiting for my order.”
“To shoot me?”
“No!” said Father, rolling his eyes. “From now on, if
you see Nora, if you talk to her, or even think about her, then I give the
order, and he finds her, and he kills her!”
In the next instant, two things happened. I felt a cold,
black hate pour over me like subzero tar, and then I lunged at Father with the
idea of shoving his Adam’s apple through the back of his neck. After I had
started forward just a foot or two, the freeboot leapt
in front of me and grabbed my throat with his moist, iron-strong hands.
“Careful,” he whispered, in an oddly high-pitched voice.
“Please do not do that.”
Up close, I could see just how gnarled and distorted was
his face. It was like he had been sliced into a hundred pieces, sewn back
together, and then covered with a clear salve. I got a whiff of sweat and
feces. And when he smiled, he exposed his tiny sharp teeth and the bloody bits
of flesh and veins stuck between them.
“Get away from me!” I said. Recoiling, I fell backward
and knocked into Joelene. We both toppled to the floor.
Father laughed and pointed at us like we were two silly
children who had fallen from a seesaw. “Sorry,” he said, dabbing the corner of
his eyes, “but that was funny. You should have seen your look!”
Xavid smiled sadly and said, “Comedic!”
Joelene stood and gave me a hand.
“Did you see those reflexes?” Father asked Xavid. “Did
you get that?” he asked the film crew. They confirmed that they had. “He’s
boiled,” said Father. “He’s boiled down to the real shit.”
“You can’t,” I told him.
“Oh, yes I can.” Father snapped his fingers. “Like that
he could have her tied up and ready for torture.” The candle flame danced in
his pupils. “So, now do you get it? You marry Elle and everything’s lard. If
you don’t, he goes after your little puss ball. And believe me, he gets her. No
question about it.”
“That would be awful!” exclaimed Xavid.
“Right!” said Father. “Because he’s
good. He’s so good, he’s like the black plague injected in your eye.
This guy can crack systems. He can scale walls. And no
medicated bullets. No medicated anything.” Turning to the
freeboot, Father said, “Right? No medicated shit.”
The freeboot, who like a
trained but diseased hawk was perched back on his stool, said, “You are
correct.” His voice was soft and quiet, as if counterpoint to the grisly fury
of his being. “The lovely Miss Nora Gonzalez-Matsu will feel every terrible,
painful thing I do to her.”
A hateful
raging fire. That’s what I felt as I sat in the car while we headed back
to civilization. Joelene sat beside me, patting me, and whispered soothing
words, but I felt alone and broken. Somehow, I was going to kill Father.
Back in Kobehaba, before we parted, Father said,
“Listen, I don’t want that hunk of gristle to tear Nora in half. The truth is, the guy scares me! Freeboots are
usually pretty disgusting, but that one’s completely evil. I’m telling you, you
should see the fucker eat a jar of mayonnaise. It’ll make you sick!” He snorted
a laugh. Meanwhile, Xavid got out his chopsticks and began fluffing Father’s
hair again. “Nora’s really nothing in the whole scheme of things. I know you
like her and everything, but let’s just do what we have to do and nothing bad
will happen.”
“You leave us little choice,” said Joelene.
“That’s the idea!” Father forced a laugh. Then to Xavid,
he said, “Don’t make it too perfect. I’d like to look like we went at it a
little, you know?” Xavid pulled a corkscrew-looking thing and a spray bottle
from a pocket and kept working.
“Look,” continued Father, “the numbers from his date
with Elle are just what we needed. We’ll have the audience. We’ll introduce our
new partner, we’ll demo their crap, and hopefully we’ll be lard.” He smiled and
asked, “okay?”
I didn’t answer.
“I know you don’t like this, but every day, every hour,
every minute, I do things I don’t want to do. But I do them. I do them for the
company.”
Patting my shoulder, Joelene said, “He’s very tired and
upset, sir.”
Father let out a big sigh. “Fine! Take him home. Wipe his ass with a silk doily, or whatever it is you do. Just get him ready for the show.”
Ten
My sleep was distressed and filled with
nightmare. At one point, I was on a rooftop in an unrecognizable city. In the
distance, I saw a green and gold mkg train
that I knew had only one passenger—her. I watched it slowly pull out of a
station. When it came to a curve, it was like some strange momentum took over, and the train barreled forward, derailed, and
crashed.
Frantic to get to her, I was climbing down an endless
set of polished wooden stairs. At first, the stairs were normal and I could
move fast, but as I continued, they got steeper, until I could no longer step
up, but had to climb. Soon I was scaling a sheer wooden cliff. Then I was
clinging with my fingernails onto tiny cracks.
I lost my grip and plunged down.
With a start, I woke sweaty and anxious, but determined
to get a message to Nora about the freeboot.
“This isn’t yours!” I heard Joelene say on the other
side of the room. “I don’t give a fuck about you. I repeat, just leave him the
fuck alone!”
Peering toward my desk, I saw her profile in the blue
light of her screens.
“Listen to me,” she repeated, “stay away or I’ll kill
you!”
In all the years she had been with me, I think I had
heard her swear once when she’d badly stubbed a toe. And she had never used
this harsh tone, nor threatened anyone. Shutting my eyes, I put my head back
onto my pillow, and pretended to be asleep. She spoke again, but not loud
enough for me to hear.
Then the room was silent. I wanted to peek, as if to
confirm that she was there—that I hadn’t dreamed it, when I heard footsteps.
“Michael,” she said, softly, “your father is coming.”
Turning over, I saw that Joelene’s eyes were puffy, and
her cheeks were white. She had been up all night—talking to whom I didn’t know.
I asked, “What’s going on?”
“I suspect he wants us to help plan the wedding.”
It took me a moment to remember the product show and
Elle. Pulling the chenille up over my face, I said, “Tell Father I died of head
lice.”
She sighed deeply and with obvious irritation. “They’re
here already!”
Sitting up, I saw the estimator clock count down … three
… two … The front door was unlocked from the outside and Father and Xavid came
in. Father wore a blue feather boa over a jacket so yellow it made my mouth
pucker.
“We solved your shooting!” he announced. “Last night,
our engineers found a worm in the code. I don’t have to tell you how
super-hideous and awful that is. Anyway that worm was
responsible for the freeboot breach where you got
shot.”
The gold-visor-wearing orange satin stepped in carrying
a naked man. Stooping, the satin then plopped him onto the middle of the floor.
Dark purple and green bruises colored the man’s arms, legs, and chest. A line
of blood ran from one of his ears. In his mouth was a wad of blue cloth. I
covered my chest with my blanket.
Pointing a finger at the man, Father declared, “This is
the bastard who put the worm in our code and wanted you dead.”
He writhed against the wires that tied his hands and
feet. Scooting farther back in bed, I asked, “Who is he?”
“Ken Goh!”
I hadn’t even recognized him without his blue and orange
face paint. At once I felt furious at him, sympathetic for his present
suffering, and confused. “Why would he do that?”
“We don’t know!” said Father, as if I wasn’t even
supposed to ask. “But he did it. We caught him. End of story. And it was my
hairdresser who figured out the evil plot.”
“Simple deduction!” said Xavid, as he pushed up his
glasses.
Father then snapped his fingers. “Take the prisoner to
the dungeon beneath the PartyHaus.” The gold visor satin picked up Ken and
headed out. “You,” he said to me, “get dressed. Chesterfield Kez is here, and
he’s brought Elle’s brother to be your friend.”
“Wait,” I said, “if Ken was behind the shooting, that means it wasn’t mkg!”
“Forget those puds! They’re rancid lard! Besides, Elle’s
ratings killed Nora’s. We need that hype to cover our asses.”
I asked, “Why do we have to cover anything? I don’t even
understand why we have to merge with anyone in the first place.”
That stopped Father. He stood staring at me for a long
time.
“What?”
“All right!” he said, pretending to be happy. “So, what
new product do you have? And what technology are you using? Frequencies?
Anomaly theory? Or are you just hiding more shit in
Brane-7, like your good ol’ granddad?” He laughed because he knew I had no idea
what he had just said. “Yeah!” he continued, “That’s what I thought. And that’s
why it’s your job to get out there and smile and wiggle your nut sack to the
rhythm!” Before he stormed out, he added, “Get dressed! We’ll be back in two
minutes!” The door slammed shut.
I had heard of Brane-7 before. It was another dimension
and had something to do with the RiverGroup system, but that was all I knew. As
the sound of the door slamming repeated in my head, I felt contrite, even
useless. And for the first time, I understood how much my ignorance trapped me.
On the tiles I saw several drops of blood. “Why would
Ken want to kill me?” I asked Joelene.
She let out a breath. “It does seem odd.”
“What’s a code worm? And what’s
Brain-7 and those other things?”
“A code worm …” she began, “is a very complicated type
of leech that attaches itself to the host and can create a new entity that is
formed …” Her voice faded, as she seemed to sink into thought.
I waited for her to continue, but she turned, headed to
her screens, and began working as if she had forgotten about me. Annoyed, I
asked, “Were you talking to someone earlier?”
Her amethyst eyes darted toward me. “No.” She smiled
stiffly, and then said, “I need several minutes here. Why don’t you get dressed.”
“Before I woke, you were talking to someone.”
“Please,” she said, returning her eyes to her screen, “I
have to work.”
“You swore. And you said leave him alone. You
were talking about me.”
After a deep breath, she said, “Listen to me, I am
trying to secure our future. Things have become extremely dangerous. Yes, I
used strong language earlier, but I am working for exactly what you want.” With
that she continued to operate her screens.
I didn’t know what to think. “What are you planning?”
She didn’t acknowledge me. “Hello? What is the plan?”
“Will you stop bothering me?”
Her tone was as harsh as I had heard before. Throwing
off my blanket, I stood, and sped to my dressing room. After I rounded the
corner, I waited for her to come after me, but heard no footsteps. I felt worse
that I’d been forgotten.
My dressing room was as big as my living quarters, and
was decorated with several shiny, charcoal-hematite chairs, an unfinished
hemlock plank floor, adobe walls, and both color and black-and-white iMirrors.
It was a simple, meditative space where I had spent hundreds of hours observing
fabric in my loupe, admiring the evenness of stitches, and reading about the
histories of various fibers. Today, I just wanted to break something.
To the left of my makeup chair was the tie rack, the
underwear warmer, and shoe engine. Next sat my Mr. Renovation shirt machine,
and filling most of the space were three rows of
Stanley-Dior suit racks with my sixty Mr. Cedar suits. I couldn’t touch them,
so I grabbed a charcoal-and-burgundy-striped tie, reared back, and whipped it
at the floor as though I were killing a snake.
I felt a stab of pain in my shoulder. The tie just lay
there. The gesture had been pointless and I felt ridiculous. A moment later,
the tie began to smoke, and then flames appeared. I had grabbed one of my
favorite Mr. Cedar ties, Love Alone, which had nitrocellulose fibers.
Using the dressing room fire extinguisher, I doused it with white powder. So
much for my show of fury! I’d ruined a beautiful tie, covered my pajamas with
sodium bicarbonate, tweaked my shoulder, and felt exactly the same sense of
futility as before.
From the racks, I grabbed a suit at random, tore off my
pajamas, got a pair of shorts and an ironed shirt from my machines, and
dressed. Checking myself in the iMirror, I felt transformed. Without realizing
it, I had gotten a suit titled Constant Heart. Mr. Cedar had designed it
several months ago for a fashion show I hadn’t attended. The fabric was a
creamy moon-wool charcoal. The silhouette was slim and efficient.
“Joelene!” I called. “What tie
should I wear?” Usually, my dresser, Stefano, would have come from his
servant’s entrance. I guessed he was sleeping. “Joelene,” I said again,
“Stefano’s not here. Can you please help me?” I thought I heard a bump in the
main room and headed out to check.
Xavid, Father, and his film crew were coming in. I
didn’t see Joelene.
“Come here!” said Father, waving urgently. “Let’s do the
big RiverGroup introduction together.” Smiling, he added, “It’ll be fun!”
“I’m not dressed. Where’s Stefano?”
“We let that old fart go,” he said. “Cost-cutting.”
He looked me up and down. “You’re fine. Come here.” Pointing at the closed
door, he said, “They’re waiting.”
“I don’t want to see anyone,” I said, wishing Joelene
could get me out of this.
“Get over here and be nice,” he growled.
“Leave me alone.”
“Why is everything a war with you?”
“Why are you threatening Nora?”
“I don’t want to,” he said as if it were
self-evident.
“But you are!”
“I have to because you’re such a disaster of a son.”
“I hate you,” I told him. “I hate the family, I hate the
company. All I want is Nora and all you do is keep me
from her.”
His face turned purple. He looked angry and hurt, but
mostly hurt. “Fuck-tastic!” he spat. “Things were going so lard six seconds
ago. We caught Ken and his code worm. What do you think? That shows you I’m
trying.” Propping his hands on his hips, he said, “Thanks for ruining the whole
day!”
“You’ve ruined my life.”
He threw his hands up. “I can’t believe you. I just
can’t deal with …” He kicked the air, then turned away, and while muttering,
shook his head.
“Should I introduce our visitor?” asked Xavid.
Father said, “Whatever,” with a flick of his wrist. He
looked at me as if he had never been more disappointed with anything.
“I want my own life,” I told him.
“You’re not going to have anything if RiverGroup crashes
and burns. And we’ve already crashed, and we are on fire!”
I asked, “Why did you hire Ken?”
For a second, I didn’t think he was going to answer. His
lips slowly tightened and it looked like he was going to have another outburst.
“He passed all the tests! Okay?”
“What are your tests?”
He rolled his eyes and said, “Just shut up. All right?”
I could only guess how ridiculous they must have been.
Could Ken dance Bäng? Did he like Father’s newest favorite band, like the
Palladiüm Pinheads or whatever? Or maybe the tests were whether Ken would wear
the company colors, and agree with everything and anything Father said.
“They’re still waiting,” prompted Xavid.
“Go ahead,” muttered Father.
Opening the door, Xavid poked his head out, and said,
“Listen for your name, then come on in.” Returning to our side, he held a hand
beside his mouth as if shouting to a crowd of a hundred. “Introducing
a new friend and brother to the RiverGroup way of life. A fantastic
human being with billions of healthy red blood cells …”
As he continued his useless introduction, I glanced
toward the bathroom door. Was Joelene in there? Usually, she took no more than
a minute. I hoped she wasn’t sick.
“… So,” concluded Xavid, “let’s bloody our shorts for
one of RiverGroup’s new friends. That’s right! It’s our new pal, the stylish
and very intelligent Walter Kez!”
A second later, a young man peered in. His baby-fat
cheeks were as pale as cake flour. His watery, blue, manga eyes were ringed
with red as if he hadn’t slept for three days. He wore a long, slender,
dust-grey suit that was short in sleeve and trouser as if he had grown or it
shrunk. It looked like one of the lesser tailors—Me-Yaki, Seem, or Mix-a-Fibré. On his head he wore a wide-brim straw hat with
a blue ribbon. The hat made him look like a CubeEye reader, albeit a
pudgy, somewhat malformed one. He stood for a moment, adjusting the
“Welcome!” said Father, now trying to crank up the
enthusiasm. “Come in! Meet my son, the famous and amazing Michael Rivers. He’s
going to marry your sister at the big product show. That’s really exciting!”
Chesterfield Kez, his uncle, the skull-faced man whose
hand I had not shaken last night at the club, strode in past his nephew.
“Hold on, Ches,” cried Father, “Xavid will give you a
big, fun intro!”
“Is that a camera?” whined Walter.
“They’re filming my big, dopy, butt-tastic life!” said
Father, shooting a quick evil eye my way. “’Seven hundred
hours! You’re welcome to start watching anytime.”
“Thank you!” said Walter, his eyes tearing. “I just
can’t be around cameras.”
“Kid’s got allergies,” explained
“Butt rockets!” yelped Father. “Go on!” he told his
crew. “Get out!” As they ran out the back door, Father said, “Xavid, grab the
two security cameras!”
Xavid yanked the little cameras from the walls, but even
so Walter was scratching feverishly at his neck, making the skin red and raw.
For the next hour—although it
felt like a dozen—I sat polite prisoner before pale, powdery, straw-hat-wearing
Walter Kez, as he showed me his magazine collection. His voice was whiny,
nasal, and he had a habit of inflecting the end of his sentences.
“This is a rare CubeEye issue twenty-three?” He
opened it and flipped through all the pages—past dozens of photos of men in
felt and straw hats. “This,” he said, picking up another, “is the first issue of
118 Tones? It’s very, very valuable? Oh, and this is Blot issue
forty. There’s a printing error on page five? So, it’s worth billions?”
Blot was actually not bad. It dealt with
reproduction fibers. I asked for it and browsed while he continued to show copies
of skd, Re-Ax, Salon 17,
École, Inhab, and Turncoat. Meanwhile, I kept looking for Joelene. I
worried that I upset her before. I shouldn’t have stormed off to my dressing
room like I had. She was probably mad at me.
“I really, really like 118 Tones, don’t you?”
asked Walter, holding another issue.
It was a cheap imitation of Pure H, but I said,
“Sure.”
Walter narrowed his eyes at me and I felt defenseless,
as though he could see how isolated and unhappy I was. Leaning toward me, he
whispered, “My sister’s mad at you ’cause you saw Nora.”
The strange thing was, I had
forgotten they were related. “Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
He burst out laughing. “Don’t worry! I don’t like my
sister.” Bending farther toward me, he added, “I’ve seen her eat her own snot
balls.”
Unfortunately, I could easily conjure the image of Elle,
dressed as a cat-beaver-bunny gnawing on a dark, waxy little bit stuck under a
fingernail.
“I like Nora better,” he said. “She’s very alluring and
enchanting.”
“Thank you,” I said, not sure I appreciated his
admiration.
Reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket, he held
out his hand. In his sweaty palm were two black cockroaches. “Want one?”
“No!” I said, recoiling.
“They’re pills!” he said with a giggle. “They’re aru!” His eyes were glowing. “They’re
illegal, but so soothing! I get them in the slubs!”
The bug-shaped pills were hideously realistic with
little eyes and painted-on legs. They were the ones Joelene had mentioned.
Mother took them, and the freeboot who shot me had had
something to do with them.
“They make all bad feelings go away,” he said, as
he first glanced toward his nannies, then placed one of the things onto his
pink tongue, reared his head back, and swallowed. “Go on,” he said, holding the
other toward me.
“No,” I said, “thank you.”
After he pouted for a second, he returned the pill to
his pocket.
“You go to the slubs?” I asked, since it was not just
illegal and frowned upon but dangerous.
“Some places are very fascinating.” He stuck out his
lower lip. “Not the bad place where you were.”
I was still shocked he went, let alone survived.
“Doesn’t your uncle watch you?”
“He can’t,” he whispered, with a sly smile. “I have such
a bad camera allergy.”
A beeping little alarm sounded in his jacket. I watched
him check inside his left lapel. “Oh, gosh!” he said, all excited. “Nora is on
the channels!” Turning to his nannies, he said, “Nora is on! May my friend
Michael and I watch, please?”
We had not been left alone. Before Father, Xavid, and
“I suppose that would be all right,” said one, as she
fiddled with the control Father had given her. Finally, she switched on the
main screen. Against a raging forest fire were the words Heavy Profit Camp in
black outlined with glittering gold.
The titles faded and
sitting before a faux campfire was Nora’s father, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu. She had
inherited his fierce eyes, but little else. While her features had an uplifting
feel, his were the opposite. His mouth resembled the beak of a flesh-eating
bird. The bottom edge of his nose was tilted upward so that his nostrils formed
a curvy lowercase m. But his two most distinctive features were the puffy bags
under his eyes, which made him look like he hadn’t slept in five years, and his
oily, black hair, with its shiny, pointed locks that resembled crow feathers.
As for clothes, he wore a striped green jacket over a
patterned gold shirt. The top four buttons were undone to expose a green and
gold undershirt. His pants looked like a combination of woven yellow leather
and maybe some sort of green vines with leaves and odd little persimmon flowers
here and there. His shoes were thick soled and the leather was as so dull it
looked more like pressed dryer-lint.
As he held a stick before him where a burnt wiener
dangled on the end, he said, “Our product offers a dramatic choice and much
less operating costs. Super non-symmetry takes a lot of power. We don’t.” He
tried to laugh a friendly laugh, but all the lines in his face pulled the other
way.
“Were you insulted by Mr. Rivers’ assertion that mkg was at fault for the
freeboot?” asked the interviewer, a man dressed in aquamarine and pink
flannel who was toasting several marshmallows on a long fork.
“Idiots!” shouted Nora’s father with such energy that
his wiener did a summersault on his branch. “I don’t have any comment. Except they’re idiots and grubs!”
Beside Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu sat what were obviously his
versions of Ken Goh and Xavid, two men in wooden suits with big hairdos, who
chimed in with Idiots and Grubs, respectively.
To the right of the yes men, sat Nora.
Her face was so serene, so perfectly at ease, and her clothes so minimal and
colorless—that she looked like she was a photo of a woman from a different
world pasted into the picture.
She wore a brilliant white shirt that looked at once
downy-soft and as smart as folded high-silica paper. Her tailored jacket was a
deep charcoal and the fabric had flecks of what looked like black quasar dust.
The shoulders and arms so perfectly fit her body, in a strange way, it was indecent because it so perfectly reflected her
nude body beneath. Her eyelids were a smoky brown; her eyelashes resembled the
sable of a fine paintbrush lightly dusted with crushed black iron, and her hair
had been trimmed and brushed so that it resembled finely grained mahogany.
She would breathe in, hold her air for an instant, and
then exhale. Her blinking was the same. Each time her lids closed, they held as
if she were resting, sleeping, or escaping for a single instant. When open, she
focused on her father’s profile in such an intense way that I got the idea that
she had been required to be on the show, as if it were punishment for her
meeting me at the SunEcho.
Her father tried to talk about their new product, and
something he called integrity-cloak, but the interviewer kept asking about
RiverGroup and me. After a minute or two of the back and forth, Nora’s father
began screaming. “RiverGroup is a foul and constipated old lady!” After he
spoke, he wrenched his face into a smile.
Nora’s eyes turned to mine. While I
had been concentrating on her before, now I was transfixed. And I swore
she could see me through the electromagnetic fields between us. As I looked
back into her eyes, the blush in her face deepened, and the corners of her
mouth quivered toward a smile. I wanted to reach through and pull her through
to my side.
Her right hand, in one of her grey chenille gloves,
moved from her lap and then her index finger touched one of the black chrome
buttons on her jacket. Her hand held for an instant, and then fell back to her
lap as if it had never moved. A moment later, her eyes returned to her father.
“We are a prestigious family of true blood!” he
continued. “We will persevere and work hard for our clients. And as for that
other so-called company, council has advised me not to mention that Ribo-Kool
is nothing but an assemblage of snot-dripping vagrants!”
The screen went black. One of Walter’s nannies had
snapped it off. She then came to Walter’s side and began stroking him. “There … there! Never mind him! He’s nothing but an angry
old snuffly-guffly.”
I stared at the blank screen. Of course Nora could not
see me—there was no possible way. And yet, I knew she had. Moreover, she had
sent me a message, but what it meant, I wasn’t sure. Did it reference a Pure
H story in issue nine where a woman touches a shirt button on her blouse to
signal her former husband that she has returned from an affair with machines?
If I remembered, though, the reader knows that her heart stops the same instant
she touches the button. Perhaps she was referencing a photoR6 in
issue nineteen. Amid a mass of black threads is one silvery button. The copy
read A single cast iron snowflake. At
least, that wasn’t negative.
The front door opened. I expected Joelene, but in came a
man in a four-foot-tall orange chef’s hat and matching jacket, wheeling in a
tray.
“Good morning!” he said, with a big smile. “I’ve brought
a special breakfast especially chosen by Mr. Rivers Senior, himself. And this
exciting, fast-breaking meal has graciously been provided by Frix Food Product
Corporation—Making Your Life Something You Can Snarf.” His broad smile faded as
he glanced about, as if trying to find the cameras.
“They’re gone,” said one of the nannies.
“Oh,” he said, disappointed, as if this was supposed to
be his big moment.
As Walter’s nannies seated him at the table, I said I’d
be right back, and hurried to my bathroom, but she wasn’t there. In the
dressing room I knelt and looked under the hangers. “Hello?” I asked, as I
opened the servant’s door. Surprisingly, inside was a dark stairwell, and just
ten feet ahead, a heavy locked gate.
She must have gone out the back door. I headed out of my
dressing room and straight toward it. As I did, I heard Walter’s feet across
the iron tiles.
“Wait! Where’re you going?” he asked, as if afraid I was
leaving.
I pushed open the iron door and stepped outside. To the
far left was the black PartyHaus, covered in shadows. Straight ahead were
several technology buildings, and to the right, were the garages and storage
buildings. I didn’t see Joelene anywhere.
What would she be doing somewhere else in the compound?
Or had she left me? Had she gotten so frustrated and angry she had quit? It
didn’t seem like Joelene, but maybe the past few days had been too much. And
Father’s punch last night couldn’t have helped.
“What is it?” asked Walter.
“Nothing,” I replied, discouraged.
“Look it!” he said, pointing at the PartyHaus. “The
place you danced!”
“Yeah. Come on. Let’s eat.”
Back at the breakfast table, I told myself Joelene was
doing as she had said—working to get me what I wanted. Maybe she was in a
secret place sending Nora a message. She would be back soon; she would have
good news. I had to be patient.
Meanwhile, the chef held a large covered dish before us,
and then lifted the cover. A steam cloud rose and revealed two long cakes
shaped like scantily clad women. I recognized Frix’s slut cakes, as Father ate
them all the time. The skin was a sweet, rubbery fondant. Inside was a layer of
soft cake, around a candy skeleton, which, when fresh, bent at the major
joints. The one nearer me was a brunette in bright green shorts, red platforms,
and pasties. The other had red hair, a tiny blue skirt, boots, and big, dark
nipples. The cook served them.
Walter clapped his pudgy hands as his was placed before
him. “She’s beautiful!”
I stared at the doll’s tiny bump of a nose; her full,
fuchsia lips, her large, dark-circled eyes, and her two sharp eyebrows and
imagined Nora lying on an enormous plate in a sugary, suspended animation.
Better yet, I saw the two of us, lying next to each other for a sweetened
eternity.
Just then, I remembered that in Pure H seven was
a photoR4.5: the front of a grey woolen jacket was wrapped over a
fist, and over the middle knuckle a buttonhole was stretched taught. The image
was violent and angry, and I hoped that wasn’t what Nora was feeling. Then
again, she had surely been coerced to appear with her father on that business
show. Maybe she was expressing her frustration.
“How do you eat her?” asked Walter, turning his head
from side to side, as if looking for instructions.
Father, Xavid, and
“We had the mother ass of all meetings!” said Father,
spreading his arms as if to demonstrate. “The ScrotümKings sang their new hit
to start us off. Then Xavid did our hair. And if all that wasn’t lard enough,
“Heard you enjoyed your slut cake!”
Father said to Walter.
“Oh, I did, indeed!” he beamed, as he knit his hands
together and then tried to pry them apart in a wiggly sort of excitement.
“First I licked her boots, and then her bottom!”
“They’re good that way! Take some home,” said Father, as
he presented him with a box. “You know, sometimes I bite off their feet first.
Or other times, I start with their hair. I guess it’s true what they
say—there’s no right way to eat a slut!”
“Thank you so much,” said Walter, his face aglow. “We
had a very enjoyable morning.” He shot me an odd, rather mischievous smile.
Walter’s nannies packed up his magazines, straightened
his clothes and hat, and led him to me. Holding out his hand, he said, “It was
my pleasure to meet you!” Without moving his lips, he whispered, “We can have a
grand adventure in the slubs if you want.”
“Thank you.” I said, as I shook his moist hand.
He and his uncle then left and the second the door
closed, Father turned to me. “Fucking disastrous destruction!
Your Joelene is our second traitor of the day.”
At first, I thought it a joke, but he wasn’t laughing or
making one of his stupid faces when he thought himself funny. “She is not!”
“We caught the bitch in the code workshop trying to send
a message to mkg! So we tossed
her in the dungeon next to Ken.” By the end of his sentence he was screaming as
loud as of one of his Ültra bands.
“Let her go!?” I said. “She’s not a traitor!”
Father closed his eyes for a moment. “Anyway,” he began,
“here’s the story. If I send the freeboot and he kills
Nora now, then you’re not going to be properly motivated for the product show.
So, what we’ve come up with is that we send him to harm her, then she’s
still alive, and you’re still in check.” Father turned to Xavid. “Right?”
Xavid pushed up his glasses. “We’ll just have him break
off one of her little toes.”
“Yeah … that’s good!” said Father. “So, I could send him
to—”
I reared back but when I flung my fist at his face, he
grabbed me and threw me to the iron tiles. A pinpoint of black pain burned at
the back of my head. As I pushed myself up, I said, “Do not do send that
beast!”
“God, you’re weak!” said Father with a laugh. “I barely
knocked you.”
“Do not send the freeboot!”
He glanced at Xavid and rolled his eyes. “You’re embarrassing me!” He started to head for the door then stopped. “Oh, and for the show … none of your Pure Haggis clothes. Get some color.”
Eleven
Once they left, I turned right around and
raced to the back door. I was going to run to the garage, get in my car, and
somehow make it to Nora’s this time. Once I opened the door and stepped out,
though, I nearly slammed into the orange satin with the gold visor.
“Out of my way!” I said.
He didn’t reply, but grasped my shoulders and picked me
up like a bag of groceries. After placing me back inside, he closed the door.
“Bastard!” I said, as I watched
him through the peek-cam, hoping he’d go, but he just stood staring back
through his visor. Turning, I sprinted to the front door, but an identical
satin waited there.
I rushed to my desk and opened Joelene’s screens. I
turned every knob, but they had been wiped clean. Frantic, I grabbed the remote
for the big screen, hoping to find the Soup and Intellectual show or
something, but all the channels were blocked. Smacking the controller, I must
have hit the history knob as it began playing a recording of Heavy Profit
Camp that hadn’t been erased.
Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu complained about RiverGroup again,
and there was Nora.
“Hide,” I told her. “Go somewhere safe.” Stepping before
the screen I leaned forward to kiss her gloved hand, and just before I did, she
lifted it, and touched the button. Up close, though, I saw something. Hitting
the stop knob, I realized that she was pointing to a capital f that had been scratched into the
shiny black surface of the button. The letter wasn’t perfect and it looked as
though Nora had done it with a needle or pin.
What did it mean? Father? Farther? Famous? Furious?
I could think of a vulgar word, but surely Nora would never use it. Staring at
it, I willed myself to understand, but without Joelene’s help, I couldn’t
figure it out.
The estimator clock said Father wasn’t due back for
forty-seven minutes, but I had a bad feeling, so I erased the memory and
switched off the screen.
At my desk, I pulled open the refrigerated drawer, took
out several Pure H magazines, and began rifling through them, but
nothing made sense. I felt a presence. Looking up, I saw Xavid with his head
held high, his hands on his hips, as if he were posing. Once he saw that I’d
seen him, he smiled, stepped closer, and said, “I crept up on you,” as if
pleased.
“What do you want?” I asked, irritated.
Combing his white-capped hair with a hand, he gazed
around my place and said, “We are going to have to learn to work together,
because you are also one of the extremely valuable assets here.”
Assuming that was some sort of bizarre compliment, I
just asked, “Can you help me with Joelene?”
He laughed at me. “You’re fond of her, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not. There’s something strange about her. I have a
sense like that. I’m good with people.” He pushed up his amber glasses. “Besides,
her hair is awful. That color is wrong for her and it’s
ugly. I’ve never liked it.”
Her natural curly hair was fine. I said, “I’d like to
see her.”
Frowning, he said, “She’s gone.”
I hoped he didn’t mean dead. “I thought she was at the
PartyHaus dungeon.”
He whipped around as if someone was sneaking up on him.
His eyes darted left and right behind his amber glasses. Finally, when he
seemed satisfied that we were alone, he turned and
asked, “What?” as if he had forgotten what we were talking about.
“Joelene …” I said, wondering what was wrong with him,
“is she all right?”
As if it didn’t matter, he said, “I suppose.”
“I want to see her.”
He started walking around my apartment, looking over my
things. “I don’t think so.” He stopped before my couch, bent close enough to
smell it, and asked, “Do you have any real skills or anything?”
For an instant, I felt depressed. The truth was I wasn’t
sure. “What do you want?”
He then headed to my small kitchen. “I think RiverGroup
can make a comeback,” he said, admiring the black gold cabinets. “Some don’t,
but I do. They don’t know what I know.” Turning, he smiled and asked,
“Did I tell you that I’m very fucking smart?”
“I think you did.” I knew I’d heard him say that before.
“If I can turn it around, there will be profits.
Extraordinary profits, because it’s one thing to build something, it is quite
another to rebuild. That’s a particular type of skill. It’s not just creating,
but destroying, too. Do you know what I mean?”
I said, “Yes,” but didn’t and didn’t care.
Narrowing his eyes, he said, “You never answered. Do you
have any skills? Are you smart at all?”
“I am smart,” I said, and lamented how little conviction
was in my voice.
“Well,” he said, as though disappointed, “when the time
comes … if it does … will you support me?”
I had no idea what he meant, but said, “Yes, if I can
see Joelene.”
“Excellent!” Pushing up his glasses again, he said,
“I’ll give you one minute.”
“I want more than that!”
“I don’t expect I’ll actually need your approval. Your
father has all the voting rights, but you never know … you might become
useful.” He stared at me blankly. “At this point, that’s all you may have. One
minute.”
Outside, while Xavid explained
to Gold Visor that we were going to the PartyHaus for business, I watched Father’s
hairdresser. Obviously, he thought he was more important than he was, and while
I had found talking with him demoralizing, Joelene was worth a million
humiliations.
Soon, the three of us, Xavid, the satin, and I started
along the path toward the access road. A buzz filled the compound like it had
not in years. From a dozen delivery trucks, men hauled crates of carrot wine,
food, fuel, and other equipment toward the black building. In the oxygen
gardens and all along the access roads, a battalion of gardeners were clearing
away weeds, pruning trees, planting flowers, and Fluffing father’s prized
dandelions.
Bamboo scaffolding covered half of the PartyHaus where
workers were repainting it, or adding highlights of gold leaf. And as much as I
hated the building, had hoped for years that it would collapse, I felt as if
its restoration summoned the end of things, like it was the rearming of a bomb.
When we reached the base of the stairs, I paused and
gazed up at the fifty-seven steps, not relishing the climb. After maybe twenty,
I had to stop. My legs burned.
“Back when you danced,” said Xavid, as he wiped his
brow, “I bet you could have walked up on your hands.”
“I suppose,” I replied. Then, as if to show him, I
climbed the rest without pause.
At the top, two workers stepped aside from the huge
front doors. I had forgotten how intricate and demonic they were. Made out of
black marble, they had been carved with hundreds of animals, but like a zoo
gone sexually mad, tigers kissed hogs, ducks groped gophers, boa constrictors
fellated elephants, and bison mounted giraffes.
Gold Visor took hold of one of the massive handles and
pulled. It creaked open with a low, painful note, and we entered. Before my
eyes adjusted, I couldn’t see anything, but heard sounds all around. Straight
ahead, metal banged against metal. From the right, I heard a high-pitched
grinding. Several amplified voices wove together into a mishmash of feedback
and reverb. Curiously, the air still smelled like it had years ago: a blend of
sweat, sex, and desperation, like a pungent curry.
In the foyer, while Gold Visor and Xavid conferred with
another satin, I peered toward the main dance hall. As my eyes became
accustomed to the darkness I saw a hundred workers polishing the floors, cleaning
the walls, washing the ceilings, the carvings, the mosaics, and the bronzes.
All of them wore ugly blue and orange leotards and they reminded me of the
velvety maroon thing I had worn when Joelene and I had descended the cooling
system in the MonoBeat. And I felt nostalgic—not for that dreadful
experience—but for all the times we shared. I knew she wasn’t a traitor, and
her profanity before, even her grumpiness was because she was hard at work on
what sounded like our exit strategy. How I longed for exactly that.
The PartyHaus was laid out in the shape of a giant X. In
the center were the circular dance floor and the balconies that surrounded it.
In the four arms of the X were bars, restaurants, shops, and the guest rooms.
When the rages were happening every night, thousands crowded every floor and
every inch of the building. These days, Father said it housed ten times as many
rats.
“This way,” said Gold Visor. Xavid and I followed.
We headed across the old dance floor. When I did my
routines, it had been covered with a springy black material. Today.
It looked like they had put down uranium tiles. On the other side, a stage had
been erected. At the back a forklift was placing a jet engine into some sort of
pipe organ. Above the stage hung a fifteen-story screen.
On it glowed a vivid test pattern of horizontal
stripes. At stage-front were three actors and father’s silver-haired director
who had also worked the promo-date with Elle.
“You go to that side. That side,” he said to a man who
wore a sign that read Super Distinguished RiverGroup ceo. The other man wore a sign that said Michael.
The girl’s read Interest. “Yes,” he continued, “and now the girl will
come down the middle. She’s the center. She’s bringing not just the two
families together, but this family as well.” He spotted me and waved. “Oh, hello! Michael. How you doing? Look here, this is the
wedding blocking! We’re mapping out the big wedding!”
“I see.”
“It starts out minimal then gets maximal. You know? Flow. Change. Difference.”
Smiling and combing back his chrome locks, he added, “You know, you can’t have
loud without quiet. You can’t have big without small. So at first, it’ll just
be you and your dad, and then we’ll add the girl. Then we’ve got the triangle. Next the square and then the pentagon. Shape follows
meaning.”
I nodded, if only to indicate that I’d heard, as we
continued across the dance floor.
At the far side, we came to the stairs that led into the
building’s bowels. Most of the entrance was in the process of being covered
over with a wall of vending machines. When I danced, streams of people were
always going in and out but I had never set foot below. It was where the real
freaks: the Wets, the Kate Wools, and the Bügs went. I’d heard rumors of the
surgically and pharmaceutically enhanced who sometimes
killed themselves for pleasure or fantastic dance moves. Supposedly, one woman
hadn’t come up for two years and lived on nothing but sweat and semen.
The farther down we went, the cool and heavier was the
air. The odor was of mildew and rotting meat. And as the cacophony of
construction from above dimmed, odd sounds, like the pings of electronics and
the squelches of bats, began to echo and ricochet around us. Orange sodium
bulbs had been placed here and there on stands as a few workers mopped the
floor and patched, what I decided were, hundreds of
rat holes.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Lower level,” said Gold Visor. His deep voice
reverberated into the recesses.
We continued for several minutes then came to another
set of stairs. The satin held out his arm for support as these stairs were wet
and slippery. The light was dimmer here and I was afraid that if I lost my
footing, I would tumble to the center of the Earth.
Gold Visor produced a flashlight. The walls looked wet,
and all around water dripped from tiny stalactites that covered the ceiling. I
saw a large black salamander with yellow eyes hold for a second, then dash off,
its tail zigzagging in the liquid.
We reached the end of the stairs and continued forward.
As the satin shone his light back and forth, I decided that the walls weren’t
as wet as I thought, but made of glass. Ten feet ahead, we came to a forest of
sculptures like the carvings on the front doors only huge and more repulsive. A
twelve-foot-tall teddy bear had an enormous, veined phallus so big, it rose five feet above its head.
After we had wound our way around a dozen ever more
cartoony and debauched turtles, hamsters, and bunnies, we came to a clear area.
Another orange satin, with long white hair, sat at a table covered with half a
dozen screens. He stood and bowed.
Beyond him, on the black floor, lay Joelene, in nothing
but her green bra and underwear. I crouched beside her. Her skin was mottled
with a hundred small bruises, as if she’d been peppered with pool balls. Father
had beaten her and left her to die.
Xavid stepped above us. He kicked at the thick metal
cuff on her left wrist. Then he toed the chain that connected it to the floor.
“Good,” he said, peering down at her.
“Get away,” I told him. After he sneered at me and
stepped away, I knelt closer to her. “Joelene, can you hear me?” She didn’t
speak or move. I had been hoping she could help me with Nora’s message, but
clearly, I was the one who would be helping her. Touching her cheek, I found it
warm and worried she had a fever. “It’s me. Michael,” I said. She moaned like
she was dreaming. “I’m going to help you.” Her eyes finally opened, and I was
never happier to see those amethyst irises.
“Pain,” she whispered, her dry lips sticking together.
“Get me …” Her voice faded and her eyes closed.
“Get you what?”
Farther back, I heard Gold Visor say, “This prisoner’s
dead.”
Beside the satin, I saw Ken Goh ten feet away. His mouth
was wide open as if he had died screaming.
Xavid stepped over him. “Corporate selection,” he said.
“Only the smart survive.”
I wanted him to shut up and go away and was about to
tell him so, when Joelene mumbled something. Putting my ear close, I asked her
to repeat it, but she just moaned. “Don’t worry,” I said, stroking her
forehead, “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Are you …” she began.
“Am I what?” I asked. She didn’t reply. “Am I marrying
Elle? No! I’m not. I’m not going to.”
“Are you …” she repeated.
“No, I’m not!”
“That’s it!” said Xavid. “Your minute’s up. Let’s go.”
“I’m staying here with her.”
Xavid rolled his eyes far up in his glasses. “It’s been
more than a minute.” Pointing a thumb at the satin, he said, “He will be happy
to drag you back to your apartment.”
“I want more time.”
He stepped closer. “I used to watch you dance on the
channels. I thought you were just wonderful. But now that I’ve gotten to know
you, you’re as selfish and stupid, as your father says.” I could have hated
him—I probably already did—but wasting more energy on him seemed futile.
Behind, I heard Joelene say, “Are you …” again. An instant later, I understood.
Twelve
As I hurried through the long spiral to Mr.
Cedar’s showroom, I again remembered the times when I had stopped to admire his
displays, contemplate the exhibits, and learn from his interactive experiments.
Today, I even passed what looked like a fascinating exhibit on the history of
pockets, but I had too much to accomplish before midnight. As I neared his
sugar maple and hammered-palladium doors, though, I felt compelled to act civilized
for at least one moment and stopped before a wood and glass display.
Inside was a large swatch of charcoal fabric held
vertical and flat by several robotic arms. When I
pushed the single red button on the front of the experiment, a mannequin’s
hand, representing the wearer, rose on the right side of the fabric and a metal
rod lowered on the left. A fierce spark jumped from the rod toward the hand,
but as indicated on a series of meters, the fabric’s electronic network
reflected the lethal shock.
I stood before the
experiment for several beats as I thought of the Miniature city flickers
quote and the woman in the alpaca-silk and platinum dress who was covered
with a thin, vaporous layer of flame, the necktie from Mr. Cedar I had thrown
at the floor that burned, and the wedding blocking I had just seen at the
PartyHaus, where Father and I were to stand alone on the stage.
“Michael,” said Mr. Cedar, his voice startling me, “do
come in.”
Last time I’d visited, the gallery was filled with
posing mannequins. This time it was empty except for his sketching board and a
large sports screen, tuned to the AppleBoard Shirt Ironing Invitational. I
couldn’t believe that I had forgotten about one of my favorite events. Last
year, my tailor and I had attended in person.
“It’s the last round,” said Mr. Cedar. “Fanjor versus Isé–B again.”
Competitive ironing was the oldest and most prestigious
sport played among the fashionable. In my dressing room at my apartment, I had
my own speed and sleeve boards and several competitive irons, but of course, I
was nothing compared to the people who made it their life. For the past several
years, one man, Fanjor, dominated the tournaments. In the beginning, I had
admired his ironing, but gradually, as he kept winning, and got more and more
arrogant, I got sick of him.
Now my favorite was Isé–B. He was a handsome, wiry man
with short-cropped, dark hair, stern russet eyes, and always had a five-o’clock
shadow. Unlike the rest of the ironers, who used modern, souped-up,
Intel-Sunbeams, Greikos, or Jaun-Tees, he preferred a coal-powered
Schiaparelli-Firemaster 77, with duel chimneys, and a customized Steam-Jet 188.
It was incredible to watch him work that thirty-two pound-hunk of polished iron
over crisp white shirts, as it spat clouds of steam and belched black smoke.
And while he was truly a brilliant ironer who regularly won the
smoothest-in-show and wrinkle creativity awards, he had yet to beat Fanjor head
to head.
The channel was showing a replay from Masters Trophy
last year, where Isé–B had lost by a twentieth of a second. After being awarded
the coveted Golden Cuff, Fanjor, dressed in his signature yellow, pranced about
the stage, chanting his own name.
“How’s Isé–B doing today?” I asked, as Fanjor, now in
slow motion, leapt into the crowd where his fans began licking him as though he
were a lemon candy.
“He’s two hundredths of a second behind.”
That wasn’t good. In this last speed round, Isé–B needed
a lead to have a chance.
“So,” said Mr. Cedar, turning his attention to me. “Another suit?”
“I suspect my last.” He raised an eyebrow as if
concerned I might be changing styles or tailors. “I have an idea,” I began.
“You see, yesterday, that neck tie you made for me, Love Alone
… burned.”
“The stolen silk was juxtaposed with a small amount of nitrocellulose.”
With a grimace, he eyed my neck and asked, “You weren’t injured, were you?”
“Not at all,” I said, contrite that I had thrown it at
the floor in a fit.
“You need it replaced?” he guessed.
“Not that.” After an exhale, I looked him in the eye and
said, “Since Nora and I can’t be together, we’ll have to be apart.” I swallowed
and asked, “Can you make me a whole suit of nitrocellulose?”
He stopped twisting his beard. His eyes fell to his
sketching board, and his expression turned somber. While I knew my request was
extreme, now I feared I had overstepped the bounds of our relationship. How
could I have asked my tailor, of all people, to help me kill my father and
myself? Frantic, I tried to think of some plausible way to claim I was joking.
He asked, “Your situation is that dire?” and I saw the
calm gravity I had been hoping for.
“It’s worse,” I answered,
thinking of Father’s freeboot.
He began rolling his beard hair again. “Yesterday … I
saw something new by Pentagon-Straus in The Official Fabric Guide.” After he
manipulated something on his table, he nodded toward the screen. “It’s quite
dangerous and curiously comes in a single color—a luminescent orange licensed
from the famous suits in the Bäng epic, Adjoining Tissue.”
During a commercial for a vacuum-pressing table, he ran
highlights from the Tissue movie, which I hadn’t seen in years. It
opened in an eerie moonlight garden filled with long walkways, beautiful marble
fountains, and dozens of perfectly trimmed geometric bushes. One
by one, the forty band members of HammørHêds enter, sing, and begin having sex
(simulated sex, I suppose) with the shrubs. As the drums fire and the
organ plays, they sing of loneliness and desperation. Then the garden is lit on
fire and the blue is burned away so that it becomes daytime. Now, wearing big,
bright orange suits, they are happy, they punch each other and scream about the
band’s glorious future. In the last sequence, each member cuts off the ends of
their pinkies. Doctors stitch all forty together—pinky stump
to pinky stump. The epic ends as the camera spins above and they have become
one big, human volvox.
“My old anthem,” I said. The song I associated with my
first death would also be connected to my second. “Perfect.”
He switched off the video. The screen returned to the
ironing competition and a buzzer sounded—the ironers were to report to their
boards. I watched Isé–B step onto the stage. He added several more embers into
his iron, primed it, rolled his shoulders and neck, and then stared at the
heated vacuum table. What I loved about him was that he existed in his own
perfect world, concerned with nothing but cotton, heat, and steam. I longed for
such a purity, such a singularity of mind.
“He doesn’t have a chance, does he?” I asked, trying to
be lighthearted as if that might temper yet another second-place finish.
My tailor was busy at his drawing screen and had
finished half a dozen quick sketches. The drawings disturbed me. And the way
the material shimmered and smoldered made it look like fire. Worse, the
silhouette was large, bold, and muscular like something a satin would wear.
Before I had time to figure out how to express my
displeasure without insulting him, the commentator said, “They’re off! This is
the final heat for the gold!”
Fanjor and Isé–B stood beside two parallel ironing
boards arranging their white cotton shirts. Fanjor started on the cuffs, Isé–B,
the back.
“Fanjor is off to another fast start,” said the
announcer.
“He’s been in a zone all week,” enthused the color man.
“Go Isé,” said Mr. Cedar.
“Isé–B has finished the back,” said the commentator.
“But Fanjor and his incredible quickness are already in evidence!”
Isé–B got out his sleeve board and began the left.
Fanjor didn’t bother and just crushed the material flat, leaving two creases on
the sleeve.
“Why isn’t he penalized
for that?” I asked. “That’s not right!”
“Indeed,” agreed Mr. Cedar.
“He just guts it out with that speed,” added Color, as
if he’d heard my complaint. “Fanjor wills his victories. They’re not subtle or
graceful, but they’re fast.”
“They’re brutal!” I complained. “And they’re ugly!”
“Isé–B is close,” said Mr. Cedar. “He’s got a chance.”
“I just want him to beat Fanjor!”
A close-up showed Fanjor leaning in as he started the collar.
While picking up his iron, he hit the steam and a blast filled the air. His
goggles fogged so badly, he had to stop, and wipe them off.
“Uh oh!” cried the announcer. “That could be a costly
error!”
“Yes!” I screamed. “Go! Isé–B.
Go!”
“Three years ago, a steam-up just like that cost Fanjor
the Northern Invitational,” explained Color. “That was the last major won by
the veteran Matús before he retired, leaving Fanjor to dominate. Today of
course, Fanjor is the veteran, and Isé–B, the upstart.”
I couldn’t believe it, but I was about to see Isé–B
finally beat him! “Go!” I shouted, as Isé–B ran his Schiaparelli across the
shoulder yoke. Then he flipped his shirt around and worked the collar.
“Faster! Come on! Hurry!”
“It’s neck and neck!” said the announcer.
“I’d say it’s completely up for grabs!” added Color.
“No!” I screamed. “Isé–B’s ahead! He’s winning!”
As Isé–B finished the collar; Fanjor flew his Intel
across the front. In another flash, he grabbed a hanger and slapped it onto the
finishing rod. The horn sounded. An instant later Isé–B, hung his.
“Incredible!” said Color. “Just
incredible!”
“Fanjor pulled it out again!”
“He’s unbeatable,” declared Color. “And you could see it
in his eyes. Right at the end, he just wanted it more.”
I felt teased, then crushed again. And it wasn’t so much
that I wanted Isé–B to win, but Fanjor to be beaten, as if I wanted some proof that good things happened, if not for me, for someone
somewhere. But it was just like the Tournament of Ironing Champions, The Weave,
and Fiber-Con. It was always the same. It was unfair, just like everything.
“We’re going to go down to the boards,” said the
announcer. “Our own very attractive Lindsay Beech is down on the stage with
Fanjor, who —”
Mr. Cedar snapped off the screen. He worked on his
sketching board for several moments “Watch,” he said.
On the screen played a rendered movie
of myself in a radiant orange suit. I stood in a generic-looking coffee
shop of polished iron, black cement, and silver furniture. In my right hand, I
held a black glass of what I assumed was cream coffee.
“It’s boxy,” I noted, unhappily.
“It’s the bastard child of early Ültra and Pure H.”
“Indeed.”
Holding up a finger, he said, “Observe.” He touched a
few things on his board. Another figure, wearing black, entered the frame. He
tossed what looked like a fist-sized rock. When the rock hit the orange suit,
it exploded in a white flash, sending the head and arms flying. An instant
later, nothing but a few glowing embers and a black spot remained on the floor.
“I’ll deliver it this evening,” said my tailor.
Thirteen
During the first few minutes of my trip back
to the family compound, a feeling of regret began to swell in my stomach like a
hastily eaten meal. I wanted to tell my driver to turn around, so I could go
back to Mr. Cedar, ask him to design a normal suit, and devise some other way
to stop Father. When I had thrown Love Alone to the floor, it had burned
like a piece of paper, not a stick of dynamite. I didn’t want to end up as a
fireball with my limbs flying across the stage in different directions.
Each time I was about to press the intercom button I
came up with a reason why the suit made sense. First, instead of a smoldering
fire like the tie, when the suit detonated, I probably wouldn’t feel much. I’d
see a flash of yellow, sense a flare of pain, but then I’d be dead. Second, the
power assured Father’s elimination.
Then I worried about the color of the suit. While the Adjoining
Tissue orange was symmetrical and fatalistic, did I really want to end my
life in an Ültra disaster? And more importantly, what would Nora think? My
death would devastate her, but would the color of the suit and the
ferociousness of the explosion contaminate my sacrifice and ruin our grey
perfection? Or did the color separate my death from our love and protect our
colorlessness?
Gazing straight ahead at the red emergency brake button
with its big white E, I took several deep breaths, and tried to clear my head.
I thought of how desperate Father was. I thought of Elle and the ridiculous
marriage that was supposed to happen tonight. And most of all, I thought of my
beautiful Nora and the freeboot and Father’s threats
of violence. No, the orange was good. Father had asked for color and he would
get it.
Then I felt the car slowing. We weren’t stopping again,
were we? Pressing the intercom, I asked, “What’s going on?”
“A car is approaching from behind.”
Spinning around, I saw a shiny gleam on the horizon. “Is
it Father?” He had discovered my plan!
“They have not identified themselves, but are nearing
our safety zone.”
“Is the car blue and orange?”
A beat later, the driver said, “Negative. Green and gold … mkg colors.”
I raced to the back of my car and peered out the window.
Was it Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu coming to get me? Was it he all along? Or was it
Nora? And if it was, what was she doing?
“They’re gaining on us,” said my driver. “I have orders
to take evasive action.” After he spoke, I could hear a harsh whine from below
as the engines began to overdrive. When they engaged, we would be shot out of
range, and I would never know who it was.
Then a peculiar feeling filled me, as if I had just seen
something. I searched the inside of the car, hoping the answer was close by.
When I looked at the red emergency button up at the front of the cabin, my skin
went cold. When Nora had touched the button on her jacket during Heavy
Profit Camp, her finger had covered the bottom edge of both the button and
the letter she had scratched on the surface. It wasn’t an F. It was an E!
The vacuum motors had just about reached their final
velocity. As fast as I could, I ran forward, leaped, and hit the red button.
The brakes engaged instantly. Baffles and airbrakes shot out from the sides of
the car, and a large parachute was released behind. The force slammed me into
the upholstered partition.
When I came to, I sat up and felt a spasm of pain shoot
through my head and neck, like a long skewer had been plunged through me. I
heard nothing. The motors were all off. Everything was still except for a
flickering emergency light in the center of the cabin roof. The air was sour
with the tang of burnt electronics and rubber. Then from the car speakers came the message, “Emergency stop engaged. Rate: zero.
Systems: go.”
Holding my head with my right hand, as if that eased the
pain, I stood, and looked out back. The road was clear. I rubbed my eyes, but
they weren’t deceiving me. Striding to the back of the car, I was sure I was
missing something. Nothing but sunlight reflected off the white tiles for a
thousand miles.
Nora’s car was gone. It had disappeared, or had been a
mirage. It probably hadn’t been her at all, but some mkg official, a muskrat of a man dressed in stripes and
plaid, who cared for nothing but statistics,
investments, and earnings. He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow, but raced past to a
board meeting in Kong. Moreover, the letter scratched onto her button had been
an f, not a partially covered up e as I had thought. And what it meant,
I was just too dumb to figure out.
I felt desolate, and for several moments just stood
there staring out at the
When I turned around to glare at the emergency button as
though it were to blame, I saw a green and gold
Wrenching the side door open, I jumped down to the
tiles, stumbled, but kept my balance, and ran. The sun was scorching, the air
stunk, but I didn’t care. She was here.
A hatch on the back of her car was partly open, and
several gears were recoiling the last of a green and
gold parachute. She must have been watching and hit her emergency button a
split second after me. Beside her car was the orange tarp where I had fallen
off the
“Nora!” I called. The windows on her car were tinted a
dark green and it was impossible to see in. “Can you hear me?” I banged on the
door with my fist and worried she was unconscious. “You all
right?” A second later, I heard a tap from the inside. The lock
disengaged. The seal broke and a small whoosh of cool air escaped. The door
rolled back.
And there she stood. For each of our four promotion
dates, she had worn her signature satellite suits and jackets. This time she
wore an evening dress and her hair was up. I was so surprised how elegant,
formal, and beautiful she looked that I inhaled a gulp of air and almost
choked.
Her dress was made of hundreds of layers of the sheerest
fabric I had ever seen—probably the incredibly rare nano-wool that only came
from the soft underbelly of a single, faultless, genetic-t angora goat
from Asia-1. The outer edge resembled vapor, but as the layers built up and
created ever-shifting moiré patterns, the tone deepened to where the center was
the absolute black of outer space. The fabric hung beautifully from her hips
like a spray of gradient mist and was four feet wide at the floor. On her feet,
she wore shiny black pumps made of what looked like unnilseptium-coated
deerskin. The waist was small, and the charcoal bodice, covered with an
intricate pattern that reminded me of ginkgo leaves scattered on pond water,
fit her like paint. Her hands and arms were covered with long, chenille opera
gloves that matched her dress. The scoop neck showed her graceful neck, around
which hung a single string of the rare, double-heterojunction, light-emitting
diamonds.
Her lips were painted a soft, moist watermelon. Her eyes
looked luminous and pure black. Her
lashes were thick, and her eyelids, the color of ironwood smoke. Woven into her
hair were glistening strands of silvery-white rhodium isotope.
With an impish smile, she said, “I’m no longer a
Gonzalez-Matsu,” as though she had become a nameless outlaw. Then her
expression turned serious and sultry. “What I am … is yours.”
Grasping the doorframe, I pulled myself up. “I’m not
Michael Rivers,” I said, as I inhaled her redolent
mixture of exotic woods and ambergris. We stood inches apart, and for several
seconds her eyes darted from my left to right eye before finally settling on my
grey left.
In that moment, we left ourselves, and as we closed our
colored eyes, we shed our names, our families, and even the hues of our being.
Softly, I touched my lips to hers, but a moment later, I
felt like my being was falling into her mouth. As we kissed, I gathered a
handful of the gossamer of her skirt and squeezed it hard enough to press my
fingerprints into the fibers. She in turn, put her chenille-covered hands
around my neck and began to press on my Adam’s apple as if to heighten my
senses.
We lay side by side in the near
silence of her car. It was only after we had become one that I heard what was
playing on the sound system. It was Love Emitting Diode’s Down for
Piano-forte, where a ton of goose feathers were slowly dropped puff-by-puff
onto a vintage Steinway Grand.
Across Nora’s upper lip and forehead were droplets of
perspiration. While listening to the chromatic silence, I watched the light
refract in them, like so many tiny magnifying glasses. The rhythm of her
breathing was just now returning to normal.
Sitting up on an elbow, I closed my eyes for a moment as
if to gather strength. “Father is trying to harm you. He has a freeboot looking
for you.”
With a sad and mocking laugh, she said, “I heard my
father hired satins to hurt you.”
Her news confirmed my plan in a way I hadn’t even
thought of before, but the fighting between mkg
and RiverGroup was sure to escalate unless it was stopped. “After
tonight,” I said, “there won’t be anything to find.”
Her eyes flit right and left as if trying to decide what
I meant.
“I’ve just come from my tailor,” I explained, “with my
last suit.”
Her expression turned to concern. “You mean …”
“Nitrocellulose,” I confirmed.
“Michael,” she said, frowning, “not that.”
“The fabric is orange … Ültra orange.” She flinched as
if she knew that color was a precursor of worse things. “My plan is to
eliminate Father.” The corners of her mouth darkened, and I could tell she was
about to tell me that was unacceptable, but before she spoke, I added, “Unless
he is destroyed, you’re never going to be safe. And I can’t kill him to be with
you. Everything must end.”
The quarrelsome spark in her eyes faded, and slowly,
like a turtle retreating into its shell, she sunk into her self. “I feared
this,” she said quietly, as tears rolled down her face. “We are not for this
world.”
With my fingertips, I gathered the drops on her cheeks,
and touched them to my lips. “We aren’t,” I agreed.
She looked into my eyes as if for possibilities,
options, or alternatives. Then, as if she couldn’t find any either, her gaze
fell. “I’ll say goodbye to my Michael now. Later, I’ll know you’re someone
else. Someone who is sacrificing himself for us.”
That was it! I could see myself as a young boy—in the
very beginning when I had loved the music and the crowd’s adulation. This would
be his final appearance.
“And afterward,” she said, her lips trembling, “I’ll
join you.”
“No!” I sat up and grasped her hands. “Please, Nora.
Hide. Go somewhere where you won’t be found … somewhere far off
the system. Stay there and you’ll be safe.”
“Without you?” As if defeated,
as if our time was over, she smoothed the silky chenille on her forearms and
hands.
I could have argued. I could have insisted that she go
on, live her life, find someone else, but I knew I wouldn’t convince her.
Knowing we would both be dead tonight, I felt wretched and hallowed at the same
time.
When we were both gone, the world would know how we were
meant for each other and how much we were willing to sacrifice.
Reaching toward her, I grasped her cool, smooth chenille-covered hands, after squeezing, I let go, and pulled back an inch. We looked at each other, and I could tell she was thinking the same: we were the beautiful but dead couple in the plutonium button ad with our yearning hands outstretched but unconnected.
Fourteen
Without another word, I stood, straightened my
pants and jacket, opened the door, and stepped out into the putrid, hot air. I
walked quickly, hoisted myself up into my car and sat. I knew if I looked back
I wouldn’t have been able to leave.
As I buckled myself into my seat, I could hear the
vacuum-arc engines in Nora’s car rev. A part of me couldn’t believe that we had
just made love. I wished it could happen forever. And even now I could feel my
memories shrink and darken like a fall leaf.
“Close the side door, please,” I said into the intercom.
Her car began to roll slowly. I fought back tears, but
willed myself not to cry. After taxiing fifty feet, the engines engaged and her
car shot forward. Goodbye, I thought after her. Goodbye, Nora.
Once I had wiped my face and blown my nose, I repeated,
“Side door, please.” No reply came. Nora’s car soon shrank to a watery-looking
dot on the horizon. “Driver? Hello?” I pressed the
intercom switch firmly. “Please acknowledge!”
Since we had stopped, I hadn’t heard from him. Undoing
my seatbelt, I worried that something had happened. I lowered myself to the
tiles again and headed to the front. The round pilot door was ajar. Wedging my
fingernails under the edge, I coaxed it open. “The intercom isn’t working,” I
said. “Could you close the door?”
Inside, it was pitch-black and silent. A second later, a
pinkish light flickered from what I assumed was some control panel low on the
dash. I hadn’t ever been inside a pilot’s cabin. They were barely four feet
tall and the seat was designed for someone who weighed less than seventy-five
pounds. On the silvery dashboard were two steering sticks, several switches,
and knobs. In the sculpted black seat, the driver looked young—my age perhaps.
All of my previous drivers had been older. He looked like a bug boy, and I
wondered why someone so inexperienced was driving.
“Are you all right?” I asked. When my eyes adjusted to
the dim, I saw that his helmet was off kilter and half of his face was dark. I
was about to ask what was the matter, when I realized it wasn’t face-paint, but
blood flowing from a gash on his forehead. His eyes were three-quarters closed.
Touching his neck, I was glad to find him at least warm.
This was my fault! I had pressed the emergency button
without any warning. As soon as I had thought that, I saw that his seat belts
were hanging at his sides and a corresponding splat of blood was on the inside
of the windshield.
Reaching in, I got one hand under his legs and the other
behind his shoulders, but the space was so cramped, and he so heavy, I couldn’t
budge him. Then I worried he had a neck injury, and left him in the chair.
Glancing up and down the
I barely fit through the pilot door, but I was able to
squeeze my way in. The best I could do was to lay sideways, propped up on one
elbow with my feet dangling out the open door. That way, at least I could
operate the controls, see out the windshield, and watch the three screens
below.
The leftmost was on. A woman with frizzy hair in a white
plastic jacket placed an enormous blue and white capsule on a man’s tongue.
After he wiped his nose, he struggled and swallowed it. Then he returned the
favor with a pill the size of a baby’s fist. He shoved it into her mouth and
while she gagged and her eyes watered, he continued to push it farther down her
throat with his thumbs. Snapping off the screen, I felt repulsed by whatever
smut or torture that was supposed to be.
Then I had a bad feeling. Pushing myself off the
driver’s lap, I glanced down at his crotch; his uniform was unsnapped and
there, lay a flaccid, ruby-colored organ.
“Gross!” I said.
Fetching a handkerchief from my pocket, I spread it over
him and returned my attention to the controls. On bits of white tape someone
had labeled the six switches. From left to right they read: Warm up, Full,
Tuning, Cruise, Decay, and Off. I flipped the first to see what
would happen and heard the familiar gradual rising whine of the motors. After
thirty seconds, I hit the second, but the motor’s pitch continued to rise and
red lights blinked on a dial. I switched off Full, but the motors kept
going faster and faster. I smelled an acidic smoke. Switching off Warm up, they
finally began to slow. Once they returned to what sounded like their normal
speed, I flipped Full and they held. One switch at a time, I told
myself.
Now, how did the car actually move? As I looked over the
controls, the middle screen blinked on. I saw Xavid’s big glasses and his
snow-capped hair. As he squinted into the dark, I quickly covered my face with
my arm. “Turn on the lights!” he said. “Where are you? You hear me, you slubber
butt? You’re late! Get that fucking shit-ball
dancing-boy back here. I need him for my show.”
I didn’t move or breathe.
“You pill freak, where are you?” A blast of static came
from the screen as if Xavid had huffed at it. “Fucking useless Goddamned cousin!” he muttered. A second later, it shut off.
While Xavid’s Ültra bombast and complete hatred of me
weren’t surprising, what was his obviously incompetent cousin doing driving my
car? And why was Father’s hairdresser hiring key personnel?
Grasping the left steering stick, I turned off Full
and flipped Cruise. The car didn’t move.
“How do you make this thing go?” I asked. My unconscious
driver had no advice. The middle screen came on again. Only this time it wasn’t
Xavid, but a diagram. At the bottom was a teardrop, which I guessed represented
my car, and at the top was a blinking light. Looking through the windshield, I
saw nothing. A moment later, though, I saw the familiar shine of a
Was it Nora, returning to help? Or was it Father and his
orange satin coming to get me? Or was it just some other car? And what would
happen when it blasted past me? When I had been on the road, the winds from the
passing cars pummeled me. I knew that the vibrating skin on
Bending my head until I was against the driver’s shins,
I saw three more knobs below labeled Tempo, Track, and Mode.
I gave Tempo a twist and the car barreled forward into the other lane. Grabbing
the left steering stick, I leaned it hard the other way, but not before we
slammed into the wall, and a horrible twisting metal sound reverberated all the
way down the side.
The center screen blinked the word collision as
if I had no idea. The right showed a diagram with several red arrows,
presumably where I had just caused damage. I maneuvered the car back into the
right lane and just as I did, the on-coming car blasted past us and knocked us
against the other wall. The screens lit up again.
Seconds later, I had centered the car and we were moving
fast. Soon, I saw an exit sign to America-3 and made the wide turn. I was no
longer on the
“Find Walter Kez,” I said to the screens. The center one
displayed a map, and it didn’t look far. Less then fifteen minutes later, I
switched from Full to Decay and then Off. The car came to
an easy stop. I had made it!
Once I had extricated myself
from the pilot’s cabin, I turned to get a look at the Kez residence and the
surroundings.
The house was just two stories made of a blush-colored brick.
The windows on the second story were covered over with red-painted wood.
Fifteen feet from me was the matching red front door centered on a dilapidated
front porch. For about half a mile in all directions were
browned fields of corn. Beyond that were thousands of the
yellow and red square houses that dominated the slubs.
The front door opened. Walter stepped out. He wore a
silver jacket over an undershirt. His hair was a mess, and he looked sleepy.
“Elle’s not here!” he shouted, as if reluctant to come closer.
“My driver’s injured,” I said. “Can you help him?”
He turned and darted back in.
While I waited, I told myself that this was the
slubs—not a terrible area obviously, but the slubs anyway. Had Father come to
look at their place? Did he have any idea who he was trying to merge with?
Sure, they could have some amazing new technology behind those covered-over
windows on the second story, something that might even save RiverGroup, but I
doubted it.
Walter came back out, pulling on the same light-grey
suit jacket as he had worn before, and I figured it was the only one he owned.
Behind him was the other nanny.
“Where is the patient?” she asked, with a modicum of
medical authority. I motioned to the pilot door and while she stuck her head
in, Walter dug a toe into the dirt.
“You probably shouldn’t be here.”
“I know, but do you have any more of that aru?”
“Oh,” he said, pouting, “sorry. I ate the last one.”
“Can we get more?”
“My sister has the car. She’s in Yooku getting ready for
the show.” Peering up, he asked, “Aren’t you going to marry her at midnight?”
Glancing out at the dusty cornfields, I felt far away
from everything. I said, “I don’t know.”
His nanny had managed to pull out the injured driver.
She held him in her arms as a mother might cradle a baby.
“He’s bloody!” said Walter, stepping back.
I asked, “Will he be all right?”
She nodded once then took him back to the house.
“Do you have someone who can drive my car?”
He said he did and he directed us around the main
building to a small slubber shed of a house ten feet square. As he knocked on
the black door, he said, “She’s very nice. And very helpful.”
A young girl, in loose beige pants and a long, ugly
unwoven undershirt, answered the door. She didn’t look especially pleased to
see Walter, and her eyes were heavy as though his knock woke her.
“We’re going to buy
aru. We need you to drive Michael Rivers’
This child could drive a
Leaning around Walter, she peered at me as if she were
the one unsure. “The Michael Rivers?” she asked, as she wiped her wet
nose.
“See!” he said, teasingly. “I told you I know him!”
Curling a lip, she asked, “What are you doing
here?”
Once I had a better look, I decided she was probably in
her twenties. “Trying,” I said, emphasizing the word because I was
beginning to doubt my decision to come here, “to get aru.”
“For you?” she wanted to know.
“A friend.”
She rolled her eyes, as if she didn’t believe. When I
showed her my car, the first thing she did was walk all the way around it,
dragging her finger over the surface.
“It’s nice, but we’ll probably barely get three point
two.” Turning and squinting accusingly at me, she added, “Someone scraped off a
bunch of the fast fibers.”
“Fine,” I said, unhappy with her manner, but at least
semi-confident she could drive. I asked Walter, “Where do we get the stuff?”
“Asia-12.”
I wanted to collapse. After all I had gone through to
get here, the place was on the other side of the
globe, hours and hours away. We would never make it in time.
Wiping her nose again, the girl asked, “What about the
Arctic pass?”
“What’s that?”
She turned and spoke toward the north presumably.
“Supposed to be part of the new
I asked, “Is it safe?”
Starting toward the pilot door, she said, “Nope,” and
crawled in.
Walter grunted and stepped on a waterbug almost as big
as his foot. Gritting his teeth in disgust, he said, “Come on! She’s good.”
The Artic pass turned out to be
a decrepit one-lane, floating metal bridge that stretched across the North
Pole. It rose one hundred feet above the blood-red water and the thousands of
brown and orange junks that covered the ocean like water birds. The bridge had
no walls, no guardrails, and swayed back and forth in the currents. Gripping
the upholstery of my seat, as if to hang on and help steer, it was like riding
a wild bull, especially since the road wasn’t surfaced, and it felt like we
were thumping over railroad ties.
Walter threw up into his handkerchief half a dozen
times. Several of the windows cracked, but held together. The main screen
snapped and showered the floor with bits of glass and glowing goo. The overhead
light blinked out and when the auxiliaries came on, two of them flicked off as
well.
When we were finally off the bridge and back on real
roads in Asia-12, I felt grateful, but wasn’t sure if my bones were in the same
order.
Meanwhile, night had descended and everything had gone
black. Outside, I saw not a single spot of light, and except for the road ahead
in the beams, we could have been in outer space.
Walter stood and freshened up in the bathroom. When he
sat, I could see that he was at least his normal pale.
I wasn’t attacking him, or accusing, but I just wanted
to confirm what I suspected. “There is no Ribo-Kool, is there?”
Although he didn’t look up, his fingers began worrying
an errant thread on his jacket. “Sorry.”
“What is there?”
“Nothing,” he said, with a sob. “Don’t turn me in,
please! It wasn’t my idea! I didn’t want to change my name.”
“Your name?” I asked surprised.
“Who are you?”
“Noole. My grandfather made
bricks in that building where I live.”
Changing identity was not just illegal but impossible,
especially from slubber to family member. RiverGroup, or one of the other
security companies, protected all names and numbers. “How did your uncle do
that?
Shaking his head, he said, “Xavid Xarry did.”
“My father’s hairdresser?” I
asked, as if he were crazy.
Walter peered at me. “He’s cfo and coo of
RiverGroup.”
I had forgotten about his titles. Maybe because when
Father announced it, it seemed like a joke. “How do you know Xavid?” I asked.
“Or how does he know you?”
“He’s
I didn’t care that they were slubbers, but I knew Father
had no idea. I knew he hadn’t even gone to their house to take a look. And I
knew that once it was discovered, the other families would cry foul that
RiverGroup was merging with the enemy. Grabbing the control, I tried to turn on
the cracked screen to call Father and tell him what an idiot he was, but of
course, it didn’t work. I longed to see his face turn red as he learned that
yet another of his magnificent plans had died an ugly death.
“Look it!” said Walter, pointing.
Outside, lights had appeared on the horizon. I thought
of the Pure H copy, Miniature city flickers, and that was exactly
what it looked like—a tiny metropolis gleaming white, blue, and orange.
I asked, “That the place?”
“No. I think it’s Moscostan. I
go there to see creepy things.” Frowning, he added, “I have bad nightmares about
it sometimes.”
“Where do we get the aru?”
“A little farther.” Pointing to
something approaching on the left, he asked, “What is that?”
Leaning over to get a better view from the windows, we
were quickly approaching a tall, lit yellow and red sign. As we neared, I could
read the ornate, script letters. It read, Tanoshi No Wah. Behind the
sign was a large red-and-yellow-striped tent.On each of the six peaks, a red
flag flapped in the breeze. Around the central tent were a dozen smaller ones
and what looked like parked trucks and several lit rides with mechanical women,
giant ducks, and golden blimps. To one side was a makeshift parking lot with a
few rusted but garishly decorated four-wheeled trucks.
I said, “It’s my mother!”
Fifteen
Walter laughed as if I were insane. “Your mother?”
“I mean it’s her carnival … the one she travels with.”
He looked horrified. “Way out here?”
“She left Father years ago. She
joined this carnival. I don’t know. It’s like she does it to embarrass me.”
“Why would she leave your dad?” he asked. “He’s so
nice!”
I was about to explain, but it did not seem worth it, or
maybe it only confirmed his dreadfulness that he had charmed one odd and
insignificant boy. Instead, I said,
“We’re stopping.”
“Oh no!” he said. “It’s too dangerous around here!
Moscostan is not good.”
“Driver,” I said into the intercom. “Stop at this
carnival.” As I spoke, we zipped past it, but she began to slow immediately.
“You didn’t tell me about this!” said Walter, panicked.
“The places you go aren’t good!”
“You don’t have to get out. I’ll go alone.”
Frowning, he said, “No, I’ll go with you.” Then he sat
pouting, as if he regretted our friendship.
Soon Walter’s driver had turned the car around and
parked it in the muddy lot.
“Look how big they
are,” he said, pointing to a group of slubbers in the same silver and white
jackets and loose pants I had seen when I fell off the
Before I changed my mind, I grasped the side of the door
and swung myself down. The ground squished underfoot.
From somewhere—maybe from the big tent—I heard an odd
singing. The voice was at once lyrical and beautiful, but also oddly stinging,
as though it was the combination of an accomplished opera soprano and a giant
mosquito.
“I need a step.” Walter still stood in the car, his toes
over the edge, looking down the three-foot drop.
“Come on,” I said, holding up my arms, “I’ll help you.”
He jumped right into me and almost knocked me backward. I grasped the shoulders
of his jacket, though, held him and kept myself up, too.
Straightening his jacket and hat, he frowned and said,
“I don’t want to die.”
“We’ll be fine,” I said, hoping that was true. From
here, I could see that the smoke was coming from one of the smaller tents where
a vendor was roasting meats.
As Walter and I walked across the muddy field, slubbers
who had been milling about stopped to watch. A few pointed at us, some gestured
at my
Walter tugged on my sleeve as if he wanted to run back
to the car.
“He was just trying to frighten us,” I said, not sure
that’s what he’d really meant.
As we continued, I saw a makeshift fence surrounding the
tents, and next to the opening stood a small red booth. On top of the booth was
a sign that read tickets. Inside
was a man in a shiny gold shirt. He had a small face, a heavy brow, and what
seemed like a permanent scowl.
“Good evening handsome and distinguished guests,” he
said, louder that I expected. “It seems you have come from afar in a very fancy
car! I am so very sorry to say that the Tanoshi No Wah has already performed
tonight.” His glowering expression was gone. Now he beamed at me with a manic
look. “I can offer you both the very best seats for tomorrow’s performance,” he
said. “Only one hundred thousand apiece, gentlemen.”
Exiting slubbers slowed to gawk at us. Two women in
white plastic pointed at us. A man in silver and the same bunny shirt as I had
seen before, scowled.
“Thank you,” I said, leaning in so the others might not
hear. “Actually, I’m Michael Rivers. I believe my mother works here.” I wasn’t
sure if work was the right word. “I’d like to see her if I could.”
He leaned slowly back as his eyes circled my face. For
an instant, I thought he was going to tell me to go away. “Forgive me! I should
have recognized you! Please, forgive me.” He then fumbled with the things on
the little desktop—a roll of tickets, pieces of blue and green paper, a grey
metal box. After he had jammed everything in the container, he jumped down from
his chair and disappeared. A second later, he emerged from a small door on the
right side of the booth. He was just three feet tall.
“I’ll tell her! I should have recognized you. I’ll go
tell her right now! Forgive me, please.” In his right hand, he held the metal
box. “I’ll run and tell her right now!” He hadn’t yet moved.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you!” He laughed. “Thank you, Mr.
Rivers!” Next, he threw his arms around my right leg, as if hugging me. Walter
must have thought I was being attacked. He yelped, stumbled backward, and fell
to the ground with a splat.
The golden man let go. “Forgive me! Is this … another of
our brothers?”
“No, he’s a friend,” I said, as I stepped to Walter’s side to help him up. The golden man got on the other side and together we righted Walter. Several of the circled slubbers laughed. Walter frowned a