1.
I am in my car, foraying into the lower city in search of life
and books. Autumn storms loom gray over the city, twinging the air with the
scent of ice-cracked winter. Rain makes an opaque smear of my windshield so I
pull over. Through the steady-streaking glass I see a shopfront, its marquee a
freakishly grinning clown juggling amidst sprinting elephants, relic from a
past century. I duck in through the rain.
Lights the dull yellow of bad teeth hang low over a field of
chaotic merchandise extending back into gloom: cracked plastic pipe fittings,
pyramids of rusted folding chairs, stacks of polished second-hand shoes, nuts
and bolts in all states of corrosion, jackets and shirts and pants in fusty
piles that spill into the aisles, toys of plastic and rubber and wood jumbled
and jangled and broken, lampstands with no sockets or wires or switches. A
collection befitting only the unwillingly unimplanted. I walk past other
customers who paw slowly at the goods, seeking time’s elusive elasticity until
their next implanting, looking for books.
For I have taught myself to scrutinize the marching lines of
characters, to discern meaning, emotion, beauty. To read. Learning this archaic
skill required I wrench my brain to pieces and set it afire and kick the ashes
to the grate to begin again, sweating black pools into notebooks and
dictionaries and grammars as months tripped past. In my obsession with these
old wares, I have made myself, as my father is fond of saying, obsolete. I look
for a clerk. That’s when I see her.
She is in a sequined singlet, denim miniskirt, flip-flops. Very
unwise garments this time of year, yet she seems too blithely angelic to be
affected by mere variances in the atmosphere. She moves with a light grace I
associate with characters from my books. I wonder what she can be doing here,
among the forlorn.
I go to the counter with the long confidence of my long family
line my only justification. She surveys me with alarming frankness. Lineage is
trivial: there is no doubt who is supplicant and who has favors to grant.
“Do you…” I say, voice halting, “do you have any books?”
“Follow me,” she says, and saunters through the random pilings
of collected curios with the balletic grace of a jungle creature which has
never been hunted.
“The books,” she says, gesturing expansively at a row of wooden
shelves swathed in dust.
Lopsided piles of printed matter, to be sure—but not
books. Blue-faded girls sporting outlandish coiffures and attire, pages of
proffered goods, curlicued designs. These are magazines.
“I see,” I say, and return my eyes to her.
2.
Books are fuel. They exist in vast quantities relatively easy
to acquire. To the deep chagrin of implanters fed on the supposition that the
universe is their gooey plaything, the winters grow no less cold. When someone
emerges from a pleasant implanting of cotton-candy skies and mango beaches to a
chill storm, the rift in reality is a deep one, indeed. And since an
unimplanted body must be warmed, books burn.
A factoid of life to which I once gave no thought, here in this
city my ancestors founded and elevated to a minor antediluvian importance. The
city is irreparably decayed nowadays, the solid profit-making enterprises of
yesteryear long since fled overseas where legions of peasants beg to be
exploited. Somehow the city lurches on as we burn off the last of the land’s
fat. Naturally, I was fed on implantings from birth. A few years previously, I
had taken to wandering the neighborhood in the blank tedium between
implantings. I walked among the abandoned estates, where once local notables
looked down on the city and which are now magnets for scavengers. I met an edgy
one at the gates of the Fulberg Estate. He shot me at a distance of five paces.
I spent weeks abed following this nose-dive into life’s
viscera, attended by Maranantha and a wheezing mole-chinned doctor my father
turned up somewhere, waiting to see if I would die. The doctor decreed I
receive no implantings while my condition was critical. As the cumulative
effects of the implanted years faded, intimations of mortality and reality
dented my consciousness. The kiss of pain, with its promise of inevitable
death, is a reality that shatters all the illusions of implanting if you cannot
immediately escape to the next one. But it is real—a distinction only the
unimplanted can make. I resolved not to stop there. After being proclaimed out
of danger, I refused more implantings.
My father was incredulous and Maranantha horrified. She got
down on enormously bloated knees and begged me not to “turn all crazy” on
her—hadn’t she raised me on her own milk? Still I refused, and the
mole-chinned doctor was banished from the house amid cries of malpractice. From
cheery intimacy the housestaff became silent in my presence, avoiding any touch
or look when bringing meals and changing bedsheets, speaking in stammers,
scuttling away at first opportunity. Maranantha never stopped clicking her
tongue and saying I’d “never get to be like folks again.” My father predicted
I’d soon give up this foolishness.
“We have implantings,” he said, “because of reality.”
I observed as though from a windy height. With a long
convalescence ahead, I cast about for ways to expand a non-implanted existence,
where everything from the chafe of bedsheets to the glare of the noonday sun
was real. Then I discerned, as through a bubbling prism, the well-dusted shelf
beside the picture window and its rows of books.
3.
My mind nearly snaps in two in the struggle for something to
say to the shopgirl. I catch an unflattering glimpse of myself in her dark
crystal eyes.
“You look fine,” she says. “Not what you wanted?”
“Not exactly,” I say.
“How about something else to read?” she says, reaching in a
back pocket (years off my life, I’d give, to be one of those supple fingers)
and hands me a slip of green paper. Then she goes off with flicking hips, her
scent a trace in that dim spot I am loath to leave. But I do finally, stealing
backwards glances all the way, green slip of paper wrapped tight in my palm. I
have some serious work ahead.
Outside the rain has let up and the last sorry shafts of light
are exiting stage left. The streets are littered with hunched figures slouching
heavily through the haze as they edge through the gaps between implantings.
Some look to be shopping for the tonic of a clever new device. It is one way to
grease time’s slide. For instance, my father bought a massage chair a few
months ago. He enjoyed it so much he did not stand until it broke down a week
later.
The car is sputtering a lot
worse lately. I have to find someone who can attend to this growling machine. I
once depressed a button near the seat and to my surprise, a front panel popped
loose. I spent a sweaty hour bruising and scraping and burning my fingers
before finding a lever that released a catch and allowed me to lift it up.
Propping the heavy panel on my shoulder, I gaped at the stinking mass of coiled
tubes and grills and caps. Maranantha called the housestaff over to see. They
gathered round, pointing and gaping and murmuring at its monstrous complexity.
Finally my shoulder could support the panel no longer. I let it drop, which is
how the scullery maid had her fingers broken. The car requires the attentions
of someone who will not make of it a menace.
I weave through the holed streets across the riverbridge.
Something spilled upstream a while back and the river is still redscummed and
reeking. Over the hill, I swerve around a crater the rains have created.
Someone is going to crash right in one day—it is almost big enough for a
car. The whole road will wash out eventually, I suppose, and then I’ll have to
find a new way into the lower city. On the hillside slope-backed porters cart
heavy loads of vegetables on their backs. I wonder how long they’ve been
walking and who grew the greens.
I pull in the drive and up to the west wing garage.
Maranantha’s waddling around in there, hanging out the laundry. Easy to see
she’s near her next implanting. Look how fast she moves. Which isn’t to say
she’s going quickly. She can’t. Not with blubber overflowing her slippers and
more wattle off her chin and arms than I have meat on my body. She says it’s in
her family bones, but I suspect it has more to do with the vast quantities of
honeyed oats she consumes. Don’t tell her that, though. She won’t bring you a
hot meal for a month. And don’t ask why she’s hanging out wet laundry in the
garage past nightfall. Maranatha moves to the logic of her own implantings.
My forebear Trajan Holden built this house almost two centuries
ago. He was the city founder. A life-sized portrait of him hangs at the head of
the staircase. I’ve seen my father in front of it, mumbling garbled hopes that
Trajan’s strength will reappear in the family line. He feels he did his part to
restore the family fortunes by making me Trajan’s namesake. We live on the
interest-bearing efforts of our industrious ancestors, which are maintained by
a phalanx of sensible advisors, and my father’s ambition is to see out his
remaining years with no tribulation.
“Going to rain again, sure,” says Maranantha, her hands blue as
she wrings out the laundry. She colonized the garage one afternoon when I was
out with the car and it has remained hers ever since.
“Looks like it,” I say, carefully passing through the dim
shadows, since Maranantha leaves housework scattered when the need for an
implanting overwhelms.
“I’m going to be at this forever, Lord help me,” says Maranantha.
Which means the lion’s share of the laundry will be in the tub
come morning, because Maranantha is about a minute away from an implanting.
Were I to linger in the doorway, I’d be bowled over by her rush to her
quarters.
I wind my way on the threadbare carpet paths among the genteel
clutter, everything no generation could bring itself to part with. According to
my father, his father used to speak expansively of restoring the house. He got
as far as clearing out the west wing garage, where the car sat unused until I
began to make use of it. The housestaff does not distinguish valuables (an
ivory-carved chess set) from scrap (my father’s magnetic billiards table),
stacking things wherever they can, a revolving wardrobe sloped against a formal
dining table beneath a ping-pong table and two life-sized stuffed bears, coated
in dust and leaning head-to-head. At our biannual meeting, our advisors quietly
hinted how valuable many of these possessions are. My father’s eyes threatened
escape from his skull and he said, “Surely it hasn’t come to that.”
The advisors gave oily smiles and said, “Not for some time.”
My father was relieved. For my part, I expect to see the
artifacts of my ancestors traded away. Any offspring of mine will likely
inherit little more than a name.
I go up the stairs, past housestaff dusting the portrait of
Trajan, which they keep immaculate for superstitious reasons of their own. Down
the west wing hall in my chambers is my only prized possession. The bookshelf.
In addition to the 15 books I originally had, I have saved 61 volumes from the
fire. Often I dream of a debilitating accident which leaves me permanently
bed-ridden within reach of them. My mahogany desk is in a dark corner. I have a
bright lamp (a “reading” lamp, my father proudly told me, after pulling it from
some dusty corner of the house), pens, a magnifying glass, two dictionaries and
three grammars, well-worn reminders of my progress. After all, I came to books
with no more understanding than I have of my car.
I cannot describe the agony of forcing raw words into my brain
those first months, which demanded interpretation and understanding, so unlike
the direct feed of an implanting where all you must do is passively accept
sensation. I very nearly surrendered. Years later, my brain would still retreat
if I did not force it into labor. I must persist, else I will sink back into
the morass from which I sprang. I have become into a strange creature, alone in
an uncomprehending world that trusts all to the next implanting. Or so I have
thought. I thrust my shoulders over the green slip of paper.
4.
The night is nearly gone. I ache and shiver from my efforts.
But I think of the shopgirl and continue.
The message on the green slip of paper is: “Rave Party. Be
There Or Be ☐.
No drinkheads. Implanting = Slavery. 12 October. Sokon Hall.”
“Party”: I knew this word. “Rave”: I did not. Literally it
means:
1. To
speak wildly, irrationally, or incoherently.
2. To
roar; rage.
3. To
speak or write with wild enthusiasm.
4. To
attend a rave.
v. tr.
To utter or express in a frenzied manner.
But I didn’t understand until I remembered Della Mae Percy, one
of my books, which cost me 3 months of labor to read after recovering it from a
lower city fuel crate. It took two hours to get back through the first page of
“The Rave” and rediscover what one is: heedless dancing, sonic music, drugs,
sex, panting breathless sweating. Yes. “To attend a rave.” An improbable
occasion for me, who prefers my silent warren here above all else.
I understood the next 4 words, but for nearly an hour the
symbol was beyond me. Why four lines forming an empty space? I consulted my
dictionaries, The Trucker’s Atlas, The Guermantes History of France, Veen’s
Meridian, straining my eyeballs page by
page as Maranantha’s predicted rain pelted against the picture window. Finally
I found a similar shape, a four-sided equilateral shape, a square, in Snows
of Midsummer, and a definition: an egghead,
a stiff, a square. Not me. I will “Be There.”
“No”: understood. “~head”: an individual overly taken with a
particular substance or activity, e.g., a “drinkhead”: a person perniciously
fond of alcohol. I myself have never partaken, but I know some do to plug the
breach between implantings. Its debilitating effects have caused it to be
occasionally criminalized and always discouraged: you can still see the ancient
faded slogan painted on lower city walls: “Don’t Drink, Think.” This obsolete
rallying cry caused me some mirth when I could finally read it.
“Implanting”: understood.
“=”:
1. Having the
same quantity or measure or value as another.
2. Being the
same or identical to in value, as in mathematics.
3. Having the
same privileges, status, or rights.
“Slavery”; variously meaning:
1. The state
of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2.
a. The
practice of owning slaves.
b. A mode of
production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.
c. The
condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
I see, I see! To be implanted is to be a slave a specific
influence, to be bound in servitude. If you are not implanted, you are free!
Yes! What I have been trying to articulate since the day I refused them!
12 October: 4 days from today.
“Sokon Hall.” I haul out my giant map of the city, 200 pages of
faded blue ink showing every street and corner of 75 years ago. This I also
took from a fuel crate, its owner eyeing me incredulously as I handed over
cash. After an hour’s careful searching, I locate Sokon Hall not two blocks
from where I saw the shopgirl, and curse my slow mind. Sokon Hall is the
informal name for the Sokon Realty Tower, the city’s sole highrise, which
gray-slanted façade I see from my chamber windows every day, so that I have
never noted its presence.
Green slip of paper comprehended on my desk, I stand at a
rain-washed window watching the translucent outline of Sokon Hall form in the
cottony gloom of dawn, wondering where the shopgirl is, thinking it is no slave
who will meet her there.
5.
After days of wet-mouthed anticipation, 12 October arrives at
long glorious last. I dress carefully and deliberate on the route to Sokon
Hall. Maranantha scuttles by in the hallway. Soon she will be incapable of
anything but implanting. My father hopes she will last out his time, so he will
be spared the burden of replacing her. I wonder if she hopes for the same.
Car keys sweaty in my palm, I meet my father on the great
stairs. He is ambling slowly, as is his wont, not nearly so gung-ho for his
implantings as Maranantha.
“Ah, son,” he says. “Off again?”
“Yes,” I say.
He nods slowly. “Very good.”
“I’ll see you, Dad,” I say, sliding past an ivory lamp covered
in the dust of a generation. If he’s not in dire need of an implanting, he
might stand here with me in silence for an hour.
“I need one,” he says again, rheumy eyes soft. “I do need one.”
“Okay, Dad,” I say, and get down the stairs.
A chill wind kicks up clouds of dust on the dry streets. I make
my way past the fuelsellers at the bottom of the hill, the beggars at the
onramp looking for leftover implantings, the produce stalls on the offramp. In
the lower city I weave my way among the halted cars and shuffling pedestrians,
arriving finally at the great plaza in front of Sokon Hall. I park across the
street and wait for some sign.
There is nothing to see. Not that I have any idea what to look
for. But I have a pocketful of money and a lot of patience. I flag down a
bicycle vendor. He has sausages and bread warmed over a brazier. Grease
trickles down my chin and I can’t remember why calorie bars and supplemental
pills are adjudged superior to organics.
I sit in my idling car all day, watching the fuel gauge and the
opaque sun-glinted lobby windows. Nothing happens. I re-read the green slip of
paper, desperate for a clue. But nothing. Aimless strollers with the glassy
look and slobbery chins of pirated implantings wander by. Tendrils of despair
creep into my pulsating brain.
And then, as the lobby’s interior comes visible in the fading
light, I see movement. People inside! Not shufflers, but walkers with purpose.
I get out of the car and the doorhinges squeak so loudly I cringe. I cross the
plaza as a single sodium light flickers on, breathing heavily and seeing the
rusted chain on the entrance doors. I look around wildly. How are these people
getting in? The plaza seems vast as a desert and twice as hopeless. I press my
face to the window. Denied the shopgirl by a pane of glass!
But a woman stepping quickly across the lobby sees me. She
motions with a jutting thumb behind her. I walk that way and she nods and
smiles. Then she is gone and I run around the corner of the building, my breath
coming in wheezy gasps, into an alley clogged with refuse. A small path winds
through moldering plastic bags and miscolored plastics to a small doorway
framed by a single light, slightly ajar. I summon what calm I can, and enter.
In the lobby I cross past white-dried skeletons of potted
plants and a reception desk and myriad signs that might take hours to read,
down a gray corridor, then up a jagged-tooth staircase into a vast blankness
that rises into murk. Sokon Hall is hollow all the way up the gray-domed
ceiling. Watery shafts of sunlight make faint outlines on the floor to the
click of my heels echoing up into the nothing. A torch flickers at the far side
of this inexplicable emptiness and the air thrums low. I have seen Sokon Hall
every day of my life and never known it was hollow at the core. Think how much
else I do not know.
The flickering torch sends up a strand of oily black smoke.
Beside it are two glowing buttons labeled with up and down arrows. Surely I am
headed up: I push that button, and a horrible rumbling emanates from a slatted
doorway in the wall as a light turns on above it. It sounds like fierce wind in
a long tunnel. The two gray slats open to a small space. I look in and
hesitate. The doors close. I push the button again. They open. I think of the
shopgirl and enter.
Inside is a double row of buttons labeled with a number. “78”
is blinking, so I push it. The doors slide shut and the box jolts. There is a
pressure on my head and shoulders as the walls of the box peel away—they
are made of glass. The lobby slides away below. I try to stay in the center of
the box as levels flee past, balls tingling and chin trembling, feeling I’m in
a free-fall. The box stops and the door slides open. Heavy thumping issues from
somewhere ahead. The “1” button is blinking impatiently. I step into another
narrow hallway where another flickering torch burns. My shoes squeak and the
doors hiss shut behind me. I come to a door, the thumping much louder, and go
through.
And everywhere are people, people, people. Who do not notice me
wandering in the purple velvet din, their skin glowing ethereal grays, yellow,
oranges, reds, contorting in wild rhythms, shouting among the chairs and
couches and padded squares of carpet, shimmying walking jumping, couples,
threesomes, groups, entwined in kissing, sucking, pawing, sweating and moaning
and grabbing for fistfuls of hair and flesh, dousing themselves in hot grease
to slide naked across a plastic floor, coupling with whoever they touch, men on
women on men on men on women on women on women on men, downing amber-colored
glasses one after the other after the other as I am staggered into, kissed,
lose my belt and my zipper comes undone, buttons disappearing from my
grease-splotched shirt in the dizzy noise and dripping heat of the ceiling
raining down condensation. Someone places a glass in my hand and brings it to
my mouth gently but irresistibly as someone else fondles me from behind and is
gone by the time I twist around to see. The shopgirl’s image swims blurry in my
mind’s eye. I cannot see how I will find her. Then she appears.
She is naked on all fours, long black hair wet on the staircase
of her ribs, simultaneously involved with three others in a paroxysmal scrum. I
weave a careful approach on grease-slicked soles. She sees me and manages to
keep her balance while raising a hand in greeting. My mind is dead. I slump to
my knees, watching her jouncing head. A woman crawls over to me and teases my
member with her tongue. A man joins her. I have never been very able (even in
the hands of the very exclusive callgirl service the Holdens have long
utilized), but seeing the skewered shopgirl triggers a forceful response that
culminates in mighty shudders as I grip handfuls of hair on two heads. They
disappear, and when the shopgirl and her associates have finished in a roiling
spasmodic burst, they likewise take leave of each other. The shopgirl comes to
me. She leans in and her hot lips brush my ear.
“Find what you wanted?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say.
She pulls on clothes from somewhere, denim miniskirt and black
bra. Her hair is sweat-slicked and her skin crystal-beaded. I cannot imagine
how I clawed my way through the days before her. She takes my hand and we surf
through the crowd on waves of pleasure sought and spent. She rummages through a
pile of garments near a small doorway and finds fur coats. We go out on a
balcony into the slap of a cold wind. The shopgirl’s hair flails in the wind
and the city blinks in patches below and beyond all is black.
“Your first time,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
So close to her now, calm courses through me with the gentle
surety of a waking dream.
She says, “From now on you’ll often be calm. And it will not
seem like a dream, nor be one.”
I stare.
She smiles. “You are unimplanted. That is a start. Someday you
will die. Before that there is much to see. If you want.”
How can I know if I want to?
“You’re here. That’s enough.”
Has she pierced my brain with soft claws?
“No,” she says. “I’m only listening. You’re mumbling out your
own thoughts.”
Mumbling?
“Yes. You’ve no ability to discriminate between realities.
What’s in your head, what’s outside. You don’t implant, but you don’t know
where you are.”
Is this what has made me so alone, so repulsive, so set apart?
“What people don’t understand, they hate or think holy,” says
the shopgirl. “But not where I’m from.”
Where?
“Nowhere near here,” she says. “You ought to see for yourself.”
I try to keep my mind as still as possible—I want no more
looking ridiculous in her lovely eyes.
“You’re not doing a very good job,” she says.
What is her name, this angel who knows my every thought?
“Paula,” she says.
6.
We stay all night. I dance. I down that amber liquid which
tastes like jasmine. Soaked in that edible grease, I contort myself on floors
and couches and chairs, pleasing and being pleased. Paula leaves my sight for
minutes, maybe hours, but always she returns. I try to keep track of her
couplings and triplings and quadruplings, but soon give up. I make great
efforts not to talk or think. In those steaming sonic-pounded rooms, it’s not
so hard. Then Paula says it’s time to go.
We step over prostrate entwined bodies walking to the slatted
doors. I swirl in dizzeous loops as we go in the elevator and the light
filtering in from above is milkwhite with dawn. Paula leans against me, breasts
firm against my heaving chest, and sticks her tongue far enough down my throat
to lick my heart. She tastes of peaches, of sweat, of a heaving multitude.
“Peaches?” says Paula, wiping my dripping bottom lip with a
forefinger knuckle. “Well, you’re getting there.”
Getting where?
“Wherever it is you’re going,” she says.
I fear she will leave me.
“Don’t even think it,” she says.
There are no secrets from her.
“Not many,” she says, and the doors slide open.
We go out on the cracking crooked street in the gray iron dawn.
My ears pound and my eyes blur and I am unsteady on lopsided feet. I lean into
Paula. The sky is a roseate gray, blue streaks frittering its edges, nothing
around us moving but a loping stray dog timid at first light.
“The world is so much bigger than this city,” says Paula.
I walk through a cottony vapor. I must see myself through to an
even keel…oh my lovely, my shopgirl…
“Shh,” says Paula. “Don’t blubber. This will pass.”
# # #
