Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, page 9
A delivery guy in an fluorescent-orange poncho cycled past weaving in and out of the traffic. There were a lot of people on the paths, pushing past and ignoring one another. Many were clad in bright yellow raincoats or obscured beneath big black brollies. I worked my way through a bunch of kids gathered outside a pachinko parlour. Once free of them, I noticed a vintage Asahi beer ad stuck in the window of a tiny bar that had hiragana or katakana letters (don’t ask me which kind) scrawled above its door in flickering pink neon. Beneath that was a sign that read ‘Arcadia’.
I needed no further invitation. Laurel could wait a quick drink, she probably wasn’t even up yet. There was a young guy keeping shop behind a dirty-looking linoleum bar. He was Caucasian and had maybe a dozen or so facial piercings—he looked bored to death as he stared up at a TV screen mounted on the wall. I was his only customer. I ordered a beer, sat myself down in a corner table, and lit up a cigarette.
“Hey! No smokin’ in here, dude.”
Damn.
“You got something I can put this out in, then?”
“Use the floor.”
I glanced down—the floor looked like it hadn’t been swept in months. It was a wonder that the Department of Sanitation hadn’t hit this place yet. I carefully dropped my butt and ground it into submission with my heel. Then I downed the watery beer and was about to order another—in spite of how crap it tasted—when the Mitt-Mate in my coat pocket squealed away to the tune of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It was the factory install, guaranteed to debunk street cred, but I’d never worked out how to change it. I took out the gadget and flipped it open.
“Spade & Archer,” I said in a mundane drawl. “Yeah—it’s me, precious. What’s the rumble? Uh-huh. Yeah? Congratulations are in order, then. You must be real happy, angel. Mm-hmm. Yeah, course I will. Right now? Okay, I’ll call you back tonight. Feedback? Sure, I guess. Love you too. Later.”
I flipped the machine shut then shoved it back into my pocket. I looked over to the TV screen. Based on the big ITC logo stuck in the lower right corner of the screen it was already tuned to the right channel.
“Say, kid, can you tweak that up a fraction?”
“Huh?”
“Turn up the volume.”
“Sure thing, dude.”
There was a quick-fire sequence of police in full riot get-up, complete with plasti-glass shields and raised batons. They were battling a ferocious mob, and there was a chaotic mix of screams and shouts above the clang of alarms. The clips revolved around each other in ecstasy and then retreated into one corner as the head and torso of an anchorwoman filled the screen.
She launched into a histrionic tirade about the latest Deviant riot at a Hospital across the city, and then they showed more jump-cut, jerky footage of crazies in blood-spattered white tunics yelling and spitting and thrashing. Next up, it switched to a smoother take of a bloodied cop who broke down talking about his butchered comrade. The camera panned over other injured and bewildered police, but there were now no signs of the Devs.
A new mug filled the screen—on location, a subtitle told us, in a wide corridor outside the Hospital’s main entrance. Dorothy. She looked just the right amount of disheveled and her bob was now highlighted a conservative brunette. She was hysterical, though eloquent—in that excited newsreporter sort of way—as she related the details of the vicious riot and the severe injuries inflicted upon dozens of security guards and police officers.
“The riot has been successfully quelled, but at what cost to the men and women who work here?” she was saying, her voice controlled now. “Members of the police force and other government security services put their lives on the line everyday and the Deviant threat is only becoming more volatile. Susan Pithman, chair of the Committee on Deviant Affairs, has condemned the violence seen here today and announced that all proposed Deviant related civil liberty reforms will be put under harsh scrutiny.”
She paused for effect.
“As Howard Smith, of the Hospital Board of Directors, recently stated, ‘the Deviants have only themselves to blame’. This is Dorothy Maquina for ITC News, reporting. Over to you, Jane.”
So Dorothy wasn’t just the weathergirl anymore—she had a real job.
simple, really
I sneaked home considerably later than intended and of course Laurel wasn’t to be found. She’d made the bed, finished the grand-master challenge of washing all those dishes, and left a message letting me know that she’d been called in for a session of Activities.
She’d signed the note:
Laurel Zuzushi xxx
After sticking the milk in the fridge, I checked online and found the answer to her little mystery—‘zuzushi’ was Japanese for ‘shameless’ or ‘impudent’ and was represented by the sosho-style kanji that Laurel had tattooed across her back.
I lit up a cigarette and chewed life over—was it possible that I was on the cusp of taking charge again of my life, after years in Purgatory, limbo, or wherever the hell it was I’d been adrift? That was a big, bold, brash prospect—especially in the light of my deplorable alcoholic and chemical tendencies. For some reason, though, it was beginning to feel like things were falling into place and even those terrible habits didn’t have quite the stranglehold on me that they so recently did.
Was V’s death the turning point? It would be a sorry state of affairs if that was what it took to reform. Or was it Laurel’s doing?
Too much thinking, so I flipped on the TV and slipped in a disc. The screen went pitch black before the RKO film studio logo reared into monochrome glory. It was one of my fave sci-fi flicks from the early 1950s: The Thing from Another World, with James Arness menacing a crew of American soldiers trapped in an Arctic base. The direction, while credited to Christian Nyby, smacked more of Howard Hawks’ style. Hawks was listed only as producer, but I had my doubts.
Coffee—with real milk—was an inspired taste-sensation, especially when pooled with a couple of cigarettes. Then I did something as out of character as it gets—I stopped the film mid-reel and roved the channels for the news. I found my fix in the form of a thirty-something gent with short brown hair and precision-chiseled features. Next to his head was a shot of a funky-looking helicopter captioned with the slogan ‘Watch the skies!’ The newscaster immediately filled in the blanks about the newly introduced police vehicle, dubbed a hoverchopper.
Next up was a photo of the cop I’d seen on the news earlier—the one drenched in blood at the Dev riot—and the caption read ‘Deviant Terror.’ The newscaster flawlessly morphed from joviality to a down-angled look of concern as he reeled off ‘up-to-date’ info on security force casualties during the clash. Still no mention of any wounded or dead amongst the Devs. It wasn’t that there weren’t any—they just didn’t warrant the coverage.
The inset flipped again, this time to an old suit with white hair and an amiable mug—the very recognizable big cheese of Hylax, Wolram E. Deaps, well known not only for his incalculable success in the business world, but for his fruitless political aspirations and his abject hatred of all things Deviant. The newscaster was sensational—he gracefully shifted expression again, and this time his face was all toothy smile and introduced the next segment with a sincerity even I almost believed. They made a quick cut to a press conference, where Deaps, the old geezer, was standing at a podium.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a superb, British-sounding baritone, “I can assure you, here and now, that we will never rest upon our laurels. There remains too much at stake and this administration must accelerate its quest for a future so many once thought impossible. It was just fifteen years ago that Virus X threatened our very existence, bringing our nation to the very brink of destruction. It is my honest belief that our present administration, with its forward thinking policy of The New Direction, lifted this nation out of the grasp of unthinkable horror—saved us from ecological crisis, from economic collapse, from starvation. While the scars will remain with us, we have survived.”
He paused.
“But I would be remiss to not point out that we still face an adversary that threatens to destroy us from within. I am, of course, taking about the Deviant menace. We must continue to push forward. We must continue to fight. This I promise you—we shall not let Deviancy steal or pollute our hard-earned achievements. We must continue to take any and all measures necessary to ensure our nation’s future growth and well being. This responsibility falls not just on our ever-vigilant government—no!—for we all must share the burden together. It is our civic duty, our very destiny.”
Deaps had done his homework and he was playing the mob for all it was worth. Having reached his patriotic crescendo, he switched up his tempo and took on a more fatherly tone.
“To that end, I am exceptionally proud to announce that the Hylax Corporation has made a fifty billion credit contribution to assist the authorities in combating the Deviant menace, the threat of which we all know currently plagues our nation. We feel this is a sound investment—an honourable investment in a better, stronger future. Together, we will stamp out Deviancy once and for all.”
Deaps paused again, to off-screen applause.
“Allow me to conclude with this simple vision,” our man on the stand pushed on, “I foresee a utopian future for this nation, one in which justice, decency, and hope create the groundwork for a superior quality of life for not only our country, but for each of us—for you, for me, for posterity. We shall, together, conquer adversity. We should all stand proud. Thank you and good day.”
The precision-cut anchorman filled the screen once more.
“That was Wolram E. Deaps, CEO of the Hylax Corporation and longtime spokesperson for Citizens Against Deviancy, the man many credit with being a visionary not just for his work with plastics, but for his tireless efforts against Deviancy.” His voice smacked of reverential awe.
I sat back to mull it over. Kee-rist on a plastic popsicle stick, fifty billion credits—elections must be rolling up again. You’d think Deaps, the perennial Also-Ran, would be dead sick of politics by now. Deaps’ success in business had never translated to politics, despite his best efforts. He’d apparently blown a king’s fortune ten times over on candidacies—he ran for Senator thrice, and president twice, all to spectacular failure. He was so iconic, and his losses so lopsided, that some late night pundits called him Senator Deaps for a quick laugh. This wasn’t to say that Deaps was a laughingstock—if anything, he was generally well respected by the stodgy generation—but few actually wanted the man running things.
In fact, the man was well-hated among certain circles. There were even concerted efforts by his detractors during election years to deface every ‘Led By W.E.D.’ poster in the city—reworking them to everything from ‘Fed Up With W.E.D.’ to ‘Better Dead than W.E.D.’ Either was an improvement, if you ask me. The only person I knew who voted for the windbag was my very own mum, who for some reason thought Deaps was the bees knees. Between his wealth and his constant jabbering about public safety, it almost made sense—if you could get over the fact that the man was, well, Wolram E. Deaps.
Deaps had earned his army of enemies for very publicly backing (and according to some rumours, authoring) the Bill of Deviations. It was a widely known secret that Deaps was very powerful behind the scenes, even if he never could seem to get himself into office. Conspirists buzzed that he had accumulated a vault’s worth of blackmail material on various government types, though it was more likely he simply paid his way through. They were all In Bed With W.E.D., if you will.
Point is, most everyone that had ever lost a friend or loved one to Deviancy likely held a grudge towards the man, though lately it seemed like all was forgiven—with the recent spate of attacks covered endlessly on the telly, Deviancy was the in thing to hate and fear. Deaps himself was getting tonnes of positive press for having apparently been ‘ahead of the times’—a visionary who’d tried to warn the rest of us short-sighted bastards about the dangers of Deviancy. The announcement of Hylax’s massive investment could only add to his evolving reputation.
Just thinking about it all got my goat, chiefly because I didn’t understand why they even went out of their way to maintain the charade of a democracy anymore. It was probably for the same reasons they always went on about the ‘nation’, when all we really had left was this city—it’s not as if we’d had a legitimate show of hands since the Catastrophe. The same corrupt party had been voted back into office again and again. Deaps aside, any pretence at an opposition party was forever doomed to end in disarray, scorched by scandals, immediately prior to each ballot. In the end, we the people would all donkey-vote the same party back into office with another landslide majority—we were stuck on repeat and it didn’t look like anything was going to change anytime soon. That was what gave them the power to push through the Bill of Deviations in the first place.
Didn’t people realize we were treading excessively polluted water? Rebuilding the industrial base within the city limits—hyped as the salvation of a downwardly spiraling economy—made all those ecological problems a hundred times worse. The sad fact was, the only reason Hylax could front such an obscene amount of capital in the first place was that they’d screwed us all over to make it. The manufacturers got big concessions and tax breaks—as a ‘thank you’ to them and a full frontal ‘fuck you’ to Joe Bloggs—while they spewed industrial waste into our limited air and water supply. And nobody even chirped.
I’m confident far too many desperate souls actually believed all the reassuring words spouted out by the government and businessmen like Deaps. My mother, for example, was so blind to it all that Deaps actually floated her boat. I knew others that were simply apathetic, and most of the rest were likely just too damned scared to pipe up.
And where did I fit in? I wish I could blame apathy—I am, remember, a somewhat pathetic, self-pitying alcoholic with a predilection towards prescription drug abuse. But, above and beyond my indulgent habits, I was in fact just another government henchman. I actually fucking helped them. No wonder then that I always drift towards self-loathing, it’s a wonder I can sleep a wink even with the medication.
To think that this was the only city left in the entire bloody world.
play it again
Veronica.
There were nights where I could still feel her beside me as I tried to fall asleep. Worse were the days where I’d walk down the street and recognize her perfume in the air—a soft ginger infused with lilac.
In a way, it was so much more soul-saving to instead recall the sound of her in the bathroom, vomiting and moaning from the pain just before she was Hospitalized, cold sweat coursing down her pale face. By that point she was no longer able to eat or sleep and we were terrified she might not get better, but just as terrified of her mystery illness being discovered by the authorities. I couldn’t even dare get her to a doctor.
As part of my Level A package they sent me monthly video discs detailing the life and times of an increasingly gaunt and lifeless version of the woman I’d loved, who read all the right things from a series of pre-approved cue cards. In the early days I’d scour those discs for hours on end. I wanted so desperately to see through the mask of death and rediscover the woman I cherished, but at some point realized she simply wasn’t there anymore. They’d strip-mined her soul. She’d been recast as a cardboard cutout. Shortly after I stopped visitations I began throwing the discs out without even opening them.
I had to escape my apartment and Ziggy’s bar, Kemidov’s, sprung to mind. I wasn’t in the mood to lean on someone’s shoulder and cry, but a swift succession of alcoholic beverages would go far to simmer things down.
I grabbed my coat and double-bolted the door behind me, then waited for the elevator to hit my floor. After its lethargic descent and a particularly abrupt halt, I walked outside into the rain and emerged into a thick crowd of pedestrians. After a brief walk I tumbled down the stairs of Kemidov’s and plunked myself on a vacant stool off to one side. That’d suit me for the rest of the night.
It seemed that Ziggy worked twenty-four hour shifts in this place, and, true to form, there he was, polishing a glass. He had his hair severely slicked back and he was wearing another of his infamous body-hugging suits. Ziggy always looked more like a slightly off kilter gigolo than a bartender. I nodded to him and he swiveled to grab me a bottle of brandy.
“The tab?”
“Yeah.” I immediately downed my first glass and held it out to him. “Refill?”
“You’re the boss. Gotta say it, though—the tab’s getting outta hand, bub.”
“Payday’s next week, so I’ll square it up with you then. I’m good for it—you know that.”
“I know that. Wanna talk shop?” He yawned loudly and leaned against the bar while he wiped down the counter in front of me.
“Sure. Did I tell you my wife died?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Shit. Typical. Did I mention, then, that she was a Dev?”
“That part you skipped. A Dev, huh? And you being a Seeker—surprise, surprise. You do the business on her yourself?”
“No. Still heavy, though.” I stared at the liquor in my glass and swirled it round a bit, thinking about the Test. Ziggy turned away to serve another customer then returned to me with a fresh synth-brandy bottle and a packet of chips.
“This is on the house.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“You look glum. Besides, I’ve got crates of the synth in the back room and these chips will give your stomach a healthy lining. They also make you more thirsty, so everybody wins. But listen, pal, you’ve gotta pay up the tab soon. I’ve got my own bills.”
“What, pick up some new pimp suits?”
“Ahh, I knew there was a reason you were my best customer. Must be the respect.”
“That you’ll always have. As we’ve established, I’m good for the tab.”
