Futureland, page 4
“We could make a billion-dollar fight if you get the women of the world on your side, Fifi. Get that and I can live a few more years.”
“I will, Daddy. And I’ll pay to have the MacroCode Gen-Team find you a cure.”
“I know you will, baby. I know you will.”
3 The night before the Mathias Konkon fight, Pell Lightner came up to the three hundredth floor of the Fifth Business. He whispered his name into the key-mike and the door slid open. He hesitated a moment before entering, took a deep breath, and then walked in confidently, standing to his full five foot nine and a half inches.
“Fifi?”
There was no answer. He went through the entrance area into the living room.
The sight of Leon Jones sitting on the long, overstuffed sofa gave Pell a scare, but then he realized that his girlfriend’s father was far beyond worrying about him. The elder Jones’s eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking right at Pell, but really he was gazing far away into faded Pulsedreams. After years of use the dreams had dwindled into a kind of bleached-out euphoria. The loss of specific dream content was the first sign that a user’s brain was near final collapse.
“Hey, baby.” Fera was standing at the door to her bedroom, naked.
Pell liked it that the musculature of Fera’s chest hadn’t erased her womanly figure. Her breasts were real breasts, and except for that one evening on the Sammy Rosen show, Pell was the only man to see under her dress nowadays.
All of his young life, Pell had lived in Common Ground, the place for all unemployed citizens. He had learned to appreciate a good thing. He was only nineteen, permanently unemployed and without benefits except for an octangular sleep tube underground and regular rations of rice and beans.
“Take down your pants,” Fera said.
Automatically Pell took a step forward. At the same time he pulled down his pants. He leapt toward her and she held him up in her arms. Fera grinned broadly when Pell grabbed her hair to keep his balance.
She carried him from the room while her father mused.
Fera had met Pell at a Soul Shack on Middle Broadway. He was strutting around among the Backgrounder girls, acting like the cock of the walkway. She got a hot ribs and yam dinner in a plasbox and then walked up to the group of young Backgrounders. Pell was arrogant and snide, but when she asked him if he wanted to go with her he was in the car as quickly as he could move.
“You remember when we first met?” Fera asked her lover. She was on top of him, grinding her hips.
“Yeah,” he coughed.
“Did you love me for my body or my money?” Her coarse blond hair raked his eyes.
A look of confusion came over his face. For a moment it seemed as if he had found an answer, but instead he had a powerful orgasm.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he cried meaninglessly.
“Baby, do you love me?” Fera asked Pell in her dark bedroom. Through the open window the spires of upper Manhattan stretched toward the sky.
“We don’t use that word underground.”
“What do you say, then?”
“I look for you, I see you, I won’t turn away.”
“That’s a lotta words just to say the same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing. Not at all. ‘I love you,’ means, ‘I need you.’ The way I say it means that you can count on me. The way I say it is strong.”
“You turned away from your friends to come with me.”
“I never told ’em I wouldn’t.”
Fera laid her big palm on his chest.
“I wish I was like you, Pipi,” she said.
“What you mean? Here you up above, butter and cream— and I’m down below, bread and water.”
“But you know what you think.”
“Huh?”
“If I say something or ask something, you have an answer. Even if you just don’t know you sound so sure. All I know is that I love my daddy. That and boxing is all I have. Everything else is a mess. That’s why I like fighting, because I get so mad not bein’ sure, and hittin’ somebody makes me feel better. Even gettin’ hit feels good.”
“Then that’s good enough. It keeps you upover.”
“But I want more.”
“What?”
“Like you. To look and not turn away.”
4 The Konkon fight was the turning point in Fera Jones’s career. The night before was the first time Leon experienced a Pulse Reflux episode. It left him bedridden and unable to be in his daughter’s corner. She asked Pell to stand in for her father, and the diminutive Backgrounder agreed. He had been sitting ringside for over six months and had some notion of what was expected of a corner man. The only thing he didn’t know how to do was stop the bleeding in case of a cut, but Leon had been smart enough to bring in Doc Blevins, the premier cut man of boxing, as a permanent member of Ferocious Fera Jones’s corner.
Mathias Konkon was a wily boxer. He avoided the brunt of Fera’s initial onslaught. He rolled with some blows and picked others off with deflecting gloves. He had a solid chin, too, and so whenever Fera was accurate enough to land a hard punch, she was surprised with a series of left hooks and right uppercuts in answer.
Over six rounds she had lost all but one.
In between rounds Pell begged his boxer to box.
“Stick and run, Fifi,” he pleaded. “Let him come after you. Let him come after.”
“I can get him,” Fera declared. “All I need is one shot and he’ll cave in.”
Each round she went out streaming sweat and oozing confidence, but at the bell she came back another point down on the scorecards.
In the seventh Konkon let loose. It was toward the end of the round and Fera was breathing hard. She’d thrown her full artillery at the slippery Fijian. If she had connected with anything, the announcers were certain that Mathias would have wound up in the hospital. But the shorter boxer had figured out just the right crouch to avoid a haymaker. When he saw that his opponent was temporarily winded, he threw a full-fledged attack at her head.
“Jones is in trouble!” Atkinson exclaimed at ringside.
“He’d do better to attack the body,” Bonner added conservatively. “Kill the body and the head will fall.”
At that moment, Mathias connected to Fera’s jaw with a jolting right cross. Fera Jones sprawled out on her back, unconscious from every indication. But while the referee was waving the exultant Konkon back to his corner, Fera Jones opened her eyes and willed herself to her feet.
“She’s cut!” Bonner yelled. “She’s cut over her right eye!”
The blood was cascading down the right side of her face. But Fera Jones didn’t even dab at it with her glove.
The referee asked her did she want to go on.
She nodded.
He asked her another question.
She answered to his satisfaction.
He waved for the fight to continue, but the bell rang before another blow could be thrown. Doc Blevins was in the corner with his steel compressor and cotton sticks, ready for his charge. His bald head was painted black and red for the colors of Jones’s trunks. There was a bright green stripe painted across his forehead for his Irish mother.
The ring doctor stood at the side, watching the procedure closely. Pell stood over his fighter, his fists clenched as if he wanted to hit her himself.
Instead he pinched the flesh at the tip of her chin, hard. Her eyes, vacant until then, cleared.
“He’s gonna beat you, you stupid cow. He’s gonna beat you ’cause you out there fightin’ like a girl. Like a fuckin’ girl.” Every word was broadcast around the globe on VIN, Video International Network. “You’re the best fighter that ever lived and you’re throwin’ it away ’cause you don’t want to do what you’re supposed to do.”
“I can get him,” she said.
“Not if you don’t jab. He’s got you so girly out there that you forgot how to box. He’s made a fool outta you, and look at you. All blooded up and ugly. It’s over. I’m throwin’ in the towel.”
Pell reached for the towel. He picked it up.
“No, don’t,” Fera said, more like a child than a machine of destruction. “I can do it. I can do it.”
Pell paused, towel in midair there between him and his fighter. Over a hundred million people around the globe watched.
“One round, Fera. One round to prove that you can do what’s necessary.”
The bleeding had been stemmed. Certainty returned to Fera’s eyes. She nodded and fifty million women around the world felt their hearts thrum and galvanize. Groucho T, the Internet philosopher, later said, “The whole world changed between the seventh and eighth rounds.”
Konkon never had a chance after the seventh. In rounds eight and nine Fera’s left jab turned his face into hamburger. In round ten she knocked him to the canvas six times before the referee gave her the win.
“I want to thank Diana for my victory,” Fera said to the Eclipse, “with a nod to Legba for sending me his trickster friend, Pell Lightner.”
The Radical Feminist Separatist Party of Massachusetts declared that the next day would be a floating holiday, called Fierce Woman Day, and closed down the state. Women around the world bought T-shirts with the images of Fera and Pell on them. The president came to visit Fera in her suite at the Fifth Business, and Time magazine named her Woman of the Century.
Leon Jones had been hospitalized, and was undergoing deep neuronal therapy for severe reaction to Pulse. But he left his bed to come to the victory party thrown in Madison Stadium in honor of the tremendous victory over Konkon.
“I always knew you had it, baby,” he told his daughter.
“It was Pell, Daddy. He brings out something in me, something more than boxing.”
“What do you mean, Fifi?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. I don’t even know that it’s something I can know.”
5 The celebrations that followed the Konkon fight were spontaneous. It wasn’t a championship fight. The Fijian was only ranked eighth in the world. But there was something about Fera’s heart and about her man, Pell. Everyone watching the fight knew how much he loved her. They saw how deeply his passions went.
THE MAN BEHIND THE WOMAN, the cover of Sports Illustrated announced, displaying the photograph of Pell’s contorted face between rounds at the Konkon fight. Sixty Minutes did a fifteen-minute piece on the vulnerability and valor of her drug addict father and Backgrounder friend, Pell. Fera was being asked to speak at political fund-raisers and feminist luncheons around the world.
“But what do I have to say to these women?” Fera asked Selma Ho, publicist for the Green Party and SepFem sympathizer.
“You don’t have to say anything, dear.”
“Why invite me if they don’t want me to say anything?”
“People talk to explain things, to prove a point. You are the proof, M Jones.”
Lana Lordess, governor of Massachusetts, head of the vote-strong FemLeague, came to visit Fera at the Fifth Business three days before the Zeletski fight.
“It would be better if we talked alone,” Governor Lordess said as she sat on the overstuffed couch. Pell sat on the edge of the stone fireplace. Leon reclined in his portable electric chair, shocks jolting his thin frame every forty-three seconds. It was one of many therapies he was to try in order to stave off the collapse of his brain.
“This is my family,” Fera said.
Lana Lordess was only five foot four, but her presence was large. Even if Fera had not seen pictures of Lordess on the news every night, even if the FemLeague wasn’t the third largest party in the Congress, even if Lana had not personally led a march of ten million women in Washington, D.C., even if Fera had never heard of this small, overall-wearing woman, she would have still felt the power of those eyes.
Leon’s shoulders jerked.
Pell stared at the floor.
“I don’t discuss woman-business in the presence of men without having my lawyers present,” Lana said.
“Then get the fuck out,” Fera replied.
Lordess’s security guards both stiffened. They were big women with chemically enhanced muscles. Fera knew the black one from the ring.
“Watch yourself,” the black guard said.
“While I do I suggest that you count your teeth.”
Pell snorted out a laugh.
A shock went through Leon. His head twisted and shook.
“I don’t want to fight,” Lordess said, reaching out with both hands.
“No, you don’t,” Fera assured her.
“Can we have a word?” Lana asked.
“My father always taught me to make my presence known from the first second I’m in the ring,” Fera Jones said. “If you lose the first few seconds, he always says, then the fight is lost until you make up ground.”
“I come here as a friend.”
“You came here ’cause I won fights against men.”
“That makes us allies.”
“I never saw you out there with me. I never saw you when me an’ Daddy were poor and down.”
“But I’m here now.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Fera offered. “You send the girl guards out in the hall, and I’ll ask Daddy and Pell if they’ll wait in the kitchen.”
“As leader of the FemLeague I am bound to defend myself from harm. I cannot be left unprotected.”
“Then there’s no more to say,” Fera said firmly.
Lana Lordess rapped her knuckles upon a denim knee, her dark eyes staring straight into those of the boxer. But Fera Jones was not worried. She’d stared down men who had threatened to beat her to death in the ring. They had tried and failed.
“The FemLeague wants you for our pinup girl.” Lordess fell right into the discussion when she realized that she could not expel the men. “Women all over the world adore you. Your heart and spirit and strength are examples for all of us. Millions of women on the line between their false male consciousness and their true self-interests will flock to you. Join our party and you join a real fight, the fight for true equality and for sanity. We will stem the corporations, we will end the senseless starvation, we will stop the insane militias. Your help, just yours, Fera, will make the difference for the future of womanhood.”
Fera had heard the same words, except for her name, on the vid three weeks before. They were even more moving in person. She believed in woman power. She wanted the world to be different.
“Will men have a political voice in your new world?” Fera asked.
“All qualified citizens will have their say over the condition of the nation,” Lordess answered. “Honest, hardworking citizens will be our guiding members.”
“I’ll think about it,” Fera said.
“We must strike now, sister. Now, just before your greatest trial. Join us and then defeat Zeletski, your words will be diamond.”
“I said I’ll think about it.”
“Can I call on you tomorrow, then?”
“I’m in training, M Lordess. Talking distracts me. I need to concentrate on the fight.”
“But we need an answer. Is there nothing I can say?”
“No.” Fera had a dim notion of what she should do. But the idea was still totally submerged, rising only slowly, like a slumbering whale from the darkness of the deep.
“What if I could tell you the truth about your mother?”
“Ungh!” Leon Jones grunted. His head flailed back and a foot lashed out.
Fera and Pell ran to his side.
“We’ll have to talk later,” she said to the governor. “My father is going through deep neuronal therapy.”
“Hear me out,” Lana said.
“Leave,” said Fera, a threat and a command.
6 “. . . I never told you about her because it hurt me too much,” Leon was saying. “She was just about seventeen when she came into my adult school intro to history class. She looked all crazy. Eyes different-color browns, skin just a touch’a green under eggshell tan. Little and weakly, sharp as a pin. She came to every class like she was burnin’ to know something, who knew what?” A shock went through Leon, and he bit his lip. “Whenever I tried to talk to her, to get to know what she was about, she’d shy away. If she hadn’t had to sign up I wouldn’t have known that her name was Nosa an Letona.”
“Nosa an Letona,” Fera mouthed.
“I told the class on the first day that each and every one had to come to my office to defend their final paper. I told them that without that they couldn’t get credit.” Fera dabbed her father’s bloody lip with a fiber napkin. The next shock made his hands jump. “I didn’t think I’d see her even for a passing grade, but she showed up. Her paper was full’a Fem-Lib stuff. How women were the first citizens and how men tricked them over and over again. She talked about genetic plots and the purpose of gender. When I asked her how old she was she said she didn’t know.”
“She must’a known near about,” Pell said. “Even White Noise kids know near about.” White Noise kids, the children of unemployable Backgrounders, lived under the city, in Common Ground. Without taxpaying parents they could get no education and lived by their wits.
“She said that she didn’t remember being a child. All she knew was an all-girl orphanage. When I asked her did she run away she said that she was there to talk about the paper. I told her that it was very well written and that I liked how clear her ideas were and how strong the language was. She asked did I agree with her ideas and I told her that nobody knows history—”
“—because history doesn’t really exist except in the leaky jars of our heads,” Fera said, finishing the words that she had heard from childhood.
Leon grinned at her memory and then grimaced from an electric shock.
“When I said that, she blinked, blinked like she had just seen something that she had never suspected was there. After a minute she crawled into my lap and put her arms around my neck. That’s when I realized that she was hot. Not sex, but her body temperature was way up there. I thought she was sick but she said that that was normal for her. I’m ashamed for what I felt for that child but I refuse to be sorry. I asked her where she lived and she said in a hole that she dug under a bridge just outside of the town. A hole in the dirt. I took her to my house. What else could I do? I didn’t mean to do anything. She was a child. She needed to be held, wanted it. I held her and held myself back at the same time. We never stopped touching for the next few days. If I let her go she got nervous and shaky. We ate side by side and even went to the bathroom together. It wasn’t like sex. It wasn’t sex at all. It was more like puppies or kittens all on top of each other all of the time.
