Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set)

by Harmon Cooper

  “Go finger yourself with Pinocchio’s nose!” I finally yell up at her.

  She laughs at me and says she’s filming all of this. The voice inside my head also laughs at me.

  Hold up – if your conscience laughs at you, are you simply laughing at yourself? If your conscience laughs at you, who else do you have to turn to? If you could meet your conscience what would you say?

  Hey, give me better advice next time so I don’t get so many divorces. Why didn’t you tell me not to walk out the door that day? What do you do in your free time? Do other consciences get together once a week and talk shit about their hosts? Does a conscience have a conscience? Does the little voice inside your head have a different intonation than your actual voice? Is it a woman’s voice? A man’s voice?

  I ask my conscience to say something to me. You know, give me a test run, let me hear what it is you sound like. Prove thyself conscience or forever hold your peace!

  Of course, the voice is suddenly mute. Leave it to a conscience to leave you hanging desperately in times of need. A quiet conscience is about as useful as a condom with button-sized holes poked through it.

  I look back up at the Humandroid claiming to be Yeshi. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, humming a song I’m unfamiliar with. The sound crescendos and falls. I try to push myself further into the corner made by the door and the front seats. I’m sweating profusely and wiping my hand on whatever upholstery I can find. I can feel my heart pounding against my ribcage.

  “Meme,” the woman claiming to be Yeshi says, “Come sit up here. Come lay in my lap. It will be okay. We will be there soon. Meme, you have to relax before we get there, or they won’t let you into the club ... I’ll take care of you. Always.”

  TWENTY ∞

  “These people are animals,” Tyro said. He waved his hand toward the tilting dance floor of POLLUTION CLUB 512. “Animals … ”

  “Just have fun, Ty.” His wife gave him a playful shove.

  “Stupid mask … ” Tyro was palming the long nose of a pollution mask between his fingers. “God this stuff is expensive. Why am I even here again?”

  “Oh, just have fun.”

  He watched as Hannah slowly inhaled her pollute. He’d chosen something called Kenzo GalloFeces for her and for himself, Clive Christian’s Imperial Atrocity, with a ginseng carrion topper. He sighed, trying to forget all the work he had hoped to complete that evening.

  Women and their constant need for attention. Women and the weight they put on irrational gestures. Flowers? They die. Chocolate? It gets eaten and makes you fat. Jewelry? They already have enough jewelry. Vacations? Why vacate a house that has everything you need? Clothes? It’s nearly impossible to select something for a woman that she actually likes. Movie night? Why watch a movie in a large room with tons of stupid people when you could watch it from the comfort of your own living room?

  All these absurd gesticulations, all to remind women – constantly – that you indeed cared about them. Tyro knew this, but wasn’t sleeping in the same bed with her every night enough? Didn’t drinking coffee with her and watching her rub the sleep out of their eyes suffice? Didn’t listening to her bitch about her problems with her friends count for something? Why all the extra stuff? Why the inconsequential vanity?

  Her beauty products? Expensive and malodorous. Her yoga classes? He didn’t trust the gropey instructor. Her wardrobe? Worth as much as their aeros. Her bi-weekly trip to the spa? Quite possibly the most unnecessary expenditure he’d ever encountered. Her manicure? Who the hell thought of making a business around scrubbing and painting other peoples nails anyway?

  Aside from his unwillingness to accept the generally agreed upon societal behaviors of an American wife, he loved her dearly, and rarely said things about her bizarre bourgeois needs. Tyro merely pretended to understand his wife. After all, she was one of the best women he’d ever met.

  Hannah was the only one who found it cute when he fell asleep in their study with his head in a book. She was the only one who would listen for hours on end about some minor discovery in the field of Humandroid psychology or robo-socio biomimicry. Many nights she was invisible, and while he was bad at articulating his gratitude for this, her invisibility was her most unique quality. Maybe this is what love is, he thought, as he watched her play with the strap on the back of her pollution mask. Maybe love is knowing when to disappear.

  Sometimes Tyro could relate better with his clients than he could with other humans. Humandroids made sense. They didn’t spend frivolously, they didn’t require much pampering, they lived minimally, they didn’t require courting, they didn’t require trips to the spa, or jewelry, or anything else Tyro deemed redundant. In a very frightening way, they were much more evolved than your average human. It was good they didn’t fully recognize this, good they were trained not to question human superiority…

  “You going to try it?”

  “I guess … ” Tyro grumbled, albeit with a slight smile. He knew he was going to get laid no matter what. Depending on the amount of pollutes his wife consumed; it could even make for an interesting lay. While they weren’t always getting their missionary on, it had become the norm as of late.

  A man walked by wearing chaps and nothing else. There was a long strip of manicured pubes shaved above his penis. Tyro kept seeing men with the strip and couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. Youth, he thought, youth and their asinine attempts to revitalize culture or prove ingenuity through salacious shock value.

  His wife was already gyrating to the choons bassing from the tilting dance floor in the other room. She was dressed modestly compared to the vamp next to her, a tall woman with a sheer top that only covered one breast and see-through leggings with no panties. Is this what it takes to attract a mate these days?

  He took another long inhale. Craziness.

  Suddenly the music seemed louder. At the same time it seemed thinner, as if it was being played through a straw protruding from his ear canal. He started to nod slightly to the music, hoping his wife didn’t notice. If he looked like he was having too much fun, she would tease him later. He had to maintain stoic homeostasis.

  The bartender, a short pudgy woman with the standard bartender dreadlocks, waved at him. She indicated to Tyro that she’d yet to administer the ginseng carrion topper. She flapped a small white packet in the air and smiled maniacally. Giving Tyro the thumbs up, she poured the glittery packet into a shot glass. Using her dreadlock, she sprayed something yellow and yolky into the shot glass. From the countertop, she retrieved a funnel with an LCD advertisement flickering on the side (the advertisement was for a new movie called Saddam Hussein: Vampire Hunter). The bartender used the funnel to empty the topper into a glass bubble on top of a pollute distributor. Within seconds, the liquid turned ultramarine and started to boil.

  “It’s ready,” he said to no one in particular. His eyes fell upon Hannah. She swayed back and forth with her hands in the air. With the pollution mask on, she resembled a blond haired anteater with emerald green eyes.

  His vision was starting to bubble and at the same time, things had begun to slow down. It must be the ginseng carrion, he thought, as he continued to watch his wife’s hair strike her mask like fulgurating harpoons. Stupid pollutes. He placed his hand in his front pocket and palmed his glasses.

  Over his wife’s shoulder, Tyro saw someone enter the pollution bar. His heart did a summersault when he saw Rinchi, his most troubled client. She turned and walked back out the door, distracted by something happening in the hallway. Out of panic, he took the largest drag off the pollute that he could muster. He fell forward, catching himself on a bar stool. His wife laughed at him and kept dancing.

  The pollutes were making him suddenly aware of all that was happening around him. He didn’t want his wife to see him peering over her shoulder at the door. Rinchi would return soon enough. She had the gait of someone who would return, the willpower splashed across her bang-framed face.

  The door opened a
gain, and Rinchi walked into the club holding hands with Meme.

  “It’s him.” Tyro slid his pollution mask to the top of his head.

  “Who?” Hannah yelled loudly over the music.

  “Meme!”

  “Where?” Hannah pushed her mask to the top of her head and followed her husband’s finger to the entrance. “Who’s he with?”

  “That bastard … That stupid bastard … ” Tyro slammed his pollution mask down onto the bar. ‘meme is with one of my clients!” He began fixing his hair, hoping not to look too intoxicated. “Do I look like I’ve been using pollutes?”

  “I don’t know … ”

  “Shit,” Tyro said. The effects of the pollutes had started to heighten. Regardless, an opportunity like this rarely presented itself. Meme was seeing a client – instant grounds for termination. Better yet, Rinchi, like all Humandroids, recorded everything that happened. So if he needed proof, all he had to do was put in an order to have her ocular feed transferred to him.

  “I’m going over there,” he said. With a revengeful grin on his face, Tyro yanked his arm away from his wife and turned towards Meme.

  TWENTY-ONE∞

  “How did the second drop off go?” Nelly asked Noah. He’d just picked her up at her private condo off Wilshire Blvd. The development had been named Faux-Luxury, in line with a trend to embrace doublespeak, or as the mayor of LA, Bruce al-Hakim, said at the time, “we must equivocate ourselves into the future. Equivocate for clarity! Obfuscation for humanity! Duplicity for ingenuity! No means yes and yes means no!”

  Faux-Luxury was a twenty-eight story piece of pure starchitecture. The rooftop glamping sites featured a green McStarbucks tent with yellow arches, an outdoor shower concealed by a transurface mirror, a pollution bar cut out of large redwood trees, eight private Jacuzzis, a small observatory aimed at the Hollywood hills and a clever storage building for aeros. Once an aeros landed and the driver disembarked, a platform lifted the vehicle onto a shelf, stacking it neatly on top of another aeros.

  Nelly’s building – unique in its design by stretching the length of six city blocks yet being surprisingly narrow – had a hotel on the bottom eight floors, hotel apartments on the next eight floors and a VirginAT&T shopping center with a movie theater spanning the next four floors. The Faux-Luxury was capped off by twelve stories of Samsung condominiums rimmed with sparkling parapets, each custom made through a joint collaboration between Korean and Italian artisans. Sandstone Gargoyles wearing pollution masks perched outside the condominiums, gazing down like filthy rich vultures on the plebes below.

  Noah (small driver’s cap, a fitted tuxedo, eyeliner on his left eye and white gloves) smiled at Nelly in the mirror as their aeros began its ascent. “The second drop off went fine. No complications whatsoever. Not that I expected any. So where do you want to go tonight, dear?”

  “A pollution bar near POLLUTION CLUB 512,” Nelly said. “I have to deliver some of this Bhutanese stuff to Mimidae tonight.”

  “The snail stuff?”

  “Yes. She’s going to a party upstate this weekend and wants to bring along something powerful. She invited me, but as you know, I’ve been feeling kind of sick lately.” Nelly put her hand on her stomach and looked down at it, frowning. The baby was taking all her fun away. How selfish. “Three weeks to go … ”

  Even though it was night, Nelly wore a pair of razor thin sunglasses, which were designed to look like a slash mark across her face. A disposable LCD tika was applied to her forehead. The tika transmitted a video of an eye with tentacles extending from its pupil. Her hair had been pulled back into Princess Leia buns and she wore a loose fitting lavender blouse.

  “Oh this damn baby … ”

  “You poor thing, you should let me cook some prenatal spaghetti for you tomorrow night. I was given a recipe recently by a friend. We can sit back and jam some choons.”

  “Sounds delicious. Does it have meat?”

  “Of course not sweetie, I know you are a vegan!” Noah winked at her. “I’d never feed you meat. Those that eat meat are … ”

  “So barbaric.”

  “Meat is murder,” they said together.

  Nelly laughed, “I love how you finish my words.”

  “Words of the wise are often met with imitation.”

  “You think I’m wise?” Nelly asked, her voice softening.

  “Beyond your years darling, beyond your years.”

  TWENTY-TWO∞

  “You wanted to dance, right?” Yeshi asks as she hauls me to the front door of POLLUTION CLUB 512. The people huddled around the bar’s entrance are amorphous blobs. Their tight bodies and gawking faces warp and contort like melting pretzels. I try not to look at them. Let the droid do the talking, that damned little voice says again.

  Who are you!? I scream inside my head to the little voice. I close my eyes and try to log into iNet. I can’t remember my password. I can’t remember how to log in. I need to look up something on iNet. I need to figure out who I am. I need to figure out who you are!

  “Meme, put your finger here to pay the cover charge.”

  Yeshi lifts my hand and sets my finger down on a small blue pad. My fingerprint appears on a hovering LCD screen near the doorman with a green check across it. The man – a five-hundred-pound former Mexican wrestler (I say this because he’s wearing a luchador mask) – nods slightly and lets us in. We walk down a flight of stairs, past gilded picture frames and flashing advertisements.

  We near a large metal door and the Blue Fairy claiming to be Yeshi walks in. I stay back, not ready to enter into the fray. The wallpaper in the hallway is made from clumps of black and yellow cubes. I try to figure out how they’re connected. I move towards the wall and slide my hand across one of the cubes. It detonates, sending blots of color whirling into the air. I freak out and try to swipe it off. It clings for dear life as I start spinning around in circles. I suddenly feel as if I’m stuck in a vacuum caused by the optical illusion, as if I’m looking the wrong way through a telescope.

  “Come on,” Yeshi says.

  “Who are you?”

  “Yeshi,” she laughs again. “You’re so fucked up Meme; I wish I could get as crazy as you.”

  “Yeshi, the ladyboy Humandroid?” I pull her towards me. I kiss her neck; run my finger along her collar bone.

  “Shhhhh… honey. Let’s just get inside, dance for a while, and then we can go somewhere else. I have an idea.”

  Without saying a word, she pushes me through the final entrance into the club. I’m greeted by an ocean of jostling unfamiliar faces. Everything is a blur, as if butter had been rubbed onto my pupils and my eyeballs had been glazed with fructose. Even with the fuzzy vision, I can make out the tilting dance floor in the next room. As I adjust my gaze, the room starts to shrink and I suddenly feel as if I’m a giant crammed into a withering cell.

  The back of my neck is pressed against the top of the ceiling, my arms swing to the floor, my elephantine knees knock over the people in front of me, my fingers get caught up in the bartender’s dreadlocks. I want to scream, to cry out. I want to break free from the constricting room, but I’m being dragged deeper into it by this cadaverous man-woman claiming to be Yeshi! The room gets smaller, the people get closer, the smells get stranger, my life gets vaguer.

  “Meme, what the fuck are you doing!?”

  I recognize the voice and my body starts to shrivel.

  I’m no longer a giant. I’m a mouse and I’m looking for the first hole I can find. It can’t be him. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. I’m hallucinating. You aren’t a mouse!

  “Meme, what the hell are you doing with a client?” The voice turns towards the woman next to me. “Rinchi, what are you doing here with him?”

  “Rinchi?” Yeshi laughs. “I’m not Rinchi … ”

  “Tyro?” I finally manage say, putting my hand on his shoulder and leaning forward to get a good look at him. Is it really him? What’s he doing
here? It looks like him. Serious face, blood shot eyes, freshly shaved, thin tie, glasses, asshole demeanor …

  “Get your hands off me!” he shouts. He swings his shoulder away, leans forward, sways for a moment, and gives me a push. His glasses fall to the ground. I close my eyes and watch as streams of lights fall backwards with me. I hit an invisible spring and bounce forward.

  I open my eyes and I’m on top of the man claiming to be Tyro. The back of his head is against the tessellated floor. No one cares that we are fighting. They dance over us, jamming their heels into our ankles and stopping the boots a little too close to our baby-makers.

  No chance to dance – I must defend myself! I began striking him repeatedly. “Who are you?” I bellow as I pound my fists into his muzzy face. “What have you done with Tyro? Who are you!?”

  A rose colored liquid falls from his nose and escapes in the crevice of his mouth. Squiggly veins appear at his temples; I suddenly feel horrible for the imposter. Look how much he is suffering! I began kissing the fresh fist marks on his face.

  “Get the fuck off me!” he yells into my open mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell the imposter Tyro. I feel like I should be crying, like I should be running, like I should be hiding.

  “Meme!” I hear Yeshi say from behind me.

  The imposter tries to buck me off but I’m stronger than he. I look up and notice the crowd has finally stopped dancing. A woman with blonde hair runs to me and yanks at my arm. I kiss the imposter’s face again, hoping that my gesture won’t go unappreciated. I feel so bad for him, I feel so stupid for hitting him. Still, he was claiming to be Tyro, which was a no-no.

  The adrenaline has a sobering effect. As I kiss him I imagine small flowers pouring out of my lips and into the wounds on his face. I try with all the strength I can muster to bring him closer to me. That’s when I feel a strong muscular arm rip me off the man claiming to be Tyro.