Torn Realities

by Post Mortem Press

  The joke's on you though. When she sits down near the spot you've staked out for yourself on the bus, you have to look at that goddamned thing for the next half hour until some kind soul leans down and whispers in her ear. She looks around, shocked, like she just woke up and doesn't know where she is.

  Then she pulls out a rag and clucks again. Says something in Chinese. Maybe she looks at you and knows you did it on purpose. Maybe she sees something on your face she doesn't like and doesn't push the subject. But maybe not.

  Later you'll remember that look on the old Chinese and wonder if you made a similar face the first time the phone rang.

  *****

  Let's say you're sitting in your apartment and it's 42 degrees and you're sweating your balls off. You're still wearing the suit Ajax lent you the money to rent, refusing no for an answer and insisting. Shoving fistfuls of dirty paper money into your hand.

  "You're not going to her funeral dressed like that", he says, his face twitching from a bad implant. He's got a silver eye that was supposed to let him see in the dark but he's allergic to the metal and it gives him seizures sometimes because there's an optic pin rubbing against something important in the frontal lobe of his brain. He cries out in gibberish sometimes, but you think it's funny. He doesn't. "Don't be an asshole."

  So you dressed up nice because Angela's parents were going to be there and they hate you anyway, only now they hate you more. You see her father's ugly glare across the hall the entire time the J.P. is going on about what a sweet girl Angela was and how the Gods have taken her somewhere better. They never found Angela's body so in place of a casket they have a little wooden box and the latest photo taken of her. She's smiling and waving at the camera, and her left arm is out of the picture.

  Only it isn't, really, because you have this photo at home and you're in it. Her arm is around your face, and you're both smiling.

  Afterward you walk up to her parents and say you're sorry it happened and her father has to be held back by two of his brothers trying to knock your head off and the whole time he's screaming IT HAPPENED ON YOUR WATCH, and IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU and you can't say you blame them and you can't say you disagree with them.

  Sitting on your couch in that suit holding the same photo from her funeral you put your hand over your smiling face and think how your happiness would have been a small price to pay for her life if you'd ever been given a chance to give it.

  You should take that suit off before your ball sweat costs you an extra hundred bucks in cleaning fees but all you can think about is how you wish you could hear her voice one last time and that's when the phone rings and you pick it up and you hear her breathy voice on the other end of the line.

  "Hey Patrick Terran, it's Angela. I wanted to talk to you about the weight you've put on. I know a couple ways to slim that figure down just in time for beach season..."

  Maybe you stopped dreaming then, because your dreams all went black and turned into nightmares.

  *****

  It's called behavioral targeting, and while it may be as old as advertising itself it really got its wheels turning in the post dot-com social-media boom at the dawn of the techno age. The goal is simple: by mining your life for information about you as a person, marketing firms can hook you up with advertising you are most likely to be interested in. They call it a service to both consumers and corporate. You don't even think about your shopping habits anymore. Like Coke? Love New Diet Coke Light. Love blue? Check out aquamarine. Targeted advertising works not because they give you what you want, but because corporate knows what makes you feel bad about yourself and are perfectly happy reminding you how much you suck and how they have a cure to make you the talk of cyber-town.

  You'll have 7 million Facebook friends in no time if you just lose twenty pounds. Or change your eye colour. Or get rid of your natural teeth in favour of something with lights. Regrow lost hair and lost limbs. Stop shitting and farting like a monkey and use subtle liquid waste removal like a civilized person. Design your baby's DNA so they'll grow up smarter, faster, and stronger than you ever could. Buy mechanical pets or household replicants to help with the chores because you're a filthy pig who can't keep house. And why should you? Put your card in the slot and we'll take care of everything.

  The new craze in targeted advertising is for simulants of your actual friends and family members to call your line and talk you into losing weight or fixing your acne or getting rid of gross body hair/smells/needs. It's been incredibly effective. Daughters that hear their moms tell them to buy douche are 48 percent more likely to do so. Sons who hear about how their extra body fat is a shame on the family are 55 percent more likely to buy workout pills and diet aids. Corporate is scrambling to cover all the action on this, and they're making enough money to drown any cries that it's immoral to use people's loved ones against them. After all, they've been doing it for hundreds of years.

  Angela knew you better than anyone. At some point, she must have told them everything.

  *****

  You're standing outside the coffee shop where you first met and the rain is lashing your face. Just like that day you met. You might have worked in that place once, covering the bills but not much else. Maybe you had enough money for some drug of choice on the weekend. It wasn't a life, but it was living. And then your job was gone. Shitcanned because you showed up at work one night high off your skull with puke on your shirt and made inappropriate comments to your co-workers on duty about how they were slaves to the Corporate teet and they were all gonna get theirs in the end. Thing is, you didn't even remember doing it until Corporate pulled you into the office and showed you the video screens. You threw a sucra-sweet bowl at an old lady and then ran around trying to kiss the customer's asses.

  Maybe you laughed when Corporate said ass-kissing was figurative, and not meant to be taken as a literal action. It left them open to sexual harassment lawsuits. Yeah, you laughed. Corporate didn't laugh, though. They handed you your paycheck and told you to get off the premises in the next five minutes or you'd be charged with trespassing.

  And don't come back or you'd be charged with trespassing.

  And don't call us, or you'd be charged with harassment.

  And don't blog about us on your site of you'd be charged with libel.

  And don't mention us in passing to anyone or you'd be charged with slander.

  And if you're not off the property in four minutes and 18 seconds, you'd be charged with trespassing.

  So you left. And maybe you stewed on how they treated you after working there for eight years, and maybe you were a little sorry but felt you could hardly be blamed for something that was obviously done under the influence of drugs. You couldn't even remember doing it, for Christ's sake. Maybe the bills were due and you were getting tossed out on your ass and then Corporate sent you a Vmail explaining that they had decided to sue you for damages from that night in the coffee house and don't worry about sliding your card in the phone, because they'd already emptied your bank account and you still owed them another $3500 and you needed to have that to them by the end of the month to prevent further action.

  So you skipped the bus and went for a walk instead, and then there you were in the rain, across the street from your former place of employment fantasizing about going in there and really kicking up some shit, ready to pump your quarters and start the game of your life, when a breathy blonde with a Hello Kitty umbrella kicks water at you and your sour face and then laughs. She leans in close and you smell mangoes and wax lipstick and flowers and other entrancing girl-smells and she whispers Come on, this place sucks. I know somewhere. You ask her where she came from, thinking Heaven, thinking Miami, and she points to a dirty old city bus winding away from you. The #1, a cross-town bus that literally goes everywhere. The sign on the back says VIST R'LYEH, and there's a happy family having the time of their lives in some distant tropical paradise. The emerald water is black, but you think it's just grime from driving the city streets. Later, you
'll realize you were mistaken.

  Sometimes your life changes in predictable ways. You see the change coming and there are lots of signs pointing like a curve in the road. Warning you the path to take is changing ahead and if you don't change with it you'll soon find yourself sailing off a cliff into black space. But sometimes the biggest changes in your life come on little, spur-of-the-moment decisions you wouldn't think would affect you in a million years. This was both. You turned your head away from your former place of employment because you wanted to smell that girl again, and she was already dancing down the street. It was a small choice. The curve came when your body moved with your head and took that first step toward her. You never saw it coming.

  She was right, the place was better. The coffee sucked, the service was terrible, and they were playing some early-century industrial to suit the mood. Nouveau post-something or other she called it. You took it to mean they could forgo expensive light tables and wall aquariums in favour of cinder blocks and rust panelling. Warehouse incandescent bulbs spit dirty yellow light on everything and it hurts your eyes. Everyone wears black and you can't tell the girls from the boys.

  But Angela is there, and it makes this place paradise.

  She talks about how great the world must have been before simfarming and climate change. She talks about the goldfish they sell in a vending machine on campus that glow in the dark, and how everyone has them for pets and how someone has been putting them in the toilets in the girls' bathrooms.

  You counter with corruption and greed, your same-old schtick. She talks about flowers that smell like candy and simpuppies that always stay small and cute. You hit her with your big guns, you vent about Corporate and how they've turned the world in to cancer.

  She asks if you know cancers are immortal growth and if we can tame them we can live forever. That doesn't sound so bad.

  She's an art student and she knows your friend Celina and she saw you a couple weeks ago when you were strobing on a weekend high and ranting about Corporate. You looked so crazy. She found out where you work from Celina and had already been by there a few times but hadn't seen you. She asks if it's stalking and you say yes but you aren't creeped out. You're flattered. Your heart is hammering in your chest and it stutters when she smiles and helps you put sugar in your coffee and your hands touch.

  She did it on purpose. It burns you when she smiles and you know you never want to be away from this girl again. It's too early to tell her you love her but you say it as a joke after she names off some bands you like. She just looks at you like she knows it wasn't a joke but it's all right.

  *****

  You're eating noodles and shrimp for dinner and the phone rings. Your stomach does a quick double flip and threatens to come up on you. You know you shouldn't answer the phone but you will. You have to. Because Angela is calling.

  "Hey Patrick Terran, it's Angela." It's funny, because in the three years you were together she never once said that to you. She called you Patty-cake. It was cute when she said it.

  "Hi Angel," you say, and every letter feels like it's cut from razor blades.

  "I wanted to talk to you today about your disgusting foot odor."

  "It's good to hear your voice." Your palms are hot and slick and the viewfinder is showing you a composite of Angela's face made up from a lot of different images. It isn't exactly her, but it's damn near her.

  "Did you know that you're offending friends and family with disgusting foot odor?" she says. "In fact, one in two people will suffer with this uncomfortable and embarrassing condition. It's caused by a buildup of bacteria feeding off the sweat your feet make in your socks and shoes. Bacteria are disgusting little creatures that live off your old, dead foot flesh and drink the salt out of your sweat. Smelling them on you is both offensive and hurtful to those you love most."

  "I knew that because you told me last week," you say. Your words are muted with snot in your throat and in your nose, which can be embarrassing and painful for your loved ones.

  "Luckily there's a product designed just for people like you and your stinky feet."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Happy Feet is a Johnson and Simmons product designed to cure unnecessary foot odour and save you from being embarrassed in public."

  "I miss you, Angel. I just wanted you to know that."

  "Please pick up some Happy Feet by Johnson and Simmons, Patrick Terran? For me?"

  The video face puckers in a playful pout that stabs the air from your lungs. Today it's your bad feet. Other days it's about the weight you're putting on. Other days it's about how you should get rid of your unsightly oily skin with a graft. She calls to tell you all the things she would never say when she was alive. She tells you these things to shame you and hurt you into buying products. And you listen to the whole thing hoping that the end of the conversation will be different this time, because it always hurts so bad at the end, and the way things are going you know it isn't going to be any different.

  "Take care, Patrick Terran. I'll see you soon!"

  And you listen to those razor words bite into your flesh and if you cry every single time, well, who can blame you.

  *****

  "That's fucking horrible," Ajax says, scratching at his eye. Today it's red and swollen and there is a rime of dried blood around the lid.

  "You should have that looked at," you say, pointing to your own eye.

  "Yeah, I did," Ajax says. "They say they want to take it out. Say it's going to cause more seizures and eventually I'll be a drooling organ donor. From the optic pins." He makes a funny exploding-head motion with his hands and a popping noise with his lips, letting you know that someday, maybe, his head will explode.

  "That sounds pretty horrible too."

  Ajax shrugs. "Black market, baby. What are you gonna do?"

  "I guess," you reply, watching as he picks at his bloody eye and wipes his fingers on a plastic towel.

  "No," he says. "I mean, what are you gonna do? About the phone calls."

  "Nothing," you say, but that's a lie. You are definitely going to be doing something.

  Later when you leave Ajax to his bleeding eye you walk for a long time sucking in dirty yellow air and scratching your head when the rain makes you itch. You decide Angela was wrong. There's nothing beautiful in the world. The things that made the world beautiful have all been sliced up and zip wrapped or canned. They've been packaged for individual consumption. Give them credits, they give you your life. It's the perfect economy, the way man was meant to live. Everything is fair because money doesn't care what colour you are, or if you're fat or crippled or blonde. It doesn't care if you came from unfiltered DNA or from the mining colonies of Io or from Detroit. You either opt-in to the system or you opt-out.

  Your feet are sore and you're tired of walking and the rain is giving you a rash. You step into a bus station and there are two girls smoking and one of them hurls a choking cough from her lungs like tuberculosis and spits a wad of bloody phlegm on the glass. Her brown eyes match yours from the corner of your vision and she turns her head slightly to let you know she's waiting for you to say something. You want to tell her she's boring; you've been there and done that. But you don't.

  You're too busy looking at the wad of grease on the glass, the way the blood sits in the centre like a red yoke from a counterfeit egg, and you think about how the world is circular. You wonder again if you made the same face as that old Chinese with the slime on her coat the first time you picked up the phone after Angela died and listened to her list off your faults and you realize it doesn't matter. Nothing ends. Opting out of one thing is opting in to another.

  The bus comes, and it's the wrong one but you take it. You sit as far away from the girl as you can.

  *****

  The bus route is one of those long circle jobs that go all the way around the city. It meanders in and out of a dozen neighbourhoods. People get off. A few get on. More leave. Eventually the girl with the brown eyes and bleeding lungs gets off, swi
shing past you without a glance. You're already forgotten. Some guy who gave her a weird look once upon a time when she spit blood and slime on a window. You wonder if she'll still remember the sight of that red and brown slug long after you've disappeared from her memory.

  The bus trundles off and you fall asleep. You dream of that tropical paradise with the black water and happy, screaming families raping and torturing each other. You dream of endless fields filled with some kind of strange fleshy plants with huge, jutting organs sticking straight in the air There are bloody sheets spewing out of the organs like flags, dancing softly in the wind.

  Angela is with you, but her face is long and canine. She's got huge red eyes. She's never been more beautiful. The air is thick with the sound of grinding gears and slapping meat. Some small animal is wailing in terror. And before you, standing like rows like some brutal harvest of flesh are rows upon rows of pink human torsos with tentacles for limbs like starfish. Gorged, erect penises jut straight up from their bellies, and silky red tissue ejects from the piss holes like lung filters in a sea anemone. You see thousands of them, stretching out forever, spewing their red tissue and then sucking it back in again with a flex of their rock-hard bellies. The tissue floats in the air, collecting pain like dust, collecting screams like food.

  "They're tireless workers," Angela says. She takes your hand and leads you toward the fields. "Omni-matrix software upgrades have linked their brains together so they function as a collective, sending out millions of calls a day, asking their loved ones to buy their goods. Corporate is our biggest customer."

  "Those are people?" you ask. The marvel of it all. "How do they survive?"

  "They don't. They're dead. But dreaming. It's a very powerful tool. Just think about all those souls linked together. You need never be bored. You need never be lonely. Your every sick wish and desire granted."

  "But by who?" you say, thinking of R'lyeh and those torturous family excursions. "If this isn't Corporate, who is this?"