Her phone was beeping. She snuck a peek. It was her old editor. “Listen,” she said. “I have to go. There’s a call coming in I have to take. I can call you right back.”
“Don’t,” he said. “It’s OK. I’m busy here anyway. This is a big day.” His laugh was like a dog’s bark.
“Take care of yourself, Kettlewell,” she said. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“Nil carborundum illegitimis to you, too.”
She clicked over to her editor. “Jimmy,” she said. “Long time no speak. Sorry I missed your calls before—I’m in Russia on a story.”
“Hello, Suzanne,” he said. His voice had an odd, strained quality, or maybe that was just her mood, projecting. “I’m sorry, Suzanne. You’ve been doing good work. The best work of your career, if you ask me. I follow it closely.”
It made her feel a little better. She’d been uncomfortable about the way she and Jimmy had parted ways, but this was vindicating. It emboldened her. “Jimmy, what the hell do I do now?”
“Christ, Suzanne, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what not to do, though. Off the record.”
“Off the record.”
“Don’t do what I’ve done. Don’t hang grimly onto the last planks from the sinking ship, chronicling the last few struggling, sinking schmucks’ demise. It’s no fun being the stenographer for the fall of a great empire. Find something else to cover.”
The words made her heart sink. Poor Jimmy, stuck there in the Merc’s once-great newsroom, while the world crumbled around him. It must have been heartbreaking.
“Thanks,” she said. “You want an interview?”
“What? No, woman. I’m not a ghoul. I wanted to call and make sure you were all right.”
“Jimmy, you’re a prince. But I’ll be OK. I land on my feet. You’ve got someone covering this story, so give her my number and have her call me and I’ll give her a quote.”
“Really, Suzanne—”
“It’s fine, Jimmy.”
“Suzanne,” he said. “We don’t cover that kind of thing from our newsroom anymore. Just local stuff. National coverage comes from the wires or from the McClatchy national newsroom.”
She sucked in air. Could it be possible? Her first thought when Jimmy called was that she’d made a terrible mistake by leaving the Merc, but if this was what the paper had come to, she had left just in time, even if her own life-raft was sinking, it had kept her afloat for a while.
“The offer still stands, Jimmy. I’ll talk to anyone you want to assign.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Suzanne. What are you in Russia for?”
She told him. Screw scoops, anyway. Not like Jimmy was going to send anyone to Russia, he couldn’t even afford to dispatch a reporter to Marin County by the sounds of things.
“What a story!” he said. “Man!”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah I guess it is.”
“You guess? Suzanne, this is the single most important issue in practically every American’s life—there isn’t one in a thousand who doesn’t worry endlessly about his weight.”
“Well, I have been getting really good numbers on this.” She named the figure. He sucked air between his teeth. “That’s what the whole freaking chain does on a top story, Suzanne. You’re outperforming fifty local papers combined.”
“Yeah?”
“Hell yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should ask you for a job.”
When he got off the phone, she spoke to Perry, and then to Lester. Lester said that he wanted to go traveling and see his old friends in Russia and that if she was still around in a couple weeks, maybe he’d see her there. Perry was morose and grimly determined. He was on the verge of shipping his three-dee printers and he was sure he could do it, even if he didn’t have the Kodacell network for marketing and logistics. He didn’t even seem to register it when she told him that she was going to be spending some time in Russia.
Then she had to go into the clinic and ask intelligent questions and take pictures and record audio and jot notes and pay attention to the small details so that she would be able to write the best account possible.
They dressed well in Russia, in the clinics. Business casual, but well tailored and made from good material. The Europeans knew from textiles, and expert tailoring seemed to be in cheap supply here.
She’d have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years’ worth of Florida casual.
She’d see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle—not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics.
She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room coffee-maker.
“Hello, Freddy,” she said.
“Suzanne, darling!” He sounded like he was breathing hard.
“What can I do for you?”
“Just wanted a quote, love, something for color.”
“Oh, I’ve got a quote for you.” She’d given the quote a lot of thought. Living with the squatters had broadened her vocabulary magnificently.
“And those are your good points,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “Goodbye, Freddy.”
PART II
The drive from Orlando down to Hollywood got worse every time Sammy took it. The turnpike tolls went up every year and the road surface quality declined, and the gas prices at the clip-joints were heart-attack-inducing. When Sammy started at Disney Imagineering a decade before, the company had covered your actual expenses—just collect the receipts and turn them in for cash back. But since Parks had been spun off into a separate company with its own shareholders, the new austerity measures meant that the bean-counters in Burbank set a maximum per-mile reimbursement and never mind the actual expense.
Enough of this competitive intelligence work and Sammy would go broke.
Off the turnpike, it was even worse. The shantytowns multiplied and multiplied. Laundry lines stretched out in the parking-lots of former strip-malls. Every traffic-light clogged with aggressive techno-tchotchke vendors, the squeegee bums of the twenty-first century, with their pornographic animatronic dollies and infinitely varied robot dogs. Disney World still sucked in a fair number of tourists (though not nearly so many as in its golden day), but they were staying away from Miami in droves. The snowbirds had died off in a great demographic spasm over the past decade, and their children lacked the financial wherewithal to even think of over-wintering in their parents’ now-derelict condos.
The area around the dead Wal-Mart was particularly awful. The shanties here rose three, even four stories into the air, clustered together to make medieval street-mazes. Broward County had long since stopped enforcing the property claims of the bankruptcy courts that managed the real-estate interests of the former owners of the fields and malls that had been turned into the new towns.
By the time he pulled into the Wal-Mart’s enormous parking lot, the day had heated up, his air-con had conked, and he’d accumulated a comet-tail of urchins who wanted to sell him a computer-generated bust of himself in the style of a Roman emperor—they worked on affiliate commission for some three-dee printer jerk in the shanties, and they had a real aggressive pitch, practically flinging their samples at him.
He pushed past them and wandered through the open-air market stalls, a kind of cruel parody of the long-gone Florida flea-markets. These gypsies sold fabricated parts that could be modded to make single-shot zip guns and/or bongs and/or illegal-gain wireless antennae. They sold fruit smoothies and suspicious “beef” jerky. They sold bootleg hardcopies of Mexican fotonovelas and bound printouts of Japanese fan-produced tentacle-porn comics. It was all damnably eye-catching and intriguing, even though Sammy knew t
hat it was all junk.
Finally, he reached the ticket-window in front of the Wal-Mart and slapped down five bucks on the counter. The guy behind the counter was the kind of character that kept the tourists away from Florida: shaven-headed, with one cockeyed eyebrow that looked like a set of hills, a three-day beard and skin tanned like wrinkled leather.
“Hi again!” Sammy said, brightly. Working at Disney taught you to talk happy even when your stomach was crawling—the castmember’s grin.
“Back again?” the guy behind the counter laughed. He was missing a canine tooth and it made him look even more sketchy. “Christ, dude, we’ll have to invent a season’s pass for you.”
“Just can’t stay away,” Sammy said.
“You’re not the only one. You’re a hell of a customer for the ride, but you haven’t got anything on some of the people I get here—people who come practically every day. It’s flattering, I tell you.”
“You made this, then?”
“Yeah,” he said, swelling up with a little pigeon-chested puff of pride. “Me and Lester, over there.” He gestured at a fit, greying man sitting on a stool before a small cocktail bar built into a scavenged Orange Julius stand—God knew where these people got all their crap from. He had the look of one of the fatkins, unnaturally thin and muscled and yet somehow lazy, the combination of a ten kilocalorie diet, zero body-fat and non-steroidal muscle enhancers. Ten years ago, he would have been a model, but today he was just another ex-tubbalard with a serious food habit. Time was that Disney World was nigh-unnavigable from all the powered wheelchairs carting around morbidly obese Americans who couldn’t walk from ride to ride, but these days it looked more like an ad for a gymnasium, full of generically buff fatkins in tight-fitting clothes.
“Good work!” he said again in castmemberese. “You should be very proud!”
The proprietor smiled and took a long pull off a straw hooked into the distiller beside him. “Go on, get in there—flatterer!”
Sammy stepped through the glass doors and found himself in an air-conditioned cave of seemingly infinite dimension. The old Wal-Mart had been the size of five football fields, and a cunning arrangement of curtains and baffles managed to convey all that space without revealing its contents. Before him was the ride vehicle, in a single shaft of spotlight.
Gingerly, he stepped into it. The design was familiar—there had been a glut of these things before the fatkins movement took hold, stair-climbing wheelchairs that used gyro-stabilizers to pitch, yaw, stand and sit in a perpetual controlled fall. The Disney World veterans of their heyday remembered them as failure-prone behemoths that you needed a forklift to budge when they died, but the ride people had done something to improve on the design. These things performed as well as the originals, though they were certainly knock-offs—nohow were these cats shelling out fifty grand a pop for the real deal.
The upholstered seat puffed clouds of dust into the spotlight’s shaft as he settled into the chair and did up his lap-belt. The little LCD set into the control panel lit up and started to play the standard video spiel, narrated in grizzled voice-over.
WELCOME TO THE CABINET OF WONDERS
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON—AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN’T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS.
THEIR MARVELOUS INVENTIONS EMERGED AT THE RATE OF FIVE OR SIX PER WEEK. SOME DANCED, SOME SANG, SOME WERE HELPMEETS AND SOME WERE MERE JESTERS.
TODAY, NEARLY ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS HAVE VANISHED WITH THE COLLAPSE OF NEW WORK. THEY’VE ENDED UP BACK IN THE TRASH HEAPS THAT INSPIRED THEM.
HERE IN THE CABINET OF WONDERS, WE ARE PRESERVING THESE LAST REMNANTS OF THE GOLDEN AGE, A SINGLE BEACON OF LIGHT IN A TIME OF DARKNESS.
AS YOU MOVE THROUGH THE RIDESPACE, PLEASE REMAIN SEATED. HOWEVER, YOU MAY PAUSE YOUR VEHICLE TO GET A CLOSER LOOK BY MOVING THE JOYSTICK TOWARD YOURSELF. PULL THE JOYSTICK UP TO CUE NARRATION ABOUT ANY OBJECT.
MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE LEFT, TOWARDS THE MINUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN ITEM IS UGLY, UNWORTHY OR MISPLACED. MOVE THE JOYSTICK TO THE RIGHT, TOWARD THE PLUS-ONE, IF YOU THINK AN ITEM IS PARTICULARLY PLEASING. YOUR FEEDBACK WILL BE FACTORED INTO THE CONTINUOUS REARRANGEMENT OF THE CABINET, WHICH TAKES PLACE ON A MINUTE-BY-MINUTE BASIS, DRIVEN BY THE ROBOTS YOU MAY SEE CRAWLING AROUND THE FLOOR OF THE CABINET.
THE RIDE LASTS BETWEEN TEN MINUTES AND AN HOUR, DEPENDING ON HOW OFTEN YOU PAUSE.
PLEASE ENJOY YOURSELF, AND REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE GOLDEN.
This plus-one/minus-one business was new to him. It had been a mere four days since he’d been up here, but like so many other of his visits, they’d made major rehabs to their ride in the amount of time it would have taken Imagineering to write a memo about the possibility of holding a design-review meeting.
He velcroed his camera’s wireless eye to his lapel, tapped the preset to correct for low light and motion, and hit the joystick. The wheelchair stood up with wobbly grace, and began to roll forward on two wheels, heeling over precipitously as it cornered into the main space of the ride. The gyros could take it, he knew, but it still thrilled him the way that a fast, out-of-control go-kart did, miles away from the safe rides back in Disney.
The chair screeched around a corner and pulled into the first scene, a diorama littered with cross-sectioned cars. Each one was kitted out with different crazy technologies—dashboard gods that monitored and transmitted traffic heuristics, parallel-parking autopilots, peer-to-peer music-sharing boxes, even an amphibious retrofit on a little hybrid that apparently worked, converting the little Bug into a water-Bug.
The chair swooped around each one, pausing while the narration played back reminisces by the inventors, or sometimes by the owners of the old gizmos. The stories were pithy and sweet and always funny. These were artifacts scavenged from the first days of a better nation that had died a-borning.
Then on to the kitchen, and the bathrooms—bathroom after bathroom, with better toilets, better showers, better tubs, better floors and better lights—bedrooms, kids’ rooms. One after another, a hyper museum.
The decor was miles ahead of where it had been the last time he’d been through. There were lots of weird grace-notes, like taxidermied alligators, vintage tourist pennants, chintz lamps, and tiny dioramae of action figures.
He paused in front of a fabric printer surrounded by custom tees and knit caps and three-dee video-game figurines machine-crocheted from bright yarns, and was passed by another chair. In it was a cute woman in her thirties, white-blond shaggy hair luminous in the spotlight over the soft-goods. She paused her chair and lovingly reached out to set down a pair of appliqued shorts with organic LEDs pulsing and swirling around the waistband. “Give it a plus-one, OK? These were my best sellers,” she said, smiling a dazzling beach-bunny smile at him. She wheeled away and paused at the next diorama to set down a doll-house in a child’s room diorama.
Wow—they were getting user-generated content in the ride. Holy crap.
He finished out the ride with a keen hand on the plus-one/minus-one lever, carefully voting for the best stuff and against the stuff that looked out of place—like a pornographic ceramic bong that someone had left in the midst of a clockwork animatronic jug-band made from stitched-together stuffed animals.
Then it was over, and he was debarking in what had been the Wal-Mart’s garden center. The new bright sun made him tear up, and he fished out his shades.
“Hey, mister, c’mere, I’ve got something better than sunglasses for you!” The guy who beckoned him over to a market-stall had the look of an aging bangbanger: shaved head, tattoos, ridiculous cycling shorts with some gut hanging over them.
“See these? Polarizing contact-lenses—prescription or optically neutral. Everyone in India is into these things, but we make ’em right here in Florida.” He lifted a half-sphere of fil
my plastic from his case and peeled back his eyelid and popped it in. His whole iris was tinted black, along with most of the whites of his eyes. Geometric shapes like Maori tattoos were rendered in charcoal grey across the lenses. “I can print you up a set in five minutes, ten bucks for plain, twenty if you want them bit-mapped.”
“I think I’ll stick with my shades, thanks,” Sammy said.
“C’mon, the ladies love these things. Real conversation starter. Make you look all anime and shit, guy like you can try this kind of thing out for twenty bucks, you know, won’t hurt.”
“That’s all right,” Sammy said.
“Just try a pair on, then, how about that. I printed an extra set last Wednesday and they’ve only got a shelf-life of a week, so these’ll only be good for another day. Fresh in a sealed package. You like ’em. you buy a pair at full price, c’mon that’s as good as you’re going to get.”
Before Sammy knew it, he was taking receipt of a sealed plastic packet in hot pink with a perforated strip down one side. “Uh, thanks…” he said, as he began to tuck it into a pocket. He hated hard-sells, he was no good at them. It was why he bought all his cars online now.
“Naw, that’s not the deal, you got to try them on, otherwise how can you buy them once you fall in love with ’em? They’re safe man, go on, it’s easy, just like putting in a big contact lens.”
Sammy thought about just walking away, but the other vendors were watching him now, and the scrutiny sapped his will. “My hands are too dirty for this,” he said. The vendor silently passed him a sealed sterile wipe, grinning.
Knowing he was had, he wiped his hands, tore open the package, took out the lenses and popped them one at a time into his eyes. He blinked a couple times. The world was solarized and grey, like he was seeing it through a tinted windscreen.
“Oh man, you look bad-ass,” the vendor said. He held up a hand mirror.
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