Outrageous Fortune

by Tim Scott

  I felt a fuzz of warmth run through me: a warmth of realization that I had friends, people who cared about me, and I was not alone now and I never would be. On the far edge of the canteen, a huge yellow-and-black monster of a machine with wheels the size of Detroit edged its way in like a blind armadillo. On the side of it was emblazoned in large letters: “Wombat Retrieval.” My gaze swept up the machine. It had a couple of massive metal pincers, pointing at the ceiling, and I could see the swoop of transparent tubes crisscrossing the roof. As I watched, an Odysseus Hat screamed through one of them with a flick of its silver metal sides and a barely audible hum.

  “Jonny. Jonny, are you listening to me?” Sarah’s voice broke into my thoughts.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I’m listening.”

  “You really need to see someone. A specialist. You’re all confused, you poor thing, so it’s not surprising something like this has happened to you. I talked it over with Becky, who’s done a night school diploma course on psychology—although to be exact it’s the psychology of plants—but it all comes down to the same thing apparently. She has made me see that you are the one with the problem in our relationship. You need me to look after you, but you can’t see it because you have a leaf infection.”

  “A what?”

  “A leaf infection. You have a leaf infection, which stops you absorbing sunlight, and in human terms it means you’re not open to the real world and to people’s feelings, you poor love.”

  “Sarah, stop this,” I said gently. “Let’s not get tangled up now in things we can’t resolve. Anyway,” I added, “how’s Possible Horse?”

  “Possible Horse?” she said, shaking her head. “I reckon you always loved that cat more than me. Why don’t you come back now and see him? He misses you. Why don’t you just come back for a while?” There was a silence as I thought of a hundred things to say and none of them quite right.

  “Yes! It’s time to add the power of the nuclear bomb to your golf swing,” sang out a hologram, a very small man suddenly appearing between us on the table. “Hi! I’m Tony Shappenhaur IV. You know me better as ‘The Thinking Buckaroo,’ and I’m here to tell you about the amazing power of this driver.” I swatted with irritation at the thing, to absolutely no effect.

  “They have a virus of these in some zones at the moment,” said Sarah. “It’s OK. I was given a zapper for it.” And she ferreted through her bag, produced a slender unit, and zapped the hologram away, leaving a tiny burning smell.

  “Sarah,” I said, suddenly feeling that the answer to much of what had happened to me was inexplicably close. “Has anything strange happened to the world? What I mean is, have you noticed anything small that’s changed? It might be important.”

  “Really? Well, I don’t know, the MacObrees have a new Crossfield, the 4000 V. Dum Dum. Is that the sort of thing? And my sister got an ear problem after she went scuba diving. I don’t know. What are you talking about? Nothing’s changed much.”

  “No, it has changed,” I said, with more urgency than I was expecting. “Something’s not right. Someone has moved something they weren’t supposed to,” I continued, trying to rein in my voice so I sounded considered rather than just plain mad. “Someone has eaten the forbidden apple or something, and it’s messed everything up, and I’m worried it’s me that’s done it.”

  “What are you talking about, Jonny? Have you seen yourself? You look like a dog that’s been thrown in a mole mine.”

  “A coal mine, Sarah.”

  “A what?”

  “A coal mine.”

  “Jonny, what does it matter what’s in the mine? Really, have you lost all sense of proportion? It’s just as Becky said it would be.”

  “Sarah…”

  “The only weird thing here is you, Jonny. Look at you! Never mind, let’s not get you upset, poor love. Come on, get those clothes on and let’s go home and get you cleaned up.” And I remembered, as I looked at her, that Sarah had forgotten how to indulge in anything that wasn’t rock-solid normality; she thought doing that was called growing up.

  I walked out into the fresh air on the forecourt of the Zone Securities Headquarters and stood there as Sarah trotted on ahead, unaware I wasn’t with her. It was just past midday and for the first time in what seemed like an aeon, I was actually free to do what I wanted.

  I didn’t have a house. I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t have a Jab-Tab. But I was free.

  I let the sun wash over my face and breathed in deeply, looking at the world with a sense of wonder and detachment. We were in Easy Listening and, as you’d expect, many of the people wandering about the streets were wearing cardigans and slippers. I even saw someone with a pipe. Down the road, a Well-Mall for broken hips looked pristine and clean, and a paint store selling Change-A-Tone paint was touting for business. Change-A-Tone was the paint that sensed your mood from the hormones you gave off and changed color to be the most in tune with you at that moment. So one day your house walls might be blue, and the next day you’d come in and they’d be deep red. That was all very well, but I didn’t want my fucking walls telling me how I was feeling, and I think a lot of people felt the same. It was one of those things that some people swore by, but most people swore at.

  I sighed. If I was going to start smoking again, I thought, this would be the ideal time. Right now, a cigarette would make life considerably more pleasant. But I didn’t have any, and I knew Sarah wouldn’t either. I looked about and wondered if it was worth trying to bum one off someone.

  “Jonny. Jonny!” called Sarah from the bottom of the steps, “Are you coming?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Because I don’t want to stay in Easy Listening a moment more than I have to. This place makes me feel like I’m two hundred years old.” I trotted down the steps after her, still itching for a cigarette.

  “You don’t have a smoke, do you?” I asked, with pointless optimism.

  She turned and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  “No,” I said. “Just a long shot.” We were closer to the road now and the bikes streamed past—a lot of Crossfield 1000s but mixed in I noticed a Swoop Chicken (which was pretty rare), then a Flat Iron Gun. It rasped away—and owning a bike like that meant you had to avoid the sound sniffers in zones like Classical and Swing. A couple of GaFFA 8s thwocked down to the Zone Securities Chopper Bowl, and I let out an audible sigh of relief that it wasn’t me in one of them now. We walked in silence over to Sarah’s bike. “I got a new machine, see?” she said. “I hated the color of the other one. Why did I ever think I could live with yellow?”

  “Very cool,” I nodded, seeing the perfect, easy flare of a new Crossfield 1050. “Sarah,” I added, after a pause, “I’m not coming back with you to your place. It doesn’t feel right. We just haven’t had enough time, somehow.”

  “Jonny, don’t be ridiculous. Look at you! Where else can you go? You don’t have a house. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I need to see Teb,” I pressed on. “And I really need to see Mat.”

  “You don’t have a proper girlfriend, then? Jonny, you need to get settled, and those two are just drifters like you. They can’t ever help you. Come back, come on. Spend five minutes with Possible Horse and just have a…a cup of coffee, or one of those Long Island things, and we’ll try and straighten us out.”

  “Sarah, no. Take me to Mat’s. Please.”

  “No. No, I won’t. Not this time.” She looked at me with a stony, broken face. “This is as far as I go. Becky said you need a firm hand and plenty of bright sun.”

  “Stop going on about plants!” I shouted, rather too loudly. “Sorry,” I added, after a pause. “Look, there’s not time to go all through this again and I really must see Mat. Honestly, thank you for getting me out of there and I really mean it when I say, look after yourself. You have a generous heart. Good-bye, Sarah.”

  I turned and walked away, knowing I was leaving her on the edge of an emotional cliff, which wasn’t at all fair after all
that she had just done—but this definitely wasn’t the time for psychology about me, about her, and especially not about plants. I was about twenty yards down the road when I heard her high voice, breaking with emotion.

  “All right, Jonny,” she cried. “All right. You win. You always win. Why is it that you always win?” I stopped and turned slowly, looking into her confused face—tense with fear, anxiety, and desperation—and I thought it wasn’t at all like her to soften like that.

  “I wasn’t trying to win anything,” I said, wanting her so much to understand.

  “OK,” she said, more quietly as I approached. “But I can’t keep bailing you out. All that stuff with Eli’s brother, Jack—you never let it go. You need to let things go, Jonny. Things change. You have to move on. You have to just be.”

  I smiled inwardly, hearing words I had said to her years before being pushed back at me. “I know. Things have changed, Sarah; things have changed so much.”

  She touched me lightly on the cheek, half-avoiding my eyes, and smiled. Then she let her hand drop and slid onto the bike, her crash suit snapping about her. I stood for a moment, allowing the touch to glow on my skin, and wondered if she was crying. But she wasn’t able to let herself cry much. More likely she was holding back a flood of emotion in a tight, never-to-be-resolved knot inside.

  This was not the time for any kind of in-depth talk, but I wished it was, wished I could drag her to a place where she could see how things were. Wished, simply, that she understood. I sighed and climbed heavily on the back of the bike and felt my crash suit thrum and brrr as it adjusted to my body.

  She had a heart of gold and it was such a shame we got so messed up as a couple, and I thought that could be the epitaph for the whole human race. “Underneath it all they were really quite nice. They just got screwed up. Mostly by stuff that wasn’t entirely their fault.”

  The crash suit was comfortable and that was one of the great luxuries about a new bike; the crash suits don’t snap so tightly about you that it feels like you’re being bear hugged by an overweight, sweating wrestler who has taken it upon himself to give you a demonstration of the Heimlich Maneuver. How often had I arrived at places red-faced and clawing for breath like a dog at the end of the National Stick-Chasing Championships because of a malfunctioning crash suit? I had lost count. The traffic in Easy Listening was light and Sarah connected her Jab-Tab to the bike, fired it up, and throttled away.

  There was no way I was drifting into being a couple again. No way I was even risking going to her apartment. We’d been through all that and moved on, and it wouldn’t be good for either of us if we fell back into the old way of doing things. We’d just find the tramlines our lives had run on before and roll through the same arguments, the same frustrations, the same dead-end everything. Although she had a good heart, this woman and I had nothing in common anymore but our past. What had bound us in those final years had been nothing but inertia and fear—fear of loneliness, fear of not knowing whether we could make it on our own, fear of life.

  The bike shimmied between lanes as Sarah headed toward Motown in the glaring sun and I tried to relax and let those thoughts go.

  Mat lived in Rave, which was three or four zones away, and getting there wasn’t going to take an age at this time of day, as long as Motown wasn’t having one of their “dancing in the street” days. Then you couldn’t move at more than two miles an hour because of the crowds and the constant supply of people climbing on the back of your bike and expertly cartwheeling off it. They always made me wonder why my childhood hadn’t involved doing more of that rather than throwing stones into the breakers.

  But my mind was still all snagged up on Sarah. There was something hollow about the time when we were married, as if the memories had gone rotten and were about to disintegrate. We weaved our way past a plasi-screen of Elnor Elnorian, one of the government cronies.

  “Hi,” his voice warbled through the head speakers on my crash suit. “I’m Elnor Elnorian. Enjoy your time on bail. Bail is a beautiful gift that comes wrapped with forgiveness, along with this pink form—”

  I snapped the off button down on my head audio. I had as much time for Elnor Elnorian as I did for a skunk that wanted to teach me how to play tennis. He was the last person I wanted to have lecturing me, and I could feel my heart pounding with childish annoyance. His ludicrous corruption speech had been heralded as one of the great honest speeches in American history, which had brought out into the open one of the taboo subjects of our age. I remember it almost word for word:

  “If we are going to be corrupt,” he had said on Thanksgiving two years before, with a dental plan smile, “and I say, it’s inevitable for any government in any modern-day society, I tell you what, I want it to be the best corruption in the world. I want corruption that is superbly efficient. Corruption that is simple to understand. Corruption that makes sense to the homeless, those in hospital, those single mums struggling at home. And most of all, I want corruption that benefits every single member of our nation in the long-term fight for liberty, freedom, justice, and freight haulage.”

  It had won him a standing ovation. A standing ovation! Sure the audience had probably been paid, and the journalists who wrote about it were likely paid too, but some people actually believed it. They quoted it in bars. But then, some people will believe anything if you serve it up on a plate. Elnor Elnorian was the man pressing ahead with the new science bill that fed zillions into a new space program.

  What had made me think of that, for God’s sake?

  What I definitely needed now, I decided, was a drink—or more specifically, a huge number of Long Island Iced Teas, one after the other, until my brain no longer had the capacity or interest to think about anything.

  We flew under the gate out of Easy Listening and into Motown. Sarah leaned the bike into a long cambered corner that just cried out to be taken at speed, but I knew she’d hold back and be sensible about it because that was Sarah. The architecture around us reverted to wooden one-story weather-boarded buildings and stores with flamboyantly hand-painted signs that just made you smile because they were so ridiculously cute.

  The City Caretakers had cordoned off the inside lane so that people could dance in the street if they chose during off-peak traffic, and a few were, here and there. Among them I saw a smattering of beehive haircuts and people wearing pointy glasses, but a lot of the others just looked pretty ordinary. Not everyone went to great lengths to live in the style of their zone and thank God they didn’t.

  I challenge anyone not to like Motown. It’s happy without baggage, celebrating life without the heavy self-deluding overtones of so much of Religion. When this is all over, I thought, it would be cool to come here for an ice cream sometime and listen to “Baby Love” play all afternoon in a café someplace.

  We swerved between some ludicrously old-fashioned bikes and I felt a pang of warmth that I was going to see Mat. A crazy wave of optimism seared through me, as if my life wasn’t messed up at all and I was just heading over for a regular surfing trip.

  Sarah opened the throttle and we screamed out of Motown and into Punk, and I felt a small wobble through the bike. Most likely she was a bit nervous about crossing the zone and wanted to take it at speed because Punk was bursting with designer anarchy of varying sorts, and although the roads were generally OK because Zone Securities went ape-shit if they weren’t, every now and again something unexpected erupted and it usually involved smashing things. That seemed to be the main pastime of everyone living here—and judging by the wrecked surroundings, they were all pretty expert at it too. Getting insurance to live in Punk must have been almost impossible, and the excess on breakages must have been the equivalent of the income of a small country.

  I switched off the air con on my suit, opened the visor, and breathed in the fresh air as I watched the dilapidated, paint-sprayed walls flit by. Somewhere in the distance smoke rose from a fire and loud music suddenly erupted from a supermarket as a man in a suit pushe
d open the door, looking uncomfortably out of place. A plasi-screen by the road filled up with a blond girl, but I didn’t hear what she was saying because I’d switched off the crash suit speaker. Then a lion ate her, and I gathered from the large lettering that appeared that it was an ad for Swedish Spinach.

  An outrageously designed mall scooted by, all pink angles and huge flags, and up ahead I could see the gate out of Punk and into Rave loom on the horizon like a wild beast. It was a stainless-steel monolith that blurred past as we hammered through, finding ourselves in the swish expensive malls of Rave, with their neat, white-walled houses.

  Rave had some cracking stores and a plethora of superb Japanese restaurants that served some of the best sushi known to man—which is something Mat and his girlfriend, Nina, went on about as though they had found the Holy Grail. And not only that, as if they had found the Grail in the same place as a packet of particularly good chocolate cookies.

  I mean, I like sushi. I really do, but it’s not something I feel any need to worship.

  Sarah eased up behind a gaggle of slower bikes and I wondered how long it had been since she had been to Mat’s. I guessed it must have been years, and yet she threaded the bike easily through the corners, as though the route was fresh in her mind. We passed a store called “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhbang!” that gave the impression from the window display that all it sold were colorful pointy bits of wood, and maybe it did. The people in Rave bought all kinds of odd things, mainly by mistake when they were out of their heads on drugs.

  Inside the shop, on the other side of the glass and mixed in with the reflection, was a man who was the spitting image of my boss, Habakkuk, and the whole guilt pang about work hit me like a large hammer. I had clients waiting for dreams; waiting for serial dreams that only I could write, and they would be jumping down Habakkuk’s throat, bypassing that small, sticky smile he had creased permanently into his face. Not only that, Habakkuk would kill me when he found I had lost my entire dream library. But he would have to join the line, I thought ruefully.