Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “Top of page two. A famous local specialty, you should try it.”

  “Sounds great.” He signaled a waiter and ordered. Greta asked for chicken salad.

  Greta began to spin the narrow stem of her wineglass, which he had filled with mineral water in order to forestall more gin. “Oscar, how are we going to work this? I mean us.”

  “Oh, our liaison is technically unethical, but it doesn’t quite count when you’re unethical away from the action. You’ll be going back to your work, and I’m going to the East Coast. But I’ll be back later, and we can arrange something discreet.”

  “That’s how this works, in your circles?”

  “When it works…It’s accepted. Like, say, the President and his mistress.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Leonard Two Feathers has a mistress?”

  “No, no, not him! I mean the old guy, the man who’s still officially President. He had this girlfriend—Pamela something, you don’t need to know her last name…She’ll wait till he’s safely out of office. Then she’ll license the tell-all book, the fragrance, the lingerie, the various ancillary rights…It’s her cash-out money.”

  “What does the First Lady think of all that?”

  “I imagine she thinks what First Ladies always think. She thought she’d be an instant co-President, and then she had to watch for four long years while the Emergency committees staked her guy out in public and pithed him like a frog. That’s the real tragedy of it. You know, I had no use for that guy as a politician, but I still hated watching that process. The old guy looked okay when he took office. He was eighty-two years old, but hey, everybody in the Party of American Unity is old, the whole Right Progressive Bloc has a very aged demographic…The job just broke him, that’s all. It just snapped his poor old bones right there in public. I guess they could have outed him on the thousand-year-old girlfriend issue, but with all the truly serious troubles the President had, trashing his sex life was overkill.”

  “I never knew about any of that.”

  “People know. Somebody always knows. The man’s krewe always knows. The Secret Service knows. That doesn’t mean you can get people to make a public issue of it. Nets are really peculiar. They’re never smooth and uniform, they’re always lumpy. There are probably creeps somewhere who have surveillance video of the President with Pamela. Maybe they’re swapping it around, trading it for paparazzi shots of Hollywood stars. It doesn’t matter. My dad the movie star, he used to get outed all the time, but they were always such silly things—he got outed once for punching some guy at a polo club, but he never got outed for playing footsie with mobsters. Crazy people with time on their hands can learn a lot of weird things on the net. But they’re still crazy people, no matter how much they learn. They’re not players, so they just don’t count.”

  “And I’m not a player, so I just don’t count.”

  “Don’t take it badly. None of your people ever counted. Senator Dougal, he was your player. Your player is gone now, so you have nothing left on the game board. That’s political reality.”

  “I see.”

  “You can vote, you know. You’re a citizen. You have one vote. That’s important.”

  “Right.”

  They laughed.

  They had consommé. Then the waiter brought the main dish.

  “Smells wonderful,” Oscar said. “Got a lobster bib? Claw cracker? Hammer, maybe?” He had a closer look at the dish. “Wait a minute. What’s wrong with my lobster?”

  “That’s your écrevisse.”

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “Crayfish. Crawdad. A freshwater lobster.”

  “What’s with these claws? The tail’s all wrong.”

  “It’s domestic. Natural crawdads are only three inches long. They stitched its genetics. That’s a local specialty.”

  Oscar stared at the boiled crustacean in its bed of yellow rice. His dinner was a giant genetic mutant. Its proportions seemed profoundly wrong to him. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. Certainly he’d eaten his share of genetically altered crops: corncobs half the size of his arm, UltraPlump zucchinis, tasty mottled brocco-cauliflowers, seedless apples, seedless everything, really…But here was an entire gene-warped animal boiled alive and delivered in one piece. It looked fantastic, utterly unreal. It was like a lobster-shaped child’s balloon.

  “Smells delicious,” he said.

  Greta’s phone rang.

  “Look, can’t we eat in peace?” Oscar said.

  She swallowed a forkful of vinegar-gleaming chicken salad. “I’ll shut my phone off,” she said.

  Oscar prodded experimentally at one of the crawdad’s many ancillary legs. The boiled limb snapped off as cleanly as a twig, revealing a white wedge of flesh.

  “Don’t be shy,” she told him, “this is Louisiana, okay? Just stick the head right in your mouth and suck the juice out.”

  The music from the band stopped suddenly, in mid-quartet. Oscar looked up. The doorway was full of cops.

  They were Louisiana state troopers, men in flat-brimmed hats with headphones and holstered capture guns. They were filtering into the restaurant. Oscar looked hastily for Fontenot and saw the security man discreetly punching at his phone, with a look of annoyance.

  “Sorry,” Oscar said, “may I borrow your phone a minute?”

  He turned Greta’s phone back on and engaged in the surprisingly complex procedure of reinstalling its presence in the Louisiana net. The cops had permeated through the now-hushed crowd, and had blocked all the exits. There were cops in the bar, a cop with the maître d’, cops quietly vanishing into the kitchen, two pairs of cops going upstairs. Cops with laptops, cops with video. Three cops were having a private conference with the manager.

  Then came the thudding racket of a helicopter, landing outside. When the rotors shut off, the entire crowd found themselves suddenly shouting. The sudden silence afterward was deeply impressive.

  Two mountainous bodyguards in civilian dress entered the restaurant, followed immediately by a short, red-faced man in house shoes and purple pajamas.

  The red-faced man bustled headlong into the restaurant, his furry house slippers slithering across the tiles. “HEY, Y’ALL!” he shouted, his voice booming like a kettledrum. “It’s ME!” He waved both arms, pajamas flying open to reveal a hairy belly. “Sorry for the mess! Official business! Y’all relax! Ever’thing under control.”

  “Hello, Governor!” someone shouted. “Hey, Huey!” yelled another diner, as if it were something he’d been longing to say all his life. The diners were all grinning suddenly, exchanging happy glances, skidding their chairs back, their faces alight. They were in luck. Life and color had entered their drab little lives.

  “See what the boys in the back room’ll have!” screeched the Governor. “We’re gonna look after you folks real good tonight! Dinner’s on me, everybody! All righty? Boozoo, you see to that! Right away.”

  “Yessir,” said Boozoo, who was one of the bodyguards.

  “Gimme a COFFEE!” boomed Huey. He was short, but he had shoulders like a linebacker. “Gimme a double coffee! It’s late, so put a shot of something in it. Gimme a demitasse. Hell, gimme a whole goddamn tasse. Somebody gonna get me two tasses? Do I have to wait all night? Goddamn, it smells good in here! You folks having a good time yet?”

  There was a ragged yell of public approval.

  “Y’all don’t mind me now,” screamed Huey, casually hitching his pajama bottoms. “Couldn’t get myself a decent meal in Baton Rouge, had to fly down here to take the edge off. Gotta take a big meeting tonight.” He strode unerringly into the depths of the restaurant, approaching Oscar’s table like a battleship. He stopped short, looming suddenly before them, hands twitching, forehead dotted with sweat. “Clifton, gimme a chair.”

  “Yessir,” said the remaining bodyguard. Clifton yanked a chair from a nearby table like a man picking up a breadstick, and deftly slid it beneath his boss’s rump.

  Suddenly the three of them were
sitting face-to-face. At close range the Governor’s head was like a full moon, swollen, glowing, and lightly cratered. “Hello, Etienne,” Greta said.

  “Hallo, petite!” To Oscar’s intense annoyance, the two of them began speaking in rapid, idiomatic French.

  Oscar glanced over to catch Fontenot’s eye. There was a two-volume lesson in good sense in Fontenot’s level gaze. Oscar looked away.

  A waiter arrived on the trot with coffee, a tall glass, whipped cream, a shot of bourbon. “I’m starvin’,” Huey announced, in a new and much less public voice. “Nice mudbug you got there, son.”

  Oscar nodded.

  “I dote on mudbugs,” Huey said. “Gimme some butter dip.” He pulled his pajama sleeves up, reached out with nutcracker hands, and wrenched the tail from the carapace with a loud bursting of gristle and meat. He flexed the tail, everting a chunk of white steaming flesh. “C’est bon, son!” He stuffed it into his mouth, set his teeth, and tore. “That GOOD or what! Gonna BODY-SLAM them Boston lobsters! Bring me a menu. My Yankee friend the Soap Salesman here, he’s gotta order hisself somethin’. Tell the chef to put some hair on his chest.”

  Their table was now densely crowded with waiters. They were materializing through the ranks of state cops, bringing water, cream, napkins, butter, hot bread, panniers of curdled sauce. They were thrilled to serve, jostling each other for the honor. One offered Oscar a fresh menu.

  “Get this boy a jambalaya,” Huey commanded, waving the menu away with a flick of his dense red fingers. “Get him two shrimp jambalayas. Big ol’ shrimp. We need some jumbo shrimp here, the Child Star looks mighty peaked. Girl, you gotta eat something more than them salads. Woman can’t live on chicken salad. Tell me somethin’. You. Oscar. Man’s gotta eat, don’t he?”

  “Yes, Governor,” Oscar said.

  “This boy of yours ain’t eatin’!” Huey crushed the crawdad’s boiled red claw between his pinching thumbs. “Mr. Bombast. Mr. Architecture Boy. I cain’t have a thing like that on my conscience! Thinkin’ of him, and his pretty wife, just wasting away up north there on goddamn apple juice. It’s got me so I cain’t sleep nights!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that you’re troubled, Your Excellency.”

  “You tell your boy to stop frettin’ so much. You don’t see me neglectin’ life and limb because the common man can’t get a decent break up in Boston. We get Yankees like y’all down here all the time. They get a taste of the sweet life, and they forget all about your goddamn muddy water. Hungry Boy needs to lighten up.”

  “He’ll eat when those soldiers eat, sir.”

  Huey stared at him, chewing deliberately. “Well, you can tell him from me—you tell him tonight—that I’m gonna solve his little problem. I get his point. Point taken. He can put down his goddamn cameras and the apple juice, because I’m gonna do him a favor. I am taking proactive executive measures to resolve the gentleman’s infrastructural contretemps.”

  “I’ll see to it that the Senator gets your message, sir.”

  “You think I’m kidding, Mr. Valparaiso? You think I’m funning with you tonight?”

  “I would never think that, Your Excellency.”

  “That’s good. That’s real good. You know something? I loved your dad’s movies.” Huey turned to gaze over his shoulder. “WHAT’S WITH THE BAND?” he bellowed. “Are they DRUNK? Put the band on!”

  The musicians rapidly reassembled and began playing a minuet. The Governor slurped a demitasse, then returned his attention to the monster crayfish and lit into it savagely. He snapped and devoured both claws, and then sucked hot spiced juice from its head with every appearance of satisfaction.

  The waiters began laying out fresh platters of Cajun delicacies. Oscar examined the steaming feast. He had rarely felt less like eating.

  “What about you now, darlin’?” Huey demanded suddenly. “You’re not saying much tonight.”

  Greta shook her head.

  “You gotta know what the Soap Boy here is up to, right? Dougal is out, the FedDems are in, it’s s’posed to be somebody else’s pork now. What do you think? Nice little lab up on Route 128? Some kind of promise, I guess.”

  “He doesn’t make many promises,” Greta murmured.

  “He better not, because he can’t promise Boston beans. I got two boys in the Senate who can sit on his Senator’s neck from here to Sunday. I built that goddamn laboratory! Me! I know what it’s worth. Up in Baton Rouge, we just put a new bill through the Ways and Means Committee. A big expansion for ‘Bio Bayou.’ Maybe my lab ain’t as big as yours, but it don’t need to be big, if you don’t have to feed every pork-eatin’ lawn jockey in the fifty states. I know the goddamn difference between neuroscience and them sons of bitches who are cataloging grasshoppers. You know I can tell the difference, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know, Etienne.”

  “It’s a cryin’ shame, you fillin’ out them federal grants in quintuplicate. A woman like you needs a free hand! Let’s just say that you fancy workin’ on…blocking the uptake of methylspiropedirol in extrastriatal dopamine receptors. Might sound kinda funny to the layman, but that’s all the difference between sanity and total schizophrenia. I defy you to find a single elected federal official who can even pronounce them words! But that’s the coming thing. Digital…biological…and now cognitive. Plain as the nose on my brain. You think we’re gonna sit here in Acadiana, as the only nonnative people in America ever subjected to forced ethnic cleansing, and watch a bunch of POINTY-HEADED FAT CATS tryin’ to OUTTHINK US? Out-goddamn-THINK us? In a pig’s eye, sister!”

  “I don’t do cognition, Etienne. I’m just a neural tech.”

  “You won the Nobel for establishing the glial basis of attention, and you’re claiming you don’t do cognition?”

  “I do neurons and glial cells. I do neurochemical wave propagation. But I don’t do consciousness. That’s not a term of art. It’s metaphysics.”

  “You’re a mile deep, darlin’. But you’re an inch wide. It ain’t metaphysics when it’s sitting on a table in front of you with an apple in its mouth. Look, we known each other a long time. You know old Huey, don’t you? You’re a friend of Huey’s, you can have anything you want. Anything you want!”

  “I just want to work in my lab.”

  “You got it! Send me the specs! What do you want, airtight? We got sulfur and salt mines a mile down, holes bigger than downtown Baton Rouge. Do whatever the hell you want down there! Seal the doors behind you. Science, the endless frontier, darlin’! Can’t ask for better than that! Never sign an impact statement again! Just get your results and publish, that’s all I’m askin’! Just get your results and publish.”

  __________

  Oscar and Greta returned to the beach house at four in the morning. They watched from the deck railings as the headlights of their six-car state police escort turned and faded into darkness.

  The krewe, alerted by Fontenot, had been carefully guarding the beach house. It had not been entered or searched. That seemed like a small comfort. “I can’t believe that people came up to him and kissed his hands,” Oscar said.

  “There were only three of them.”

  “They kissed his hands! They were weeping, and kissing his hands!”

  “He’s made a lot of difference to the local people,” Greta said, yawning. “He’s given them hope.” She stepped into the bathroom with her overnight bag, and shut the door.

  Oscar went into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator door. His hands were shaking. Huey hadn’t cracked him. Oscar hadn’t lost his temper or his nerve; but he was appalled at the speed of the man’s reaction and the swift price he’d had to pay for taking foolish risks in Huey’s sphere of influence. He found an apple in the fridge and picked it up absently. Then he went in and sat in the hideous armchair. He stood up again, immediately. “He had that place packed with armed goons, and those people were kissing his hands!”

  “The Governor needs bodyguards, he lives a very dangerous life,” Greta said from b
ehind the bathroom door. “Oscar, why did he call you the ‘Soap Salesman’?”

  “Oh, that. That was my first company. A biotech app. We made emulsifiers for dishwashing liquid. People don’t think these things through, you know. They think biotech should be fancy and elaborate. But soap is a major consumer item. You get a five percent processing edge in a commodity market like soap, and the buyout guys will beat your doors down…” His words trailed off. She was brushing her teeth, she wasn’t listening.

  She came out in a white flannel nightgown. It was ankle-length and had a little pastel bow at the neck. She opened her overnight bag and pulled out a compact air filter.

  “Allergies?” Oscar said.

  “Yes. The air outside the dome…well, outside air always smells funny to me.” She plugged in her filter. It emitted a powerful hum.

  Oscar checked the windows to make sure they were shut and curtained, then stared at her. All unknowing, his feelings about her had undergone a deep and turbulent sea change. His encounter with the Governor had roiled him inside. He was all stirred and clotted now. He was passionate. He felt aggressive and possessive. He was sick with jealousy. “Are you going to sleep in that?”

  “Yes. My feet always get so cold at night.”

  Oscar shook his head. “You’re not going to sleep in that. And we won’t use the bed. This time, we’ll use the floor.”

  She examined the floor. It had a lovely hooked rug. She looked up at him, her face flushed to the ears.

  He woke just after dawn. He was asleep on the rug. Greta had stripped the bed and placed the sheet and coverlet over him. She was sitting at the bureau, scribbling in her notebook.

  Oscar slowly examined the water-stained ceiling. His kneecaps were rug-burned. His back felt sore. There was a slimy damp spot congealing under his hip. He felt truly at peace with himself for the first time in weeks.

  Without the services of Fontenot to scope out trouble and smooth his way, Oscar found travel difficult. Traffic in Alabama was snarled by manic Christian tent-revival shows, “breathing fresh life into the spirit” with two-hundred-beat-per-minute gospel raves. In Tennessee, Oscar’s progress was stymied by battalions of Mexican migrant workers, battling the raging kudzu hands-on, with pick and shovel. Oscar was enjoying the relative safety of a bogus biohazard bus, but there were circumstances when even this couldn’t help him.