Ryman-Paradise-interior-ebook

by Paradise Tales (v5. 0) (mobi)

  “Banging!” I say back. That’s my talk. “You’re a Britney fan, huh?”

  The Kid’s sussed. He knows exactly what’s going on. “Britney … Whitney … all that old stuff.” He chuckles and nods and shakes his head. “I big big fan!” I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, this old guy is into some shit. He’s thinking, this old guy is hacking me back my tips.

  The microwave pings like my dinner’s ready, only it’s not food that’s cooking. I put on my glasses, and then put the transcoder on top of them and suddenly Britney is translated into the Corporation’s accounts. But only if you are looking at ’em through my glasses.

  I got a real good line on who’s been stealing a little bit of the Kid’s bandwidth.

  My Medical Supervisor. My trusted Dr. Curtis. So I siphon out the dosh and siphon it into the Kid’s corporate account. Ready for loading to his bank.

  “Banging!” the Kid says.

  Grand Dad House.

  So then I call on Dr. Curtis. “You got a face like shit and your brains are all on your chin.”

  Dr. Curtis leans back and looks like someone who’s just been told a real bad joke. Behind him is a wall of screens, some of them showing people’s pumping insides.

  You see, you get old, you end up in here, and that gives them the right to monitor every last act and word. You’re a patient.

  I’m one mad patient. “I may be eighty but I could still deck you!”

  He leans back, with his eyebrows up and his eyes hooded. “I could always prescriptionize out all that aggressive testosterone. So unbecoming in the aged.”

  I hate him. Really. I can take most people, but if I could do Curtis an injury I would. Curtis has got hold of my pubic hair and can give it a twist whenever he wants.

  “Look Curtis, you been hacking off our tips. Duh! Don’t you think the staff kinda notice they’re not getting paid? And I know we’re all a bunch of senile old codgers, but even we can tell when we don’t get our asses wiped ’cause the staff can’t feed their kids. You leave our tips alone, asshole!”

  The good doctor sniffs. “I’m afraid I have expenses.”

  “Yeah; and they all got tits.”

  “And I’ve only got one other source of income.” He starts to smile. A nice long pause, like it’s his close-up or something. He purses his lips into a little bitty kiss. “You.”

  He’s such a drama student. He tells me, “If my account is empty, I’ll hack it out of yours.”

  No, he won’t. It won’t be that easy. But he has got a point. It is the whole point, the underlying point. I gotta sit on that point everyday, and it goes straight up my ass.

  I can’t walk without help. My kid’s poor. I gotta find a hundred thou a year.

  So I take it out of other people’s bank accounts, OK?

  Curtis is my doctor. He knows everything I do. I have to give him a cut.

  I have a dream. I put Dr. Curtis in rubber mask and backward baseball cap, and shove him out on the lawn at night so the cameras don’t recognize him and he gets area-denied. He gets sound-gunned. He gets microwaved; his whole body feels like it’s touching a hot lightbulb. His whole goddamned shaven tattooed trendy fat little ass feels what it’s like to be poor and hungry and climbing over our wall just to activate some ordnance.

  All this is before lunch. It’s a well crucial day. Stick around, it’s about to get even more crucial.

  It’s Saturday, and that’s Bill’s day to visit. I go to the Solarium and wait, and then wait some more. Today he doesn’t show. I wait a little while longer. And then ring him up to leave a message. I don’t want to sound whiney, so I try to sound up. “Hey, Bill, this your dad. Everything’s cool. I hope it’s under control for you, too.”

  Then I sit and hang out. I don’t want to be some sad old fuck. I open up a newspaper. It tells me Congress wants to change tax rates, to ease the burden on younger taxpayers. Oh cool, thanks.

  I go back to check out Jazza. It’s the afternoon, but he’s sleeping like a baby.

  Jazza used to be so cool. It’s good to have someone from your time, your place. Even if he doesn’t remember who you are.

  We wanted to send a rocket to Mars. We built it ourselves and called it Aphrodite and went to Nevada and launched it and it went straight up looking like 1969 and hope.

  We made pretend-music; started our own company, developed a couple of computer games, called ourselves Fighting Fit and sold the company. We ran a pirate download and shared the same girlfriend for a while. After we lost all our money, we emptied the same accounts, too. Amateur spaceships don’t pay for themselves. I decided to go mundane and went into security software. I went straight for a while. Jazza never did. He still hung out there. From time to time I gave him some freelance. When Bill went to college I went to check Jazza out. He was still at a mixing desk at fifty. He was wearing one of those shirts that keeps changing pictures or told the punters what toons he was pumping out.

  I hack Jazza’s bills as well. Otherwise, he’d be out on the street.

  I sit there awhile, just making sure he’s OK, if he wants anything. He snores. I give his knee a pat and leave. You get lonely sometimes.

  I get to my room and there’s a message. “Dad, you probably know this already, but Bessie was mugged. I’ll be over tomorrow.”

  Bessie is my granddaughter. Never have a well crucial day.

  The next morning we’re doing Neurobics.

  They found out that even old people grow new neurons. If they give you PDA, it goes even faster, but you got to use it or lose it. So they make us learn. They make us do crazy stuff. Like brush our teeth with the wrong hand. Or read stuff from a screen that is upside down. Sometimes they make us do really off-the-wall stuff, like sniff vanilla beans while we listen to classical music. They’re trying to induce synaesthesia.

  Today we were in VR. We’re weightless in a burning space station. We got to get out through smoke and there is no up or down. What way does the lever on the door pull?

  I get a tug on my arm. It’s the Kid. He smiles at me real nice. “Mr. Brewster? I come find you. You son is here.”

  These days I walk like Frankenstein, on these fake little legs. They make your muscles work so they grow back. Nobody’s supposed to hold me up. The Kid does, though. To him I guess I’m some old granddad and that is how you show respect.

  So I introduce him to my son. Joao, this is my boy, Bill. Bill stands up and shakes the Kid’s hand and thanks him for taking care of me. My boy is fifty years old. He’s got a potbelly, but he still looks like a guy who never spent a day in an office.

  Bill is real neat. I can say that. He’s a neat kid; he just never made any money. He’d work in the summers as a diving instructor and in winter he’d go south. He went to teach primary school in the Hebrides. He did a stint putting chips in elephant’s brains in Sri Lanka.

  Today, though, his smile looks weirded out.

  “How’s Bessie?” I ask him.

  Something happens to Bill’s face and he sits down.

  “Um. You didn’t see the news? It was on the news.”

  “Bessie was in the news?” Oh shit. You don’t get in the comics just for stubbing your toe.

  Bill’s voice rattles. “They did something to her face,” he says. He takes out his paper and fills it, and lays it out on the table.

  I tell him, “I didn’t see anything about it. I think we’re filtered. I think they filter our news.”

  “VAO. Only this time it really was a victim who got activated.”

  VAO protects banks, shopping malls, offices. Anything First World, or Nerd World, got VAO. It’s supposed to zap thieves. For just a second I thought maybe Bessie had been on a job like maybe being a gangsta skips a generation or something.

  Bill’s newspaper fills up with an animated headline.

  The headline says

  V

  A

  O…

  And the headline animates into

  Very

 
Ancient

  Offenders

  And then, for your delectation and amusement, up comes my granddaughter’s mugging, caught on security camera and sold by the ordnance company to defray costs.

  They run my granddaughter’s mugging for laughs. Because the muggers are old.

  Ain’t dey cute, them old guys?

  There’s my Bessie, going out to her car. Slick black hair, skinny red trousers, real small, real sweet. Able to take care of herself, but you don’t expect your own bolted, belted VAO parking lot to be the place where you get mugged.

  These four clowns come lurching out at her. They’re old guys like me. They’re staggering around on calipers; they got the Frankenstein walk, but they stink of the street. One of them is wearing old trousers that are too small. The legs end up around his calves, and they’re held up by a belt, they don’t close at the front. There is a continent of dingy underwear on display.

  Bill says, “Microwave. Somehow they turned it on her instead of them. But they didn’t know what they were doing.” Bill can’t look at this, he’s hiding his face.

  And on the paper, Bessie is denied her own area.

  The keys in her hand go hot, she drops them. Her own shiny hair goes hot and she clasps her head, and she crouches down and tries to hide under her own elbows.

  Bill talks from behind his hand. “It’s supposed to stop before two hundred and fifty seconds. After that it does damage.”

  These are old, old codgers. They shuffle. They forget to turn the fuckin’ thing off. They pick up the car keys, and they’re too hot and they drop ’em. Well, duh. Finally they shuffle round to some kind of switch.

  We’re at three hundred seconds, and Bessie’s trousers are smoking, and the skin of her face is curling up.

  “She’ll need a cornea transplant,” says Bill.

  They pick up her purse and just leave her there. They get into the car. I get a look at them.

  There’s two ways you get old. One, you shrivel up. The other, you puff out like a cloud. One guy has a face like melted marshmallow in these dead-white hanging lumps.

  “Old farts,” I hear myself say. I’m so sick of feeling angry. I feel angry all the time, and there’s nothing I can do about anything. There’s nothing I can do about Bessie, nothing I can do for those old stupid jerks.

  “She’ll be OK,” says Bill, and he’s looking at me and for just a sec I’m his daddy again. I never was much of a daddy when he was a kid, always off on a job or working for the company. He ended up being the kind of guy who never stops looking for a father. Christ, Billy. I wanted to have enough money so that you would never have to work, to make up for not being around. But all my money goes into being old.

  We latch hands. Bill’s spent all his life helping people. Bill’s just a better man than I am.

  “I’m sorry, Billy,” I say, and I mean for everything.

  That night Jazza and I finally go for a beer at the bar in the Happy Farm, but J’s in bad shape. He just sits staring. Neurobics make him dizzy. They got a new timed drug dispenser on his wrist. He does a little jump and groans when they dose him. We’re hanging out with Gus.

  Gus does this sweet little hippie routine. He says that he sold plankton to places like Paraguay so they could get carbon-reduction credits. Now. Everybody who was awake knows that it didn’t work and nobody made any money at it. In fact they lost their shirts.

  So I ask myself: Where does Gus’s money come from? I mean, you got this greasy little dude who took too much whizz. His dialog is just too sussed for an eco-warrior.

  “You heard about this VAO stuff?” he asks me.

  “Only ’cause my granddaughter got mugged. I didn’t know they filter our news.”

  “I got something that filters the filter,” he says. “This is news we need to know.”

  “About my granddaughter?”

  “No. Look me in the eye. The guys that do this are a crew. It’s several crews all over the country, but they’re all linked, and they’re all old guys. And they’re doing this kind of stuff a lot.”

  Suddenly, I am aware of the surveillance all around us. “So?”

  “Kind of blows our story, doesn’t it? Sweet little old guys playing computer games and taking physio.” Gus’s eyes are steady as a rock.

  I knew it. Gus is a player.

  I ask him, “How much are you, uh … tipping Curtis?”

  His face and smile are less expressive than an armadillo’s behind. “Too much,” he says. His eyebrows do a little jump.

  “Anybody else?” I ask him, meaning who are the other Players. It’s nice to know that even at our age we can make new friends and acquaintances.

  “Oh yeah,” he says looking around. “You could start with The Good Fairies.” The Good Fairies are a couple, been together fifty years. They look up from their table, and they look pretty mean to me.

  “I’ll get you that filter,” says Gus.

  Good as his word, I get mail. Takes me a while, because it downloads as dirty pictures. I try a couple of times and finally get the code. Load it up and I got a different personalisation on the news.

  So I fill up my newspaper and I read the backstory. This crew has been at it for months. Old guys who hijack armed intelligent cameras, old guys who spray clubs with paralysis gas or shoot electricity through whole trainloads of commuters. They edit out every single last purse and wristwatch while the ordnance that is supposed to protect the punters is turned around on them.

  There are zapped grannies, zapped babies, zapped beautiful teenage girls who should have been left to enjoy life. I never had any respect for direct-action crime. Money is magic, it’s a religion. All you gotta do is just walk into the temple and help yourself and nobody gets hurt.

  Not these geeks. For them, hurting people is part of the point. They’re not even really crooks. Crooks want to be invisible. These guys are so stupid and vicious that they want everybody to know about them.

  They got this crazy leader who calls himself Silhouette. Aw, Jesus, can you believe that? He probably grew up wanting to be Eminem or something. He still does that dumb thing with the splayed-open hands pointing down. Silhouette is skinny like a model. His knees are fatter than his thighs and ho-hum he’s all in black and he has his whole face blanked out, just black, no eyes no mouth. Oh, Daddy Cool.

  I take one look at this guy and I know just who he is. My generation, you know, we never fought a war. We grew up watching disasters on TV and worrying about our clothes. This guy is sitting there and he’s holding his face so that we can see he’s got killer cheekbones. The guy’s probably eighty and he’s worried about his looks.

  And of course he’s got a manifesto. He croaks it at me, in this real weird voice, until I figure out it’s been recognition-masked. No voiceprint. It makes him sound like he’s talking underwater.

  “You sniff money on old people, and just because we can’t run and can’t hurt you back you strip us naked. You leave us in cold-water flats and shut us up in expensive prisons you call Homes. You don’t pay us the pensions you promised. When we get sick, you tell us our insurance that we paid for all our lives doesn’t cover the cost of care. You want us to die. So. We’ll die. And we’ll take everything from you when we go.”

  You want to know the spookiest thing of all? I know where he’s coming from. I know exactly what Silhouette means.

  “Age Rage,” he says and clenches a fist.

  So the next day I’m back down in the bar with Gus. I got Jazzanova with me like he’s my good-luck charm. Gus has his squeeze Mandy. Mandy used to be a lap dancer. She’s still got a body, I can tell you.

  She’s also got a mouth and the brains to use it. Her cover is that she used to be in property development. Well yeah maybe. A certain kind of old babe has the hardest eyes you’ll ever see.

  Mandy says, “The trouble with that scum is they’ll turn the heat up on all of us.”

  “Yup,” says Gus. “We’ll end up on the street.”

  “I’ll take
Curtis with me,” I promise. “I got evidence on the guy.”

  Mandy’s not impressed. “Good! You can share the same cardboard box. Hope it makes you feel better.” We’re too old for fear. We just turn our backs on it. If we get the fear at all, it takes us over and our legs don’t work and we go little and frail and old. So we got to be like old dried leather. It used to be soft, but now it’s as hard as stone.

  The Good Fairies sit listening. They are as cerebral as fuck. I mean these guys are the only people I know who can tell their genitals what to do. They got married fifty years ago and they’ve only fucked each other since. I blame AIDs.

  The Good Fairies sometimes talk in unison. It’s like twins who’ve been locked up in the same closet since they were born. “We have to take out Silhouette.”

  Beat, as we cogitate. True. Beat. Us? Beat.

  Then we all start roaring with laughter. Mandy coughs like a dog with its vocal chords cut out. Gus squeaks. I know I sound like gravel being milled. Jazzanova stares into outer space, and doesn’t want to be left out, so he laughs at the strip lighting and then he swallows a chip off the table edge, thinking it’s a pill.

  Mandy is barking. “The Neurobics Crew!”

  The Good Fairies sit holding hands, sipping their cigarettes, and they don’t move a muscle.

  Fairy One says, real calm, “It’ll be real funny inside that cardboard box.”

  “ ’Specially when it rains,” says the other. This guy is five foot two with a dorky beard. He looks like a failed Drag King, but he calls himself Thug, which has to be some kind of joke.

  “Yeah, but you guys,” says Mandy. “I can hear where you’re coming from, but what are you going to DO?”

  Fairy One calls himself JoJo, but I bet he’s really called George, and he says, “We ask him to stop.”

  “Oh yeah? Sure!”

  “His position doesn’t make sense. He says he does it because he’s old. But it is the old he’s hurting.”