Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  Vo, the proprietor of the bakery, came out to greet him by name. He was a Vietnamese man in his sixties or seventies who, Dodge inferred, had acquired world-class baking skills as some consequence of the French colonial presence in his home country. This operation was serious business: not just a toaster oven under a counter but a whole complex of expansive kneading boards and marble slabs, Evinrude-sized stand mixers, and walk-in ovens reaching deep into the building. Senior Asians and hairnetted hipsters could be viewed rolling out pastry dough and hand-shaping croissants. Vo would not deem the business to have succeeded until he had everyone in a half-kilometer radius walking home every evening with a baguette under his or her arm.

  The front of the house sported half a dozen small tables and, where it fronted on the sidewalk, a window counter. A secondary entrance connected to the building’s lobby. Richard came in that way and picked up another cup of coffee and a New York Times. Vo wanted him to understand that he had yesterday acquired a bushel of ripe Yakima Valley apples from a personal connection at the Pike Place Market—just enough to make a few tartes tatin, which he was keeping in reserve for special customers. Not that it was much of a secret, since the apple-y aroma had permeated the whole ground floor. He was wont to back up his verbal communications with physical demonstrations, perhaps a habit acquired during the decades when he had been learning English the hard way. Gently cupping one of Richard’s elbows in the palm of his hand, he led him around behind the counter to display a cardboard box stashed there, half-full of apples. He bent down and pawed through them until he had found a worthy specimen, then pulled it out and held it up in front of Richard’s face, perching it atop his fingertips in a pose that strongly called to mind Escher’s Hand met Spiegelende Bol, save that in this case, of course, it was an apple. It was an apple from which earlier generations of American grocery shoppers would have recoiled in dismay, had they seen it in the produce section at their local Safeway. It was half the size of the brawny, cottony Red Delicious apples usually seen in such places, its color ranged from an almost purple shade of red to an almost yellow shade of green, it had a few minor spots and dimples, and a couple of actual leaves were still attached to its stem. But it was so round and taut that it looked ready to explode. Vo kept thrusting it higher and higher into the air, looking back and forth between it and Richard.

  “Now, that is a real apple!” Richard finally said. It was not a particularly clever thing to say but he knew it was the only thing that would calm Vo down. Vo rewarded him by insisting that he take the apple “for lunch.” Richard received it with due ceremony, like a Japanese businessman accepting a business card, running his fingers over its curves and turning it this way and that to admire its color, then placed it carefully into the bag slung over his shoulder. He soon found himself at his customary table with his coffee, his crossword puzzle, and his slice of tarte.

  He was at least two-thirds finished with it when he remembered with a start that he was under doctor’s orders not to eat any food before the medical procedure. He had obeyed earlier but forgot himself when confronted with the opportunity of tarte tatin fresh from the oven.

  He looked at the remaining part—the best part, since it comprised the edge crust, and he had been raised to save the best for last—with a mixture of guilt and embarrassment. In the end he decided to eat it. He doubted that having food in the stomach was really a significant danger. It was just one of those general recommendations, like turning off your cell phone while pumping gas, that had been promoted to a hysterical warning by lawyers. And to the extent it might actually be dangerous, the die was already cast. Having three-thirds of a slice in his stomach couldn’t be much worse than having two-thirds. And if he left the remainder on his plate, Vo would notice it and take it the wrong way and perhaps demote him from special-customer status.

  More important than the possible medical complication was the question, which came quickly to mind, of whether this lapse was an early indicator of senility. The speed with which he had demolished the crossword puzzle seemed to argue against it. But that was all long-term memory, right? He wasn’t sure. As a boy he had been oblivious to the existence of this thing called senility until an older cousin had clued him in to it during a family reunion and supplied a brief (and in retrospect hilariously imprecise) rundown of its symptoms while casting significant glances at Grandma. After that, young Richard had overcompensated for his earlier naivete by becoming hypervigilant to its onset in family members of even modest decrepitude.

  2

  The doctor’s staff had been very firm on the point that, following the procedure, he would be unfit to drive because of the powerful drugs they were going to give him—that he would, for all practical purposes, be an ambulatory basket case, and that they wouldn’t even begin the procedure unless he had a designated minder who would sign him out afterward and take responsibility for keeping him away from heavy machinery. Accordingly, Richard now walked two blocks to a transit stop, boarded a city bus that would take him to the medical complex on the hill above downtown, and made himself comfortable in a seat amidships.

  He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chicken-poxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them, the consequences of having turned a deaf ear to the Din for twelve whole hours. He willed himself not to see those and instead brought up his address book. He scrolled to the K section and found five different entries for Corvallis Kawasaki. Some of them had little pictures attached to them, which helped Richard guess how out-of-date they were. Most had accumulated during the years that Corvallis had worked hand-in-glove with Richard at Corporation 9592, the game company that had made Richard a billionaire and Corvallis, in the lexicon of the tech business world, a decimillionaire. The pictures on those tended to show him hoisting pints in bars or in various funny/celebratory poses connected with the company’s rise to prominence in the online gaming industry. One of them, however, was a very straight, formal head shot of Corvallis with his hair neatly trimmed and gelled, wearing a suit and tie. This card—which was only a few months old—identified him as the CTO of Nubilant Industries, a company that did cloud computing. It had been formed last year as part of a “roll-up,” which was tech biz parlance for acquiring and combining several companies that were all operating in the same “space.” Corvallis had been induced, by means of a hefty stock option grant, to leave his position at Corporation 9592 and join the new company. Richard had been sorry to see him go, but he had to admit that it was an excellent fit—Corvallis had overseen the shift of all Corporation 9592’s operations from old-fashioned server racks to the cloud, and he hadn’t been as lavishly compensated as others who had been luckier in their timing. Since Corvallis’s departure to Nubilant—which was headquartered near downtown Seattle—he and Richard had exchanged texts on several occasions, trying to find time to meet up for a drink. So far, it had not come together. But when Dodge pulled up his Corvallis text message stream, he found, at its tail, a flurry of messages from over the preceding weekend, in which Corvallis agreed to take the afternoon off and serve as Richard’s designated minder, collecting him from the clinic in his narcotic haze and taking him to lunch or something as he returned to his senses.

  omw to clinic, Richard thumbed. Then he fetched a substantial pair of headphones from his bag and placed them over his ears. The sounds of the bus were muted. He plugged the cord into the phone and turned the headphones on. For these were electronic noise-canceling headphones. Directly they began to feed anti-noise into his ears, making everything quieter yet.

  Corvallis texted back, K. The phone displayed the ellipsis indicating that he was still typing.

  Dodge activated the music player app and began scrolling through his playlists, looking for the P section. His tinnitus was ramping up because of the unearthly quiet produced by the noise-canceling feature.

  Corvallis added, if u r feeling up to it I will take you by the office—would like to show you what we are up to—cool stuff!

  Richar
d decided not to respond to that one. As much as he liked Corvallis, he dreaded going on tours of high-tech companies. He tapped the words “Pompitus Bombasticus.” The lavish tonalities of a full symphony orchestra, backed up by a choir and fortified by a driving modern percussion section, filled his ears. Pompitus Bombasticus was Richard’s favorite group. Apparently it was just one guy working alone in a studio in Germany; the philharmonic, the choir, and all the rest were faked with synthesizers. This guy had noticed, some years ago, that all inexpensive horror movies used the same piece of music—Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—in their soundtracks. That opus had become a cliché, more apt to induce groans or laughs than horror. This German, who had been living the starving-artist lifestyle while trying to establish a career as a DJ, had been struck by an insight that had transformed his career: the filmmakers of the world were manifesting an insatiable demand for a type of music of which Carmina Burana was the only existing specimen. The market (if the world of composers and musicians could be thought of as such) was failing to respond to that demand. Why not then begin to make original music that sounded like the soundtrack of the sort of movie scene in which Carmina Burana inevitably played? It didn’t have to sound exactly like Carmina Burana but it needed to evoke the same feelings. The German gave himself a new name, which was Pompitus Bombasticus, and put out a self-titled album that was enthusiastically ripped, torrented, downloaded, and stolen by innumerable aspiring young filmmakers united by a common sentiment that if they heard Carmina Burana one more time they would shove pencils into their ears. Since then, Pompitus Bombasticus had come out with five more albums, all of which Richard had legally downloaded and merged into this one long playlist. The breathtaking sweep and emotional bandwidth of the music made unloading the dishwasher seem as momentous as the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this case, it cast a haze of fake poignancy over this text from C-plus (as Dodge called Corvallis). He did not wish to come out and say as much directly, for fear that C-plus would take it the wrong way, but, in the later phases of their professional relationship, C-plus’s role had become less all-around tech expert and more general intellectual sidekick and helpmeet. When it came to all of the stuff that Richard had omitted to learn during his extremely colorful late teens and early twenties, Corvallis Kawasaki was Virgil to his Dante, Mr. Peabody to his Sherman.

  As an example, when Richard had remarked, a few years ago, on the fact that nearly all of his dreams were set in the landscape of the same small town in Iowa, C-plus had told him that this was related to a well-known insight by a German philosopher named Kant, who had posited that the mind simply was not capable of thinking about anything at all without mapping it onto space and time. The brain was just hooked up that way, nothing you could do about it. Young Richard had learned the basic properties of space-time by pedaling around a particular street grid on his bicycle, trick-or-treating on particular blocks, fleeing from big kids and vice principals through convenient backyards. It was burned into his neural “connectome” now; it was the Kantian substrate of all mental activity relating to space and movement. Perhaps worrying that Richard wasn’t following his argument, C-plus had then wrapped it all up by likening it to the hexagonal graph paper that nerds used to plot out the landscapes on which war games were prosecuted. This final detail had planted a suspicion in Richard’s mind that C-plus was just fucking with him. This had all happened, for no particular reason, minutes before a board meeting: the most important board meeting in the history of Corporation 9592, during which they announced that the company’s annual revenues now exceeded those of the Roman Empire at the height of the Augustan Age. Richard had fobbed the task off on the CFO, who would revel in that kind of thing. While the CFO was running through his PowerPoint deck, Richard had pulled out his phone and, in a merely pro forma attempt to conceal what he was doing, had, under the conference table, Googled Kant. The results looked formidably hard to read but sufficed to prove that there had actually been a guy named Kant and that he had indeed concerned himself with such topics.

  The music of Pompitus Bombasticus made Richard’s fifteen-minute bus ride seem as inspiring and yet tragic as the Battle of Stalingrad. As the vehicle swung around a corner downtown, it was halted by a man holding up a stop sign as a long truck full of dirt pulled out into the street, bound for wherever excess dirt was dumped. The soundtrack in Richard’s headphones made this labored but basically simple operation seem as much a technological miracle as the departure of a massive yet graceful starship from its orbiting dry dock. It was taking Dodge a few moments to get his bearings. He realized that an older skyscraper—a building that had helped to define the city’s skyline since the 1960s—had been obliterated while Richard’s attention had been elsewhere. A rendering on a sign depicted a much taller building that was going to replace it. Fogeyish as this was, he felt somehow let down and scandalized. You take your eye off the ball for a minute and a building’s gone.

  But in the very next block was a building that had been a celebrated architectural happening when it had gone up, what, five, no, ten years ago. Now it was just part of the landscape. It occurred to him to wonder whether he would still be alive when it was torn down. For that matter, he had been known to wonder whether his current car was going to be the last car he would ever buy, whether the leather jacket he was wearing now was going to outlive him. He was not being morbid. He was not depressed, not thinking about death overmuch. He just assumed that he was on a very long glide path leading to death in perhaps another thirty to fifty years and that he had plenty of leisure in the meantime to ponder it. He saw life as a trench in the First World War sense of that term, dug very deep at one end but becoming more shallow as you marched along, gradually ramping up to surface level. Early in your life you were so deep down in it that you didn’t even know that shells were bursting and bullets zipping over its top. As time went on these became noticeable but not directly relevant. At a certain point you began to see people around you getting injured or even killed by stray bits of shrapnel, but even if they were good friends of yours, you knew, in your grief and shock, that they were statistical aberrations. The more you kept marching, however, the more difficult it became to ignore the fact that you were drawing close to the surface. People in front of you died singly, then in clusters, then in swathes. Eventually, when you were something like a hundred years old, you emerged from the trench onto open ground, where your life span was measured in minutes. Richard still had decades to go before it was like that, but he’d seen a few people around him buy the farm, and looking up that trench he could see in the great distance—but still close enough to see it—the brink above which the bullets flew in blazing streams. Or maybe it was just the music in his headphones making him think thus.

  They passed a good restaurant—a favorite of Richard’s when he needed to host a business lunch. A box truck pulled out of the adjoining alley and inserted itself into a gap in traffic in front of the bus. It was decorated with the logo of a company that evidently provided table linens to restaurants that were classy enough to make use of them. Off the little truck went, headed for the next restaurant where it would make a delivery. The bus driver was annoyed by the manner in which it had claimed the space. Richard, ahead of schedule and not responsible for anything, just zoned out on the flow of traffic. As they passed the alley, he saw a beer truck unloading kegs of microbrew. The purposes of linen and beer trucks were obvious, being printed right on their sheet metal, but of course every vehicle on the street and every pedestrian on the sidewalk had a purpose as well. It was the flowing-together and interaction of all those intentions that made a city. The early failure of Corporation 9592’s game designers to capture that feeling had led to several months of Richard’s doing what Richard generally did, which was to attack problems so weird that merely to cop to their existence would have been career suicide for anyone who wasn’t the company founder. The name of the game, and of the imaginary world in which it was set, was T’Rain. The world’s geology ha
d been convincingly simulated by a man who went by the name of Pluto and who was very gifted at that sort of thing. The urban landscapes had turned out to be much less convincing, for reasons not immediately clear. It was one of those problems assumed to be trivial that had turned out to be really hard. What it boiled down to, once they had spent millions of dollars flying people in for seminars and simulating urban traffic flows on supercomputing clusters, was that, in a real city, everyone had something they were trying to do. Sometimes everyone had a different goal, other times (as just before a big sporting event) everyone had the same goal. The way that people and vehicles moved reflected their pursuit of those goals. When you had spent some time in a real-world city, your brain learned to read those behaviors and to process and understand them as citylike. When you visited a made-up city in a massively multiplayer online game, however, you generally saw group behaviors that failed to match those that convinced your brain that you were looking at something real, and the illusion failed.

  “Pill Hill,” which loomed above downtown, had long ago been seeded with several hospitals that had done nothing but grow and consolidate as the city had developed into a horn of plenty, morbidity-wise. The few spaces not claimed by the hospitals themselves had sprouted medical buildings, twenty and thirty stories high, all interconnected by skybridges and tunnels. That combined with mergers and consolidations had turned the hill into a fully interlocked, mile-wide, three-dimensional maze entirely devoted to health care. It was well served by mass transit. Richard could have taken the bus right to the entrance of the clinic. Instead he decided on the spur of the moment to get off several blocks early and enjoy a stroll down Cherry Street. The neighborhood was old by local standards, with mature maples that had presumably been imported by settlers who wanted it to look like the leafy towns of the northeastern and midwestern United States. The autumn color was peaking. His earlier musings had caused him to wonder, again just in an idle and non-gloomy way, how many more times in his life he would see the leaves turn. Twenty or thirty? Not a super-large number. One of the Furious Muses was pointing out to him that the smallness of this figure should drive him to appreciate the beauty more than he was doing. That didn’t seem to work, but he had to admit that the glorious colors were made even more impressive by the current Pompitus Bombasticus selection.