“Fuck you,” I say, and it’s easy to be a convincing actor. The orgometal makes the pants that were baggy tight. Same for my shirt. I become a huge block of muscle. Something different, more dangerous than a man. My head hurts. The patron’s eyes go wide for a second. I locate: I’m a kid hit by a stranger. Instead of his face, I punch a car that’s in a driveway near me. The metal folds around my fist. Then I walk toward him. I take two steps. He points the handgun at me. I locate: your life is in the hands of someone who doesn’t even know you and thinks you don’t deserve it.
“Wait,” I say. He shoots. Faux bullets explode on my chest. The mecha-suit is tweaked so pouches of red blood from one of four pockets burst on any high-velocity impact. I have to replace the blood pouches in the pockets every four walk-throughs.
What’s left to do? I charge. My stomps are heavy and huge. He shoots again. I make sure I’m close enough that when the pouch explodes warm what-would-be blood gets on the patron’s face. He’s breathing hard, and Murderpaint™ faux blood is sprinkled on his face, and he’s forgotten that he paid to be here with me. I touch the patron’s neck with my orgometal-enhanced hand. He pulls the trigger again. His shirt gets drenched. It looks almost like he’s the one who’s been shot. I cough a death cough, and then I fall at his feet. I make oh, ahh sounds. The patron looks down at me. Pop goes the gun a final time. I can barely feel the shot hit my chest because of the suit. I’m quiet, dead, with my eyes open, staring into the sky/the patron’s eyes, staring right into his human. The patron runs to house 336, then back to my body. He picks up my glasses, then puts them down, wipes them off with his shirt. He’s scared and thrilled. After exactly three minutes of the patron’s not knowing what to do, three minutes of his thinking about taking my pulse, then thinking better of it, three minutes of his making a sound I always hope is the thing before real honest tears but is often just panicky breath, sirens go off. Saleh and Ash, playing cop #1 and cop #2, drive into the lane. They jump out of the car and sound very stern as they ask the patron what happened.
“He attacked me!” the patron says. “He tried to kill me.” I keep my eyes dead and continue to shallow-breathe. According to the guidelines, he’s to be brought into the second part of the module, the Station, for a brief questioning, after which he’ll be emailed a complimentary story about how he was found innocent in court after claiming self-defense. When Saleh and Ash take the patron away, I lie on the concrete for another minute before getting up. Then I press a release trigger near my belly button to disengage the mecha-suit. I go to change my shirt and wait for the next patron.
When patrons leave and fill out their postmodule surveys—which have a rating ranging from one, meaning not at all, to five, meaning absolutely—they mark five all through the questionnaire if I was on the clock. Did they have fun? Five. Did they viscerally feel justice was at work? Five. Would they come again? Five. In the comments section they write things like, “I’ll be back soon. I’d bring my kid if I could.”
I do six more walk-throughs that morning. I don’t really feel like eating with anyone on my lunch, so I stay in my dressing room. Normally, I eat with Saleh, and we joke about how much we hate working, but she’s been picking up more walk-throughs at the Terror Train, so I stay in the dressing room until it’s time to go get shot some more. Then I clock out.
I wave to Mariam, and say, “That’s my time,” and she punches me out.
Once I made the mistake of getting into my car when the protesters were out in the lot. Since then, there’s some kind of thing waiting for me at the end of every other shift. Sometimes it’s eggs on the window with not-nice things drawn into the splattered yolks. Today, I see too many papers to count wind-blown and scattered in the area around my car. A bunch of them are stuck under the windshield. They flutter like leaves. I bite my lip and grab one of the papers before wiping the rest of them away. It says CHRISTOPHER COONLUMBUS, which I think is pretty funny. The first time they tagged my car, I cried with Melanie about it. Now I wipe away the flyers. I get in my car and hit the preset for my place. The car starts moving, and I recline for a nap. I’ll be half-asleep when I get home, and I won’t have time to think about anything before I’m gone in bed.
I wake up thinking about putting on a tie. When I got the promotion, the first thing I bought was a new tie. I imagine Melanie looking at me, her face soft with admiration. I imagine her nodding and smoothing out my collar. I don’t know why I imagine that because she rarely did that kind of thing even when we were together. She definitely never did that kind of thing after that article, “Injustice Park: The Pay-to-Play Death of Morality in America,” came out and the protesters started getting national coverage. Every day for a month, the news trucks circled around the park. Then they got bored and left, and it was just the protesters again. They weren’t going to get bored. After all that, even at home, I was a sellout for months.
“Why do you still work there, Zay?” she’d say when I was up late drafting a proposal for a new module on my own time with no guarantee anybody would even see the work.
“’Cause it’s a solid job,” I’d say, even though that wasn’t the reason at all.
Then she’d say something like, “What’s a job without a soul?” And then I’d stop what I was doing and consider explaining to her for the millionth time that I hadn’t sold my soul.
“But it’s okay for you to eat here? To live here? That’s cool?” I’d say instead. And I wouldn’t bother with my usual argument: that it was better for me to get fake blasted ten or twenty million times a day than for an actual kid to get murdered out of the world forever. Did anyone ever think of that, ever?
“Really?” she’d say. Then I’d feel bad for making her feel bad about not having a job. We were a good team, and before Zimmer Land, we rarely made each other feel bad on purpose.
“I’m sorry,” I’d say, and go from wherever I was in the apartment to right beside her.
And she’d be, like, “I just don’t want you doing things that aren’t you.” And she’d rub my back, and I’d remember I love her for real and have since sophomore Theatre Players.
After Melanie left me, Saleh asked me if I hated her.
To be funny, I answered like this, “On a scale from one to five, one being ‘not at all’ and five being ‘absolutely and I’d pay money to go back even though she shattered my heart to pieces when she left me and then, when she got with Heland, it was like she took those pieces and somehow further obliterated them to some kind of heartdust that she then sprinkled into the sun,’ I love her a five.” We laughed at that.
I can imagine Melanie looking at me now as I’m tightening my tie and ready almost an hour before I need to be, heading to the creative meeting I always said I’d get to.
Why do you still work there, Zay?
Well, Melanie, I think as I look in the mirror one last time, because maybe there’s a version of the park that isn’t complete trash. And also because, even though it makes me want to rip my eyes out when I see you with Heland, at least I still see you, and sometimes we even speak. That’s why.
I manual-drive all the way there. I park in the employee lot. It’s sunny outside, and we won’t open until almost two. It’s not even nine thirty. Creative meets at ten. I see cars in the lot. It’s disappointing. I wanted to be first. I wanted everyone to sit down after I was already seated and for each of them to take note of me.
Most of the lot is roped off with police tape and KEEP OUT signs. Beyond the taped-off space there are plaster walls that hide the new module they’re building.
In front of the construction site, there’s the trailer that management uses for meetings.
I open the door. The trailer is full. Everyone gets quiet and looks at me the way little kids look at themselves when one of them has done something wrong. Heland’s floating head speaks first. “Thanks for joining us, Isaiah,” his hologram says, smiling kindly. Heland Zimmer, the CEO of Zimmer Land. In person, he looks like he wakes up every morning a
nd chops a few trees down before eating half a dozen raw eggs. When he’s projecting via HoloComm, he’s a giant head with a beard. Also, he’s white, a fact protesters remind me of very, very often. Heland is an idiot. An idiot who thinks he’s doing the right thing. I think. An idiot with a black girlfriend named Melanie, which probably makes him at least 20 percent less racist in the eyes of consumers according to some focus group somewhere.
“What?” I say. The others on the creative team are looking at me.
“We’re just getting ready to wrap up, but have a seat.”
I look at Heland’s floating head.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it, get comfortable,” Heland says. Chairs scoot up so I can pass. There aren’t any seats left, so I stand in the back of the room next to a table bearing the carcass of a fruit platter and a puddle of coffee. “All right,” Heland continues. “As you know, it has been a trying time for us, but we believe our future is secure. Next week, Lot Four will finally open up, and with it, a new chapter in interactive justice engagement. Doug, wanna take it from here?” Doug is sitting down with a laptop in front of him. Doug is Heland’s right-hand guy. He’s the president of park operations and leads the creative team. Once, after I’d fully engaged the mecha-suit, a patron called me a “fucking ape.” He’d screamed, “Go back to Africa.” I grabbed him by his head. His feet dangled. I hit him once on his side. I punched him so hard I broke two of his ribs. When Doug wrote me up for it, he told me it was a formality, not to worry about it. Then, two weeks ago, when I first stopped engaging customers with any real aggression, he said, “Make sure your heart’s still in it because somebody else might want the job.”
“Love to,” Doug says. “Zimmer Land values creativity and innovation, always with its mission in mind.” He clicks something on the laptop. The Zimmer Land mission statement hovers in the air behind him in hologram blue.
Zimmer Land Mission
1) To create a safe space for adults to explore problem-solving, justice, and judgment.
2) To provide the tools for patrons to learn about themselves in curated heightened situations.
3) To entertain.
“The things Zimmer Land aims to do at its core have not changed. And we’ve delivered with the situational modules we’ve provided. Now, thanks to the information gathered from our patrons and the creative team’s work, we are officially ready to expand Zimmer Land and generate a significant increase in revenue, all while extending the reach of the park into a greater portion of the market. Our new module will spearhead this transition. This is the future of Zimmer Land.” There’s an unnecessary flash, then the mission statement reappears.
Zimmer Land Mission
1) To create a safe space to explore problem-solving, justice, and judgment.
2) To provide the tools for patrons to learn about themselves in curated heightened situations.
3) To entertain patrons of all ages.
When I see the difference, my throat dries up.
“Starting a week from today, Zimmer Land will officially be open to patrons of all ages. And Lot Four will be revealed as PS 911.” The hologram flashes into a three-dimensional representation of the building soon to be unveiled outside. It’s a small school. Doug explains the basic premise of the new module. How it will focus on juvenile decision-making/justice implementation. And how, with only their eyes, their ears, and their wits, youths will have to figure out who in the building is the terrorist planning to plant a bomb in the gym. Doug touches his laptop some more to take us through the halls and explains how many choices the module will offer patrons: you might team up with other patrons to stop the terrorist, or maybe sneak off and take on the terrorists alone, or maybe you aren’t decisive enough and die in a violent explosion. He says the revisitability of the module will be greater than any module we’ve ever had before. “Any questions?” he finishes.
Somebody asks who the primary players will be. Doug explains there will be some new hires coming in for training this week and also that any current players who want a shot should audition the following week. I raise my hand.
“Does this mean the other modules will be open to kids now?” I know the answer, but I want to see everybody hear it plain and clear.
“Well, yes,” Doug says. “Even our most popular outfits have started to see a sort of dry spell. The new traffic should alleviate that and create some dynamic new possibilities.”
“And, of course, we’ll start some testing in this new direction this week before we go live,” Heland says.
“Any other questions?” Doug asks. Everybody’s quiet because everybody wants to go. I have a lot more questions. “All right, that’s great, guys,” Doug says. “I’m really excited to see what we can do these next few weeks.”
Heland’s giant head nods. That’s the signal for everybody to go. I watch the others leave. Doug is the only other black person on the creative team. I was going to say something about that in the meeting—just as a talking point, just as something to get everyone thinking about what the park is doing and what it could do.
I don’t leave with everyone else. Doug sits down. Heland blinks.
“I was told the meeting was going to be at ten,” I say. I’ve already pulled up the email from Doug, which clearly said ten.
“Oh, that’s my bad,” Doug says as I push the screen toward his face. When I see he’s not interested, I take it back. “That was the old meeting time; I meant to switch that.”
“No harm, no foul,” Heland says, smiling. “Nine from now on, sound good?”
“I had some things I wanted to bring up in the meeting.” I have several things I wanted to bring up. “I think Cassidy Lane needs some big changes.”
“Cassidy Lane is still the most profitable of all the modules,” Doug says, looking at Heland, not me.
“What’s on your mind?” Heland says. I can’t not think about Melanie when I see Heland.
“Well, I think we need to offer more choices in the prep so the firearm option doesn’t seem like the only one that will be”—I pause looking for the word that I think they’d want to hear—“entertaining. Right now, I think the module is kind of flat. It could be a lot more dynamic. There are a lot of opportunities before the patron-meets-player portion of the module for some interesting problem-solving work.”
“I mean, I hear you, Isaiah,” Doug says. “But it sounds like you want to take the thing that makes the module entertaining and strip it down. It’s about being dunked into a situation and making the hard choice. How do you have real justice without life-and-death decisions? You know, some fireworks. You don’t. That’s how.”
I look at Doug. “I’ve been working the module for more than a year. The majority of the patrons are revisitors who just want to kill me over and over again. It isn’t a hard choice for them. I think we could make killing a less obvious option, and we could also make the killing, if they do choose that, matter more in the postsequence. It’d be more intense. I’ve drafted a thorough plan for an accessory to Cassidy Lane, which they could pay for in advance, that would take them through a trial process, where maybe they could find out that their decision to kill leads to a life in prison. Or they might have to meet the family of the guy they killed or something.”
“I hear you, and you should definitely send me any plans you have,” Doug says. “But it’s important to remember that we want to capture that visceral, intense, in-your-face moment when justice is begging you to do something and—”
“I think we’re equating killing and justice for our patrons,” I say flatly.
“Well, sometimes it’s the same,” Heland says. “And sometimes it isn’t. That’s the magic of the module.”
“Another thing.” I know Heland and Doug want to go, but I have a lot more to say. “I don’t think the mecha-suit is necessary anymore. It isn’t realistic enough to justify itself in the module.”
“You’re killing me,” Doug says. “The moment when you
activate your suit is literally the point of all modules, where patrons feel most viscerally connected to the experience. That’s the exact feeling we’re going for. We need it. Plus, it protects you. It’s a liability issue.”
“How many teenagers in the world can afford a mecha-suit? It’s surprising, but it isn’t real life. A kid wouldn’t have a mecha-suit. He wouldn’t be able to become a tank and fight off a grown man. He wouldn’t fight through gunshots.” I realize I’m breathing hard, so I try to slow down.
“I get that,” Doug says, closing his laptop. “These ideas are all worth exploring, for sure. Send me an email, and we’ll rap at the next meeting.” Creative meets once a month.
“That’s great. I like your enthusiasm, Isaiah,” Heland says.
“Thanks,” I say, and I walk out of the trailer leaving Doug and Heland to discuss other things and ignore what I’ve just told them.
The first time I really spoke to Heland was at the new-employee banquet. I’d brought Melanie. Heland had told me about his work on Wall Street, how he gave up all that money to be a social worker in Albany. How he’d helped high-risk kids smooth things out and found permanent housing for former addicts. Zimmer Land was the “next step in the evolving face of social interconnectivity and welfare promotion.” He said that to me. And it’s not that I believed him, but I didn’t think he was lying either. Plus, I needed a job.
I head out to go do nothing until it’s time for me to come back to the park and work my shift. It’s still early, so my car is clean. No flyers asking me what it’s like to sell my soul. It’s there, in that open lot with no place to hide, that I see her. Getting out of her own car, going to the park to see Doug and maybe talk about the new hires. She’s the new head of human resources at the park.
Friday Black Page 9
