Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  They began to speak then, in an orderly fashion, each man and woman in turn.

  A young Haitian girl, skinny as a weed. “I hitched here all the way from Florida. Broke out of a detention camp. I got no papers, couldn’t get no job or welfare. I was sleeping in the Grand Central when these folks found me. Now I cook. I feed them all. You taste my cooking one day maybe.”

  A red-haired kid with bad skin. “My parents kicked me out for getting high all the time. That was all I liked to do, except fool with radios and electronic shit. But I don’t mess with drugs no more. Too busy fixing up all the busted stuff everyone brings me, so we can sell it.”

  A guy in his fifties, his face a map of broken veins. “I was heavy into booze. Lost my wife and kids in a traffic accident. Got so I couldn’t stand the thought of working on cars anymore, which is what I used to do. Now I’m off the sauce, though. And I can still make an engine purr.”

  A pudgy woman with a mass of frizzy blonde hair. “I used to work in a garment shop, piecework. It was illegal, and the cops closed it down. I lost my apartment. Then I found these folks. They’re all wearing stuff I sewed.”

  On and on the stories flowed. Each person had been down and out until joining Sledge’s band. Somehow, upon doing so, they had found the impetus to pick themselves up out of the gutter and turn their lives around.

  When the last person had finished telling his story, Sledge turned to me. He spoke with a sincere passion I could not believe was feigned.

  “You see what were doing now, man, don’t you? We are people helping people, without no government backing. We are an outlaw rescue team, a guerilla salvage crew, putting lives back together that society busted apart. We are a family, too; people caring for each other. We got rules and a code. And we don’t ask for no charity. We take the castoff crap from this crazy wasteful society—thrown-away humans and thrown-away things—and we make it new. We are like a bunch of Robinson Crusoes living on this here savage island you call Manhattan.”

  “But you don’t have to live this way anymore—”

  “But we want to! We all tried your kind of life, and we found it don’t agree with us. Takin’ orders, punchin’ a time clock, runnin’ all the time just to stay in the same place— Forget it! Right now we feel like we’re doing something useful. Some of us do go back anyway. Fair enough, we don’t try and stop ’em. There’s always someone else who wants to join us. And all we ask is to be left alone. Just let us exist in the margins, man. That’s all we ask.”

  “There’s no margins planned in this new development.”

  Sledge laid a big hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “C’mon, man, you can’t leave us this one building out of the whole shebang, erect your sparklin’ city around us?”

  I was too confused by all I had heard. I just shook my head in an ambiguous gesture. “Ill have to talk to my superior—”

  Sledge slapped my back. “Great, man! You go to bat for us. Make ’em understand what’s at stake.”

  Sledge led me back outside. As we were parting, I thought to ask about his own story. His brows lowered, and his mouth grew solemn.

  “Me, man? I done some bad things in my life, before I wised up. You can just say I’m atonin’ now. Atonin’ for what I can’t change. If I learned one lesson in my fucked-up life, it’s this. You can’t never change the past, so you’d better make the most of each chance you get when it’s in your hands.”

  A day later, Sledge’s words echoed in my head as I headed back to the project after leaving Mama Cass.

  I kept asking myself if I had made the most out of my meeting with her. If I had pushed as hard as I could. Or if I too would have to atone someday.

  4.

  Two members of the Emerald crew were standing on the roof of my trailer looking confused when I pulled up in my government car. They were holding the end of a cable that ran in a catenary to a newly erected pole, and from there to another and another, right up to the edge of the project, where it disappeared down a manhole in a lane of 135th. A semipermanent cordon had been set up to block traffic.

  “At last,” I said, excited. Then: “Hey, where’re the Unilink guys?”

  Leotis pulled a sheepish face. “We convinced them we could handle the installation. They were kinda busy, so they took us up on it.”

  “And now you’re stuck.”

  Shayla grinned. “Sorta.”

  “All right. Wait till I drag my old bones up there.” I moved to the ladder leaning against the mobile home, then halted. “You guys got a shearing fork?”

  “Say what?”

  I shook my head. “Pitiful, truly pitiful. Hold on a minute.”

  Inside the trailer I rummaged through my tools until I found my old fork, then returned to the ladder.

  The metal roof of my headquarters was so hot from the August sun that I couldn’t lay my hand on it.

  I took the cable from Leotis. It was thick as a man’s wrist.

  “What you’ve got here is over a hundred strands of fiber optics, the arteries of the metamedium. You’ll notice this cable’s been capped at the factory, to keep it clean. The cap is a nonremovable seal. What we have to do now is trim the cable to the proper length. But you can’t just saw it off with a hacksaw like you ignorant savages were doubtlessly planning to do. You’d fracture the structure of the fibers irreparably, and the signal would be so much noise. We need a clean shear.”

  I held up the fork.

  A fat pistol grip with worn black-rubber palm insets flowed into a projection that terminated in a U-shape resembling a stubby tuning fork. The arms of the U were grooved on the inside right back into the trough.

  I laid the cable on the roof, pinning it with my left hand. Pressing the fork against it, I said, “There’s a gas cartridge in the handle. When I pull the trigger, it sends the slicer down the tracks. The slicer is a length of carbon-composite wire.”

  I pulled the trigger. There was a pop. I removed the fork.

  “It didn’t do nothing,” said Leotis.

  “Pick up the cable.” Leotis bent and lifted.

  The first six inches with the cap remained behind.

  “Shee-it.”

  Hanging the fork from my utility belt, I took the cable from Leotis and walked over to the junction box. I butted the new end against the glass interface plate and tightened the weatherproof collar around the cable.

  “Now we’re part of civilization again,” said Shayla.

  I started to say something flippant, then stopped.

  She was right.

  Climbing down off the trailer, I felt as if I were descending into a web of culture. I sensed again the onus Mama Cass had laid on me, a geas only someone of our generation could have understood. To make the world whole, or spend the rest of your life explaining why you had failed.

  Inside, the balky air-conditioning felt good on my bare arms.

  The screen that had been dead just the other day, when Drucker had asked to see his architectural renderings, flowed now with moving images, static menus, plain text and dazzling icons. All the other trailers fed off mine, and tonight, I knew, their screens too would come to eager life, as the crews relaxed.

  I keyed up an oldies channel with the video off and lay back on my bed and shut my eyes.

  From the speakers blasted Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers.”

  One generation got old,

  One generation got soul,

  This generation got no destination.…

  The camel stuck his nose under the tent. The rest of him soon followed.

  The metamedium was the camel. It was also the glue that held our culture together and the universal solvent that melted anything it touched. Now that it had entered the boundaries of the project, I knew that Sledge and his people were truly doomed.

  After a while, I got up to go tell them so.

  A wash of western lemon clouds against a celestial vault gone mostly navy and dove-gray, smeared with red, prinked out with a single diamond.

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nbsp; In the dusk, the nova—eye, ring, or simply star—heralded the night. All over the city, the country, the northern hemisphere, I knew there would be people getting on the phone or the metamedium right now, saying, “Time to crank it up, cuz.” And the cuz would respond with, “Give me the protocol why, Mister Mode.” “Nova’s why enough, cuz.”

  There were no crew members left at the demolition site except Holly. She had on a pair of telefactoring gloves, and was directing a compliant from a few yards off.

  “Hey, lady, let’s call it a day,” I suggested.

  “Sure. Pretty soon. I just want to clear away a little more of this rubble.”

  Holly made a fist with her right hand, and the compliant wrapped one pneumatic arm around some roof timbers lying jumbled like pick-up sticks. She turned slowly, raising her arm, and the compliant swivelled on its caterpillared turntable until it held the debris above a dump truck.

  “Seen Sledge?” I said.

  Holly pointed with her gloved left hand toward the squatter-occupied building. The compliant gestured too with its free arm, like a big clumsy child imitating its mother.

  “Mike—what’s going to happen to them?”

  There was no point in lying to her. “The word from Mama Cass is that they simply have to go. They’re not in the plans.”

  Holly frowned. “These are the very people we’re building this city for, Mike. There must be some way of accommodating them during the construction.”

  “I take it you’ve been hanging around with them this afternoon.”

  “Well, there was no other work to do—”

  “Oh, I’m not chastising you. I’m just saying that it shows. Listen, I know their life is seductive in a weird sort of way, and even makes a certain kind of ecological sense. But it’s the obverse of what we’re doing here. This project is predicated on making everything new. Look around you.” I waved my arm to indicate the ghost-filled desolate plain. Nothing or no one imitated me. “We’ve torn down everything, the whole brutal ecosystem these people depended on. This city is running out of niches for their particular culture. They’re going to have to adapt.”

  “It’ll kill them.”

  “Maybe. If they’re totally inflexible. But that’s not proven yet.”

  I started off for the squatters’ building. Holly opened her hand, and the lumber fell loudly into the truck.

  “You’ve got a leak in one of your hoses,” I called over my shoulder.

  “No way. I checked them just this morning.”

  “Bet you a beer.”

  “Done.”

  This morning, the doors and windows on the building slated for demolition had gaped like empty eye sockets. Now, the place was sealed up tight. The windows had been covered over with irregular cast-off sheets of plastic, then painted with quikset polymers for an airtight seal. The door was fashioned from the panels of a delivery truck, and still bore the fragments of a company’s name, rotated to the vertical: hart’s brake.

  I knocked on the door, feeling tired and sad, foolish and a little scared.

  “What’s the protocol, strutterbuck?”

  I recognized the voice of Runt. “It’s me, Ladychapel. Can I talk to Sledge?”

  “One millie.”

  Soon the door rumbled aside on its tracks. I stepped in.

  The interior of the building was a good fifteen degrees cooler than the furnace air outside.

  “Got the blowers working, I see.”

  Runt pushed a finger under his runny nose and scrunched up the half of his face that still worked. “I don’t mind the heat. Kinda like it, actually. This chill is unnatural. I always get a cold from it. But the others—” He shrugged philosophically.

  “But you helped dig the pits anyway.…”

  Runt looked at me as if I were feeble-minded. “Hell, cuz, that’s just how we hang around here.”

  The land behind the building was now dotted with pits covered with more scavenged plastic sheets. Serving as moisture traps—I had seen similar constructions in Israel—the pits were linked to the building by buried clothes-drier ductwork, laid in trenches, then covered. Several vacuum-cleaner motors sucked cool air in through the wide scavenged plastic hoses.

  “Sledge around?”

  “In the attic. Go on up.”

  The place was lit with infrequent low-wattage bulbs powered off the same—stolen? —fuel cells that ran the blowers. There were thirty or forty residents in the building. Panther, Three-Card, Cray, Vetch, Pogue, Jimmy Ripp, Vinyl, Skag, Slats, Annie.… I had been introduced that morning to them all, but couldn’t keep names and faces totally straight yet. Some I passed were busy working to improve their quarters; others were asleep on bare mattresses; the rest were relaxing. Some smiled at me; others scowled and looked aside; the rest ignored me. There was no visible order or direction to their actions, and they couldn’t have resembled my disciplined crews any less than they did. But I somehow picked up the same vibes from them as I got from my people. They had a system for getting things done.

  Up in the space beneath the roof, it was just Zora and Sledge. They had a plastic leaf-shredder powered by a crank. They were feeding precut strips of newspaper into the hopper, filling the bag below with newspaper mulch. When the bag was full, Zora would catwalk along the rafters and dump it where it would serve as a pretty decent insulation.

  Sledge smiled when I came up, but it wasn’t a happy smile. The teeth he was missing didn’t help. He started turning the handle harder.

  “Hey, cuz, you brung me somethin’ to feed in my grinder here? How ’bout that cable you was foolin’ with today?”

  “You heard we’re wired now? News sure does travel fast.” I paused while Sledge chewed up about a week’s worth of Times-Post. The papers were two years old, among the last issues published. Even the merger hadn’t saved them. “Don’t dig the metamedium, I take it.”

  “Dig it? I’d like to dig it somethin’ all right—its grave. Damn thing is like suckin’ pap through a straw. It’ll rot your brain faster ’n blue chill.”

  “Could be. If it’s abused. But it helps educate and inform a lot of people too.”

  Sledge snorted. “Educate, my ass. It’s all predigested by Unilink. Let people read if they want a real education.”

  Sledge slapped his rear pocket. There was a paperback inside, title-end up. I made out The Wretched of the Earth.

  “Well, no one’s making you tap into the metamedium—”

  Sledge laughed brutally. “Oh, ain’t they now!”

  During our dialogue, Zora had been squatting on her haunches watching us. Her thick black hair fell in waves to her shoulders. Her skin was nutmeg, sprinkled with cinnamon freckles. (Look close sometime, the two spices aren’t the same color. Nothing really is.) She wore a bandana—one of Sledge’s?—tied around her breasts, a skirt fashioned from a raw piece of leather, and a pair of sandals that laced up her calves.

  From where I stood I could see straight up to the shadows between her thighs. Her face was stolid. She didn’t seem to care one way or another. But the view wasn’t helping me concentrate on dealing with Sledge.

  I looked away and changed the topic. “I’ve been talking to my boss.”

  “And?”

  “She wants you and your folks out of the project.”

  “And where we spoze to go?”

  “The camps—”

  “Fuck the camps! Livin’ by the clock, eating what and when somebody else says, sleepin’ in tents, playing fuckin’ video games all day—”

  “It’s clean, it’s free, and it’s only temporary. When the project’s done, you’ll have a permanent home.”

  “We got a permanent home now. If you let us be.”

  I looked at Sledge. Beneath the anger was a silent supplication. But I knew there was nothing I could do for him.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I lied. “You’ve got at least a week.”

  I figured I owed him that much. We could work around them for a few days.
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br />   Sledge smiled. Zora didn’t. I wondered if I had fooled either of them.

  “Excellent, man. Look, I’ll walk down with you.”

  At the outer door I took a last glance inside. A wave of déjà vu swept over me, and I was sitting again in a college classroom.

  “Bricoleurs,” I said.

  “Missed that burst, man.”

  “Bricoleurs. It’s an anthropological term. It refers to a class of people who live as scavengers, using odds and ends that the rest of society discards.”

  “Brick-o-lures. Yeah, you got it, Mike, that’s us. We are the Bricks.” Sledge bellowed back inside. I felt sorry for anyone trying to sleep. “Listen up, all. We’re the Bricks now. And bricks are for buildin’, so get buildin’!”

  I went back to my trailer.

  It was after midnight when she came. But I had known she would.

  “You ain’t so old as you look,” she said around dawn.

  “And you aren’t so young,” I said, and kissed cinnamon.

  5.

  I woke up alone, around noon. The first thing I did after I dressed, even before visiting the commissary roach coach for my vital first coffee of the day, was to stroll over to Doc Hodder’s trailer.

  Hodder had owned a successful Park Avenue practice at one time. Then he had started peddling skinslip on the side. He had gotten away with it until becoming addicted himself and losing his facade of competence. It’s hard to conduct a physical when the movements of your clothes or the feel of the stethoscope in your hand is enough to trigger a thirty-second spasm of involuntary ecstasy.

  The judge had given Hodder a choice after his twenty-four-hour detox regimen: Riker’s Island or community service. It wasn’t a hard choice.

  Hodder wore a Solidarity scarf with President Walesa’s picture silk-screened on it. They were big that year.

  “Hey, Doc, you busy?”

  Hodder sipped at a beer that left froth on his mustache. “Not so. Just patched up Bonilla’s hand and gave him a tetanus shot. He managed to run a nail through his palm.”

  “Don’t put your needle away. I need an STD booster.”