Grey

by Jon Armstrong

  I didn't want to think about Mother and her problems. I didn't want her in my bed when I came home, and I certainly didn't want her asking me to hold her clothes while she stripped. I said, "She scares me."

  Joelene folded her hands in her lap and tilted her head in just that way she had when regurgitating her facts. "Reports indicate that she's taking a combination of self-administered color therapy and an illegal and powerful painkiller, strengthener, and mood shaper: aru."

  "aru?"

  "Actually, it's an amazing and useful drug." She frowned. "The families have exaggerated the dangers of everything the 'Ceutical Warlords make. Whatever else they are, the slub rulers are masters of biochemistry." I thought she was going to continue in that vein, but she shrugged. "In any case, your mother's group, Tanoshi No Wah, is losing money. You would be a huge draw, of course."

  "Everyone just wants to use me," I complained.

  She pursed her lips as if she were going to speak, but stood abruptly. "We have a meeting."

  Instead of being driven to the business building across the compound, Joelene suggested we walk along the oxygen gardens and the reflecting pool. It sounded like a good idea, but the temperature-regulated air and the filtered sunlight didn't lift my spirits. Instead, I felt crushed under the vast, ashen sky. While nothing that had happened was Mother's fault, her tantrum made me feel doomed. I would never escape my family. I would never escape their wishes and their desires for me. As we approached the wood-shingled office building, I asked Joelene, "Why?" knowing she would understand.

  She stopped before the door and spoke quietly as if telling a secret. "I have diverted some of your discretionary funds to Tanoshi No Wah to try and help your mother and her friends. They have a lot of medical needs, and I believe they're poorly managed. It's the best we can do now."

  I didn't even know I had discretionary funds. "But why is she with a carnival in the slubs? Why did she leave us for that?" I felt she did it to embarrass me, like everything else she did.

  Joelene glanced to her right as if she were trying to think what to say, but then she stood there, as if momentarily transfixed.

  I turned to see that she was staring at the PartyHaus. At one time it had been the crown jewel of the compound, but now its black and gold Rococo façade was matted with dirt and dust. From the roof were long, pale green lines of oxidation. And at the top of the stairs, the enormous front doors were splattered with droppings as thousands of birds had made nests in the intricately carved fornicating animals. It was a combination disco, hotel, brothel, and amusement park where I had spent the nights of my youth at one hundred and fifty beats per minute.

  When Joelene's eyes met mine, I felt that we both had the same mood: a nebulous sense of defeat, under-painted with the caustic dread of seeing Father.

  Finally, she nodded toward the door. We entered the building, and found meeting theater five. The three-hundred-seat auditorium was empty, dark, and cold. Joelene located the controls, and as she turned on house lights, I sat in one of the orange, over-stuffed chairs toward the front. Above the stage hung an enormous, glowing estimator clock—a family antique. Across the top it read: Hiro Bruce Rivers Arrival Time. Below were the stylized, red numbers.

  "Joelene," I said, at once relieved and annoyed to see that it read: one hour and thirty-three minutes. "I'm not waiting."

  "That can't be right," she muttered as she opened a screen and checked with his people. "They say five or ten."

  As if the estimator clock had heard, the glowing numbers on the clock's face flickered then read fourteen minutes eighty-one seconds and began counting down.

  "The freeboot who shot you," said Joelene, reading from her screen, "is suspected to have been from Antarctica. The family council reports that the medicated bullets were prototypes stolen in Europa two weeks ago. They suspected he was a lone gunman. What little has been discovered suggests that he trafficked contraband including aru and other pain caustics."

  The details of my shooting bored me. They changed nothing. They brought Nora no closer. "What does Father want?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  "We'll cover your health, debrief your date and the aftermath. He may want to strategize. And it's possible he might apologize." Joelene shrugged as if to say the last was unlikely.

  "It's his fault!" I said.

  "It's no one's."

  "He ruined the company."

  "That," she said, stretching the word, "is a different issue."

  "So, it is his fault. RiverGroup should have protected me! That's failure. It was the most important day of my life! The most important moment in history! Just when everything was so perfect!" I put my head in my hands. As much as I detested everything that had happened, I hated to whine like a spoiled child. The clock's numbers twinkled, and now it read fourteen days, five hours, and sixty-three seconds. "Look at that," I said, standing, "he's not coming."

  "Wait," said Joelene as the lights sputtered and blinked. Then it said five seconds. Four seconds. Three seconds. I flopped backward into the chair. An instant later, though, the clock read five minutes and was counting up.

  "This is impossible!"

  The clock numbers flashed, then spun backward again to four seconds. Three seconds. It skipped two and stayed on one for half a minute.

  Just as I gave up and started to stand again, the house lights went black. An announcer's voice boomed, "Straight from the highest profit quarter on record, President, ceo, cfo, coo, cio, cpo, Chief Programmer, and all-around Super Code Bastard, give it up for Hiro Bruce Rivers!"

  As a catastrophically loud drumbeat kicked in, and we covered our ears, orange and blue fireworks exploded across the front of the stage. At the back, a figure rose from the floor before a giant vibrating blue RiverGroup logo. For several beats, he stood there, his head down, his arms flexed, as if posing like a monster wrestler.

  When a throbbing, super-deep bass and a whining singer, who sounded like he was either in a state of ecstasy or dreadful constipation, started, Father came to life. He jogged forward and pumped his fists victoriously. A spotlight came on as a cast-iron phallus-shaped podium rose to meet him at the front of the stage. Horns and guitars blasted, the voices wailed, and I thought I heard the words cunt spaceship.

  Now Father sashayed back and forth with exactly the same moves he'd been doing for years—a combination of pelvis thrusts, head bobs, and a lot of sliding to and fro on his foot-tall, green-glass platform shoes.

  "Slap me! Slap me hard!" he cried as the music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. "That's You're My Cunt Spaceship by TastyLüng," he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the silence. Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness. "Hello?" he asked, as if afraid he was alone. "What the hell? Anyone out there?"

  I was tempted to say nothing, hope he would decide the place was empty, and go away. Instead, I said, "You ruined everything!"

  His eyes darted toward me. "I'd like to fire the whole fucked-up piece of fucking shit company!" First he threw a stack of papers into the air, then hugged the podium and thrust his hips into it. "We're fucked! What do you want me to tell you? It was the weirdest and worst possible thing at the worst possible moment." Papers rained down on his head as he implored, "How we gave a fucking freeboot an identity and let him right in the middle of our fucking press conference, I have no fucking idea!"

  "It's your fault!"

  "Me?" He laughed. "We had everything nailed down—everything completely checked, then out of nowhere—wham! A fucking freeboot with a fashion rifle. And I thought you were dead when you fell over! That was fucking scary. That was shit-in-thong time! And why he shoots your hands and feet, I don't know. Nothing makes any fucking sense! We've been checking everything, but I can't find any answers." As if he were shouting at the world, he tilted his head back and cried, "Fucking freeboots!"

  My father was an inch shorter than I, but he still worked the machines s
o his arms where bulky, his legs, sculpted, and his neck, thick. His clothes were as putrid as his taste in music. Today, he wore a long, tailed, green-plaid jacket over a vibrating orange and black shirt, long blue pants with little video screens all over, and the aforementioned platforms. As for his hair, he dyed it dark brown and had it permed into a tight Afro. It looked exactly like moist chocolate cake.

  His hairdresser, Xavid, with his snow-capped hairdo and huge square glasses, came running onto the stage, and began to gather up the fallen papers and hand them to Father. Xavid then quickly patted Father's Afro here and there and headed off.

  "Anyway, I feel for you, son! I do. I was watching that date—and holy fucking shit was it boring—but whatever! I was there with my girls, my snacks, and we were all cheering and going on, and then I couldn't fucking believe a freeboot! They should all be rounded up and fried in oil! Motherfuckers."

  "They're off the system," said Joelene, with surprising annoyance. "That's why they can't be located and rounded up, as you say."

  Father leaned far forward and squinted. "You're here, too? Jesus fuckercakes, Michael! Can't you fart without her anymore?" He smacked his face with one of his thick hands. "God, son, what do you have in your ball sack? Muffins?"

  "I want Nora back," I said.

  He shook his head. "You know what I think of mkg, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, and that Nora—who, I have to say, seems like the biggest priss hole in the universe? They can suck one of my anal enchiladas!"

  "Don't say that. I love her!"

  "I don't know why. She's as dull as skim milk!"

  I hated his relentless verbal attacks. "You never understand."

  "Thankfully!" he muttered. "Anyway, glad to see you're better. That color-therapy blasts, doesn't it?" He paused, as if waiting for me to agree, then shrugged. "Anyway, believe me, someone was behind that shooting. There are too many things that don't make sense. Like where are the bullets and how in the hell he could shoot the top of your feet?"

  "The freeboots," said Joelene, "despite the families' miserable view on them, do have some highly advanced weaponry."

  Thrusting his pelvis, Father said, "My highly advanced weapon can't pee around a corner!"

  "The commission is looking into the possibility of guided and disintegrating munitions."

  Father threw his hands into the air. "Anyway! It was a total disaster. Especially for us, because we're the idiots who are supposed to keep track of those maggots. But forget all that crap for a second. We have to act before the company goes down the toilet, and I've got something lard." Stepping to the edge of the stage, he turned to the wings and hollered, "Watch this dismount!" Until then, I hadn't noticed his film crew, but there, in the shadows at the edge of the stage, stood his silvery-haired director and the cameraman. Father had everything recorded for an auto-documentary that he was always reediting. Last time he screened it, it was five hundred hours long. Next to the crew stood his hairdresser and his assistant, Ken Goh, who wore his usual loyalty-proving orange and blue face paint.

  Then Father jumped from the stage, landed on his green glass platforms, and proclaimed, "Still got it!" Snapping his fingers, he bellowed, "House lights!" He swiveled one of the other chairs around, and plopped down. "First, a few announcements." Nodding toward his hairdresser he said, "I just promoted Ken to Financial Distribution Officer and Chief of Positives. And Xavid, who shows lots of ambition, will be our new Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Chief of Brains. Take a bow, guys!"

  Ken gave two thumbs up and winked at father. His hairdresser bent at the waist. When he straightened he smiled, rolled his eyes up in his amber lenses, and said, "I'm just so fucking smart, aren't I!"

  Father laughed. "Oh yeah, tell the world! Got to let them know. So, they're working hard to sell our stupid assets just so we can keep going."

  "My extreme pleasure!" said Xavid.

  "Meanwhile," continued Father, turning back to Joelene and me, "we look like the world's biggest idiots—like we can't even wipe our own asses—and instead of mkg and your dumb-ass Nora schmora from bitchora for the product show, we got tons of empty dick."

  "Stop talking about her!" I told him.

  "It was categorically not her fault," added Joelene. "Nor has mkg been implicated in any way. The family commission has exonerated them."

  Because it was poignant, fitting, and guaranteed to annoy Father, I quoted copy from Pure H. "Her sadness replenished."

  Father slowly turned toward Joelene. "The day he started worshiping that stupid Pure Ham magazine, was the worse ever!"

  "Pure H," I corrected.

  "No," he said, with a laugh, "the H has to stand for something. So maybe it's Pure Hell or Pure Halitosis!" Turning to Ken and Xavid, he asked, "You hear that? Pure Halitosis!"

  "Funny!" exclaimed Ken.

  "Witty," agreed Xavid.

  I thought about getting up and leaving since this was pointless.

  "Whatever one's fashion tastes," began Joelene, "Pure H is a remarkable fusion of influences with a brilliant and elegant sense of individuality."

  "Holy fuck!" he bellowed. "Shut up and hold onto your dicks!" Eying Joelene, he added, "Hold 'em real tight!" She stared back coldly, and it occurred to me that she had come to loathe him just as much as me. "We've got someone else." He winked at me. "Someone scorching hot!"

  I sat there and stared at him. It was like my brain couldn't make sense of the light and sound emanating from him. And even when he handed me a screen, I couldn't interpret the image.

  "Her name is Elle Kez," he said. "She's the granddaughter of Konrad Kez, the real estate gazillionaire. He died in that stupid blimp accident and his company went under, but she's all blue blood and all. Anyway, Xavid knows Chesterfield, her uncle and he's go experimental security-code model. It uses some micro-organic rrna chip thingy that is supposed to be super-stable and . . . then . . . it . . . um . . . " He threw his hands into the air and turned to his men. "It's real complicated and shit, right guys!"

  "Experimental!" called Xavid.

  "That's it! Anyway," he continued, "we can demo it at the product show and keep our biggest customers, like BrainBrain, slt, iip-2, and lettt from leaving. They're all calling me and freaked out because they're afraid a freeboot is going to jump out of their closet and shoot their balls." Father laughed sadly. "It's not easy to talk them off the ledge, but this will help. We need something new. You with me?"

  "Sir," said Joelene, "this seems quite rash. Are you sure?"

  With his upper lip curled, he asked, "Am I sure? I don't know! But we can't show any weakness now because we're just about dead." He turned to his crew to scoff at Joelene. "The guy who runs Ribo-Kool is Chesterfield Kez, and he's lard." He let out a breath. "Look," he began again, "even if Ribo-Kool's thing is a big ol' green turd, it's going to save us for the product show."

  The photo he had handed me finally turned into a discernable image. It was a girl who looked about my age. She might have been pretty, except that she was terribly over-done. She had fake, gold hair, green eyes with heavy pink mascara, and lips covered with thick, violet paint. Her nose was pointy and pinched, as if she were wearing an invisible clothespin on the end. Worse, she was laughing and had her mouth so wide open you could see a half-inch of gum above her white teeth, a glistening, golden, made-up tongue, and a uvula hanging in back. Dressed in a fluttering mass of polka dots, and what looked like a white furry, little ear-bot hanging from her left lobe, she looked like one of those flighty, imperceptive, and giggly girls who read CuteKill, Ball Description, or Petunia Tune.

  "Don't worry if she looks like more than you can handle," said Father to me with a sly grin, "I've got some fully charged sex-pods you can borrow."

  I scowled at him.

  After a laugh, he said, "Anyway, you're going to go on a big publicity date with her to get a buzz going, then we'll have you two French or something at the product show. They'll love it!"

  My jaw went soft. He was serious. This was his
solution. I wanted to laugh at him, or somehow cut his notion in half with one perfect word. But all I could do was imagine Nora floating farther and farther away.

  "Michael is devoted to the family and the business," said Joelene. "But he is still suffering from both the trauma of the attack and a broken heart."

  "Trauma?" shouted Father as he stood and climbed back onto the stage. "You want trauma? I'll give you a trauma." Toward the back of the auditorium, he shouted, "Crank up Massive Bladder Tumor!" An instant later, the sounds of drums began firing and some male singer wailed in pain. Father treated us to his same dance moves he had just five minutes before.

  Holding my hands over my ears, I closed my eyes and waited for the cacophony to stop. When it did, and I opened them, Father was standing before me. Dumping the rest of the papers in my lap he said, "Tomorrow. Eight o'clock. That's the whole deal."