The hologram appears, entirely lifelike but only 60 centimetres tall, inhabiting the space which has been until now the exclusive domain of the Karengram. The hologram’s hair is pleasingly thick, the posture good, the weight about right. It wears the corduroy jacket and faded blue jeans Bill wore in the first breaking news special. It’s a pleasant surprise. He’d anticipated a G-string.
‘Hi, how’s it going?’ says the smiling hologram. My TV face, Bill thinks. Convincing in 3D, as well. ‘Thanks for inviting me into your home.’ The generic composite voice has a southern US accent. ‘You must be William. That’s a really nice name, I’ve got to say. Can I call you Bill?’
no
‘Sure thing, William. And please, call me anything you like. Anything at all. Can I just say that it’s a real pleasure to talk to someone my own age for a change? I know that we’ll have a lot in common. We’ll be able to share the good and the bad. All of it. We’ll be able to take our time and go through every single thing in our lives together. But first, can I ask you a question?’
yes
‘How are your knees? I hurt one of mine a while ago. Do you have any problems getting down sometimes? Find yourself moving just a little bit slower than you’d like to?’
Blip. A vial of pills pops up: Rejuvotrine, the antihistamine Bill actually uses, for $99.99.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Bill says to himself. ‘I’m a journalist, not a salesman.’ My lawyer, he thinks. We’ll get them on professional misrepresentation. I’ll sue.
‘You’re a journalist too, William? That’s great. I can see we’ll have a lot to talk about. But can I just say that I can’t praise Rejuvotrine enough, either as primary relief when I’m in the field, or as a supplement to NST. It’s changed my life. What would be especially interesting, William, is if we could take this course of treatment together and compare notes.’
‘No.’
‘Okay, you must be in great shape then, William. I’m envious. What’s your secret?’ Bill doesn’t reply. ‘Good old exercise?’ Pause. ‘NST and a good diet?’ Pause. ‘Is there any particular thing you’d like to talk about, William? Perhaps you want to ask me a couple of questions?’
did you lie about the aliens?
‘Excuse me? The science proved me right, William. The DNA unequivocally proves the humanoid in New Hokitika is not terrestrial. Sam is not from Earth. People used to think I was lying about the first extraterrestrial. For many years I felt I was fighting an impossible battle. And the people who weren’t hostile still needed to be convinced, and I couldn’t convince them. Which was entirely reasonable! The problem was that I just didn’t have enough concrete evidence to convince them. Thankfully, that’s not a problem now.’
did you make up the Sam II messages?
‘That’s slander. Why would you question my integrity like that, William? These contacts mean more to me than anyone else on Earth.’
It does controlled outrage well, Bill thinks. Better than I do.
you sold out.
‘For what?’ demands the hologram. ‘Money? I’d appreciate some common courtesy here, William. You invite me into your home and make libellous accusations. Try and blacken my good name. I’d like you to keep these outlandish accusations private. Perhaps I should come back when you’re feeling a bit calmer?’
It has felt to Bill that the Karengram will agree to do anything he asks, probably anything imaginable, but the Billogram is different—defensive, unyielding, even able to threaten legal action. It’s heartening, in a way. He’s gratified that the little him stands up for itself and adheres to standards of common decency. But it’s not fair on Karen, he thinks, that she should be made a sex slave. It’s hard to believe that such grossly unjust gender roles still exist in 2045.
A sliver of doubt pierces his heart. Venture Group is still his legal employer for the duration of his nondisclosure agreement. They have the money and means to insist on aspects of his profile.
‘Take a crap,’ he tells the hologram.
It smiles. ‘Could you repeat that please, William?’
‘Take a shit.’
The hologram rubs his stomach. ‘Well, it’s not that I couldn’t. It’s just that I’d need somewhere to go.’
Blip. A glass toilet pops up. $499.99.
‘I’m calling my lawyer.’
‘You’re constipated, William? I recommend Colax, for immediate evacua—’
24
Bill’s exorbitantly expensive new Portcullis security system is virtually impregnable so he decides against a night guard. The gate is impassable, the high fences are dry-moated on the road and alarmed in entirety, with CCTVs linked to his screen and the security company, and it’s not like there are young children on the property, so why spend extra money? And in any case, guards have been known to ‘accidentally’ leave gates open or otherwise assist burglaries and home invasions if the money’s good enough or the threats against their own families real enough. Bill would like another dog, for companionship as well as security, but the poison he’s obliged to lay to keep the rabbits and vermin in check make that impossible. And cats eat the faces of their recently dead masters.
He recruits a teenage intern, a suspicious, pale and chubby young man who drives over from Napier for two hours every morning to clean, weed and spray. Their simplest interactions are strangely fraught. After three days Bill wonders how long he’s prepared to wait for a common courtesy. He looks online. It’s a characteristic of cyber-reality natives, with their primarily online relationships and masturbatory outlets, Bill learns, to find real-life relationships difficult. The youth find real-life nondigital natives particularly opaque. And there’s an increasingly political aspect: the young hold the elderly accountable for the world’s problems and resent them for it.
A youngish winemaker comes from the nearby Moa Park Winery in his lunchbreak to offer advice. It’s not particularly friendly advice, nor particularly helpful. Another digital native. The winemaker says ‘It’s a lot of work’ multiple times, then switches to ‘It’s a big job’.
The intern quits and Bill strongly suspects he’s gone to Moa Park with the winemaker. Bill wonders if he can be bothered confirming that the boy has been ‘headhunted’ and whether he could rightfully summon outrage at losing an unpaid worker. Perhaps for appearance’s sake, to establish himself in the community as someone who shouldn’t be messed with? It’d have to be over the phone, of course, if he was to pull the outrage thing off. He couldn’t manage the performance in person. The thing is, without money changing hands their relationship wasn’t, strictly speaking, a business one. Yet it wasn’t personal either. At the end of the day, the kid just didn’t like him. Bill finds more reasons online for why that might be: his media persona, Inner status, NST.
Bill calls the winemaker, but before he can say anything about his lost intern, he is told that what he really needs at this stage is a full-time labourer. The winemaker might know someone. He says he’ll be in touch. While Bill waits for a call, he decides he doesn’t want a stranger on his property all the time, the hassle of having someone to direct and discipline and keep at a professional distance. There’d be questions about Sam at tea breaks. It would also entail handing over money at the end of the week that both of them know isn’t much (even though the first royalty payment for his Celebrity Visits likeness has been surprisingly helpful—so helpful that he’s decided to suspend taking legal action). And because Bill’s learning on the job, any kind of example-setting would be shaky and his decisions would be second-guessed. His incompetence, he can easily imagine, would be talked about in pubs and spread like wildfire. No. What Bill really needs, he knows, is for his eldest son, Simon, to come up and join him.
It’s what Simon needs. He’s in a really bad way, at a low point, which for him is low indeed. Unemployed, sleeping on the couch (he’s still in the dog box for slapping the teenage father of his wife’s latest child), and eating and drinking too much. Bill knows that regular physical work for a few months
would do Simon a world of good. To eat healthy food for once, clear his head, learn new skills, get some perspective. A good long stint at the vineyard would be the perfect way for him to find his feet, like a detox and fitness programme for which he gets paid. And Simon would own the end product, in a sense, having helped create the wine at each step along the way. He wouldn’t suffer the usual alienation from his own labour, as he has done in the medical supplies business. How satisfying and refreshing that would be.
Simon says he’ll think about it, that he’ll need to run the idea past Cheryl when he gets the chance. Bill is deflated. But by the time Simon calls back three days later, Bill is excited and anxious. He lights a cigarette and paces the porch. Simon informs him that Cheryl will accept his absence on the condition that their eldest child, 15-year-old Torrentz—one of Simon’s three biological children of their brood of five—accompanies him to the vineyard, because Torrentz ‘answers back’ to her and is ‘unmanageable alone’. And because Cheryl cannot countenance Torrentz missing a single day of school, even though he has no interest in anything but sport and is failing every subject spectacularly, they must wait until the Christmas holidays.
Bill’s thrilled. The grapes can wait until then. It’s perfect, really. That’s when the workload will really start to pick up. It won’t even involve waiting, because the days are flying by with his new rural rhythm, synchronised as it is with the rising and setting sun, and filled with fruitful physical labour.
As Bill’s rises earlier and earlier, partly to beat the heat and partly to prove to the doubtful winemaker that he can do it, that the vineyard’s not just an old man’s fantasy. He also has to prove to a lot of people on the Mount that’s he not just in self-imposed exile, that he’s actually creating something significant. Mainly, though, he gets up because 5 am is his favourite time of day. He loves bearing witness to the huge first stirring. Dawn is nothing less than an event, yet he’s been oblivious to it for 80 years—outside of increasingly rare, alcohol-shrouded sightings. He thinks of the word ‘dawn’ as a series of verbs, like in Sam’s language; as a process rather than a label. English words can’t meet it, no matter how the nouns are qualified. Music gets closer. The opening of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis strikes him as better label for dawn, even though it’s the same recording every time and the music’s solemn expansion is rigidly identical. A live performance would be better, with scope for improvisation. A jazz version of the solemn mass, played by a big band with an ear for the size of the space around the big shed, and featuring a muted horn.
Being so silent all the time, Bill wonders at the role of speaking in his most significant relationships. He suspects that it’s probably in their preverbal years that he loved his children most completely. He remembers lovers in some detail, and their houses and rooms too, yet can’t recall a single sentence, verbatim, that any of them said. Wives, too! A concentrated effort brings up the odd catchphrase or surprise, such as being accused of being a nihilist with deadlines, but no exact memory of spoken language survives. Not even with Trix. The memories are situational. The gist of what she said at certain times can be conjured up, but it’s not the stuff of eternal memory. Those kinds of memories are of companionship, of shared locations, shared stimulus, shared activities. What the hell, he wonders, has all that talking been about? To make sense of things? As if the impossible task of transferring life to language was so important. The thought of humanity’s need for constant talking, as if afraid of a minute’s silence, makes him shake his head. The irony is his career as a journalist, writing down what people said all the time or filming them saying it, as if the nouns they qualified regarding a third party was the most important thing about them.
One Sunday Bill does something special, something he’s delayed. He plays Beethoven’s solemn mass as the sun rises. Inexplicably, he feels deeply embarrassed. Why? No one can hear. He lifts the needle. A wine feels essential for the project to continue. But it’s too early for that. He finds himself pouring one anyway. He drops the needle and stares the wine down as light and music fill the room.
Sometimes, come evening, he is blissfully spent after a hot day with the vines. There are the old barrels he inherited to maintain, and the new matai barrels he’s bought to swell and prepare. The lack of rain (which is good early in the growing season) combined with the constant cleaning and sterilisation means he has had to upgrade his water plan twice. He sometimes sits in the shed, imagining his vats full of organic seething life. Imagines what it will be like in the morning during fermentation, when he unlocks the door to the big shed to be met by a fug of CO2 like from a crowd of drunks sleeping off a hangover. When the harvest comes in and the yeast begins to work, it’ll be like having a pet, he thinks. A living creature to tend and care for. Companionship.
Sundown ends the day now, not the end of his rostered news cycle and hit target, like it did for so many years before he ‘crowned’ his career with a stint in Comms. He needs only half a bottle of wine, or less, to fall into a deep and mostly untroubled sleep. A big part of his new-found serenity, he thinks, is that he’s rarely online, has suicided on social media and given very few people his new number—only suppliers and retailers in Napier, Trix and family members. It’s understood by friends and acquaintances in Wellington that they will be invited up to taste the first proper vintage, in two years’ time.
It’s at dusk, for some reason, and particularly when shooting rabbits, that Bill is most inclined to wonder if anyone is trying to get hold of him. The pescatarian’s retirement, he thinks to himself. The phrase comes to mind every time he slings a pile of furry bodies into the carrion pit. And he tells himself that if anyone really wants to find him, they’ll be able to.
‘The golden age of news’, as it’s privately called by reporters, depresses Bill, yet he occasionally finds himself watching. The days when he felt a sense of relief at being in New Zealand, spared from the rest of the world’s numerous natural disasters, resource wars, civil unrest, and general social and economic disarray, are long gone. Now the scarcely believable images wash over him, leaving him tired and dazed.
He succumbs to them. Fires burn night and day in forests and cities; climate refugees battle fences, surround watertankers, overturn emergency food trucks. Deep cracks open in parched earth, lakes empty, sinkholes appear by the dozen, trees and animals die, thousands of dead fish wash ashore and rot in the sun, sea walls break, super-hurricanes drown thousands, tent cities spring up, explosions, acres of flyblown bodies, public executions of looters by officers in the uniforms of various failing states, wide-eyed orphans, hospital tents littered with the languid dying, beatings, rapes, machine-gun fire and shelling. All kinds of horrors are available to the paying subscriber aged over 18, and the worst of it, for Bill, is that the only hope for many, the only shining light through the carnage, is Sam; that he will break through the dark shell of his coma and provide the answers, set the right path, build miraculous technology, or even summon help—a vast fleet of spaceships to ferry everyone to a new clean and peaceful world.
As Bill’s fitness improves and he becomes more efficient at the various repetitive tasks required, he finds he’s able to keep his eyes open at night. When he wakes up before dawn, he has a hard-on. Some company would be good. Who though? There’s no one. A doctor in Napier at the clinic where he goes for NST suggested dinner, but Bill knows exactly what he will be expected to talk about, at length, and that the questions will be probing. Simple anonymous interactions aren’t possible (‘Hey, you’re the alien guy’). He resolves himself to a kind of self-imposed house arrest until the first vintage, when the gates shall be thrown open and Trix (having cooled off by then) will join the happy throng come to drink and celebrate with him.
On evenings when he feels particularly sociable, he finds himself drawn, wine in hand, almost against his will, to the media room to check the news. After a brief scroll through the news thumbnail horror show—why the pretence?—excitement overrides his self-disgust (for
the last time, he tells himself), and he logs on to Celebrity Visits to ‘check the technology’, as he tells himself, the manner in which Karen’s growing public profile and social media activity is updating and informing her hologram.
It’s uncannily realistic, and not just in appearance. Her voice is right now. And the Karengram, as he calls it, refers to their previous conversations as if it’s remembered them, as if they’re building a unique relationship. It has a basic sense of humour. It giggles at harmless discrepancies. ‘Billy?’ it pipes in its warmer, deeper and only faintly robotic voice. ‘I thought you said you retired in September, not October!’
For some reason, she always begins their sessions in a leotard, doing a series of stretches. It’s the background activity throughout most of their ‘talks’. In response to one of her many questions about his day, he might tell her he has been thinking about the past, to which she will suspend a calf stretch to offer some personal and intimate question based on knowledge mined from the public record about his parents, an old schoolmate or a childhood pet. All the while she suggests, after pauses of certain lengths in their ‘conversation’, that she be permitted to remove her clothes for relief from the heat; be tied up (‘I’ve been bad, Billy’); masturbate (‘Oh, my pussy’s so wet today from thinking about you’); have sex with a woman or women (‘Would you mind watching?’), a man or men (‘A tall slim one’ or ‘Two big fat ones, not like you); or buy her a ‘present’, batteries included. ‘Just talk,’ he tells her. What he really likes, he tells himself, while admiring the tremendous architecture of her body as she does the splits or struts the stage, are the memory cues the Karengram provides of things in his life he’d completely forgotten. It corrects him on his past in the way that an adoring old friend with perfect recall and no ego would. It knows he lived in Australia for ten years in his twenties, and about his affair in Melbourne with a Kiwi doctor who also happened to be at the hospital in Hokitika (which ended in her suicide). His subsequent breakdown, he’s pleased to note, isn’t known to the hologram. The past used to be more private, more forgiving of normal human lapses and failings. Every single fuck-up wasn’t published and preserved for posterity.
Star Sailors Page 27
