Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

  Back when we worked bread and confections, Mallory joked about my writing. Words were too lofty for a Red Light kid. I was good, though. I thought of words like math equations, word x will elicit emotion y given that context b reflects, to a degree of 95%, the implied sentiment behind word x. Emotions as math. She didn’t like my move to the Financial District, which made her phone call about a job especially strange. I guess I was swayed by the prospect of passing her in the lobby every day.

  I’m standing now, smart enough not to be sitting in Reiss’s chair when he arrives. I’ve got another bill balled and ready for the flames when Reiss appears beside me. His sweat glistens in the fire. He glances to the broken window then back at me. “Mallory told me you needed to see me. She said it was urgent.”

  “Mallory lied.” I toss the dollar. “Important, yes. Not urgent.”

  “What do you want?” He moves to his desk, gestures for me to follow.

  I settle for the tilted horizon offered by Arnold’s broken chair. “I’m concerned, Mr. Reiss.”

  “As am I, Max.” Reiss hides a grin. We could use the couch, but Reiss is having too much fun with my struggle in Arnold’s crooked chair.

  “No, I’m concerned that your concern is just adding fuel to the fire.” I look to the pit in the corner. “So to speak.”

  “You know, anyone else who questioned my decisions would be rotting in an Outskirt dumpster by now.”

  “My point exactly. What I did for you is beyond money. It’s saving a life. Why not embrace that? Why let the media tear you down for being human?”

  “I’ve made my living as a devotee of the dollar, Max. I’ve celebrated its victories, and I’ve cursed its losses. What I’ve built—this building, a half-dozen others like it, a few new ventures I can’t yet speak of—all of it is thanks to my loyalty to the home team.”

  “Yes, sir.” I let a few moments swab the tension free before speaking again. “People are upset. Beyond upset. People are realigning themselves to a new god. Trading Favors and organs, after so many years of weakness, is a market correction.”

  “I can pay you in fingers if you’d like.”

  “Understood, Mr. Reiss.”

  “Or drugs. Juice, perhaps.”

  “Cash is fine, Mr. Reiss.”

  “Good. Now, on to what you’re going to do for me next.”

  I fan a stack of greasy cash and motion toward the fire. “I’m pretty busy, as you can see.”

  “Make me not second-guess taking your kidney, Mr. Phlebalm.” I concede and grant him the floor. “I want you to find the guy who notified the press of our donation and bring him to me.”

  I chuckle openly, expecting a reciprocal reaction. Reiss remains stern. “I can’t be your heavy, Mr. Reiss. You know I respect you, but I’m just a failed novelist who happens to be great with numbers. Hell, that’s probably why my writing isn’t worth a shit. I’ve got equations on the brain.”

  “You’re the only one as invested in this whole thing as I am.”

  “I’m just an economist. You have much further to fall.”

  “You’ll have help. Mallory will be going with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not stupid, Max. She knows the streets, and right now the streets are our enemy. If she turns out to be worthless out there, kill her.”

  “Seriously?”

  He smiles. “Your writing isn’t terrible, Max.” He knows that will pull a grin from me any day.

  Arnold’s been picked hollow. I hope his family got away with the bulk of him before the dayshift imports from the Outskirts and Ghost Town got a chance to scavenge. He’s a shell now, even his eyes are gone. The duct-tape vest has been split down the sternum, leaving the carcass flayed and spoiling in the summer heat. I can almost hear him sizzle. A few weeks from now the autumn cool would have kept him fresh for at least a few hours more. Timing was never Arnold’s strongest quality. Mallory kicks his thigh like she would tires on a used car. “Look at all that skin. We’re dealing with amateurs, at least.”

  Things sure have changed. In the past, Mr. Reiss had me chase away unlicensed street vendors peddling knock-off leather pocket-books on the sidewalk right here where Arnold has landed. Now, we’re all becoming little more than walking wallets, human leather with organs stacked like bills. “Should I run back upstairs for my knife?”

  Mallory bends down for a closer look. “The skin’s already started to separate. It’s too late.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I wasn’t.” She turns from the body. “You still writing?”

  “Trying.”

  “Really? People are bartering with fingernails just for the protein, and you’re putting words on paper?”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  She shrugs. “Just seeing how much of the old Max is left, I guess?”

  “I still know a good donut, too.”

  Mallory lets a smile slip. “Arthur gave me the name of someone he wants us to check out. Try to keep up, Max.”

  She’s destroying this sidewalk with her sway. “If Reiss knows who we’re after, why doesn’t he send the police? He pays them enough.”

  “The police have forgotten how to pull a gun.”

  “They’re just adapting to the market? More interested in truth than violence?”

  “Truth is important, I get that. I just don’t think it’s the job of a police officer. But I suppose that’s why I’m not commissioner.” She dodges pedestrians and food carts, like we’re a low-speed chase on a high-stakes sidewalk.

  “You’ve thought this through,” I shout to her.

  “Besides, I have my own leads. We’re hitting the bakery on Fifteenth.”

  “Bakery?”

  She turns and yells to me, “People need food more than they need money,” and hails a cab. The roads degrade to cracked rubble and the building façades lose the reflective marble shine of the Financial District, give way to the brick utility of the Red Light fringes. For the first time in a while, I imagine coming back here, returning forever.

  I don’t buy this bullshit about me being here because I’m invested. By that logic, he could have pushed any of the teat sucklers infesting that building, and every one of them would have cried for the chance to be where I am. It’s his specific words that get me: You’re the only one as invested in this whole thing as I am.

  “Did you know Arnold well?” Mallory massages her feet in the back of the cab.

  “Arnold who?”

  “Funny.” She pulls a cigarette, offers me one. I accept but pass on her offer to light. I’ll save this one for later. I don’t smoke, but I may soon. “He couldn’t have done that duct tape work himself.” She cracks a backseat window. Her smoke dissipates into the Red Light air. “Was it your idea?”

  “Depends. Was it a good idea?”

  “Seems strange for a man of the cloth to protect organs like that.”

  “The cloth?”

  “Linen and cotton bills.” The cab stops. Mallory steps to the broken asphalt. “Why watch out for Arnold’s family? Shouldn’t people like you promote that kind of suffering, like an example or something?”

  I’m ten paces back again and having to shout. “Where are we going?”

  “I told you already.” She turns toward a row of window stages, each illuminated in red, curved silhouettes breaking the sharp light. The women writhe like snakes. Even when I lived here, I never took the time to call on a storefront woman. Like Las Vegas, I guess. If you live there, you don’t care about Tropicana Boulevard.

  Geography and social status keep the Red Light and Financial District separate, but people are people wherever you go. Every bar here is more, with bouncers regulating basement-brawl gambling, bartenders pushing street Juice under the table, and armchair doctors at the ready to tie dishrag tourniquets. Just like every office back Downtown is more, bureaucracy and strict schedules regulating boardroom acquisitions. But I’ve thought about domestic life—bedroom sets, family portraits, kids—an
d no matter how you look at it, nurseries look better gilded than they do illuminated by flashing red and blue.

  “I wouldn’t buy bread down here, anymore,” I say.

  “Why not? People are here. A good businessperson does business where the business is. Mr. Reiss taught me that, actually.” Mallory nods to a man slumped on a stool outside a bar called The Gurney.

  I try following the nod. The man grimaces. “You an apprentice?” I ask Mallory.

  “Just an observer.”

  As the streets spiral tighter, light dies away. We’re guided by the unreliable flicker of crooked streetlights networked by heavy bundles of shoddy wiring. Hungry bags of desperate skin have replaced the windowed call girls. “What kind of bakery is this?”

  “Best conchas in the city.”

  “Warner’s?” The district certainly has deteriorated since I moved to the city center.

  I follow her around a corner just in time to see her heel disappear behind a rusted alleyway exit door. I follow. The smell of bread hits hard, even before my eyes adjust to the new light. I recognize the scent.

  “New location?”

  “Death and taxes and rising rent. The only three sure things in life.”

  Years ago, before the internship that ultimately led to me tossing money into Mr. Reiss’s fire pit, I lived as a lonely post-adolescent/pre-social acclimatee without the confidence or vocabulary to properly court someone like Mallory Warner.

  She leads me through the prep tables, lined tight, at least triple the density I remember. Even then Warner’s Bakery staked a reputation as the largest in the district. Today, perhaps the largest in the entire city. I’d ask her to keep talking, to clue me in to more than just this nostalgic tease, but I wouldn’t hear her over the roar of the machines anyway. Only when we land in a corner office nuked bare to utility and function can I breathe and hear enough for a conversation. Mallory takes a chair behind a metal desk. I grab the overturned milk crate against the wall. “What happened to this place? What happened to you?”

  “The economy and the economy.” She powers on a computer and gestures toward a cold pot of coffee behind her. I decline. “Where you are living, people like Reiss are freaking out. A changing of the guards like we’re seeing is quite literally the end of their world. Losing money could mean losing the desire to stay alive. Empty wallets are a cancer to those shits in the Financial District.”

  “So why work there?”

  She eyes me, judgmental, before speaking. “Because to people like me, like you used to be, collapse of cash means the rise of bread.”

  “You’re baiting me with that pun, aren’t you?”

  “Probably.” The computer monitor illuminates her face. “But it’s not only bread, of course. It’s any food, any shelter, any necessity.” She taps the keyboard, sips from a cup rimmed in dust and dirt. “It’s Favors, too. You know this. I’ve seen your itinerary. Your days are one part studying the gaining Soul Standard and one part fluffing Reiss’s ego. Me working there is simply for the competitive insight.”

  “Reiss’s other girls, before you, they don’t have a part in this, do they?”

  “This isn’t a conspiracy, Max. Those other girls, probably just like any other go-getter in the Financial District, figure if they invest in the right stocks, the right lip balm, and strong enough kneepads, they can weasel their way to the top. For me, it’s business. Thanks for opening the door, by the way.”

  A man, dressed not unlike the cloth people from the Financial District, steps into the room, hands Mallory a fat folder strapped with a red rubber band, and leaves, the scent of bread dough and sweat wafting as he passes. Mallory thumbs quickly through the folder, isolates and stuffs a single piece of paper into her pocket, before dropping the folder into a drawer at her side.

  “The growth of Warner’s represents the evolution of society, Max. From the Gold Standard to the fiat system to the Soul Standard. From physical commodities to faith-based commerce to Favor-based commerce. We’re not the enemy. The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was instilling a societal faith in a goddamn piece of paper. We’re a—”

  “—a market correction.”

  She glows. “Yes. We’re an uprising. We’re the destruction of oil derricks when the people want electricity. We’re Juice distilleries when people become tired of liquor and drug taxes. We’re a protest. We’re a picket line.”

  “How is Trevor’s Juice distro, by the way?”

  “You know about that, huh?”

  “I just now pieced it together. You sound like him. Fair warning, Reiss is looking for a way to tax Juice. He’s got lawyers manipulating the FDA into official statements regarding the health benefits and safety of it all. I’d give Trevor another ten months of running the stuff without regulations saddling his every move.”

  Mallory relaxes into her chair. I’ve seen this same posture from Reiss. “Why’d you leave, Max?”

  “The same reason you stayed, I suppose. Opportunity.”

  She parts her lips to speak, but the phone rings, pulling her away.

  This concrete bunker has all the charm I remember of a Red Light bakery. A soft amber glow penetrates every crack in the walls and roof; the light from neon signs and dumpster fires combine to give the district a perpetually somber dawn. If I hadn’t escaped the area so quickly those years ago I might be able to fool myself into appreciating this four corners pit, even if only aesthetically. The smell of bread, though, it helps. Mallory’s radiance doesn’t hurt either. She ends the call, stands, and tells me that we’re headed back to the Financial District. “You coming or leaving?”

  “I’ll follow a bit more. I still need more dirt on you.”

  “Good luck. I’ve got enough dirt on you to keep you buried forever.”

  We enter a waiting car outside the bakery. Mallory takes the wheel, and nods for me to keep in back. “Nothing personal,” she says, “but I’m not going to perpetuate a reputation for dealing with cloth people. I’d rather play the hired driver.”

  The lights, the people, the sounds—it all claims niche space somewhere in my head, despite the recent years of corralling numbers and logic for Reiss. As we cross the unofficial Pale Street border between there and here, I take on a strange calm, perhaps my splitting head finding stasis among the dueling worlds. We pass easily, without even a check for contraband, while pedestrians get hassled on the street from both sides. “Why do you think Reiss hired either of us? We’re not exactly a diamond caste.”

  “We’re not a lazy caste either. You’ve made it higher than most of the inbred cloth people working for Reiss. I’ve got the bakery. We do canned goods too, in the east wing. We’re growing. In fact, distro keeps an office in the Belvedere Building. As does accounting. The Warner front just preps, produces, and packages. We’re diamonds in the rough.”

  We pass a storefront display of airbrushed T-shirts. “How do the people who make clothes feel about the cash men being called cloth people?”

  “Probably the same way the cash people would feel about us aligning as diamonds of any sort.”

  Back before sharing a downtown office building, Mallory and I would align around little more than the docking ramps of our respective family businesses. The Phlebalms own a sugar processing plant way out near the Outskirts, right where the Red Light fades into dying barns and wheat fields. Mallory would check inventory as I checked her. I kept poised around her, careful not to puff my chest the way every dock foreman did for her back then. I suppose I always thought of myself as the buried diamond. Never her.

  “How much do you remember of me?” I ask her. “From the bakery days. I’m curious.”

  She meets my eyes in the rearview mirror. “You didn’t talk much. You were basically a podium with a clipboard.” I grin, embarrassed but understanding. “You were a good enough looking podium, though.”

  “You were thinner back then,” I say, not regretting the statement but feeling like I should.

  “It’s amazing the calo
ric inconsequence of stress and cigarettes.” She rolls down the window, lights a cigarette of her own. “I’m not much for segues so I’ll just ask, what ever happened with the girl who pulled you into this glamorous lifestyle?” She nods to the congested world around us, accenting her sarcasm with a honk and a strong “fuck you” to a merging truck.

  “Died.”

  “Sorry.” The cigarette slips out of the window, another “fuck” as she watches it tumble back and die on the wet asphalt. “How?”

  “Gall bladder surgery went bad.”

  “Isn’t that pretty routine? I didn’t think people died of that.”

  “Me neither.” Another truck, cutting in from a narrow right lane, pops the awkward tension enough for me to escape the dirge we’re unwittingly orchestrating. “If you’re my driver,” I say, palming a bottle of Norvasc in my front pocket, “how about driving me by the Dawn Assisted Living facility on Troost?” Her eyes cut me down from the rearview mirror. “It’s a Favor run.”

  “I knew you weren’t clean,” she says, smirking.

  “Any good businessman knows the importance of multiple revenue streams.”

  The Dawn facility acts as a temporary home to old people queuing up for the final sendoff. The facility sits on a plot set firmly within the crosshairs centered among four of Reiss’s five main financial skyscrapers, positioning the residents within as mere decrepit collateral damage to an eventual Reiss takeover. At least, that’s Reiss’s perspective.

  Owning the Dawn facility would cement Reiss as a true property god. He says the facility’s cathedral room would make a great reception desk. If he knew I ran Favors here, or ran Favors at all, for starters, he’d leverage my position to get some quality intel.

  Then he’d have me so scared of a slow torture I’d likely be next out of his office window.

  The cathedral room is where I find Ernie. He’s a bloated man, though not one trapped by his own immobility. Word is he’s doing just fine for a widower in a nursing home. Seems all this praying is doing him good. I wait for the man to unclasp his hands before I approach.

  “Delivery,” I say, shaking the Norvasc.