by H. A. Swain
Next, Mom puts on her best Buzz-worthy announcer’s voice. “And every spectacular moment after that—her breakdowns, her burnouts, her phoenix-like returns! Until at twenty-five, at the pinnacle of her career, she recorded the last duet ever with Taylor Swift, the grande dame of pop stardom.” She looks at me. “Am I right?”
“Bravo,” I say. “Spot on.” But no matter how much Mom tries to persuade me the music industry is no place for me to land, I know she loved almost every moment of her career and probably still misses it. “But if you had to do it over again, would you?” I ask.
Mom thinks, then says, “There’s only one thing I regret.”
I lean forward, eager to hear.
She reaches out for my sister’s hand. “Alouette.” We stare at one another. Her lip quivers. “Which is why I don’t want your father to force you to have an ASA. I couldn’t stand it if…”
“Mom, it’s different now,” I assure her, but the truth is, I’m scared, too. Dad swears it was a fluke that Alouette’s surgery left her like this. But what if he’s wrong? What if the problem was genetic and I wind up staring at the ceiling doing birdcalls for the rest of my life, too?
“Your father is a bully. He’s controlling and emotionally abusive and has the emotional IQ of a toddler,” Mom says angrily.
“It doesn’t help when you try to fight with him through me,” I tell her.
“You’re right!” She holds up her hands and sighs. “I just want to help you. I want you to know you’re not required to have an ASA.”
“Oh, really?” I say, sarcasm dripping. I hop off the bed and begin to pace. “Dad will disown me if I don’t and I won’t be able to get a job without being some kind of crazy genius.”
“That can’t be true,” she says. “If you find something you like to do. For example…” She stops to think.
I stand across from her and laugh. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can tell me one thing I like to do.”
“Well,” she says, biding her time. “You used to like building cars with your Blox.”
“When I was seven.”
“You could be a car designer!”
“For me to be a mechanical engineer, I’d need to go to an academic school, not a Plute playground for the future famous. And I’d still need a spatial reasoning ASA to be more than a low-level worker.”
“Okay, fine,” she says, waving away that example. “But when you really think about your future, Orpheus, when you think about what you want to be, what is it that you imagine yourself doing?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble, but that’s a lie. I do know. I peer up at her. She smiles gently as if she’s truly interested in what I want in life.
“I want to make music,” I tell her and she looks surprised. “But not as a performer. I’m not like you or Alouette.” We both glance at my sister, remembering all her promise as a kid, jumping up on stage any chance she got. “I don’t like to be front and center. But when I hear songs, I know how I could make them better. And I don’t mean how to improve the singer’s look or by planting stupid stories in the Buzz to get more attention. I mean I want to work on the actual song itself.”
“Like an old-fashioned producer!” Mom laughs, delighted. “I could see you doing that, Orpheus. You’d be good at it.”
I shake my head. “Dad won’t let me. He has no intention of handing over the reins of the company to me unless I get an ASA. He says business is cutthroat. That you have to be dispassionate and decisive, fully focused on the music. ‘In this world,’” I say in my best grumbling Dad voice, “‘either you’re a genius or a loser.’”
Mom scowls. “Despite what he might think, your father isn’t the ruler of the world.”
“No, but he is the ruler of the music industry.”
Mom lifts an eyebrow. “That won’t last forever.”
“Sure,” I snort, disbelieving.
“Listen, honey, I’m here to tell you, the PONI life isn’t bad. You can find something you love to do and be very happy without all the crap that comes with being a Plute celeb. Big houses, flying cars, constantly being in the public eye. Personal fulfillment is better than public success.”
“Easy for you to say,” I mumble. “You’ve had both.”
“No, not easy for me to say at all,” she insists. “My life might not look like much to you, but it’s hard-won, Orpheus. I’d like to save you the trouble of going through everything I had to endure just to get right here.”
I sigh and slump back onto Al’s bed as confused as ever. “I wish I could be happy without an ASA,” I tell her. “I truly do. I see what all my friends go through and I think it might not be worth it. Sometimes, I just want to walk away, but…” I trail off.
“Just promise me this,” Mom says and reaches for me again. “Promise me you won’t do anything rash or stupid before I have a chance to take care of your father.”
“Funny,” I tell her. “He thinks he’s taking care of you.”
ZIMRI
After my “interview” with Smythe and Beauregarde, I stomp through the rest of my shift, half furious that Medgers is picking on me again, and half nervous that she’ll drag the detectives to my POD and demand to look around before I get home. Clueless, yet defiant that she has nothing to hide, Nonda might let them in. So, as soon as the final buzzer sounds at the end of our shift, I bolt from the warehouse. I don’t even wait to see Brie during the switch. Instead, I shoot her a quick ping saying something important came up, then I run home as fast as I can. Luckily, when I arrive everything is in order and Nonda’s not there. I grab the digital recorders from the nook where they’ve been hiding beside my bed and jog along the riverpath toward Tati’s in Old Town.
When I hit the bend in the river—where Nowhere hides—I turn east off the path, hop a fence, and climb through a bramble patch into the cracked and weedy parking lot of Black Friday, the Corp X cut-price megastore filled with factory rejects and overstock where most of the warehouse workers shop. In the vacant lot, beneath one working light, a group of guys loiter around a trashcan.
“Hey Zim! Zimri!” the one with an old sailor’s cap calls as I jog past. He raises a glass bottle of Tati’s finest Juse in salute.
“Hey there, Captain Jack,” I yell back. Jack was my dad’s best friend when they were boys, then they worked side by side in the warehouse until my dad died. A year ago, Jack’s arm got crushed in a bailer at the warehouse and he lost his job. The money from my first concert went to him after the Corp X–assigned justice broker worked a crappy deal that said Jack had to pay Corp X back for the damage his arm did to the bailer.
“You don’t stop to talk anymore?” he yells.
“In a hurry!” I tell him.
“Go on then,” he waves. “Don’t let us slow you down.”
Lots of PODPlex folks tell their children never to go to Old Town. If you’re not originally from here, it probably seems seedy with all its abandoned buildings turned into “dens of iniquity” as Tati likes to say with pride. Need some Juse? Go to Old Town. Want black market electronics? Old Town is your place. Anything you can’t get from the warehouse or Black Friday, you can probably find in Old Town if you know where to look. It’s cash-only down here, no COYN accepted because Corp X has nothing to do with this self-supporting economy. By the people, for the people is Tati’s favorite joke, as if she’s a socialist and not a pure anarcho-capitalist who’d sell anything at the right price.
But I see something different when I jog down the empty streets here. This is where Nonda grew up and went to a school with real books and classes in art and music. Not just a place that teaches you how to be a good future employee like Corp X’s Special Quality Education for Workforce Life facility where Brie, Dorian, and I went. This is where my mom and dad were raised. I grew up on their stories of the starry ceiling and velvet curtains in the Paramount movie theater, parties in the Oak Room with live bands or deejays, church suppers, and card games, when the community was built by the peo
ple and not by a faceless corporation.
Then Corp X came in and bought up all the land surrounding the town for their behemoth business. They plowed down everything except what’s left in the center of the town to build their warehouses, PODPlexes, and the Strip. They try to pass off Complex life as the community of the future. Since they’re the only employer within hundreds of miles, people don’t have much choice. Either you work for Corp X (and your POD rent, plus health insurance, and justice brokerage fees come out of your monthly COYN) or you scrape by on your own in Old Town.
So when I jog past the abandoned Paramount theater (its blue sign faded to gray), the dilapidated school (where Brie and I used to play), and the church caving in from neglect, I see a dying tree that’s compartmentalized itself—first the foliage went, then the birds fled, and entire branches withered and died. But I know that the roots are still here, deep underground, trying to sustain what little life is left.
At Tati’s shop, I hop up on the porch and stop to catch my breath while smiling for the cameras—Tati’s first line of defense against a raid. Whenever an electronics company gets wind of what Tati does, they send security agents to shut her down. They come in the front, she goes out the back. She claims she doesn’t care when they haul her gadgets to the electronics dump a few miles outside of town. They’ve cleaned her out many times but she just waits a week or so then goes back to the dump, digs out everything, fixes it all up again, and reopens for business.
Inside the shop, the shelves are loaded with her illegally refurbished transmitters, receivers, speakers, remotes, HandHelds, and old-model tablets no self-respecting Plute would still carry around. Mom told me once that Tati was the smartest person she ever met and I don’t doubt it. The woman knows how to break apart, put together, fix and mix anything with more than two parts.
“Zimri, Zimri, Zimri.” Tati comes through the curtain, wiping her hands on a rag and shaking her head. I’ve outstripped her by several inches in the past year but she still outweighs me by at least twenty pounds. She’s short and compact. All curves. Men love her but she doesn’t care. Her heart belongs to Brie’s mom and vice versa. “Girlie, what am I going to do with you? Mm-mm-mm.”
“What?” I ask. “What did I do now?”
“Don’t play dumb with me.” She leans against the counter and smiles. “How’d you hijack the Stream?”
I hop up onto the counter beside her. “I was hoping you could explain that to me, because I have no idea.” I dig the video camera out of my pocket and hand it over.
“Well…” She scratches her head as she studies the little machine. “Your mom and I used to hack around a lot with a video setup. Did you use that old laptop?”
I nod.
“I’d have to take a look again but my guess is, we set a signal to bounce off some satellite that happened to line up perfectly with you last night. I just wish I’d known you were going to do it so I could have gotten the sound quality better.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” I tell her. “A couple of private detectives questioned me at the warehouse today. They weren’t happy but they figured I couldn’t be the culprit. They said, ‘How could a little sixteen-year-old Plebe be smart enough to hijack a LiveStream?’”
Tati tosses her head back and laughs long and hard. “Wish I could have seen all those clueless Plute faces when you broke in.” She drops her jaw and bugs out her eyes.
“You think they could trace it?” I ask her.
“Nah, the signal probably looked like it was coming from Europe or South Africa. We always made sure to hide our IP addresses and make them bounce around. I wouldn’t worry about it. Unless you’re planning to do it again.”
“You know I will,” I say.
“Just like your mama,” she says with pride, and I blush.
“I want to release the audio,” I tell her as I pull out the audio recorder. “I played with Dorian last night.”
“Marley’s son?” Tati asks, eyes wide, and I smile. “Mm-mm-mm.” She shakes her head. “You got him around your little finger, huh?”
“No,” I say, but my chest warms at the thought of kissing him by the river.
“Funny how history has a way of repeating,” Tati mutters. Then she tosses her rag on the counter and grabs a heavy ring of keys. “Come on. I’ll take you over to the house. I have to check on some things anyway.”
“Hey, do you remember a friend of my mom’s called Calliope Bontempi?” I ask as we head out the back door.
“Sure. I’d forgotten all about her until she popped up in the Buzz this week,” Tati says as she locks up. “She was real young when she showed up at the warehouse. Sixteen, seventeen years old. Pretty little gal. Sad as could be. Seemed traumatized. Rainey took her under her wing. Sometimes Calliope would sing out at Nowhere with them. She was around for a while then disappeared after your mom left.”
“The detectives were snooping around about her, too. They think Calliope was behind the hijacking.”
“Good,” Tati says, laughing. “Let them think that. Idiots.”
* * *
For years, Tati’s let me stash my transmitting gear in the old house where Nonda raised my mother. Inside, the first floor is empty except for some bottles scattered around and burn marks on the floor from where someone once tried to start a fire. Tati taught me that the key to a good hiding place is to make it look just suspicious enough to take it off the radar of anyone who might be snooping. Too messy and they’ll make assumptions. Too clean and they’ll look harder for what you’re trying to hide. If someone came in here, they’d think it was just another vacant house where the underbelly gathers. What they wouldn’t know is that Tati has a Juse distillery in the basement and upstairs, beneath the peaked roof, is an antenna we’ve built from scavenged parts.
Tati moves a bookshelf to get down into the basement while I run up the creaking steps to the attic where the air is thick enough to make me sneeze. I turn on the lights to illuminate my father’s old paintings. Dark studies of the river, swirling clouds about to rain, and several portraits of my mother. She was gorgeous back then. Tall and strong, with the same nose as me and a gap between her teeth that was handed down from Nonda to my mother to me. But most of the resemblance is in our hair.
Like my mother, I keep mine short on the sides and let the top grow wild and free. Nonda would prefer I braid it, but I like my hair au naturel. Sturdy tendrils wind their way out from my skull like sweet-pea vines searching for something to climb. At night, I rub my hair with shea butter and tea tree oil just like my mother did, then twist it up to sleep. In the morning, I run my fingers through until it puffs out like a dandelion gone to fluff.
After paying my respects to my parents, I pull the tarp off my setup. I love the way it looks—tidy black boxes with little knobs and switches begging to be tweaked. Then I hop on the stationary bike Tati and I installed to crank up the generator and I pedal fast. When the battery is juiced up enough, I transfer my audio file to the box. It only takes a minute for the whole concert to upload. Then I set the timer. For a brief half hour starting at midnight tonight the transmission will reach anyone within a five-mile radius who’s scanning the waves. Finally, I disconnect the recorder, erase the contents, cover everything up again, and slip out.
* * *
The minute I get back to our POD, I know something’s not right. The apartment seems too still. Everything is just as I left it when I popped in an hour ago. There are no shoes in the foyer. No cooking smells. No gentle sounds of Nonda singing to herself or snoring from the couch. It’s as if she hasn’t been here all day.
My heart slams against my rib cage. Since I was little, there’s been a part of my brain that fears the worst every time I get home and no one’s here. It’s not a stretch to figure out why. I had just turned ten when my mom took off, and was barely eleven when my father took the plunge. Not that it was a surprise. He’d been slipping away synapse by synapse for months, especially after my mother left. By the time he thre
w himself off the bridge into the river, he was barely present anymore. Even his body had shrunk down to almost nothing because he hardly ate.
I check everywhere in the POD, but unlike last night with Marley and Dorian, this time Nonda does not appear. “Where did you go?” I whisper as I look out the window into the night. Most likely she got confused again. Maybe she went out looking for me and lost track of time. She probably got turned around and is wandering again. I ping her with my HandHeld, knowing it’s a long shot. The older she gets, the more she resents any device. Says they’re an affront to her personal liberty. I jump when I hear a faint noise coming from the sofa. For a moment I wonder if Nonda could have fallen between the cushions. She’s gotten so small in the past few years she just might fit. I shove my hand in that soft place and pull out her HandHeld, blinking and pinging with my message.
A voice deep inside my head starts screaming, This is your fault. You’re selfish. Hurting everyone around you so you can make your music. I know that voice. It’s my father, yelling at my mom before she left. Now I’ve gone and done the exact same thing. I wasn’t here for the person who needs me and loves me most because I wanted to play my stupid songs on the stupid radio for the one random stranger who might be listening. How could I be so selfish? Especially when it comes to Nonda—the only person who protected me when our family fell apart?
ORPHEUS
As much as I want to see my sister, I’m relieved to get out of the MediPlex and away from the endless back-and-forth between my parents. From inside my Cicada, I ping Arabella to let her know I’m free because we’ve been missing each other all day. First she was at a movie premiere, then a fashion show while I was visiting Al, and now she’s at an after-party for the release of a horror novel called The School for Broken Children in an old college where everyone is dressed as scholars as a joke. We agreed to meet for dinner, just the two of us at The Deep End, the hottest CelebuChef restaurant in the City, then we’ll hit another premiere or maybe a concert, depending on how we feel and how much Buzz Ara stills needs.
