The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future

by Thomas Nevins

  “Apricot jam and coffee too, while we’re at it,” George said. A guy could dream. He knew they didn’t have anything to eat in here; they would have to go to the communal dining room. They even had to boil their drinking water. George thought maybe Patsy would forget that she was hungry. But he was too!

  He wrapped his arms around Patsy’s shoulders and drew her closer to him. She came easily. They both looked toward the mountain, breathing in rhythm. George was surprised to see flecks of white in the windows of the houses across from them on the mountainside. George was surprised there were houses there at all.

  THEY HEADED TO the camp’s common mess hall. The Conglomerates called the place the Coots’ Café, but it reminded George of the cafeteria at Susan E. Wagner High School back in Staten Island. It had the same drone of conversation and dragging feet. It even smelled the same, industrial cooking and sweat. He had tried to avoid going to the cafeteria because he thought Patsy might be found out, or that it was a breeding ground for infectious viruses. And he was afraid that Patsy and he would become separated or for some reason that she would be taken away from him, or worse. He wasn’t sure why he felt this way, but that wasn’t going to stop him from worrying about it. Where would they bring her? Where was she going to go? But George didn’t want to think about an alternative to this place.

  It wasn’t as if there were doctors or attendants at the mess hall. All the work was done by other Coots. But there were cameras everywhere, and George couldn’t trust the Coots who worked in the mess hall. Maybe they were offered perks for turning in other Coots to the authorities for “treatment”—if Coots argued, or if a Coot had serious health concerns—in order to make room for more paying customers.

  Patsy and George worked their way through the line and got their oatmeal and water. George couldn’t believe they served hot oatmeal in the hundred-degree desert, but hunger had its own demands.

  They sat down at a table with like-minded souls. Some complained of the heat and the food, but George was glad for the company and it gave him a chance to compare Patsy’s condition with others. She didn’t seem any worse than some of the folks who shared the table, and George took comfort in that. Patsy stared at her dish, and George’s comfort vanished. Feeding her would be a sure sign that she couldn’t take care of herself; everyone at the table was eating their food; everyone was eating but Patsy.

  George willed her to pick up the spoon, and when that didn’t work, he whispered, “Like this,” and showed Patsy how it was done. On George’s second demonstration Patsy leaned over and stole the oatmeal from his spoon with a gulp and a smile. This might work, George thought, and decided to make a game of it. Patsy responded as if she were a queen worthy of such attention, and he couldn’t tell what the men and women at the table thought.

  One of the skinniest guys George had ever seen approached the table with a towel over his shoulder and a bucket in his hand. He even looked like a custodian from high school.

  “Whatta ya think, this is a cruise?” he said. George doubted that anyone here, no matter how deep the delusions, would confuse this with a cruise. “Let’s get a move on,” the guy said. Yeah, George thought, it was just like high school.

  EVEN THOUGH ALL of the possessions—photos and souvenirs, the tangible accumulation of Patsy and George’s life—had never arrived, Patsy hadn’t stopped looking for them, every day, in fact. George let her do it. He thought the review might lead Patsy to memories of their life and help keep her mind alive.

  How Patsy loved those dishes, her periwinkle-blue china set. Truth was, George didn’t miss them much, but he thought Patsy would enjoy seeing them.

  Maybe she’d eat better on them, George thought. And she’d probably eat better if we had a little food.

  He understood now that their lives had been stolen from them, like so many periwinkle-blue china dishes. The contributions they had made in the world had been received without gratitude, and Patsy and George had been cast aside, depleted goods. And there was a whole heap of such goods, a desert full of used people, sent to turn into dust in the Santa Ana wind. Most of them were too old or too defeated to fight back, or even to resent it, but for George the wonders of this Western world kept sidetracking his anger.

  George looked out the open door and listened to the desert creatures. Patsy didn’t like the sound of the owl; she thought the coyotes sounded like lost babies, the bats like angry cats. But it was the sound of those mourning doves that got her goat. Their plaintive coo used to drive her cat crazy back in Staten Island, and they still annoyed her. When they began their song, Patsy’s head would pick up. The cry seemed to cut through her disease, and George, who used to hate them too, now had come to enjoy the little drama between the birds and his wife. He’d come to view it as an intellectual exercise that worked the muscle in Patsy’s failing brain.

  George had decided that he was going to have to learn a lot about his new environment if he hoped to relate it all to Patsy, let alone help her survive. Also, George figured, he needed to hone his intellectual capacities, what remained of them. This, of course, presented an additional problem: Like how?

  As usual, Patsy took care of that, and, as usual, in a very unusual way.

  GEORGE HAD DOZED off on the back step. He felt his shoulder shake, and the movement brought him around. At first George thought it was the middle of the night, and then he noticed how bright it was. He became aware that Patsy was sitting on the side of the step outside and was not in bed next to him. She had something on her lap and she was talking.

  “Isn’t this yours?” Patsy was repeating, and she was tugging on the sleeve of his shirt. There was a laptop computer on her lap.

  George finally said, “What’d you say?”

  George looked down and saw the old laptop computer. She must have thought this was his, as it was just like the one they used to have way back when. It must have been fifteen years ago, when their granddaughter Christine was a teenager and she used to e-mail her grandfather about school, or home, or just about her day. George loved those e-mails, and he would read them out loud to Patsy and she would join him in his response.

  The laptop was clumsy and weighed a ton. “Where’d you find this?” George asked.

  Patsy replied, “I don’t know.” And it looked as though she were going to cry from George’s questioning. She must have felt as though she had done something wrong, from the way George was speaking to her.

  “Thank you, honey,” George said. “How’d you know I was looking for that?” Patsy seemed to feel better and pointed toward the kitchenette. George stood up, walked inside, put the computer on the kitchen table, and covered it with the blanket from the bed. The cabinet beneath the microwave was open, and he reached in and pulled out a tangle of two cables. One was to attach to the electrical outlet with a battery recharge box, and the other was the old modem and phone cable. George thought he could probably recharge the battery in the outlet that ran the microwave, and he would worry about the phone jack later. He wondered if whoever had left the laptop had also left instructions. George realized that they were probably on the computer. He wondered how he was going to get into the computer to read them. He was getting very excited, and then he froze. He twisted his neck as he looked all around him. Patsy flinched, startled. She wondered what George was looking for. What George was looking for was whether someone was watching. Could the security cameras have picked them up? There were no sirens, no alarms to alert the authorities. Were they busted?

  “Well, what exactly could they bust us for?” George asked himself. “Let’s see: For the possession of stolen property, possession of unreported personal property, possession of an unauthorized communication device? Insubordination? Treason?” George said, “For starters.”

  George peeled the blanket away from the laptop. It was a dinosaur but it looked to be in pretty good condition. He was going to open it, but then thought better of it. True, the Conglomerate Rangers hadn’t broken down their door yet, but George de
cided he’d better wait until he calmed down.

  “Holy…,” George said. “We have the phone hookup and the electric outlet right here by the cabinet.” As soon as he had said this, he realized that this had been used for this purpose before. The cabinet was a communication station, a renegade outpost in the desert, and that made George nervous. “Holy” was right.

  GEORGE WAITED UNTIL the middle of the next day to hook up the wire to the back of the computer. Since no one had approached them at their home or at the Coots’ Café, he thought the authorities must not know about their finding the computer. His heart was racing as he pushed the plug into the wall. He jumped when the machine began to whirr. He had never been so excited at the sound of these synthetic strings before. In fact, he’d rarely heard them. Now it sounded as though he’d entered heaven.

  George couldn’t click through the fields fast enough. He went through all the simple steps and had all of the files scrolling in front of him, and he didn’t see anything that he recognized. He went again to the beginning and started looking at the file names, line by line. Somewhere along the line Patsy got up and joined him.

  “Start here,” Patsy said, stabbing at the air. George ignored her. He was really starting to worry that he’d done something wrong. “Start here. Start here.” Now Patsy was jabbing his side with her two index fingers.

  He typed in the letters S-t-a-r, and even before he had entered the second t, a file popped up on the screen, and the file opened with a flash and a whoosh of sound of the word “welcome” as it appeared on the screen.

  “If this should be found by the authorities,” a voice said, startling Patsy and George, “there is little here that the authorities don’t know. The point of this program is to inform the residents that life in the Conglomerate camps isn’t the only way. There is an alternative to their tyrannical rule.” It sounded like the voice was taking a breath. “The authorities have got to feel like prisoners too, stuck in the same conditions as the Coots.” The voice paused. “There isn’t enough manpower to track you down if you leave, or to care. Start to store what you need; prepare, rest up, come north, and join us….” The voice trailed off.

  “What’re you supposed to do, talk to this thing?” George said. Then it hit George that they had become like spies awaiting instructions. There was an insurrection going on in their room. He could only imagine the penalty for treason here in the Conglomerate Wild West.

  George typed in the word “next” and pressed enter, and what seemed like minutes passed before the voice resumed its narration. Patsy and George both jumped.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” the voice said as the screen filled with text subtitles to the audio. “You are now located in the Valley of the Sun in central Arizona.” A map of the state appeared with the cursor blinking at their position. “You are in a Conglomerate-operated community of anywhere from fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand residents. There are camps scattered throughout the state and neighboring region whose function is to warehouse the elderly.” The voice took a breath, the locations turned colors on the screen, and the text waited for the next word.

  “There is a segregationist approach to the makeup of these camps, but it is not a segregation based on race, creed, et cetera, but rather by ailment or disease. The authorities are responsible for deciding who suffers from what debilitation and sentencing the resident to ‘the appropriate facility.’ This is a cost control mechanism to limit the medical staff needed for treatment, a mass-produced disease treated by the least amount of staff possible.”

  George looked over at Patsy and thought about the idea that the authorities could separate by disease. Why did the Conglomerates care?

  “The Conglomerates rationale for this system of segregation is for the alleged care of the afflicted,” the voice said. “They market the concept to Congress that it is better for the patient and the system to have the disease separate and centralized, to maximize the employees they have to handle the care.” The voice took a breath; George didn’t.

  “You are currently in a holding facility, one that receives all comers prior to the determination by the authorities of where the resident belongs.”

  George was determined not to submit Patsy to any tests, or himself either. The two of them had avoided the authorities, so how were the authorities to know about Patsy? It was then that he seized upon the hope that this message was for him and would tell him how Patsy and he could get around this separation stuff.

  “There’s a guy getting out of a truck,” Patsy said, and there was. George panicked, pulled the plug for the laptop out by the wire, and everything stopped. The screen went blank before it turned black. Patsy looked over at George. He grabbed the blanket and threw it over the machine and the countertop.

  The guy was opening the back of a truck, pulling out a small hand truck. He dropped a large water bottle onto the hand truck, pulled out a rectangular box, placed it on top of the bottle, and started to wheel the hand truck up toward their door.

  “Water,” the guy yelled out as he made his way up the walk.

  “He’s delivering water,” George said, as if he didn’t believe it.

  “Yeah, I am,” the guy answered. Patsy looked past his wide-brimmed hat and the Conglomerate uniform, and she saw that the guy was one of them, a Coot. The guy said, “You’re gonna have to help me too.”

  “What do you want me to do?” George said.

  “Well, for one thing,” the guy said, “you could get out of the way.”

  The man headed right toward the cabinet that the microwave was on, and when he was right next to the cabinet, he swung the hand truck around and brought it to a halt. He took a box cutter from his hip pocket and sliced the top of the box open like a surgeon. He wedged the water stand in next to the cabinet.

  George began to sweat as soon as the water stand was next to the computer. At least that’s how George saw it—as if the guy were headed right for the computer. Did he know? George thought. Could he tell?

  “You all right?” the guy asked.

  George nodded.

  “Welcome,” the guy said, “but we still got to lift this bottle up here.” The guy reached over and plugged a wire from the stand into the plug below the microwave. That was where George had just had the computer plugged in. The laptop wire hung behind the cabinet. The sweat was rolling off George.

  “You sure you’re all right?” the guy asked George again. “Well, anyway, you’re in business. Hot and cold water when you want it.”

  George thought this guy sounded a little like the voice on the computer. He wanted to hear more. “Why are they giving us water?” George asked. “There aren’t any other amenities.”

  This was funny, the guy thought. There weren’t many people who asked him anything. While his real mission was to network candidates up north to Dr. Dunne’s medical refuge, he would look for the best and the worst—the best because Dunne needed individuals that could help, and the worst because Dunne’s facility was the best for those who needed the most help.

  The deliveryman said, “I didn’t ask ’em why, but I’m glad they do. It keeps me employed and hydrated. If you ask me, and you did, the real reason is Congress needed a pet project as part of the Family Relief Act.” The guy took a breath; he wanted to make the most out of this chance to give his opinion. “In this case it fell under elder care, health, and nutrition. The Conglomerates would provide drinking water, and as far as they were concerned that took care of both health and nutrition. Besides, somebody and their constituents have to be making out on this deal, and whoever sold them this piece of crap made out pretty well too, that’s for sure.” The guy tapped the top of the empty box. “Their day will come, though, when the people have their way,” he said. He hoped he hadn’t gone too far. Once he got started…“In any case, I gotta go.”

  “Wait a minute,” George said. He wanted to find out if there was a way he could verify the information he had just received from the file on the laptop. George
was about to ask him, when he realized that no matter what this guy said, he might have been sent by the authorities to determine what their disabilities were, and how bad, and where they really belonged. George wanted him out of there. “Well, I guess you’re busy,” George said. “You’d better go. There’s probably a lot of people waiting on their water.”

  “The people I work for,” the guy said, “they don’t hold much for marriage, family, commitment—or much else, for that matter. They’ll take you away from your wife for most any reason. Erratic behavior, for instance,” the guy said, looking at George not Patsy. “So, if you don’t know, or remember, what it is you’re talking about, the best thing is to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Well, I’ll try,” George said. “And thanks for the water. Can we expect to see you again?” He hoped to get the guy’s schedule so he’d be better prepared next time.

  Wife’s kind of quiet, though fine-looking, the man thought, especially for being a biddy and all. Who knows, Dunne might be able to use them. It wouldn’t kill him to keep an eye on these two, he thought as he looked at Patsy. No, it wouldn’t kill him at all.

  “Well,” the guy said, “I expect you can be expecting me again. Thanks for the offer.”

  What offer? George thought. But instead he said, “Always welcome.”

  The guy tipped his hat toward Patsy and headed back to his truck.

  We

  Christine found the envelope with her name written on it. It had been pushed under her door. Her first thought was to call the investigators and report her find, but she dismissed the idea and went into the bathroom. She reached into the cabinet beneath the sink for a plastic bag and the small doctor’s bag she kept as an emergency kit. She removed a pair of rubber gloves and a surgical mask, put them on, opened the medicine cabinet, took out tweezers, and headed back to the front door. She picked up the envelope with the tweezers and dropped it into the baggie and went back into the bathroom. She held the baggie up to the light. She opened the toilet seat in case she had to dispose of whatever was inside. She used the tweezers and pulled the folded paper from the envelope. She unfolded the paper with the tip of a file and glanced at it quickly before she placed it into the bag.