Like a stalled train, civilization slowly rattled back into motion, with its usual burden of claptrap. The life he had now, in the civilized moving train, it was a parody of that past life. That burning, immediate life. He had even been in love then.
Today, he lived inside his kiosk. It was a pretty nice kiosk, today. Only a fool could fail to make a living in good times. He took care, he improvised, so he made a profit. He was slowly buying up some flats in an old apartment building, an ugly, unloved place, but sturdy and well located. When old age stole over him, when he was too weak to hustle in the market anymore, then he would live on the rents.
A football team scored on the big flat screen. The regulars cheered and banged their flimsy tables. Borislav raised his heavy head, and the bar’s walls reeled as he came to himself. He was such a cheap drunk now; he would really have to watch that.
Morning was painful. Borislav’s mother tiptoed in with muesli, yogurt, and coffee. Borislav put his bad foot into his mother’s plastic foot bath—that treatment often seemed to help him—and he paged through a crumbling yellow block of antique newspapers. The old arts district had always been a bookish place, and these often showed up in attics. Borislav never read the ancient “news” in the newspapers, which, during any local regime, consisted mostly of official lies. Instead, he searched for the strange things that the people had once desired.
Three huge, universal, dead phenomena haunted these flaking pages: petroleum cars, cinema, and cigarettes. The cars heavily dragged along their hundreds of objects and services: fuels, pistons, mufflers, makers of sparks. The cigarettes had garish paper packages, with lighters, humidors, and special trays just for their ashes. As for the movie stars, they were driving the cars and smoking the cigarettes.
The very oldest newspapers were downright phantasmagoric. All the newspapers, with their inky, frozen graphics, seemed to scream at him across their gulf of decades. The dead things harangued; they flattered; they shamed; they jostled each other on the paper pages. They bled margin space; they wept ink.
These things were strange, and yet, they had been desired. At first with a sense of daring, and then with a growing boldness, Borislav chose certain dead items to be digitally copied and revived. He re-released them into the contemporary flow of goods. For instance, by changing its materials and proportions, he’d managed to transform a Soviet-era desk telephone into a lightweight plastic rain hat. No one had ever guessed the origin of his experiments. Unlike the machine-generated new products—always slotted with such unhuman coolness into market niches—these revived goods stank of raw humanity. Raw purpose. Raw desire.
Once, there had been no Internet. And no Internet-of-Things, either, for that could only follow. There had only been the people. People wanting things, trying to make other people want their things. Capitalism, socialism, communism, those mattered little enough. Those were all period arrangements in a time that had no Internet.
The day’s quiet study restored Borislav’s good spirits. Next morning, his mother recommenced her laments about her lack of a daughter-in-law. Borislav left for work.
He found his kiosk pitifully stripped and empty, with a CLOSED sign in its dampspotted window. A raw hole loomed in the wall where the fabrikator had been torn free. This sudden loss of all his trade goods gave him a lofty thrill of panic.
Borislav savored that for a moment, then put the fear behind him. The neighborhood still surrounded his kiosk. The people would nourish it. He had picked an excellent location, during the darkest days. Once he’d sold them dirty bags of potatoes here, they’d clamored for wilted carrots. This life was easy now. This life was like a good joke.
He limped through the biometric door and turned on the lights.
Now, standing inside, he felt the kiosk’s true nature. A kiosk was a conduit. It was a temporary stall in the endless flow of goods.
His kiosk was fiberboard and glue: recycled materials, green and modern. It had air filters, insulated windows, a rugged little fuel cell, efficient lights, a heater grill in the floor. It had password-protected intrusion alarms. It had a medical scanner in the walls. It had smart-ink wallpaper with peppy graphics.
They had taken away his custom-shaped chair, and his music player, loaded with a fantastic mashed-up mulch of the complete pop hits of the twentieth century. He would have to replace those. That wouldn’t take him long.
He knelt on the bare floor, and taped a thick sheet of salvaged cardboard over the wintry hole in his wall. A loud rap came at his window. It was Fleka the Gypsy, one of his suppliers.
Borislav rose and stepped outside, reflexively locking his door, since this was Fleka. Fleka was the least dependable of his suppliers, because Fleka had no sense of time. Fleka could make, fetch, or filch most anything, but if you dared to depend on his word, Fleka would suddenly remember the wedding of some gypsy cousin, and vanish.
“I heard about your good luck, Boots,” grinned Fleka. “Is the maestro in need of new stock?”
Borislav rapped the empty window with his cane. “It’s as you see.”
Fleka slid to the trunk of his rusty car and opened it.
“Whatever that is,” said Borislav at once, “it’s much too big.”
“Give me one minute from your precious schedule, maestro,” said Fleka. “You, my kind old friend, with your lovely kiosk so empty, I didn’t bring you any goods. I brought you a factory! So improved! So new!”
“That thing’s not new, whatever it is.”
“See, it’s a fabrikator! Just like the last fabrikator I got for you, only this one is bigger, fancy, and much better! I got it from my cousin.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Fleka.”
Fleka hustled under his backseat and brought out a sample. It was a rotund doll of the American actress Marilyn Monroe. The doll was still unpainted. It was glossily black.
Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate retail movie star, was always recognizable, due to her waved coif, her lip mole, and her torpedo-like bust. The passage of a century had scarcely damaged her shelf appeal. The woman had become an immortal cartoon, like Betty Boop.
Fleka popped a hidden seam under Marilyn’s jutting bust. Inside the black Marilyn doll was a smaller Marilyn doll, also jet-black, but wearing less clothing. Then came a smaller, more risqué little Marilyn, and then a smaller one yet, and finally a crudely modeled little Marilyn, shiny black, nude, and the size of Borislav’s thumb.
“Nice celebrity branding,” Borislav admitted. “So what’s this material?” It seemed to be black china.
“It’s not wax, like that other fabrikator. This is carbon. Little straws of carbon. It came with the machine.”
Borislav ran his thumbnail across the grain of the material. The black Marilyn doll was fabricated in ridges, like the grooves in an ancient gramophone record. Fabs were always like that: they jet-sprayed their things by piling up thin layers; they stacked them up like pancakes. “‘Little straws of carbon.’ I never heard of that.”
“I’m telling you what my cousin told me. ‘Little nano tubes, little nano carbon.’ That’s what he said.” Fleka grabbed the round Marilyn doll like a football goalie, and raised both his hands overhead. Then, with all his wiry strength, he smacked the black doll against the rust-eaten roof of his car. Chips flew.
“You’ve ruined her!”
“That was my car breaking,” Fleka pointed out. “I made this doll this morning, out of old plans and scans from the Net. Then I gave it to my nephew, a nice big boy. I told him to break the doll. He broke a crowbar on this doll.”
Borislav took the black doll again, checked the seams and detailing, and rapped it with his cane. “You sell these dolls to anyone else, Fleka?”
“Not yet.”
“I could move a few of these. How much you asking?”
Fleka spread his hands. “I can make more. But I don’t know how to make the little straws of carbon. There’s a tutorial inside the machine. But it’s in Polish. I hate tutorials.”
B
orislav examined the fabrikator. The machine looked simple enough: it was a basic black shell, a big black hopper, a black rotating plate, a black spraying nozzle, and the black gearing of a 3-D axis. “Why is this thing so black?”
“It’s nice and shiny, isn’t it? The machine itself is made of little straws of carbon.”
“Your cousin got you this thing? Where’s the brand name? Where’s the serial number?”
“I swear he didn’t steal it! This fabrikator is a copy, see. It’s a pirate copy of another fabrikator in Warsaw. But nobody knows it’s a copy. Or if they do know, the cops won’t be looking for any copies around this town, that’s for sure.”
Borislav’s doubts overflowed into sarcasm. “You’re saying it’s a fabricator that copies fabrikators? It’s a fabbing fab fabber, that’s what you’re telling me, Fleka?”
A shrill wail of shock and alarm came from the front of the kiosk. Borislav hurried to see.
A teenage girl, in a cheap red coat and yellow winter boots, was sobbing into her cell phone. She was Jovanica, one of his best customers.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Oh! It’s you!” Jovanica snapped her phone shut and raised a skinny hand to her lips. “Are you still alive, Mr. Boots?”
“Why wouldn’t I be alive?”
“Well, what happened to you? Who robbed your store?”
“I’m not robbed. Everything has been sold, that’s all.”
Jovanica’s young face screwed up in doubt, rage, frustration, and grief. “Then where are my hair toys?”
“What?”
“Where are my favorite barrettes? My hair clips! My scrunchies and headbands and beautiful pins! There was a whole tree of them, right here! I picked new toys from that tree every day! I finally had it giving me just what I wanted!”
“Oh. That.” Borislav had sold the whirling rack of hair toys, along with its entire freight of goods.
“Your rack sold the best hair toys in town! So super and cool! What happened to it? And what happened to your store? It’s broken! There’s nothing left!”
“That’s true, ’Neetsa. You had a very special relationship with that interactive rack, but … well …” Borislav groped for excuses, and, with a leap of genius, he found one. “I’ll tell you a secret. You’re growing up now, that’s what.”
“I want my hair toys! Go get my rack right now!”
“Hair toys are for the nine-to-fifteen age bracket. You’re growing out of that market niche. You should be thinking seriously about earrings.”
Jovanica’s hands flew to her earlobes. “You mean pierce my ears?”
Borislav nodded. “High time.”
“Mama won’t let me do that.”
“I can speak to your mama. You’re getting to be a big girl now. Soon you’ll have to beat the boys away with a stick.”
Jovanica stared at the cracks in the pavement. “No, I won’t.”
“Yes, you will,” said Borislav, hefting his cane reflexively.
Fleka the Gypsy had been an interested observer. Now he spoke up. “Don’t cry about your pretty things: because Boots here is the King of Kiosks. He can get you all the pretty things in the world!”
“Don’t you listen to the gypsy,” said Borislav. “Listen, Jovanica: Your old hair-toy tree, I’m sorry, it’s gone for good. You’ll have to start over with a brand-new one. It won’t know anything about what you want.”
“After all my shopping? That’s terrible!”
“Never you mind. I’ll make you a different deal. Since you’re getting to be such a big girl, you’re adding a lot of value by making so many highly informed consumer choices. So, next time, there will be a new economy for you. I’ll pay you to teach that toy tree just what you want to buy.”
Fleka stared at him. “What did you just say? You want to pay this kid for shopping ?”
“That’s right.”
“She’s a little kid!”
“I’m not a little kid!” Jovanica took swift offense. “You’re a dirty old gypsy!”
“Jovanica is the early hair-toy adopter, Fleka. She’s the market leader here. Whatever hair toys Jovanica buys, all the other girls come and buy. So, yeah. I’m gonna cut her in on that action. I should have done that long ago.”
Jovanica clapped her hands. “Can I have lots of extra hair toys, instead of just stupid money?”
“Absolutely. Of course. Those loyal-customer rewards will keep you coming back here, when you ought to be doing your homework.”
Fleka marveled. “It’s completely gone to your head, cashing out your whole stock at once. A man of your age, too.”
The arts district never lacked for busybodies. Attracted by the little drama, four of them gathered round Borislav’s kiosk. When they caught him glowering at them, they all pretended to need water from his fountain. At least his fountain was still working.
“Here comes my mama,” said Jovanica. Her mother, Ivana, burst headlong from the battered doors of a nearby block of flats. Ivana wore a belted house robe, a flung-on muffler, a heavy scarf, and brightly knitted woolen house slippers. She brandished a laden pillowcase.
“Thank God they haven’t hurt you!” said Ivana, her breath puffing in the chilly air. She opened her pillowcase. It held a steam iron, a hair dryer, an old gilt mirror, a nickeled hip flask, a ragged fur stole, and a lidded, copper-bottomed saucepan.
“Mr. Boots is all right, Mama,” said Jovanica. “They didn’t steal anything. He sold everything!”
“You sold your kiosk?” said Ivana, and the hurt and shock deepened in her eyes. “You’re leaving us?”
“It was business,” Borislav muttered. “Sorry for the inconvenience. It’ll be a while before things settle down.”
“Honestly, I don’t need these things. If these things will help you in any way, you’re very welcome to them.”
“Mama wants you to sell these things,” Jovanica offered, with a teen’s oppressive helpfulness. “Then you can have the money to fix your store.”
Borislav awkwardly patted the kiosk’s fiberboard wall. “Ivana, this old place doesn’t look like much, so empty and with this big hole … but, well, I had some luck.”
“Ma’am, you must be cold in those house slippers,” said Fleka the Gypsy. With an elegant swoop of his arm, he gestured at the gilt-and-glassed front counter of the Three Cats Café. “May I get you a hot cappuccino?”
“You’re right, sir, it’s cold here.” Ivana tucked the neck of her pillowcase, awkwardly, over her arm. “I’m glad things worked out for you, Borislav.”
“Yes, things are all right. Really.”
Ivana aimed a scowl at the passersby, who watched her with a lasting interest. “We’ll be going now, ’Neetsa.”
“Mama, I’m not cold. The weather’s clearing up!”
“We’re going.” They left.
Fleka picked at his discolored canine with his forefinger. “So, maestro. What just happened there?”
“She’s a nice kid. She’s hasty sometimes. The young are like that. That can’t be helped.” Borislav shrugged. “Let’s talk our business inside.”
He limped into his empty kiosk. Fleka wedged in behind him and managed to slam the door. Borislav could smell the man’s rich, goulash-tinged breath.
“I was never inside one of these before,” Fleka remarked, studying every naked seam for the possible point of a burglar’s pry bar. “I thought about getting a kiosk of my own, but, well, a man gets so restless.”
“It’s all about the product flow divided by the floor space. By that measure, a kiosk is superefficient retailing. It’s about as efficient as any sole proprietor can do. But it’s a one-man enterprise. So, well, a man’s just got to go it alone.”
Fleka looked at him with wise, round eyes. “That girl who cried so much about her hair. That’s not your girl, is she?”
“What? No.”
“What happened to the father, then? The flu got him?”
“She was born long after the
flu, but yeah, you’re right, her father passed away.” Borislav coughed. “He was a good friend of mine. A soldier. Really good-looking guy. His kid is gorgeous.”
“So you didn’t do anything about that. Because you’re not a soldier, and you’re not rich, and you’re not gorgeous.”
“Do anything about what?”
“A woman like that Ivana, she isn’t asking for some handsome soldier or some rich-guy boss. A woman like her, she wants maybe a pretty dress. Maybe a dab of perfume. And something in her bed that’s better than a hot-water bottle.”
“Well, I’ve got a kiosk and a broken leg.”
“All us men have a broken leg. She thought you had nothing. She ran right down here, with anything she could grab for you, stuffed into her pillowcase. So you’re not an ugly man. You’re a stupid man.” Fleka thumped his chest. “I’m the ugly man. Me. I’ve got three wives: the one in Bucharest, the one in Lublin, and the wife in Linz isn’t even a gypsy. They’re gonna bury me standing, maestro. That can’t be helped, because I’m a man. But that’s not what you are. You’re a fool.”
“Thanks for the free fortune-telling. You know all about this, do you? She and I were here during the hard times. That’s what. She and I have a history.”
“You’re a fanatic. You’re a geek. I can see through you like the windows of this kiosk. You should get a life.” Fleka thumped the kiosk’s wallpaper, and sighed aloud. “Look, life is sad, all right? Life is sad even when you do get a life. So. Boots. Now I’m gonna tell you about this fabrikator of mine, because you got some spare money, and you’re gonna buy it from me. It’s a nice machine. Very sweet. It comes from a hospital. It’s supposed to make bones. So the tutorial is all about making bones, and that’s bad, because nobody buys bones. If you are deaf and you want some new little black bones in your ears, that’s what this machine is for. Also, these black toys I made with it, I can’t paint them. The toys are much too hard, so the paint breaks right off. Whatever you make with this fabrikator, it’s hard and black, and you can’t paint it, and it belongs by rights inside some sick person. Also, I can’t read the stupid tutorials. I hate tutorials. I hate reading.”
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 43
