The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  He walked up to her, tried looking into her eyes, but quickly took refuge—as he often did—by focusing on a point just below her eyes. He put his face up to hers and tried to kiss her with the physical version of his feathery app. But Ellen pulled his head toward hers and kissed him deeply. Then, both of them eager to escape each other’s eyes, and the awkward questions sure to follow, they hugged.

  Ellen also came to the meeting with apprehensions. She had gotten to know Ralf in the virtual worlds as the “real” Ellen. If he was put off at first by her less-than-perfect skin or body, he had overcome that, she believed, and had come to love her as a person unlike any other in the world, real or virtual. She was unique. Now, though, she was unveiling herself as an Artemis, a genetic package she shared with thousands. She and her parents had rejected her real self, and settled for a type. This filled her with shame. Worse, she feared that Ralf would prefer her mail-order looks to the “real” avatar she had created in such faithful detail. It was almost a no-win proposition: If Ralf adored her as an Artemis, Ellen would feel scorned.

  Ralf adored her. He couldn’t help himself. Ellen, while loving the flesh-and-blood Ralf, with all of his shyness and awkward glances, couldn’t forgive him for preferring the Artemis. She often wanted to escape with Ralf into virtual worlds, where she could be her original self. He resisted. “Let me just love you as you are, in real life,” he said as they lay together one evening on his couch in Adams Morgan.

  “You don’t want me for who I really am,” she said, pulling away from him.

  “I do,” he said. “The only you that exists in this world is the one I’m touching right now.” With that he reached a hand up the back of her blouse.

  Ellen wrestled free. She argued angrily that the real Ellen was the avatar. But this line, with its inherent contradiction, was tough to defend.

  Nonetheless, that winter they moved in together in the apartment on Irving Street, in the Mount Pleasant section of Washington. Yet as their physical lives converged, they found themselves straying from each other. Ralf began avoiding love with the flesh-and-blood Ellen, and all the sensitivities it stirred. It was far easier, he found, to make love in virtual worlds to women who looked just like her. He convinced himself that by loving avatars that looked like his girlfriend, he was remaining, at least to a small degree, faithful.

  Sometimes in his virtual ramblings, Ralf would see Ellen’s avatar circulating nearby, looking ever more ungainly. She was still hunting for people who might love her for who she “really” was. But he was sure she would never put herself through another reckoning. She had already endured one. Why would the next be any different? Ralf found this sad. To avoid Ellen on dating sites, he disguised his avatar, replacing his round western eyes with Asian ones, and pulling his hair back into a ponytail.

  The Mount Pleasant apartment grew largely into a “shelter”—a place for couples to park their bodies and carry out other physical upkeep. Inertia kept them together, along with the improved economics of shared living. When asked, they told friends and relatives that one day they might have a child. But nothing in their relationship pointed in that direction.

  3/6/72 3:47 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  As they make their way through El Paso, Ellen finally gets through to Ralf’s brother, Simon. He gives her an address on Mesa Street, which she passes on to the car. It promptly turns south, skirts the downtown, with its bank towers and hotels, and plunges into a section of the city that looks like Mexico.

  “Weird,” Ralf says, looking around. Much of the traffic is on horseback, with men, women, and even children clip-clopping along the street and up onto the sidewalks. The Sheng-li settles into a trotting speed. The brick buildings look at least a couple centuries old, their sagging porches held up by rusting iron struts.

  Ralf points out the porches, but Ellen is busy in her boost, learning about Juárez. “Get this,” she says. “The strongman over there, Don Paquito, has a harem and pet tigers that roam through his mansion. He has a glass eye that he likes to take out and put in people’s cocktails, for a joke.”

  Ralf nods absently. “Are you sure Simon lives around here?” he says. “Doesn’t look like his kind of neighborhood.”

  “My geotags are fading and blinking,” Ellen says, shaking her head.

  “It’s probably all that crap you carry around in your boost,” Ralf says. “You don’t need all those archives when you can get stuff off the network.”

  “They don’t take up any space at all, compared to video,” Ellen says. “In any case, the network’s feeling a little iffy around here.”

  They pass a beet-shaped woman wearing red boots and short pants three or four sizes too small. “Do you think they still have … streetwalkers down here?” Ralf asks.

  “Looks that way,” Ellen says.

  “But why advertise physically, when you can do it in the boost?”

  “I bet most of her clients are old,” Ellen says, “and maybe they’re wild. I mean we’re only”—she checks for a second—“about 297 meters from the border.” She opens the window and wrinkles her perfect nose. “Smells weird,” she says.

  “Horse shit,” Ralf says.

  “No. It’s more industrial.”

  “Probably pollution from Juárez. I think they drive old gasoline cars over there.”

  “Drive them? With steering wheels?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  The car continues into an area of smaller houses with tiny fenced-in yards. Then, right where they’re expecting to find Simon’s house, they come across a market. Ellen has never seen such colors. She snaps images of oranges, mangos, carrots, peppers that look impossibly red, and enormous bunches of spices she doesn’t recognize. In one stall, a woman is selling a pile of weavings, most of them in shades of red and blue. “Cool neighborhood,” she says.

  “I just can’t believe he would live here,” Ralf murmurs. He asks her to recheck the address.

  Ellen tries, but gets no signal. “Maybe we’re too close to the dead zone,” she says, pointing toward Juárez.

  A series of powerful explosions echo in the distance, rattling the tin roofs around them. It startles Ellen, who grabs Ralf’s arm. He looks up at the sky. “It isn’t thunder,” he says. He surveys the horizon, east to west, looking at the shanties of the wild city. “Looks miserable over there.”

  Ellen finally locates the address and sees that they’re on South Mesa instead of North Mesa. She gives the Sheng-li new directions. As it swings around, she looks back longingly at the market. “I’m going to have to come back,” she says.

  Five

  3/6/72 4:38 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  The address leads them to the Cavalry Club. It sits on the east side of North Mesa Street, just a few blocks from the university. The parking lot is nearly deserted. But standing by the wooden door, bareback and unhitched, stands a single white stallion, its snout buried in a creosote bush. “We should get one of these things,” Ralf says. He walks up to the animal and pats its neck.

  “Stay back,” Ellen says, “they kick.”

  “Not with their front legs.”

  “Up front they bite.” She walks in an exaggerated arc, distancing herself from the animal and her wild boyfriend, and pulls open the door. Ralf gives the horse one more pat and follows her in.

  The inside of the Cavalry Club feels like an old barn. Bridles, saddles, spurs, and other horse paraphernalia hang from the rafters. The floor, made of wide wooden planks, is sprinkled with sawdust. Country music is playing, but not loud enough to drown out the beeps coming from a couple of vintage game machines by the bar. Ralf recognizes one of them—Pong—from a throwback app he ran years ago in his boost. At one end of the bar sits an antique black telephone, probably from the 1920s or ’30s, with the handset in a raised cradle and a circular dial on its face. Chairs are mounted upside down on the long wooden tables. A young man with a broom nods at the visitors and finishes sweeping under the last table. Then he
deliberately returns the broom to a closet before taking his place behind the bar.

  “That your horse out there?” Ralf asks.

  The bartender, who looks barely old enough to drink, doesn’t bother to answer the question. “Your brother should be here in about ten minutes,” he says.

  Ralf is taken aback. “You knew I was coming?”

  “I have eyes,” the bartender says. “You’re practically identical.” He stands silent, studying Ralf, and then says, “You know, I’m not getting anything from you.”

  “Long story,” Ralf says. Without elaborating, he orders a beer for himself and a chlorophyll drink for Ellen. Then he watches quietly as Ellen engages the young bartender. She learns that his name is Chui, a Mexican nickname for Jesus. He studies philosophy at UTEP. When Ellen asks why the bar is so empty, he says that “no one” comes there, even though it’s only two blocks from campus, maybe because the drinks cost twice as much as anywhere else. It’s a lucky thing, he tells her, that he’s paid by the hour, and not from tips.

  “Why would they charge twice as much for drinks?” she asks, looking around. “Not enough sawdust?”

  “You’d have to ask his brother,” Chui says, gesturing with his head toward Ralf.

  Ralf, who has drained his beer, signals for another. This is the first real drink he’s had in years. Some people still come to real bars for the wet-brain experience. But judging from the crowd, the retro boom hasn’t extended to the Cavalry Club. He wonders how his brother makes a living with this joint.

  Ralf’s first (remaining) memory of Simon features an angry thirteen-year-old standing at the top of a staircase in their Chevy Chase home, screaming at their mother. The boy is pudgy. He looks slightly feminine. Ralf wonders, as he pictures this scene, if that gender analysis intruded years later into the memory, as a revision. The wet brain is susceptible to such mischief, he knows. In the memory, Simon is yelling, “You killed him!” Crying and balling his fists, he repeats those three words again and again until he’s hoarse. Not a great memory to kick off the relationship, Ralf thinks.

  It only got worse. At the center of the issue was the boost. Simon didn’t get his until he was twelve years old. Like many in his generation, he struggled with it. Puberty was hard enough, and now he had to deal with another tool in his head. He had trouble controlling it. The software commands, which came instinctively to Ralf, confused him. He blamed the boost for practically every problem in his life, for his pimples and his clumsiness. He even blamed it for the powerful new desires coursing through his body which made him want to hug and kiss other boys. Those tormented him and interfered with his sleep. It was true that the boost helped Simon with his schoolwork. Even as he struggled with commands, he managed to call up historical facts fairly easily, and run quadratic equations. But other classmates adjusted far more quickly. So in comparison to them, the boost made him dumber. That angered him. The saddest part, though, was that the boost led to the chip wars in South America, into which his father and his father’s entire family had disappeared, never to be heard from again. Meanwhile, it was his mother, serving in government, who helped cap the entire country. From Simon’s perspective, she was solely responsible for the globe’s technological leap, and all of its repercussions—or at least the negative ones. As he repeated loudly that one night, and again in later years, he blamed her for his father’s death. It gave him little comfort that his baby brother, capped before he could walk, shifted effortlessly between his two brains, and appeared to be developing into a more advanced line of human. It was also clear, at least to Simon, that Stella adored the baby boy—and loved him far more than she did the angry pimply-faced and boost-challenged adolescent screaming at her from the top of the stairs.

  Stella was struggling, too. Barely thirty years old, she found herself alone with a rebellious boy and a precocious infant. What’s more, China’s growing dominance fueled the growth of America First!, which quickly grew into the nation’s leading political force. It marked the rise of Rev. Tommy Q. Foley. In barely three years, he rose from leading the country’s largest megachurch, in the suburbs of Dallas, to Speaker of the House. Foley, it was well known, answered to the nation’s preeminent lobbyist, John Vallinger.

  With the America First! takeover, Stella lost her job in the Senate and moved with her two boys back to New Jersey. Simon grew only angrier. Stella ended up sending him to a progressive boarding school near New Hope, in the Philadelphia suburbs. Her mother was all too happy to bankroll this chapter of Simon’s education, if only to remove the rebellious boy from the household.

  Ralf takes a sip from his beer and looks at Ellen. She and Chui have stopped talking, and are messaging instead. She’s smiling, and looking happier than she has since they left DC. Her glass of green liquid looks untouched.

  “Excuse me,” Ralf says, clinking his glass with his finger.

  Chui and Ellen both look at him.

  “You said Simon would be here in ten minutes?” he says.

  “Ten, twenty minutes, a half hour,” Chui says. “When it comes to numbers, he’s not always real precise.”

  “Can’t you message him?”

  Chui leans forward on his elbows and looks at Ralf. “How well do you know your brother?” he says. He flashes a quick smile to Ellen. This has probably been the theme of their messaging.

  “We haven’t seen a lot of each other,” Ralf admits.

  “Well, I don’t think he messages with anybody,” Chui says. “He’s a throwback kind of guy. He actually writes notes by hand.”

  Ellen laughs. “How does he send them? Carrier pigeon?”

  “Sometimes, yes,” Chui says gravely.

  3/6/72 5:52 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  The sun sets over the Franklins in streaks of purple and orange as hulking Oscar Espinoza directs his KIFF Wrangler across the east side of El Paso and turns up Trans Mountain Road. In the middle of Espinoza’s broad face sits a nose that has been compacted and bent to the left. Its value—and a questionable one at that—is largely ornamental. Espinoza breathes mostly through his mouth.

  His mission on this Sunday evening, which popped in as a message from George Smedley, is to stop by the Cavalry Club, on Mesa, and keep an eye on Ralf Alvare, who appears to be in the parking lot. “Don’t interfere with him,” Smedley messaged. “Whatever you do, don’t zap him.”

  This is a reference to Espinoza’s last assignment. Under the orders of Tyler Dahl, he was tracking a geneticist who had surprised people in Washington by traveling from his labs in Bethesda directly to El Paso. The fear was that the scientist, like others before him, would cross into Juárez, carrying his secrets into the so-called dead zone. Espinoza prevented this from happening, by zapping him with the llegal boost-scrubbing tool Dahl had provided. He must have pushed the button too hard, because the scientist fell dead at the border. It took all of Vallinger’s connections in El Paso, and a fortune in fees, to keep the case out of court.

  During this ordeal, Espinoza suffered a series of debilitating headaches. Out of nowhere, it seemed, searing pain would shoot from a molar to the back of his head. The pain brought tears to his eyes. At first, he went to a dentist, thinking that one of his teeth was rotting, or impacted. The dentist found nothing, and the headaches continued. It was only later that Espinoza figured out that Vallinger—or Tyler Dahl—had the controls to his boost, and could produce and call off the headaches with simple commands. An app instructed the nerves to create pain, just the way others told them to simulate the taste of a Tecate beer or produce orgasms.

  Espinoza now understands, and even accepts, that Vallinger has access to his boost, as well as the tools to manipulate it. The man is powerful, and he pays well. What torments Oscar Espinoza is the idea that someone on Vallinger’s staff might one day administer a killer headache and then, perhaps, receive a message, or maybe a lunch invitation, and simply forget about the employee in El Paso, doubled up in pain. In that circumstance, Espinoza thinks, he will hold the zapper
right to his temple and push the button. The last victim of his tool, he suspects, will be himself.

  Espinoza crosses the mountain and sees the valley of Juárez stretched out in the distance. Its sparkling lights are dimmed by a cloud of smog hanging over the city and stretching into South El Paso. He looks at the tiny dots circulating on the roads. Ancient cars. He gets a pang of nostalgia for his driving years. Those distant memories, lodged only in his wet brain, seem almost like a dream now. The mountain on the horizon carries the same message it has for more than a century. The big white letters read: La Biblia Es La Verdad. Leela, or THE BIBLE IS THE TRUTH. READ IT. As Espinoza’s KIFF turns south on I-10 and heads toward Mesa, he wonders about religion in the wild world. Would those people actually page through the physical book—and believe the words? Espinoza ransacks his boost and finds a copy of the Bible, an audio version, and a few old movies with biblical themes: The Robe, The Ten Commandments, and a vintage HBO documentary on a twentieth-century athlete, Moses Malone. Maybe one day he’ll take a look, he tells himself.

  When Espinoza pulls into the Cavalry Club, he parks next to an orange Sheng-li. Keeping a safe distance from a white stallion standing near the door, he walks into the tavern. Two people are seated at the bar, a dark-haired man with a couple days of beard growth and a stunning blond-haired woman who looks his way. Espinoza recognizes her look. It’s one of the genetic packages, but he can’t come up with the name. Juno? Diana? He searches her image in his boost and comes up with it: Artemis.

  He sits at the far end of the bar and orders a seltzer. The bartender serves him his drink and returns to the other two. Nobody pays much attention to Espinoza, at least once they take in his nose. He looks casually around the tavern. Piled high near the bathroom is a mountain of paper, probably for packaging. He looks toward the trio to his right. Funny, he thinks. He’s picking up only two signals. They wouldn’t hire wild barmen at places like this, would they? Sipping his drink, he ponders the potential benefits. They probably work for cheap, the poor losers. It would be easy enough to cheat them out of money, since the wild can’t count to save their lives.… But how do you go about paying a wild man? Espinoza ponders this question. They can’t receive credit beams. He wonders if they deal in pieces of paper—old-fashioned checks or currency—and whether banks actually employ people to handle such chores. Probably not. The whole world is built for the boost.