Future Americas

by John Helfers

  The artist nodded. ‘‘Ten dollars takes it away.’’

  ‘‘It’s worth a hell of a lot closer to a million than to ten,’’ said Enrique admiringly.

  ‘‘I see you and I have similar tastes, my friend.’’ The artist existed a hand that was permanently stained from the use of oils.

  ‘‘This should be in a gallery, not out here on the street,’’ protested Enrique.

  The artist sighed. ‘‘Galleries are only interested in what’s popular this week. If I had a baboon, I could splash paint on its bottom and let it sit on a canvas. Then I’d be as rich as you appear to be.’’

  Enrique stared at him for a long moment. ‘‘So why don’t you?’’ he asked at last.

  ‘‘Because then I wouldn’t be an artist.’’ The painter waved a hand at the Met and snorted contemptuously. ‘‘There’s no art in there, only piles of garbage and pieces of crushed automobiles. That’s what passes for art these days—ugly, welded pieces of junk and paintings that look like vomit. There’s no appreciation of beauty or talent.’’ He grimaced. ‘‘Walking through the Met or the Guggenheim is almost as depressing as watching recycled fifty-year-old sitcoms on the Broadway stage, with or without music.’’

  ‘‘You’ve been to the theater lately?’’

  The painter smiled ruefully. ‘‘Do I look like I have two hundred dollars for a ticket?’’

  ‘‘Then how do you know?’’

  ‘‘I hear the audiences discussing it when they come out.’’

  ‘‘And they hate it?’’ asked Enrique.

  The painter shook his head. ‘‘They love it, just as they love the dreck that passes for art today. And if they love it, then you know how awful it must be.’’

  ‘‘Couldn’t some of it be good?’’

  ‘‘You can make a beautiful house out of styrofoam and toilet paper,’’ answered the artist. ‘‘A gorgeous house. But it is still made of styrofoam and toilet paper.’’

  ‘‘If you feel that way, why waste your time painting at all?’’ asked Enrique, hoping for some answer, some hidden insight that would help him decide what do to about this hideous play in which he found himself trapped.

  ‘‘Because art isn’t just something to hang on a wall,’’ said the painter. ‘‘It is the mirror of mankind’s soul. And I must be true to my soul by being true to my art.’’

  Enrique handed the painter a twenty and took the portrait of the old woman away with him. The price had been ten, he knew that, but hell, the man’s convictions alone were worth the extra ten.

  Maybe, like a clock’s pendulum, it was time to value both beauty and the intellect again, to aspire to the best in man rather than the easiest. If the trend didn’t stop soon, everyone might as well go back to swinging from the branches of trees. If a talented artist would rather starve being true to his art than peddle the junk that delighted an indiscriminate public, then maybe he, Enrique, could keep alive the works of one great man. . . .

  A week later, Enrique was called to the theater.

  Hector greeted him happily. ‘‘You were right— those plays were pure genius! Of course, the language made it practically impossible to follow the story. But I feel in my bones that we have a megahit on our hands!’’

  ‘‘Come, sit between us,’’ Carlos invited him.

  Enrique scooted into the row of theater seats. Though he wanted to feel their excitement, he’d been stung too many times by too many ‘‘brilliant’’ concepts that would have bored the average eight-year-old of a century ago.

  Carlos handed him a cigar. ‘‘You had me worried for a while with all your talk, but when Hector told me the plot—hell, I almost shit in my pants it was so brilliant.’’

  ‘‘Which play are we doing?’’ Enrique asked.

  ‘‘The original title was Macbeth, but I’ve updated that as well,’’ said Hector, tossing a script into Enrique’s lap. ‘‘I call it Macbrady. It’s the story of a man who was married to a lovely woman, yet they were all alone.’’

  The pit in Enrique’s stomach grew geometrically. Quietly, he whispered, ‘‘No.’’

  But his voice was lost on Carlos and Hector. Somewhereamid their excited chatter and grand expectations, Carlos said, ‘‘Your agent has signed the contract on your behalf. I think this baby can run for years!’’

  Enrique groaned. While overseas, he had given his agent the power of attorney to deal with contracts, a power he’d neglected to revoke upon his return home.

  ‘‘You’ll play Mike Macbrady,’’ Carlos said, ‘‘an architect at King’s Designs, the top architectural firm in Scotland.’’ His eyes glazed. ‘‘People love foreign settings, even when they’re not as rigorously realized as Spamalot.’’ Carlos took a deep breath, forced himself to become calm, then continued. ‘‘You and Duncan, another architect, are competing for an important client’s account. Whoever gets the account will be made a full partner and oversee the Cawdor branch.’’

  Enrique felt faint. Meek, mild-mannered Hector had become a murderer, and Shakespeare was his victim.

  Enrique flipped through the rewrite of Macbeth. Every page brought a new shudder. When he could bear it no longer, he shouted ‘‘This is wrong! Macbeth has to kill Duncan!’’

  ‘‘You’re the star,’’ said Carlos. ‘‘You can’t be the murderer. The people will never stand for it, not with orchestra seats going at two for five hundred. They want to be amused and delighted, not shocked and depressed.’’

  ‘‘Besides,’’ added Hector, ‘‘it’s not Macbeth—it’s Macbrady.’’

  ‘‘I don’t care what you call it, it’s Macbeth,’’ said Enrique. ‘‘Will you be dressing the three witches in miniskirts next?’’

  ‘‘It’s a thought,’’ said Carlos amiably.

  So no one would die in Macbrady.

  Enrique knew who Macbeth should have killed. By the time he finished the script, he was pretty sure he knew who Enrique Rodruiguez should have killed, too.

  His agent.

  On opening night, reviewers from the four major Manhattan newsdisks sat in the audience. That much hadn’t changed in well over a century. There were half a billion people in America, but the opinions of four New Yorkers—each brilliant, ascerbic, and provincial—would determine whether the play would go on to have a profitable run or would close its doors permanently after one performance.

  Enrique sat brooding in his dressing room when Carlos entered, his face aglow. ‘‘Sold out!’’ he announced with a triumphant grin.

  ‘‘Bully for us,’’ said Enrique without enthusiasm.

  ‘‘What’s the matter?’’ asked Carlos, suddenly worried. ‘‘Aren’t you feeling well?’’

  ‘‘I feel like a murderer—of the theater, of the language, of Shakespeare. Or, if not a murderer, at least an accomplice.’’

  ‘‘That again?’’ demanded Carlos irritably. ‘‘People want happy endings. Those old plays are depressing. King Lear? Please! No one wants the audience going home to slit their wrists! We want them to buy tickets for n
ext week on their way out! And to tell their friends how good the play made them feel.’’

  ‘‘Even if it’s all a lie?’’

  ‘‘What makes depressing endings and five-syllable words any better than happy endings and dialogue they can understand?’’

  ‘‘Look around you,’’ said Enrique disgustedly. ‘‘We’re performing for a bunch of six-year-olds in adult bodies. Doesn’t it bother you that more of them are on an intellectual and cultural par with Lassie than with Lassie’s owner?’’

  ‘‘It means they’re that much easier to separate from their money,’’ answered Carlos. ‘‘And for the record, this year’s hit musical is Rin Tin Tin, not Lassie.’’

  Enrique had to admit that it made perfect sense. Why would an educated elite embark on a generations-long process of undereducating (or was the word uneducating?) the public except to make it easier to separate them from their money. He almost wished he could perform for that tiny percentage of totally amoral robber barons the plays they wanted to see. But of course no one would ever be able to identify them. It was a lot easier for an intelligent man to appear as a fool than for a fool to appear intelligent.

  ‘‘Come on, cheer up!’’ said Carlos. ‘‘You’re on in a couple of minutes. Get that frown off your face and knock ’em dead.’’

  He gave Enrique a hearty pat on the back.

  ‘‘Maybe I’ll do that,’’ said Enrique.

  Enrique waited for his cue, then walked out onto the stage. He moved to the center, then found himself staring, almost hypnotized, at the audience.

  My God, look at them! They’re living proof that Darwin was wrong!

  One of the actors nudged him. ‘‘Wake up, Enrique!’’ he whispered. ‘‘You’re on!’’

  Enrique took one more look at his audience, the people he was being paid to please. Then he took one step forward and began to speak.

  ‘‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

  It were done quickly: if the assassination

  Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,

  With his surcease, success; that but this blow

  Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

  We’ld jump the life to come.’’

  There was a confused buzz in the audience. Enrique could pick out a few sentences. ‘‘What the hell is he talking about?’’ and ‘‘I thought this was supposed to be in English.’’

  Undaunted, he continued, a sneer of contempt on his lips:

  ‘‘But if these cases

  We still have judgment here; that we but teach

  Bloody instructions, which being taught return

  To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

  Commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice

  To our own lips.’’

  ‘‘Get that bum off the stage!’’ yelled a man.

  ‘‘This was supposed to be a comedy!’’ shouted a woman.

  ‘‘Fools!’’ yelled Enrique. ‘‘Idiots! Chattel! There will be no Macbrady this night, no Gilligan, no charming hillbillies, no lovable teenagers whose IQs could freeze water. Tonight, whether you like it or not, you are going to be introduced to the greatest bard of them all, a bard your great-grandparents all but worshipped before they spawned generation after generation of contented cud-chewers like yourselves.’’ He took a deep breath and glared at them. ‘‘My name is Macbeth.’’

  ‘‘Is he insulting us?’’ demanded a man.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ said another. ‘‘I don’t understand what the hell he’s saying.’’

  ‘‘Well, I understand the tone!’’ snapped a third. He stood up and hurled a shoe at Enrique.

  As if by common consent, the entire audience began hurling debris at him.

  ‘‘Nitwits!’’ he screamed. ‘‘If you attack everything you fail to understand, I wonder that you have time to sleep!’’

  Then a young man leaped onto the stage, followed by another, then six more, all of them pummeling him into senselessness. The riot squad arrived five minutes later and made some arrests that would never result in convictions, but Enrique was beyond caring. He died on the way to the hospital. Carlos reluctantly refunded the money, hired a top television actor to play Macbrady, and saw the next morning’s line at the box office extend halfway around the block. Two of the newsdisks carries the story, buried somewhere between the classifieds and the results of the Pan-Asian Soccer League quarter finals.

  They buried Enrique Rodriguez two days later, with the headstone he had requested in his will, one proclaiming that he was The Last Actor.

  But he wasn’t, of course.

  He was just the last one who cared.

  THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

  by Brian Stableford

  Brian Stableford’s recent novels include Streaking and The New Faust at the Tragicomique. His recent non-fiction includes a mammoth reference book, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia and a collection of critical essays, Heterocosms. His recent translations from the French include the second volume of the classic series of Paul Féval novels after which his favorite publisher is named, The Invisible Weapon, and the anthology News from the Moon and Other French Scientific Romances.

  WHEN DR. HARKNESS EXPLAINED to Sarah Whitney that the resurgent cancer was too widespread and too aggressive to leave any significant hope for successful treatment, she didn’t feel anything, except for the everyday excruciation. It wasn’t that she was simply repressing her feelings or blotting them out with some kind of endogenous antidote to emotion; she simply didn’t feel any horror, grief, sorrow, or regret.

  She suspected that the disease was responsible for that; not only was it bloating her with vulgar pain but shrinking her emotional range in proportion.

  She turned away to look out of the third-floor windowof the doctor’s consulting room, but not because she couldn’t face him. The hospital was on the city perimeter, and the south-facing window had a splendid view of the mighty crowns of the Neogymnosperm forest that ringed Phoenix Reborn.

  The doctor offered to start her on a further course of chemotherapy, but he made it pretty clear that her chances of finishing it were slim to none; taking the poison would only reduce the limited capacity she still had left for clear thought and purposive action.

  ‘‘You might do better,’’ Dr. Harkness concluded, ‘‘to think about planting.’’

  To Alan, of course, that was like pulling a trigger— but for once, he didn’t launch the kind of direct and focused assault normally favored by prosecutors. He had plenty of denial and anger stored up, ready to spray out randomly. ‘‘This is twenty-third century America!’’ he ranted. ‘‘How can it be possible that some stupid cancer can still get through our defenses? It was supposed to have been cured, damn it! She had the chemotherapy! It was supposed to work! She’s thirty-six years old, for God’s sake! This is not supposed to happen in this day and age! We survived the goddam Ecocatastrophe and saved the goddam world! We’re supposed to be past all that.’’

  Dr. Harkness tried to explain. It was pointless, in the circumstances, given that it wasn’t ignorance or incomprehension that had set Alan off but sheer blind range, but the oncologist was one of those slightly furtive intellectuals who have no other resource but dogged explanation. Sarah had he
ard it all before, so she didn’t bother to listen to the performance, but she totted up the points in her own mind while she tried hard to internalize the peaceful green of the tree crowns and use it, symbolically, to soothe the perennial pain. It would have been easier if the pain had been polite enough to take the form of a constant ache, but it was more like the infernal equivalent of Russian classical music.

  Sarah understood that cancer, like every other evil afflicting humankind, was subject to natural selection. Two hundred and fifty years of increasingly-sophisticated magic bullets had won battle after battle, but could never win the war, partly because successful treatment preserved genetic vulnerabilities within the population and partly because people’s immune systems, blithely unconscious of the fact that the magic bullets were the good guys, were being trained to mount better defenses against their invasions, effectively fighting on the cancers’ side.

  The Ecocatastrophe hadn’t helped, of course; the explosive progress of the novel techniques of Botanical Transfiguration had restabilized the climate faster than anyone had dared hope, but the inevitable side effect of the wildfire spread of the Transfigured Forests had been an order-of-magnitude increase in the estrangement of the organic environment—which had, in turn, called forth inevitable echoes in physiological sensitivity. No matter how good the overall accounts looked, one component of the cost paid for biotechnological progress was the further proliferation of animal cancers. Even plants were affected by the trend, although Human Trees were said to be as resistant as it was possible to be.

  When mutual exhaustion finally produced a lull in Alan’s grandstanding cross-examination of Dr. Harkness, Sarah said: ‘‘My grandma still thought that once the Ecocatastrophe was over and progress was back on track, we’d finally emerge into the long-delayed Age of Medical Miracles, when the prime of life would last for centuries. I never found out what she’d have thought of the Foresters—she died before they hit the headlines. She did feel guilty about her carbon debt, though.’’ Sarah winced as she finished, because speeches of that length were taxing, in symphonic terms—but she gritted her teeth, because she knew she’d have a lot of talking to do now that the bad news equation had reached its final proof.