“How the hell did you do that stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Clearfather admitted. “I think God was working through me.”
He tried to picture Uncle Waldo’s and Aunt Vivian’s faces.
“Shit,” said the kid. “I guess—I should thank you. What’s . . . your . . . name?”
“You can call me Mr. Clearfather. I’m going to need money and to find a hotel. They said you were rich. Is that that true?”
“Y-yeah.” The boy nodded. “But I don’t have any money on me. And no hotel is going to let you keep that dog. You want to stay at my house?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Clearfather mumbled, suspiciously.
“You can bring the dog.”
CHAPTER 8
The Life You Save
The boy seemed to know his way through the maze, which was a good thing. With the pale sun getting lower, more alarming figures began appearing: Nazis, nurses, brides, Boy Scouts.
“What’s your name?”
“Wilton Brand,” the boy replied. “My father’s King Brand, as in Kingland Brand, former CEO of American United Steel.”
The names meant nothing to Clearfather.
“You shouldn’t be hanging around a place like this,” he said as they passed a cage full of Asian girls.
“Don’t you think I know that?” the boy quipped. “It’s the Pandora. At first it was like this beautiful cloud. Everyone lusting after me—always feeling good about myself. Then the nightmare started.”
Clearfather peered around at the amputees sloshing in creamed corn—the fat men squirming like salamis in their nets—and the desperate crones lashed to the wheels. The Canario growled.
“You gonna keep the dog?” the kid asked.
“I can’t just abandon him. Or you.”
“What are you gonna call him?”
“Warhol, I think. You . . . look like you’re feeling better.”
“Yeah,” Wilton replied, surprised. “Sometimes when you’ve scored you get a little peace—but not like this.”
“Maybe you can get off the drug,” Clearfather suggested. “Can’t you get help?”
“Where have you been?”
“I’m having memory problems.”
“Shit. The drug was supposed to be help. That’s how Nang’s Disease and Increased Simplification Dependency Syndrome got started. Efram-Zev invents diseases. That’s why Vitessa bought them up. They just applied their Designer Virus strategy from the cyberside to pharmaceuticals.”
“How could people fall for that?” Clearfather asked as they crossed paths with a bandaged woman leading a little girl in a party dress.
“You’ll see,” the boy said as they stepped clear of the wrecks onto a long wet street of open grates. Halfway down was a concrete bunker where his car was parked, although the term car scarcely did it justice. The vehicle, branded a Nomadder, was more appropriately described as a hybrid troop carrier/Japanese all-wheel-drive mobile home.
“Fix yourself a drink or a snack,” Wilton nodded, indicating the vehicle’s galley kitchen and wet bar. “I’m going to grab a quick shower.”
Clearfather sat down in one of the chairs shaped like a nude girl. The interior of the vehicle stank of alcohol, sweat, and old pizza. Dirty panties, tubs of lubricant, and various dildos cluttered the floor. Waves of depression washed over him. There was something about this troubled teenager that made him think of the boy in the bathroom in his vision (or was it his memory?). Guilt, fear? He didn’t feel anything like sexual desire, which was an intense relief given all that he’d just seen. But there was something—poised between hope and sadness.
It occurred to him that he was old enough to be the boy’s father, and he tried to feel inside himself for any recollection, any clues that might indicate whether he had children. But there was nothing. Just fuzzy hints of memories . . . Aunt Vivian and Uncle Waldo working at jigsaw and crossword puzzles . . . a porch at sunset . . . bright warm shapes whose faces were lost in the sun.
He heard a heavy bass line thumping through the insulated wall and rose to inspect the rest of the habitat. There was a small iridium box on the counter that sprang open at his touch. Inside rested a crystalline lozenge that resembled a pink argyle diamond, but had a cloying scent like marzipan—a dose of Pandora, he guessed. On the floor in the kitchen were piled Sapporo beer cans, Russian cigarette butts, condoms, and porno comic books full of zombies having sex, but around the corner he noticed a swath of blue silk like a curtain. Underneath was a bulletin board, thick with digital photograms. Some of the pictures were images from childhood . . . birthday cakes and trail rides . . . clowns, watermelons. In each of these pictures, the boy whom Clearfather presumed to be Wilton looked so small and fragile. The majority of the pictures, however, were from more recent times and focused on a willowy young girl with curly auburn hair. An older Wilton posed with her in a garden or on a riverboat. There was a wistfulness and a longing to the pictures that filled Clearfather with a deep ache. He let the soiled swath fall back into place and turned to see the boy dressed in fresh clothes.
“I’m . . . sorry,” Clearfather said.
“That’s Nikki. See, I’m straight really.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It was my fault,” Wilton responded, not seeming to hear.
“She’s . . . pretty,” Clearfather said.
“She’s dead. And I’m not,” Wilton replied.
“Hm. Well, not for lack of trying.” Clearfather sighed.
“What do you know?” scowled the boy.
“I bet she died of the same drug that’s killing you almost as fast as the guilt that’s eating you up inside,” the bald man answered.
The boy was about to hurl some insult but stopped in midsentence.
“Who the hell are you, mister?”
“I don’t know,” Clearfather admitted.
“What are you?” the boy sputtered.
“I’m wondering that myself.”
“You wanna save me—is that it?” The boy laughed.
“I have. Once.”
Wilton Brand appeared not to know how to take this remark.
“You’ll be paid. My parents are rich. Not compared with Wynn Fencer—but rich enough.”
“Who’s Wynn Fencer?” Clearfather asked.
“Shit, you really do have a memory problem!” the boy scoffed. He picked up a moldy slice of cheese-injected pizza then flipped it into the sink. “Fencer founded the Vitessa Cultporation. He’s the richest man on the planet.”
Clearfather tried to nod. These names from the larger world didn’t interest him much. His concern was for this rich spoiled abandoned boy who spent his time and money humiliating himself with strangers and worshiping at a secret shrine, trying to regain his lost childhood and his first love, who died of the same fate that was stalking him. Clearfather noticed a bead of collagen oozing from the crack in the boy’s lower lip. He wondered what he’d been like when he’d been that age. Lonely? Confused? Frightened? Whatever the answer was, it lay hidden behind a veil.
“It’s time to go home now,” he said.
The boy went silent and gestured toward the cab that was laid out like the cockpit of a commercial jetliner. Minutes later they were battling the hordes crossing the Allegheny. Eidolons advertising McTavish’s (YEER HAGGIS IS REDDY!) and Chu’s (TODAY’S SPECIAL: SALMON STOMACHS IN A TANGY PLUM SAUCE) ghosted over tanks of LPG and a village of stilt huts. Back behind them, Pittsburgh seemed to be undergoing some kind of biorobotic transformation. Mirror-bright towers and cylinders of tensuron shared the same block with older buildings that would’ve been called skyscrapers once, which were now imprisoned in scaffolding. In residential pockets of blight, steep tarpaper-roofed frame houses alternated with Médecins Sans Frontières trailers. Open-air flea markets pooled like oil, and heavily armored luxury hotels and apartments glared out over tent cities.
The minor bridges were all clogged with traffic, as the Fort Du-quesne span now
resembled an apocalyptic wagon train frozen in time. The dirty genetech bomb that Al-Waqi‘a had used to attack Three Rivers Stadium during the World Series had had an unexpected effect, creating a weather-resistant botanical jungle so that all of Clemente Memorial Park was rampant with giant orchids and carnivorous plants—a fact that did not stop the homeless from seeking refuge there or hunting parties of river people exploring at their peril. Clearfather’s eyes darted back and forth, trying to take it all in.
“You really don’t remember who you are?” Wilton queried, blasting the horn at a wild dog pack. “Who do you think you could be?”
Clearfather figured there was no reason not to be honest. “At first I thought I’d escaped from a mental hospital—or that I was some sort of agent—drugged or conditioned to forget. What do you think? You seem to have been around.”
Warhol gave Clearfather’s face a bestial lick.
“Well . . . ,” Wilton mused. “Apart from the born-for-porn potential, I’d say you’ve got the makings of a kick-ass magician. You just need a good manager.”
The boy seemed so much calmer and more normal now, it was hard for the bald man not to smile. “Don’t hide my light under a bushel, huh?”
“You said you thought God was working through you?”
“I didn’t—don’t—know—how else to put it,” Clearfather said, frowning again. He didn’t think it was wise to mention Aunt Vivian and Uncle Waldo. Or the vaguer form of the man at the radio station.
“I don’t believe in God but I haven’t felt this free of the Pandora since the first week,” Wilton said. “Maybe you’re some kind of healer. In any case I’m grateful for you helping me. I’ll make sure you get paid well.”
‘Thanks,” said Clearfather. “I didn’t do it for the money, though.”
“So . . . why . . . did you do it?”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Clearfather answered after a moment. “Because—I’m here.”
“Some kind of savior.”
Clearfather shrank at this comment, but, turning to face his young driver, he noticed that the boy’s face was open and relaxed now, free of any malice or arrogance.
“I guess the question is . . . what kind?”
They drove through a crowd of demonstrating Kurds and Wilton activated the roof-mounted water cannons, which cleared a path all the way to the Access Way. They were headed northwest beside the Ohio River. Out of the left-hand windows Clearfather spotted the long grim outline of an island. Once a lush, treed home to scores of small farms, Neville Island had in its industrial prime been an inferno of steel spark/coke plant/cement manufacturing. Now all that remained of those ash-rain times was a mountain of pig iron, the boarded-up remnant of the Sunoco plasticizer facility, and row upon row of haz-chem drums that marked the boundary of the Red Cross station and Fong’s Trash & Treasure.
A right-hand turn up Blackburn Road took them through Sewickley Heights and higher up the hills into the misnamed but far more exclusive, fortified seclusion of Fern Hollow. They passed through a guard station into woods of budding oak trees and scrub laurel—then through a rusted iron gate beside which two birdshit-stained granite lions brooded, and then down a long winding private drive.
Through the windows of the Nomadder, Clearfather could make out a dilapidated wrought-iron fence and a desiccated ivy wall running into an older barricade of hand-stacked fieldstones from which one might have expected a loaded musket to appear—perhaps aiming at that mythical squirrel that supposedly could have once hopped all the way to Iowa without touching the ground.
When at last in view, Wilton’s “house” proved to be an immense decaying Victorian spectacle of gingerbread bowsprits and steeples, widow’s walks, cupolas, towers, chimneys, and belfries. The boy drove straight toward a stable that had been converted into a high-tech garage and shut down the engine system.
“I still have both kidneys,” he announced, as if this were uncommon. “That’s my bargaining power with the old man.”
“And how old is your father?” Clearfather inquired, scanning the grounds. Even in the fading light it was plain to see that the grand estate had seen grander days. The tennis courts were frost-heaved and all the topiary animals looked like hedgehogs, while in the once majestic animal park a lone wildebeest sheltered in a prefab kids’ clubhouse.
“A hundred and twenty-five or so—but his new wife, my mom, is seventy, although he thinks she’s sixty. That’s why Pop’s Will is so important and can be altered at any minute. Whoever’s in the good books then could win the pot and be able to make life miserable for everyone else. Meanwhile Pop sits on a few boards, smokes and drinks, and is able to conduct his feud with Julian Dingler.”
“Who’s that?” Clearfather asked.
“Regional head of Vitessa R and D. Our nearest neighbor. Dad had him set up the house’s intelligence system and now he’s paranoid Dingler’s spying on us.”
“What was that?” Clearfather asked as a howl rose out of the falling dark.
“Our mastiffs. Whatever you do, don’t go wandering the grounds alone.”
Warhol roared back and then produced a large steaming poo on the walkway.
“Don’t worry.” Wilton chuckled. “It’s what everyone else in the family does!”
CHAPTER 9
The Abyss Stares Back
Outside the carriage house garage, another distinctive sound reached their ears—an electronic hum and compressed-air hiss. Warhol grew tense. As the shape entered the field of light from the lantern overhead, it became clear that it was the remains of a man built into an organically sympathetic variation on a mobile gantry robot, although it was impossible to tell where the man ended and the machine began. He wore a black smartfiber jacket over a white shirt with a high collar—and where a face should’ve been there was a mask made of polished chrome, which acted as a convex mirror, so that observers were confronted with a fun-house distortion of their own faces. If Clearfather hadn’t been distracted by the silvery light he would’ve warned the man about the dogshit, but as it was one of the polyurethane platform feet came down on the pile, so he thought it best not to say anything. Warhol rumbled.
“Restrain that brute or I’ll taser you all,” the mask echoed.
“Come here, Warhol,” Clearfather called.
“How did you know I was referring to the dog? And where have you been, you little pervert—out sucking blood?”
“Good evening to you, too, Hooper,” Wilton replied. “I trust you’ve been keeping my mother happy?”
“Who’s this?” the mask demanded, pointing at Clearfather. “One of your new boyfriends? I thought you were going back to being straight.”
“This man saved my life,” Wilton announced with a hint of pride. “He’s going to be staying with us tonight.”
“Is that so?” the mask echoed. “Well, Old Smokey’s having a dinner party. There’s going to be an update of the Will. Ernst has wet his pants over something and is refusing to come. Improves the odds, eh? Drinks at seven sharp in the library. Be there or be square. And don’t let me hear about any problems with that dog.”
The man-machine hissed and clunked off with the dogshit clinging to his foot.
“It’s so hard to find operational help these days.” Wilton grinned.
“Who was that?” Clearfather asked.
“That’s Hooper, our butler and my mom’s lover. Dad owned a factory where Hooper was a foreman until he got between two robot assembly systems that were having a dispute. Dad’s company couldn’t meet the insurance payout so Dad got his personal reconstruction doctor, Hugh Wieviel, to do as good a rebuild as he could and invited the guy in to live with us. Now Hooper bangs my mother. See, I’m a lab job. One of her frozen eggs from ages ago and some of Dad’s old sperm.”
“So . . . your mother . . . she’s your dad’s second wife . . . ?”
“She’s his fifth wife. His first wife, who died in the car accident that paralyzed my half brother Ainsley—she was cremated and i
s in an urn in his study.”
“What happened to his second wife?”
“She was stuffed and is mounted in his study. His third wife was frozen and is in a secret vault on the property waiting to be thawed out and revived.”
“What about the fourth?”
“Her heart may still beat for Dad. I suspect he recycled her organs after the ‘illness’ that came upon her down in Rio.”
“And . . . you all live on this estate together?”
“There’s more.” Wilton winked. “Way back before Mom—or Ravena—married Dad, she had triplets. Three sons. They’re about forty years older than me. You’ll meet them all. Hooper said we’re having a dinner party tonight? We have a dinner party every night, and every night there’s an update to the Will.”
Warhol raised a deep guttural concern, which Clearfather seconded. If it wasn’t for his need of money, he’d have preferred to take his chances back along one of the riverbanks.
“And who’s Old Smokey?” he asked the boy as they made their way toward the mansion, which looked like some mad dollhouse crammed with halogen flashlights.
“Dad. He’s one of the last of the great chain smokers. Chain drinker, too. That’s why he’s trawling for a new liver. I think this is number four. But you have to remember to call him the Man of Steel. That’s what people called him back when he was CEO of American United Steel.”
“Are we going to meet him now?”
“No, I think we should ease into it,” Wilton said. “Let’s go explore the weird world of Ernst first.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s my other half brother. He’s a hundred. His real brother Ainsley is ninety-something—and has been bedridden for around eighty years. Dad worships Ainsley. He’s paid for hundreds of operations for him over the years and has set up an entire wing of the main house for him as a closed-circuit TV studio with cam units and monitors throughout the estate. Despite all the surgery, I used to have bad dreams about him, so I just interface with him on screen.”
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