by Jim Nisbet
And all messages boil down to a single message, Tipsy thought, which is, since technology represents hope rather than monstrosity, get with the program or perish.
“… Or perish,” the speaker concluded.
Murmur murmur murmur, responded the audience.
A slide of a bank exterior, marble pillars, leaded glass windows, big double doors atop a few granite steps up from the sidewalk.
“Democracy, as Marx pointed out, paves the road to socialism.”
“Fuck him!” someone in the crowd shouted.
“Yes, yes,” the speaker turned her palms toward the crowd, “I know. You’d think we could cite somebody else who has pointed it out.”
Oh, man, Tipsy thought, where is Quentin when I need him? Did Marx really say that?
“… Nevertheless, the younger here among us will almost certainly live to witness the complete privatization of public capital, and the nationalization of all responsibility for private debt in excess of as little as one million euros.”
“Dollars!” someone shouted. “Yeah,” responded another, “Why not dollars!”
“Whatever,” the speaker shook her head. “Mark my words, the children of our children will live to see the no-bid privatization of all public functions and systems.”
“We’ve gained control of our schools. By flooding the student mind with unassimilated information geared strictly toward their contributing to technological efficiency and not having the time for anything else, we simultaneously weed out rebellion simply by setting rebels up for impoverishment. Train a technician and you breed innovation. This individual—one deploys the term individual strictly in the sense of a biological entity —will find him or herself attracted by the sense of accomplishment he can be taught to anticipate, and lulled away from any notion that what he might be doing conspires to achieve nothing less than the culling of any instinct that might deviate from one hundred percent efficient participation in the subservience of the scattered needs of humanity to the specific requirements of technology.”
I’m back to gobsmacked, thought Tipsy.
“But, surely,” someone shouted, “do we not remain, at bottom, human?”
Laughter.
“Do we not recognize the hunger of the human spirit in each human breast?”
More laughter.
“Are we not all, still, despite various artificial anomalies, human beneath our rip-stop exteriors?”
General hilarity.
More of the same. Then … “Yes,” the speaker beamed, “that’s exactly the sentiment. And that’s why we need to put a human face on reality. It is for this reason we pursue our short-term goal of creating and introducing a relic to which only the chosen will be rewarded with access, as if to a beacon suited to the navigation of the soul.”
Wild applause.
“Remember, relic derives from the Latin for remains, which in turn comes down to us from relinquere, to leave behind. This relic will have been as it were, not the subjunctive, condition contrary to fact …”
Knowing, if uncertain, laughter.
“… left behind, to guide us, to reassure us, to remind us to behold our future as promised by our past and guaranteed by our present. …”
I’m getting dizzy, Tipsy realized.
“… For the true believer, there will be veneration. For the skeptic, there will be DNA evidence. Dare we imagine a deity right in our midst? Brother Imhotep …”
A spotlight found a man in the audience. After a pause, delighted laughter. Tipsy could see nothing. She looked over her shoulder. In the darkness behind her Oscar Few had lowered his head and was shaking it slowly. As she turned to look around, the projection screen flickered and a real-time image filled it. The man in the apex of the spotlight appeared to be dressed as a full-on, 3,500-year-old Egyptian dude, all cornflower blues, liquid tan complexion, Masonic dividers in one hand, a carpenter’s square in the other, silhouetted hieroglyphs gliding over his entire carapace. A smattering of applause. The actor took a bow. The reaction is tepid. People are talking about other things.
“… There will be pews comfortable enough to encourage meditation but not sleep …”
Amused laughter.
“… Votive candles for purchase, a dedicated library, a portrait gallery, an audio tour, pedagogical holograms, graduated levels of membership strictly related to generosity, and so forth.”
Groans, laughter, teasing remarks. “Why not shut up and get everyone here to sell one of their Hummers!” “Yeah! Hum up or shut up!” “Put your Hummer where your mouth is!”
Privatization of public capital, Tipsy thought. And, as if the crowd had read her mind, a communicable chant arose from it. “Hey, ho, whaddya say, how much we gonna privatize today? Hey, ho …”
“Loath as I am to quote him,” the speaker insisted, “it was Goebbels who said, ‘We do not talk to say something, but to obtain a certain effect.’ Put another way, it doesn’t matter what we say, but how we say it. Our reliquary will do just that. Written materials will be made available, if only because some few riders of the Silver Tsunami cling to the printed word. Also videos, of course, inspirational music, and devotional talks. Be assured that the experience, in and of itself, will be nothing short of inspirational. …”
Murmurs of knowing assent.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the speaker bowed from the waist, “I thank you for your time and attention.” She checked her watch. “See you at the no-host bar.”
The lights come up amid desultory applause.
An hour before the show, Tipsy had picked up Few in front of the cop shop on Bryant Street.
“Ahm, look,” she began, after he’d climbed into the Beamer. “Since this is our first date, you being a cop and all, full disclosure, I still don’t have a driver’s license.”
“Not my department,” Few announced. He showed her the uniform she’d be wearing that evening. “Like it?”
A few hours later, eight or ten blocks after they’d departed the lecture hall, Tipsy stopped the Beamer at a red light, and Few observed confidently, “Pretty crazy scene, huh.”
Tipsy watched the cross traffic. “Crazy?” she said after a moment. “You mean, as in wild?”
“No,” Few said. “I mean, crazy. Insane. Loco. Nuts.”
The light turned green and they were across the intersection before she told him, “I was fascinated.”
Few’s lips parted, he turned his head slightly in her direction, then he turned back toward the windshield. My Daddy always told me, he reminded himself, that if you’re going to spend your life as a cop, you’re going to spend it with crazy people.
Exhaustion seeping into his voice, he said aloud, “Just drop me on Bryant Street.”
Normally, Few might have filed his report on a thumb drive, including cellphone photos of rapt faces and license plates, along with random communications intercepts, if any, the audio of the proceedings dubbed off his pen or his watch or both, along with any notes he might think germane. The normal surveillance stuff.
Of course he went through the motions; he turned in his data and filled out a report. But normal, it seemed to him, had petered out a while back. So, two weeks later, on his monthly hike in the Marin Headlands, Oscar Few deposited first generation cassette dubs of all his raw data in the Shock & Awe commemorative lunch box he’d concealed in a gopher den at the foot of a century plant left behind by long gone squatters twenty feet above the high tide mark in an out-of-the-way place called Pirates Cove. Few no longer trusted any other form of media or repository. You seen a five-inch floppy drive lately? How about a zipdisk?
He had little fear of official repercussions, no more than he had hope for making headway on this case. He was already being asked to justify his overtime expenses. Like, fourteen dollars for a thumb drive?
Still, he figured, some day, when this park would be in the midst of being turned into a vast housing project, the raw materials of his secret history might provide a clue as to how it all was
allowed to happen.
IV
DEAD MEN’S POCKETS
TWENTY
BEFORE SHE WAS PROPERLY SEATED ON THE STOOL NEAREST THE SMOKING deck, Faulkner plunked down a coaster, a draft of Anchor Steam Beer, and a sealed envelope.
The envelope had been addressed by Charley. Inside, however, she found a note from someone else.
I have news of your brother.
Tipsy turned the note face down on the bar, covered it with her hand and looked around as if she were a tourist from Kansas to whom, concerning this dive, some bribed concierge had conveyed misleading information. Nobody paid attention.
She took a sip of beer and turned the page face up.
Of necessity, I’m on the move. Discretion advised. But if you’re interested in Charley’s news, I’ll telephone the bar at nine o’clock on Sunday night.
The note was unsigned.
Three men, one on a stool and two standing, dressed according to a variation on a theme: torn hickory shirt, paint-streaked bib overalls, a striped engineer’s shirt flecked with little holes burnt by slag. Two of them wore moustaches, the third a full beard. The three were in there doing the same thing she was doing, which was taking the edge off a hangover and starting in on a new one. One of them had a shot of bourbon lined up behind his beer glass: the avant-garde.
None of these guys paid any attention to Tipsy, either. Unlike herself, all they had to do was get drunk, get some sleep, get up, go back to work, and persist with the notion that, beyond the gallon of paint, beyond towing some hulk to Oakland, beyond that coffee can full of valve springs, the future didn’t exist.
“Faulkner.”
“Yo.”
She held up the envelope.
“It was stuck in the door when Walter opened up this morning.”
“At six?”
“Five-thirty.”
She let the envelope fall to the bar.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
She looked up.
His face fell. “Didn’t you miss me?”
“Miss you … ? Oh! Yes—yes of course I’ve missed you.” She stood and tendered a distracted hug.
“Gee,” Quentin said, as she pulled away. “That’s what I call a perfunctory salutation.”
She waved this off. “Sit down and have a drink. You’ll feel better about it.”
Quentin didn’t sit down and he didn’t order a drink. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No more than usual.”
“Okay,” he snapped.
She shook her head. “This is coming out all wrong.”
“There are other bars,” Quentin pointed out, “and other lonely female drunks in this town, and if I can’t do any better than stand here and take this … this chill abuse—”
Tipsy shook her head. “Will you please lighten up and sit down?” She jerked an empty barstool a foot closer to her own. “Where the hell you been?”
“Sensitivity training.”
She didn’t give it a thought. She tapped the envelope with a fingernail. “I need to ask you something.”
“Sure.” Quentin sat on the stool. “We can discuss my problems later.”
Tipsy frowned. “Where’d you get that jacket?”
“Downtown.”
She fingered its sleeve. “There’s still a thrift shop downtown?”
Quentin archly drew away from her. “I beg your pardon?”
“Then it’s as new as it looks?”
“You like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you, darling. I’d tell you that I bought it exclusively because I dress for you, but that wouldn’t be true, if only because I never see you anymore.”
“You never see me any more? The truth of the matter is, I, we”—she indicated the rest of the bar—“nobody sees you any more.”
“That’s all in the past,” Quentin said. “Faulkner.”
“Mr. Quentin Asche,” Faulkner said, coming down the bar. “Long time no see.” They shook hands.
“What time is it? Wait. I forgot.” Quentin shot his cuff and had a look. “It’s seven-thirty.”
“Nice watch,” Tipsy said, as if perplexed.
Faulkner spun a napkin onto the bar. “What’ll it be?”
“Whiskey sour. Hold the whiskey.”
“No fruity drinks.”
“An Old Fashioned, then. Hold the bourbon.”
“I’m outta cherries.”
“Soda water, rocks, maybe a lime?”
“I can do that.”
“Thank god. I’m exhausted.”
Faulkner went away.
Quentin watched Tipsy watching the watch. “You like it?”
Tipsy frowned. “What the hell is going on?”
“I put the house on the market, served China with eviction papers, China made himself scarce, I took the house off the market, cleaned it up within an inch of its life, took out a second, had a guy draw up some plans and get a building permit, hired a contractor for the remodel, and moved my skinny portfolio into the nicest hotel money can buy.”
“Wow,” Tipsy said, after a long pause. “And here I was thinking maybe you had committed suicide.”
“Well,” Quentin admitted, “the thought crossed my mind. But then I realized I have no heirs—see?”
Tipsy shook her head. “Negative.”
“If I were so foolish as to blow myself away, without the proper paperwork, whatever assets I left behind would go to improve some bridge in Yolo County.”
“You mean, probated to the State of California.”
“Exactly. It was China’s Pumping Iron poster that reminded me of it.”
“He didn’t take it with him?”
“He didn’t take it with him.”
“Huh. He must have been pretty upset.”
“I sincerely hope that was the case.”
“You don’t know where he went?”
“No idea.”
“Not at the house, at any rate.”
“The house least of all. We hauled two twelve-yard debris boxes out of there, stripped out the fixtures, the lath and plaster, the insulation, even the plumbing and electrical—the place is down to the studs and uninhabitable.” He touched her arm. “Even the Datsun has been hauled away. And I sold the Mercedes to my mechanic for what I owed him. Now it’s his nightmare, and I’m taking cabs everywhere I go.”
Tipsy put her hand on his forearm. “You didn’t throw out that kitchen window?”
Quentin smiled and patted her hand. “Not on your life.”
Tipsy relaxed. “Twelve yards of debris. …”
“Twenty-four.”
“It sounds like a lot.”
“It was. But it’s what it took to get the place back to zero. By the look of it, China ran the facilities into the ground before he took off. I mean, darling,” Quentin made a face, “the toilet was clogged with magazine pages.”
Tipsy made a face. “Nice.”
“It cost me close to ten grand just to clean the place up enough to gut it.”
“How much for the whole remodel?”
“Depending on fixtures, eighty to a hundred.”
“Just out of curiosity, what’d you list it for?”
Quentin smiled. “A conservative one point one million.”
Tipsy, who had raised her drink halfway to her lips, set it down on the bar again. “I’m gobsmacked a lot lately.”
“Be very gobsmacked. It would have gone for more. And,” Quentin raised a forefinger, “it’s a tear-down.”
“But it’s your home!”
“Maybe that’s why I took it off the market.” Quentin shook his head. “On the other hand, I am so over the past-tense aspects of that place. Let’s look at it from the point of view of an inveterate real estate developer.”
“How’s that?”
“Would you spend eighty to a hundred grand to make three to four hundred grand?”
“Does unilateral foreign policy make me sneeze?”
“Right you are. Meanwhile, darling, it’s first-class hotels and organic luncheons.”
“You’ll do design and dècor yourself.”
“Correct. When the project is finished, oh, eight or ten months from now, I’ll figure out what to do with it.”
On the television over the far end of the bar a couple of steroidally overdosed women in sequined patriotically-colored bikinis and crash helmets bashed each other with electronic pugil sticks that lit up whenever they scored a solid hit. A crawl across the bottom of the scoreboard read, Sabotaged pipeline scorches 10,000 acres, 5 villages.
“I finished the DUI class.”
“Congratulations.”
Tipsy studied her beer. “Thanks.”
After a short silence Quentin said, “You should see this hotel. Fabulous restaurant. We’ll go there later. Their cocktails start at nineteen dollars.” He spilled a little carton of pills on a napkin and began to sort them. “A very nice bar,” he added significantly, talking to Tipsy but addressing the pills, “where they don’t resent fabricating a whiskey sour. Entertainment, too. Real entertainment, I mean. Musicians who can play music.”
“You know perfectly well, Quentin, that you’re the only customer in here who can get a mixed drink.” Tipsy touched the base of her glass to the rim of Quentin’s.
“The Margaritas and Bloody Marys in here,” Quentin reminded her, “are pre-mixed. The margin on top-shelf Margaritas is something like three hundred percent.”
“Just like your house,” Tipsy observed.
“Oh really, darling.” Quentin closed his eyes and segued directly to realtor mode. “I bought DeHaro Street in June of 1977 for $45,000. The down payment was sixty-seven hundred and fifty dollars. It’s been paid off for twenty years, and now it costs about two thousand a year, in insurance and taxes, to own. Let’s generously suppose that I put $35,000 in it over the years—a new roof, two paint jobs, two dishwashers, new cabinets, like that—plus the ten thou I had to throw in on account of that parasite that was living there.” He set his glass on a coaster and lowered his voice. “I priced it low.” He threw two pills to the back of his throat and chased them with water. “With multiple bids, I probably could have cleared the asking price. One-time deal on my primary residence after the age of fifty-five—I’d get out from under tax free.”
