Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (20 page)

"No," he said. "You go on."

The gurgling cry of her mother's call came just after Tracie rounded the bend.
3

Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie's mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.

"Good afternoon, Leon," the short chocolate brown young man said.

"Pell." Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.

And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera's full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager--after Leon had succumbed to the symptoms of Pulse use--and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn't read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the classic novels, and he preferred listening to the
East Coast Times
to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell's psychological motivation.

"How have you been, Leon?" Pell asked in the small two-man elevator.

"Slow."

"Fera said that you've been taking long walks."

The elevator doors slid open on eight.

Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she'd been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken--Leon was never sure which.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews."

"Mr. Jones," she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. "This your son?"

"No. My daughter's boyfriend."

"You a boxer too, boy?" She spoke with a slight Korean accent.

"No, ma'am. I'm a congressional aide."

Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.

"It's all I got. The gin is good. The tea's good for you."

"No thanks. You been drinkin' a lotta gin?" Pell asked, almost nonchalant.

"Fera's worried, huh?" Leon said. He sat down in the reclining bamboo chair that his first wife had bought when they were just married.

Pell lit on an emerald hassock that came from Amherst with Leon and his second wife, Fera's mother, Nosa.

"Yes she is, sir," Pell admitted. He wore a soft gray andro-suit that was open at the collar, revealing a pendant of twigs bound together in the form of a falling man. "She said that your mind was wandering, that you were talking to children you didn't know in the park. She called Dr. Bel-Nan. He assured her that it's all a part of the healing process. Me coming up here is just to keep Fera from worrying. You know she's drafted her first bill: the Chromosome Pattern Security Act. If it's passed it will be the first law enacted that will encompass the planetary colonies."

"You speak so well, Pell." Leon said. "I remember when 'nig' and 'motherfuckin' chuckhead' were in almost every sentence you spoke."

Pell had a wide face and an equally broad grin. His eyes lit up and the corners of his mouth raised to form the shallow bowl of his delight.

"It's only senators that can talk like that in Washington, sir."

"But do you understand what you're saying?" Leon asked. "What?" Pell's confusion showed.

"I mean, you can't read, can you?"

The wary look of Common Ground came suddenly into the well-spoken young man's eyes.

"I read. I've read the Declaration of Independence,
Moby Dick
--"

"Without your phono implant?"

Pell tensed for a moment and then let go. He smiled and asked, "What's the problem, Professor? Why rag on me?"

"Did you know that Homer was an illiterate?"

The question got Pell's attention.

"Yeah," Leon continued. "In his time there was no written language, at least not for everyday people like Greek storytellers. A good one like Homer could remember, word for word, a dozen or more epic poems. Poems much longer than most novels you hear today. And he would really act out each part. Deep voice for Zeus and twittery little words for children and animals.

"In
Fahrenheit
451
, Bradbury has his ideal community double as a library. Each member commits an important text to memory. It's called the oral tradition, Pell. Your generation is returning to that. Just like Bradbury's fireman. Only he still wanted to read."

"That's very interesting, Leon--" Pell began. He was going to continue but the professor cut him off.

"So you can see what's in the cards. The word
hear
will gain a new significance, while
write
will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt. And this transition will not take thousands of years, merely decades. Five years without electricity and all of civilization could fall back into barbarism." Leon laughed and sat back. It had been years since he befuddled students with his intellectual constructions. Pell was a bright kid, but, the professor thought, he knew nothing and had no idea of the depth of his ignorance.

"So," Pell paused, making much of his deliberation. "What you're saying is that you aren't going senile and Fera can stop worrying about you."

"That's one thing," Leon said, nodding sagely. "Another is that we teeter precariously upon the edge of the precipice."

It was Pell's turn to laugh.

"You laugh?"

"I been teeterin' ever since the first time I was gang raped on the IRT at three in the mornin'." Pell tapped the branch talisman. "Barbarism done been here, Professor. You could put the rent on that." __________

As was often the case, Pell had the last word. That night Leon Jones mulled over and over the crimes committed upon the young man. He'd never heard of the rape. He doubted if Fera knew.
That he survived,
Leon wrote in his journal,
is a feat greater than all my years of education and
Fera's heavyweight belts rolled up into one.

__________

"Hi, Lenny," Tracie said in the dream.

Leon was a child too. They were sitting on the ground near a Morningside Park bench. Chamomile was flowering up through the cracks in the asphalt, stingless bees gathered their pollen.

"Do you wanna come on down t' my house?" Leon wasn't surprised to hear himself speak in the deep southern accent of his childhood. He
was
a child after all, playing with his best friend Tracie in the park. Tracie shook her head vigorously. "I can't. Not till you go swimming with me."

"How come?"

"I don't know," the blond child said. "But it's about the park." Leon noticed that it was fall. The leaves were turning. They must be maples, he thought, because their leaves are so red. Just then he saw a gang member run from behind one tree, cross the road, and then hide behind another trunk. Another man with a gun followed.

"It's our park," Tracie's voice said.

There came that gurgling scream.

"What's that?" Leon asked fearfully, but he wasn't sure if he meant the gang member and robber or the scream.

"That's just my mom," Tracie replied. "She's always screaming like that." The dream replayed itself again and again until Leon came to anticipate every event. Sometimes the gang member chased the robber. Sometimes he could make out Tracie's name in the scream.
4

"Your daughter called," Dr. Bel-Nan said the next day at their regular appointment.

"Yeah," Leon said. "She a good girl."

He was sitting on a medical table, on waxy paper, in his underwear.

"She's worried about you."

"Yeah."

"Do you know why she's so worried?" Bel-Nan asked. He was studying an X ray of Leon's brain on a wall-size passive computer image that appeared as a complex acrylic painting. No light shone from behind the screen, but if Bel-Nan touched any specific point that area was enlarged by ten and overlaid on the broader image.

"No, sir. I don't."

Bel-Nan checked image after image, sometimes increasing the subject of his study a thousandfold. Meanwhile Leon sang, "What you gonna do when the pond goes dry, honey . . . ?" After fifteen minutes of study and song Bel-Nan turned and asked, "Have you been to the park lately, Professor?"

"I was up there yesterday. Kickin' back, takin' it slow."

"You seem to be speaking in a . . . a . . . I don't know how to say it," Bel-Nan said.

"Dreamt I was a boy last night," Leon said with glee. "When I woke up I remembered how I talked back then. They called it ignorant where I went to school so I weaned myself off of it. But you know it kinda tickles me to go back to it a li'l bit. Yeah, just a li'l bit."

"Is that how you spoke to the little girl, the one you met in the park?"

"Not in the park, no."

"You saw her somewhere else?"

"In a dream I did. In a dream about the park."

"What was she wearing?" the doctor asked, seemingly distracted by something he'd seen in the X ray. But Leon wasn't fooled. The question was wrong even for a psychiatrist to ask.

"What you lookin' at, Doc?"

"What? Oh, uh, nothing, really. I mean, I'm looking to see if the microcircuitry has begun to dissolve. You see," he said, building confidence as he spoke, "the time it takes for the sheath around the circuit to melt away should be enough for the brain to have generated its own neural links." Anyone who watched the Med-channel knew about the micro-nerve-bonding process. It involved computer circuitry made from a blood by-product that was compatible with biological processes while temporarily performing complex computer functions. The inventor, Carmine Giampa, was now senior vice president of MacroCode International.

"You don't say," Leon said, as if this were the first time he'd heard of such a miracle. Bel-Nan picked up the sarcasm and cut short his medical lecture.

Leon dressed and went with Bel-Nan to an ultramodern office. All of the furniture was constructed of transparent plasteel accented here and there with the odd stroke of color. It was the kind of furniture that went out of style quickly.

"How long the lease on this furniture you got, Doc?" Leon asked.

"You must tell me about the girl in the park," Bel-Nan said. His ugly smile was gone, his hair tied back.

"Why? She's just a child."

"Did you dream about her before you met her?"

"That would be crazy, now, wouldn't it?"

"You haven't answered the question." Leon could see the doctor's hands clenched under the transparent desk.

"No. I dreamed about her for the first time last night."

"Did she seem like a normal child? Was she, how old was she?"

"Twelve. Yeah, just about twelve."

"But you said that it was a little girl."

"I'm sixty-two, Doc. I think'a my own daughter as a baby."

Bel-Nan was rubbing the tips of his fingers together under the desk.

"Why would you think I dreamed about a girl and then I met her?" Leon asked. The two seconds of blank expression on Bel-Nan's repulsive face convinced Jones that he was about to hear a lie.

"The recording process in the microcircuitry," the doctor said, "sometimes switches events. The system of recording is linear instead of the random-emphasis method of biological memory. Sometimes an event might be misrecorded when the sheath starts breaking down. You know, memories in two places."

"I got to go, Doctor."

"I don't think that's advisable," Bel-Nan said.

"Why not?"

"I'd like to keep you under observation for a night or two."

"I'll be happy to, Doc," Leon said. "But not tonight. Tonight I'm meetin' a friend to play a game of chess." The ugly smile returned, tinged with bad intentions. "What's this friend's name?" Leon stood up. "What's your real name, Doctor?"

The smile vanished.

Leon turned away and walked out the door.

"Come back, Professor," Bel-Nan called. "I'm afraid that I can't let you leave." Bel-Nan's office was on the eighteenth floor of a forty-floor building. There was an express elevator which stopped only at floors 1, 18, and 35; this to speed up traffic for those who didn't mind walking a few floors up or down.

An elevator car was waiting.

The ground floor was a vast chamber of Synthsteel and glass. There were two hundred feet for Leon to walk to the entrance. He moved quickly through the sparsely populated room. A line of four people waited to walk through the Data Detectors--the system that checked IDs against the possession of unlicensed property, and also for weapons, warrants, and labor truantism. Each person passed between the slender copper-studded glass poles without incident. But when Leon passed through an alarm was set off. Two large guards emerged from a kiosk in the plaza and approached him.

"Excuse me, M," a brawny, redheaded white man said. He was followed by a lanky young man who was white-haired.

"What's the problem, M?" Leon said without a stutter.

"Seems like somebody put a hold on your ID," the large redhead said in a friendly manner. "Maybe you left your briefcase or something like that."

"I didn't have anything," Leon said. "It must be a mistake."

"It'll just take two minutes," the guard assured.

Both men wore the bright red T-shirts that meant private law enforcement. The lanky man had yellow trousers and the redhead wore black. These colors meant that the larger man was the superior officer.