Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World (36 page)

The way most cyclers survived an unemployment cycle was by finding illegal labor or a relative or friend who knew the drill. He could become a prettyboy or maybe sell a body part--but, no, it wouldn't have to come to that. His brother, Rand, in Oklahoma City would take him in. He'd make Harold work in the communal gardens but that was bearable. He wouldn't have to get involved with the black market, or worse, the weapons market--or worse still, to become a thief. To be caught stealing would mean a thirty-year minimum sentence in one of the corporate prisons. There was no early release, parole, or life after prison. The few ex-cons that Harold had seen were hollow-eyed, slack-jawed men and women. Maybe black people didn't get the striped flu, but they sure got bit by prison--they sure did.

"Prison sucks the soul out of our men and women through a pinhole in the heart," XX Y had proclaimed more than fifteen years before. "And we just look the other way . . ." Harold's heart was racing. What was he doing thinking about Common Ground and Angel's Island prison? He decided to go back, pay the hundred dollars, and leave.

"Here you go," the nervous doorman said as he opened a door. Jamey pushed Harold through into a room filled with light.

Harold went through the door thinking that he would turn around and go back out again. Yasmine meant a lot to him, but not enough to live in hell.

He looked around to get his bearings. He was standing in a cavernous room full of large raised platforms that held fiberplas beds. There was a ledge around the mattresses and chairs, too. Going by the size of the room Harold figured that it held over forty tablebeds. At a table a few feet away Harold saw something that slowed his exit.

An elderly man, bald and gray, with parchmentlike skin, was sitting on the ledge of a table while a young woman, no more than twenty, stroked his huge penis. The white man had well-defined muscles to complement his twenty-inch boy-hard erection. The slender Asian girl rocked back and forth holding on with both hands. The look of reverence on her face seemed studied but that didn't detract from Harold's fascination. He had heard about the sex therapies that the uppers could afford. The process of cell rejuvenation could make parts of the body young again, at least for a while. Drugs could make you virile. An every-other-day visit to sensory-dep tanks could exercise your body until it had what was advertised as peak physique.

This man had it all.

"Yeah, yeah," the man grunted. Then he looked up at Harold and winked just before he came.

"Yeah, baby," the Asian prettygirl said.

The man's emission went on and on. He looked at Harold and Jamey, winking again, as if to say, "Who's the man?"

"Damn," Jamey said. "You see that?"

Two tables over a woman who was near the man's age sat naked at a table. Her face, thighs, and belly were pudgy and somewhat wrinkled, but her breasts put the prettygirl's to shame. Harold felt nauseated and aroused at the same time. The man was strutting around now with his erection tilting up, still dripping semen.

"Somethin', huh?" Yasmine Mü said. She was standing next to them. "I know an even older guy who's got one-half again as long. He has to hold his up when he walks around 'cause it hurts his muscles.

"Hey, Yas," Jamey said.

He hugged the young brown-skinned woman. She was wearing a clear plastic full-length jacket and a G-string.

Harold had forgotten all about leaving. He was looking at Yasmine, unable to speak.

"Hi, Harold," the Iranian emigré said.

"Hey."

"I wondered if you guys'd come," Yasmine said in her newly acquired American accent.

"We wanted to see you, Yas," Jamey was saying. His attention was distracted by the older man's approach to the elderly, young breasted woman.

"See me like that?" she asked.

"Uh," Harold said. He wanted to say yes before Jamey could, but the word was stuck in his throat.

"As long as you don't see us like him," Jamey said. Yasmine laughed.

"Harold wants you to be his prettygirl," Jamey said. "He wants to juggle brass pots with you. That's what he said."

Harold had said it, three years earlier when he and Jamey first signed on with L&L Leasing. But he didn't expect Jamey to remember or to speak for him. They had both lusted after Yasmine while she was busy bumping with uppers in storage rooms and doored cubicles. Back then Yas wasn't interested in cyclers sexually.

But now she smiled and took Harold by the hand. They walked across the mostly empty room of tablebeds toward the far exit. This led to another dank hallway lined with brick and bright light decals. They passed several doors and various men and women along the way. They had to step over three lovers who had fallen to the floor between decals, rutting wild.

Finally they came to a door that sprang open at a word from Yasmine. It was a small room containing only a fiberplas mattress and a hotplate altar with three brass pots on it. Weak candle decals flickered when they entered. There were no decorations on the wall, no carpeting on the floor.

"They move all of this stuff every week?" Harold asked.

"Take off your clothes," Yasmine answered.

Harold's andro-alls were off with a quick gesture. He looked down seeing how small his erection was compared to the man in the main room.

"I guess I won't need the hot pot on you, Harry," Yasmine said. She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in person. Tall--his height--and dark-skinned in that Middle Eastern way. She had large eyes that slanted upwards, black as liquid space, and a mouth that was meant to eat only sensuous fruits and honey cakes. Harold had dreamt of Yasmine at least once a week for the past three years.

She moved close to him and took the erection gently in her hand.

"Your card will be decremented by the minute, two dollars a minute. Do you understand?"

"Yuh."

"I have to say that, Harold. It's the rules."

"I know."

"How long do you want me?"

"As long as I can get."

"How much money do you have?"

"Three thousand, I think."

"How much to spend?"

"All of it," he whispered.

She began stroking his erection in a loose grip. The rest of Harold's body stiffened. Yasmine was looking him in the eye.

"Tell me before you come," she said. She seemed to be studying something that was going on in his head. He felt his legs buckle. Yasmine supported his buttocks with her free hand.

"Don't fall. Put all your mind into your cock. Try to come but tell me before you do."

"I . . . I . . . now . . . now," Harold rasped.

Yasmine reached down to the altar in a deft motion and brought a brass bowl under his nose. Instantly his diaphragm went into spasm and the feeling of orgasm subsided.

"How's your heart?" she asked.

"Okay, I think."

"Because I'm going to do things to you that would kill that old man in the grand hall. Bust his heart open like a rotten peach."

Harold blinked and almost lost consciousness.

"No sleeping, no sitting," she said. She held another bowl under his nose and started the gentle stroking again. "I will bring you up to the edge twenty times or more if I want. And every time you have to tell me and every time I'll pull you back. Okay?"

"What if I said no?"

Yasmine wagged her head slowly from side to side. She smiled and he wondered if his heart
was
strong enough to last the night.

4

". . . three men--captured after apparently trying to contaminate a children's immunization center in Rockland, Oregon--have all committed suicide while in custody of the Rockland police." The newsman, Letter Phillips, wore a lavender T-shirt. His hair was brown and thick. He sat forward on his tall stool and spoke seriously, without personal appeal. This switch from his usual wisecracking manner was effected to tell the audience that this was
real
news. "Our correspondent in Oregon, Couchy Malone, has more."

A beautiful waif with surgically enhanced eyes appeared in the curve. Her skirt was short and her thin legs seemed unsteady.

"Thank you, New York," said the freckled child, striped flu marks on her arms. "Police sources have informed this reporter that a map of some sort was found among the possessions of one of the prisoners. This map identifies immunization centers around the Midwest, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Each center's location has been circled in red and some of these had been marked with a black check sign." Couchy disappeared and a red circle marked with a black check, floating in space, replaced her.

"Was the Rockland site checked, Couchy?" Letter's voice inquired.

"That's the problem, New York," the child said as she reappeared. "It was not checked. The police and the FBI fear that the checked centers may have already been contaminated. These centers work all through the school year. Thousands of children are immunized each day." The strain of fear, real fear, came into Couchy Malone's voice.

Harold put down his shrimp and noodle cup to concentrate on the news report.

"This could be the tip of the iceberg, New York," the young ITL freelancer said. "It could be a very real act of monstrous terrorism."

"Can you tell us which immunization sites, centers, have been marked with the black check?" Letter asked quickly, as if he were trying to drown out her fears.

"No. No, New York. My sources wouldn't or couldn't identify the marked centers."

"Thank you very much, Couchy," Letter Phillips said.

Couchy Malone looked as if she wanted to say something else, but her image faded as Letter Phillips returned to the curve. Harold wondered if she wanted to call out some kind of warning to her family or loved ones.

"In another disease-related story, seven cases of Jeffers's Disease have been reported in and around the Denver area. Named after the doctor who identified it, this new syndrome speeds up the body's metabolism, depleting certain essential elements for blood and skin maintenance. We have Dr. Jeffers on satellite hookup to talk to us about this new disturbing disease."

Above the anchorman's head appeared a patch in which was the head of a man with a thin face and large ears. In childhood he was probably cute.

"Are you with us, Dr. Jeffers?"

"Yes, Letter."

"Seven cases of this terrible illness," Letter said. "How many have been fatal?"

"All of them."

"How long did they suffer?"

"Three days, at least. No one lived out the week." Dr. Jeffers looked as if he had been frightened and now he was numb.

"What is the cause of this disease, Doctor?"

There was a pause then. Maybe the audio line had gone down and the doctor was simply waiting to hear. But Harold believed that Jeffers was considering his answer. He was wondering what to say.

"We believe that there is an environmental cause to the illness, Letter. As we speak federal agencies are trying to discover some link between the victims--where they worked, what they ate, where they went swimming. It's something like that."

"So you don't believe that this could have anything to do with the potential act of terrorism in the Northwest."

"I can't see any connection whatsoever," Jeffers said. "The immunization centers are for children only, and none of the victims down here have been immunized in over a year."

"That's a relief," Letter said with a big smile.

Jeffers didn't seem relieved. His image faded.

"On the lighter side . . ." Phillips began.

"Vid off," Harold said.

He sat back in his new Propper Chair, a thin sheet of transparent and flexible Synthsteel held aloft by pulsating magnetic waves emanating from a disc anchored to the floor.
Like floating on air,
the holo-ads claimed. And it was true, but the feeling was only physical. There was nothing light or buoyant about Harold's life. And this was strange, because he was in love. Yasmine Mü was the center of his life. It was true that he only saw her at the Blanklands Eros-Haus; that he had to pay for her attentions. But she never charged him the full rate and once a week she'd allow him to spend the whole night in her cubicle. Harold's heart and body were Yasmine's to command. But there was a downside to love. The IT curve, the Propper Chair, and all the other little perks of the working life had lost their sheen. He felt small and vulnerable.

Lately Harold had been thinking about his parents, Clarence and Renata Bottoms. By the age of forty they had both faded into White Noise. He hadn't heard from either one in years. He supposed that they were migrants living in what was known as the undertow, the currents of illegal labor under the cycles of unemployment. These migrants moved from city to city, living in Common Ground. They were gone.

Harold had been recalling the last conversation he'd had with his father. They'd met at a China Tea stand on One forty-first and Lenox. Harold paid for the drinks.

"Thanks, son," the elder Bottoms said. He was five eight but seemed shorter because he stooped a little.

"Your mama and I had to give up the apartment. I think she goin' down to Florida. I'ma make it out to St. Louis. Maybe your brother got a hoe in the garden for me."

He never asked to stay with Harold. There were stiff penalties for stacking up in a rental. Either you made your own rent or you stayed in Common Ground. If you were found sheltering someone unemployed you were evicted, fired, and thrown into a double unemployment cycle.

"I'm gonna miss you, Dad," Harold remembered saying. Not
I love you
or
Can't you stay?
Just acceptance. And even that weak farewell was a lie. He had never missed his parents. It wasn't until he experienced the sweet-faced, rough loving of Yasmine that he began to miss them. He wondered if they still spoke to each other. Everyone had a communication number. This code took the place of the Social Security number after that program went bust in 2012. __________

Jamey and Harold spent a lot of time together and at the Blanklands. Jamey's wife had had their marriage license revoked for emotional and material incompatibility. She married the woman she worked for and moved to Seattle to join a state-run pottery studio.