Husk (13 page)

Phillip enters the lounge and places my packed bags near the doorway. The keys to the Rolls-Royce Phantom jingle in his hand. Shaw, forgetting momentarily that he has been returned to phantom form, begins to offer me a handshake. Once he realizes the mistake he drops his hand with a look of embarrassment. I stand and hold my hand out, beckoning him to shake. The wry smile returns as
he reaches out to me again. We fake a gesture of farewell, graphics overlapping flesh, both satisfied by the action. Those holographic eyes look into mine, holding me in place better than a physical appendage ever could as his projected pupils search my own made of matter.

‘You’ll understand if I don’t rent you again?’

‘Of course,’ I reply.

‘It’s nothing personal.’

‘Quite all right, Mr Shaw,
I could do with fewer clients right now, to be honest.’

I approach Phillip and bend down to retrieve my bags. As I rise the butler slips a Cohiba into my shirt pocket for the road and gives me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. It’s
nothing personal, the sharing of brains and bodies between living and dead.

No
, I think.
Nothing personal at all.

‘Mr Rhodes?’

‘Yes, Mr Shaw?’

I turn back to see
my client standing in the middle of the room, looking doleful, one hand raised in a warning of sorts. His holographic image flickers once, twice.

‘Remember, there is a vast difference between those that seek to live for ever, and those who are simply too scared to die.’

My last evening in London consists of nursing a drink in the Red Lion pub and doing as little as humanly possible while waiting for Phineas to show. I sit by a window and stare out at the street, my forehead pressed against the cool glass. It’s raining again,
an unending line of anoraks and umbrellas shuffling past in the slick grey. Everyone appears faceless, moving at a uniform speed, skins drained of colour. Garbage and recyclables are piled on the pavements, awaiting collection, their stink encumbered by the rotten weather. This place, like every city, is so damn overcrowded, saturated with people and the waste they produce. My mind keeps replaying
snippets of what Shaw said earlier. His words are starting to seem obvious now.

‘We won’t get it until we’re dead,’ I mutter.

We’re almost there, I think. Mass depression must be the first step toward our species’ extinction, a collective lack of giving a fuck about the future that in effect cancels one. It’s already beginning, new diseases and disruptions, fresh war and famine, news reports
clocking death tolls higher than the day before. The four horsemen are out of the starting gate, but most people aren’t watching this last race. All bets are off. There is too little left to gamble with. Maybe it’s not a bad thing. As mass killers of everything else, perhaps we deserve a taste.
Every day I see more examples of how awful we treat the majority of everything we come into contact
with, how inhuman we can be when it suits us. We’re like locusts, consumers that can’t help themselves, predisposed to eat each other out of house and home. How many more of us can our world handle? All I want is to make enough money to insulate myself against the inevitable, get me and Ryoko someplace safe by the time everything goes to total shit.

But no matter how much I make, it never seems
like enough.

When I was a kid, I formulated some incorrect ideas about earning money. Anyone on a TV or movie screen, those motherfuckers had
made it
in my opinion. Didn’t matter if they were playing a bit part or offering a clownish bleached grin for a toothpaste brand. Any face on a concert poster, any chiselled body on an advertisement, any mouths delivering lines to cameras, I assumed those
people didn’t have to work another day in their lives. Figured their houses and cars were paid off, debts settled, money in the bank that would never run out. The pedestals they were on, heights above the average person, kept the cash coming somehow.

This consumed me, the idea that there was a loophole in the system, certain jobs that you only had to work once or twice to reap eternal benefits
from. Star in a movie, drop an album, pen a book, get a million hits on a viral video and for ever collect on bountiful residuals. Check your bank account every few days just to see the cash
stack up for that one important or popular thing you did. I believed being the centre of attention for even fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame could be milked for dough and dates for the rest of whatever. That
spelled
contentment
. I was convinced of its reality, a defining moment from where you never looked back. Money for nothing and your chicks for free.

I remember when I woke up and stopped believing this bullshit. It was winter, unending days of no snow, but bitter cold. I was seventeen and desperately looking for a part-time job, wandering from store to store with copies of my resume. Getting
hired before a Christmas season was supposed to be easy, but I was learning different. Automated cashiers were taking over everywhere. Most stores were looking to downsize. Even a good-looking white kid with a high school education couldn’t get jack shit for minimum wage. All up Broadway I tried with no results. When I hit 14th Street I wandered into the market at Union Square, browsing stalls until
I saw something that made me stop. A puckered, pissed-off face glowered at customers from behind a table of novelty hats. The face was familiar, something celebrity about it. As I stared, a cute tattooed chick manning another booth nearby flagged my attention with a little wave. She was three or four years older than me, with a tongue ring, selling someone’s homemade puppets.

‘Recognize him?’
the girl said.

‘I think so.’

‘That’s the lead singer from Red Rum Runners.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked, dumbfounded.

‘Being a douche-bag, thinking he’s superior to everyone else.’

‘Didn’t his band just get nominated for Best New Artist?’

‘Yep. And look where it got him.’

I guess my look of disbelief amused her, because she let out a deliciously evil giggle and beckoned me over with
a finger.

‘Believe it, cute stuff. When the Rum Runners aren’t on tour, this is where you’ll find him, broke and brooding.’

It took me a while to digest the fact that this rock star was working like a chump once he stepped away from the spotlight. The girl looked me up and down, told me I could hang out with her, asked if I wanted a puppet. I set my sights on a plush werewolf, but I had no money.
She gave it to me regardless, said I could work it off in other ways. After she closed up we went back to her place to smoke dope and fool around. Beth was her name. She was broke like me, beautiful too. She was my first love. That girl showed me how to get more out of my young life than anyone else.

We screwed almost every night for two months in her dingy little apartment. She called me her
no strings attached.
I called her my
sock puppet
. Drunk and high, we would devise plans to get rich and famous so we could leave our hardships in the dust. Music, modelling, acting, it didn’t matter, as long as it let us dabble with lifestyles of the rich and famous. Beth was determined to do something, anything, that would get her royalty cheques for the rest of her life. Easy money, she called
it. It might only take a
single leaked sex tape. She said we’d do it together. It was our escape plan.

Then one day I showed up at her apartment and found it abandoned. Not even a note left behind. Went to Union Square and discovered the puppet stall was gone. Poked around, but no one seemed to know a thing. The Red Rum singer gave me a bemused look when I asked him if he’d seen Beth at all.
After a long pause he told me he hadn’t seen her since she’d left his apartment two nights ago. I asked what the hell she was doing in his place and he responded with a sly smile. I glanced around at the other vendors, the little community of mostly young men. There were smirks on almost half the faces. The realization of how many of them Beth may have had behind my back began to dawn on me. Strangely,
I didn’t feel jilted, but when the lead singer gave a derisive chuckle I turned back and decked the prick. He went down, out cold, knocking over his table and chair. Next thing I knew I was running, hoping my right hook had left him unable to sing for a while. Back home I called Beth repeatedly but her phone was disconnected. I never heard from her again. Being left in the lurch like that, it
broke my fucking heart.

A couple years later I got into a cab in Brooklyn and found a headshot and IMDb acting history taped to the back of my cabbie’s seat. We got to chatting and he ran down the list of shows he’d been hired for at one point or another, everything from cop dramas to comedy sitcoms. Said he was driving the taxi to help out a friend. Told me it was for nostalgia more than anything,
since it was the gig he’d had before the acting career took
off. Driving cabs kept him grounded, he said. Good for the soul, he said. He liked helping people out, getting them to where they needed to go, good karma and shit, he said. That was before he pressed me for any possible connection to the entertainment business. The man wanted a gig … anywhere … for anything … It was pathetic. He was
clutching at straws. The desperation in the car was like humidity. His eyes bothered me, the way they wobbled in their sockets when he spoke of his chosen profession.

It was sitting in this cab, looking out the window and wanting out as my driver prattled on, that I caught sight of Beth again. She was standing on a corner in front of a backlit bus shelter advertisement, looking much different
from how I remembered her. As we drove by, my feelings came bubbling back up, flooding me with anxiety, drowning my heart. The infatuation and rejection, all of the crippling love and hurt I’d previously felt pervaded every inch of me. In an instant I threw cash at the cabbie and told him to pull over.

I ran back to Beth, calling her name, eyes fixed on the girl wearing the black miniskirt and
heavy mascara. When I finally reached her it took her too long to recognize me. There was no joy in Beth’s face when the penny finally dropped, just indifference. She had gained weight. There were bags under her eyes. Thick make-up almost camouflaged the cold sores. The old bruise on her cheek dusted with rouge was more noticeable. Her first words to me were nothing more than a curse under her breath.
She told me to beat it, that she was working and I was fucking it up by being around.

‘Working?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re a
whore
now?’ I asked, realizing the point of her attire.

Beth looked at me, glassy-eyed and nonchalant. ‘We’re all whores now, kid.’

The words hung on her lips, making me step back, the truth as offensive as the open sores caked with foundation and lipstick. The girl I had been
in love with was alien to me, little more than a silhouette before the glowing advertisement. In a nearby store window, flat-screens flickered images of those types I’d misinterpreted: newscasters, weatherpersons, late-night infomercial hosts. I looked at Beth, the one who’d been a dreamer like me, determined to make that
easy money
for life. That’s when I finally understood. We’re all just slaves
to the system. It’s only the people you never see that get all that never-ending wealth.

‘Scram, man,’ Beth said. ‘You’re scaring away my customers.’

And just like that, I grew the fuck up. The juvenile longings bending me out of shape simply stretched and snapped. This was adulthood, with all its bleak realities and petty problems. Beth was showing it to me, drawing back the curtain. I hated
her for it. I wanted to hug her and hit her at the same time. She repulsed me, yet there was an erection swelling in my jeans. If she wanted to be trash, I would use her up and throw her away like trash. I opened my wallet, watching her hungry eyes flick to the bills I withdrew.

‘How much?’ I asked.

My question was supposed to shame her. It was supposed to give me a sense of superiority. Beth’s
mouth bent into a cool smirk instead, her eyes flashing viciously with a level of experience I could barely comprehend.

‘For what you have in your wallet you can barely get a handjob. Find an ATM and add thirty to it and I’ll suck you off. You wanna put it in my vag or ass, it’ll cost you double.’

All I could manage was a whimper.

‘But if you wanna call up a friend with some dough,’ Beth continued
in a soft voice as she licked sore lips, ‘I can swing you a real sweet deal on a three-way. It’s my specialty.’

The delicateness with which she placed that sour cherry on my cake was horrifying. I felt blood drain from my face, strength slip out from behind my knees. My stomach cramped. Her laugh was cruel.

‘Go home, kid.’

I turned and walked away, never feeling so small in all my life. By
the time the tears welled up in my eyes I was running. I ran all the way home, locked myself in my room and cried. Then I dropped my pants and masturbated, thinking of Beth, imagining all the other people who had shared her, passed her around and fucked her rotten ass. When I came it was the biggest orgasm I’d ever had.

Like Beth said, we were all whores now.

Sitting in the pub waiting for my
friend, I think about the profound effect that one girl had on me, how anything sacred seemed like snake oil afterwards. When Phineas
walks into my field of vision holding two pints, I don’t recognize him. His striking features make me think he’s some actor, or model or reality TV star gracing me with his presence. When I realize it’s my friend and he’s just a man like me, I’m dismayed. He looks
tired and troubled. I doubt he’s had a sleep since his session.

‘I didn’t know you liked coming to watering holes like this,’ I say with a smirk.

‘Had to come here, mate. At least a quarter of my misspent youth was having too many rounds in this place.’

Phineas sits, putting a pint down in front of me, looking around the rough old establishment with reminiscence in his eyes. This is the world
he clawed himself out of; vicious cycles of binge drinking, dole money, gang violence and trying to live out one more day. It took him moving across the Atlantic to finally escape it. He seems out of place among its scratched wood and chipped paint now. The sour smell of spilt beer clashes with his cologne. The dull yellow lowlight looks greasy on his smooth black skin. The expression on Phineas’s
face, however, tells me he couldn’t be more at home.

‘What time is your flight?’ he asks, taking a sip of lager.

‘Got a few hours yet.’

‘How was your gig?’

‘Good for me. I was used for something other than life’s excesses for a change.’