Makers (56 page)

“You seem to be recovering quickly,” he said, sizing up Death in his chair. “Good to see it.” He seemed a little distant, which Death chalked up to being interrupted.

“It’s great to see you again,” Death said. “My friends and I have been coming by the ride every day, helping out however we can, but we never see you there, so I thought I’d call you.”

“You’d call me.”

“To see if we could help,” Death said. “With whatever you’re doing.”

“Come in,” Lester said. He gestured behind him and Death noticed for the first time the small sign that said HOTEL ROTHSCHILD, with a stately peacock behind it.

The door was a little narrow for his rolling chair, but he managed to get it in with a little back-and-forth, but once inside, he was stymied by the narrow staircase leading up to the upper floors. The lobby—such as it was—was completely filled by him, Lacey and Lester, and even if the chair could have squeezed up the stairs, it couldn’t have cornered to get there.

Lester looked embarrassed. “Sorry, I didn’t think of that. Um. OK, I could rig a winch and hoist the chair up if you want. We’d have to belt you in, but it’s do-able. There are masts for pulleys on the top floor—it’s how they get the beds into the upper stories.”

“I can get up on canes,” Death Waits said. “Is it safe to leave my chair outside, though?”

Lester’s eyebrows went up. “Well of course—sure it is.” Death felt weird for having asked. He backed the chair out and locked the transmission, feeling silly. Who was going to hot-wire a wheelchair? He was such a dork. Lacey handed him his canes and he stood gingerly. He’d been making his way to the bathroom and back on canes all week, but he hadn’t tried stairs yet. He hoped Lester wasn’t too many floors up.

Lester turned out to be on the third floor, and by the time they reached it, Death Waits was dripping sweat and his eyeliner had run into his eyes. Lacey dabbed at him with her gauzy scarf and fussed over him. Death caught Lester looking at the two of them with a little smirk, so he pushed Lacey away and steadied his breathing with an effort.

“OK,” he said. “All done.”

“Great,” Lester said. “This is what I’m working on. You talked to Perry about it before, right? The Disney-in-a-Box printers. Well, I’ve cracked it. We can load our own firmware onto it—just stick it on a network with a PC, and the PC will find it and update it. Then it becomes an open box—it’ll accept anyone’s goop. You can send it your own plans.”

Death hadn’t seen a DiaB in person yet. Beholding it and knowing that he was the reason that Lester and Perry were experimenting with it in the first place made him feel a sense of excitement he hadn’t felt since the goth rehab of Fantasyland began.

“So how does this tie in to the ride?” Death asked. “I was thinking of building rides in miniature, but at that scale, will it really impress people? No, I don’t think so.

“So instead I was thinking that we could just push out details from the ride, little tabletop-sized miniatures showing a piece every day. Maybe whatever was newest. And you could have multiple feeds, you know, like an experimental trunk for objects that people in one region liked—”

Lester was shaking his head and holding up his hands. “Woah, wait a second. No, no, no—” Death was used to having his friends hang on his every word when he was talking about ideas for the ride and the story, so this brought him up short. He reminded himself who he was talking to.

“Sorry,” he said. “Got ahead of myself.”

“Look,” Lester said, prodding at the printer. “This thing is its own thing. We’re about more than the ride here. I know you really like it, and that’s very cool, but there’s no way that everything I do from now on is going to be about that fucking thing. It was a lark, it’s cool, it’s got its own momentum. But these boxes are going to be their own thing. I want to show people how to take control of the stuff in their living rooms, not advertise my little commercial project to them.”

Death couldn’t make sense out of this. It sounded like Lester didn’t like the ride. How was that possible? “I don’t get it,” he said at last. Lester was making him look like an idiot in front of Lacey, too. He didn’t like how this was going at all.

Lester picked up a screwdriver. “You see this? It’s a tool. You can pick it up and you can unscrew stuff or screw stuff in. You can use the handle for a hammer. You can use the blade to open paint cans. You can throw it away, loan it out, or paint it purple and frame it.” He thumped the printer. “This thing is a tool, too, but it’s not your tool. It belongs to someone else—Disney. It isn’t interested in listening to you or obeying you. It doesn’t want to give you more control over your life.

“This thing reminds me of life before fatkins. It was my very own personal body, but it wasn’t under my control. What’s the word the academics use? ‘Agency.’ I didn’t have any agency. It didn’t matter what I did, I was just this fat thing that my brain had to lug around behind it, listening to its never-ending complaints and aches and pains.

“If you don’t control your life, you’re miserable. Think of the people who don’t get to run their own lives: prisoners, reform-school kids, mental patients. There’s something inherently awful about living like that. Autonomy makes us happy.”

He thumped the top of the printer again. “So here’s this stupid thing, which Disney gives you for free. It looks like a tool, like a thing that you use to better your life, but in reality, it’s a tool that Disney uses to control your life. You can’t program it. You can’t change the channel. It doesn’t even have an off switch. That’s what gets me exercised. I want to redesign this thing so it gets converted from something that controls to something that gives you control.”

Lester’s eyes shone. Death hurt from head to toe, from the climb and the aftermath of the beating, and the life he’d lived. Lester was telling him that the ride wasn’t important to him anymore, that he’d be doing this other thing with the printer next, and then something else, and then something else. He felt a great, unexpected upwelling of bitterness at the thought.

“So what about the ride?”

“The ride? I told you. I’m done with it. It’s time to do the next thing. You said you wanted to help out, right?”

“With the ride,” Death said patiently, with the manner of someone talking to a child.

Lester turned his back on Death.

“I’m done with the ride,” Lester said. “I don’t want to waste your time.” It was clear he meant, You’re wasting my time. He bent over the printer.

Lacey looked daggers at his shoulders, then turned to help Death down the stairs. His canes clattered on the narrow staircase, and it was all he could do to keep from crying.

Suzanne rode the bullet-train from Miami airport in air-conditioned amusement, watching the Mickey-shaped hang-straps rock back and forth. She’d bought herself a Mickey waffle and a bucket-sized Diet Coke in the dining car and fended off the offers of plush animatronic toys that were clearly descended from Boogie-Woogie Elmo.

Now she watched the kids tear ass up and down the train, or sit mesmerized by the videos and interactives set up at the ends of the cars. The train was really slick, and judging from the brochure she found in the seat-pocket, there was another one from the Orlando airport. These things were like chutes leading from the luggage carousel straight into the parks. Disney had figured out how to make sure that every penny spent by its tourists went straight into its coffers.

The voice-over announcements as they pulled into the station were in English, Chinese, Spanish, Farsi and Russian—in that order—and displayed on the porters’ red coats with brass buttons were name-badges with the flags of many nations, denoting the languages they spoke. They wore mouse-ears, and Suzanne—a veteran of innumerable hotels—could not dissuade one from taking her suitcase.

He brought her to a coach-station and saw her aboard a bus marked for the Polynesian, decorated with tiki-lamps, bamboo, and palm-fronds (she touched one and discovered that it was vinyl). He refused her tip as they saw her aboard, and then stood and waved her off with his white gloves and giant white smile. She had to chuckle as she pulled away, amazed at how effective these little touches were. She felt her muscles loosening, little involuntary chuckles rising in her throat. The coach was full of parents and children from all over the world, grinning and laughing and hugging and talking excitedly about the day ahead of them.

The coach let them off to a group of Hawai’ian-shirt-clad staff who shouted “Aloha!” at them as they debarked, and picked up their luggage with swift, cheerful, relentless efficiency. Her check-in was so painless she wasn’t sure it was over until a nice young lady who looked Chechen picked up her bag for her and urged her out to the grounds, which were green and lush, like nothing she’d seen since landing in Florida. She was surrounded by the hotel structures, long-houses decorated with Polynesian masks and stalked by leggy ibises and chirping tropical birds. Before her was a white-sand beach fronting onto an artificial lake ringed with other luxury hotels: a gigantic 1970s Soviet A-frame building and a gingerbread-choked Victorian hotel. The lake was ringed with a monorail track and plied by handsome paddle-wheeler ferry-boats.

She stared gape-jawed at this until the bellhop gently tugged at her elbow, giving her a dazzling smile.

Her room was the kind of thing you’d see Lucy and Ricky checking into on honeymoon in an old I Love Lucy episode—wicker ceiling fans, bamboo furniture, a huge hot-tub shaped like a seashell. Outside, a little terrace looking over the lake, with a pair of cockatoos looking quizzically at her. The bellhop waved at them and they cawed at her and flew off. Suzanne must have made a disappointed noise, because the bellhop patted her on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, we feed them here, they come back all the time. Greedy birdies!”

She tipped the bellhop five bucks once she’d been given the grand tour of the room—a tame Internet connection that was “kid-friendly” and a likewise censored video-on-demand service, delivery pizza or sushi, information on park hours, including the dazzling array of extras she could purchase. It turned out that resort guests were eligible to purchase priority passes for boarding rides ahead of the plebes, and for entering parks early and staying late. This made Suzanne feel right at home—it was very Russian in its approach: the more you spent, the better your time was.

She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.

Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she’d showered she found she didn’t want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai’ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.

She passed the rest of the day at the Magic Kingdom, taking a ferry from the hotel’s pier to the Victorian wrought-iron docks on the other side of the little artificial lake. As she cleared the turnstiles into Main Street, USA, her heart quickened. Kids rushed past her, chased by their parents’ laughing calls to slow down. Balloon sellers and old-fashioned popcorn machines jostled for space in the crowd, and a brass band was marching down the street in straw boaters and red striped jackets, playing a Sousa march.

She ambled up the road, peering in the adorable little shop windows, like the shops in a fancy casino, all themed artificial facades that were, in back, all one shop, linked through the length of the street.

She reached the castle before she realized it, and saw that it was shorter than it had appeared. Turning around and looking back down Main Street, she saw that the trees lining the sides of the street had been trimmed so they got progressively larger from the gates to the castle, creating a kind of false perspective line. She laughed now, amused by the accomplishment of the little trompe l’oeil.

She squeezed past the hordes of Asian tourists taking precisely the same picture of the castle, one after another, a phenomenon she’d observed at other famous landmarks. For some Japanese shutterbugs, the holiday photo experience was as formal as the Stations of the Cross, with each picture of each landmark rigidly prescribed by custom and unwritten law.

Now she was under the castle and headed for what her map assured her was Fantasyland. Just as she cleared the archway, she remembered her conversations with that Death Waits kid about Fantasyland: this was the part that had been made over as a goth area, and then remade as the Happiest Construction Site on Earth.

And so it was. The contrast was stark. From fairy castle to green-painted construction sidings. From smiling, well-turned out “castmembers” to construction workers with butt-crack-itis and grouchy expressions. Fantasyland was like an ugly scar on the blemish-free face of a Barbie doll.

She liked it.

Something about all that artifice, all that cunning work to cover up all the bodies a company like Disney would have buried under its manicured Main Street—it had given her a low-level, tooth-grinding headache, a kind of anger at the falseness of it all. Here, she could see the bodies as they buried them.

Out came her camera and she went on the prowl, photographing and photographing, seeking high ground from which to catch snaps over the siding. She’d look at the satellite pics of this spot later.

Now she knew what her next project would be: she would document this scar. She’d dig up the bodies.

Just for completeness’ sake, she went on some of the rides. Her super-fancy pass let her sail past the long lines of bored kids, angry dads, exhausted moms. She captured their expressions with her camera.

The rides were all right. She was sick of rides, truth be told. As an art-form, they were wildly overrated. Some of them made her sick and some of them were like mildly interesting trips through someone’s collection of action-figures in a dark room. The Disney rides didn’t even let you drive, like Lester’s ride did, and you didn’t get to vote on them.