The Mere Future (14 page)

“Better Potty Than Knotty”

Which would turn out to be an article about The Boy Scouts and their rope work. Then the TV anchors would just happen to adlib it a couple million times, and before the new sun rose, it was plastered all over Teach-Shirts. A week from Thursday, he would be having a fight with Claire, and in their most private, intimate moment, she’d rhyme something with
potty.
The ad had become their life.

Claire. It had been three months since she’d dumped him, and he was still carrying a blowtorch.

The level of self-consciousness that the Beats brought to art-making is perhaps their worst legacy. Yet it never trickled up to those who needed it most. A little self-consciousness would sober up those plasties. It used to be easy to identify the establishment and say what a “square” was. Now, who knew? Trends came only from the center. The margins? Where are they?

Jeff looked around himself. Where? Where? He couldn’t find a single edge.

There were no real hipsters, just the folks with power and those without. This whole system left people like Jeff out in the cold.

And the advertisers claimed “society” had changed—but, except for reading a great book, Jeff’s life was feeling worse and worse. There was no place to hide from Competition: The Social Aggression. And it didn’t acknowledge its own existence.

Now, with all the mail deliveries, Power Guys could plant stories on the mid-morning, late-morning, and early-afternoon news. They kept reporting that people were going back to reading books because the only thing on the serves, scans, TVs, and glossies were ads, ads, ads. People were saturated, the News said. They wanted some emotional catharsis … suddenly. And guess what? These reports were ads themselves. The product? Books!

Jeff was tripping on all of this. He stared and mulled. He stepped outside and looked at things differently. He saw that those dressed as trendsetters were walking down the streets reading, feeling free about it. Flaunting their books. He knew that they were probably buying stock in book companies, automatically, as they walked. This made them double-cool—and richer.

Jeff was sure that books were another invented fad. They stunk of it. He recalled the good old days when trends started in someone’s living room and happened to catch on. Those days were long gone. But that’s the price everyone has to pay if they want low rents. Right?

Jeff hated himself. He could have pulled out his own beard. That’s how sad he was. He’d spent the last three months smashing his fists down on his own skull and still he deserved more punishment. He’d fucked up the whole thing with Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. And it was all over those stupid letters she’d sent him. He should have just appreciated them. He should have just kept them happily, as a sign that someone loved him once, even if not enough. But, instead, he had to over-interpret. He didn’t know. He didn’t know that lots of people spoke so intimately to lots of other people at the same time. He was terrified.

How was Jeff to know that all around him people were sharing intimacy as if it were nothing? They were sharing praise and what they appreciated about each other, what they loved about each other. He had no idea that that was normal—to own the love that you feel. How could he? He’d rather kill her than have that happen. Rereading those letters made him want to fuck her again. But when he told her so, she didn’t want to. Then she said that she did think he was sexy, but that relationships are about more than two people. They’re also about the world. And, while she was sure that he would be so kind and loving to her on a personal level, she didn’t think that the relationship would work “socially.”

Claire let him go.

Socially?
SOCIALLY
?

SOCIALLY?

He wasn’t fucking society. He was fucking her.

That’s why Jeff loved Trueblood, because Trueblood did what he had to do, and then he could explain it. Of course, those were the days before the twenty-four-hour Incest Channel. Ladies with big hair from Milwaukee came on around-the-clock and told how their parents’ Satanic cult committed ritual abuse. They described how their mothers poked their vaginas with knitting needles, killed babies, and made their daughters eat the livers of the dead babies before boarding alien space ships.

Jeff never wanted to take one step out of Manhattan. Here, when people kill their own children, there is no Martian involved.

He preferred the Defense of Incest Channel, where men with expensive haircuts, and also some regular Joes, defended their rights to rape their children. They believed that the bad Puritans wanted to ruin everything.

Anyway, there was a lesson to learn from Trueblood. Even after three months, Jeff could win back Claire’s love,
SOCIALLY
, if only he could become persuasive.

28. MAIL

D
OMINICK QUIETLY
tended the bonfire out back behind the store. That’s how he spent his days now. He’d wake and smoke a cigarette, lying in bed in his undershorts while Freddy cooked up a bowl of oatmeal. Then they would walk across the street to their store and make some coffee. Then Dominick would light up another smoke.

They liked their store.

Freddy loved to sit at the front desk and wait for dispatchers to come in. Then he’d pay them by the bag.

It had not taken many days of apartment living in The New Era for the brothers to start paying attention to the mail. It came at least five times a day, often more. Each time, their box would be full. But Fred and Dominick didn’t have any friends, nor were they doing any business. Besides the occasional postcard from their counselor, Ginette, their mailboxes were stuffed to the brim with ads.

At first, Freddy dutifully brought the stacks of paper into the house with regularity. Some of them had nice pictures and designs and others had special smells, sounds, and textures related to specific products. But the paper quickly overtook their lives. They tried pasting layers of it onto the walls as decorations, but soon the size of their apartment was greatly diminished. Freddy made some shelves out of it, but soon the shelves overflowed with mail. That’s when Freddy got the idea of opening up a dump. Within hours many of their neighbors were paying a small fee to have a dispatcher (Freddy) clean out the stuff on a regular basis, and Dominick’s job was to burn it all in a ditch out back.

The ad producers were upset at first by this unforeseen development, but since the number one rule of advertising is that “people and systems act on and transform each other,” they quickly recognized that a new market was dawning. So they started producing “Mail Dumper” Teach-shirts, baseball caps, and tote bags, which advertised the wearer’s rebellion against the mail system. These new items were first produced in small quantities and sold only in specialty shops, but then they started to appear in knock-off versions and could be purchased through any website. A condom was produced called “The Male Dumper.” All needs were met. Before he knew it, Freddy found a newspaper headline trumpeting:
MAYOR, A MALL DUMPER
, when Sophinisba banned shopping malls from the island of Manhattan. Then some dispatcher mumbled it to Fred when referring to his old lady, never realizing that he was repeating an ad.

It was a crazy autumn day. At first, the big tree out back had slowly revealed a bright orange underbelly and then a kooky red surface. It cascaded into bright gold, which had now become as crispy and brown as a shoe, brown as a single piece of singed mail.

Dominick was quiet, neither constant nor desiring. He was numb. He smoked. He feared any tension. He was self-medicating by staring at the flames. He feared any strong emotions. Fred, on the other hand, loved his job. He loved chatting with the dispatchers, carrying the stacks of paper out back. He loved the way the sacks pulled on the sinew of his back and created unsightly, outof-character lumps of hard tissue at the same weird points on both arms. He knew from TV that most people paid for their lumps with their lives. They spent every last cent on gym clothes, and then on gyms. They spent their most important years trudging up machines. He knew that there were actually writers, sitting at home, trying to decide between writing a book or going to the gym. When that didn’t work, they had plastic surgery. Most New York bodies were extremely expensive. But his was for free. Besides, he could never use those machines. He didn’t know how to program.

Having a function blunted his compassion. He had goals now, which prioritized actions and took him outside of the realm of unity with all mankind. He’d had a good idea, and clearly no longer wanted a lover, now that he’d achieved something. No use risking failure when success felt so fine. Why get wrapped up in the promise of a pleasure he wouldn’t be able to feel secure about until he was already sick of it? Like his father. Jeff. His father was lovesick for someone he was so mad at, he would have spent the entire relationship getting back at her, or getting her back, if she’d give him either chance. Fred did not want that life. He’d rather burn the mail.

29. LAKE

“T
HAT’S SOME
fire you’ve got there.”

Dominick didn’t even blink. Three or four times a day someone said, “Hey, that’s some fire you’ve got there.” It was a sign. A sign of the other person’s loneliness or lack of purpose, of a superficial desire to connect without the ability to offer something more. It was a clue of banality, of a person who just repeated what they had heard someone else say. It was a symbol of emptiness or a search for a blank conversation to fill a blank afternoon.

“Son,” Jeff said, squatting down next to his son, “that’s some fire you got there. You’ve grown up to be a pretty good fire tender after all.”

Oh no
, thought Dominick, panicking as a terrible excitement took over his being. His father had returned to destroy him.

“I remember when you were a boy and I took you to a lake. Do you remember?”

Dominick nodded, wishing, wishing, that the old man would go back to ignoring him.

“We did all kinds of things. Right, my son?”

“Right.”

“When you were six we went for a walk. When you were seven I took you to the park, remember? They say that the first seven years of a boy’s life are the most important. Don’t they? Don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Dominick whimpered.

“They do! Voices carry over lakes. Did you know that? Son? Two fellows can be out on a boat fishing and sharing a couple of secrets and the next thing you know, the women back on shore, unwrapping those tuna fish sandwiches, well, they know every detail. The guys come to land and the little ladies are gone. They packed up the picnic lunch and threw it in the trash. People think that nature keeps their secrets, but it don’t. Listen to me, Dom. The old man’s got some experiences that can help you out. Let me be the wise old one and you’ll have an easier time of it. I’m warning you.”

Jeff picked up a perfume sampler and threw it on the fire.

“Now the whole world will smell of perfume,” Jeff said. “Ain’t that nice?”

Many people before him had made the same assumption, but actually nothing smelled stronger, when it was burning, than ink.

30. TITANIC

W
HEN
G
INETTE
finished her lettuce lunch, she settled on a carrot-dipped cucumber for dessert. All day she planned her strategy for how to get out of her second job at the clinic. She was so sick of drug addicts. Sick of doing “good works” for others. Blech. She was sick of checking their rectal cavities, sick of hearing their lies, their pain. She was sick of sitting in offices with people who had wasted a lot or most of their time. And she hated taking care of them because no one else would. They were mostly weak, shafted by the social structure, or had genetic predispositions that were so ingrained, even amputation wouldn’t have changed anything. What she really wanted out of life was to climb at THE MEDIA HUB, get a better design job, and have a bit more status in the scheme of things. She wanted to do something with her life that really mattered, like be an Art Director.

For three years Ginette had secretly been working on a master mock-up for a design idea to break into the big time. It was a four-dimensional makeup case with an Indian bedspread motif, chrome plating, and scratch-n-sniff. She knew it was a winner. Every week she sent it out to a different art director and hoped desperately for a reply. To date, she had sixty-five rejections out of 380 submissions. She knew that the other remaining 315 art directors would probably never get back to her. They had already stolen her idea or thrown it away. This was all because she was a nobody and didn’t come from the right family. Her father was a shoe salesman and her mother was a CPA. In order to get in with an art director, you needed to have a father who was Idi Amin and a mother who was Peggy Lipton.

But one day, while glancing at the Scan, she saw a spotlight on Nadine, art director at the
CAN-BC
Autodimension Design Division of
THE MEDIA HUB
. Ginette recognized her from the street. Nadine had really cool lip gloss. She was gay, and those girls tended to be nicer to Ginette, plus Nadine said, in the spotlight, that she was “open to new dimensions.” Ginette sent her a really slick qmail, and a prototype with an anti-Xerox coating. No point in taking any chances. Nadine called her two minutes later, apologizing for the delay. She said she’d seen Ginette “around” many times, and would “love” to get together. She apologized twice again.

Why is she apologizing when these types are usually real cunts?
Ginette thought.

So they got together for water, to talk things over.

“This is the best design I have ever seen in my life,” Nadine said. “And I am so honored to be working with you. Let’s get together again next week.”

“You know,” Ginette said at their second meeting, “I had a dream about you.”

“I’m so honored to be in your dreams,” Nadine said. “Now, let me tell you that I have just been put on retainer by Sophinisba herself to develop a new design for the city crest. If you can turn this makeup case into a city crest, we’ve got a deal.”