Virtually True (8 page)

“Right.”

Maxi’s words echo off wood- and urine-colored sea. “Good afternoon, ladies and gents. I know you’ve suffered, you’re scared, and all that, so let’s not waste your time or mine, shall we? Anybody here been raped or tortured? Speak up now, you get an exclusive.” No answer, so he says to True, “They’ll be here a while. Gonna check out the UND camp first. Need some updated footage. Wanna come?”

UND: undesirables. Besides taking in garbage from other nations, for a price, Luzonia accepts UNDS, locking them away in camps like these, lets them claw and kill one another. A nation within a nation. Drug addicts, political prisoners, rapists, child molesters. Garbage and undesirables make up a significant percentage of the nation’s GDP.

“No. I’ve got things to do here.” Besides, at Rush’s behest, True came by a few weeks before, gathered enough UND footage to get them through “Sweeps Week” times three.

True turns his attention to the Japanese refugee camp, a hastily assembled plot of land and dock reclaimed from the sea with Japanese technology. Notices an old man, alone, lying on the dock, his head propped on a small bag. He sees True, motions for him. Approaching, True reads the motto stitched on the bag:
Tomorrow’s Fashion Today
.

“Mizu onegaishimasu.”
The man whispers while True kneels.

True turns on his wrist-top, accesses the Japanese translation program while surreptitiously filming. He says, “What did you ask?” and the old man watches Japanese characters dance before his eyes. If the man couldn’t read, True could change the program to repeat whatever English sentence he utters in Japanese, but this often leads to an uncomfortable, confusing, time lag.

The words
I asked for water, please
, float before True’s eyes, accompanying the Japanese babble. True gives him a squeeze bottle.

Reporter?
The man has a tear-shaped face and coin-slot eyes.

“Yes.”

He licks his lips.
Tell them it was bad, very bad. My wife is dead. My children, I do not know where they are.

“How were you able to survive?” True hopes the man can pick up on his gentle tone.

Tears soak into the dock’s hot wood
. It was late afternoon. I was shopping for my wife, who has been ill. As I was preparing to enter my home there was a tremendous sound. The ground shook and large cracks in the earth opened up nearby. There was a terrible explosion. Someone had left gas on and immediately other houses caught fire. I don’t know how long it lasted. When it was over, I saw my home collapsed. My wife was inside.

He sobs. True places a comforting hand on his shoulder, knows that although he can erase his presence from the footage later, he can’t erase the man’s sorrow. When the man calms, he says,
I have lived through many earthquakes and tremors. I have been awakened by a grumbling floor, shaking my futon like an electric massage. But I have never experienced such an earthquake before. My wife, my house, they’re gone.

The man shudders again. True asks his name.

Endo
, he says, sniffling.
Hiroyuki Endo.

“Mr. Endo, soon you’ll be able to return to your home. And Japan will be rebuilt. Your country has always rebounded from adversity. After Admiral Perry, after World War Two, after the Tohoku tsunami
—
”

Deep sobs.
No. No. It will not be possible. I sold my land so I might have money to survive here, but these Luzonians are cruel. They do not accept electric yen. They make us pay two commissions. Now I can never return to my home.

“Why did you sell your land?”

There was no way I could go west from Tokyo. Only people with relatives had anywhere to go.

“Who bought your land?”

I don’t know. At the airport, a man offered me money. My house and property was split in half. I saw it with mayonnaise. What else could I do?

“Mayonnaise?”

Mayonnaise
. He says this with conviction.
And I trust mayonnaise.

A software glitch. It’s happened before. True plugs “mayonnaise” into the dictionary and the Anglicized phonetic “my own eyes” pops up.

He offered cash. I had no choice. Bank records were wiped out. I knew that to survive, I would need money.

“How much did he pay?”

I received very little, a fraction of its value just yesterday. Now the land is ruined.
Endo shakes. True mops his forehead with his shirt tail
. You know, I was an insurance claims adjuster.

“Yes?”

That is so. I know a few things. I know the insurance industry can survive such destruction, since so little of Tokyo was insured. But I would not wish to be American or European now.

“Japanese foreign assets will flow back to Japan?”

Perhaps it was irresponsible to place Japan’s capital on four fault plates
.

“And the majority of the vast majority of the nation’s wealth as well.”

Yes
. The man slips into heaves, covers his eyes with his arm.

“Great, mate, ya got him to cry.” Maxi’s filming the scene. “I owe you one.” Later, True knows, Maxi will erase him from the scene and frame the old man alone, wallowing in sadness. Probably patch in his own questions as well. True wonders why Maxi bothers to film at all when he can fabricate any footage he wants.

True interviews other refugees
—
salarymen and their families, young Japanese
cyberjinrui
and
otaku
, the latest generation of cyberjunkies, elderly, hunched-over women called
obaasans
—takes some standard background footage, edits it on his wrist-top, and files it with Rush.

Rush is a domino-sized cube lodged in True’s screen. “I got the footage. But I have a collagen appointment. I’ll look it over later.”

“Whatever.”

“Hey, Ailey. You think we need a hacker?”

A question without a context. “Why?”

“Reiner got the network to sign on for one. A guy with a mix of numbers and letters in his name. She gets one, I think I should too. Got to run.”

Numbers and letters?  Could be True knows WWTV’s most recent acquisition. The electric datasphere is indeed an intimate place.

*          *          *

Back in Bar 24-7, True’s shouting through barbed wire at the club’s bartender while filming the bizotic events on stage.

“About yea high.” True’s holding his hand chest high. “Eleven years old, maybe. Squatter kid.”

The bartender’s response is drowned out by the crowd, an emcee shouting, “She is beautiful, yes? Young. Drug, disease free.”

The center of attention is a pre-teen girl with hair hanging to her tailbone, standing sadly amid the hubbub. She wears a yellow floral-print dress, hoop earrings, and her face is smeared with makeup: deeply rouged cheeks, thickly painted lips, nails bright red. Tears well in her eyes, adding to her vulnerability, and, True assumes, her price. He turns his attention back to the bartender. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“I have not seen her.”

“Know anyone who might know?” True slides a sheath of money through the cage vent.

The bartender, eyes holding True, covers the bills with his hand, reels them in, counts them and shrugs. “If you have the money you can have any woman. They’re all the same, if you ask me.”

On stage the emcee fans his face with the girl’s skirt. “Look! No hair. Fresh, young. Tits like buds on trees.” Holds up a piece of paper. “A doctor’s report. She’s a certified virgin. See?”

“Three thousand!”

            “Four thousand!”

                   “Four thousand five hundred!”

True forks over more bills.

“Wait.” The bartender confers with a bouncer with knuckles of calloused corduroy. A kickboxer, a necessary prerequisite for Nerulan bouncers. Just in case there’s a cache of weapons nearby.

Applause and table-thumps. The price is escalating. Virgins are at a premium.

The emcee shrieks, “Ten thousand. Do I hear ten thousand?”

A chainsaw buzz. But no bid.

The girl tries to run, is slapped by a thick matron, who forces her into modeling positions. The girl shrieks, kicks. And the men laugh in that way that men who go to whores do. So does the bartender.

“Where’s her mother?” True asks.

The bartender’s smile carved in wood. “Her mother is with her. There.” Points to the stage. The matron.

“Ten thousand! I bid ten thousand!” A tourist with a physique that reminds True of gnocchi—sticky pink skin, pudgy knees.

Over the sound system. “The bid stands at ten thousand. Once ten thousand.”

The bartender whistles. “Talk to the Rajput.”

“The Raj-what?”

The emcee shouts, “Twice ten thousand.”

“The Rajput is a rounder. She knows the ways of the street.” Rounder: a hustler.

“Sold for ten thousand! Collect your prize!”

The tourist lumbers to score his winnings.

True asks where he can find the Rajput. The bartender points to the door.

Outside, True sees only one rounder—an Indian woman wrapped in a sari. She stands beneath a sign radiating waves of red neon. True studies her: black and gray strings of unkempt hair, twisting and tangled in a bun. Her skin is loose around her bones, a size eight epidermis draped over a size six frame.

She hisses. “Pssst. Surveillance Sentry?”

“What?”

“You are searching for Surveillance Sentry?” Her voice is sing-songy, staccato, rising from deep in her throat.

“No. Are you the Rajput?”

She draws coated software cards from the myriad folds and ties of her tattered sari, displays them as a fan. “Maybe you are lonely. If that’s the case, let me help.” She inches a pink and gold card out of the deck with her thumbs. “With this you can invent the lover of your dreams. And what is more important than being loved? You are limited only by your imagination. It can do
any
thing, any
thing
you want.”

“Did you see a shanty girl begging here night before last?”

“Dose on some FREEze, plug in the program, and
life
may even be worth living.”

He’s out of practice, too easily sidetracked, his interviewing skills rusty. The first order of business is to control the tempo, to be the one asking questions. “She was about eleven years—”

“—you cannot find it anywhere else.”

“Find what?”

“This software. It is scarce. Very valuable.”

“I don’t need it.”

“And if I were to lower the price?”

“You haven’t given me a price. But whatever it is, I’m not interested.”

“Baba,” she sighs. “Life is hard. I lost my family, my husband, parents, sisters, brothers, uncles and aunts, cousins, everybody,
yaar
. You know how it is to lose your whole family, to wake up in the night, to see their faces, to hear them talk, but only in dreams? Do you know how empty life is without them?”