The advance winds hit, stirring up debris on the open field. Lightning zips between the clouds. He can see the thin dark cone, zigzagging downwards; then darkness descends. Luckily the checkpoint is built into the security building beside it, and those things are like bunkers, thick and solid. He ducks inside as the first rain strikes.
There's a shrieking of wind, a crashing of thunder, a vibrating sound as everything still nailed down hums like a gear in a giant engine. A large object hits the outer wall. He moves inward, through one doorway and then another, scrabbling in his garbage bag for the flashlight. He's got it out and is fumbling with it when there's another gigantic crash, and the overhead lights blink on. Some previously fried solar circuit must have been refried.
He almost wishes the lights hadn't gone on: there's a couple of biosuits off in the corner, with whatever's left inside them in a bad state of repair. Filing cabinets pulled open, paper scattered everywhere. Looks as if the guards were overwhelmed. Maybe they were trying to stop people from getting out through the gates; there was an attempt to enforce a quarantine, as he recalls. But the antisocial elements, which would have included just about everyone by then, must have broken in and trashed the secret files. How optimistic of them to have believed that any of the paperwork and storage disks might still have been of use to anyone.
He forces himself to go over to the suits; he prods them with his stick, turns them over. Not as bad as he thought, not too smelly, only a few beetles; anything soft is mostly gone. But he can't find any weapons. The antisocials must have made off with those, as he would have done. As he did do.
He leaves the inmost room, goes back to the receptionist's area, the part with the counter and the desk. All at once he's very tired. He sits down in the ergonomic chair. It's been a long time since he sat in a chair, and it feels strange. He decides to set out his matches and candle ends, in case the lights go out again; while he's at it he has a drink of birdbath water and the second package of cashews. From outside comes the howling of the wind, an unearthly noise like a huge animal unchained and raging. Gusts are coming in, past the doors he's closed, stirring up the dust; everything rattles. His hands are shaking. This is getting to him, more than he's allowed himself to admit.
What if there are rats in here? There must be rats. What if it starts to flood? They'll run up his legs! He pulls his legs up onto the chair, folds them over one of the ergonomic arms, tucks the floral sheet around them. No hope of hearing any telltale squeaking, the racket of the storm is too loud.
A great man must rise to meet the challenges in his life, says a voice. Who is it this time? A motivational lecturer from RejoovTV, some fatuous drone in a suit. A gabbler for hire. This is surely the lesson taught to us by history. The higher the hurdle the greater the jump. Having to face a crisis causes you to grow as a person.
"I haven't grown as a person, you cretin," Snowman shouts. "Look at me! I've shrunk! My brain is the size of a grape!"
But he doesn't know which it is, bigger or smaller, because there's nobody to measure himself by. He's lost in the fog. No benchmarks.
The lights go out. Now he's alone in the dark.
"So what?" he tells himself. "You were alone in the light. No big difference." But there is.
He's ready though. He gets a grip. He stands the flashlight on end, strikes a match in its feeble beam, manages to light a candle. It wavers in the drafty air but it burns, casting a small glowing circle of soft yellow on the desk, turning the room around him into an ancient cave, dark but protective.
He rummages in his plastic bag, finds the third pack of cashews, rips it open, eats the contents. He takes out the bottle of bourbon, thinks about it, then unscrews the top and drinks. Gluk gluk gluk, goes the cartoon writing in his head. Firewater.
Oh sweetie, a woman's voice says from the corner of the room. You're doing really well.
"No I'm not," he says.
A puff of air - whuff! - hits his ears, blows out the candle. He can't be bothered relighting it, because the bourbon is taking over. He'd rather stay in the dark. He can sense Oryx drifting towards him on her soft feathery wings. Any moment now she'll be with him. He sits crouched in the chair with his head down on the desk and his eyes closed, in a state of misery and peace.
10
~
Vulturizing
~
After four deranged years Jimmy graduated from Martha Graham with his dingy little degree in Problematics. He didn't expect to get a job right away, and in this he was not deceived. For weeks he'd parcel up his meagre credentials, send them out, then get them back too quickly, sometimes with grease spots and fingerprints from whatever sub-basement-level cog had been flipping through them while eating lunch. Then he'd replace the dirty pages and send the package out again.
He'd snared a summer job at the Martha Graham library, going through old books and earmarking them for destruction while deciding which should remain on earth in digital form, but he lost this post halfway through its term because he couldn't bear to throw anything out. After that he shacked up with his girlfriend of the moment, a conceptual artist and long-haired brunette named Amanda Payne. This name was an invention, like much about her: her real name was Barb Jones. She'd had to reinvent herself, she told Jimmy, the original Barb having been so bulldozed by her abusive, white-trash, sugar-overdosed family that she'd been nothing but a yard-sale reject, like a wind chime made of bent forks or a three-legged chair.
This had been her appeal for Jimmy, for whom "yard sale" was in itself an exotic concept: he'd wanted to mend her, do the repairs, freshen up the paint. Make her like new. "You have a good heart," she'd told him, the first time she'd let him inside her defences. Revision: overalls.
Amanda had a rundown condo in one of the Modules, shared with two other artists, both men. The three of them were all from the pleeblands, they'd gone to Martha Graham on scholarship, and they considered themselves superior to the privileged, weak-spined, degenerate offspring of the Compounds, such as Jimmy. They'd had to be tough, take it on the chin, battle their way. They claimed a clarity of vision that could only have come from being honed on the grindstone of reality. One of the men had tried suicide, which conferred on him - he implied - a special vantage. The other one had shot a lot of heroin and dealt it too, before taking up art instead, or possibly in addition. After the first few weeks, during which he'd found them charismatic, Jimmy had decided these two were bullshit technicians, in addition to which they were puffed-up snots.
The two who were not Amanda tolerated Jimmy, but just marginally. In order to ingratiate himself with them he took a turn in the kitchen now and then - all three of the artists sneered at microwaves and were into boiling their own spaghetti - but he wasn't a very good cook. He made the mistake of bringing home a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins one night - a franchise had opened around the corner, and the stuff wasn't that bad if you could forget everything you knew about the provenance - and after that the two of them who were not Amanda barely spoke to him.
That didn't stop them from speaking to each other. They had lots to say about all kinds of junk they claimed to know something about, and would drone on in an instigated way, delivering themselves of harangues and oblique sermons that were in fact - Jimmy felt - aimed at himself. According to them it had been game over once agriculture was invented, six or seven thousand years ago. After that, the human experiment was doomed, first to gigantism due to a maxed-out food supply, and then to extinction, once all the available nutrients had been hoovered up.
"You've got the answers?" said Jimmy. He'd come to enjoy needling them, because who were they to judge? The artists, who were not sensitized to irony, said that correct analysis was one thing but correct solutions were another, and the lack of the latter did not invalidate the former.
Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and ove
r, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of pieces of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
"Like your computers?" murmured Jimmy. "The ones you do your art on?"
Soon, said the artists, ignoring him, there would be nothing left but a series of long subterranean tubes covering the surface of the planet. The air and light inside them would be artificial, the ozone and oxygen layers of Planet Earth having been totally destroyed. People would creep along through this tubing, single file, stark naked, their only view the asshole of the one before them in the line, their urine and excrement flowing down through vents in the floor, until they were randomly selected by a digitalized mechanism, at which point they would be sucked into a side tunnel, ground up, and fed to the others through a series of nipple-shaped appendages on the inside of the tube. The system would be self-sustaining and perpetual, and would serve everybody right.
"So, I guess that would do away with war," said Jimmy, "and we'd all have very thick kneecaps. But what about sex? Not so easy, packed into a tube like that." Amanda shot him a dirty look. Dirty, but complicit: you could tell the same question had occurred to her.
~
Amanda herself wasn't very talkative. She was an image person, not a word person, she said: she claimed to think in pictures. That was fine with Jimmy, because a bit of synesthesia never went amiss.
"So what do you see when I do this?" he'd ask her, in their earliest, most ardent days.
"Flowers," she'd say. "Two or three. Pink."
"How about this? What do you see?"
"Red flowers. Red and purple. Five or six."
"How about this? Oh baby I love you!"
"Neon!" Afterwards she would sigh, and tell him, "That was the whole bouquet."
He was susceptible to those invisible flowers of hers: they were after all a tribute to his talents. She had a very fine ass too, and the tits were real, but - and he'd noticed this early - she was a little flinty around the eyes.
Amanda was from Texas, originally; she claimed to be able to remember the place before it dried up and blew away, in which case, thought Jimmy, she was about ten years older than she made out. She'd been working for some time on a project called Vulture Sculptures. The idea was to take a truckload of large dead-animal parts to vacant fields or the parking lots of abandoned factories and arrange them in the shapes of words, wait until the vultures had descended and were tearing them apart, then photograph the whole scene from a helicopter. She'd attracted a lot of publicity at first, as well as a few sacks of hate mail and death threats from the God's Gardeners, and from isolated crazies. One of the letters was from Jimmy's old dorm roommate, Bernice, who'd cranked her rhetorical volume up considerably.
Then some wrinkly, corrupt old patron who'd made a couple of fortunes out of a string of heart-parts farms had given her a hefty grant, under the illusion that what she was doing was razor-sharp cutting-edge. This was good, said Amanda, because without that chunk of change she would have had to abandon her artwork: helicopters cost a lot of money, and then of course there was the security clearance. The Corpsmen were really anal about airspace, she said; they suspected everyone of wanting to nuke stuff from above, and you practically had to let them climb into your underpants before they'd let you fly anywhere in a hired copter, unless you were some graft-ridden prince from a Compound, that is.
The words she vulturized - her term - had to have four letters. She gave a great deal of thought to them: each letter of the alphabet had a vibe, a plus or minus charge, so the words had to be selected with care. Vulturizing brought them to life, was her concept, and then it killed them. It was a powerful process - "Like watching God thinking," she'd said on a Net Q&A. So far she'd done PAIN - a pun on her last name, as she'd pointed out in chat-room interviews - and WHOM, and then GUTS. She was having a hard time during the summer of Jimmy because she was blocked on the next word.
Finally, when Jimmy didn't think he could stand any more boiled spaghetti, and the sight of Amanda staring into space while chewing on a strand of her hair no longer brought on an attack of lust and rapture, he landed a job. It was with an outfit called AnooYoo, a minor Compound situated so close to one of the more dilapidated pleeblands that it might as well have been in it. Not too many people would work there if they'd had other choices, was what he felt on the day he went for the interview; which might have accounted for the slightly abject manner of the interviewers. He could bet they'd been rejected by a dozen or two job-hunters before him. Well, he beamed at them telepathically, I may not be what you had in mind, but at least I'm cheap.
What had impressed them, said the interviewers - there were two of them, a woman and a man - was his senior dissertation on self-help books of the twentieth century. One of their core products, they told him, was the improvement items - not books any more, of course, but the DVDs, the CD-ROMs, the Web sites, and so forth. It wasn't these instructionals as such that generated the cash surplus, they explained: it was the equipment and the alternative medicines you needed in order to get the optimum effect. Mind and body went hand in hand, and Jimmy's job would be to work on the mind end of things. In other words, the promotionals.
"What people want is perfection," said the man. "In themselves."
"But they need the steps to it to be pointed out," said the woman.
"In a simple order," said the man.
"With encouragement," said the woman. "And a positive attitude."
"They like to hear about the before and the after," said the man. "It's the art of the possible. But with no guarantees, of course."
"You showed great insight into the process," the woman said. "In your dissertation. We found it very mature."
"If you know one century, you know them all," said the man.
"But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives."
"Exactly!" said the man, as if Jimmy had just solved the riddle of the universe in one blinding flashbulb of light. He got a finger-cracking handshake from the man; from the woman he got a warm but vulnerable smile, which left him wondering whether or not she was married. The pay at AnooYoo wasn't that great, but there might be other advantages.
That evening he told Amanda Payne about his good fortune. She'd been carping about money lately - or not carping, but she'd inserted a few pointed remarks about pulling your own weight into the prolonged and intent silences that were her specialty - so he thought she'd be pleased. Things hadn't been that good in the sack lately, ever since his ChickieNobs blunder, in fact. Maybe they'd pick up now, in time for a heartfelt, plangent, and action-filled finale. Already he was rehearsing his exit lines: I'm not what you need, you deserve better, I'll ruin your life, and so forth. But it was best to work up to these things, so he elaborated on his new job.
"Now I'll be able to bring home the bacon," he concluded in what he hoped was a winsome but responsible tone.
Amanda wasn't impressed. "You're going to work where?" was her comment; point being, as it unfolded, that AnooYoo was a collection of cesspool denizens who existed for no other reason than to prey on the phobias and void the bank accounts of the anxious and the gullible. It seemed that Amanda, until recently, had had a friend who'd signed up for an AnooYoo five-month plan, touted as being able to cure depression, wrinkles, and insomnia all at the same time, and who'd pushed herself over the edge - actually, over the windowsill of her ten-storey-up apartment - on some kind of South American tree bark.
"I could always turn them down," said Jimmy, when this tale had been told. "I could join the ranks of the permanently unemployed. Or, hey, I could go on being a kept man, like now. Joke! Joke! Don't kill me!"
Amanda was more silent than ever for the next few days. Then she told him she'd unblocked herself artistically: the next key word for the Vulture Sculpture had come to her.
"And what
's that?" said Jimmy, trying to sound interested.
She looked at him speculatively. "Love," she said.
AnooYoo
~
Jimmy moved into the junior apartment provided for him in the AnooYoo Compound: bedroom in an alcove, cramped kitchenette, reproduction 1950s furniture. As a dwelling place it was only a small step up from his dorm room at Martha Graham, but at least there was less insect life. He discovered quite soon that, corporately speaking, he was a drudge and a helot. He was to cudgel his brains and spend ten-hour days wandering the labyrinths of the thesaurus and cranking out the verbiage. Then those above would grade his offerings, hand them back for revision, hand them back again. What we want is more ... is less ... that's not quite it. But with time he improved, whatever that meant.
Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier. It was his task to describe and extol, to present the vision of what - oh, so easily! - could come to be. Hope and fear, desire and revulsion, these were his stocks-in-trade, on these he rang his changes. Once in a while he'd make up a word - tensicity, fibracionous, pheromonimal - but he never once got caught out. His proprietors liked those kinds of words in the small print on packages because they sounded scientific and had a convincing effect.
He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos that came from above telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him because they'd been dictated by semi-literates; all they proved was that no one at AnooYoo was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.
His social life was - for the first time in many years - a zero: he hadn't been stranded in such a sexual desert since he was eight. Amanda Payne shimmered in the past like a lost lagoon, its crocodiles for the moment forgotten. Why had he abandoned her so casually? Because he'd been looking forward to the next in the series. But the woman interviewer from AnooYoo about whom he'd had such hopes was never seen again, and the other women he encountered, at the office or in the AnooYoo bars, were either mean-minded eye-the-target sharks or so emotionally starved even Jimmy avoided them as if they were quagmires. He was reduced to flirting with waitpersons, and even they turned a cold shoulder. They'd seen fast-talking youngsters like him before, they knew he had no status.