Grey (3 page)

"Let's get you dressed," she said, with a sigh. "We're going to meet your father back at the company compound."

"I demand to see her immediately!"

"The merger is off!" She spoke louder than she ever had before. An instant later, I thought she was going to cry again. "Sorry," she said, dabbing her eyes, "I didn't mean to raise my voice. It's just very difficult. And please understand that we won't be able to monitor her on the channels, send messages, or communicate in any way. Her family's company is now RiverGroup's enemy."

When what she said sunk in, I felt like I might weep. I had survived the bullets, only to find my world ruined. An old photo
^S7
from
Pure H
came to mind. It was of a man suspended in a vat of clear balls and his whole body was held in place and dimpled like a giant golf ball.

"I'm very sorry, Michael," she said, softly. She started to reach toward my foot, as if to stroke it, but then pulled back, probably because I was still undressed. "Listen," she continued, "after such a devastating security breach, mkg can't merge with us. It would be a public relations disaster. Frankly, RiverGroup is in great trouble. The company's stock has fallen from 63,000 a share to less than 300. We're teetering on collapse." After pursing her lips, she added, "As for mkg, there is no communication between the two family companies. Nora's father, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, held a press conference just minutes ago and announced their new direction."

I met Nora's father for a few seconds before our train-date. He was like my father—one of those loud, old-fashioned men who was almost impossible to embarrass, obsessed with volume, speed, money, and the culmination of everything bright, garish, and vulgar. He wore a glowing violet suit, a shirt that blinked green and gold, and large, gold, oil-burning earrings that left smoke contrails when he moved.

"He did this!" I said, sure. "Before we got on the Bee Train, I bowed my head to him, but he just glared back like he hates me.
He
had the freeboot shoot me!"

"I don't see it," she said, shaking her head. "There must be a weakness in RiverGroup security code. After all, it is supposed to track and monitor information that should have prevented this very thing."

Slapping a hand onto the bed, I said, "I just want Nora."

Joelene lifted my legs and spun me on my butt like a mother maneuvering a baby. Picking up the black underwear, she said, "Your tailor has improved the cloth's temperature control system." Joelene slipped my underwear over my left foot and then the right.

"No, it can't be," I said, imagining Nora floating away.

"It can change from indoor temperatures to outdoor heat in one point three seconds," she continued. "That's a third of last year's model, and for the wearer, it means complete comfort." She sounded like a brochure. Respectfully turning her head, she pulled up the shorts and simultaneously flicked the color spa's green logo-cloth away. "He's also improved the wrinkle control."

"I want to see Nora!" I said, as if mounting one last attack. "I want to be with her, Joelene, I have to see her now!"

She glanced toward the system camera in the far corner of the room. "We're going to survive," she said, soothingly. "Things will work out, Michael. I promise."

Although I didn't know how things could work without Nora, I trusted Joelene. She was the reason I was in a position to meet Nora and understand her significance and brilliance. Until my heart attack when I was fourteen, I was barely a person, let alone a fashionable and grey one. Until then, I danced at the PartyHaus every night before the cameras and what were said to be ten billion fans. Then, on one particular Saturday night, while performing my famous routine, I died.

Wearing gold leaf pants and a hunter green, sheer shirt with gold epithets and ice buttons, I rode an elevator to the center of the polished dance floor. When a spotlight hit me, I began by slowly raising my hands and face to the burning light.

As the massive crowd cheered, the dj transitioned to my anthem,
Adjoining Tissue
, by HammørHêds. During the intro, I rolled my arms, legs, and head like I was a bit of seaweed undulating in a gentle current. It was a tease and the tens of thousands of partiers on the fifteen balconies of the PartyHaus knew it. They screamed my name as if they couldn't wait. Finally, when the cannon drums started firing, I began.

Back then I had a choreographer, two wardrobe consultants, several hair and makeup stylists, and a team of strength and agility trainers. Because of the forces from the massive, fifty-foot Cold-Flame speakers on the dance floor, the untrained were regularly knocked unconscious, maimed, and even killed by the percussive blasts. I had mastered the beats like a karate-surfer riding tsunami waves.

In my routine, I did splits, hand-twirls, punch backs, double-triples, and my own triple and a half front. Before
Adjoining Tissue
finished, the dj started transitioning into
Kuts
by Dr. Ooooo. The fx for this part of the routine called for a shower of razors, like deadly snowflakes from far above, and as I deftly avoided them both in the air and on the floor, a few other brave partiers began to join me.

One, a young woman known as Elinor W, wore a brilliant blue costume that covered her from head to toe except for cutouts for her eyes, chest, and crotch. I remember how she got into her groove, then looked up to smile at me. In that split second, she lost her concentration, and like an ax cleaving a block of wood, a razor sliced into her left eye. She screamed and fell as more razors lodged into her legs and body. I continued my program while paramedics dragged her away.

When I think of myself back then, especially, how I didn't even slow my routine for an instant, let alone stop to help, I can see how hollow and unhappy I was—a boy who was very good at one thing, but derived no pleasure from it. Worse, down deep I think I despised the world that adored me, as I was little more than a marionette in Father's marketing schemes.

But soon after Elinor W was taken away, something happened. What I like to think is that the guilt and self-hate built up so much in my chest that my heart began to seize. In the middle of
Engraved Blööd
by The Bürning Spines, the ice buttons had melted and my shirt hung open, revealing my puffed chest. Admiring dancers surrounded me like worker bees. Each time a drop of sweat flew from my forehead or torso, they dropped to the floor, and shoved and pushed for the chance to lick it up.

The first sensation of my heart attack was in my jaw. A strange, cool numbness made my teeth buzz, but I ignored it and figured it was the strength drugs or some odd harmonic from the speakers. But gradually, the coldness traveled into my eyes and brain like a slow, thick liquid. Then the chill traveled into my arms and legs and turned dark and leaden. I slowed, lost my rhythm, and one of the beats slammed into me hard. I tried to regain my groove, but was knocked back and forth like a pinball. As I lost consciousness, the colored lights high above grew so bright they seemed to shine through my skin and into my emptiness.

They say the crowd rose to their feet and screamed in adulation, until they realized that toppling over backward and slamming my skull on the floor wasn't my newest move.

Two days later, when I woke, I heard a tremendous cheer and slowly realized that I was in a hospital bed, in the middle of the dance floor, and that the place was packed with ten thousand watching my every twitch. I had never felt so vulnerable and exposed. I insisted that I be taken away. My house was quickly reconstructed, made quiet and dim. The silence felt good, so I told my choreographers, stylists, consultants, and trainers to leave me. I lay in bed and did nothing. One of the doctors, concerned about my low spirits, brought me a magazine. I remember paging through the thing, at first fascinated, since I had never seen one before. Gradually, though, I became discouraged and angry as I couldn't read a word or even recognize a single character.

I decided I had to read and begged for a tutor. Father refused because he wanted me to resume dancing as soon as I could, but when my body wouldn't respond to the healing drugs, he acquiesced, if only to shut me up.

All of the candidates came in party clothes—feathered shoes, fog bras, chrome nose-plates, gelatin shirts. I liked them all, then at the end of the second day, a woman with violet eyes came in a dark tailored suit, a shirt that matched her eyes, and black shoes with tiny grey stitches around the slender sole. I laughed since I had never seen anyone dressed so drearily. Maybe it was impish curiosity, but instead of telling her to go, I let her answer the interview questions like everyone else.

All the party people I knew were full of bombast, like Father. They shouted and swore, bragged and boasted. Joelene did none of that. Instead, she spoke softly, but with a fluid and powerful ease. At the time, I felt like I had discovered a new type of human. I hired her because she fascinated me, and I knew she would irritate Father.

Two years later, I could read and felt like I was becoming a person. Then she introduced me to
Pure H
and everything changed again.

Published every other month, the magazine is one-half meter square and printed on the most luscious and expensive paper made. It is a joy to touch and hold. But the most extraordinary thing about the magazine is that one anonymous person produces it. Although I'd heard speculation about who he might be, I preferred to enjoy his art without worrying about identity. He photographed every photo. He wrote all the copy. And each issue was a complex puzzle to be savored and deciphered.

I became grey. I began listening to the silence djs, like Love Emitting Diode, Huush, and zzz. I discovered my tailor, Mr. Cedar, and began wearing grey frocks, vests, and suits made of colorless moon and satellite wool. And by then Father and I had come to hate each other.

"Look at these creases," said Joelene, as she held up the gen-cotton shirt. Indeed, it was beautifully ironed. And at the bottom of the right tail was Isé–B's fanciful signature of wrinkles.

"Generous of him," I said, as I put out my right arm. While I loved it, it was small consolation for all that had happened.

"Patience." She added, "
Miniature city flickers
."

The photo
^R5
that accompanied that copy was of a translucent house at the edge of a dark, piney wood. A woman stands in a clearing. Her twisted hair is powdered a light grey, and her ball gown by H. Trow is a beautiful alpaca-silk and platinum draped creation that creates a perfect hourglass. Her face is young and fresh. Her eyes are tart, her lips, moist. Something about her posture—the way her back is arched, her legs bent—makes her look burdened with melancholy, perhaps even pain.

When I first saw the image, I thought a spotlight or some illumination was creating a halo around her, but as I studied the print I decided that it wasn't just light but flame. The delicate corona that surrounded her looked exactly like the nearly invisible flames of an alcohol fire, and I decided that the photo
^R5
was taken the split second before the heat began to singe her hair, skin, and eyes.

Behind her, beyond the translucent wall, stands a man in a black suit and black tie. Although the details are hazy, clearly he is facing toward her. But the way he holds his head both cocked to the right and angled too high, he appears at once blind and yet cognizant of her. At first I assumed he was her killer, but after careful study, decided he was her lover and that he too is dying. His right hand is the clue. His fingers are tense and gnarled in what seems like both grief and regret. On the floor beside him are several sharp dark shapes, like shards of a glass. He drank poison and dropped the glass as the toxins had not only immediately blinded him, but have begun to astringe his veins and muscles, moving from his extremities toward his heart.

When I had finally deciphered the photo
^R5
, I sat and stared at it for a long time, frightened and disturbed. I discussed it with Joelene, and she explained that it was about the beautiful inevitability of entropy, the wilting of flowers, the browning of leaves, the cooling of cream coffees, the fading of color. Then I understood that I, too, appreciated these things. I sought them out and savored them. But as Joelene slipped the jacket over my shoulders, and I felt the servomotors create perfect folds and wrinkles as I moved, I knew I could never appreciate a world without Nora.

Joelene and I rode back around the globe to the RiverGroup family compound in the speeding silver teardrop that was my limousine. For the first few minutes, I reviewed the post-date interviews, but soon, I switched off the screen and stared out the window at the scenery rushing by. But that motion reminded me of the Bee Train and of my last date with Nora, so I closed my eyes.

"Nora is at Slate Gardens," said Joelene. "For cold baths, mud, and mourning."

I refused to look at the photos or her family's publicity release. Joelene read part of it aloud, and it sounded like something a phalanx of lawyers had produced. I counted the word
regrettably
five times.

As the car exited the Loop, the super highway that only the upper echelon of the families could use, and we wound our way through the baking desert southwest, my feelings shifted from despair to anger. Of course it wasn't Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, nor was it as Joelene had said, a terrible and inopportune breach. It was Father! It was his ineptitude, his incompetence, and his dreadful strategies. Like so much of what had gone wrong in my nineteen years, it was all his fault.

The access road began to rise above the garish city of Ros Begas, into the Rockies where a valley had been dug in a mountain and the RiverGroup compound had been built. Just as the car came to the top of the lip and started down, a ray of sunlight glinted off the huge glass dome that protected the buildings from the sun, the insects, and the carbon dioxide. Beneath stood the dozen mismatched buildings that made up our little city. Some were windowless warehouses with flat roofs. Several were covered with wooden shingles as if they were trying to be old-fashioned ski lodges. Around the edge were smaller office buildings. Most were glass; a few had metal skins, one was stone. Dead center, sat the black and gold, now abandoned, PartyHaus, with its wide stairs, Ionic columns, and crumbling friezes.