Paradise Tales (10 page)

It costs a hundred thousand a year to live here, and they call the tips discretionary. That’s another hundred fifty a week. And I make sure I pay it, because I want these bozos to motor if I get sick or something.

I keep my voice cool ’cause I want to make sure I got this right. “No tips? I pay your tips, man.”

I need this guy’s name. You can’t talk somebody down if you don’t know their name. My eyeglasses are running through all the photographs of staff, and finally I see him. I click a bit of my brain, like I’m going to ask him his name. The glasses tell me.

The Kid is called Joao and he’s from some part of Indonesia that speaks Portuguese.

“Joao?” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I am sorry. I pay. Really.”

He stands there swelling up and down like he’s pumping iron.

“Joao? I pay the tips. You don’t get them?”

Kid’s so mad his wires are crossed. He scowls and blinks.

“Lemme show you,” I say.

I try to ease him to the machine, you know, I just touch his arm, and he throws it off, like this. For a second I think he’s going to give me a Jersey kiss. So I keep my voice low and soft. “Hey, man, just be cool about it, OK? Lemme show you.”

So I open up my records. See? I show him all that debit. All those tips going out just as regular as spam. I point to the money, there on the screen. Right out of my bank account.

The Kid blinks and rubs his whole face with his hands. I begin to wonder if they teach people to read in the country he’s from.

Then suddenly he shouts. “I no get them!” He’s throwing up his hands and wiggling his cheeks. But I can see. Now he’s not mad at me.

I feel pretty sick myself, in my gut like my chicken was full of salmonella. I’m thinking, Oh fuck. We got ourselves a tips racket.

Somebody somewhere, probably one of the hotshot doctors who can’t pay for his new swimming pool or his lawsuit insurance, is hacking out the cleaner’s tips.

I could complain, and I could call in the law. But. I got reasons. Know what I mean?

“How long you not been getting your tips?” I ask him.

He tells me. Months. I can see why he isn’t all that concerned about cleaning up my shit. I sit him down, pour him a whiskey. This will take a while, and I want him to know right in his balls who got him back his money. Me. Here. The Brewster.

I call up my contact. She’s top dope, a tough old babe still on the outside called Nikki. She’s got this great translation package. We have this audio conversation about her new bungalow which is a cover for a hack download. It comes in looking like a phone bill. It then runs a request from a nostalgia TV line. I load up and sit back and watch what looks like an old Britney Spears video.

It’s not a video, believe me. I can’t do anything that looks like a hack. The ordnance is always watching. They say it’s in case we get ill, but hey, why do they snoop our keystrokes? If you want to hack here, it’s a case of no hands. And everything has to look like something else.

I smile at the Kid and jerk my head at the cameras, glasses, TV, computer … all the surveillance. But hey, the Kid’s cool. He can’t speaka da English, but he gets what I’m doing. For the first time I get a smile out him. He chuckles and lifts up the whiskey glass. “Z24!” he says. Ah, that’s Kidtalk.

“Banging!” I say back. That’s my talk. “You’re a Britney fan, huh?”

The Kid’s sussed. He knows exactly what’s going on. “Britney … Whitney … all that old stuff.” He chuckles and nods and shakes his head. “I big big fan!” I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking, this old guy is into some shit. He’s thinking, this old guy is hacking me back my tips.

The microwave pings like my dinner’s ready, only it’s not food that’s cooking. I put on my glasses, and then put the transcoder on top of them and suddenly Britney is translated into the Corporation’s accounts. But only if you are looking at ’em through my glasses.

I got a real good line on who’s been stealing a little bit of the Kid’s bandwidth.

My Medical Supervisor. My trusted Dr. Curtis. So I siphon out the dosh and siphon it into the Kid’s corporate account. Ready for loading to his bank.

“Banging!” the Kid says.

Grand Dad House.

So then I call on Dr. Curtis. “You got a face like shit and your brains are all on your chin.”

Dr. Curtis leans back and looks like someone who’s just been told a real bad joke. Behind him is a wall of screens, some of them showing people’s pumping insides.

You see, you get old, you end up in here, and that gives them the right to monitor every last act and word. You’re a patient.

I’m one mad patient. “I may be eighty but I could still deck you!”

He leans back, with his eyebrows up and his eyes hooded. “I could always prescriptionize out all that aggressive testosterone. So unbecoming in the aged.”

I hate him. Really. I can take most people, but if I could do Curtis an injury I would. Curtis has got hold of my pubic hair and can give it a twist whenever he wants.

“Look Curtis, you been hacking off our tips. Duh! Don’t you think the staff kinda notice they’re not getting paid? And I know we’re all a bunch of senile old codgers, but even we can tell when we don’t get our asses wiped ’cause the staff can’t feed their kids. You leave our tips alone, asshole!”

The good doctor sniffs. “I’m afraid I have expenses.”

“Yeah; and they all got tits.”

“And I’ve only got one other source of income.” He starts to smile. A nice long pause, like it’s his close-up or something. He purses his lips into a little bitty kiss. “You.”

He’s such a drama student. He tells me, “If my account is empty, I’ll hack it out of yours.”

No, he won’t. It won’t be that easy. But he has got a point. It is the whole point, the underlying point. I gotta sit on that point everyday, and it goes straight up my ass.

I can’t walk without help. My kid’s poor. I gotta find a hundred thou a year.

So I take it out of other people’s bank accounts, OK?

Curtis is my doctor. He knows everything I do. I have to give him a cut.

I have a dream. I put Dr. Curtis in rubber mask and backward baseball cap, and shove him out on the lawn at night so the cameras don’t recognize him and he gets area-denied. He gets sound-gunned. He gets microwaved; his whole body feels like it’s touching a hot lightbulb. His whole goddamned shaven tattooed trendy fat little ass feels what it’s like to be poor and hungry and climbing over our wall just to activate some ordnance.

All this is before lunch. It’s a well crucial day. Stick around, it’s about to get even more crucial.

It’s Saturday, and that’s Bill’s day to visit. I go to the Solarium and wait, and then wait some more. Today he doesn’t show. I wait a little while longer. And then ring him up to leave a message. I don’t want to sound whiney, so I try to sound up. “Hey, Bill, this your dad. Everything’s cool. I hope it’s under control for you, too.”

Then I sit and hang out. I don’t want to be some sad old fuck. I open up a newspaper. It tells me Congress wants to change tax rates, to ease the burden on younger taxpayers. Oh cool, thanks.

I go back to check out Jazza. It’s the afternoon, but he’s sleeping like a baby.

Jazza used to be so cool. It’s good to have someone from your time, your place. Even if he doesn’t remember who you are.

We wanted to send a rocket to Mars. We built it ourselves and called it Aphrodite and went to Nevada and launched it and it went straight up looking like 1969 and hope.

We made pretend-music; started our own company, developed a couple of computer games, called ourselves Fighting Fit and sold the company. We ran a pirate download and shared the same girlfriend for a while. After we lost all our money, we emptied the same accounts, too. Amateur spaceships don’t pay for themselves. I decided to go mundane and went into security software. I went straight for a while. Jazza never did. He still hung out there. From time to time I gave him some freelance. When Bill went to college I went to check Jazza out. He was still at a mixing desk at fifty. He was wearing one of those shirts that keeps changing pictures or told the punters what toons he was pumping out.

I hack Jazza’s bills as well. Otherwise, he’d be out on the street.

I sit there awhile, just making sure he’s OK, if he wants anything. He snores. I give his knee a pat and leave. You get lonely sometimes.

I get to my room and there’s a message. “Dad, you probably know this already, but Bessie was mugged. I’ll be over tomorrow.”

Bessie is my granddaughter. Never have a well crucial day.

The next morning we’re doing Neurobics.

They found out that even old people grow new neurons. If they give you PDA, it goes even faster, but you got to use it or lose it. So they make us learn. They make us do crazy stuff. Like brush our teeth with the wrong hand. Or read stuff from a screen that is upside down. Sometimes they make us do really off-the-wall stuff, like sniff vanilla beans while we listen to classical music. They’re trying to induce synaesthesia.

Today we were in VR. We’re weightless in a burning space station. We got to get out through smoke and there is no up or down. What way does the lever on the door pull?

I get a tug on my arm. It’s the Kid. He smiles at me real nice. “Mr. Brewster? I come find you. You son is here.”

These days I walk like Frankenstein, on these fake little legs. They make your muscles work so they grow back. Nobody’s supposed to hold me up. The Kid does, though. To him I guess I’m some old granddad and that is how you show respect.

So I introduce him to my son. Joao, this is my boy, Bill. Bill stands up and shakes the Kid’s hand and thanks him for taking care of me. My boy is fifty years old. He’s got a potbelly, but he still looks like a guy who never spent a day in an office.

Bill is real neat. I can say that. He’s a neat kid; he just never made any money. He’d work in the summers as a diving instructor and in winter he’d go south. He went to teach primary school in the Hebrides. He did a stint putting chips in elephant’s brains in Sri Lanka.

Today, though, his smile looks weirded out.

“How’s Bessie?” I ask him.

Something happens to Bill’s face and he sits down.

“Um. You didn’t see the news? It was on the news.”

“Bessie was in the news?” Oh shit. You don’t get in the comics just for stubbing your toe.

Bill’s voice rattles. “They did something to her face,” he says. He takes out his paper and fills it, and lays it out on the table.

I tell him, “I didn’t see anything about it. I think we’re filtered. I think they filter our news.”

“VAO. Only this time it really was a victim who got activated.”

VAO protects banks, shopping malls, offices. Anything First World, or Nerd World, got VAO. It’s supposed to zap thieves. For just a second I thought maybe Bessie had been on a job like maybe being a gangsta skips a generation or something.

Bill’s newspaper fills up with an animated headline.

The headline says

V

A

O…

And the headline animates into

Very

Ancient

Offenders

And then, for your delectation and amusement, up comes my granddaughter’s mugging, caught on security camera and sold by the ordnance company to defray costs.

They run my granddaughter’s mugging for laughs. Because the muggers are old.

Ain’t dey cute, them old guys?

There’s my Bessie, going out to her car. Slick black hair, skinny red trousers, real small, real sweet. Able to take care of herself, but you don’t expect your own bolted, belted VAO parking lot to be the place where you get mugged.

These four clowns come lurching out at her. They’re old guys like me. They’re staggering around on calipers; they got the Frankenstein walk, but they stink of the street. One of them is wearing old trousers that are too small. The legs end up around his calves, and they’re held up by a belt, they don’t close at the front. There is a continent of dingy underwear on display.

Bill says, “Microwave. Somehow they turned it on her instead of them. But they didn’t know what they were doing.” Bill can’t look at this, he’s hiding his face.

And on the paper, Bessie is denied her own area.

The keys in her hand go hot, she drops them. Her own shiny hair goes hot and she clasps her head, and she crouches down and tries to hide under her own elbows.

Bill talks from behind his hand. “It’s supposed to stop before two hundred and fifty seconds. After that it does damage.”

These are old, old codgers. They shuffle. They forget to turn the fuckin’ thing off. They pick up the car keys, and they’re too hot and they drop ’em. Well, duh. Finally they shuffle round to some kind of switch.

We’re at three hundred seconds, and Bessie’s trousers are smoking, and the skin of her face is curling up.

“She’ll need a cornea transplant,” says Bill.

They pick up her purse and just leave her there. They get into the car. I get a look at them.

There’s two ways you get old. One, you shrivel up. The other, you puff out like a cloud. One guy has a face like melted marshmallow in these dead-white hanging lumps.

“Old farts,” I hear myself say. I’m so sick of feeling angry. I feel angry all the time, and there’s nothing I can do about anything. There’s nothing I can do about Bessie, nothing I can do for those old stupid jerks.

“She’ll be OK,” says Bill, and he’s looking at me and for just a sec I’m his daddy again. I never was much of a daddy when he was a kid, always off on a job or working for the company. He ended up being the kind of guy who never stops looking for a father. Christ, Billy. I wanted to have enough money so that you would never have to work, to make up for not being around. But all my money goes into being old.

We latch hands. Bill’s spent all his life helping people. Bill’s just a better man than I am.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” I say, and I mean for everything.