The Mere Future (11 page)
While Dom stared, Freddy paced back and forth, fearing the effects of a cup of coffee and hating himself for not being able to appreciate being alive.
“I feel that deep inside myself I am right,” Freddy said. “Therefore I am trapped. Because if I thought I was wrong, I could change and avoid being slapped.”
“Right about what?” Dominick stared. He didn’t get it.
But Freddy was too upset to answer. Any attempted clarification would fail to hit the nail on the head, and he did not ever again want to say anything without fully believing every dimension of it.
“Right about the fact that you are not wrong?” Dominick suggested as he puffed.
“Yeah,” Freddy answered, crying over the stove. “Don’t ever leave me.” Fred’s grief was his only self. “I love you so.”
Long before this moment, Fred realized that if he were ever to betray Dominick, he might have a normal life. He could have all those rewards that people get for letting their brothers down, for avoiding the Black Sheep. He knew exactly how that process worked. As long as he allowed Dominick to be the Black Sheep on his own, Fred could be superb. If he worked at it, he could have all the status Dom lacked. But Fred would have to collude with everyone else’s attitude of disdain towards his only brother. Cluck-cluck, stab in the back, exclude, and condemn—that sort of thing. Then he, Freddy, would be considered superior by all. Not only did his father want it that way, everyone else did too. The bribery was incredible. They begged him to be better than Dom. But Fred stood by his brother because he needed someone to stand by.
Now, with this New Way of Life, the rest of the city was following Freddy’s lead. They were officially standing by each other too. Look at this great apartment! It only existed because others cared. And yet, Freddy also knew that a social structure couldn’t do all the work of being humane. It could only make a suggestion. Individuals still had to be nicer in order for it to work. Someone still had to sit with a lonely person in a stark apartment holding his hand while the two of them, together, stared out the window.
If Freddy had been someone’s wife, others would have considered that kind of loyalty to be the highest virtue. But when it’s your brother, you’re supposed to throw him to the wolves so that you are free to hold the hand of your lovely wife. Why is a wife better than a brother? Fred did not make up any false, self-justifying theories about why he chose his real brother over a nonexistent wife. He knew the real reason. Fred chose Dominick because his brother was the only true witness to Fred’s real history. His true cause.
Only Dominick had seen Fred’s real experience and stared it in the face.
No one else could ever know him, and Freddy wanted to be known.
S
OPHINISBA HAD SOME
explaining to do, and she eschewed television as a way to meet the peeps. She would rather repeat something she believed, over and over again to people’s faces, than to say it once in a slick and impersonal way. So Madame Mayor set up a little store-front office and invited the neighbors to stop by for a chat.
The citizens, not being used to this method, were not stopping by in numbers sufficient to be effective, so she moved outside and sat in front of the subway at a little folding table, hoping to catch the folks on their way to
THE MEDIA HUB
.
“Hey you,” she would shout, showing everyone how much she wanted to communicate. Once they realized what was going on, people stopped off for a few minutes and had a mayoral chat. It was refreshing.
Nadine and I happened to pass by one morning while Sophinisba was on an explanation junket. Of course, we stopped to talk, since we liked her so much. We thought she was doing a great job. I mean, we both felt that way at the beginning. I still loved Sophinisba, but at this point Nadine was feeling suspicious about everything in life, including the government.
“Sophinisba is still doing good stuff,” I said. “Everyone can see it.”
“Well,” Nadine murmured. “I don’t know.”
She was being crabby.
“Ms Mayor?” she said, as we approached the card table where SB presided. “There is something I do not understand.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Sophinisba smiled encouragingly as she simultaneously ran the city through her Finger Pilot.
“All these great changes, all these services. All these humanitarian transformations, Lady Mayor ...” Nadine inhaled. “They cost money! And yet you have dismantled all corporate megaculture from the city’s streets. So tell me, how are you paying for all this?”
“Well,” Sophinisba gleamed, seemingly ecstatic that someone was paying attention and not just passively receiving. “What a great question.” She offered each of us a glass of fresh-squeezed peach juice. “You see, taxing the rich, etcetera, etcetera … while a great idea, is a concept from a less complex past.”
This relieved Nadine, and she dropped her guard. She did not identify with the rich, nor did she want to protect them. But the idea of building a better society by taxing the rich and using their money to help the poor was not a new idea. And this era was supposed to be brand spanking new only.
“Taxing the rich,” Sophinisba continued from under her wired pink-brimmed hat. “This can no longer work for a couple of complex reasons.”
“Like what?” Nadine asked.
“Basically, the rich would never allow it.” Sophinisba shrugged the inevitable. “History has proven this.”
We both nodded.
“The rich would rather destroy the universe’s atmosphere, beat others to death, starve and humiliate all living creatures, and poison the water supply, than use their extra cash to help others. It just ain’t gonna happen.”
Nadine was completely impressed. I could tell by the way her lips softened, and her tongue darted in and out.
“And the other reason it can’t work ...” A couple of people started hanging around listening. It was getting kind of interesting having a mayor lay it on the line. “... is that the poor are too disorganized to force such a thing. Historically, they have only been able to make progressive change temporarily, usually with the aid of some former prince or kid who went to Harvard. It just never pans out in the long term. The obstacles are too tough. Would you like some pink chocolate?”
We all had two pieces each, all forty of us gathered by the entrance to the Free BMT. It was good, like red chocolate milk. Calm and relaxing and somewhat narcotizing.
All the way to work, Nadine and I talked over Sophinisba’s message.
Redistribution of the wealth was a solution from another time. That was true. And therefore, impossible. One of the most long-lasting effects of long-term rapid fire marketing on the New York psyche was that anything that smacked of a previous moment was no longer palatable. Like last month’s egg. Unless it was nostalgic. But Retro-Socialism hadn’t yet been reintroduced in designer colors. So far, the only thing that Capitalism couldn’t contain was Socialism. But everyone knew that it would find a way. Perhaps this was it.
Lenin had promised that the Capitalists would sell us the rope with which we hang them. But he was wrong. The Capitalist sells us the rope with which we hang ourselves. It’s direct marketing. No middle-man.
Feeling toasty, with the sweet and sticky chocolate in our guts, we floated off, soothed by the personal touch and reasonable explanation. And yet, that night Nadine woke up angry and afraid.
“What is it, my hon-bun?” I asked, moved by her quantity of emotion.
“How is she paying for this?” Nadine asked. Terrified that she had been deterred.
“Well, she told us, didn’t she?”
“What did she say?”
And I could not, for the life of me, remember.
H
ARRISON AND
C
LAIRE
were out on a date.
Claire had read the eight words in that week’s
Brand New York
about Glick, the country’s most unknown artist, and she was impressed that Harrison knew about her when everyone else did not. They went for a walk together to stare at Glick’s front door.
Harrison knew, from reading all eight of my pages that none of her work had ever been reproduced, and that none existed in any collections, museums, galleries, or display cases, private or public. It was not in a single lobby or living room. This fact actually haunted him. It was such an extreme example of his worst fear. The fact that it had actually occurred meant it could happen to him. Obscurity. When Claire requested that they view Glick’s art, he had to fortify himself with a bottle of Bombay. But then they both arrived and stood, staring, at that sad, horny front door.
Standing there, facing his fears, Harrison realized that despite both her inadequacy and her superiority, he was in love with Claire.
Ginette would never have understood the extreme terror represented by Glick’s front door.
Through the window they saw a deranged woman, smoking. Then they returned to the door.
“Well,” Claire said after a long sad silence. “It’s not very new.”
“No,” Harrison agreed. “The style is forty-eight years old, at least.”
They nodded, knowingly. In unison.
“Of course …” Claire inserted her hand, and her idea, into Harrison’s pocket. “Old is … not necessarily … terrible. Is it? I mean, it won’t sell, that’s for sure. But this isn’t … isn’t for sale, I guess. Right?’
“Don’t be naïve,” Harrison guffawed. “If Madonna Ciccone wanted to buy this, I’m sure that Glick would sell.”
“Madonna” was now an iconic word, like “Jesus.” It had no material base. When people said “JESUS!” they did not mean the son of God. They meant an emotion reflecting frustration or astonishment. It had no substance behind it. No person. Saying “Madonna” was like saying “well.” The real person had disappeared from public view long, long ago. She might have been dead, or worse, retired. Her name was now a phrase that represented the secret, ultimate desire of every ambitious person. It was an emblem of a crassness so brilliant and calculated that it was beyond reproach.
Harrison and Claire stood for a moment contemplating Madonna as the irrefutable potential corrupter of Glick’s pretentious obscurity.
“I don’t want to be too conceptual,” Claire added sincerely, wearing a cardboard codpiece and plastic diaphragm skirt, “but I do think that the idea behind selling out was that you would change what you made to suit the buyer. Not that the buyer would happen to want to purchase it, as is. Do we condemn people for that now too?”
“Of course not,” Bond reassured her. “But if someone has a buyer without having to make changes, then their original concept was commodifiable enough in the first place. They were born selling out. It is the gracefulness of adjustment by which we measure an artist’s maturity.”
He was thinking of himself. He had never had to sell out, just sell. Harrison went to a college where his parents paid $40,000 a year so that he could ease into the ruling cog. His teachers had gone to the same school and so they identified with him, their younger self. They phoned their other friends from the good old days and told them that their new discovery, Harrison Bond, was exactly like them too. He went to a corporate graduate school to which his parents signed over an additional $80,000, and there he had even more influential teachers who also looked like him. It was a world of people who looked in the mirror but thought it was the window.
This higher tier of teachers phoned their agents and editors who also looked, walked, talked, lived, and wrote like Bond. He drank with them. His book was like theirs. When the publisher bought it, he paid him back the amount of his two tuitions. That kept the money circulating in the right places. By this time, the other guys from the same schools had taken over the major magazines and newspapers. They reviewed his book favorably, with
gravitas
, and wrote feature stories about his
gravitas
as well. He became known for his
gravitas
. Americans did not resemble Harrison and his cronies, but they were used to following orders from people like him, so they did what they were told and bought the book.
Okay, it had happened this way once. It had been incredibly easy, though Harrison thought it was hard. But could he do it again?
Harrison realized, right then and there, standing next to Claire, staring at Glick’s eternal failure, that success could only repeat if he didn’t worry about it. If he worried, it wasn’t success. He had to second-guess nothing. He had to remember that his natural self was exactly what they wanted. The crucial error would be to alter a single gene. He was already perfect. He just had to stay that way.
“But, honey,” Claire said, oblivious to the volumes of monologue going on inside him, “Glick never sold anything, remember?”
“Mmmmm,” he mmmmed.
“So you really can’t put her down for selling out. Right?”
“Guess not,” Harrison agreed by negation.
“How strange,” Claire bobbed, as they turned away and continued on to a shop. “If everyone thought like her, I’d be out of a job.”
“So would they,” Harrison laughed suddenly. He was a good sport after all. Someone was more pathetic than he and always would be. This was a fact he must never forget.
“Y
OU KNOW,”
Nadine said about sixteen times the next day, “we still don’t understand where she is getting the cash.”
We were strolling on a Sunday a.m. looking at shops. There were so many to choose from. There was the Checkbook Shop, the Dreydel Shoppe, the Wrist Massage Palace, the Imported Ginger Store, and the Allergy Supply Wholesalers, which specialized in different-colored tissues. There was a store where you could pay a small fee to take a nap. Oh look, the Pink Chocolate Spot. That must be where Sophinisba got hers. There were so many to choose from. Each unpredictable from their exterior. Each under no pressure, because their overheard was so low.
“Isn’t it weird?” I said. “We used to be able to tell what a store sold by glancing at it, while whizzing by on a bike. Now I have to go all the way inside to figure it out. Walking down the street is like going to a museum. You really need time to look.”