The Mere Future (15 page)

“Oh, wow,” Ginette said, calculating. She had approached 380 art directors. Nadine was the only one who wanted to rescue her from social work. “It’s a deal. Do you think the city crest could be a makeup case?”

“Hold that thought,” Nadine said. “Call me on Thursday and we’ll set up a meeting.”

When Nadine went home that night, she looked at her girlfriend, me. She knew that she loved Ginette in a way that she could never love me. After all, I was there and Ginette was a fantasy. But that if she pursued Ginette, everything would be a disaster. Showing your desire is an invitation for pain.

She had to think it over.

She thought and thought.

Ginette called and called, called and called. She called every day for thirteen months.

Nadine thought and thought. Thought and thought. Finally, Nadine called her back. “I really apologize,” Nadine said. “Let’s meet four months from Thursday at 1:13.”

“Okay,” Ginette said. “My house would be fine.”

Nadine felt that that extension would give her time to decide.

That day Ginette scrubbed and scrubbed. She needed this job, and no one else had called her back. Ginette spent the last of her paycheck on smoked mozzarella from Pittsburgh, slicing the cheese lovingly, arranging it beautifully on the most precious platter.

Nadine decided at the last minute that this was ridiculous. She had to get rid of me before she started dating someone else. But how? In the meantime, she blew off the date.

This predictable no-show by Nadine created a weird obsession in Ginette’s mind, as all withholding always does. All Ginette could think about night and day was why Nadine lied to her. What Nadine had said to her. What Nadine promised her. All the ways Nadine recreationally misled her, and why? Why? Why?

Nadine became her air and water. She couldn’t think about anything else except for this chick who’d fucked her over, who’d taken away her dream. As always happened, this kind of hatred was deeply erotic. How else can you feel about the person who has what you want? Who goes out of her way to offer it to you, and then won’t show up? It’s a cock tease, and it works. Night after night, Ginette tossed and turned in her sweaty little bed, imaging Nadine’s luscious body. Fucking her with a tree. Whenever she had sex with a man, Ginette imagined it was Nadine, especially at the moment of pain. She’d walk down the street always looking for Nadine. Every room she entered, she was prepared. Even when her beeper sounded that a client was in trouble, she had her hand around Nadine’s neck and her underpants stuffed firmly into Nadine’s petulant mouth.

31. THE CITY THAT NEVER LISTENS

R
IGHT AFTER
THE CHANGE
, Sophinisba worried that all shops would cease. Americans had gotten into the habit of ordering items off the Scan. They’d think of what they wanted, tell the Scan, and charge it. Since nothing was made in the US anymore, the computer would order the thing from production plants in the Democratic Republic of Congo and keep the profits. They didn’t have to stock inventory or make selections. It was an interesting process that intrigued everybody because they had to rely on their imaginations to understand what they would like. The consumer had to project an image, instead of cathect with a displayed object. And therein lay the fatal flaw.

At first, everyone delighted their own fancy, dreaming up boxes of dried boysenberries and goat milk soufflé, reversible cars, instant intimidation machines, automatic sneaker scrubbers, and see-through jockstraps. But after a while, the rusty imaginations felt taxed. Only Africans knew how to make things, and Americans could barely think. This shopping system required the consumer to constantly come up with something desirable, and this was impossible to achieve with regularity while simultaneously multitasking and doing Pilates. Consumers wanted limits, perfection, parameters of selection.

So, ever responsive, the Scan started providing leading suggestions to make the process less taxing on the consumer. To give her the illusion of creativity without actually having to come up with anything.

For example:

DO YOU WANT SOMETHING:

1. groovy 2. funky 3. tasteful 4. demure 5. kitsch 6. chic 7. hung 8. decent 9. mysterious 10. organic 11. dependable 12. pan-Asian 13. high carb 14. raw

But even that degree of specificity never turned out to meet the consumer’s expectations. Most of the items got returned. Shopping was not fulfilling its potential in a world where personality still reared its ugly head. So shops were born again. Shops and books. Ultimately, the market always returns to the basics.

We always return to the basics,
Freddy read, heard, and then thought as he watched his father’s lying face spewing all that bullshit. Yet, suddenly, something unspeakably cruel happened. Freddy’s father stood up, threw up his hands, showed Fred his disgust, and beckoned casually in Dominick’s direction.

Shockingly, as Freddy’s world fell, Dominick stood mechanically, dusted ash off his pants, and left his brother behind to follow his father down the street.

Fred stared.

Dominick staggered behind Jeff.

How could this happen?

The problem was that Fred had invested his entire heart in a helpless addict who had no resistance. Freddy had depression; that was his resistance. Dominick had no such brakes.

As Fred watched his soul be demolished, Dom did what his father said because he had cravings, cravings that could not be defied. He was addicted to the hope that someday his father would be interested in him, that someday he would have protection and guidance. This was his Jones.

When Fred watched his darling brother going off with Pop, he slowly got moving and lumbered along. He didn’t
have
to. It wasn’t a compulsion. He followed anyway, because to abandon Dominick, in Dominick’s moment of abandoning him, would have been grotesque. Historically, every time Dad let Dominick down, Fred stood by Dom’s side. He had promised himself, early on, that only when his father was kind to Dominick would Freddy allow his father to be kind to him too. Paternal love should not be exclusive to one child.

If Freddy had just allowed Jeff to privilege him, while treating Dom like dirt, it would have violated the most sacred relationship on earth. It was the only relationship in Fred’s life that was not by coincidence or choice. Fred loved his brother because he was his brother. Not because of what Dom could do for him. This was a relationship of human loyalty, not family currency. And so, Freddy followed them down the block.

“You see, kids,” Jeff said obsessively, “Claire always wanted a family of her own.”

Oblivious to what his sons were thinking, Jeff was reliving the Claire situation.

“But one day she rented some bench time in the Central Park Mall. As she sat, four hundred couples walked by with little babies in strollers. All of the mothers were over thirty, but dressed like fifteen-year-olds. All of the fathers had pained, hyper-masculine expressions of raw possibility under constraint. All the kids were named Waldo, Cornelius, Theodora, or Lucille. All the kids were going to grow up with enormous entitlement that they did not merit. They would then strive to become Republican super-models. It was pathetic. And so she knew that she could never be a part of it.”

Jeff lead his sons down Merrill Lynch Boulevard, across Shearson Lehman Street, and turned right on J. Crew Avenue. They stopped in front of the National Gym, and boldly jaywalked over to a tiny cinder box of studio duplexes. Then they walked upstairs.

“But
OUR
family,” Jeff continued, “we have nothing prefabricated. We are not conventional. We have no social advantages. Maybe we will fit her needs.”

They stood, preparatorily, in front of apartment $E.

“If she could see us all together, she might not be such a snob.”

Jeff knocked on the door. Unexpectedly, the balsa slab slid open, and the three men looked in through the narrow doorway.

There was a brief light creeping under the drawn window blinds. And it was surrounding Harrison Bond.

Bond’s hands were dripping in blood. He leaned over Claire’s mutilated corpse.

“Oh my God,” Jeff gasped.

Harrison looked up at the three of them, stricken with capture. He had a floppy, sexy new haircut. He was huge, and his aqua-weave shirt was soaked in gore.

Jeff, Dom, and Freddy looked at Claire’s body, splayed out across her living room floor. Her face had been cut open. He torso was slashed.

Harrison clutched a jagged can opener.

Then the three men saw what was actually taking place. Claire’s chest had been cracked and pried wide, then her heart had been lifted out of her body. Strangely, though, the attaching muscle had not been severed, so it hung from her body’s cavity.

One thing was clear to all. Claire Sanchez would never live again.

Harrison looked at these three panicked men. His fear softened and then passed. He had just been having the greatest feeling of relief that a man can ever experience. His worst fantasy had been fulfilled. Nothing more horrible or more pleasurable would ever take place again. He had finally expressed himself, for real. For the first time in his repressed, angry, frightened life, Harrison Bond had done what he needed most to do.

But now that fleeting perfect happiness, like all happiness, was over because of other people. It was over because Jeff, Freddy, and Dom had walked in on the middle of his release.

Harrison gazed up, still bent over. Having his hand inside Claire’s chest was the most intimate he had ever been with another person. The most unpretentious. She could not judge him or lie to him, evade or avoid or blame him for anything. She could not reduce him. This was her heart. There was nothing bullshit about it. It was real.

Harrison’s mouth slid open. Saliva fell to the floor. He almost died standing up—from too much excitement.

“You!” Harrison shrieked, pointing a dripping fist at the three smaller men. “How could you do this? You animals!”

32. NO WORLD

N
O WORLD,
Ginette thought, rushing to the holding cell.
No world
.

She wanted it to go away.

There had been many, many times over the course of her years at her second job working with sad people, that her former drug addict clients had relapsed or gotten in trouble of a petty or grandiose kind. That’s the nature of sadness. When people are already in trouble, they become easy targets for more.

After all, if a well-dressed, clean man asked you for help, you would be more likely to help him than if he was sick, dirty, and bleeding. But the sick, dirty, and bleeding man would need it more. Right?

Many times, over the years, little Ginette had had to run to clinics and hospitals, jails and morgues. That was routine.

But not these guys. Not those little brothers.

(She was refusing these events.)

No, not
THEM
!

How did sweet, nice sad boys like Dom and Fred get caught up in pain this severe?

Ginette was deeply afraid for the brothers because she knew very well how the system worked. She knew that innocence was irrelevant. Okay, that’s a cliché, but still true and disconcerting. And she was sure that they were innocent. They weren’t capable of feeling anything deeply enough to lead them to commit a crime of passion.

The Destruction of the Innocent,
volume 1,982,103,332, was underway.

Punishment without crime. That’s the way of the world. No one can escape.

Nadine said to call, so I called
, Ginette reasoned.
And then I
got humiliated and sad.
So clearly Dom and Fred were innocent— Ginette had been innocent, after all.

It’s so easy to get slammed. Even if you do what they say. What you do has no bearing on the matter. The question is,
Do they need
someone to slam
? If they do, you’re fucked.

It started out with Nadine and ended up with two scared, tiny men being falsely accused of murder. Plus their father.

That’s why, as far as Ginette was concerned, it was big people, art directors like Nadine, who should go to jail. Not little-bitty Dommie and Freddie.

People who lie on the small plane are just making the big lies more palatable and harder to resist. That’s what Ginette had learned. She had tried to make an alliance with some powerful art director, but instead here she was with the imprisoned shmucks. She had tried to date the popular, the wealthy and connected Harrison Bond. But instead she was running to jail to visit some pathetic, sad people who just wanted to burn garbage and smoke. Her life was not going the right way.

On the street, as she walked toward the prison, she felt so guilty for having had ambitions. How dare she ever try? It was gross the way she was willing to sell out everyone she’d ever met, make them live with a compact and an eyeliner for the city crest. How could she impose that level of tasteless kitsch on all these unsuspecting hardworking New Yorkers passing her innocently on the street?

She arrived at the prison and showed her retina to get in.

Prisons had been more affected by television than by Sophinisba. All those prison and cop shows had prepared America for clean, modern institutions, with articulate and consistent prisoners. Since the people who get convicted for crimes often watch more TV than those who don’t, this particular group was particularly disappointed. The putrid, boring, scary wasting of life was nothing like what they showed on
Law & Order
. And this made everybody mad.

As a result, a series of TV riots took place over a number of years. The inmates demanded broadcast-quality conditions. A compromise was reached in which TV backdrops were placed on top of the old rotting cells. This gave each convict a drywall interior pasted up against the rusty iron bars. Somehow that was comforting to viewers of reality TV shows like
Rikers
or
Death Row,
which followed real-life inmates as they did their time, tried to stay alive, traded sex for drugs, and became jailhouse lawyers and Muslims.

The networks installed huge-screen monitors so prisoners could watch each other sleep on props and eat props every week. It made them feel romantic, important, and somewhat fantastical. This sedated them. The unreal feeling of punishment was surrounded by the Real Unreal. Everything was truly fake. This made incarceration more tolerable.