The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (12 page)

McCallum flipped the light-bar switch. Red and blue strobes blasted across the top of the op car. Confident that she’d done nothing wrong, it took Lillian almost a mile to pull over. He pulled in behind and got out. The cold snapped at McCallum as he approached the side of the car. He wore jeans and a pea-coat, so he figured the poor woman might not lower the window right away. He tried to make his walk casual, knowing for all 25 feet that he could very well be making things worse.

The curved glass slid into the curved door. Lillian looked at him, stern, then puzzled, then horrified a lot faster than McCallum planned.

“You,” she spat. “You?”

“I’ve sorry, Mrs. Leveski—” McCallum started.

“Sorry? For stealing my husband?”

“For stopping you now. This way. I guess you remember me.”

“I’ll remember your face for the rest of my life. Have I done something wrong? I’m going to call for a female op, if you don’t mind.” Lillian raised her left wrist, turning her band.

“I do,” he said. “If you can give me a moment.”

Lillian’s finger lingered over the ‘on’ button.

“I don’t think your husband killed anyone.”

“You got that right.”

“I’ve got no budget line for an investigation. It’s cleared.”

“I don’t… You want money?”

“Do you have any?”

“Jesus Christ, this is a shakedown? You should’ve dug into the data, sir. I’m broke. Beyond broke. We bought the house and had the baby on two incomes. Now it’s one. Less than one. Did you know the company still draws pension funds, even though Emory’s income’s been suspended? I’m about to lose the house. Every month that he’s on the chain gang is another we go deeper in debt. We’re already buried and he hasn’t even had his hearing yet.” Her voice rose to a screech. “He hasn’t even had his hearing yet! Sir!”

McCallum let the ‘sir’ reverberate and settle into the swish of the passing traffic. “Do you know John Raston?”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “I know him.”

“I’m looking for him.”

“And…” She didn’t understand; McCallum did.

“He doesn’t have his bracelet.”

Lillian faced forward, eyes focusing out through her front windshield. “Old crusty jerk-wad.”

“Mrs. Leveski?”

“I always knew he’d get Emory into some trouble. I knew it, just not how… and I never figured anything like this. You see, sir, they weren’t matched up well. Emory had so much going for him. John Raston had nothing.”

“Can you help me find him?” McCallum asked. “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

“God help him if I did.” She looked back at McCallum. “He’s gone off line. He’s been prepping to be an ollie for years. Maybe his whole life.”

An ollie
, McCallum said to himself. Off into the wilderness. No communication, no money, no trace.

“Thank you for your time,” McCallum walked back to his car. He couldn’t be around Lillian Leveski any more. He saw people getting chewed in the cogs of society every day. He usually escaped feeling like one of the teeth. She didn’t allow that and he couldn’t blame her.

Chapter Fifteen

Emory had trouble grasping his plastic spork. His skin had grown so dry his joints cracked along the sides when he closed his hands. White-toped crevasses, red and pink beneath, he could peer into them, amazed that so much burning pain could emanate from such tiny fractures, amazed that the cuts even existed. To work all day in the wet, only to have your skin desiccate to the point of cracking. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair.

“The nurse will give you cream.” Campbell sat down across from Emory. He placed his tray on the table.

“Never thought to ask,” Emory said. “They ignore everything.”

“Unless it interferes with your productivity. If you get to where you can’t pick up a tool, they’ll give you some cream.”

“Splendid.” Emory sporked some gray, mashed potatoesque substance into his mouth. He had to be careful not to let this batch stick to the roof of his mouth. The last one almost killed him. About 50 other men sat in the big room, eating what the company called dinner, Emory didn’t think one of them would notice him choking, or, if they did, leave their food to save him. Except maybe Campbell.

“They can’t escape healthcare.” Campbell studied his tray like a puzzle. “Right down to the moisturizer.”

“So I’ve got that going for me.”

“Health care’s funny that way. They pretty much have to provide it. You can’t have people curling up and dying on the street.”

“We pay for it,” Emory said.

“Oh sure. They turned it into a revenue draw. I haven’t figured out how it started. If one of the three companies offered it, the other two had to fall in or fall out. Or, they absorbed huge healthcare companies in the Buy-Ups and momentum took over. I never found any definitive data.”

“Maybe it was both,” Emory picked up the shingle of brown protein and ripped off a chunk with his canines.

“Probably both,” Campbell said. “Much of what happened during that time had more than one cause. You don’t have paradigm switches that big without a large number of factors in play.”

“The world is a complex system,” Emory said.

Campbell ate some of his potato stuff.

“Like that.” Emory pointed his spork at Campbell’s mouth. “You need to eat smaller bites or you’ll never get it down, where your stomach can start breaking it down to even smaller parts.”

“True. You break healthcare down, it gets simple. You’re born into a company, they educate you, they develop an interest in keeping you alive while you’re useful.”

Emory said. “It’s a closed system.”

“Yes. Once the companies established complete control it was just that. Complete. The good and the bad.”

“You think they bit off more than they can chew?” Emory made a tiny smile at his own joke. The right corner of his lip cracked, like his knuckles. He had not smiled in a while.

Campbell made a light, listless chuckle. “In a way, I think you’re right. In the old days, companies could shed what they didn’t like, or no longer needed, in their striving for profit and growth. When they reached the end, they lost the abilities that got them that far. They now have everything and can rid themselves of nothing.”

“A system can’t really work that way.” Emory finished his peach slice, the best part. The taste you wanted to be last in your mouth. “Nothing is perpetual. There’s always waste.”

“Yeah.” Campbell spread his arms and rotated at the hips. “And you’re looking at it.”

They both glanced around, forever wary of a tussle, an advance, a change in the fragile balance of each moment. The Alternative Work Detail resembled a closed system, Emory learned. No one, not the workers, not the supervisors, had a way out. It busted in on itself every so often. A fight. A protest. A boiling in everyone, at the same time, that blew apart the brief periods of peace. He mused over possible repairs. Moving guys around, chopping shifts, acknowledging holidays — humans seemed to need pivotal points in time — or the occasional party. He knew of an auto-parts factory in the Hamilton catchment that brought in hobbyists for company-sponsored sex parties. The plant saw increased output numbers that far outweighed the costs.

That wasn’t going to happen here. None of it would happen here. Emory had ended up in a place with no ideas.

“Suicide,” Campbell said.

“That’s not an answer,” Emory said. “That’s quitting.”

“Not us, capitalism,” Campbell continued. “That system couldn’t last either. It had to kill itself.”

“I thought this was capitalism?” Emory ran an up-turned palm in a semicircle, displaying the room.

“I don’t know what this is. It’s not the capitalism that’s in the files, though. It’s nothing like the pre-Buy Up era. It couldn’t be. That was my point.”

“Capitalism committed suicide,” Emory conferred.

“Self-destructed, would be a better term.” Campbell nodded at his own correction. “It had to. It was based on competition and competitions eventually come to an end.”

Emory lifted a spork full of gray goo and held it in front of his mouth. “They ate each other up until there were just three fat corporations with nothing left to eat.” He put the goo in his mouth.

“Capitalism ate itself to death.” Campbell laughed.

“Not a bad way to go,” Emory said.

“I can think of worse ways.”

“So what do we have now?” Emory asked. “What system do we have?”

“I don’t know. Nobody talks about it. There’s no market for that kind of thinking. There’s no school for strictly intellectual pursuits.”

“Just a hobbyist, then. One of those philosophers with his own post or one of those anthropology clubs. Maybe some hobbyist has a name for this system.”

“Oh,” Campbell said, “That kind of hobbyist.”

“There’s only one kind,” Emory said. “Believe me. There’s only one kind.”

* * *

“I had to get on the train because I wasn’t going to make it to Atlanta otherwise,” Sylvia said through a mouth so thin and tight the words ricocheted. They caught other passengers in the car. They couldn’t help but look her way, which made her even angrier. Public arguments were unseemly. Low class. Worse than riding coach on a train speeding across a frozen countryside of concrete slab buildings, industrial towers, conveyors and other crap she didn’t care to see.

“Where is Samjahnee?” Gavin Stoll’s voice entered her ear.

“You should be more worried about where I am.”

“You are the least of my worries,” Gavin said. “We’ll straighten this out.”

“I left Sam in the Lockport catchment, with the truck. He’ll collect B-roll while I ride the rails like some hobo.” She re-crossed her legs and smoothed out her cashmere skirt. The older couple across from her went back to their monitors, watching some tripe about spies or pirates, she imagined. At least trains had legroom. She couldn’t imagine cramming this belly of hers into the last seat on an airship.

“We’re checking things right now,” Gavin continued. “According to our records, your assigned employer, Vermillion Holdings, has accepted the last six pay differentials. They are, in fact, 10 percent more than the man they’ve got filling your position. We shouldn’t be hearing a dribble from these bastards. They’re going to lose money taking you back.”

“Is this a milking?”

“Pun intended?”

“Do they want more, Gavin. Is a 10 percent differential not enough?”

“They didn’t tell us otherwise. We tagged onto the same agreement you established with Marshall. We pay them off so we can have you. They never complained. If this is a leveraging move, they don’t appear to know what they’re doing. You don’t call Human Assets first. God, you never call them at all if you can help it.”

“You’ve got to fix this, Gavin. I’m not going back to landscaping. I’m not. Ever.”

“We don’t want you to.” His voice sounded like salve, Sylvia thought. Too soothing. She’d tell him to dial it back if she were directing this scene, which she wasn’t and that fact made her angrier than all the other facts combined.

“Then take it up a notch,” she said. “Call our investors and get this guy juiced. I was almost done up there, you know.”

“I know.”

You do?
Sylvia thought.
Save for later
. “I had a couple of beefy leads on this Milkman. A few more days and I would have…”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. How stupid. Did she think it would be that easy? Like finding a lost earring? The Milkman would sit and wait as if this were a great game of hide and seek. She’d find him under the stairs and they’d laugh and have lemonade and she’d capture it all on video.

“Forget the whole thing,” Sylvia said. “What a silly lark.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The movie, Gav. The movie was going nowhere.”

“You just said—”

“I just said I didn’t want to go back to landscaping, but that’s my true calling. Putting it off any longer isn’t going to help.”

“B—”

“Don’t bother with Mister… what’s his name?”

“I don’t know. Clive?”

“Clive. Yes. I’ll see him soon enough. You get out, enjoy the sun. What’s the weather like on the coast?”

“Fine. 72, like always.”

“I’m headed for some heat myself. And looking forward to it. I’ll be in touch.”

Sylvia slapped her index finger across her bracelet. Then she slapped it again. And again. She slapped it 12 times — until it stung too much — as the couple across from her watched.

* * *

The bamboo framed out a box big enough to hold a man, if your intention was to get him to turn on his friends after a few days. Thin nylon fishing line crossed through the structure, meeting occasionally in fat, elaborate knots. The knots caught the ambient light, making them much more visible than the line. Standing back, looking through, the knots formed undulating patterns. A calm wave? A snake? A woman on her side, satisfied? All three?

McCallum loved it. He couldn’t imagine how long the piece must have taken. His beer grew warm as he strolled around it, wanting to view if from every possible angle, forgetting to sip. The intricacy. The statement. He couldn’t move on to the rest of the works, fully aware they could be even better.

“Hypnotic, isn’t it?” That voice from a crypt. McCallum turned, panning the gallery spotted with people mingling, nibbling, trying not to spill their red wine on the white everything, none of whom were addressing him. Then he looked down. Aga Graber looked up, holding a partially filled brandy snifter with two hands. Five foot in heels, she wore a floor-length black crepe gown. Her curly salt and pepper hair lay flat and wide across her head, making her look, at the moment, like a mushroom, McCallum thought.

The thought made him smile. “Can’t part from it.”

“Then buy it,” Aga said. “That’s what it’s for.”

“I don’t think it’s in my area of affordability.”

“Eh, you’d be amazed. She’s young and poor. No name yet. It would be a good investment.”

“I’m sure,” McCallum turned back to the sculpture. “Still outside an op’s salary.”

“I suspect the real reason may be your loft is already filled to the shingles with art.”

“That is also true.” McCallum smiled again.

“I can help you with that.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been asking for years.”

“I know.”

“Someday I’m going to stop asking and then what are you going to do?”

McCallum turned. His grin popped, leaving his lips parted and curled.

“You’re an artist, Eddie.”

“And an op,” he added. “Who dabbles in art.”

“It should be the other way around.”

“Being a professional artist would be no better. I can’t imagine having a boss tell me what to paint and how to paint or not to paint at all. I couldn’t function properly. I couldn’t do my best work working for the company.”

“Can any of us?”

What a great question
, McCallum thought, peering through the strings and knots at the intersections of balled, glossy spectrums.
Can you do your best work for the company or do you need to leave to achieve greatness? To get something done that is complex and hard? Something the company simply won’t let you do?

One could connect those knots in so many different ways. The curve of the helix, the arc of the sun. The artist had had to get right in there, into the web and work her way out, envisioning the whole project first, crafting backward. The meticulous tying and stringing. He couldn’t see any short cuts. It took true devotion to create a piece of art like this.

“You are right,” McCallum said. “About the dabbling. Nothing profound was ever done by dabbling.”