Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 8

"You're sabotaging your solar again," Skinner said.

"I might as well take a ball-peen hammer to it," said Carl.

"You're cursed. Put a machine in your hands and it takes itself apart."

Hiroko said to Chiho, "I was worried you guys wouldn't escape Phoenix this time."

Chiho replied, "We ran into some demonstrators on the way out, but we did fine."

"Yeah, because I showed off my c.o.ke," Skinner said.

"There was a testosterone moment," Chiho nodded.

"We got out of there in one piece is all I'm saying."

"Those people just want to get out before it gets too hot," Hiroko said.

"Then they should move out altogether," Carl said.

"I second that opinion," Skinner said. "Slide that dip on over here, if you please. There are relocation programs, right? They can move up to Canada."

"Or Alaska," Carl said.

"And live in a camp?" Hiroko asked. "I hear those places are foul."

"Some of them are," Chiho said. "They're improving, though. According to Reader's Digest, anyway."

The conversation was veering dangerously toward buzz-kill territory. They all seemed to recognize this, and with a collective breath moved on to other topics.

"School! How's teaching this semester?" Chiho asked Hiroko.

"Fabulous. I taught Theory of Counterinsurgency, FUS History with an emphasis on the New England theater, a couple intro freshman cla.s.ses. I had incredible students this semester."

"Her students drove her to tears," Carl said.

Hiroko said, "Please tell us you're staying a couple weeks, at least. We've got a pantry full of food that'll go to waste otherwise."

"Football, barbecue, a little walk in the woods," Carl said.

"Our thoughts exactly," Skinner said. "I don't know how much longer we can hold out in the desert."

"You said that last year," Chiho said.

"Every year I mean it a little bit more. Putting a prophylactic on my house four months out of the year."

"Let me see your garden!" Chiho said. Hiroko did an embarra.s.sed and proud little shrug and motioned for her to follow.

When the women were gone, Skinner and Carl looked at each other and shared a laugh.

"Jesus, we're still here," Skinner said.

"Still looking like s.h.i.t, a day late and a dollar short."

"When you can live forever, all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. You're just going to die in some stupid accident."

"Could come any day."

"And a welcome day that'll be."

They laughed again, matching the cadence of their guffaws. Carl said, "Seriously. You bring the memories?"

"Right here." Skinner patted his breast pocket. "I told Chiho."

Carl nodded. "I told Hiroko. We got into a fight about it."

"Likewise."

"But we gots to do what we gots to do."

"Sort through the bulls.h.i.t."

"Get our past in order."

"I promised Chiho I wouldn't drink. You help me out on that?" Skinner asked.

"You got it. I'll not drink with you."

"You don't have to."

"You would for me."

"True. You make these buffalo wings?"

"I wish I could take credit but they came out of a f.u.c.kin' bag. Cooper died."

"Wait, who-Cooper? s.h.i.t, no."

"Lung cancer finally. One of those weird kinds of lung cancer that happen to people who don't smoke. So rare the Bionet doesn't have a reliable app to deal with it. He tried a cigarette when he was sixteen, puked his guts out, and never touched the stuff again, even when we were in combat. Now that's f.u.c.kin' willpower. I talked to him a month before he pa.s.sed. He blamed the cancer on that one cigarette from ninety years ago. Cigarette smoke was the least of what ended up in our lungs."

"I can't say I ever got along with Cooper that well. G.o.d rest his soul."

"You barely got along with anyone. You were the crew's resident son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"But when the s.h.i.t went down is what I'm saying."

"You don't even have to say it."

"I'm trying harder not to be a p.r.i.c.k. I volunteer at the local pool. Hand out boogie boards to snot-nosed kids. Went door-to-door collecting toothbrushes for our church. Apparently they need toothbrushes in Alabama or someplace."

"Guy on his fifth set of dentures collecting toothbrushes. That's a good one."

Skinner grinned. "How you keeping busy besides busting solar panels?"

"Dude, nothing much has changed since you were here last. I do my Tai Chi in the morning and my yoga at night. I reread all of d.i.c.kens and am back on a Melville jag. It's all about supporting the wife's career. She's working on a book about the FUS. Trying to spell out once and for all why it went down, who was responsible. Most of the time she's buried in books."

"How'd a dumba.s.s like you marry a woman so smart?"

"My thoughts precisely. She could've just retired a long time ago but she's got unfinished business with the FUS. She thinks she did too little to prevent it is my theory. Like she was part of the whole propaganda apparatus that brought on the worst of it. It haunts her. I've been trying to tell her to give it a rest, what's past is past. But she's too much like you. Has to go over it and over it in her head."

"An incredible woman. They broke the mold et cetera, et cetera."

"Roon called here last week."

"Say what?"

"She wants to get in touch with you and Chiho. I think she wants to make amends."

Skinner rubbed his face. Audible stubble. "I wasn't expecting that. Is she okay? Jesus, I'm a s.h.i.tty father."

"She sounded good. I talked to her maybe five minutes. She says she doesn't have your new number. She wanted-I really should wait until Chiho is here to tell you this."

"What happened?"

"Don't worry, man, it's nothing bad. Just wait for the ladies to come back from their little garden tour and all will be revealed."

Five minutes and five buffalo wings later Hiroko and Chiho came back indoors. Chiho beamed. "Did Carl tell you Roon called?"

"Yeah, he did, what's-"

Chiho knitted her fingers together and held her hands to her chin. "Roon and Dot have a baby!"

Skinner opened his mouth to say something, stopped, looked to the others to figure out how he should be feeling. "A grandchild?" he said.

"A little boy," Hiroko said. "He's two now."

In this safe place, in the company of people who loved him, bewildered and unable to speak, Skinner found tears trembling at the corners of his eyes.

Now they'd have to see Roon. Their stay would be shadowed by expectation and shot through with giddiness that they'd finally get to meet a grandchild. Skinner shook his head and gazed curiously at his open palms, as though he'd achieved grandfatherhood via some feat of manual labor. Carl suggested they go on a walk.

The path through the woods roughly followed where a sidewalk used to be. Here and there stood foundations of houses. If you kicked at the weeds or peeled back layers of fallen leaves, little artifacts of extinct Portlanders emerged. Bottles, cell phones, plastic toys partially covered in moss, the rusted whorls of a box-spring mattress. Trees had reclaimed the grid, reverting it to chaotic geometries determined by fallen seeds. Chiho loved the birds most, the wild flocks that had replenished themselves post-FUS, blotting the sky in great concentrations of feather, cackle, and wing. A woodp.e.c.k.e.r smacked its beak against a snag, probing for grubs. Amid a copse of pines rose an old McDonald's golden arches sign, boasting of billions served. Billions! The husbands and wives walked paired down the path.

Skinner said to Hiroko, "Carl says you're working on a book."

"More like the book's working on me."

"So what's your angle on the FUS?"

"I'm considering it by way of a neurological metaphor," Hiroko said. "I stumbled on some research from the 1950s, two scientists named Olds and Milner who first identified the pleasure centers of the brain. I guess their most famous experiment was when they stimulated the pleasure centers of rats whenever the rats pressed a particular bar in their cage. It didn't take long for the rats to stimulate their pleasure centers to the point of exhaustion, to the point of not eating or taking care of their other physiological needs. My argument is that in the age of f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t, human beings became like those rats, whacking the bars that stimulated our pleasure centers even as those very bars were what triggered our doom. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, we started to understand the terms of our self-destruction. Our rational minds argued against using fossil fuels, against overeating and too much television, against acc.u.mulating too much wealth among too few, but a more powerful part of our brains kept pushing those bars. Push, push, push. The solutions, the ways we might avoid the FUS, were staring us right in the face. It was obvious and apparent: stop using oil, stop making plastic, control the growth of the population to a logical level so we could exist within the parameters of our ecology. If we didn't do these things, most of us would die. But we were willing to die because a more powerful part of our minds, the old mammalian limbic system, was busy pushing those bars. The more recent, less developed part of our brains, the neocortex, was waving its arms and screaming for us to stop our destructive behavior. In this war between the limbic system and the neocortex, the limbic system won, hence the FUS."

Carl picked up a stick to walk with. "So by the time we got tangled in the FUS, who were we fighting for exactly?" he said.

"We were fighting for Boeing," Skinner laughed.

"Yes, but more to the point, we were fighting for the limbic system," Hiroko said. "We were fighting to keep pushing those bars. When everything collapsed, there were few bars left to push. But now the earth's renewing itself. Look around us. There are a lot fewer people to make a mess of things. The qputers are undoing the damage."

"Still, Phoenix gets hotter every year," Skinner said.

"True," Hiroko said, "because not every place is recovering at the same rate. It's going to take some places a lot longer."

They came to an old intercity light-rail car covered in vines. Through the dirty windows they read advertis.e.m.e.nts for colonics and undergraduate degrees.

Skinner said, "So you're saying we fought on the wrong side, Hiroko?"

She shrugged. "In the FUS, everyone was on the wrong side. The very idea of sides was on the wrong side."

The nocturnal animals of the forest performed their first stirrings as light seeped out of the sky. The path widened and intersected with a hard-packed gravel road. Nearby leaned a bus-stop sign. In a few short minutes a bus arrived, a shambling, multihued contraption furnished with couches and love seats, a kitchenette in the back where a woman cooked a garlicky organic meal. A few other riders, swaddled in patchwork outfits of Gore-Tex and hemp, sat reading alternative weeklies, about them hanging the whiff of weed. The four friends crowded together on a couch across from a balding man in gla.s.ses who was absorbed in a battered copy of Benjamin's Illuminations, a scarf wrapped so many times around his neck that it appeared to be holding his head in place. The bus b.u.mbled along the irregular road and the trees eventually gave way to deliberate landscaping and an actual paved arterial. Soon they were on Burnside through the vital guts of Portland. A block or two from Powell's City of Books they climbed off the bus and squeezed through an alley to Hiroko and Carl's favorite Thai place. As they approached the back entrance, a great wave of plates and cutlery crashed through the door and spilled out into the alley. Carried on this wave was a disheveled and quite stoned busboy, and close behind a chef rode a baking sheet like a surfboard, yelling obscenities at his young and now-fired employee.

"Asleep on the job!" the chef bellowed. "What kind of dishwasher are you! And you dare evoke the name of the great Woo-jin Kan!"

"Don't worry. The food's actually great," Hiroko said as they climbed over the dishes, trying not to slip on a rainbow of curries.

During appetizers, Chiho proclaimed, "We're so rude. We haven't even asked about Jadie."

Carl sighed. "She's had her troubles with the Bionet. Became some sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d's embodiment. We got her in a recovery center down here."

"Christ," Skinner said.

"It started out with dancing," Carl continued. "She'd go to parties where everyone tried out these illegal apps, give over her codes to a ch.o.r.eographer and they'd put her body through elaborate moves. Soon it turned into an everyday routine. She surrendered some of her basic functions, like what time she'd wake up, when she'd eat and use the bathroom. Her DJ was good to her at first, they usually are, got her to make new friends-other embodiments-made her feel popular, put witty comments in her mouth when she was in social situations. She got a bit part in a TV show they film up in Vancouver."

"Forensic Mindf.u.c.k," Hiroko said.

"The one about the detectives?" Chiho asked.

"The one where they travel back in time and use modern forensic methods to solve crimes of the past," Carl said. "Anyway. Around that time she dropped out of school, which we weren't too keen on, but it looked like she had a real career getting started."

"When did you find out she was getting DJed?" Chiho said.

"We were clueless," Carl said. "We thought she was succeeding purely on her own merits. If we'd known, we'd have flown up to Vancouver and tossed her a.s.s in a recovery center straightaway."

"We knew something about her had changed when we visited," Hiroko said, "but we couldn't identify it. I thought it was the pressure and excitement of her new life. Sometimes her hands trembled like she'd had too much coffee."

Carl rubbed his stubble. "Her show got canceled and she was out of school and looking for work. That's when her DJ lost interest in her and set her on autopilot. He got her a job waitressing and wiped his hands of her, setting her loose on autogenerated subroutines. She described it as being like living the same boring day over and over again. She woke up exactly at 7:02 a.m., had the same cereal for breakfast, ran 4.2 miles on the treadmill, and went to the same stores and bought the same three items every day-a nail file from the drugstore, a copy of Nabokov's Lolita from the bookstore, and a set of shoelaces from a shoe repair shop. Then she'd go waitress at a greasy spoon that served only regulars who ordered the same things every day. After that she'd come home, watch a tape of the same stupid comedy, take a shower, and go to bed at 9:00 on the dot. And every night she had the same dream, in which she separated bottles for recycling behind the restaurant where she worked. Brown bottles, green bottles, clear bottles. The dream always seemed to last a couple hours, but got more detailed every night. She started to be able to read the labels, see the air bubbles in the gla.s.s, feel the texture of the glue on the bottles. Her dreams became so high-def that they started making her waking reality look foggy. Then she'd wake up and start all over again. Treadmill, shopping, work, home, movie, shower, bed, dream. It went on like this for months. Part of her remained aware of what was happening, a weak little section of her brain, and she started to suspect that the regulars at the cafe were embodiments, too, retired embodiments also on autopilot. She'd become this reliable little machine, a component that did its part to keep the companies that made the nail files and the shoelaces and the copies of Lolita in business, programmed to be a battery plugged into the economy. On her days off the routines automatically changed, and she'd send us an email and tell us how she was looking forward to enrolling in school again and finishing her degree. Very little variation to these messages. Hiroko and I kept trying to plan a trip up north and see her but stuff kept getting in the way. I broke my leg, Hiroko got a grant to write her book, all the usual we've-been-busy BS that keeps families from seeing each other. We were just happy to know she was planning to go back to school. So, finally, a couple months ago we got our act together and headed up to Vancouver. She kept trying to dissuade us from coming. I got suspicious. So we head on up there and found her new apartment, in some lousy part of town with people crazy and pa.s.sed out, trash all over the place up and down the street. I ran up the steps to her door. We pounded on it and she told us to go away, so I knew something real foul was going down. The worst scenarios ran through my mind, you know how it is with a daughter. So I got all commando and broke down the f.u.c.kin' door. Really messed up my shoulder for the weekend, I might add. We found her looking completely normal, standing in the middle of her apartment. With a hundred ninety-seven copies of Lolita, a hundred ninety-seven packages of shoelaces, and a hundred ninety-seven nail files all piled up on the kitchen table. And she was standing there dressed, smiling, making the same repet.i.tive motion with her arm, a little shuffle with her feet, waiting for the clock to strike 9:00 a.m. so she could go out and do her shopping. Her smile terrified me. A smile a thousand miles from happiness. I just came out and asked her if she was an embodiment."

"Christ," Skinner said. "Did you ever catch the son of a b.i.t.c.h who did this to her?"

Carl shook his head. "The cops are still looking. They're about five years behind the technology, if you wanna know the sad truth. It's shocking. There's a whole underground economy driven by embodiments. People just set up to work at mindless jobs, to consume the same s.h.i.t every day, punch in and punch out, keep products in production, services rendered, walking around numb and dumb and compliant, without an original thought in their d.a.m.n heads."

"She's doing better," Hiroko said, "but it's a long recovery. The ego atrophies during the embodiment state. It has to be rebuilt little by little. It takes weeks for them to be able to introduce themselves or shake someone's hand."