The Absolved Page 9

  But things are different now. While Martinez still holds a large lead in the polls, it’s not because anyone is inherently optimistic, but that Bradford is unthinkable. His Luddite ideology is anathema to those of us who’ve somehow managed to cling to the vision of America as the great City on the Hill.

  There’s been talk on the news of an impending clash between Bradford’s supporters and the Martinez holdouts. An army of robot police has been deployed. These cyborgs are nowhere near out of the Uncanny Valley, looking and acting far more like machines than anything resembling human, eliciting feelings of eeriness and revulsion among all of those who observe them. A barricade has been placed across from the Convention Center to separate Bradford’s supporters and the people queued up for Martinez.

  I buy a pretzel from a vendor and watch the scene unfold. The Bradford side gives the impression they’ve been cast to play a part in some sort of sinister carnival. All of them are wearing a uniform of matching hats and T-shirts bearing threatening slogans: Death to the Machines! Turn Back the Hands of Time! Make a Robot Your Bitch! Many of their ranks are holding crudely drawn signs depicting men and women engaged in obsolete labor, swinging a sledgehammer or sewing a dress. Deep in the crowd I spot a mock trial taking place in which a judge has ordered a robot to be executed for the crime of displacement. A jubilant cheer fills the air as the machine is strung up by the neck.

  The Martinez supporters are far fewer in number, all of them neatly dressed and waiting quietly with heads bowed. Some of them also are holding signs, although none of them are handmade, but distributed by officials from the campaign. The taunts and jeers from the Bradford supporters go almost entirely unanswered. Only one old woman dares to stand up to her attackers.

  “You’re not half the men and women our robots are!” she shouts.

  In response, hundreds of cans, pieces of rotten fruit, and assorted trash rain down on the Martinez camp. When eventually they’re let into the building, the Bradford followers, now bereft, disperse.

  Wandering the streets, I notice another crowd amassed around a street performance. I push toward it to find that it’s Karl who’s in command, alone and powerfully built—his large head and low-sloping brow, virtually neckless on his broad shoulders.

  He performs a series of magic tricks, all executed perfectly, delighting the crowd. Karl’s son serves as his assistant, first allowing himself to be levitated, and then sawed in half. After each trick, Karl says, “How about a round of applause for my son, Karl Jr.” Karl playfully messes the hair on the smiling boy’s head.

  “For the grand finale,” Karl shouts into a bullhorn, “I’d like to bring my dear friend out to assist me.”

  I should have guessed, but from the crowd steps Lydia, sinewy and taut. The two embrace as Karl whispers in her ear, and she laughs.

  “Please give a warm welcome to Lydia!” Karl says, holding high Lydia’s hand.

  After the enthusiastic applause recedes, Karl takes from a bag a large, cast-iron horseshoe, five times the size of any I’ve seen.

  “Who would like to test this?” Karl says.

  A man steps forward and struggles to lift the horseshoe over his head.

  “Heavy, eh?” Karl says.

  “Yes, very!”

  Karl relieves the man and drops the shoe to the ground with a crash so resounding that the crowd is startled.

  “I will now throw this horseshoe around Lydia’s neck without harming so much as a hair on her head!” The audience gasps collectively. “Do not—I repeat, folks—do not try this at home, unless of course you’re a glutton for tragedy!”

  Karl fastens protective pads around Lydia’s shoulders, and then takes long paces away. Karl’s son, Karl Jr., plays a drum roll. The crowd is silent with anticipation. Lydia stands with her arms extended like Jesus on his cross, her face as serene as a sleeping baby’s. Karl kisses the horseshoe then twists his hips as his arm swings forward in a long arc at whose end he heaves the shoe Lydia’s way. Like a cliché, time itself seems to stop as the horseshoe hurtles toward Lydia. After what feels like hours, the shoe, just as Karl had proclaimed, lands on her shoulders. A ripple tears through Lydia’s body, from top to bottom, but she remains steady ’til all goes still, and the crowd explodes. Karl has somehow transported himself to her side by way of removing the shoe, after which the duo bow long and slow. The drummer boy opens his gram and makes a lap around the audience for collections. Most people, of course, can’t be bothered, typical, on the whole, though not for Lydia.

  “Are you people now so conditioned to free handouts,” she cries through the bullhorn, “that you can’t remember the good old days when you paid for a service received?”

  Scarcely anyone is compelled by this plea. Most simply avert their eyes and scurry away. Worse, as Karl is returning his horseshoe to its bag, one of the robotic policeman approaches. A heated exchange ensues, capped when the robot issues Karl and Lydia tickets for an illegal public act.

  14

  I’m relieved to hear some birds chirping as I trudge through this heat. If only the park weren’t in such awful disrepair—grass dying or dead, rose bushes dead, dust and dirt as far as you can see. There has been no rain for ninety-six days. The aqueduct is at an all-time low. And we may not get another drop until December. It’s no mystery that humans are opposed to absolutes. There’s no complete happiness or unhappiness—we can’t know the future. Great hopes and terrifying uncertainties, these are the things that riddle us.

  I can’t help but think about the old days, albeit through the lens of an obviously naïve sentimentality. Memories from long ago seem like the pinnacles of happiness.

  Rachel and I, for instance, once spent two weeks riding bicycles through the Italian countryside, drinking fine wines, gorging on pasta, making love and waking arm-in-arm. As I walk past the decrepit fountain where ducks once swam, the memory of those days fills me with so much joy I’m afraid I’ll burst. Inevitably, however, I’ll see something like a squirrel climbing a tree, and it’ll trigger a sense of wretchedness. While these memories bring joy, I know that in the moment I never felt the same. I obsessed instead over the most trivial inconveniences and hardships. In Italy, I ruined a day when after having ridden our bicycles twelve miles to a quaint bed and breakfast on a vineyard, we got sent away for lack of a reservation. I was livid. Rachel had sworn that morning that she had made it. How stupid I had been. I could have gone on in the spirit of adventure, but instead spent two hours making her cry with my insults.

  At the coffee vendor I find Serena, who drinks ten to twelve cups a day and claims to need just four hours of sleep a night. The woman never stops. I receive holograms from her at all hours. I often joke with her that if she keeps firing people I may soon be her only friend. This doesn’t bother her in the least. Her greatest pride rests in her business acumen.

  “Pretty tough on Kapoor the other day.”

  “A long time coming.”

  “You had to fire him in front of the group?”

  “Sends a strong message, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I still need that favor from you.”

  “For that girl you’re not having an affair with?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Hines is in charge of the admissions process, Henri.”

  “Last year the man had my office converted to a room for data servers and placed my personal effects in a cubicle down the hall from the nursery.”

  “I’m sure it was an oversight.”

  “He reported me to the American Medical Association for professional misconduct.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I wrote Rachel an antibiotics prescription for her strep throat.”

  Serena practically suffocates from a fit of laughter. “It seems you’ve managed to land on Dr. Hines’ bad side, haven’t you?”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  “One condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “Come to VR-Together with me.”

&
nbsp; “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the new punk rock!”

  “I’m forty-seven years old, I can’t go there!”

  “You mustn’t be afraid to try new things, Henri.”

  15

  An endless parade of pale-faced teenagers stretches out into the distance. All are attired in a uniform of grey-colored, shabby clothing. Everyone is standing in line, not talking. The only disturbances to be heard are those of errant coughs, mouth breathing, and the shuffling of feet as the crowd marches into the venue, sounding eerily like the drone of a machine. A team of women in red bodysuits and caps is making their way across the line, checking people’s grams for tickets, and then handing them a set of VR goggles.

  VR-Together is a new counterculture phenomenon that has swept the nation. As young people have become increasingly isolated from each other due to spending more and more time in the solitude of VR, interacting only with AI, who despite its likeness to actual humans is still without consciousness, there is a perceived desire amongst the youth to combine the safety of VR, where the environment has been designed to the exact preferences of each user and no one has to fear social rejection or anxiety, with the sense of community that can only be felt amongst other sentient beings.

  The solution: thousands of people congregating in a venue to live out their VR fantasies while standing in proximity to others doing the exact same thing.

  “Look at all these zombies,” I say.

  “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” Serena says. “An entire generation of people whose explicit aim is to never subject themselves to a genuine or authentic experience, only synthetic ones.”

  “You think they’re all virgins?”

  “Not only have they not had sex, but not one of these outcasts has ever been in a fistfight, taken drugs, played sports, or even done anything as risky as public speaking.”

  “The perfect bubble!”

  Realizing I haven’t yet procured a ticket, I go searching for a scalper. I wander up and down the rows of people, catching the occasional glance of a scowling attendee, who is clearly dismayed by the disruption I’ve cause to this harmonious and tranquil scene. Yet no one here would ever call me out for my transgression, as direct confrontation is to be avoided like plague, in accordance to the movement’s credo.

  Finally, like a whisper in the wind, I hear the cry of a scalper. As if I had apprenticed under an Apache tracker, my instincts lead me to him—a handsome, dark-skinned man moving easily through the crowd.

  “You need a ticket?” he asks.

  “How much?”

  “Three fifty.”

  “Face value is one twenty.”

  “Show’s sold out, man. Three hundred’s the lowest I can go.”

  We touch our gram-fingers together, swapping money for ticket. The turnstile opens for Serena’s gram, and a woman clad in red hands her a set of VR goggles. But my ticket provokes a flashing light. After three tries, a large man with a heavy mustache and black jacket appears.

  “Come with me, sir.”

  As Serena disappears into the crowd, I follow the guard to a control center manned by a team of analysts.

  “Show them your ticket,” the guard demands.

  A mousy woman with glasses and frizzy hair studies my gram. “Where’d you get this ticket?” she asks.

  “Birthday present from a friend,” I say with the straightest face I know.

  “This is a fraudulent ticket.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “I’m sorry. Your friend got taken.”

  I storm off in search of the scalper, hell-bent for destruction. The echo of a deafening silence rings in my ears as I comb the outside premises—bathroom stalls, parking lot, concessions stands, the works. From there I move into the streets, my thirst for vengeance swelling by the minute. Then, inside of a vegan donut shop with two other men, I see the man who ripped me off. My entire body is buzzing as I storm into the place.

  “What do you want?” says the scalper.

  “I gave you three hundred bucks for a fake ticket.”

  The men exchange glances and grin.

  “What makes you think it was me?” the scalper says.

  I can feel the blood rushing to my face. My hands ball to fists. “Because I fucking recognize you, that’s how!”

  Now the man’s tone matches mine. “Look, man, you think you can just walk up to any black guy you see and accuse him of stealing?”

  “There are laws against this kind of shit,” one of the other men says.

  “Go to hell!” I snap.

  When the three men rise, it strikes me I’m about to get beaten for the second time in a week. The donut clerk is hollering into her gram, now, but I’m so full of adrenaline I’m helpless to understand her.

  “What do we do with this racist?” my scalper says as one of his friends shoves me hard.

  I stumble back and trip over a chair, then jump to my feet with the chair in hand, determined to take the man down. Before I can, however, I hear someone shout, “Drop it!”

  It’s the police, I realize. I’m so taken aback that I can’t do anything, much less obey. Now, gun in hand, one of the cops draws down on me, and I screech like a cat in heat.

  “Drop the chair now!”

  The first cop holds his aim as I drop the chair, while the other hurls me to the ground and cuffs me.

  “Are you gentlemen okay?” the first cop asks the scalpers.

  “No,” answers my thief, “we’re not. This man committed a hate crime against us!”

  “Officer,” I say, astounded, “this man ripped me off for three hundred dollars!”

  “Shut your mouth,” the second cop says. “When we’re ready to get your side, we’ll ask.” To the scalpers, he says, “Go on.”

  The three men tell their version of what transpired, each adding little tidbits of absurdity to the narrative, with every falsehood told emboldening and impelling the other two to elevate their own senselessness, eventually assembling such a nonsensical account of events, I’m certain the officers will find their story baseless. But no sooner have they finished than the cop says, “My God! I’m so sorry. I thought we as a society had put this dark chapter behind us.”

  “Me, too,” the other cop says. “It just goes to show we can’t afford even a moment’s carelessness in the face of bigotry and intolerance!”

  “May I speak?” I ask.

  “We’ve heard enough out of you!”

  The cop reads me my rights, and I’m arrested for racial discrimination and conspiracy to commit a hate crime. They lead me to their cruiser and throw me in, twisting my arm and bashing my head against the window as they do. At the station, I’m stripped naked, examined for contraband, made to don a costume from the state, and tossed into a cell. My cellmate is suffering chronic diarrhea, and I spend the night with my undershirt draped over my face to prevent contracting pink eye.

  In the morning at my arraignment all charges are dropped due to a technicality—the arresting officer’s gram malfunctioned and there is no record of the arrest. The guard who processed me last night claims to have misplaced my clothes. I walk out in prison-issued attire. I take a shortcut through the jail’s employee parking lot as I wait for Chloe to pick me up. In the window of one of the cars, I see my shirt and pants folded neatly sitting on the passenger seat.

  By the time I get to work I’m so flustered that I lock myself out of my gram. The protocol is to contact my hologram’s administrator, but I haven’t the patience to sit through a lengthy hold. Knowing that Serena can reset the program, I head up to her office.

  Outside of her door, I hear the sound of soft wailing. I figure someone must be getting fired, and I tiptoe away. Just as I make it to the elevator, Serena’s office door swings open, and she shouts, “Get in my office.”

  “I can see that you’re busy, so I’ll come back later,” I say meekly.

  “This isn’t a request, Henri!”

  Serena’s office has a distin
ctly Zen quality: minimal, clean, an exquisitely balanced aesthetic, and the ideal of feng shui. Built into one of the walls is a twelve-foot-long aquarium. In it, along with exotic fish, are complex arrangements of aquatic plants, driftwood, and rocks—even an extensive network of caves. A professional aquascaper visits each month to create new designs. This month’s theme is “Dutch Gardens of the Nineteenth Century.”

  Serena has her gram open wide, and she’s on slide twelve of a presentation titled, “Why A Late Term Abortion Makes Dollars and Sense.” Her daughter, Olivia, is even softer and rounder than she was just weeks before, her bulky sweater and cargo pants being stretched to their elastic limit.

  “You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do,” Olivia says.

  “What the hell do you know about being a mother?” Serena replies.

  “Compared to you?” Olivia says. “Plenty!” She bangs on the aquarium’s glass wall, startling all of the fish, and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  “She knows I can’t stand it when anyone disturbs the fish,” Serena says.

  “Sometimes you have to love people for who they are and not because they’ve lived their life in a way that adheres to your principles.”

  Serena’s face turns puzzled and she reaches out and seizes the lapel of my lab coat, pulling it open, exposing the bright orange jumpsuit underneath. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I just need you to reset my gram so I can get back to work.”

  16

  Rachel sleeps extremely hot and can only rest in conditions that resemble the inside of an igloo on the Alaskan tundra. She sets the temperature so low—fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit—I’m always waiting to wake up under a blanket of snow.

  “Rachel, honey,” I said last night. “This is madness. I’ve lost all feeling in my toes. I’m afraid I’m hypothermic.”

  “Well, then, put on some socks!”

  I asked why I should pay a fortune in utility bills to keep my house so cold I need socks. Bickering about money always leads to mockery and grief.