2020 Read online

  Although we knew they’d be coming, we all went pale when we saw the black pickups, the monster trucks, again on the third day. A fleet even bigger than the one that had swept through Hubbard’s Cave rose on a cross-street and poured through a break in the electronic membrane so huge it seemed the four-bys had official sanction to harass and hijack Nomads.

  This time drivers like Mack were ready. He hit a switch and his own newly installed, hyperextendable tires began to inflate and the rig began to rise and shift into sixteen-wheel drive. Using a pile of street rubble as a ramp we surged up over the back of a transfer cab onto the roofs of ordinary traffic, joining a second level bright in the sunlight between high-rises, our weight so broadly distributed we rode over the mass of Nomad rigs without crushing them. Then the big rigs like Mack’s proceeded to scatter the lighter pickups of the hijackers and smear a few into the membrane. Even through the noise of chainsaws and gunshots and the gnashing of gears you could hear the Nomad cheers. We headed south toward Washington Square, our eventual destination, right down the famous Interface at Fifth Avenue, the new fleet of upper-level Nomad vehicles turning back two more attacks by swarms of black trucks.

  I thought I was heading home to Denise that day. I played a last game of license plate poker with Ryder, sketched a shelf design to reorganize Acura’s closet (parking lot architects do have some transferable skills), and tried to come to terms with my regrets. I volunteered for a last shift at the wheel so my friends would be rested when they turned to exit the Core.

  So I was the first one to spot the trouble. We’d been prepared for the second level of traffic on lower Fifth (indeed, we were part of it); we’d been prepared for the gridlock in Washington Square; we’d even been prepared for the sight of the mangled bodies of those who didn’t quite make it to the service door in the base of the Arch which led to a subway station and escape from Nomad territory.

  But none of us were prepared for the sight and sound of a third generation of black trucks which rose above the second tier of traffic. These were huge sixty-four wheelers, big as houses, powered by gas turbines so loud their roar shook the city for blocks. They came from the lower east side, their enormous tires proceeding to crush even the bigger Nomad rigs on the second level beneath their treads. Heading toward the Arch was like accepting a fate as filling in a traffic sandwich, rigs above, rigs below.

  “This traffic is awesome,” Mack said. “It’ll kill us. Maybe the only way to get you across is back in L.A.”

  I realized then how good it felt to know I was going to keep riding with Mack and Acura and Ryder.

  We bailed out of the west side of Washington Square. In New Jersey we picked up a load of freight to tow in order to pay our way, and settled back in for a non-stop to Los Angeles.

  * * *

  We drove south through Kentucky, the days idyllic with Nomad music and warming weather. Near Lexington, after I’d finished remodeling Ryder’s bunk area, fixed the plumbing, and even worked on the auxiliary diesel replacing glow-plugs, Acura asked if I thought about staying on the road.

  It was not my best moment. I was trying to get pipe sealant from beneath my fingernails and the smell of grease out of my hair. “I miss my sensurround couch,” I told her. “I miss my VR suit, I miss Denise—well, I dunno about Denise. . . .” My stomach grumbled. “I miss Instant Lunch. I even miss making goddamned Instant Lunch in my cubicle at work.”

  “It really better than Mom’s vegetable soup?” Ryder asked after a moment.

  I closed my eyes, and remembered. “Okay, definitely not. And your mom’s twice the woman Denise is.”

  “I can understand missing your dog,” Ryder said.

  “I didn’t say I missed Rot. Truth is, he doesn’t have enough space to be normal. He lives in Denise’s parking space and pees on my tires. Denise could keep him.”

  “I noticed your hair’s growing longer,” Mack pitched in.

  “You look good in Nomad clothes too, you know,” Acura said.

  “But who . . . ? I mean whose rig? Who’s willing to . . . ?”

  “We are,” she said. “Me and Ryder and Mack.”

  * * *

  The first time I made love with Acura, among the pillows and quilts on the wide bed at the back of the rig, was during a deep moonless night. Afterwards I cranked open the big hatch above us and we lay on our backs watching the sky together, her body warm against mine and sweet with the odors of spice and wild vanilla. The sky seemed huge, the stars brilliant. It felt like flying.

  And that’s how I came to stay.

  Acura put it best. Traveling, she says, is good for the brain. It’s true: you get a sense of physical and mental well-being from a journey. The monotony of settlement weaves patterns in the brain that make you feel tired and small; traveling makes you feel bigger.

  “It’s a spiritual thing,” Acura says.

  True again, I say. Every day’s an act of renewal on the road. Why do you think they had pilgrimages in the old days? Dante’s journey may have started in hell, but it got him to heaven.

  Of course, had we really tried to get me back across in L.A. (I thought of dropping in to settle my affairs), I’m not sure I could have left The Way if I’d wanted to. All the in-city Interfaces had been blocked off when we returned—apparently from total gridlock in the urban corridor from Malibu south to San Diego. We had to drop our load in Bakersfield.

  On Mack’s more pessimistic days, when his sore shoulder bothers him, he sees the increase in both city and Nomad traffic and the fleets of black trucks as indicative of a “swarming stage” in the cycle of human population. Some guy named Malthus wrote about it long ago. It’s like the suicidal march of the lemmings in Scandinavia; the increased aggressive migrations signal an end for the species in global starvation.

  But my new bunkmate is more positive. Each day is a new beginning, Acura says. The journey is eternal, each click a step along The Way, Il-Rah, The Tao. That’s why, she says, we will find the human future in space, and why the first great travelers there will come from the ranks of the Nomads. Ryder’s electronic school has already acquainted him with mobile launching.

  The problems seem distant to me now, since we’ve crossed the land bridge from Alaska into Asia. Of course Nomads have been on the roads here for years—the first mobile factories came out of Thailand, the first great wheeled musk herds out of Ulaanbaatar.

  Still, it’s the experience of a lifetime to hit Outer Mongolia and watch the traffic finally start to thin out. The road is gold across the steppes in the morning light as we steer toward Irkutsk and thousands of clicks to drive.

  The Artist of the Future

  WE WERE A FULL TWENTY MINUTES into the procedure before I even caught a glimpse of the brain radiologist, Doctor Fong. He’d left all the initial, routine tests to his assistants, and at the start of the main scan he’d been hidden, crouched behind his instruments. When he bobbed up at the mid-way point all I could see was that he was short, and he had a cowlick.

  It wasn’t until I eased back into a chair in his cluttered office that I was able to fully appreciate the cherubic roundness of his small head, the smoothness of his skin. He was nibbling on his index finger—his fingernails were bitten to the quick. His neck was thin and his lab coat looked too big. The frigid temperature of the room sliced through my hospital gown. What they said about him was true: Doctor Fong looked like he was twelve years old.

  “Every-ting check out. Brain good. Nooo problem,” Fong said, his voice high and hopelessly cheerful.

  On a low shelf there was a model of Lunar City—crudely done, in my opinion, gobs of glue showing at corners, joints not quite matched. That’s where I wished I was at the moment, on the moon, in the colony. I’d actually gotten some good work done there a few years back, a basalt arrangement titled “High Lapidary.” You may have heard of the piece. “So,” I said. “My problem’s not organic. It’s not my brain.”

  “Wanna see the scans?” he smiled. “You was thinkin’ abo
ut sex. You gotta slight depression.”

  The phrase “slight depression” seemed to me wildly inaccurate. Obviously no holographic scan could register the sense of panic, the hopeless heartsinking, the agony of an artist like myself who had been on the circuit for too long and had run out of ideas. “So, um, I can’t be admitted to a hospital?”

  “Notta chance.” Fong glanced down at my chart. “Hey, you gotta new assignment, yeah? Maybe dats gonna pick you right up. What kinda art you do?”

  “I’m a sculptor,” I sighed.

  “Thassa life, bein’ creative.” Doctor Fong giggled and offered me a stick of gum.

  “Doctor,” I asked, just trying to be mean, “how old are you?” I was angry he wasn’t going to let me sit out the next round of working grants; all I wanted was a break, some sort of sabbatical, somewhere to hide for a while to recharge my batteries.

  “Forty-five,” he said, looking embarrassed, hiding the pink package, which I now realized was bubble gum.

  Forty-five. He acted like a prepubescent twerp and chewed bubble gum. There went my hope that with greater age came greater wisdom, there went my strategy of just hanging on till I got older. Here came a burst of peevishness. “You ever do any scans of your own brain?”

  “Who tol’ you that?” he said quickly, his face flushed.

  I hadn’t quite expected shame; I’d hit some sort of nerve. “Just guessing,” I murmured, watching him squirm in his chair, wondering how to press my advantage. But before I could figure out what was going on he ducked behind his desk and disappeared, busying himself by rifling through a low drawer. When I tried to speak again he ordered me out without showing his face.

  * * *

  I rode a mag-lev train out to the northern suburbs and walked from the station, hefting my one bag of clothes and my heavy case of tools. My new booking was on Great Barrington Street: great is the right word for it, with its wide lawns, its huge old houses from the 20th Century, its tall ancient oaks. When I first started on the circuit fifteen years ago, I would have been thrilled with patrons who lived this well, but not anymore. Rich people usually expected too much.

  As I shuffled along I reflected on how we artists got into this mess. The current system of patronage began during what the historian Ian Travis MacMillan has termed The Age of the Stars, that forty-year period in which almost all American Presidents either were, or would become, well-known movie actors. At the same time a whole class of fine artists—poets, painters, sculptors, and composers—was becoming a dying breed, supported almost exclusively by government grants. By 2010, the world of high culture had become a microcosm of a welfare state.

  Then, late in the frenzy of deregulation, President Brooke Shields signed into law the booking system we live by today. The reasoning of Congress and the Administration went this way: since a taxpayer was indirectly supporting the arts with a certain percentage of his or her taxes anyway, why not book an artist directly into the taxpayers home, for a length of time in proportion to the tax paid? Such a system seemed more responsive to the market; it eliminated “wasteful government arts bureaucracies.” Ideally, the artist booked into a taxpayer’s home produced some personalized work of art that made taxpaying all the more meaningful.

  The working class generally ignored the arrangement, though I once had an affair with a ballet dancer who had to perform behind the counter of a Ms. Soyburger restaurant for three minutes. Most artists are now booked into upper income households for a month, sometimes longer. The food is usually excellent, but the expectations can make you feel faint.

  The Reynolds house was in the middle of the block, three stories high, mostly glass. A pretentious crystal entrance portico. Down the driveway a garage for three mag-lev coupes, a huge backyard. I screwed up my courage and rang the bell. Dr. Justin Reynolds was an ophthalmologist, his wife a malpractice attorney, and they were very rich. I was booked for two months.

  The girl who answered the door was wearing red platform heels, mesh stockings, a synthetic tigerskin microskirt, and a tanktop. Two huge gold earrings pulled down her lobes. I’d evidently intruded on one of the kinky afternoon sessions for which ophthalmologists had become famous.

  The girl looked at me and grinned salaciously.

  “I’ve come at a bad time,” I said. “I’ll just, uh, disappear down the street for a while.”

  “Oh, wingy, you must be the artist. HEY DADDY, HE’S HERE,” she shouted back into the bright cavern of the house. “Dads is in the kitchen meditating. I’m Dusty. I just happen to live here with these old people.”

  Such was my introduction to the Reynolds’ fourteen-year-old daughter.

  Doctor Justin Reynolds swept into the entranceway wearing a white meditation robe. He kissed me. He was effusive in his praise for the artist, as he put it, whose work he admired every night he watched the moon.

  A few minutes later his wife Andrea came stomping into the living room muttering distractedly about missing lingerie. She was an attractive but aging brunette, wearing a severe black business suit. I don’t think she realized I’d arrived, because she ignored me at first. When I was introduced she babbled about changing into something more comfortable and dashed up the stairs. Five minutes later she strolled into the kitchen wearing a see-through blouse over subcutaneous prosthetic breasts—now it was her daughter’s turn to look annoyed.

  In the ensuing tour of the property—the site, after all, of the work I was about to produce—the Reynolds showed me the architectural highlight of their house, their Typhoon Pia Room. A few years back they’d hired a decorator to simulate the devastation of a hurricane, a fashionable look, but one not particularly conducive to my kind of sculpture.

  Naturally, what really caught my attention was the substantial block of white marble in the backyard, a cube precisely one meter high, one meter wide. It was of a particularly spectacular variety, shipped in, I learned, from Northern Italy at great expense.

  “O.K.,” I said. “I know just where to start.”

  * * *

  That evening the Reynolds hosted a barbecue to show me off to some of their neighbors and friends. A famous poet booked into a home up the block was among the guests. Aside from a rusty Weber grill that Doctor Reynolds dragged out onto the deck to cook on, the affair seemed to me an ostentatious display of wealth. We were served martinis made with atomically pure vodka distilled in orbit, heart of palm salad, kangaroo steaks.

  I drank too much. My chat with the poet, who was having trouble forming coherent sentences, did nothing to raise my spirits. What, I asked myself as I looked around a crowd sparkling with platinum jewelry and young with plastic surgery, could I possibly give these people that they didn’t already have?

  I made the mistake of asking that question to Dr. and Mrs. Reynolds while coffee (Kona) and desert (Candied Orchids) were being served.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Dr. Reynolds said, smiling broadly, waving his pink hands. “Just the surprise of art, the . . . unexpected.”

  “We do have several years’ taxes tied up in you,” his wife said with a tight lawyer’s grin, squeezing my knee. She rotated her eyes upwards, to the night sky, as if suggesting the moon.

  “. . . just to have our lives changed, transformed,” Dr. Reynolds went on. He was on a roll and had everybody’s attention now. “. . . just to see the world fresh and new.”

  I saw the poet secretly empty the pitcher of martinis into a water glass and drink it straight down. He got so sloshed he had to be carried home.

  Later that night I had to bar my door against the Reynolds’ daughter, who wanted to share some of her pornographic holotapes. She fell asleep on the rug outside. But then her mother came stumbling up the hall to knock on my door. Apparently she tripped over Dusty. There were some wicked screams, shouts about missing lingerie, and judging from the thumps and groans, a struggle between the two of them.

  * * *

  The next day I accepted the inevitable, hauled my tools down into the backyard bef
ore breakfast, and started in on the block of white marble.

  In the small hours of the morning I’d come up with an idea. It was a minimalist idea, true, the nightmare of a bankrupt imagination, but it had the advantage of being totally honest to the original material. I intended to cut up the large cube into a series of smaller blocks. Then I’d create an arrangement in the yard, maybe just off the deck. I’d have to be cagey about the project to pull it off, but at least I’d produce something.

  The women sauntered out onto the lawn after breakfast, drawn by the sound of my hammer and chisel.

  “Oh, wingy,” the Reynolds’ daughter said, licking croissant flakes off her fingers. “Dads is gonna be happy.”

  “Why don’t you use the laser saw?” Mrs. Reynolds asked. “That’s what Justin would do.”

  I gave them my best Giaconda smile, and tapped on.

  “Maybe he’s like warming up, Moms.” Dusty raised her arms, leaned from side to side.

  “Mmmm,” Mrs. Reynolds tentatively concurred, starting some twists. “Warming up. That’s kind of attractive.”

  Dusty got down on the lawn and countered with leg opening exercises. Before too long they both were dancing in the backyard.

  Still, I told myself as the first day passed into the second and I recovered from a fit of midnight weeping, at least I had an idea, reductivist though it might be. What these people needed was less—that would be my surprise. By the third day I was rather pleased with myself. The incoherent poet came by, and I passed up another drinking binge. I asked for, and received, Friday off. Among other things, I thought the Reynolds might do with less of me.

  * * *

  I hadn’t forgotten about Doctor Fong. On my day off I went over to his Institute. Some instinct told me not to go right in. I circled the building, slid among some hedges that I calculated were growing just outside his lab, and discovered, peeking through the leaves, that I could spy through his window.