Joe
The ancient TriMet bus lurched forward without warning, throwing Joe Larivee into the passenger standing behind him, upending Joe’s bag and spilling its contents. “Sorry,” he said as he watched his sandwich skid down the aisle toward the back of the bus. A skinny bare arm, red and pocked with oozing sores, reached out and snatched it.
“Shit.” No lunch today. He should have left it in the fridge at work. No checks had come on payday, the Agency was out of funds, and he was out of food stamps. And out of creds with the burrito man on Division, not that Arturo had had any edible tortillas since the wheat rationing; you couldn’t even buy a loaf of real bread in Portland these days. Joe squatted to retrieve his belongings from the floor. As he rose, the bus pitched, and he braced himself on the back of the nearest seat. The SmartSpots above the bus windows flashed simultaneously in red, white, and blue. Make her happy tonight. Guaranteed. The spammers had struck again.
“One-hundred-twenty-second and Stark,” announced the prerecorded voice. “This stop sponsored by Tommy Tonkin Bicycles by Toyota.” An old woman rose with difficulty from the seat next to Joe and hobbled from the bus. Joe sat in her place. A large gaping wound in the plastic seat pinched and poked his buttocks each time the bus encountered a pothole. The young man seated beside him gripped a ragged backpack tightly against his chest. He looked frantic, his eyes darting between the window and the front of the bus, as though searching for an escape. Joe’s heart skipped. What’s in the backpack? Why is this boy so scared? That was what he was, just a boy with a few scraggly hairs jutting out of his chin. Settle down, he told himself, there’s a hundred or more reasons this guy might be scared. He looked too much like a jackrabbit to be a ’cider.
In front of him, a woman wearing buds jerked her head rhythmically to some fast-paced music. Tweaking. She was likely younger than he, but her teeth were gone, and her face was scarred with the pockmarks of an old-fashioned meth addict. He seldom saw active trash-tweakers anymore, with all the new designer drugs. Plenty of his customers were recovered tweakers or had merely moved on to a drug more subtle in its ravages. This one wasn’t using a common methamphetamine. He suspected a derivative called black trash, or death, due to the speed with which it destroyed the mind and body. Some called it a suicide drug. Joe couldn’t imagine taking that exit. Why not just throw yourself in front of a bus, for God’s sake?
Next to the tweaker a young woman with wrap-around sunglasses, her head turned toward the aisle, moved her lips almost imperceptibly, her throat pulsing. He had a vague idea about the wraparounds: popular new hardware that tapped into the simulated worlds of the grid. Joe didn’t have much knowledge about that type of thing. Just another way for the advertisers to get into your head and sell you crap.
He sighed and pulled a file folder from his bag, “Connie Velasques” written in pencil on the tab. Beneath the name he could see the ghosts of Mary Snider, Tomas Sylvan, Letitia Jackson, partially erased; erased just enough so that a stranger would not recognize them. But Joe did. And he knew their children, and their ex-spouses and lovers, their job history, their drug habits, and their pain.
“You’ve got to remove yourself from all that.” Susan Miller’s voice echoed from some cubicle of memory. “You’ve got to mind your boundaries, Joe. You’re not responsible for the mess these people’s lives are in. If you hold on to all this suffering, you’ll drown in it.” That was five years ago, his first week on the job. He wondered whatever became of Susie; one day, she just didn’t show. It seemed like a recurring script. Many new caseworkers didn’t last six months, but even old-timers like Susie disappeared without notice, worn out, unable to heed their own advice.
He returned to Connie’s folder. This would be a routine check-in. Find out how Connie was managing at her new job, how the children were faring, if she was keeping clean. Connie had just kicked a seven-year heroin habit when his supervisors assigned her to Joe in January. She had done exceptionally well over the past nine months. School had started last week, so daycare would be less of a money sink while Connie looked for work or performed the occasional temp job. He had high hopes for her.
Joe’s heart sank when the bus pulled up in front of the apartment building—the ambulance, the blue and red flashing lights of police cars, a knot of officers standing around an open door. The door to Connie’s apartment.
It was going to be another one of those fucking days.
Joe tucked Connie’s folder back into his bag as he stepped off the bus. He hated talking to the cops. His Uncle Louis had been a cop, and Joe knew a little too much of what went on in the back room. He didn’t like most of these young uniforms, just back from war, with their arrogance and their disgust for these poor people trying to survive on the broken streets—as if this wasn’t a battlefield, too. But here the land mines were everywhere, not just underfoot.
At least he was in popo territory and he didn’t have to deal with the clean-n-safes. The private security firms hired by the local business associations were Portland’s solution to social and economic breakdown. For them, he held another level of disdain altogether. But less-organized East County businesses were unable to hire their own private police force. There would be anarchy here when the PPD was finally phased out.
Across the street, a blackwater, the Fed’s contribution to local law and order, stood sentry at the westbound MAX stop, clutching a semiautomatic. Even from a block and a half away, Joe could see the nervousness in his young face and the uncertainty of his footing. Waiting commuters eyed him with skittish diffidence.
Joe approached the popos with caution, flashing his identity badge to let them know that he worked for the Agency. He deliberately set out on a path close to the building so he could see through the window as he passed.
“You got business here?” the officer nearest him demanded.
“I’m her caseworker.” Joe looked askance through the window. Inside, Connie slumped on a couch, a rubber tourniquet wrapped around her arm, the hypodermic needle still dangling from her flesh; on the coffee table the lighter, the spoon.
“You were her caseworker,” said the cop. “Your docket just got cleared of one problem. This one’s gone to Sweetland, permanently.”
“She’s got kids at school,” Joe said, adding asshole under his breath.
“Well, I guess you get a paycheck then, after all.”
Joe swallowed his anger and nodded.
“You should go take care of them kids, now,” said the young cop, dismissing him.
Don’t argue, Joe told himself. Arguing just gets you in jail. Or disappeared. “I’ll do that. Thanks, officer.”
Joe retreated to the bus stop across the street, weaving his way carefully through the bicycle traffic. Out of nowhere, a group of young boys dashed past and a bottle flew through the air, landing at the feet of the blackwater, who raised his gun to his shoulder. Crouching, his muscles tense, Joe felt the adrenalin rush through his body as he hurried across the bus lane. Almost immediately, a bus pulled up to the stop. He stepped into the vehicle, and two of the young troublemakers broke from the pack, boarding behind him. They took the seat across the aisle. Joe clenched his jaw and nervously wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Did you see that blackwater’s face?” one kid whispered excitedly.
“Yeah, chuck,” said the other. “He was friggin’ ready to piss his pants.”
“You boys should be a little more cautious,” admonished the sixtyish woman behind them.
“Whatever, Grandma,” said the first, but they became silent and left the bus after two more stops. Joe exhaled slowly.
—
The General Dynamics Church of Christ Building housed the Agency in its basement. The chapel had been converted to corporate offices, but a few die-hard church members still met in the attic. When they lost their tax exemption, the church had succumbed grudgingly to the realities of Privatization. Soon the Agency would follow. In two more years, there would be no public sector, just the so-called free market; police, libraries, schools, churches, social services, all under the dictates of private profit. Joe could see the havoc being wreaked by the gods of the Free Market. There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing anyone could do. It was what they called a done deal.
A deep despair consumed him as he entered the basement and walked down the dim, shabby hall, its light green paint peeling and scuffed by the shoes of hundreds of weary people resting their feet against the wall as they waited for assistance—help that often never came. He slunk past Christi, the receptionist, signed in, and bee-lined to his cubicle to verify that Children’s Services Corp employees were picking up Connie’s kids. Then he discon’d and put in his buds, surfing to his favorite gridcast channel to zone out on some soothing music. No one would know, or care.
“Today,” said the news announcer,“the war in sub-Saharan Africa has taken a new turn. Nigerian federal troops, advancing on rebel camps, met no resistance. The camps were empty, claimed startled commanders. They reportedly found no insurgents, yet inside the tents, arms and ammunition waited, along with some meager food supplies and a handful of field computers. One British observer reported that, ‘it seemed as though the mothership came along and beamed them up. Very eerie…’ Meanwhile, in New York, to no one’s surprise, Governor Chelsea Clinton announced that she would run for President in the coming election. At a news conference announcing her candidacy, she stressed the need to combat domestic disorder…”
Joe removed the buds, put his head between his hands. All the children—and the missing rebels were children, because it’s the children who fight the wars, who go missing—like the children of his clients, never heard from again. “To hell with this,” he whispered, almost silently. “To hell with this,” again, shouting, not caring who heard. He picked up a broken cup he used as a pencil container and threw it across his cubicle with a violence that startled him. “I’m going home,” he announced to the office, making sure that everyone could hear. “Fuck this!”
—
Joe coasted to the curb and dismounted, pressed his bike through the vendors, hawkers, and hustlers, who daily set up shop on the sidewalks, up to his apartment building bicycle corral. From Jessie’s window emanated the faint but unmistakable blue glow of her VJ screen. He clearly remembered going into her room after she left this morning to make sure everything was shut off. It was routine because Jessie inevitably left something on, and although he lectured her about the cost of electricity and climate change and the threat of further rationing, nothing seemed to get through to her. It wasn’t defiance, just forgetfulness. She had been like that since she was a little girl. Her Grandma Amy used to tease her, “You’d forget your head if it weren’t screwed on.”
So, what was Jessie doing home on a school day? Inside the apartment, all was quiet, except for the murmured voice emerging from Jessie’s room. He put down his bag and crossed the room to her bedroom door, gently pushing it open. Jessie leaned back in her chair, involved in some fantasy world, talking to the air, wearing a pair of those wrap-around sunglasses like the ones worn by the woman on the bus.
“Jessie.” No answer.
“Jessie,” a little louder.
No acknowledgement. Joe walked up behind her and removed the glasses. Jessie jumped and wheeled around in her chair.
“God, Dad. You scared the pee wadding out of me. What are you doing home so early?”
“The question is, Jessie, what are you doing home so early?”
He saw the look, the evasive movement of her eyes to the right; Jessie was about to lie. Instead of stopping her, he would let her spin her story. He would gently challenge her until she became caught up in her own web. It never failed; the fourteen-year-old was a terrible liar.
“I wasn’t feeling good.”
“So why aren’t you in bed?”
“Well, I wasn’t feeling that bad.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Just some friends.” The Look again.
“And what friends would these be?”
“Pox and Cedar,” she said. Names he’d not heard before.
“So, why aren’t Pox and Cedar in school? Are they sick, too?”
“I think maybe they’re in a different time-zone or something.”
“Jessie,” Joe lit into her, “how often have I told you that people you meet online are not your friends? You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them. They might not be kids at all. They might be rapists or terrorists or human traffickers. You don’t know what they are. Don’t you get that?”
She looked as if she were ready to cry or scream at him, Joe couldn’t tell which. It could go either way these days, but to his surprise she did neither. “I’m sorry, Dad. The kids told me about this sim on New Life. It’s really glitch. Everyone’s doing it.”
“So, where did you get the new hardware?” He held up the glasses.
“They’re citspecs, Dad,” she said. “You are so living in the past. They were selling them in the mall at SimWorld. They only cost $20.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I think the idea is to get people into the sims so they shop and buy stuff on New Life.”
New Life was the latest generation of life sims on the grid, not so much a game as a simulated world. For a couple of years now it had been the buzz among the Agency’s customers and some of his coworkers. Joe examined the glasses more closely and found they were slightly thicker than normal sunglasses with a tiny reset switch and two removable modules on the inside of the frame. They had buds built into the earpiece, otherwise they seemed quite ordinary. He grunted and put them down on her desk. Escapism. But probably no worse than some of the grid games kids played, or those stupid reality shows. Maybe he was being too harsh with Jessie.
“Jessie,” he said, “I just want you to be safe. You know that, right? Just don’t let anyone know your real name or where you live, okay? Be careful. And promise me you won’t skip any more school for this nonsense.”
“I won’t, Dad,” she said. “I promise.”
Joe closed the door and retreated to the kitchen. He pulled a beer from the fridge. He intended to zone out on the couch for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t want to think about work, or Connie Velasques, or Jessie, or the state of the world. He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep.
—
It was nearly 6 o’clock when Joe woke, his back stiff from sleeping on the couch. Jessie had covered him with one of Amy’s frayed old quilts from the closet. She could be a sweet and thoughtful girl. He probably should give her some slack.
Joe stood and stretched, a faint headache lingering in his forehead. He closed his eyes momentarily and rubbed his temples. He folded the quilt with care, laying it across the back of the sofa, then he washed, shaved, and changed his clothes. This morning he would prepare a real family breakfast. Maybe a couple of those rare and precious eggs he had saved in the fridge and some toast made from what passed for bread these days.
He took out the eggs and placed them on the counter. Then he pulled out the fred, the little infrared cooker stashed away at the back of the counter. He hardly ever used it anymore, except to reheat leftovers; most of their meals came in self-heating cartons these days. He set the table before knocking on Jessie’s door. “Hey, little girl, breakfast is cooking.”
No sound came from the room, so he pushed the door open. Jessie was sprawled on top of her bed, sound asleep. He watched her for a long moment with something that felt a little like sadness. A pretty young woman with her mother’s long, dark hair. She was growing up too fast. In a few years, he would be alone, and what would that be like? He didn’t want to think about it just now. He surveyed her room, still in transition from a little girl’s. Teddy bears and childhood games mingled with posters of pop stars and the paraphernalia of teenagers. On her desk, the screen of her virtual journal glowed. He walked over to turn the VJ off, and he picked up her gamer glasses. What did she call them? Sit specks? He pronounced it slowly in his mind. Then, with a little twinge of voyeuristic guilt, he attempted to peer into her world, but he saw only darkness. He placed the citspecs gently back on her desk. He noticed a slip of scratch paper there, “Gretel deVoid” and “Old Paris” written on it in Jessie’s scrawl.
It looked like some RPG. He smiled with nostalgia, trying to remember being a teenager, engulfed in online role playing games in the middle of the night. Things really hadn’t changed that much. He shut down the VJ and roused Jessie from bed. She seemed more groggy than usual.
“Up too late playing on the grid again,” he complained.
“Oh, Dad, do I have to get up?”
“I’ve fixed breakfast, believe it or not.”
She buried her head beneath her pillow, pulling the quilt over her. “I choose not to believe,” came the muffled reply.
“I have a riddle for you,” he said. “What has five bare toes, and is connected to a silly bone?”
Jessie giggled, and pulled her exposed foot under the covers. “Don’t you dare, Dad! I’m not a kid anymore!”
“Okay, sweetie. There’ll be no feet tickling today. But come have breakfast with the old man.”
“You know, civilized people consider tickling a form of barbaric torture.”
“Just preparing you for life,” he quipped. He regretted the words before they left his lips, but he couldn’t stop them. They sounded cruel and cynical and whining.
Jessie must have sensed his despair, because she sat up in bed and took his hand.
“Better times are coming, Daddy,” she said. “Don’t you always say that?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” he said, “better times will come.”
But, Joe couldn’t see how that was possible. Maybe in another life.
©2008–2011, Duane Poncy
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