Chicken Little (6 page)

His pulse throbbed in his jaw and his thigh in counterpoint. "But I
need
money to --"

"Leon," she said, with some steel in her voice. "You're
bargaining
. As in denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. That's healthy and all, but it's not going to get your place sold. Here's two options: one, you can go find another realtor, maybe one who'll sugar coat things or string you along to price up something else he's trying to sell. Two, you can let me get on with making some phone calls and I'll see who I can bring in. I keep a list of people I'd like to see in this 'hood, people who've asked me to look out for the right kind of place. That place you're in is one of a kind. I might be able to take it off your hands in very quick time, if you let me do my thing." She shuffled some papers. "Oh, there's a third, which is that you could go back to your apartment and pretend that nothing is wrong until that next mortgage payment comes out of your bank-account. That would be
denial
and if you're bargaining, you should be two steps past that.

"What's it going to be?"

"I need to think about it."

"Good plan," she said. "Remember, depression comes after bargaining. Go buy a quart of ice-cream and download some weepy movies. Stay off booze, it only brings you down. Sleep on it, come back in the morning if you'd like."

He thanked her numbly and stepped out into the Lower East Side. The bodega turned out to have an amazing selection of ice-cream, so he bought the one with the most elaborated name, full of chunks, swirls and stir-ins, and brought it up to his apartment, which was so big that it made his knees tremble when he unlocked his door. The realtor had been right. Depression was next.

***

Buhle sent him an invitation a month later. It came laser-etched into a piece of ancient leather, delivered by a messenger whose jetpack was so quiet that he didn't even notice that she had gone until he looked up from the scroll to thank her. His new apartment was a perch he rented by the week at five times what an annual lease would have cost him, but still a fraction of what he had been paying on the LES. It was jammed with boxes of things he hadn't been able to bring himself to get rid of, and now he cursed every knick-knack as he dug through them looking for a good suit.

He gave up. The invitation said, "At your earliest convenience," and a quadrillionaire in a vat wasn't going to be impressed by his year-old designer job-interview suit.

It had been a month, and no one had come calling. None of his queries to product design, marketing, R&D or advertising shops had been answered. He tried walking in the park every day, to see the bears, on the grounds that it was free and it would stimulate his creative flow. Then he noticed that every time he left his door, fistfuls of money seemed to evaporate from his pockets on little "necessities" that added up to real money. The frugality center of his brain began to flood him with anxiety every time he considered leaving the place and so it had been days since he'd gone out.

Now he was going. There were some clean clothes in one of the boxes, just sloppy jeans and tees, but they'd been expensive sloppy once upon a time, and they were better than the shorts and shirts he'd been rotating in and out of the tiny washing machine every couple days, when the thought occurred to him. The $200 haircut he'd had on his last day of work had gone shaggy and lost all its clever style, so he just combed it as best as he could after a quick shower and put on his architect's shoes, shining them on the backs of his pants legs on his way out the door in a gesture that reminded him of his father going to work in Anguilla, a pathetic gesture of respectability from someone who had none. The realization made him
oof
out a breath like he'd been gut-punched.

His frugality gland fired like crazy as he hailed a taxi and directed it to the helipad at Grand Central Terminus. It flooded him with so much cheapamine that he had to actually pinch his arms a couple times to distract himself from the full-body panic at the thought of spending so much. But Buhle was all the way in Rhode Island, and Leon didn't fancy keeping him waiting. He knew that to talk to money you had to act like money -- impedance-match the money. Money wouldn't wait while he took the train or caught the subway.

He booked the chopper-cab from the cab, using the terminal in the back-seat. At Ate, he'd had Carmela to do this kind of organizing for him. He'd had Carmela to do a hundred other things, too. In that ancient, lost time, he'd had money and help beyond his wildest dreams, and most days he couldn't imagine what had tempted him into giving it up.

The chopper clawed the air and lifted him up over Manhattan, the canyons of steel stretched out below him like a model. The racket of the chopper obliterated any possibility of speech, so he could ignore the pilot and she could ignore him with a cordiality that let him pretend, for a moment, that he was a powerful executive who nonchalantly choppered around over the country. They hugged the coastline and the stately rows of windmills and bobbing float-homes, surfers carving the waves, bulldozed strips topped with levees that shot up from the ground like the burial mound of some giant serpent.

Leon's earmuffs made all the sound -- the sea, the chopper -- into a uniform hiss, and in that hiss, his thoughts and fears seemed to recede for a moment, as though they couldn't make themselves heard over the white noise. For the first time since he'd walked out of Ate, the nagging, doubtful voices fell still and Leon was alone in his head. It was as though he'd had a great pin stuck through his chest that had been finally removed. There was a feeling of lightness, and tears pricking at his eyes, and a feeling of wonderful
obliteration
, as he stopped, just for a moment, stopped trying to figure out where he fit in the world.

The chopper touched down on a helipad at Newport State Airport, to one side of the huge X slashed into the heavy woods -- new forest, fast-growing carbon sinkers garlanded with extravagances of moss and vine. From the moment the doors opened, the heavy earthy smell filled his nose and he thought of the Living Room, which led him to think of Ria. He thanked the pilot and zapped her a tip and looked up and there was Ria, as though his thoughts had summoned her.

She had a little half-smile on her face, uncertain and somehow childlike, a little girl waiting to find out if he'd be her friend still. He smiled at her, grateful for the clatter of the chopper so that they couldn't speak. She shook his hand, hers warm and dry, and then, on impulse, he gave her a hug. She was soft and firm too, a middle-aged woman who kept fit but didn't obsess about the pounds. It was the first time he'd touched another human since he left Ate. And, as with the chopper's din, this revelation didn't open him to fresh miseries -- rather, it put the miseries away, so that he felt
better
.

"Are you ready?" she said, once the chopper had lifted off.

"One thing," he said. "Is there a town here? I thought I saw one while we were landing."

"A little one," she said. "Used to be bigger, but we like them small."

"Does it have a hardware store?"

She gave him a significant look. "What for? An axe? A nailgun? Going to do some improvements?"

"Thought I'd bring along a door-knob," he said.

She dissolved into giggles. "Oh, he'll
like
that. Yes, we can find a hardware store."

***

Buhle's security people subjected the doorknob to millimeter radar and a gas chromatograph before letting it past. He was shown into an anteroom by Ria, who talked to him through the whole procedure, just light chatter about the weather and his real-estate problems, but she gently steered him around the room, changing their angle several times, and then he said, "Am I being scanned?"

"Millimeter radar in here too," she said. "Whole body imaging. Don't worry, I get it every time I come in. Par for the course."

He shrugged. "This is the least offensive security scan I've ever been through," he said.

"It's the room," she said. "The dimensions, the color. Mostly the semiotics of a security scan are either
you are a germ on a slide
or
you are not worth trifling with, but if we must, we must.
We went for something a little... sweeter." And it was, a sweet little room, like the private study of a single mom who's stolen a corner in which to work on her secret novel.

Beyond the room -- a wonderful place.

"It's like a college campus," he said.

"Oh, I think we use a better class of materials than most colleges," Ria said, airily, but he could tell he'd pleased her. "But yes, there's about 15,000 of us here. A little city. Nice cafes, gyms, cinemas. A couple artists in residence, a nice little Waldorf school..." The pathways were tidy and wended their way through buildings ranging from cottages to large, institutional buildings, but all with the feel of endowed research institutes rather than finance towers. The people were young and old, casually dressed, walking in pairs and groups, mostly, deep in conversation.

"15,000?"

"That's the head office. Most of them doing medical stuff here. We've got lots of other holdings, all around the world, in places that are different from this. But we're bringing them all in line with HQ, fast as we can. It's a good way to work. Churn is incredibly low. We actually have to put people back out into the world for a year every decade, just so they can see what it's like."

"Is that what you're doing?"

She socked him in the arm. "You think I could be happy here? No, I've always lived off campus. I commute. I'm not a team person. It's OK, this is the kind of place where even lone guns can find their way to glory."

They were walking on the grass now, and he saw that the trees, strangely oversized red maples without any of the whippy slenderness he associated with the species, had a walkway suspended from their branches, a real Swiss Family Robinson job with rope-railings and little platforms with baskets on pulleys for ascending and descending. The people who scurried by overhead greeted each other volubly and laughed at the awkwardness of squeezing past each other in opposite directions.

"Does that ever get old?" he said, lifting his eyebrows to the walkways.

"Not for a certain kind of person," she said. "For a certain kind of person, the delightfulness of those walkways never wears off." The way she said "certain kind of person" made him remember her saying, "bears shouldn't be that happy."

He pointed to a bench, a long twig-chair, really, made from birch branches and rope and wire all twined together. "Can we sit for a moment? I mean, will Buhle mind?"

She flicked her fingers. "Buhle's schedule is his own. If we're five minutes late, someone will put five minutes' worth of interesting and useful injecta into his in-box. Don't you worry." She sat on the bench, which looked too fragile and fey to take a grown person's weight, but then she patted the seat next to him, and when he sat, he felt almost no give. The bench had been very well built, by someone who knew what she or he was doing.

"OK, so what's going on, Ria? First you went along with Brautigan scooping my job and exiling me to Siberia --" he held up a hand to stop her from speaking and discovered that the hand was shaking and so was his chest, shaking with a bottled-up anger he hadn't dared admit. "You could have stopped it at a word. You envoys from the vat-gods, you are the absolute monarchs at Ate. You could have told them to have Brautigan skinned, tanned and made into a pair of boots, and he'd have measured your foot-size himself. But you let them do it.

"And now, here I am, a minister without portfolio, about to do something that would make Brautigan explode with delight, about to meet one of the Great Old Ones, in his very vat, in person. A man who might live to be a thousand, if all goes according to plan, a man who is a
country
, sovereign and inviolate. And I just want to ask you,
why
? Why all the secrecy and obliqueness and funny gaps?
Why
?"

Ria waited while a pack of grad students scampered by overhead, deep in discussion of teleomeres, the racket of their talk and their bare feet slapping on the walkway loud enough to serve as a pretence for silence. Leon's pulse thudded and his armpits slicked themselves as he realized that he might have just popped the bubble of unreality between them, the consensual illusion that all was normal, whatever normal was.

"Oh, Leon," she said. "I'm sorry. Habit here -- there's some things that can't be readily said in utopia. Eventually, you just get in the habit of speaking out of the back of your head. It's, you know,
rude
to ruin people's gardens by pointing out the snakes. So, yes, OK, I'll say something right out. I like you, Leon. The average employee at a place like Ate is a bottomless well of desires, trying to figure out what others might desire. We've been hearing from them for decades now, the resourceful ones, the important ones, the ones who could get past the filters and the filters behind the filters. We know what they're like.

"Your work was different. As soon as you were hired by Ate, we generated a dossier on you. Saw your grad work."