Why don’t you ask him yourself? She didn’t say it. She didn’t know why Lester had come to her place after the flood instead of going home, why he stiffened up and sniffed when she mentioned Perry’s name, why he looked away when she mentioned Hilda.
“Something about firmware.”
He straightened his back more, making it pop and gave her his devilish grin, the one where his wonky eyebrow went up and down. “It’s always firmware,” he said, and laughed a little. Maybe they were both remembering those old days, the Boogie Woogie Elmos.
“Looks like you’ve got a lot of help,” Suzanne said, getting out a little steno pad and a pen.
Perry nodded at it, and she was struck by how many times they’d stood like this, a few feet apart, her pen poised over her pad. She’d chronicled so much of this man’s life.
“They’re good people, these folks. Some of them have some carpentry or electronics experience, the rest are willing to learn. It’s going faster than I thought it would. Lots of support from out in the world, too—people sending in cash to help with replacement parts.”
“Have you heard from Kettlewell or Tjan?”
The light went out of his face. “No,” he said.
“How about from the lawyers?”
“No comment,” he said. It didn’t sound like a joke.
“Come on, Perry. People are starting to ask questions. Someone’s going to write about this. Do you want your side told or not?”
“Not,” he said, and disappeared back into the guts of the printer.
She stared at his back for a long while before turning on her heel, muttering, “Fuck,” and walking back out into the sunshine. There’d been a musty smell in the ride, but out here it was the Florida smell of citrus and car-fumes, and sweat from the people around her, working hard, trying to wrest a living from the world.
She walked back across the freeway to the shantytown and ran into Hilda coming the other way. The younger woman gave her a cool look and then looked away, and crossed.
That was just about enough, Suzanne thought. Enough playtime with the kids. Time to go find some grownups. She wasn’t here for her health. If Lester didn’t want to hang out with her, if Perry had had enough of her, it was time to go do something else.
She went back to her room, where Lester was still working on his DiaB project. She took out her suitcase and packed with the efficiency of long experience. Lester didn’t notice, not even when she took the blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry on the back of his chair, folded it and put it in her suitcase and zipped it shut.
She looked at his back working over the bench for a long time. He had a six-pack of chocolate pudding beside him, and a wastebasket overflowing with food wrappers and boxes. He shifted in his seat and let out a soft fart.
She left. She paid the landlady through the end of the week. She could send Lester an email later.
The cab took her to Miami. It wasn’t until she got to the airport that she realized she had no idea where she was going. Boston? San Francisco? Petersburg? She opened her laptop and began to price out last minute tickets. The rush of travelers moved around her and she was jostled many times.
The standby sites gave her a thousand options—Miami to JFK to Heathrow to Petersburg, Miami to Frankfurt to Moscow to Petersburg, Miami to Dallas to San Francisco.... The permutations were overwhelming, especially since she wasn’t sure where she wanted to be.
Then she heard something homey and familiar: a large group of Russian tourists walking past, talking loudly in Russian, complaining about the long flight, the bad food, and the incompetence of their tour operator. She smiled to see the old men with their high-waisted pants and the old women with their bouffant hair.
She couldn’t help but eavesdrop—at their volume, she would have been hard-pressed not to listen in. A little boy and girl tore ass around the airport, under the disapproving glares from DHS goons, and they screamed as they ran, “Disney World! Disney World! Disney World!”
She’d never been—she’d been to a couple of the kitschy Gulag parks in Russia, and she’d grown up with Six Flags coaster parks and Ontario Place and the CNE in Toronto, not far from Detroit. But she’d never been to The Big One, the place that even now managed to dominate the world’s consciousness of theme-parks.
She asked her standby sites to find her a room in a Disney hotel instead, looking for an inclusive rate that would get her onto the rides and pay for her meals. These were advertised at roadside kiosks at 100-yard intervals on every freeway in Florida, so she suspected they were the best deal going.
A moment of browsing showed her that she’d guessed wrong. A week in Disney cost a heart-stopping sum of money—the equivalent of six month’s rent in Petersburg. How did all these Russians afford this trip? What the hell compelled people to part with these sums?
She was going to have to find out. It was research. Plus she needed a vacation.
She booked in, bought a bullet-train ticket, and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. She examined her welcome package as she waited for the train. She was staying at something called the Polynesian Resort hotel, and the brochure showed a ticky-tacky tiki-themed set of longhouses set on an ersatz white-sand beach, with a crew of Mexican and Cuban domestic workers in leis, Hawai’ian shirts, and lava-lavas waving and smiling. Her package included a complimentary luau—the pictures made it clear this was nothing like the tourist luaus she’d attended in Maui. On top of that, she was entitled to a “character breakfast” with a wage-slave in an overheated plush costume, and an hour with a “resort counsellor” who’d help her plan her trip for maximal fun.
The bullet train came and took on the passengers, families bouncing with anticipation, joking and laughing in every language spoken. These people had just come through a US Customs checkpoint and they were acting like the world was a fine place. She decided there must be something to this Disney business.
Death Waits waited, and waited and waited for the ride to come back online. He split his days between hanging out at home, writing about the story, running the fly-throughs from the other rides, watching what was happening in Brazil, answering his fan-mail; the rest of the time he spent with his new friends down at the site of the ride, encouraging them to pitch in and help Perry and Lester to get the thing back up and running. Fast, please. It was driving him bonkers not to be able to ride any longer. After everything he’d been through, he deserved a ride.
His friends were wonderful. Wonderful! Lacey especially. She was a nurse and a goddess of mercy. The money that flooded into his paypals whenever his friends let it be known that he needed more, covered all his expenses. He never wanted for companionship, conversation, helpmeets, or respect. It was a wonderful life.
If only the ride would come online.
He woke next to Lacey, she asleep still, her hair spread out across the pillow in a fall of shiny black with blue highlights—she’d given him a matching dye-job a few days before and they looked like a matched set now. He let his hands lazily trace her soft skin, the outlines of her tattoos, her implants and piercings. He felt a stirring between his legs.
Lacey yawned and woke and kissed him. “Good morning, my handsome man,” she said.
“Good morning, my beautiful woman. What’s the plan for today?”
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“Breakfast, then down to the ride,” he said. “I’ll do my email and writing there today.”
“Something before breakfast?” she asked, with a lopsided smile that was adorable.
“Oh yes, please,” he said, his voice breathy.
The smell at the Wal-Mart was overpowering. It was one part sharp mold, one part industrial disinfectant, a citrus smell that made your eyes water and your sinuses burn.
“I’ve rented some big blowers,” Perry said. “They’ll help air the place out. If that doesn’t work, I might have to resurface the floor, which would be rough—it could take a week to get that done properly.”
“A week?” Death said. Jesus. No way. Not another week. He didn’t know it for sure, but he had a feeling that a lot of these people would stop showing up eventually if there was no ride for them to geek out over. He sure would.
“You smell that? We can’t close the doors and the windows and leave it like this.”
Death’s people, standing around them, listening in, nodded. It was true. You’d melt people’s lungs if you shut them up with these fumes.
“How can I help?” Death said. It was his constant mantra with Perry. Sometimes he didn’t think Perry liked him very much, and it was good to keep on reminding him that Death and his buddies were here to be part of the solution. That Perry needed them.
“The roof is just about done, the robots are back online. The dividers should be done today. I’ve got the chairs stripped down for routine maintenance, I could use a couple people for that.”
“What’s Lester working on?” Death said.
“You’d have to ask him.”
Death hadn’t seen Lester in days, which was weird. He hoped Lester didn’t dislike him. He worried a lot about whether people liked him these days. He’d thought that Sammy liked him, after all.
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
Perry put dark glasses on.
Death Waits took the hint. “Come on,” he said to Lacey, who patted him on the hand as he lifted up in his chair and rolled out to the van. “Let’s just call him.”
“Lo?”
“It’s Death Waits. We’re down at the ride, but there’s not much to do around here. I thought maybe we could help you with whatever you were working on?”
“What do you know about what I’m working on?” Lester said.
“Um. Nothing.”
“So how do you know you want to help?”
Death Waits closed his eyes. He wanted to help these two. They’d made something important, didn’t they know that?
“What are you working on?”
“Nothing,” Lester said.
“Come on,” Death said. “Come on. We just want to pitch in. I love you guys. You changed my life. Let me contribute.”
Lester snorted. “Cross the road, go straight for two hundred yards, turn left at the house with the Cesar Chavez mural, and I’ll meet you there.”
“You mean go into the—” Death didn’t know what it was called. He always tried not to look at it when he came to the ride. That slum across the road. He knew it was somehow connected with the ride, but in the same way that the administrative buildings at Disney were connected with the parks. The big difference was that Disney’s extraneous buildings were shielded from view by berms and painted go-away green. The weird town across the road was right there.
“Yeah, across the road into the shantytown.”
“OK,” Death said. “See you soon.” He hung up and patted Lacey’s hand. “We’re going over there,” he said, pointing into the shantytown.
“Is it safe?”
He shrugged. “I guess so.” He loved his chair, loved how tall it made him, loved how it turned him into a half-ton cyborg who could raise up on his rear wheels and rock back and forth like a triffid. Now he felt very vulnerable—a crippled cyborg whose apparatus cost a small fortune, about to go into a neighborhood full of people who were technically homeless.
“Should we drive?”
“I think we can make it across,” he said. Traffic was light, though the cars that bombed past were doing 90 or more. He started to gather up a few more of his people, but reconsidered. It was a little scary to be going into the town, but he couldn’t afford to freak out Lester by showing up with an entourage.
The guardrail shielding the town had been bent down and flattened and the chair wheeled over it easily, with hardly a bump. As they crossed this border, they crossed over to another world. There were cooking smells—barbecue and Cuban spices—and a little hint of septic tank or compost heap. The buildings didn’t make any sense to Death’s eye, they curved or sloped or twisted or leaned and seemed to be made of equal parts pre-fab cement and aluminum and scrap lumber, laundry lines, power lines, and graffiti.
Death was used to drawing stares, even before he became a cyborg with a beautiful woman beside him, but this was different. There were eyes everywhere. Little kids playing in the street—hadn’t these people heard of stranger danger—stopped to stare at him with big shoe-button eyes. Faces peered out of windows from the ground on up to the third storey. Voices whispered and called.
Lacey gave them her sunniest smile and even waved at the little kids, and Death tried nodding at some of the homeys staring at him from the window of what looked like a little diner.
Death hadn’t known what to expect from this little town, but he certainly hadn’t pictured so many little shops. He realized that he thought of shops as being somehow civilized—tax paying, license-bearing entities with commercial relationships with suppliers, with cash-registers and employees. Not lawless and wild.
But every ground-floor seemed to have at least a small shop, advertised with bright OLED pixel-boards that showed rotating enticements—Productos de Dominica, Beautiful for Ladies, OFERTA!!!, Fantasy Nails. He passed twenty different shops in as many steps, some of them seemingly nothing more than a counter recessed into the wall with a young man sitting behind it, grinning at them.
Lacey stopped at one and bought them cans of coffee and small Mexican pastries dusted with cinnamon. He watched a hundred pairs of eyes watch Lacey as she drew out her purse and paid. At first he thought of the danger, but then he realized that if anyone was to mug them, it would be in full sight of all these people.
It was a funny thought. He’d grown up in sparse suburbs where you’d never see anyone walking or standing on the sidewalks or their porches. Even though it was a “nice” neighborhood, there were muggings and even killings at regular, horrific intervals. Walking there felt like taking your life into your hands.
Here, in this crowded place with a human density like a Disney park, it felt somehow safer. Weird.
They came to what had to be the Cesar Chavez mural—a Mexican in a cowboy hat standing like a preacher on the tailgate of a truck, surrounded by more Mexicans, farmer-types in cotton shirts and blue-jeans and cowboy hats. They turned left and rounded a corner into a little cul-de-sac with a confusion of hopscotches chalked onto the ground, ringed by parked bicycles and scooters. Lester stood among them, eating a churro in a piece of wax-paper.