The ancient TriMet bus lurched forward without warning, throwing Joe Larivee into the passenger standing behind him, upending his 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. Payday had been yesterday, but for the third time this year, 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 any edible tortillas since the wheat rationing began in August. You couldn’t even buy a loaf of bread in Portland these days. Joe squatted to retrieve his pen and a half-dozen file folders from the floor. As he awkwardly regained an upright position, his eye caught the SmartSpots above the bus windows. They were all flashing in a ribbon of red, white, and blue around the perimeter: Make her happy tonight. Grow your penis three inches. Guaranteed. The spammers had struck again.
“One hundred twenty-second and Stark,” announced the prerecorded voice on the bus’s speaker system. “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 down in her place. The seat bore a large gaping wound which pinched and poked him in the buttocks each time the bus encountered a pothole. The young man seated beside him gripped a ragged backpack, holding it tightly against his chest with whitened knuckles. 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 was in the backpack? Why was this boy so scared? Joe could see 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. The woman was likely younger than he, but her teeth were gone, and her face was scarred with the pockmarks of an old-fashioned meth addict, leaving her looking years older. He seldom saw active trash-tweakers anymore with all the new designer drugs out there. 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 something stronger, a derivative called black trash, or death, due to the speed 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?
A young woman with wrap-around sunglasses sat next to the tweaker. Her head was turned slightly toward the aisle and Joe could see her lips move slightly, almost imperceptibly, her throat pulsing. Over the past few months, increasing numbers of these wrap-arounds had begun to appear. He had a vague idea about their purpose –popular new hardware which 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, and their job history, and their drug habits, and their pain. Joe felt the pain of each and every one.
“You’ve got to remove yourself from all that,” Susan Miller had said to him one day in the break room. “You’ve got to remember your boundaries, Joe. You’re not responsible for the mess these people’s lives are in. You can’t hold on to all this suffering. It’ll kill you.” That was five years ago, his first week on the job. He wondered whatever became of Susie. One day, she just didn’t show up at The Agency for work. It seemed like a recurring script. Many new case workers 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 just a routine check-in. Find out how Connie was managing at her new job. How the children were faring. If Connie was keeping clean. Connie had just kicked a seven-year heroin habit when she was assigned to Joe in January. She had done exceptionally well over the past nine months. School started last week, so daycare would be less of a money sink while Connie looked for work and did the occasional temporary 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 the 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. And he didn’t like most of these young uniforms, just back from war, with their arrogance, and their disdain 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. For them, he held another level of disdain altogether. Private security firms, originally hired by the neighborhood business associations to keep transients and other riffraff from their client’s businesses, the clean-n-safes became Portland’s solution to social and economic breakdown. Out in East County, businesses had not been so organized. But, they were beginning to pull together enough to hire their own police force. There will be nothing but anarchy in East County, Joe thought, when the Portland Police Department is 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 unsureness of his footing. Waiting commuters eyed him with a skittish diffidence.
Joe approached the popos with caution, as he had been taught, 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 wearing a pair of those dark wrap-around glasses, like the girl on the bus. No blood, no drug paraphernalia that he could see.
“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,” said the cop, “I guess you get a paycheck then, after all.”
Joe seethed. He just couldn’t figure these guys out. Connie could have been this jerk’s mom. Men in uniform, the grunts, grew up in neighborhoods like these, with single parents struggling to survive, and yet they seemed so eager to turn on their own.
Joe swallowed his anger. “What happened to her?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir. You should go take care of them kids, now.”
Don’t argue, Joe told himself. Arguing just gets you in jail. Or disappeared.
“I’ll do that,” he said. “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. He was relieved to see a bus pulling up to the stop. He stepped up into the vehicle, and two of the young troublemakers broke from the pack as it ran by, and boarded behind him. They took the seat across the aisle from him. Joe clenched his jaw. Perspiration formed on his forehead, and he wiped it nervously with the back of his hand. These fools didn’t know what they were playing with. They could get a lot of people hurt or killed, including themselves.
“Did you see that blackwater’s face?” one whispered, excitedly.
“Yeah, chuck,” said the other one. “He was friggin’ ready to piss his pants.”
“You boys should be a little more cautious,” admonished a sixtyish woman sitting behind them.
“Whatever, Grandma,” said the first boy, with a nasty snarl. But they fell silent, and then left the bus after two more stops. Joe exhaled slowly.
At last, the bus pulled up to his stop near his office, which was housed in the basement of the old Church of Christ building. The church, recently acquired in a hostile takeover by General Dynamics, had succumbed grudgingly to privatization. The Agency itself now existed in a gray transition zone. In two more years, there would be no public sector at all. Just the so-called free market. Police, libraries, schools, 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 sense of despair overtook him as he entered the basement door, and walked down the dim, shabby hall, its light green paint peeling and covered with black marks from the soles of shoes where hundreds of weary legs had rested as they waited for assistance. Help that often never came. He slunk past Christi, the receptionist, and signed in, then he bee-lined straight to his cubicle and verified that Children’s Services Corp employees were picking up Connie’s kids. He didn’t trust the popo to get things right, but they had made the proper arrangements.
Too distressed to do any useful work, Joe disconnected and put in his buds, surfing to his favorite gridcast channel. He would sit and listen to 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 and put his head between his hands. “To hell with this,” he said in a whisper. Then, “to hell with this,” again, at the top of his voice. As the anger grew, 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 retrieved his bike from the indoor bike corral and rode homeward, carefully maneuvering across the bus corridor, sliding smoothly over to the turn lane. Commuting down 122nd Avenue stressed him out. Too damned much rubbish. Too many buses. He turned off on SE Clinton, the first bicycle-only street he encountered. Once safely on Clinton, he began to think about what he had just done. He might get fired for that. At the moment of his frustration, he hadn’t given a damn, but now fear began to nibble at him. Five years ago, he would have been confronted before he could leave the building. Told not to come back. But that was then. Now fewer case workers had to deal with an exponential increase in the misery index. Joe was good at what he did, and conscientious. And one of his clients had just died. He hoped they would understand.
At 119th he turned right, toward Division. Division was a rail line, but it also contained a bicycle lane, which took him all the way down to 52nd. When he arrived at the Fifty-second and Division checkpoint, a bored blackwater glanced at his ID badge and waved him though. From the checkpoint, he followed the Hawthorne trolley down to 21st, and then right to Belmont. The five-mile journey took him about half an hour on most days.
As Joe wheeled his bicycle up to his apartment building, he knew something wasn’t right. From Jessie’s window came the faint but unmistakable blue glow of her veejay screen. He clearly remembered going into her room after she left for school 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 at 2 pm on a school day? He locked up his bike in the shelter at the bottom of the stairs, in its usual place next to hers, and approached his door, turned the key in the lock. Inside, all was quiet, except for the faint sound of a voice coming from Jessie’s room. He put his bag down and walked over to her bedroom door, gently pushing it open. Jessie leaned back in her chair, involved in some fantasy world, talking on her gamer headset. He hadn’t remembered seeing her with these before. They were those wrap-around sunglasses, like the ones on Connie Velasques and the girl on the bus. As he thought about it, he recalled kids wearing them down at the coffee shop, and in the park this summer. The latest cool thing, he supposed. How do the kids say it? They were glitch.
“Jessie.” No answer.
“Jessie!” A little louder. She didn’t turn or acknowledge him.
Joe walked up behind her and removed the glasses. Jessie jumped and wheeled around in her chair, startled.
“God, Dad,” she said, “you scared the pee wadding out of me. What are you doing home so early?”
“The question is, Jessie,” Joe shot back, “what are you doing home so early?”
Joe could see the look, the evasive movement of her eyes to the right, a signal that 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 resting?”
“Well, I wasn’t feeling that bad.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Just some friends.” The look again.
“And what friends would this 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 headset.
“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.” He looked them over before setting them down.
“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. Escapism is how he would describe it, 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? These people…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 made his way to the kitchen, where he pulled a beer out of the fridge. Then he went to the living room 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.
go to Chapter 1, New America »
