A Good Old-Fashioned Future (18 page)

“He says that it’s lucky he met us because he’s here on location himself,” Betty said. “Kinema Junpo—that’s his boss—is shooting a remake of
Throne of Blood
in Scotland. He’s been … uh … appointed to check out some special location here in Bolton.”

“Yes?” Jackie said.

“Said the local English won’t help him because they’re kind of superstitious about the place,” Betty said. She smiled. “How ’bout you, Smithie? You’re not superstitious, are you?”

“Nah,” Smith said. He lit a cigarette.

“He wants us to help him?” Jackie said.

Betty smiled. “They have truckloads of cash, the Japanese.”

“If you don’t want to do it, I can get some mates o’ mine from Manchester,” Smith said, picking at a blemish. “They’re nae scared of bloody Bolton.”

“What is it about Bolton?” Jackie said.

“You didn’t know?” Betty said. “Well, not much. I mean, it’s not much of a town, but it does have the biggest mass grave in England.”

“Over a million,” Smith muttered. “From Manchester, London—they used to ship ’em out here in trains, during the plague.”

“Ah,” Jackie said.

“Over a million in one bloody spot,” Smith said, stirring in his chair. He blew a curl of smoke. “Me grandfather used to talk about it. Real proud about Bolton they was, real civil government emergency and all, kept good order, soldiers and such.… Every dead bloke got his
own marker, even the women and kids. Other places, later, they just scraped a hole with bulldozers and shoved ’em in.”

“Spirit,” Baisho said loudly, enunciating as carefully as he could. “Good cinema spirit in city of Boruton.”

Despite himself, Jackie felt a chill. He sat down. “Inauspicious. That’s what we’d call it.”

“It was fifty years ago,” Smith said, bored. “Thirty years before I was born. Or Betty here, either, eh? ‘Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.’ Mad Cow Disease. So what? BSE will never come back. It was a fluke. A bloody twentieth-century industrial accident.”

“You know, I’m not frightened,” Betty said, with her brightest smile. “I’ve even eaten beef several times. There’s no more virions in it. I mean, they wiped out scrapie years ago. Killed every sheep, every cow that might have any infection. It’s perfectly safe to eat now, beef.”

“We lost many people in Japan,” Baisho offered slowly. “Tourists who eated … ate … Engrish beef, here in Europe. But trade friction protect most of us. Old trade barriers. The farmers of Japan.” He smiled.

Smith ground out his cigarette. “Another fluke. Your old granddad was just lucky, Baisho-san.”

“Lucky?” Bobby Denzongpa said suddenly. His dark gazelle-like eyes were red-rimmed with hangover. “Yaar, they fed sheeps to the cows here! God did not make cows for eating of sheeps! And the flesh of Mother Cow is not for us to eat.…”

“Bobby,” Jackie warned.

Bobby shrugged irritably. “It’s the truth, boss, yaar? They made foul sheep, slaughterhouse offal into protein for cattle feed, and they fed that bloody trash to their own English cows. For years they did this wicked thing, even when the cows were going mad and dying in front of them! They knew it was risky, but they went straightaway on doing it simply because it was cheaper! That was a crime against nature. It was properly punished.”

“That is enough,” Jackie said coldly. “We are guests
in this country. We of India also lost many fellow country-men to that tragedy, don’t you know.”

“Moslems, good riddance,” Bobby muttered under his breath, and got up and staggered off.

Jackie glowered at him as he left, for the sake of the others.

“It’s okay,” Smith said in the uneasy silence. “He’s a bloody Asian racist, your filmstar walla there, but we’re used to that here.” He shrugged. “It’s just—the plague, you know, it’s all they talk about in school, like England was really high-class back then and we’re nothing at all now, just a shadow or something.… You get bloody tired of hearing that. I mean, it was all fifty bloody years ago.” He sneered. “I’m not the shadow of the Beatles or the fucking Sex Pistols. I’m a working, professional, modern British musician, and got my union papers to prove it.”

“No, you’re really good, Smithie,” Betty told him. She had gone pale. “I mean, England’s coming back strong now. Really.”

“Look, we’re not ‘coming back,’ lass,” Smith insisted. “We’re already here right now, earning our bloody living. It’s life, eh? Life goes fucking on.” Smith stood up, picked up his deck, scratched at his shaggy head. “I gotta work. Jackie. Boss, eh? Can you spare five pounds, man? I gotta make some phone calls.”

Jackie searched in his wallet and handed over a bill in the local currency.

Baisho had five Japanese in his crew. Even with the help of Jackie’s crew, it took them most of the evening to scythe back the thick brown weeds in the old Bolton plagueyard. Every half-meter or so they came across a marker for the dead. Small square granite posts had been hammered into the ground, fifty years ago, then sheared off clean with some kind of metal saw. Fading names and dates and computer
ID numbers had been chiseled into the tops of the posts.

Jackie thought that the graveyard must stretch around for about a kilometer. The rolling English earth was studded with plump, thick-rooted oaks and ashes, with that strange naked look of European trees in winter.

There was nothing much to the place. It was utterly prosaic, like a badly kept city park in some third-class town. It defied the tragic imagination. Jackie had been a child when the scrapie plague had hit, but he could remember sitting in hot Bombay darkness, staring nonplussed at the anxious shouting newsreels, vague images, shot in color no doubt, but grainy black and white in the eye of his memory. Packed cots in European medical camps, uniformed shuffling white people gone all gaunt and trembling, spooning up charity gruel with numb, gnarled hands. The scrapie plague had a devilishly slow incubation in humans, but no human being had ever survived the full onset.

First came the slow grinding headaches and the unending sense of fatigue. Then the tripping and flopping and stumbling as the nerves of the victim’s legs gave out. As the lesions spread, and tunneled deep within the brain, the muscles went slack and flabby, and a lethal psychotic apathy set in. In those old cinema newsreels, Western civilization gazed at the Indian lens in demented puzzlement as millions refused to realize that they were dying simply because they had eaten a cow.

What were they called? thought Jackie. Beefburgers? Hamburgers. Ninety percent of Britain, thirty percent of Western Europe, twenty percent of jet-setting America, horribly dead. Because of hamburgers.

Baisho’s set-design crew was working hard to invest the dreary place with proper atmosphere. They were spraying long white webs of some kind of thready aerosol across the cropped grass and setting up gel-filtered lights. It was to be a night shoot. Macbeth and Macduff would arrive soon on the express train.

Betty sought him out. “Baisho-san wants to know what you think.”

“My professional opinion of his set, as a veteran Indian filmmaker?” Jackie said.

“Right, boss.”

Jackie did not much care for giving out his trade secrets but could not resist the urge to cap the Japanese. “A wind machine,” he pronounced briskly. “This place needs a wind machine. Have him leave some of the taller weeds, and set up under a tree. We’ve fifty kilos of glitter dust back in Bolton. It’s his, if he wants to pay. Sift that dust, hand by hand, through the back of the wind machine and you’ll get a fine effect. It’s more spooky than hell.”

Betty offered this advice. Baisho nodded, thought the idea over, then reached for a small machine on his belt. He opened it and began to press tiny buttons.

Jackie walked closer. “What’s that then? A telephone?”

“Yes,” Betty said. “He needs to clear the plan with headquarters.”

“No phone cables out here,” Jackie said.

“High tech,” Betty said. “They have a satellite link.”

“Bloody hell,” Jackie said. “And here I am offering technical aid. To the bloody Japanese, eh.”

Betty looked at him for a long moment. “You’ve got Japan outnumbered eight to one. You shouldn’t worry about Japan.”

“Oh, I don’t worry,” Jackie said. “I’m a tolerant fellow, dear. A very secular fellow. But I’m thinking, what my studio will say, when they hear we break bread here with the nation’s competition. It might not look so good in the Bombay gossip rags.”

Betty stood quietly. The sun was setting behind a bank of clouds. “You’re the kings of the world, you Asians,” she said at last. “You’re rich, you have all the power, you have all the money. We need you to help us, Jackie. We don’t want you to fight each other.”

“Politics,” Jackie mumbled, surprised. “It’s … it’s just life.” He paused. “Betty, listen to old Jackie. They don’t like actresses with politics in Bombay. It’s not like Tulsa, Oklahoma. You have to be discreet.”

She watched him slowly, her eyes wide. “You never said you’d take me to Bombay, Jackie.”

“It could happen,” Jackie muttered.

“I’d like to go there,” she said. “It’s the center of the world.” She gripped her arms and shivered. “It’s getting cold. I need my sweater.”

The actors had arrived, in a motor-driven tricycle cab. The Japanese began dressing them in stage armor. Macduff began practicing kendo moves.

Jackie walked to join Mr. Baisho. “May I call on your phone, please?”

“I’m sorry?” Baisho said.

Jackie mimed the action. “Bombay,” he said. He wrote the number on a page in his notebook, handed it over.

“Ah,” Baisho said, nodding.
“Wakarimashita.”
He dialed a number, spoke briefly in Japanese, waited, handed Jackie the phone.

There was a rapid flurry of digital bleeping. Jackie, switching to Hindi, fought his way through a screen of secretaries. “Goldie,” he said at last.

“Jackieji. I’ve been asking for you.”

“Yes, I heard.” Jackie paused. “Have you seen the films?”

Goldie Vachchani grunted, with a sharp digital echo. “The first two. Getting your footing over in Blighty, yaar? Nothing so special.”

“Yes?” Jackie said.

“The third one. The one with the half-breed girl and the Moon and the soundtrack.”

“Yes, Goldie.”

Goldie’s voice was slow and gloating. “That one, Jackie. That one is special, yaar. It’s a smasheroo, Jackie.
An ultrahit! Bloody champagne and flower garlands here, Jackie boy. It’s big. Mega.”

“You liked the Moon, eh,” Jackie said, stunned.

“Love the Moon. Love all that nonsense.”

“I did hear about your brother’s government appointment. Congratulations.”

Goldie chuckled. “Bloody hell, Jackie. You’re the fourth fellow today to make that silly mistake. That Vachchani fellow in aeronautics, he’s not my brother. My brother’s a bloody contractor; he builds bloody houses, Jackie. This other Vachchani, he’s some scientist egghead fellow. That Moon stuff is stupid crazy, it will never happen.” He laughed, then dropped his voice. “The fourth one is shit, Jackie. Women’s weepies are a drug on the bloody market this season, you rascal. Send me something funny next time. A bloody dance comedy.”

“Will do,” Jackie said.

“This girl Betty,” Goldie said. “She likes to work?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a party girl, too?”

“You might say so.”

“I want to meet this Betty. You send her here on the very next train. No, an aeroplane, hang the cost. And that soundtrack man, too. My kids love that damned ugly music. If the kids love it, there’s money in it.”

“I need them both, Goldie. For my next feature. Got them under contract, yaar.”

Goldie paused. Jackie waited him out.

“You got a little tax trouble, Jackie? I’m going to see to fixing that silly business, yaar. See to that straightaway. Personally.”

Jackie let out a breath. “They’re as good as on the way, Goldieji.”

“You got it then. You’re a funny fellow, Jackie.” There was a digital clatter as the phone went dead.

The studio lights of the Japanese crew flashed on, framing Jackie in the graveyard in a phosphorescent glare. “Bloody hell!” Jackie shouted, flinging the phone away
into the air and clapping his hands. “Party, my crew! Big party tonight for every bloody soul, and the bill is on Jackie Amar!” He whooped aloud. “If you’re not drunk and dancing tonight, then you’re no friend of mine! My God, everybody! My God, but life is good.”

The Continental gentleman in the next beanbag offered “Zigaretten?”

“What’s in it?” Deep Eddy asked. The gray-haired gentleman murmured something: polysyllabic medical German. Eddy’s translation program crashed at once.

Eddy gently declined. The gentleman shook a zigarette from the pack, twisted its tip, and huffed at it. A sharp perfume arose, like coffee struck by lightning.

The elderly European brightened swiftly. He flipped open a newspad, tapped through its menu, and began alertly scanning a German business zine.

Deep Eddy killed his translation program, switched spexware, and scanned the man. The gentleman was broadcasting a business bio. His name was Peter Liebling, he was from Bremen, he was ninety years old, he was an official with a European lumber firm. His hobbies were backgammon and collecting antique phone-cards. He looked pretty young for ninety. He probably had some unusual and interesting medical syndromes.

Herr Liebling glanced up, annoyed at Eddy’s computer-assisted gaze. Eddy dropped his spex back onto their neck chain. A practiced gesture, one Deep Eddy used
a lot—
hey, didn’t mean to stare, pal
. A lot of people were suspicious of spex. Most people had no idea of the profound capacities of spexware. Most people still didn’t use spex. Most people were, in a word, losers.

Eddy lurched up within his baby-blue beanbag and gazed out the aircraft window. Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bright white ceramic air-control towers, distant wine-colored office blocks, and a million dark green trees. Tarmac heated gently in the summer morning. Eddy lifted his spex again to check a silent take-off westward by a white-and-red Asian jet. Infrared turbulence gushed from its distant engines. Deep Eddy loved infrared. That deep silent magical whirl of invisible heat, the breath of industry.