Clade (2 page)

Well, this time he can offer more than sympathy.

She winces as he guides her across the living room, gritting her teeth with pain, effort, or both.

“Let go,” she says, disengaging her hand and shooing him away. “I’m fine.”

Tottering heavily for a moment she steadies herself, attains a precarious balance, as if the tidal pull of the moon is enough to disturb the delicate play of forces at work in her joints. A bead of sweat forms on one temple, releasing the smell of the lavender soap and rose-scented shampoo. Her breath smells of raw cloves, which she chews to combat halitosis.

Uncertain if it’s okay to let go, Rigo hovers beside her, one hand on her arm, ready to catch her if she falls. In response, her black eyes flash, bright as Apache teardrops in sunlight. She tucks a few strands of woolen gray hair into the long braid that trails down her neck, frayed as a horse’s tail at the end, and then hobbles toward the kitchen.

Rigo follows her. Memories dust the beige lichen walls, peeling bioluminescent strips, and age-yellowed windows. It feels like he’s walking through a museum. Pictures of him and Beto hang on the walls, side by side with the Virgin Mary and several crucifixes. There’s a little shrine on a table against one wall, decorated with flowers, pictures of the saints, and half-melted candles. The tapers look sad and weepy, hardened tears puddled on the doilies at their bases. The worn furniture is polished, the threadbare rug dirt-free. Through the sliding glass door at the far end of the room, plants are visible on the little railed balcony. A hanging garden of herbs, flowers, and vegetables.

“I saw Chuy,” Rigo tells her, by way of conversation. “He was leaving just as I got here.”

“Lucky you.”

“Any idea what he was doing here?”

She shakes her head. “Who cares?” Not even an ounce of curiosity in her recalcitrant bones. “I was just about to fix dinner.” She opens the refrigerator and starts laying vegetables on the counter. “Kung pao chicken. Your favorite.”

He hadn’t planned to stay. He’d planned to swing by, drop off the meds, and then hang with Anthea for the rest of the night. But now he feels guilty, like he doesn’t have a choice.

“Okay.” He forces a smile. “But only if you let me give you a hand.”

When the chicken is cooked and the vegetables are steaming away in the wok, Rigo excuses himself. In the bathroom he instructs Varda to send a message to Anthea, telling her he’ll be late—he’s at his mother’s—and apologizing, saying how sorry he is. Hopefully, Anthea will understand. Won’t be too upset.

Just as he finishes taking a leak, Rigo gets a call from Beto. Great, the last thing he needs. Rigo fumbles on his pair of wraparound shades.

“How’s Mama?” Beto asks, his face blossoming on the wraparound windows of the shades. “She going to take the meds I gave you?”

Rigo frowns at the image of his older half-brother. Unlike Rigo—who’s a light-skinned
guero
—Beto’s a pure, stringy-muscled
moreno
with more hair on his upper lip than his head. His eyes are a jaundiced, predatory yellow.

“I haven’t given them to her yet,” Rigo says. His flitcam hovers in front of him, bitmapping his image.

“What the hell you waiting for?”

“The right moment.” With Mama, timing is everything. “You know how she is. Can’t rush her into nothing.”

“Yeah.” Beto sniffs. “It’s a miracle we were ever conceived.”

“Don’t worry,” Rigo says. “I got it all figured out, how I’m going to play it.”

Beto rubs his jaw, distracted. “Listen,” he says. “I need to see you later tonight. As soon as you’re done visiting Mama.”

“What about?”

“We can discuss it later.” Cagey.

Rigo furrows his brow, hoping to conceal his reluctance. “I don’t know, bro. I’m pretty busy.”

A muscle under Beto’s left eye jerks. The tic yanks the lower lid to one side, as if he’s been snagged by a fish hook. “You’re as bad as Mama, you know that?” Beto says with what feels like only half-feigned derision. “Always got to sweet-talk your ass to get you to do anything.”

“All right.” Rigo gnaws his lip. This is a mistake, no doubt, but for some reason he can’t stop himself. Can’t say no. “Where?”

Beto squirts him the coordinates. “Like to see you by eight, bro. No later.”

Rigo shakes his head. It’s already six. No way Mama is going to let him leave in a half hour so he can pod down. “Eight-thirty,” he says.

Beto nods. “No later, bro. I’m countin’ on you. Don’t be late.”

His image fades, leaving behind a residue of unease that settles over Rigo like radioactive fallout. Back in the kitchen, his mother has set the table, and the air is saturated with the mouth-watering aroma of sesame oil, peanuts, and spicy red peppers.

After dinner, when the dishes are washed, they head back to the living room and sit together on the couch.

“How are you doing, Mama? Seriously.”

“The stairs are a pain,” she admits. “It takes a long time, and I’m tired afterward. Stiff as a board.”

She’s tried to swap aps with tenants on the first floor, change up buildings even, without luck. One of these days she’s going to fall. It’s inevitable.

“Why do you have to climb them at all?” he says.

“You can get someone to pick up stuff at the store for you. The priest can come here to give you communion, listen to your confession.”

“Going to church and the market is the only exercise I get. It’s not that far—only three blocks. I can do three blocks.”

She’s always been a saint that way, torturing herself when she doesn’t have to—as if suffering is the one way to cleanse herself, demonstrate her love for God.

“Pain is like fire,” she once told him. “It burns away the sins of the flesh, purifies the soul.”

Maybe she believes that if she suffers enough, God will take pity on her, decide to turn her into a miracle. Rigo has never understood that kind of devotion and self-sacrifice. It’s incomprehensible to him, no different from the voices a schizophrenic hears. All he can do is bite his tongue and let her do what she wants. For him there are no miracles in the world, only reprieves.

“I hope you’re right,” he says.

“Just ’cause you got a decent job don’t mean you know what’s what any more than I do. You just think you do.”

Rigo takes out the small plastic bottle from one of his shirt pockets and hands it to her. The drug is a black-market generic cooked up by the pharm Beto rustles for. Supposedly, it’s an alternative to the legal FDA-approved medication she doesn’t have health coverage for and can’t afford to buy on what social security and disability pays. She worked forty years without ever going on the welfare roll, raised two kids, and now she can’t even get benefits.

“What’s this?” She holds the bottle up, inspecting it like a crow examining road kill.

“Herbal supplement,” Rigo says. “It’s supposed to help reduce inflammation. I picked it up at The Food Chain.” The Food Chain is a conglomerate of natural food stores that sell certified organic produce, vitamins and herbs. Rigo removed the original capsules from the bottle and replaced them with the tablets supplied by Beto.

She turns her head, fixes him with one bird-bright eye. “I never heard about this stuff. How do you know it’s safe?”

“It’s off the shelf, Mama. It wouldn’t be over-the-counter if it wasn’t safe.”

“Hah! The Food and Drug rubber stamps whatever the politicorps tell it to.”

“At least give it a try,” he says, reasonably. “If it doesn’t work, you’re no worse off than you are now.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s up to you,” he says, shrugging.

She opens the bottle, pries off the tamper-proof seal he has meticulously glued back on, and sniffs the meds. Outside, through the living room window, the neighborhood is lit up. Glare from store signs and streetlights paints the walls, washes the ceiling through the panes of crinkly cellulose. Neon condensation drips from the canopy of palms, trailing phosphor streaks against the sky.

After a moment his mother sighs, shakes out a tab and washes it down with a glass of water sitting on the coffee table. She sets the glass down and settles back into the couch, looking suddenly tired and defeated, resigned to her condition.

“When are you going to see a doctor?” He’s lost count of how many times he’s asked her this. Often enough to be a ritual. If he doesn’t pester her she feels neglected.

“I can’t afford to see a doctor.” Her usual excuse. She pats him on the leg. “What I really need is to get out of here. I’ve been thinking of applying for relocation to a subclade. One that offers medical.”

“That’s crazy.” Most subclades are politicorp subsidized. Normally relocs are trained for a specific job in the sponsor corporation, then shuttled off to an environmental reclamation project or agrifactory in some drought-ravaged region of the world. The housing is flimsy prefabs, the food surplus stock. The good thing is the use of pherions is strictly controlled, limited to those approved by the politicorp for the emotional well-being of the community. There are no clades, no pherion-induced social order or economic stratification. Everyone gets along, more or less.

The problem is, no subclade will take his mother in her present condition. She’s a liability, an economic invalid.

“I’m thinking of a church-sponsored one,” she says. “Or a nonprofit that does charity work.”

“What?” Rigo says. “You want to be a missionary? Live in some wasteland like the Mekong desert or the Texas-Louisiana dust belt?”

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says.

Rigo knows what he should do. He should offer to put her up. Take care of her. Make her feel useful. But he can’t. The words won’t come. He only has a one-bedroom ap. He’ll end up sleeping on the couch.

That’s not the real reason, though. The real reason is that it will be no different than growing up in the same ap with her. She’ll infiltrate his life. It will be like he never left. He won’t be able to breathe. Anthea won’t be able to come over—and if he spends the night over at her ap it won’t be long before his mother is pressuring them to get married. She’s traditional that way. Frowns on lack of commitment.

Still . . .

“You want to stay at my place for a while?” he hears himself say. “Just until you figure out what to do?”

“I don’t want to be a burden,” she says.

“You wouldn’t be.” Unlike a regular lie, it’s ironic how a white lie can injure the person telling it.

“I’m not going to impose on you.” The forceful-ness of her rebuff surprises him. Fills him with relief.

“Well, I’m not going to try to make you do anything you don’t want. It’s up to you.”

“What I really want to do,” she tells him, “is stay in the neighborhood. This is where I grew up, and this is where I want to die.”

Her talk of death unnerves him, seems premature. “Mama, you have half your life ahead of you. You’re only in your sixties.”

“Listen to you.” Her tone is stringent, full of reproof. “I knew that working for a politicorp would blind you. Give you false hopes and unrealistic expectations.”

“What does my job have to do with anything?” His mother adjusts the hem of her dress over her knees. “You’re forgetting where you come from.”

“Maybe I don’t want to remember,” he says before he can stop himself. “Maybe I want to look ahead, instead of behind.”

Her face puckers. “What makes you think the future will be any better?”

In rebuking the past, he’s rebuked her, the way she raised him. “Look,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It’s okay.” Her tone is gentle. Forgiving. “Everything will work out,
mijo
. You just have to have faith.”

Her answer to everything, her daily bread. “I think maybe it skipped a generation with me,” he says.

“Everyone is born with faith.” Her eyes flare, bright as votive candles against an incursion of shadows. “The hard part is to not lose it.”

TWO

After the heart-to-heart with his mother, Rigo takes the Bay to Bay to South South San Jose. Has Varda direct the pod to the address Beto squirted him. The trip is a total voyage into the heart of darkness. He’s moody, his evening dirty-dicked by whatever bullshit his brother is going to lay on him. Well, he’ll make it quick. Listen to what Beto has to say and exit stage left.

“You seem in trouble,” Varda says.

“You could say that.” Troubled. The story of his life.

“Are you in some kind of jelly?”

“Jam,” Rigo corrects, too morose even to shake his head.

“I didn’t know you were having toast,” the IA says.

“Toast is what I have a feeling I’m going to be in a little while.”

“Really? What are we celebrating?”

Hopeless, Rigo decides for the n-teenth time. A lost cause.

His pod detaches from the train near an abandoned office park at the edge of South South San’s public ecotecture zone. Most of the office buildings are mothballed, waiting private redevelopment. The pod drops him off in front of a two-story curtain glass that’s partially retrofitted with skylights and windows of photovoltaic cellulose, yellow with age and the texture of dried aspic. The feeble, bioluminescent sheen of light-emitting bacteria wafts through a few windows, giving the facade a gap-toothed look.

Maybe this is a corporate front for the black-market pharm Beto rustles for, to lend it some semblance of legitimacy.

The main double doors are unlocked. Rigo steps into the entry foyer, a hollow, gaping emptiness that sags inward like a collapsed lung the moment the door swings shut behind him. Only the faint outward pressure of light from a zebra pattern of biolum strips on the ceiling and walls keeps him from suffocating. He walks past what was once a receptionist’s desk to another set of doors, locked. Great. Now what?

A faint insect whine assaults his right ear. He turns toward the flitcam, can’t see it in the dim light. A moment later the door in front of him opens.

“It’s about time.” Beto, framed in darkness, gestures for Rigo to follow him into the building.

They step onto big squares of pressed lichenboard laid down on the concrete and tattered carpet. The boards—relatively new—harbor deodorizers, molecular disassemblers, and sterilizing bots. They release a pleasant aroma, a mixture of lavender and clove that barely masks an ammonia-laden undercurrent of urine.

As Rigo’s eyes adjust, the interior space gradually solidifies, takes shape. “Nice place you got.”

Overhead, a latticework of aluminum joists and beams support a Rubick array of plastic cubes. Tiny, densely packed rooms, stacked in layers, and accessed by ladders and catwalks. Blankets and foam padding cover the floors of some cubes, creating a colorful patchwork. In other cubes, Rigo can discern the splayed silhouettes of bodies sprawled in midair.

“Let’s go to my office,” Beto suggests.

At a ladder tucked between two rows of cubes set on the floor, Beto grips the rails and hauls himself upward. Boots clanking on the steps, Rigo follows him up several levels to a narrow gangway. Looking down, Rigo sees that people have draped blankets, black plastic, or cardboard over the walls, ceilings, and floors of the cubes to create private compartments. Between their footsteps, Rigo hears the metronome plop of water from one of the drip lines feeding the cubes. Tick tick. Steady as a clock.

“In here,” Beto says. He slides aside a panel to one of the cubes, shuts it behind them.

An Oriental rug covers the scratched plastic floor. Colorful crepe-paper lanterns dangle from the ceiling, casting an eerie red glow. A wicker-frame papasan occupies one wall, sits across from a foldable desk. The cube butts up against a window in the curtain-glass skin of the building, offering a view to the north of the San Francisco Bay. Every now and then a train streaks by, slithering through the valley like entwined eels that separate and rejoin in a ballet of silver flashes.

Rigo turns back to the cubicles. They remind him of a laboratory maze, filled with rats. “Who are all these people?”

“Guests.”

Rigo settles into the papasan. “Like in a hotel?” Beto ignores his sarcasm. “Something like that. Tourists who have no place else to go for a vacation.”

“Some vacation.”

Beto waves a hand, circumspect. He walks behind his desk and eyes Rigo with a jaundiced, predatory gaze. “I need your help, bro.”

Rigo tenses. Here it comes.

Beto leans forward, bracing his hands on the front edge of the desk. “I need you to make another delivery.”

Rigo shakes his head, pushes himself out of the gelbag to leave. “Sorry, man. I already told you. The job for Mama was a onetime deal.” It was a mistake to come. He should have begged off. Listened to his better judgment.

“Just hear what I got to say,” Beto says. “Don’t be a complete
pendejo
for once. Okay?”

It never fails. Beto has a way of making him feel like a traitor. Rigo slumps back into the gelbag. “I’m listening.”

“It’s the same kind of shit you took to Mama.” Beto runs a hand over his glossy pate. “The same kind of situation.”

“A sick person?”

“Right.” Beto straightens, starts to pace. “No insurance. Can’t afford to pay for treatment. The usual.”

“Sick with what?”

Beto pauses. “What difference does it make?”

“I want to know.”

“Aphasia,” Beto says. Then, “It’s when your brain starts to shrink and you start to lose all motor control. Can’t walk. Can’t talk.”

Rigo sucks on his teeth. Thinks about his mother. The pinch she’d be in if there was no one to help her.

“Who is it?” he asks.

Beto sighs. “You don’t need to know. It’s better that way. Safer. What’s important is that if the person doesn’t get help, that’s it. End of story.”

Rigo rubs his face with both hands, massages the tension from his forehead with blunt fingertips.

“Why me?”

“Because something else has come up. Talented as I am, I can’t be in two places at once.”

Rigo peers through the gaps in his fingers, as if looking at Beto from between the bars of a cage. “There must be someone else you can get.”

“There isn’t, bro. If there was, I wouldn’t be asking you.” Beto spreads his hands. “To be honest, you were not my first choice. But I don’t have a choice. That’s how desperate I am.”

“Where’s the delivery?” Rigo cradles his head. He can’t believe he’s thinking of doing this. He must be out of his mind.

“Salmon Ella’s.”

Rigo looks up. Blinks. “Word?”

“Word. I shit you not.”

“What time?” If he’s lucky, maybe he won’t be seen by anyone he knows from work or his aplex.

“Tonight. Nine-thirty.”

Rigo lowers his hands, shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m supposed to hook up with Anthea.”

“You should dump that bitch,” Beto says. He’s never warmed to Anthea, keeps their relationship civil but cool. “How’d you get so hooked on that scrawny
puta
, anyway? It’s like you have an addictive personality or something, bro.”

“I can’t help it, bro. I’m in love.” What else can he say? He shrugs, stands, too agitated to sit.

“It’s a sickness, man. A sexually transmitted disease.” Beto grins. “You should cure yourself.”

“And end up like you?” Rigo asks.

The grin widens with playful malice. “There’re worse things that could happen.”

“Yeah?”

Beto flips him an obscene gesture. “Look at yourself, bro. You’re turning into a fucking
tutumpote
. Oppressing the poor so you can be a success, a big-time
sucio
.”

An asshole. Rigo’s heard it all before: anybody who extricates himself from the ghetto to improve his socioeconomic standing is a sellout. It’s the kind of inbred, self-defeatest attitude that gets passed down the germline, ad infinitum, and keeps the working class downtrodden. “At least I’m legit,” he says.

Beto snorts. “You’re a prisoner of the establishment, bro. You just can’t see the bars.”

Rigo gestures to the surrounding cubes. “Like you’re any freer than I am.”

“At least I’m not busting my
cojones
like some dumbass dog at a track. Chasing after some rabbit I’m never going to catch. Isn’t even real.”

The repartee has a cathartic effect. Calming. It clears the air, eases some of the friction between them. As kids, they always felt better after a fight. Closer.

“You’re really stuck on that
jeva
,” Beto says.

Rigo shrugs. “No problem. I’ll tell her I have to go back to work, finish up some stuff before we do our thing. She’ll understand.”

Beto gives him the drop instructions and the drug, then punches him hard in the right biceps. “Remember, it’s for a good cause. Just don’t get caught and you’ll be all right.”

The Monterey shuttle pod, capable of carrying up to thirty passengers, is mostly empty. Rigo sits in back, near a young businesswoman wearing a cardboard stiff suit-
cum
-flamboyant green ascot, and a disheveled
viejo
who’s dozing, his silver hair mashed against the window. Ten minutes after the pod slots onto the fast-moving maglev, it slots off at the Cannery Row substation. From there, it’s a quick stroll to Salmon Ella’s. From outside, the place has been styled to mimic a corrugated sheet-metal warehouse. Inside, a labyrinth of rice paper partitions grid out around renovated conveyor belts, overhead spray nozzles, rinsing troughs, and other antiquated fish processing equipment. Basically, it’s a cross between a museum, an old sardine factory, and a Tokyo teahouse. Open grills line one wall, barbecuing farm-bred salmon steaks and fillets.

Rigo slinks into the appropriate cubicle, which is unoccupied, and sits at a black lacquered table under colorful paper lanterns. The lanterns are round, cylindrical, or square, and decorated with flowers, mountains, or other natural scenery. They dangle from the metal ceiling joists on invisible monomol filaments that make it look as if they are floating in place. Soon, a waitperson stops by. Rigo orders a Corona, sips, feels himself sliding into a melancholy funk that’s in danger of becoming a nasty brood. The music, some kind of European techno-Goth he normally wouldn’t mind, doesn’t help.

When he’s thoroughly depressed, an old woman approaches the table and slides in to the seat across from him.

“I feel like a castle in a corner,” Varda says.

Rigo offlines the IA. Chess has never been one of his fortes.

“Thank you for coming,” the woman says, all polite, as if they’re having crumpets and tea. She’s wearing a silver lamé skirt the size of a parachute, a purple long-sleeved blouse that covers her arms, and about twenty kilos of African beads in the form of necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. Her face doesn’t look old—but he can see it in her shrunken blue eyes, the way they’ve retreated from the world. She smiles, thin lips the color and texture of vulcanized rubber. Up close, her movements are jerky. In addition to surgically smooth flesh she has nanimatronic grafts, a mesh exoskeleton that damps the tremors in her muscles. She’s a prisoner, dying by degrees in her chain-mail cage.

“Can I get you anything?” she asks.

“Just what I came for.” He picks up the folded napkin from his lap, wipes his mouth, then rests his hand with the crumpled cloth on the table.

The woman digs in her purse, pulls out a transfer card, and sets it on the table in front of them.

“It’s in the napkin,” Rigo tells her. He removes his hand, reaches for the card a few centimeters away.

Just as he’s sliding the plastic toward him, her fingers, dry, cool, and plaintive, touch his. “Wait,” she says.

Rigo makes a show of glancing at his wristwatch. The point being that he has to be someplace else soon. He’d like to indulge her, but . . .

“I’ll make it worth your while,” she says.

For a second Rigo wonders if he’s misheard. But her fingers have curled tight around the back of his hand and wrist, like the jaws of a Venus’s-flytrap clamping shut to digest him.

“Why?” he asks, thinking to humiliate her—that maybe shame will disengage her hand. Scald her.

“What difference does it make?”

Her eyes are reptilian. Rigo can read nothing behind her watery pupils, slitted with purpose. She’s incomprehensible—a total fucking alien. What does she expect from him? Pity? Sympathy?

“Is it contagious?” Rigo asks, wondering if he can trust her to tell the truth.

“No.”

“I’m not a Necrofeel,” he says, indignant.

She doesn’t so much as blink at the insult. She’s beyond anger, it seems. Beyond shame. “I’m not dead.”

Yet,
Rigo thinks, finishing the unspoken end of the sentence, the part that she refuses to admit. She wants him to make her feel alive, to stand in the way of death like a human sacrifice.

“I’m sorry,” Rigo says. “I can’t help you.” His vitriol has suddenly dried up, evaporated like piss on hot metal.

This does the trick, though not in the way he intended. Her eyes soften. “Me, too.” As if he’s just turned down a winning lottery ticket. With a sigh, she releases him and closes her fingers around the napkin. Before he can do anything, she eases out of her seat and leaves.

Podding to Anthea’s, it occurs to him that what she bought from the pharm might not have been intended to prolong life.

Shit, Rigo thinks. He’s shaking, convulsed by something he can’t explain that makes him feel five years old again.

It’s after ten-thirty by the time Rigo gets to Anthea’s ap. Josué, Anthea’s seven-year-old nephew, is still awake and throwing a tantrum in the bedroom. Anthea watches Josué five or six nights a week, while her sister Malina works graveyard down at a desalination plant a little farther up the bay.

Malina. Mal for short—
bad
. But not to her face, unless Rigo wants to get his ass kicked. Her temper can be as short as her truncated name, so he avoids her whenever he can. If it weren’t for him and Beto, he’d find it hard to believe that Malina and Anthea are related. On the surface they have almost nothing in common. What’s amazing is that despite their personality differences, they still get along. But maybe it’s different for sisters than it is for brothers.