Gifted (6 page)

Beans stick in my throat. The audio and video recorders feel heavy in my pocket.

“They said she owed money for all the music she stole and if she couldn't pay it back, she'd go off to jail and earn them their money.” Nonda shakes her head. “Mm-mm-mm. She always was a stubborn one. She said, ‘I'd just be trading one prison life at the warehouse for another in the jail.'”

“Like the old song said,” Marley adds, “
one chain makes a prison
.”

Nonda laughs. “I think you got that wrong. It's the other way around—
one chain don't make no prison,
” Nonda sings. “And Rainey had more than one chain.”

I swallow hard, forcing the mush down. We haven't heard from my mother in years. Truth is, we don't even know if she's still alive.

“But you.” Nonda turns to Marley. “You had a good woman. She kept you on track, didn't she?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Marley whispers. He keeps his eyes on his hands, which are folded tightly between his knees.

“After Rainey was arrested, you stopped.”

I watch Marley carefully, but he won't meet my eyes.

“I promised my wife,” he says.

“Whatever happened to her?” Nonda asks. “You two split up?”

“No, she passed a few years ago,” Marley says. “Cancer.”

Nonda sighs. “So many losses.” She reaches across the table and pats his hand. “I'm sorry. She was a nice gal, your wife.”

Marley nods while Dorian and I lock eyes. We've never talked about the fact that neither of us have mothers anymore. I suppose because his mom had no choice when it was her time to go, but mine chose to leave me behind, and those are two very different things.

“You raised up this fine boy.” Nonda pokes Dorian's arm. “Good thing these young ones aren't so foolish nowadays.” She looks straight at me. “You saw what problems your mother caused. That rat Medgers coming around, harassing me. So let me ask you this, Zimri Robinson.” She folds her hands and leans in close to me. “You'd never do such a thing as make music, would you?”

Dorian and I stare at our bowls, not daring to make eye contact anymore.

“Would you?” she presses and leans in closer. “Because you know what happens if you do and you get caught?”

I'm silent, sweating, afraid she'll put her hand on my leg and ask me what's inside my pocket.

“They'll zap your brain,” Nonda says. “Turn you into a blathering idiot. So I'll ask you one more time.” She pauses, just long enough to really make us sweat. “You making music?”

Without looking at her I mumble, “No, ma'am.”

“Good!” She slaps the table, which makes us jump. Slowly she rises from the bench, her knees creaking. “Now what did you want to discuss?” she asks Marley.

He's been kowtowed and it's no surprise. Nonda has that effect on people. “Your mother…” he starts to say to me and then trails off.

“What about her?” I stare at Marley, daring him to look at me but he won't.

Most of my memories of my mother are caught up in song. I remember singing together while she gave me a bath, her showing me how to play the ukulele, both of us humming while she made us breakfast. I have a few murky memories of playing with Dorian at Nowhere while Mom and Marley jammed. When I uncovered recordings of her old music, both what she listened to and the music that she made, I felt like I knew her better. Heavy, thumping beats that hit you in the gut and songs that sounded happy but with lyrics that were raw. Sometimes, I think my music sounds like hers—as if there could be a genetic link for music like the ones for the texture of my hair and the gap between my teeth that came directly from Nonda to my mother then to me. But there's a major difference between us. I make up my own songs and don't sell them. My mother appropriated other people's music to make a profit.

I continue staring at Marley. I don't see him very often anymore, but when I do, I'm always shocked at how old he's become. Something about how his face is shrinking in on itself and his hair is thinning and his eyes are losing some of their brightness. My mother would be pushing fifty now as well. “She wouldn't want you to…” Marley says and again he can't finish.

I shake my head. “She left,” I tell him. “She doesn't get a say about what I do.”

 

ORPHEUS

By the time
Ara and I hit our Community, it's that in-between time of night when everyone who's anyone is still out trying to get in the Buzz and all the has-beens are holed up inside wondering why the public no longer cares. Even the RoboMestics have taken the kids and dogs in for the night, leaving our Community well-ordered and quiet with its smooth streets, wide sidewalks, and tall fences. Beyond big blank yards, every hulking house is a monument to success. And they just keep getting more elaborate: A replica of the Duoma, one of Mount Vernon. The woman who invented the HoverCam recently completed a scaled-down Versailles.

At neighborhood cocktail parties the adults talk about square footage, everyone complaining that they're growing out of their space and need yet another house on yet another coast somewhere else in the world. For a while salt therapy rooms were all the rage, then pet spas. I know at least ten families who expanded their foyers to accommodate walk-through microbe zappers. And hardly anyone uses their sensory deprivation chambers anymore. Quinby's family turned theirs into an antigravity tank. Good for the skin, her mother told mine.

At my father's house (a reconstructed Parthenon—modesty is not in his vocabulary), the MajorDoormo announces our arrival, but this time, instead of stepping confidently into a spotlight, Arabella and I stumble, hanging on to one another, and spill into the living room, laughing our butts off. We stop short when we see my father.

He spins around and barks, “Orpheus! What the hell!”

“Dad?” I say. “What are you doing here?”

“I should ask you the same thing,” he grumbles.

“Hello, Orphie!” I look past my dad to see Esther Crawley, Chanson Industries second-in-command, sitting on our couch.

I hop past my dad to plant a sloppy kiss on Esther's cheek. Although over the past ten years she's moved up the ranks to become my father's most trusted confidante, I still think of her as blond-hair, blue-eyed Aunty Esther who used to babysit me when she was just a junior justice broker in the firm.

“Why aren't you at the Geoff Joffrey show getting some Buzz?” Dad asks me.

“We were tired,” I tell him with a shrug.

He shakes his head and grumbles, “No work ethic,” but Esther winks at me and I snicker, which makes my father's face turn red. “Get out!” he yells.

Ara turns back toward the door, but I grab her arm and point toward the kitchen. “I'm starving,” I whisper.

Ara clenches her jaw and stares at me hard. Like most people, she's terrified of my father. Not that I blame her. Especially as he stomps across the living room again, jabbing his finger at poor Esther while shouting, “How long did it last?”

“Not long,” Esther says coolly. “Less than two minutes.”

“Two minutes!” my father shouts. “Might as well have been the entire concert. Ten seconds is all it takes for everyone to tune out. Switch channels. Hit a sports event. Turn on a goddamn book! Two freaking minutes is the lifetime of a song!”

“Less than two,” Esther explains evenly. “And the quality was terrible. Amateur stuff. Dark and fuzzy and the sound was distorted. Nobody will even remember by tomorrow.”

“That's where you're wrong,” Dad says. “This kind of breach makes me look weak! Wounded. Limping to my death. And right when Calliope Bontempi and her little brain activist group filed suit against us! You think that was a coincidence?”

“Calliope may have nothing to do with the hijacking,” Esther reasons.

This stops me in my tracks. Ara squeezes my hand tight. “Tell them,” she whispers but I shake my head. The last thing I want to do is add to my father's bad mood, so I keep moving toward the kitchen door, which feels miles away with the room tilting and whirling in my Jused-up state.

“Of course she has something to do with it!” Dad bellows. “It's all a part of her group's plan to ruin me. They're vultures. Circling. Waiting for me to die. But, if they take me down, we go back to a decade when genius was a genetic crapshoot and copyright protection was a joke and any schmuck could throw music on the Web and call it art.”

I pretend to shoot myself in the head because I can't listen to him yammer on about
the dark ages of modern humanity
(total overstatement) before he
single-handedly revolutionized brilliance
(in his dreams) and
saved the cultural elite from being subsumed into the mediocrity of the lowest common denominator
(snore).

Another jolt from the Juse hits me just then and I collide with the corner of the curio cabinet that Mom left behind when she walked out years ago. The bump sends a tremor through her collection of songbird figurines. They skitter and skate across the glass shelves on their tiny breakable legs. The fragility of the birds mocks me and I double over, clutching at the wall, laughing too much, too hard, even though nothing's really funny.

“Goddamnit, Orpheus!” my father rages. “I told you to get the hell out of here!”

“Sorry!” I call, then drag Ara into the kitchen where we eagerly raid the fridge and cabinets.

Ara pulls out a carton of leftover Mexi-Chinese nacho noodles from the fridge. “This is it? This is all you have?” she says, but she digs in with her fingers anyway.

“Something's wrong with the sensors that are supposed to reorder the groceries and my father would never do something so gauche and beneath his social standing as reprogram an appliance,” I tell her. As I'm complaining, a box zips down our delivery chute. Overhead, we hear the drone zoom off.

I run over, grab the box and rip into the contents like a coyolf disemboweling a rabbit. Socks and tea and toothpaste. “Oh, weird,” I say, pointing to
Nobody from Nowhere
scrawled in black marker across a six-pack of disposable umbrellas. I toss everything aside when I spot a bag of Crickers, our favorite crunchy rice and cricket cracker. “Yahoo!” I yell. “Krispy Krab and Bakon!” And stuff a handful in my mouth.

Ara sprinkles a whole pack into her carton of leftovers, then slurps a Cricker-covered nacho noodle so hard it smacks her forehead, leaving a smudge of ChinCheez like a yellow-orange bindi jewel between her brows. I start to guffaw, but something lodges beneath my epiglottis and I choke. Ara rushes over and slaps me hard on the back.

“Breathe, man, breathe!” She laughs while smacking me, as if she's enjoying the whole thing a bit too much.

A projectile of Cricker sludge flies out of my mouth. Immediately, five tiny SpiderBots skitter over the countertop to take care of the mess as I giggle uncontrollably. “When is this stuff going to wear off?” I whine. “Damn Juse.”

“I know, right?” Ara slumps beside me in hysterics. I lean torward her, ready for another kiss, but she pops upright, dancing foot to foot. “Oh my god, I think I'm going to pee myself.”

“Bathroom's that-a-way,” I say and point. Ara makes a run for it. I sigh as I watch her go. Will our timing ever be right?

When she's gone, Esther comes in the kitchen. “You two are wound up tonight,” she says with a smirk, then places her gold-rimmed cup in the BevvyBot, pushes a button, and waits for it to refill.

I pull myself together and hunch close to her. “Hey listen, I didn't want to tell my dad but I had a very strange encounter with Calliope Bontempi tonight.”

Esther chokes on her frothing, smoking cocktail. Liquid dribbles down her chin, which she dabs at with her sleeve. “Calliope Bontempi! What did she want?”

“As best as I can tell, she wants to bankrupt Chanson Industries, dismantle the music industry, get rid of all ASAs, and give music back to the people.”

“Oh, is that all?” Esther says with a chuckle, which puts me more at ease.

I hop up to sit on the counter next to her and ask, “Does this kind of thing happen in other industries or do people come after Dad more often because he's such a jerk?”

Esther chuckles then says quietly, “His personality doesn't help matters, but the music industry has its own unique set of problems.”

“I doubt that,” I say.

“It's true,” she says. “It all comes down to profit margins in the end.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Esther leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. “Think of it this way: When your friend Quinby sells a piece of art, someone pays a big premium to have the original. The artwork itself becomes a collector's item and a status symbol for the owner. Even after the original sells, lots of digital copies will also sell, over and over and over to make more money, but it's the actual artifact that is rarefied and valuable. So art patrons make money off the original work and the digital reproductions and downloads, plus the shows and tie-in deals for movies and products that use the image—posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts, umbrellas.” She points to the delivery items imprinted with copyrighted artwork scattered on the floor. “But with music, there is no original, big-ticket item. One song is not inherently more valuable than the next. It's always two minutes and thirty seconds of sound that gets played over and over, which has to butter our bread. That's why your dad came up with pay-for-play and put everything on the Stream. Before that, music had lost most of its economic value. People were used to music being nearly free and at their fingertips anytime they wanted it. Even though we have more control over the profits, music is still easier to steal than other kinds of art. People do it all the time.”

I look away, flushed with guilt over the receiver in my Cicada.