The World of the End (14 page)

“I had no idea” Ben said.

“What’s important,” the Mad Hop said, getting up and walking toward the door, “is that money never meant much to me. I’ve always investigated for the right reasons, unadulterated curiosity. Nothing satisfies me more than the clean annihilation of question marks. The path from question to answer, though, winds through a dark and bewildering forest. Every good investigator needs to take his cues from the helicopter.”

“From the helicopter?”

“Yes, to hover above, to see the full picture. To see the forest and not just the trees.…”

“I get it, I get it.” Ben smiled. “So is that how you plan to find my Marian?”

The Mad Hop opened the door and pulled the godget out of a side drawer nearby. “For starters let’s exchange prints.”

After they’d done so, he put a fat finger to his lips and hummed an unrecognizable tune. Then, speaking authoritatively, he said, “You said you’re forty and that she died a year and a half ago. I want you to go to the nearest Vie-deo, take out tape thirty-nine and come back here. We need an updated picture of her.”

“When do you want me back?”

“As far as I’m concerned, come back here in three hours. You can do that, can’t you?”

“I suppose.”

Noting the haze of confusion settling on Ben’s face, he smiled and pointed down at the godget. “If you press the telefinger once, you’ll get the time.”

“Hold on a second, I thought it was noon now…,” Ben said, staring at the little screen, which posted the time as a quarter to eight.

The Mad Hop giggled, a cuddly form of malice. “And I thought the dead don’t lie.”

Ben left the office, pretending not to have heard the Mad Hop’s remark. “So we’ll see each other in three hours?”

The Mad Hop nodded and shut the door. All the way to the Vie-deo, an inner voice nipped at Ben’s mind, wondering, “How, in God’s name, did he know I was lying?”

11

Extracted Wisdom

“What are you doing?” the tall uprooter asked, taking in the hideous gyrations of his coworker’s behind.

The short uprooter soured his face and pulled his head up from the ground. “It’s none of your business.”

“Like hell it isn’t…,” the tall man said, stomping his foot. “I never seen you move around like that before. Looks like something’s stuck.…”

“Don’t say it,” the short man said, cutting him off and resuming the side-to-side motion, his eyes locked in concentration.

“Why you moving like that?” the tall man repeated.

“I told you it’s none of your business!” the short one said, making sure his hips kept time. His colleague stomped down the first row of plot 2,605,327, pulled binoculars out of his backpack, surveyed the path, and spat, “nothing.”

The short uprooter waddled up the opposite path, inspected it through his own binoculars and said softly, “nothing here either.”

*   *   *

Six hours later, at the end of an ordinary day that included 1,256 broken branches, two terminal tree extractions, and a hefty dose of nerves, the two positioned themselves at the foot of the five-hundredth row and updated the day’s 1,256 new dead, marking their spots on their family trees, and jotting down the names of the two families that would be filed away as officially uprooted. Waiting for the arrival of the clean-up crew from the New Leaf factory, they grew silent.

Silence, though, was rare and short lived in this dynamic forest, which was alive twenty-four hours a day with the slow crackle and pop of branches tearing free of their trunks, hanging at impossible angles, dancing in the toss of the hollow wind, linked by an unseen string—a strand of a spider’s silk, a filament of lace, a filigree of sorts—to stronger, intertwined branches that, stooping, yearned to graze of the earth and yet still craved another last drop of life, draping the uprooters with the dying throes of tens of thousands, who clung, just barely, to the cords of their existence.

The tall uprooter never got used to the screeching music of disengagement. More than anything else, it reminded him of a jungle predator’s padded shuffle as it prepared to pounce on its prey. He always talked, whistled, or hummed something to himself, in the vain hope that the ceremony of decay, which he witnessed daily, would not infiltrate his mind. Today, too, he had a song in mind. He was ready to mangle the tune when he realized there was no way he could get into it with his buddy gyrating his hips like a girl in a hula-hoop trance.

He knew his curiosity would never be satisfied if he approached his buddy through the usual channels, so he looked to both sides, made sure the horizon was clear of clean crew workers, and began swiveling his hips, perfectly mimicking his colleague’s charm-free performance. The short uprooter noticed what he was doing, froze, and asked, “Why you ridiculing me? What kind of an alias are you?”

“Who’s ridiculing you? Look how nicely I can spin it…”

“Spin it? What are you talking about?”

“I’m spinning an imaginary hoola-hoop around my waist.”

“Why would you be doing something so silly?”

“Because swinging your hips without one, like you’re doing, is way worse.”

“But I have a reason.”

Finally.

“Well, why you been shaking your butt like that all day?”

The short man buried his face in his hand and burst into tears. The uprooter lay a knobby hand on his friend’s shoulder and asked softly, “57438291108, why are you crying?”

The short uprooter raised a pair of moist eyes and in a crushed voice said, “I hate him. He’ll ruin everything.”

“Who?”

“Elvis.”

“Elvis?”

“Presley.”

“The singer?”

“The singer!”

“What do you want with him?”

“You seen him dance?” the short one said, kicking the ground hard. “You seen the man dance? You’re lucky you weren’t at the show last night. He moves his hips in a way that makes the ladies lose their minds. They went wild, pulled their hair, cried, screamed, hit; I thought I wasn’t seeing straight. As soon as he started to dance the women in the crowd lost it. Totally! The aliases guarding the stage had to keep an inflamed group of savage women at bay, but one of them managed to break free, got to him, and wrapped herself around him. He laughed and sang her “Love Me Tender.” When the song was over, he tried to break away from the yellowish woman. No dice. The crazy woman had rubbed something like ten jars of peanut butter all over her body. When he realized there was no shaking her free, he started to lose it, screaming at the aliases to get her off of him. In the end, he went backstage with the groupie still stuck to his body. Broke the show off early. I couldn’t stop laughing, but 88888888 whipped around and scolded me, ‘When you can move like him, then you can laugh all you want!’ She told me I was immature and then gave me that iceberg-melting glare of hers. ‘And you never take me out dancing anymore…’ An hour later I found myself in some funky club with the hottest alias in 2000 shaking her thing in my face as I bopped from side to side like a robot in need of recircuiting. She forced me to dance the whole time we were there and then sprang an ultimatum on me—learn to move like Elvis, by next week, or be gone forever. In the morning I woke up and saw she had left.”

The tall uprooter’s smile held shades of compassion and jealousy. “Look, 57438291108, what are you going to do? You picked a tough alias. If she was just an ordinary alias, maybe, but 88888888 is amazing. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but the fact that she left you twelve times over the course of the past decade is flattering.”

“Flattering?” he squawked.

“Of course. She came back to you twelve times. There’s no doubt about it. If she ever goes for good, she’ll be turning her back on a super alias.”

“There’s something to that,” he said, his eyes coming back to life. “The first time she left me it was ’cause I couldn’t swim. The second time was ’cause I didn’t know how to paint. After that it was cooking, chess, massage, the tuba, mimicking animals during sex, meditation, floral arrangement, ambidexterity, effective use of metaphors, and now dance.”

“And, since you were able to master the others, you’ll do the same with dance.”

“I don’t think so,” the short one said, shaking his head. “You saw how ridiculous I looked. I’ll never manage to dance, not like the King. She’s not coming back this time.”

“You love her?”

“You know I would live for her.”

“Then don’t say you won’t learn to dance.”

“Who’s going to teach me to dance?”

The tall uprooter smiled. “My alias has a friend who teaches a two-week course in lower body dance.”

“Lower body dance?”

“Yeah, I think it’s called Bootyriffic. My alias says there’s this guy, Ricky Martin, that’s been driving the women in the old world crazy and that he’s got this new technique for shaking the bottom half of the body. From what I understand, half the course is devoted to his hip-thigh connection. I’ll get you the rest of the details tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” the short one said, spreading a smile over a layer of anxiety. Worried about his noncooperative pelvis and dreading the thought of returning to an apartment without 88888888, he obsessed about his silent telefinger, longing for the sound of her fabulous voice in his ear.

“She’s harassing me,” he said out loud.

“What did you say?”

“Passive harassment. That‘s what she’s doing to me. She’s not calling, despite, and maybe because, she knows how badly I want to hear her voice. She’ll disappear now for a week or two until I prove to her that I know how to dance. Then we’ll have a happy period where all seems wonderful, and then she’ll come up with a new requirement. I live in permanent fear of the next ultimatum. Maybe we weren’t meant to be together. She’s perfect and I’m in constant need of upgrading like some sort of defective alias.”

“You think my alias doesn’t try to change me? Like hell she don’t. Only difference is she’s not trying to turn me into a copy of herself. I think 88888888 might be a little too in love with herself. Who can blame her, right? But instead of arguing, you’re always off trying to add another link in your long chain of skills. What I don’t get is, why you don’t ask her to put some new links in her own chain.”

“She gives me her love…”

“Ha!” the tall one cried, lifting a satisfied finger in the air. “And you give her your love. But you know what the problem is with your love? It’s unconditional! Maybe it’s about time you lay down some conditions.”

“Conditions? What kind of conditions am I going to lay down on perfection!”

“There ain’t no perfection. And even if there was, you got to put some holes in it.”

“How do you put holes in perfection?”

“You look for a weak spot and zero in on it.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime?” the tall one said, flashing a toothy smile. “You need to teach your ass how to dance.”

The short uprooter nodded sullenly, surveying the busy horizon. The clean-up crew arrived, packed the severed branches and the two additional trees onto their electric wheelbarrows, and hovered over to the next plot.

“Okay, we can go now,” the tall one said, striding out of plot 2,605,327. Thirty seconds later he noticed that only a single shadow accompanied him. He furrowed his brow, turned around, and called out in surprise, “What’s keeping you?”

12

The Charlatan

Turning the tape over to the Mad Hop, Ben couldn’t rid his hands of apprehension. The investigator, all too aware of the repercussions of what he was about to do, pointed Ben in the direction of a nearby room, showed him to the sofa, and Ben, lowering himself, stared blankly at the widescreen TV.

The Mad Hop sat down beside Ben, ran his hand over the smooth surface of his head, and cleared his throat. “Any questions before we begin?”

“You bet,” Ben said, pulling his eyes away from the screen and toward the small man’s somber face. “During the introductory lecture they mentioned these life tapes. If you were alive for forty years, you have forty tapes, right? So, one tape contains a full year of my life?”

“Each tape documents a full year of your life,” the Mad Hop said dryly, “except for your final year, unless of course you died on your birthday.”

“I don’t get it. How do you chronicle a full year on a single tape?”

The Mad Hop rolled his eyes and groaned. “You still haven’t managed to grasp that this world is a little more advanced than the one you left two days ago? In the previous world, could you dictate your own weather? Could you decide on nightmare-free sleep? Could you speak a hundred different languages? Don’t worry your pretty little head, you’ll get used to all of their technological advances in due course. Think about it, Ben, how many TV addicts actually understand the process that brings the picture to their tube? I’d be willing to bet that a lot more people know who shot J.R. or why Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer were locked up, than how it works.…”

“What do you know about Seinfeld?” Ben asked. “You died in eighty-six, way before…”

The Mad Hop raised his right palm, stopping Ben in mid-speech. “You reckon the Other World deprives the dead of the fruits of the previous one? If that were the case, most of the residents here would be entertaining themselves with bonfires and wheel design. And if it’s gossip you’re after, then I’ll have you know that Bach’s crazy about techno, da Vinci advertises his inventions online, and Curie never misses an episode of
ER
. After you die, you get the best of both worlds, terrestrial and post-terrestrial.”

Ben asked, “You said that in due course I’d get used to all of their inventions. What’d you mean by ‘their’?”

“The aliases,” the detective said, his face brightening.

“Oh, well that explains that,” Ben said.

The Mad Hop laughed. “Sometimes I forget what a novice you are. The aliases are the ones in charge of the Other World. In effect, they control it.”

Ben bit his lower lip. “What do you mean by ‘control it’?”

“They run the show, might be a better way to put it,” the Mad Hop said, lighting a Benson & Hedges. “Don’t worry, you haven’t arrived at some godforsaken galaxy. They’re human beings, same as me and you. The only difference between us and them is in the way they got here.”