With a Little Help (30 page)

I drove and Rhindquist hung onto the back and he shouted at me to go faster and I just ignored him! He kept on shouting saying, You pinhead my grandma drives faster than you do and she's been dead for years! And that made me laugh so hard I nearly rolled the truck and Rhindquist nearly fell off and he was pretty quiet after that!

We got to Finance 38 and I started lifting the boxes and Rhindquist as usual took too long to push them. The security guard and me both laughed at the big pile of boxes outside the truck, and he offered me a smoke, but I said no thanks.

I went inside and told Rhindquist to Get it in gear! And he just tossed me the paper he was reading. It said MEMO TO ALL EMPLOYEES REGARDING NEW SECURITY MEASURES. And underneath, it said, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY ALL AC OUTLETS ARE TO BE COVERED WHEN NOT IN USE.

We laughed and laughed and laughed, and then my watch blipped back on even though Rhindquist had turned it off! It said, "Laugh it up, retards!" in Tony's voice.

Rhindquist put his arm around my shoulders and said Jap my prodigy, when you are right, you are
right
. He's the perfect man for the job.

--

Afterword:

This is the first story I ever sold to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who also bought "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" and all of my novels. I wrote it in one big gulp while shut in at a hotel room in Montreal on a business trip. It was snowing outside, and I could see the shredding vans moving through the streets below, and I typed and typed until my hands hurt.

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Sean had a way of getting his way -- a way of delivering argument that implied that everyone in earshot was savvy and bold, and that the diatribe-du-jour was directed at the Enemies of Art ranged without. His thesis advisor bought it every time. Sean turned in his due-diligence, a bunch of theses written in the last century: collected memoirs of the survivors of electroshock, lobotomies, thalidomide. His advisor signed off and within twenty-four hours, he was debarking in Orlando and renting a car to take him to the Home.

He didn't tell his father. He'd have to, eventually, before he could finish the thesis. But for now, it was just him and Grampa, head-to-head.

#

Grampa was switched off when Sean found him on the ward, which throbbed with a coleslaw of laser-light and videogames and fuck-pix and explosions and car-wrecks and fractals and atrocities.

Sean remembered visits before the old man was committed, he and his dutiful father visiting the impeccable apartment in the slate house in Kingston, Ontario. Grampa made tea and conversation, both perfectly executed and without soul. It drove Sean's father bugfuck, and he'd inevitably have a displaced tantrum at Sean in the car on the way home. The first time Grampa had switched on in Sean's presence -- it was when Sean was trying out a prototype of Enemies of Art against his father's own As All Right-Thinking People Know -- it had scared Sean stupid.

Grampa had been in maintenance mode, running through a series of isometric stretching exercises in one corner while Sean and his father had it out. Then, suddenly, Grampa was between them, arguing both sides with machinegun passion and lucidity, running an intellect so furious it appeared to be steam-driven. Sean's tongue died in his mouth. He was made wordless by this vibrant, violent intellect that hid inside Grampa. Grampa and his father had traded extemporaneous barbs until Grampa abruptly switched back off during one of Sean's father's rebuttals, conceding the point in an unconvincing, mechanical tone. Sean's father stalked out of the house and roared out of the driveway then, moving with such speed that if Sean hadn't been right on his heels, he wouldn't have been able to get in the car before his father took off.

And now, here was Grampa in maintenance mode. He was sitting at a table, flexing his muscles one-at-a-time from top to bottom. It was an anti-pressure-sore routine. Sean guessed that it was after-market, something the Home made available for low functioning patients like Grampa.

Sean sat down opposite him. Grampa smiled and nodded politely. Sean swallowed his gorge. The ones who had not had the surgery had been scattered, unable to focus. Then they had the operation, and suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore. Whenever their attention dropped below a certain threshold, they just switched off, until the world regained some excitement. It had been a miracle, until the kids stopped making the effort to keep their attention above the threshold, and started to slip away into oblivion.

"Hello, Grampa," Sean said.

Grampa stared at him from dark eyes set in deep, wrinkled nests. Behind them, Sean could almost see the subroutines churning. "Sean," Grampa said. Woodenly, he stood and came around the table, and gave Sean a precise hug and cheek-kiss. Sean didn't bother returning either.

He put the recorder on the table between them and switched it on.

#

Grampa was a moderately wealthy man. He'd achieved much of that wealth prior to his retirement, working as a machinist on really delicate, tricky stuff. The family assumed that he did this work switched off, letting the subroutines run the stultifying repetitions, but in his prelim research, Sean had talked to one of Grampa's co-workers, who said that Grampa had stayed switched on more often than not. Grampa had acquired the rest of the wealth shortly before Sean's father had sent him south, to the Home. The years-old class action suit brought by the guilty, horrified families of accidental zombies had finally ended with a settlement, and all the Survivors became instant millionaires in trust.

For all the good it did them.

"How are you?" Grampa asked, placidly.

"I'm working on my thesis, Grampa. I'm here to interview you -- I'll be around for the next couple weeks."

"That's nice," Grampa said. "How's your father?"

"He's fine. I didn't tell him I was coming down, though. You're a touchy subject for him."

Grampa settled back into his chair. Sean was distantly aware of other Survivors on the ward, gabbling and twitching at videogames and smoking all at once. They were high-functioning -- they could be switched on with simple stim; Grampa only switched on for important occasions.

Sean said, "Dad wishes you'd die."

That did it. It was easy to tell when Grampa was switched on; the rhythmic, methodical maintenance twitching was replaced with a restless, all-over fidget; and his eyes darted around the room. "Is he in some kind of financial trouble? He doesn't need to wait for a bequest -- I'll write to the trustees right now."

Sean restrained himself from saying hello again, now that Grampa was switched on. He kept himself focused on the task of keeping Grampa switched on. "He wishes you'd die because he hates you and he hates himself for it. When you die, he can stop hating you and start mourning you. He knows it wasn't your fault. That's why I'm here. I want to collect your stories and make some sense out of them, before you die." Sean took a deep breath. "Will you stay switched on?"

Grampa looked uncomfortable. "Your grandmother used to ask me that. I'd promise her I'd do it, every time, but then. . . It's not voluntary, Sean. It's reflex."

"It's a learned reflex, Grampa. It's not breathing. You didn't ask to have the surgery, but you learned the reflex all on your own. You
allow
your attention to drop below the threshold, you
allow
the chip to switch you off. Some people do it less," he jerked his head at the other old men and women, playing their twitch games and shouting argument at each other. "Some don't do it at all."

"Bullshit!" Grampa said, leaning forward and planting his hands on his knees -- aggro Type-A body-language that Sean often found himself assuming. "Urban legend, kid. Everyone learned it. Once you had the surgery, you couldn't help it. You know what I'm talking about, or you wouldn't be here. Your father, too -- if he was ever honest enough to admit it. You've both got it as bad as me, but no one ever tried to
cure
you."

"I don't have it," Sean said. "I just got off a three-hour plane-ride, and I was able to just look out the window the whole way. It didn't bother me. That's not a coping mechanism, either -- I never even
wanted
to watch the seat-back vid or chat up my neighbor." It wasn't true, actually. He had fidgeted like crazy, splitting the screen-in-screen on the seat-back into sixteen quads and watching as many stations as he could. He'd tried to assemble his thoughts on his recorder, but he'd been too wound up. Eventually, somewhere over Georgia, he'd surrendered to the screen and to counting powers of two.

Grampa pierced him with his stare. "If your ego demands that you believe that, then go ahead."

Sean restrained himself from squirming. He focused himself on directing the discussion. "What do you like best about the Home?"

Grampa considered the question for so long that Sean was afraid he'd switched off. "No one makes me feel guilty for switching off. No one tells me that I'm weak. Except your father, of course."

"Dad's been here?" Sean said, shocked. "When?"

"Your father visits every month. He shouts at me until I switch on, then he leaves. He does it because the doctor told him that if I didn't switch on more often that they'd move me to the zero-function ward. Sounds fine to me, and I tell him so, but he's never thought much of his brain-damaged old man."

"Where do you go when you're switched off?" Sean asked. It was a question that was supposed to come later in the interview, maybe on day two, but he was rattled.

"I don't know. Away."

"Is it like sleep?" Sean said, forgetting the rule that you never ask the subject a simple yes/no question. His heart thudded in his chest, like he was giving the first interview of his life.

"No."

"How is it different from sleep?" Sean asked.

"I usually switch on for sleep -- my subconscious is pretty good at entertaining me, actually. When I switch off, I just. . . go away. I remember it later, like it was a book that got read directly into my brain, but I'm
not there
. It's fucking great. You'd love it, Sean. You should get the surgery. I hear that there's a lot of black-market clinics where you can get it done: South-East Asia. The sex-trade, you know."

Sean struggled to keep the discussion on-track. Grampa was often hostile when he was switched on, and his father always rose to the bait. Sean wasn't going to. "How do you know that you're not there? Maybe you're there the whole time, bored stupid, screaming in frustration, and you forget it all as soon as you switch on?"

Grampa raised an eyebrow at him. "Of course I am! But that's not the
me
that's important --
I'm
the one that counts. And I get to fast-forward past all the slow parts. Which this is turning into, I'm afraid."

Grampa's eye's stopped seeking out the ward's corners, and he slipped back into maintenance mode. The noise and lights of the ward closed in around Sean. He scooped up his recorder. "Thanks, Grampa," he said, woodenly. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Bye, Sean," Grampa said, and came around the table for another hug and kiss.

#

Sean checked into the first motel he found, the Lamplighter Inn, on a dreary strip populated with disused water-parks and crumbling plazas. He lay down on the bed, fed the Magic Fingers, and played back the recording.

It was junk. The noise of the ward masked nine words in ten, and what words made it through were empty, devoid of any kind of emotional freight. He tried to transcribe it longhand, filling in the blanks from memory, but couldn't keep his mind on it.

He took off his sweaty, wrinkled T-shirt and slacks, dumped out his suitcase on the chipped, cigarette-burned table, and found his bathing suit.

There was one other guest by the pool, an old, old woman in a one-piece with a skirt, wearing a sunhat tilted to shade her from the last of the pounding Florida sun. Sean gave her a perfunctory nod and jumped in.

The water was piss-warm, thickly chlorinated. It felt like swimming in pungent sweat. Sean managed one lap and then crawled out and sat in a sway-backed deck-chair.

"I wouldn't go swimming in that if I were you," the old woman said, in a husky, nicotine-stained voice. She clattered a grin at him through her dentures. She was the color and texture of rawhide, not so much tanned as
baked
.

"Now you tell me," Sean said, squinting at her under his hand.

"Old Ross doesn't like dealing with the pool, so he just keeps on shoveling in the chlorine. Don't be surprised if you're blonde in the morning. My name's Adele. You here for long?"

"A couple weeks, at least," Sean said.

Adele smiled and nodded. "That's good. That's fine. A good stretch of time to see the Parks. Don't miss Universal, either -- I think it's better than Disney. Most people don't bother with it, but for my money, it's better."

"I don't think I'll get a chance to visit either," Sean said. "I've got a lot of work to do down here." He waited for her to ask him what kind of work, and mentally rehearsed the high-concept speech that he'd given a thousand times while working on the thesis proposal.

"What a shame," she said. "Where did you come down from?"

"Toronto," he said.

"Lord, not another snowbird!" she said, good-naturedly. "Seems like half of Canada's down here! They come here to get away from the winter, then they complain about the heat! What do they expect, that's what I want to know! Was your flight good?"

"It was fine," Sean said, bemusedly. "A little dull, but fine."

"So, you're here for a few weeks," Adele said.

"Yes. Working," Sean said.

"Nice work if you can get it!" Adele said, and clattered her dentures again. "I moved here, oh, five years ago. To be near my boy. In the hospital. I used to work, but I'm retired. Used to work at a dairy -- answering the phones! You tell people you used to work in a dairy, they think you were milking the cows! Old Ross, he gives me an annual rate for my room. It's better than living in one of those gated places! Lord! How much shuffleboard can a body stand?"