3. Dancing in the Dark
The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front
window, down Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full
night's sleep, he felt recovered from the egg. 'Halfway down the
hill stood a row of Contempo high-riseshalf a dozen shapes in
the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red,
blue, white, and yellow.
>From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, 'The Fine Arts
Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads
Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes
Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many
Kilometers.''
'Cycle,' Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen
split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access
search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service
cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in
England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two
Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole #2 over the
Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole #3
obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching
for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing
to evade best predictions
Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ,
this stuff had been going on forever it seemed
He said, 'Memex, what do you think about the attack?'
'A bad business,' said the memex. 'We are lucky to have
survived.' It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in
the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales
didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited
sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.
'What's happening in the real world?' Gonzales asked.
'Your mother left a message for you. Do you want to look at
it now?'
'Might as well.'
On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden
behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat
up and said, 'Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming
back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates.'
She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones;
her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint
parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little.
Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had
perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next
month.
Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic
while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her
energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance.
Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where
tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The
rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo
on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami.
Top dollar, but she could afford it.
She and his father had been charter members of the
gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who
vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had
the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and
cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main
life's goal as 'living until I am old enough to enjoy it.'
Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cotton-robe
over her shoulders and said, 'Call me. I'll be home in a week or
so. Be well.'
Their talks, her taped messagesboth usually made him feel
baffled and angrybut today her self-absorption pricked sharper
than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost
killed me, mother.
But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from
Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had
chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get
and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt
he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with
alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with
strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and
health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality
and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.
Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen
the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all
of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land
and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more
more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern
Florida facessun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with
heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and
women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made
brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as
instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.
Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at
home at one end of the country than the other.
'No reply,' Gonzales said.
#
The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged
among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death
gnawed at the edges of his torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with
small green sensemilla leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and
drank tea.
The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure
Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his
solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and
wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Then he thought
