The doors open. The sign outside throws itself at me:
PRESIDIO
All at once I’m back in my body, surrounded by music: Ravel’s Boléro. I imagine I must have thought to play it when I was fragmenting. An interesting choice.
As the pieces of the world re-join, I walk out onto the platform, and then on toward the North exit. An escalator. Another. Another — a long one, up and out of the station’s massive maw. The day has had a slow and odd enough start that the surroundings force themselves on me, distantly, through the thick bubble of the noise cancellation Inside. The station edifice is a beautiful monument — great shafts of shaped concrete, outstretched into the open grey-blue gradient above, patina’d in the humidity of the nearby sea.
As I rise out of it, I pass the statue guarding the austere tube of an entrance: a twenty-foot-wide concrete ellipsoid bearing a clear but intensely abstract resemblance to a bear, resolute. I imagine what it must have been like when this place was first built. Certainly there would have been a Ceremony — there were always Ceremonies. A Mayor, some Councilors. Maybe even a Premier. Dark suits; bright red neckties. A staged photograph with this sculpture, surrounded by the billowing hammer-and-sickle flags of the Republic. Dignitaries. Speeches. The same cool sun, separated only by decades. Lost in its moment.
That moment is now interrupted by a gruesome yellow graffito toupée, stenciled atop the artful idol. On the beast’s side, someone has drunkenly carved into the artificial stone:
FUCK TRUMP
I look deeper into the surface of the statue, into its blasphemous scars. The dozens of prior attempts. Some have been repaired with greater care, the letters carefully patched so that only a discerning eye could detect the subtle inconsistency in the textured noise. But others — the later ones, I’m sure — are sloppy, splotched over-top without a thought to even matching the color of the solemn rock beneath.
The poor creature, I think. It wasn’t its fault.
I walk out of the station and across the courtyard, toward a thin road that leads into the woods. Far back, before the Revolution, the whole Presidio was a military base, I was told once — though, we never learned much of that history when I was in school. I remember reading the placards when I first moved to the city: the ancient black and white photographs of the squat barracks, neat in a row; their complement, rows of faceless heathens, the American GIs in their funny hats and the infirmary nurses in their pristine white frocks.
They are all more than a half-century gone. Here-now stand the stately offices of the Old Regime, painted radiant in this sun, a rare sun. The yellows and blues play in the ether between, a symphony of refraction and shadow dancing on the imposing square. The old Department of Transportation building glows in front of me like a backlit sapphire grasped in a stone talon, its concrete spires gently caressing the thin wisps of cloud.
The air is beautiful, ocean and dirt and evergreen. I was lucky to get an office posting here, before the War. On the first go, no less — no need to grease anyone. I was luckier still to keep it after the Reunification. Maybe. Though, perhaps in a different way. Less the luck of the inhumane lotteries, and more the luck of the inhumane allocation of work. What I did, as it happened, was still quite valuable. After the chaos of Privatization, I was in the enviable position of being able to pay the new rent — something I couldn’t say of many of my old office-mates. Even the living ones.
The forest road is strange and empty, and I am accompanied only by wind, scent and sound. But the escape is not for long: it is only a couple minutes’ walk to the compound and its telltale sign:
WeWork Presidio
The old State office blocks had such a wonderfully to-the-point name. It feels a bit off-kilter to me now that they’re privately-held. Who exactly is “We”? Why are we Working? Who are we Working for? For so many years, we had been given answers to these questions; and, even though we all knew they were fake, there was something beautiful in the propaganda of it. In the collective knowing, in the ability to dream together. I wonder whose dream it is that I dream now.
I walk through the manicured courtyard, dominated by a square pool of pure crystalline blue and two pristinely coiffed hedges — one a sphere, the other a pyramid. There are four mid-rise towers, but mine is the tallest and the nicest: Tower D, in the Northeast corner. I walk up the short pedestal of steps it sits on to the first floor lobby: a glass enclosure with vaulted ceilings, entirely open save for the elevator bank at its center. There are two sunken seating areas on either side of the main doors, square pits surrounded by cushions. The upholstery used to be bright red; now, it is navy blue. That had changed quickly, too.
The elevators and the flimsy lucite gates protecting them are tucked behind the imposing black figure of the reception desk — its matte laboratory-grade top, its sides of rough slate, straight from the Underworld. The mammoth slab is far too wide for the solitary receptionist sitting behind it. She is hunched over something, scribbling furiously. The clack of my shoes against the polished floor echoes across the cavernous space, and as the sound reaches her, she is awakened from her trance and straightens up at once.
“Hello, Dr. Halsted.” The recovery is seamless; she is warm, but professional. Her eyes probe me — mechanical and captivating, as though machined by a master watchmaker. She was brought on by the new management a few years ago, a transplant from one of their New York offices. The Old World, with all of its strange codes and hierarchies. She is dressed for her station: black blazer, black turtleneck. Red lipstick. Elegant, but not ostentatious. The thin rims of her glasses are as straight as her bangs.
A good, class-conscious Capitalist, I think.
Piercing the void in front of her is a small coloring book, open to a mandala so complex its details escape my myopia. She is meticulous about these things, the coloring pages. Though this one seems particularly outstanding, even from a few paces away.
“Good morning, Kate.” I walk up to the desk and perch above the book. I lean in, absorbing all of the little spots of color, their immaculate symmetry. “Wow, that’s really something. How long have you been working on it?”
“Not too long, seems like.” She picks up a blue pencil and sets back to filling in the missing bit of one half-finished space. “But I guess I started when I got in. So it must have been … mmm, two hours, maybe? The time really gets away — not much in and out around Christmas!”
I run my middle finger lightly over the edge of the circular design. My skin catches a spot at the very frontier, a wreath of fire that the red pencil has been over fiercely, leaving subtle ripples in the paper.
“It’s beautiful. What does it mean?”
Kate smiles a bit and leans back in her chair, head tilted a few degrees to the right. “What makes you think it means anything?”
“So it’s meaningless, then?” I look at her and slowly pull back my hand.
“Well, if you must know,” her eyes glide down toward the figure, “it’s from astrology. I guess I’ve always been a little into the woo-woo stuff.” Her eyes dart back at me. “I’m a Sagittarius. What’s your sign?”
I feel my left eyebrow raise; I pull it back down as soon as I notice. It’s an odd detail from her. She seems more relaxed than usual.
It must be the holiday, I think.
“I’m not so sure; the horoscopes haven’t been so big here until recently.” This is true; it’s hard to ditch my immediate revulsion to all of Their fake mystical bullshit. Though, our schooling wasn’t so much against spirituality as such; it was against Their spirituality, the symbols and forms used for centuries to coerce and control. Even “Christmas” is still an adjustment; I much pre- ferred the old festivities for the Solstice.
Of course, our symbols served the same purpose. But knowing this changes the reflex very little.
“Well, if you look it up, let me know. I’d be curious.” She smiles a little wider, and reaches down below the desk. The left gate opens.
“Yeah. I’ll do that.” I pause. “Take care.”
I walk past her and through the transparent portal. I hit the solitary brushed steel nub on the wall, and climb into the second car from the left. I breathe a sigh of relief.
It wasn’t the service car that came — good turn.
I reach out and run my hand along the polished white plastic panels lining the elevator’s interior.
It is a painfully slow ride up. I think to myself about how much I hated that interaction. What was I doing, treating this woman like a sexualized child? I used to think about these things more. We all used to think about these things more. Just a few years of being American, and already there are so many of these moments. Moments when I am unrecognizable to myself — moments when I can see the tentacles of Their hatreds metastasizing in my mind.
“Damn — I’m sorry, Kate,” I whisper to myself.
I get off on the twelfth floor and bask in its beautiful strips of warm, indirect lights along the ceiling. But then, one cannot avoid the insipid blue carpet. I think indignantly of all of the group psychology that must have gone into the choice of the pattern in the floors from before. The Old Regime was meticulous about that kind of thing. There was probably a whole team at UCLA working on that pattern for years — an entire level of a lab somewhere in Westwood, devoted to psychometric testing of different arrangements and colors, to matching the evoked relational content to the desired particularity of the national esprit de corps. The floor had meaning. This teal monstrosity was clearly put in by the lowest bidder — you can even make out the tears and thready seams from hasty box-cutters along the edges.
What a travesty.
I get to my office door at the end of the hall. A flimsy Ikea end table holds up an oversized fake plant in front of the floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the courtyard.
I’m going to get executed one of these days for criticizing the carpet, I think. I smile; it’s a good thought.
I open the tall wood door. Noelle is already standing in the front room — mid-pace, rather, beside my coffee table. I look down at my watch; it’s a bit past 9.
Ah, shit. That’s why I came in on Saturday.
“Maestro!” I smile broadly and bow slightly. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”
“Oh, Stu. No, not at all. Don’t even think of it.” Noelle is severe. But the two of us have a rapport, and I take her at her word. Her earrings distract me — long, thin cylinders, like gun barrels. Her hands are tucked neatly into baggy, pleated trousers, and her eyes move from me to the window.
I shoot for friendly with my tone, miss, and land at professional. “Well it’s good to have you around again. How was the show in D.C.?” I move toward the inner office, and gesture with one arm.
She leads me in, and sits down on one of the two chairs opposite my desk. She crosses her legs, rubs her forehead with one hand, and sighs.
“Doesn’t get any easier.”
I sit down in my cheap little office chair; a small coffee stain on the seat thrusts itself on me. I could afford a better one, but I don’t work sitting that often, so there isn’t much point.
“Well, we’re all living on borrowed time, I suppose.”
Noelle looks off at a low bookshelf, half-smiling, intrigued.
“That’s one way to look at it.” Her neck is craned, and I see on the side the same little black tattoo as the man from the metro earlier. She remote-piloted mechs out of JPL. The Remotes had it harder than the troops on the Front: doing a nine-to-five slaughter from an air-conditioned office, then driving back home to your kids at night. It got worse after Defense realized that adding pain to the percepts increased unit effectiveness.
“How are the kids?”
“Lizzie’s been good with the travel. She’s young enough, it’s all just an adventure to her. Roy …” She pauses.
“He’s older.”
“The museums were hard. All the flags, and the movies, and the saccharine American grandeur everywhere. The fragility of it. He still sees the Enemy.”
He’ll get himself killed over something stupider than carpet, I think.
“Well, you’ll set him straight.”
She chuckles.
I get serious. “So what brings you in? Do you have another performance coming up?”
“Yes — we’re doing the Civic Center this evening, as a matter of fact. Prokofiev Five. You’re welcome to come.” She pauses. “You must come, actually; I’ll have them leave a ticket for you at Will Call.” She turns her eyes from perusing the books to me; she seems to have noticed the faux pas. “Sorry it’s on such short notice! You know me.”
“Prokofiev Five …” I pause for a bit and recall. “Your choice?”
“My choice, their choice — look, Stu, you don’t want to know the politics of these things, believe me.” Her gesturing is exaggerated for comedy, but she’s clearly sore about it. “The point is, we’ve got a bit of a guest list, and I think it would do well to impress.”
Such sibilance in that “impress”; she is trying to make a point.
My memory runs thin, and so I send off a quick search and feel the results Inside. It’s a very odd choice indeed — the Moscow premiere with the USSR State Symphony in 1945 was the night the Red Army crossed the Vistula. Prokofiev had to stop for the cannons as he introduced the work. What a resonance.
“You’re not scheming anything, are you?” I smile out of one corner.
Noelle throws up her hands. “You caught me. I’m trying to get somebody to endow the contrabassoon chair.” The brazenness of the lie is itself the message. “Do you have something for me or what?”
I look straight at her, feigning insult. “Well, of course. I could give you a——”
“Ah ah ah — we’ve talked about this.”
“… Right.”
But it’s not right, ’Elle; it’s wrong. Even my internal monologue is exasperated. One of these times, I’m going to put you in a mental hospital with your “surprises”, and Ancestors know what details they can pull out of the Neuralink. It’s a crapshoot every time.
I worry about me. I worry about her. I worry about the kids.
I walk over to a taller bookcase behind my desk, and open a Cuban cigar box sitting on the second-highest shelf. I pull up the false bottom, and grasp a plain green card between my fingers — one of two parts of an encryption key for my collection. The other is on the storage for my implant, tucked into my clavicle and locked with my semantic footprint. I tap the card with my phone.
Inside, I feel the database index as it unlocks. I walk around through it, listening to the music, touching the metadata of the Dreams. It takes about five minutes wall time to get through the whole piece, with the dilation. The first, second, and fourth movements come to mind quickly. But the third — the third is the most important one, and there’s two choices in my index that roughly fit the timing, knowing how fast her mind runs. At least, I think so.
Mother — I hope she doesn’t do something stupid like pop some Z right before she goes on. That would kill the arc.
“How far do you want to go with this, ’Elle?”
“Give me your worst.”
Well, that settles it then. I reach into my bag and pull out the stims. I walk around behind where she’s seated, and gently place my hands behind her ears.
“Now of course, I could give them to you raw, and you could feel it well enough. But I assume——”
“Mais non — I want it as real as it gets.” She makes an exuberant flourish with her right hand. “Lift the veil, Comrade Isis!”
Yes, ma’am.
As the stims tickle her, the storm of fibers within her cranium comes into sharp relief. I feel around for a second — professional courtesy. And there’s no denying it. Her psychosis is getting worse. Her dependence is getting worse. It’s all bad — this shit is killing her.
“’Elle——”
“Zip! I know where your head’s at, and we’re just going to nip that one right in the bud.”
I pull back my hands, and send the axon cloud over to the cluster for the Dream tuning. There’s no sense putting up a fuss — I’m just the middleman. \(\,\triangleright\)
Continued.