Make Shift Page 12

  MY FINGER TREMBLES WHEN I JAB THE BUTTON FOR THE LIFT. I’M THAT WORKED up—mostly anger, with a decent helping of anxiety over what I’m about to do, too. But it’s got to be done, and in a weird way it feels good to be worked up over something again. For so long I’ve just been monotone. Just drifting.

  On the way to the ground floor, watching the little animation of the scrubbing hands, I rehearse what I’m going to say. I’ve got it all floating around in my head: how I’m risking my life to come over and tell them off, how utterly selfish they are, how ashamed their parents must be. My phone is along as a simultaneous interpreter; it can echo the whole thing in loud electronic Czech.

  Night’s fully fallen when I hobble out of the apartment. For a moment the blurry orange of the streetlamps and the warm breeze on my face takes me back to when I loved this neighborhood. I used to be so fascinated by the Communist-era architecture and the little potraviny shops, used to adore Letna Park—limping up the hill was always worth it to look out over the city.

  The neighborhood was bigger back then. Now it’s just my apartment and a grocery store every three days. Sometimes I feel like I barely live here at all.

  But I do, and I’ve got the right to stay living here, which I can’t do with little idiots endangering my health and that of the public at large. I stump across the deserted street, checking the seals on my mask one last time. I brought the good one for this, full face coverage. No telling how many spit clouds I’ll have to walk through.

  Like a moth to fluorescent, I follow the lights. There’s still no sounds of conversation or laughter, which boosts my theory about the sound damper. If the kids are really committed, they might be subvocalizing to each other and letting their fancy masks synthesize speech into text—read an article about that.

  I walk through the crumbling entrance and start hauling myself up the concrete stairs. Jan would be proud—first stairs I’ve walked in ages. It’s only two flights but I’m gasping by the time I reach the top, so I take a moment to catch my breath, and to steady my nerves, too.

  I can hear the sounds of humming equipment, whatever they’re using to project the lights, but still no footsteps. Czechs aren’t much for dancing. Maybe they’re all just sitting in a circle with their beers.

  Hopefully everybody turns around and sees me at the same time, instantly startled and ashamed. More likely I’ll have to wave my arms around to get their attention. That doesn’t seem dignified, but I’m in too deep now to worry about dignity, so I round the corner and step inside the party.

  The room is empty.

  I blink, then blink again. Lighting equipment is set up, strobing electric lime and purple across the bare concrete walls, and there are a couple little pocket drones circling the room, cams rotating for a full view. But there are no irresponsible kids coughing in each other’s faces. The only human is me, a confused old fart with all the righteous pent-up anger leaking out of him.

  There’s a freshly stenciled message on the wall, and I don’t need my phone to understand it: Koronapárty ve VR—Corona Party in VR. The words are accompanied by an old-school QR code.

  I stare at the message in disbelief, then dig out my phone and scan the code. My screen fills instantly with a mob of avatars, dancing cartoons superimposed over the grungy concrete room, all grinning because they know something I don’t. I walk in a dazed circle, holding my phone out in front of me. The avatars can’t see me. I walk through them like a ghost.

  I disconnect from the feed, feeling a lump of hard plastic in my throat. I’m in an empty half-built building, pissed off at people who aren’t here. Nobody to rage at. Nobody breaking lockdown rules or curfew, except for me in about ten minutes. Just a bunch of kids throwing an online party and using a slummy old building as their backdrop.

  And of course I didn’t storm over here for the greater good. I did it to unload some of the anger that’s been curling around me tighter and tighter for months now. Anger at Jan for leaving me all alone. Anger at myself for keeping it that way, for turning down my sister’s facecalls and backing out of visits, for giving up on work. Lockdown’s the perfect excuse to shrink the world down to a cage and not let anybody inside.

  Since nobody’s around, I finally let a few tears out. It hurts. Feeling mad’s always been so much easier than feeling sad for me. But I let the tears come, and after a while it feels okay, even if it’s fogging up my mask something awful.

  There’s another message stenciled under the QR code, and this one I feel I should know—the words sort of prick at my memory. Každý je vítán, it says. I blink and frown at it, then finally hover my phone over it.

  Everyone is welcome.

  I think of the VR goggles gathering dust at the top of my closet, the ones I promised my sister I would start using. I really doubt the kids meant me, but it would be kind of a laugh, wouldn’t it, just to pop in. Maybe just long enough to tell my sister I attended a localized virtual reality corona party when I finally facecall her.

  The housebot can probably help me calibrate everything. It’s cleverer than it lets on.

  7

  Making Hay

  Cory Doctorow

  ALL OF WILMAR’S FRIENDS AT THE FACTORY HAD WATCHED THE STORM HEADING toward the Mojave for a week, watched it gathering force, watched as it defied the best predictions as it failed to veer off toward the ocean, carving a line from Portland, through Sacramento, sparing Vegas, arrowing for their concrete plant.

  Wilmar had a feeling about this one. It was going to squat over the factory for a long, long time. Long enough that he could go home to Burbank, see his family, his old school buds. He hadn’t been home in the fall for a long time, but the weather kept getting weirder and the spring rains were now fall rains, he guessed.

  But after five days back home, Wilmar was ready to get back to work. It wasn’t that he missed his work friends. Truth be told, he wasn’t that tight with anyone in Mojave yet. He’d been at the factory for most of a year, ever since graduation, and he’d made only weak friendships there. But he missed the work.

  HIS FIFTH MORNING BACK HOME, WILMAR COULDN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO GET OUT of bed. His internal weather matched it, grayness clouding his personal sun, and he recognized the signs of his brain doing its bad thing again.

  Hiding under the covers, he started pull-refreshing Friendster and swiping.

  It offered many people for Wilmar to hang out with—old high school friends, people who loved the same board games as him, people who liked hiking the same trails as him, people who liked the same kinds of clubs as him. There were dinner parties and dance parties and people who needed help moving or with community projects like digging out empty lots contaminated by old Lockheed fuel leaks. Burbank didn’t have a lot of heavy industry anymore, but the construction sites and even some of the productions at the studios shut down when the sun stopped shining, and there were lots of people with time on their hands. But he swiped past all of them.

  He knew himself well enough to recognize the signs of depression, and he knew that the best thing for it was to socialize, but he just couldn’t bear the thought of it. Somewhere, the sun was shining or the wind was blowing or the tides were crashing on the shore, and there was energy to spare, and so in those places, workers who’d been enjoying a break had been liberated from parties and family and lying in hammocks and had been sent back to work in factories just like his, sintering prefab concrete and craning it onto long, slow-moving electric trains for shipment to the inland newtowns.

  “Wilmar, are you still in bed?”

  His mom had surprised him by seeming much older than she had just a few months before, but now he’d gotten used to it and was mostly surprised by how hard she found it to knock before entering his room. She said it wasn’t his room anymore, it was her “office.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  She scowled. “I have work to do, kiddo. Papers to mark. Up and at ‘em.”

  Mom had always marked papers at the kitchen table, and as far as
Wilmar knew, that was fine with her. Apparently it wasn’t fine with her and had never been fine with her and she wasn’t going back to it any time soon. How much concentration and peace and quiet did she to need to review eighth graders’ essays about Shakespeare anyway?

  He pulled himself out of bed and dressed and even made the bed and gave his mom a kiss on the cheek when she pushed past him to sit at her desk with her tablet.

  After a late breakfast, he sat on the front lawn on a folding chair, amid the late zucchini and the very late sunflowers—in September, seriously?—and nodded at the people going past. A dozen kids blocked off most of Verdugo and set up a street-hockey game, letting the odd car squeeze past at a crawl in the single lane they’d left clear, calling a time out and making more space if two cars needed to pass in opposite directions, though the drivers got dagger-stares for not timing their crossing better.

  In Wilmar’s boyhood, every day had been known and knowable far in advance—if you asked him what he’d be doing on a specific Tuesday two years from then, he could tell you that—barring illness or maybe a wildfire—he’d be in school, and then maybe at band practice, and then home gaming.

  Then the first pandemic had broken that rhythm, and the second pandemic had killed it. The idea that what was going on in the world would have nothing to do with what you did in the world had seemed totally natural until he was twelve. Six years later, it was such an obviously stupid idea that he couldn’t believe that whole civilizations had fallen for it for, like, centuries.

  All of the panels he made at the factory had been headed for San Juan Capistrano, a city he’d visited in elementary school when they’d done a unit on the eighteenth-century Missions of the Spanish conquistadors. The Surfliner was still running then, and his class had taken over a whole car. Now most of the Surfliner tracks had been dangerously undermined by years of storm swells. The last train had run five years before.

  Suddenly, Wilmar stood bolt upright, the chair tipping backward into his mother’s succulents. He should go to San Juan Capistrano!

  HIS MOM MADE A FUSS BUT HE COULD TELL SHE WAS GLAD TO SEE HIM GO. HE FOUND a bike and rode it to the Burbank Airport station just in time to hop a train to Union Station, and used the short trip to swipe through a lot more Friendster profiles, these ones all for SJC. The system found him a ton of friends-of-a-friend, and by the time he got to Union Station, he’d found a FOAF sofa for two nights and had a FOAF dinner date. He changed trains and an hour later, he was pulling into SJC and the dinner date had turned into a dinner party in a new park in the New SJC.

  He found a bike and clipped his phone to the handlebars and let it map him to the park.

  It was getting on rush hour and there were tons of bikes in the bike lanes, and full buses passed him in the bus lane. Even this far inland, SJC’s air smelled of sea salt, and lots of the apartment balconies had wetsuits and surfboards on them. The route to the new park was uphill all the way, of course. Everything in new SJC was uphill, because going inland was good, but high ground was better.

  The park was in the shadow of a grid of huge turbines that thrummed overhead and creaked as they tuned themselves so that each one fed its slipstream to the one behind it, maximizing efficiency. He ditched the bike against a rack and flipped Friendster into friendfinder mode and let it guide him to a group of people his age with blankets and frisbees and deep tans and scratched knuckles.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m Wilmar?”

  They shouted a flurry of hellos and someone handed him a beer and someone else gave him a tamale from a thermos steamer. He tossed it from hand to hand until it cooled off, then unwrapped it and accepted a dollop of habanero sauce.

  There were a dozen people when he arrived, but more trickled in, and he was given a fresh orange, half an avocado (and a compostable spoon), hard kombucha, and a cup of gazpacho. He played frisbee, talked Burbank politics, talked national politics, collected tips on the best coffee and baked goods in newtown and old SJC, and even saw a swallow.

  “We’re putting nesting cavities in every building,” Treesa said. She looked younger than Wilmar but she said she was working on the newtown buildout so he figured she had to be older than she looked—the Jobs Guarantee wouldn’t give heavy industry gigs to people until they were eighteen. She had gone to summer surfing camp with a guy who’d been on Wilmar’s swim team and had a first cousin who worked at the gym where Wilmar’s dad went for physio. These connections didn’t make for much conversation beyond the openers, but the openers were all they needed. She was funny and smart, and she knew every single thing about the newtown.

  “No one knows where their migration patterns’ll be in a decade or two, but there’s a prof at UC Riverside who thinks that if we provide them with habitats and food there’s a good chance that they’ll keep this as their terminus.”

  “Are you studying zoology?” Wilmar asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I got my AP biology, but I’m taking a couple years off for this—” She waved her arm at the mid-rises around them, the streetcar and bus tracks, the park. “My family’s been in San Juan Capistrano since the Mission days. My umpty-great grandpa was a bricklayer, and when I was a kid my dad used to point out all the buildings he helped with. Doing this—” another expansive gesture—“it feels right.”

  “That’s incredible,” he said. He cracked another hard kombucha. It was sour and tart, and someone told him it was 7 percent, which explained how lightheaded he was. “Working in Mojave, I’d watch the slabs pile up on the loading docks, watch them head out on the freighters, and I’d wonder about the people on the other end.”

  “Did you ever put notes on them?”

  “Notes?”

  “In marker,” she said. “That permanent greasepen? We get a lot of slabs with notes on ’em, I see them sometimes when I’m priming the slabs after they’re in place. I’ve got a whole gallery of them.” He leaned in close to see the screen she spread out, swiped through her pictures: “THIS SIDE UP” and “HELL OR HIGH WATER” and then political slogans “UWAYNI FOR A THIRD TERM” and “HART’S A TOOL.”

  “There was so much election stuff, it was crazy,” she said, finding him more.

  “I had no idea,” he said. “Maybe we don’t do that in Mojave—maybe it’s just the other factories?” He knew of at least ten that served the San Juan Capistrano project, in an arc that went south to San Diego and north to Nevada. Mojave was the closest one to home, so he’d gone for it, thinking that he could shuttle back and forth. Why had he thought that would be good?

  “Treesa!” They both looked around to see who was calling, and then Treesa’s hands tightened on the screen, scrunching it. It was an older woman, hair under a kerchief and dirty clothes, heading their way across the park. She looked homeless, but did they really have homeless people in San Juan Capistrano? What about the housing guarantee?

  “Hi, Auntie Lanelle,” Treesa said, rising to intercept the woman before she could reach them. Wilmar tried not to stare as they started talking in low tones.

  But then the woman started crying and Treesa hugged her and patted her back, and that only made her sob louder. Wilmar decided he should help.

  “Can I do something?”

  Treesa glared at him for a moment, then softened. “It’s OK,” she said. The woman loosened her grip on Treesa, dug a dirty face-scarf out of a pocket and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you a friend of Treesa’s? I’m her great aunt, Lanelle Carter.” Her voice was thin and cracked. She held out her hand, and Wilmar made himself shake it, and immediately got that “need-hand-san” feeling on that hand, the subconscious need to keep from touching anything else. He noticed the feeling and was mildly ashamed: he could tell himself that it was just normal pathogen prudence, but he knew deep down that he was recoiling at her broken-ness, her living proof of social failure.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Ms Carter. I’m Wilmar Nazarian. I’m visiting from Burbank.”

/>   “Oh,” she said, and got a faraway look. “We have people in Burbank. Did you know that, Treesa? My mother’s baby brother Norbert took his family there. We used to visit them for Fourth of July. Such wonderful fireworks.”

  “How are you doing, Auntie?” Treesa asked. “Come and get a plate.”

  None of Treesa’s friends wanted to hang out with her homeless great-aunt either, so they formed a little island on a picnic blanket, with a wide, empty space all around them. “Are we socially distancing again?” Treesa’s auntie asked vaguely.

  “No, Auntie,” Treesa said, giving her a handful of freeze-dried apple chips.

  They sat in awkward silence as she ate. Wilmar thought of watching A Kung-Fu Panda Christmas Carol with his brothers, thought of the Ghost of Christmas Past. After his glum days in Burbank, he’d felt like he’d found a better mood in SJC. But the darkness was creeping in around the edges again.

  “These are wonderful,” she said and daintily dabbed at her lips with her dirty scarf.

  “Where are you sleeping, Auntie?” Treesa’s voice was soft.

  Her aunt got a suspicious look. “I’m fine, girl, don’t worry about me.”

  “You can get an apartment here.” Now Treesa’s voice had gone hard. “You’re entitled to one. Everyone whose place was flooded out—”

  Her aunt cut her off with a sharp gesture and suddenly she was much more present. “I have made it very clear that I do not want to live here. I want to live in my home. Our family home. Your great-grandfather—”

  “Built a home that is now underwater, Auntie. I loved that house, too. But we’re not fish, Auntie.”

  She made a sour face. “I don’t want to argue with you.”

  A glum silence descended again. Treesa avoided Wilmar’s eye. He wondered if there was some graceful way to gtfo, but now that everyone else had distanced themselves, he’d be abandoning her. True, she was basically a stranger, but she’d come out for his Friendster call, so she was the kind of good person that he should be good to.