Likewise, I was in excellent fiscal shape. My own vast estate was tied up in court (I had been declared legally dead for a few minutes during the searing process, and this flummoxed everything for years), but Eleanor put her even vaster fortune at my temporary disposal.
Likewise, I was in a fairly positive frame of mind. Oh, I had gone through a lengthy funk following my searing. I hid out in the subfloors of the manse, shut myself away for several months to lick my wounds. But I survived that and felt ready for an adventure. It had been decades since I’d tossed my fate to the wind. I figured I had thirty or forty years ahead of me (if I didn’t accidentally self-immolate in the meantime), nothing and no one to tie me down, an inexhaustible credit account, and a brand-new valet by the name of Skippy.
I did travel. I visited the places I had somehow missed in my previous wanderings: the Chinas, Africa, Mississippi, Malaysia. A liberal application of tips and bribes lubricated my passage. Nevertheless, I wasn’t able to break out of my own company. Gargantuan tips could get me seated in a restaurant, but they could not persuade the other diners to finish their own meals. On too many occasions, I had the entire wait and kitchen staffs to myself.
The same applied to clubs, casinos, theaters, and concert halls. To pool halls, bars, bowling alleys—you name it. I was the only tourist on the boat, the only rube at the bazaar, the only bozo on the bus. It didn’t take long for my adventure to grow stale. So I returned to Chicago and moved into an apartment suite on the 300th floor of Cass Tower. I redecorated the place and declared my parlor open each Thursday evening for a weekly salon. I sent out thousands of invitations. Three Thursdays went by, and only a few dozen guests showed up.
Not willing to admit defeat, I hired a publicist. She advised me that radical measures were called for—expensive radical measures. I told her that credit was no object, and she took me at my word. She organized a series of weekly dinner banquets to take place in my home. She hired famous chefs, musical performers, actors, and comedians from around the globe to feed and entertain us. She paid celebrities handsome, confidential “honorariums” to show up and have their pictures taken. Each banquet was to be a tightly staged, show-stopping production.
Nevertheless, she warned me that not even all this was enough to guarantee more than a few hundred gawkers to show up. What I needed, according to her, was someone to co-host the banquets with me, someone of gigantic popularity. She found such a worthy in the person of the former president of the USNA, good old Virginia Taksayer. Taksayer’s star had never set. She seemed to grow more beloved the longer she was out of office. She was expensive, sure, but she was worth it, at least according to my publicist.
Deposed as host in my own home, I was given a special role—that of resident freak. Indeed, we provided bowls of souvenir nose filters in every room. They were hardly necessary, for I slathered myself with thick, odor-blocking skin mastic and wore a mouth dam and flatulence scrubbers. What odors I could not stifle were neutralized by a state-of-the-art air filtration system I had installed in the suite. It produced a cone of negative pressure that could follow me through the rooms and discreetly exchange the air around me.
We were a smash success. From the very first banquet, my house was elbow to elbow with the cream of society, the lights of academia, and the jackdaws of government. Everyone who was anyone paraded through my parlor, supped at my board, and ravaged my wine closet. Couples coupled in my spare bedrooms, crooks conspired on my balcony, and celebrities manifested themselves from room to room. And I? I explored new frontiers of self-loathing.
Not that I knew it at the time. At the time, I thought the whole thing was pretty neat. I threw my banquets for seven years, never missing a Thursday. Although she was invited, Eleanor never attended. Meanwhile, I never left my apartment; I found quiet ways to entertain myself and to pass the time.
That’s not to say that El never visited me; she did, on my birthday, on Father’s Day, other occasions. She always brought little Ellie with her, who hung around my neck and called me daddy. Ellie claimed not to need those ugly nose filters when visiting my house because she was “habituated” to my smell, which anyway wasn’t as bad as other people said it was.
Gradually, their visits tapered off. They were on Mars one year and otherwise occupied the next. I was surprised to discover that I survived their absence. I mostly missed them during the holidays, but otherwise learned how to get by just fine.
ONE WEEK MY routine malfed. On Tuesday night I had gone to bed and asked for a vid. Skippy, my valet, was in charge of surveying the millions of programs available on the nets and selecting ones that could capture my interest long enough to escort me to sleep. On this particular night, he ran a segment from a Heritage Biography series on important cultural figures of the past.
“What’s this crap?” I said. Skippy knew I wasn’t interested in biographies, especially bios of so-called cultural figures. But I soon saw why Skippy had flagged this particular segment—it was about me. It was called “On the Surface—the Work of Samson Paul Harger, 1951-2092, A Retrospective.”
I was surprised, but not flattered. I had long ago sworn off reviews of my work. Something about this one caught my eye, though, as it must have Skippy’s. Remember, this was only a few years after my reputed mulching at the hands of the Homeland Command, and this was my first major retrospective. I found the prospect of watching it too Tom Sawyeresque to resist.
I won’t bore you, Myren Vole, with the cockamamie insights revealed in this retrospective. I will only say that the producers managed to unearth a surprising variety of archival vids and photos of my childhood family and that these were difficult for me to view without a fair amount of heartache. They had a home movie of me and my first wife, Jean Scholero, back in the late twentieth century when I was first making a name for myself with my paintings. That was especially hard to watch. I hadn’t thought of Jean in quite a while. And of course they couldn’t resist using the surveillance vids of me that day in 2092 when the slug hog-tied me on the patio of the Foursquare Café in Bloomington, from whence I was delivered to Utah for deconstruction.
I will mention only one conclusion of the retrospective and that because of the degree to which it riled me. It was hinted at in the production’s title—“On the Surface.” The show’s writers accused me of being shallow. Specifically, they asserted that either I had no feelings or I was incapable of expressing them in my work. They cited the cold, inhuman quality of my paintings and emphasized the fact that when I reinvented myself in the twenty-first century, I did so as a specialist in package design. Artificial skin, battlewrap, tetanus blanket, novelty gift wraps. Everything on the surface—get it? The wrapper—not the gift.
Myren Vole, have you ever been accused of being superficial? Here, the first draft of my legacy was being written before my eyes, and this was what was being said of me? That I was superficial? Believe me, the vid threw me off my feed. It shattered my soporific routine. I spent the entire next day stewing over it. I composed a long, insightful rebuttal to the show’s producers, which I never sent. Thursday rolled around, and I was in a terrible foul mood and I canceled the banquet at the last minute. Canceled all of them. Fired my publicist.
I decided then and there that my best rebuttal would be to “reinvent” myself once again. I was still capable of doing that, wasn’t I? I wasn’t dead yet.
I HAD BEEN out of the art biz for a while, and a whole raft of new tools and techniques had come into use in the meantime. I ordered in some of everything: story wire, smart sand, smart clay, professional holography equipment, rondophone traps, aerosol sculpture gases, liquid stone—you name it. I spent eleven months playing with this stuff, getting to know what it could and couldn’t do. I didn’t have a work in mind yet, except that I wanted to do a piece about Jean, my long-lost first wife. She was my subject.