She awoke one morning, and Mr. Sonnet was gone. She had known his departure was inevitable, but she’d thought he’d make a classier getaway. None of his things seemed to be missing from their St. Croix hotel room, but she could tell he’d flown. All in all, it had been an enjoyable fling.
Next to the bathroom sink he had left the tiny, perfect, scalloped, pink shell she had found on the beach and given to him to remember her by. The fact that he hadn’t taken it upset her more than his departure.
A little while later, when she ordered down for breakfast, the hotel manager asked if he could come up. There were urgent matters to discuss. As though reading from a bad script, he told her that her account was overdrawn. She knew that that wasn’t possible, and while he waited in her room, she called her broker at the Reed Sisters Wealth Management Services in New York, who handled the lion’s share of her and Darwin’s assets. Her broker hemmed and hawed but finally admitted that Melina’s many accounts had been tampered with the day before. Upset but not yet panicked, Melina placed calls to her other banks and brokerages. Little by little, the picture became clear. Mr. Sonnet had taken advantage of his physical proximity to her valet. He’d been very thorough; she was cleaned out. She and Darwin were broke.
Upon hearing this, the manager of the Five Palms Hotel let her know that he’d only tolerated her in his establishment because of his generous nature. He loudly bemoaned his suite, which was ruined by her unchristian odor, and he threatened to call the police.
Melina had to borrow credit from friends to tube back home. The Homeland Command confiscated her valet to assess its role in the theft. What small assets she still had were tied up in the investigation. She had to borrow in order to live modestly for a while in a rented apartment in an unfashionable RT. She started a number of lawsuits against the Reed Sisters and her other financial managers, but the courts ruled that the financial institutions be held harmless. The generosity of her friends had limits and strings. The authorities turned up no leads on Mr. Sonnet or her former wealth. They returned her valet in a hundred pieces. She considered selling it for recycling credits, but some intuition told her to hang on to it.
Melina’s slide into poverty took only weeks. She lost her apartment and was forced to move into a city-subsidized women’s dormitory.
In the three years since her and Darwin’s accident, she had fallen from a penthouse to a barracks, where she could claim only a cot, a chair, and a locker. When she thought she could fall no further, she learned otherwise. The other women in the dormitory reviled her for her odor and petitioned the management to evict her. In an uneasy compromise, management moved her into a supply closet and ruled that her door must be kept shut.
YOU ARE RIGHT, Justine. This is far more than Melina Post could have told me in five minutes. We had more time than that, for her gentleman caller was late in arriving. As we stood at my door, we made way for the arbeitors to ferry the baked shark past us, its mouth agape with butter squash, to her apartment. And we made way again when my arbeitors returned with empty servos. But as the minutes accumulated, and her special guest still hadn’t come or called, she was sure it was business that kept him. She didn’t call him, she said, because she didn’t want to bother him. She tried to mask her growing anxiety by continuing her story. I invited her back in, to sit down and have something to drink, but she was content to stand outside my door. I must say, her story was stirring my own pot of memories. The way she was treated enraged me, and I wished I could have been present to help her in her time of need. If only she had knocked on my door back then instead of waiting so many years.
So, there she was, my mistreated friend, lying on her dormitory cot next to shelves of cleaning solvents, drifting into the type of despair I knew only too well, when an extraordinary event occurred.
Across the Atlantic, Wanda Wieczorek, our Saint Wanda, who you may have heard of, had her little run-in with the furniture floor manager at Daud’s in London. She’d only wanted for her mum to sit on the silk couch; she didn’t intend to sit on it herself, until the floor manager showed up with his attitude and his troop of uniformed jerrys. She sent her mum down to the food court to wait for her, then drew her simcaster from her purse. This is a ten-thousand-euro item of furniture, the manager told her. We simply cannot permit you to ruin it with your unfortunate malodorous condition.
Fine, Wanda said, I’ll take it with me.
She took the whole floor, actually, if you include the smoke and water damage. Her suicide made international headlines. Suddenly, hundreds of seared men and women were bursting into flame everywhere. On buses, in theaters, on rush-hour pedways, in offices of big transnationals—wherever they could scare up a crowd. The greasy, roasted-pork smell of charred human flesh pervaded our cities and awoke the public conscience to our plight.
The Homeland Command had performed searing in the name of public security, and the public had condoned its policy in silence. Now the public started asking questions. Why were we punishing the victims of NASTIE attacks? Why did we have to mutilate them? The civil authorities, meanwhile, were wondering what could have possessed the HomCom to create so many walking firebombs.
Melina Post started receiving a procession of smelly visitors to her supply closet. She was known as a former aff who still owned memberships at exclusive spas and clubs and other places where the seared dearly wanted to stage their wiener roasts. But Melina, always the good citizen, refused to participate (though she admitted to entertaining some middle-of-the-night fantasies of incinerating the bitches in her dormitory while they slept).
The protests went on without her and eventually shamed the UD Parliament to declare a ban on human searing. New, nonmutilating methods of cell-sifting were introduced. The doors to the isolation cells in Utah and elsewhere were flung open, and the quarantined were safely douched and released to rejoin society (alas, too late for Darwin Post who had recently expressed into a cloud of monarch butterflies).
With the searing ban in force, the protests abruptly ceased. But soon a startling fact was uncovered. There was solid evidence that the HomCom’s “new” nonmutilating cell-sifting methods were not so new after all. They had been available to the Command for years, even in 2092 when I made my own excursion to the Utah cop shop.
The revelation that the HomCom had been searing people for years while more humane methods were available was too much to bear, and the remaining seared redoubled their demonstrations. Even Melina Post was angry, if only for the suffering of her dear Darwin. Alone in her cot, she drew up a list of all the people who deserved to broil by her hand. At the top of her list was Mr. Sonnet, if only she could locate him. Trailing close behind was that damned hotel manager in St. Croix. She thought she would tube down there and sit in one of his big rattan chairs in the lobby until he strolled by. But the winner of Melina’s vengeance lottery turned out to be her wealth managers, the Reed Sisters.
The Reed Sisters in whose trust she had placed her fortune. Their offices were only a pedway away.
Melina tried to contact a number of the seared who had recently contacted her, but they were all already toasted, except for one woman. Melina met her in a coffee shop and the woman confided that she planned to take her life on a shopping arcade over Broadway and asked Melina to join her. Melina told her she had a better idea. She had made an appointment with her former broker on the 350th level of the OXO Tower.
The following day, the two women prepared themselves in the dormitory bathroom. They applied three coats of skin mastic, donned business clothes, and soaked themselves with cologne.