I clicked it off again, waited for them to come back, but it stayed dark. Just as I decided they had given up, Father’s face appeared.
“Hey, Michael,” he said slowly, “I know I was loud before. I’ve got a talent for loud.” He laughed and held his smile until it slowly wilted. “Anyway, I know you’re not into Ültra, or Heâd, or Bäng anymore.” He paused as if to lament my transformation once again. “Look,” he said, his voice quieter, “I know you’re unhappy about being shot… and everything about that… you know… and that MKG girl and everything…”
He couldn’t even say Nora’s name. I reached to turn it off.
“Wait! Hold on! I’m upset too. I really am. And you know what I think? I think that freeboot was nothing more than dick fuzz!” He held his grin as if waiting for me to agree. “Look,” he continued, after he decided that I wasn’t going to play along, “the deal is—the company needs you. We’ve got to have something for the show. So come on back home, we’ll sit down with your little tutor and we’ll get this all hammered out.”
“No.” The word came out easily and I was proud of myself. In the past, I had had trouble standing up to him. To the driver, I said, “Full speed, please.”
“Elle’s not so bad,” he continued. “You see the stats on her tits? They’re pointy!” His eyes lit up. “Remember there was a girl who looked kind of like her from the PartyHaus? She had that kind of nose.” He flicked up the end of his with a finger.
I did not remember, nor did I want to. “Driver,” I said into the intercom, “increase speed now.”
“No,” said Father, speaking louder, as if commanding my attention, “I’m pretty sure you said something about her once. You have to remember! She was the one who swallowed everyone and everything.” As he always did, he got too close to the camera, and his face became distorted so that his nose looked like the front of a blimp. “Sheila! Wasn’t that it? Remember her? Slurping Sheila we called her.”
I glared at him. Dividing her name into two faux syllables, I said, “No-ra.”
“Shut up!” he exploded. “Don’t even say her fucking name! From now on, I’m banning it.”
I reached out and flicked the off switch. Nothing happened.
“Ha!” Father winked off camera. “Lard work, Ken.”
“Please,” I said, “go away.”
“MKG is our enemy. Two minutes ago Nora’s dad was on Profit Ranch 5000. The bastard said we’re community butt plugs!”
“I’m sure he’ll apologize if we just explain.”
“No explaining! No apologizing! They rejected us, and now we’re total enemies.”
“We can go back and explain that it was no one’s fault.”
“Stop with the explaining!” He flung his hands into the air. “They want to bury us. I’m telling you, they were behind that damn freeboot. They’re against us.”
“Against us!” echoed Ken from off camera.
“I’ll talk to Nora,” I said.
Father began laughing so gutturally at first I thought he was retching. “Oh, boy! That’s a big mug of flush water!” Turning to his guys, he said, “We’re saved! He’s going to talk to the pud-girl for us. He’s going to have her go tug on her daddy’s trousers, and he’ll fix up everything!” Then he leveled a stare at me. “You’re dumb,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I thought you wanted to become smart! Your tutor has taught you dick spit!”
I wanted to scream at him, but that would mean loud had won. “I am not your son,” I enunciated. “I’m not a Rivers anymore.”
With a big roll of his eyes, as if I had to be fooling, he said, “Come on! You don’t have a choice there!” Then he leaned in, bumped his nose against the lens, and left a greasy spot. “If you want to get all quiet, and still, and grey, and whatever… fine! But you are Michael Rivers. You have your duty so get your ass home! Get ready for your damn publicity date, and that’s it.”
I pushed the off button as hard as I could and managed to get the screen to shut down. To the driver, I said, “Full speed,” and an instant later, the acceleration pushed me back into my seat.
It felt over. I was no longer Hiro Bruce Rivers’ son. I was no longer Michael Rivers, and I no longer had his worries. The only thing I felt was the anticipation of seeing Nora. Of inhaling air she had breathed, of touching her face, and gazing at her with my grey eye.
Then the car began to slow again. “No!” I said, “don’t stop. Speed up!”
“Sorry, sir,” was all the driver said.
“Keep going!” I switched to the next seat and jabbed a finger at the screen. An instant later, I saw Father. Now he held a glass of that horrible sweet, black, fermented carrot liquor he liked. “Let me go!”
“Oh, you’re going,” he said, as he tilted the glass and let a glob of the stuff ooze into his mouth like tar. After he struggled to swallow, he said, “And if you’re out, then you’re really out!” His foot flew up at his screen and it went black.
I asked the driver to continue to Europa-1, but outside, I could see the baffle brakes open up and the air began to howl. “Please,” I begged, “for me. For Michael Rivers, please don’t turn around.” Red and yellow emergency lights began to spin all over the car. A siren, like a slide whistle, sounded and a deep voice repeated: Warning—remain in your seat for safety.
Thirty seconds later, we had come to a stop. I turned and looked behind, afraid another car was coming. I didn’t see anything, and as I looked around at the enormous flat lands that spread out on both sides and the road that split me down the center, I started to feel a strange dread. I was no longer on my way to see Nora, but I also felt that something else was about to go terribly wrong.
On the monitors, I watched the driver get out of his cockpit at the front and come around to the side. I’d never seen a car stop on the Loop before, and wondered if maybe we were having mechanical troubles. “Everything okay?” He didn’t answer. Instead, he opened the lock on the large side door and slid it open. The air that rushed in was humid and hot and smelled like rotting garbage. “Is there a problem?”
My driver was a short man with watery eyes and gentle, worn fingers. He wore the blue and orange RiverGroup uniform. The awful blue pants, with a long, padded, orange codpiece that snaked down the right leg, were leftovers from a previous product show—a costume hand-me-down. With his head bowed, he said, “Master Rivers senior says you must leave.”
“Leave?”
“Step out of the car.”
I wanted to laugh. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Shaking his head fearfully, he said, “I’ll lose everything, sir.”
Pushing myself up, I stepped to the threshold. The direct sunlight felt like it would caramelize my skin in a minute. While I didn’t want to get out of the car, I wasn’t going to call Father and plead. Besides, stepping onto the Loop—something I never fathomed doing—was a call of his bluff. The drop to the roadway was three feet. I always entered the car from the garage platform, but was sure I could make it down. As I lowered my right foot, a line of copy from Pure H came to mind. A sad fog. We jumped anyway.
I landed awkwardly and fell into my driver’s arms. “Excuse me!” I stepped back and straightened my jacket and tie. Standing on the road’s white octagonal tiles—that had never been anything but a blur before—I found I could no longer see into the slubs. The orange safety walls on either side blocked the view. And although the road stretched to the horizon in either direction, the feeling was claustrophobic even with the sky and the blaring sun overhead. After a second, the ventilation fans hidden in the shoulders of my jacket turned on and kept me comfortable.