Father rolled his eyes. Just tell me!”
Ken cupped his hands over Father’s ear and whispered. As he did, Father’s eyes got large. “No!” He stood back and glared at us. For a second, I thought he was going to laugh. “They didn’t!” he said, shaking his head. “No. It’s impossible! They couldn’t have. I completely forbid it!”
Ken shrugged as if he couldn’t explain it and backed away a step.
Father’s face turned the color of salmon. The veins on his forehead throbbed. “Fucktastic bombastic!” he finally bellowed. “You saw her! You met our enemy!”
“Sir,” said Joelene, shielding me with an arm, “please! Listen to the facts. What happened was that we—”
Father’s right fist shot forward in a karate chop of a punch that slammed her breastbone. A loud and horrible puhh came from her as she fell backward, crashed into a vending machine, and crumpled onto the floor. “I should kill you!” screamed Father. “I should have them give you an ant enema. We’re facing the biggest crisis of all time and you help him do this!”
When he turned to me, I saw a ripple of fury like I had never seen before pass through his face. It was like a tectonic shift beneath his skin. “I’m killing someone today,” he said to me, his voice raw.
Crouching beside my advisor, but keeping an eye on him so he didn’t try and bash me over the head, I asked her, “Are you all right?”
As she huffed to try and get air back into her lungs, I think she said, “Yeah.”
“First we pull a super twenty-two rating!” said Father, tugging at his Afro like he wanted to rip it from his skull. “We’re hard lard and now another disaster!” Pointing at Ken, he said, “Get back to the table and tell Chesterfield something. Say whatever he wants to hear. Beg him. Cry for him!
“Anything!” said Ken. He ran back to the table.
Joelene was breathing easier now, but her eyes shined with tears, her mouth was scrunched into a frown, and her teeth were tightly clenched. She was glaring at Father as if she were going to burn a hole through his chest.
“You are officially fired from RiverGroup,” said Father to her. “I’ll get you kicked out of the families and sent to slubberland where they’ll eat your guts alive.”
“It was my plan!” I told him. “I did it.”
“Dick-tastic!” he sneered as he rubbed his hand, as if now he felt the impact of his punch. “You’re like the worse son in the history of the universe.”
“Just leave her alone!”
“Hiro!” said Xavid as he approached, “look what you’ve done to !” With three long, hornbeam chopsticks, he began to fluff Father’s Afro back into shape.
“They saw Nora!” Father whined. “It’s a betrayal of everything RiverGroup. Most of all it’s a big fat slap in my face.”
“You need to control this,” said his hairdresser, quietly yet sternly, as he chopsticked Father’s Afro.
“I won’t do anything if you fire Joelene,” I threatened.
With his hands on his hips, Father glared at me. “You’re no help anyway!”
“Hiro,” said Xavid, “remember what I said. We need him. You need to use him.”
“He just mocks me or makes me look like an idiot!”
“Joelene didn’t do any of this. It was my plan,” I said, ignoring his ridiculous hairdresser.
“Michael,” Joelene said, “maybe it’s time that I should—”
“No!” I told her, hating even the suggestion that she should quit. The thing was, she didn’t look so much angry or hurt, but resolute.
“She can’t leave me!” I said to both Father and her. Looking her in the eye, I said, “I need her. She’s like my real family.”
Joelene suppressed a smile, and then patted the back of my hand.
“Butt vomit!” said Father. “What is the matter with you? She’s your damn tutor! Not your family. Don’t you know anything?”
“Well,” I asked, thumbing toward Xavid, “who is he?”
A drop of sweat rolled down Father’s forehead. When he wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket, it left a green smear.
“Now look what you did!” said Xavid, scolding him like a little boy. As he got out a silky cloth and wiped Father’s forehead, he leaned in and said, “I think you need to make it very clear to them what you expect.”
“Yeah!” agreed Father. A beat later, he asked, “How do you think?”
“What about your friend in Europa-13?”
Father narrowed his eyes at his hairdresser.
“Let us go back to the compound,” I told Father.
“Don’t think so! We’re taking a drive.” With a wink toward Xavid, he added, “I’ve got a rotten, horrible, stinking, evil bastard I’d like you to meet.”
Nine
From the outside, our Loop cars were identical orange-and-blue-painted teardrops, with a tilted glass all around. Inside, his was not surprisingly a design catastrophe.
Every surface was upholstered with a different material so it looked like a cheap fabric sampler. Unlike the muted, indirect lighting in my car, here a hundred blue and orange pinpoint lasers scribbled Ültra lyrics everywhere at high speed. While it covered everything in a senseless, vibrating surface, occasionally a phrase lingered in the eye. Unite our diseases… Engage booster fuck… My tender gender fatality.
When I stepped in, I found that the floor was covered with an unpleasant super-shag rug that crunched like dried leaves. Scattered among the yarns was a vast assortment of garbage, including empty carrot liquor bottles, star-shaped pills, phallus-shaped pills, fist-shaped pills, skull-shaped pills, red and black dildos, some of which were twitching like dying insects, and several bits of what looked like bloody fur. I figured it was the debris of a debauched car-party while he watched the promotion date.
My car had only four seats with consoles; his had a dozen chairs all the way around. He and Xavid sat on the far side, the film crew set up in back, and Joelene and I were closest to the side door.
Once we were on the Loop, Father opened a bottle and poured glasses of carrot.
“Some rotten garden juice?” he asked us.
“Thank you, no,” said Joelene.
Once he and Xavid had made a toast, he turned his glass upside down over his mouth and let the goop slowly drop in. “Thick!” he said, once he had finally swallowed it. For a while he turned on some painfully loud Ültra song and sang along. Joelene and I covered our ears. The phrase Snuff Your Mind flashed onto my leg. Instinctively, I swatted my hand at it as though it were a mosquito.
Then the music was off. “We have to start having rages again,” said Father. “Dance parties every night! That’s what we did when we were number one.” As quickly as he had been excited, he slumped, and said, “Our clients all hate me,” and stared at the black residue in his glass.
“They don’t hate you,” said Xavid. “You’re a tough businessman. They admire you and fear you.”
Father laughed. “They hate me because I’m a terrible businessman. They think I’m so stupid they can take me down. But I’m not going to let them.” One of the lasers etched Behold… The Immaculate Bruise across his face.
The car exited the Loop, and after we traveled down the deceleration ramp, we were on local roads passing low buildings and wide avenues. I wasn’t sure where we were, but it had to be somewhere in Europa-12, where there wasn’t much of anything good. The streets became more narrow and bumpy. I saw stretches of abandoned buildings and junk everywhere. We came to a checkpoint; Father stepped out into the stink of the night and negotiated our passage with blue slub satins.