When Joelene’s eyes met mine, I felt that we both had the same mood: a nebulous sense of defeat, under-painted with the caustic dread of seeing Father.
Finally, she nodded toward the door. We entered the building, and found meeting theater five. The three-hundred-seat auditorium was empty, dark, and cold. Joelene located the controls, and as she turned on house lights, I sat in one of the orange, over-stuffed chairs toward the front. Above the stage hung an enormous, glowing estimator clock—a family antique. Across the top it read: Hiro Bruce Rivers Arrival Time. Below were the stylized, red numbers.
“Joelene,” I said, at once relieved and annoyed to see that it read: one hour and thirty-three minutes. “I’m not waiting.”
“That can’t be right,” she muttered as she opened a screen and checked with his people. “They say five or ten.”
As if the estimator clock had heard, the glowing numbers on the clock’s face flickered then read fourteen minutes eighty-one seconds and began counting down.
“The freeboot who shot you,” said Joelene, reading from her screen, “is suspected to have been from Antarctica. The family council reports that the medicated bullets were prototypes stolen in Europa two weeks ago. They suspected he was a lone gunman. What little has been discovered suggests that he trafficked contraband including ARU and other pain caustics.”
The details of my shooting bored me. They changed nothing. They brought Nora no closer. “What does Father want?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.
“We’ll cover your health, debrief your date and the aftermath. He may want to strategize. And it’s possible he might apologize.” Joelene shrugged as if to say the last was unlikely.
“It’s his fault!” I said.
“It’s no one’s.”
“He ruined the company.”
“That,” she said, stretching the word, “is a different issue.”
“So, it is his fault. RiverGroup should have protected me! That’s failure. It was the most important day of my life! The most important moment in history! Just when everything was so perfect!” I put my head in my hands. As much as I detested everything that had happened, I hated to whine like a spoiled child. The clock’s numbers twinkled, and now it read fourteen days, five hours, and sixty-three seconds. “Look at that,” I said, standing, “he’s not coming.”
“Wait,” said Joelene as the lights sputtered and blinked. Then it said five seconds. Four seconds. Three seconds. I flopped backward into the chair. An instant later, though, the clock read five minutes and was counting up.
“This is impossible!”
The clock numbers flashed, then spun backward again to four seconds. Three seconds. It skipped two and stayed on one for half a minute.
Just as I gave up and started to stand again, the house lights went black. An announcer’s voice boomed, “Straight from the highest profit quarter on record, President, CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, CPO, Chief Programmer, and all-around Super Code Bastard, give it up for Hiro Bruce Rivers!”
As a catastrophically loud drumbeat kicked in, and we covered our ears, orange and blue fireworks exploded across the front of the stage. At the back, a figure rose from the floor before a giant vibrating blue RiverGroup logo. For several beats, he stood there, his head down, his arms flexed, as if posing like a monster wrestler.
When a throbbing, super-deep bass and a whining singer, who sounded like he was either in a state of ecstasy or dreadful constipation, started, Father came to life. He jogged forward and pumped his fists victoriously. A spotlight came on as a cast-iron phallus-shaped podium rose to meet him at the front of the stage. Horns and guitars blasted, the voices wailed, and I thought I heard the words cunt spaceship.
Now Father sashayed back and forth with exactly the same moves he’d been doing for years—a combination of pelvis thrusts, head bobs, and a lot of sliding to and fro on his foot-tall, green-glass platform shoes.
“Slap me! Slap me hard!” he cried as the music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. “That’s You’re My Cunt Spaceship by TastyLüng,” he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the silence. Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness. “Hello?” he asked, as if afraid he was alone. “What the hell? Anyone out there?”
I was tempted to say nothing, hope he would decide the place was empty, and go away. Instead, I said, “You ruined everything!”
His eyes darted toward me. “I’d like to fire the whole fucked-up piece of fucking shit company!” First he threw a stack of papers into the air, then hugged the podium and thrust his hips into it. “We’re fucked! What do you want me to tell you? It was the weirdest and worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.” Papers rained down on his head as he implored, “How we gave a fucking freeboot an identity and let him right in the middle of our fucking press conference, I have no fucking idea!”
“It’s your fault!”
“Me?” He laughed. “We had everything nailed down—everything completely checked, then out of nowhere—wham! A fucking freeboot with a fashion rifle. And I thought you were dead when you fell over! That was fucking scary. That was shit-in-thong time! And why he shoots your hands and feet, I don’t know. Nothing makes any fucking sense! We’ve been checking everything, but I can’t find any answers.” As if he were shouting at the world, he tilted his head back and cried, “Fucking freeboots!”
My father was an inch shorter than I, but he still worked the machines so his arms where bulky, his legs, sculpted, and his neck, thick. His clothes were as putrid as his taste in music. Today, he wore a long, tailed, green-plaid jacket over a vibrating orange and black shirt, long blue pants with little video screens all over, and the aforementioned platforms. As for his hair, he dyed it dark brown and had it permed into a tight Afro. It looked exactly like moist chocolate cake.
His hairdresser, Xavid, with his snow-capped hairdo and huge square glasses, came running onto the stage, and began to gather up the fallen papers and hand them to Father. Xavid then quickly patted Father’s Afro here and there and headed off.
“Anyway, I feel for you, son! I do. I was watching that date—and holy fucking shit was it boring—but whatever! I was there with my girls, my snacks, and we were all cheering and going on, and then I couldn’t fucking believe a freeboot! They should all be rounded up and fried in oil! Motherfuckers.”
“They’re off the system,” said Joelene, with surprising annoyance. “That’s why they can’t be located and rounded up, as you say.”
Father leaned far forward and squinted. “You’re here, too? Jesus fuckercakes, Michael! Can’t you fart without her anymore?” He smacked his face with one of his thick hands. “God, son, what do you have in your ball sack? Muffins?”
“I want Nora back,” I said.
He shook his head. “You know what I think of MKG, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, and that Nora—who, I have to say, seems like the biggest priss hole in the universe? They can suck one of my anal enchiladas!”
“Don’t say that. I love her!”
“I don’t know why. She’s as dull as skim milk!”
I hated his relentless verbal attacks. “You never understand.”