“Don't want to go jumping to no conclusions.”
“Never.”
“Damn straight.”
The first optician went to the counter and took out a pack of cigarettes. The second optician sighed.
“You got a good man here, Bucket,” said the customer, pointing. “I spoke too soon.”
“Watch your hands,” said the second optician.
“You'll watch 'em for me, Bucket. I know you will.”
The sun was down. Shops outside rolled down their gates. Restaurant deliverymen on green bicycles began to fill the street. Men dragged home milk and flowers and shuttered umbrellas.
The first optician lit another cigarette and put it in the customer's mouth for him, so the customer could keep his hands on his knees.
The second optician moved into the back of the shop, to call his wife, to say he'd be late.
The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door
THE DYSTOPIANIST DESTROYED THE WORLD again that morning, before making any phone calls or checking his mail, before even breakfast. He destroyed it by cabbages. The Dystopianist's scribbling fingers pushed notes onto the page: a protagonist, someone, a tousle-haired, well-intentioned geneticist, had designed a new kind of cabbage for use as a safety device—the “air bag cabbage.” The air bag cabbage mimicked those decorative cabbages planted by the sides of roads to spell names of towns, or arranged by color — red, white, and that eerie, iridescent cabbage indigo — to create American flags. It looked like any other cabbage. But underground was a network of gas-bag roots, vast inflatable roots, filled with pressurized air. So, at the slightest tap, no, more than a tap, or vandals would set them off for fun, right, given a serious blow such as only a car traveling at thirty miles or more per hour could deliver, the heads of the air bag cabbages would instantly inflate, drawing air from the root system, to cushion the impact of the crash, saving lives, preventing costly property loss. Only—
The Dystopianist pushed away from his desk, and squinted through the blinds at the sun-splashed street below. School buses lined his block every morning, like vast tipped orange-juice cartons spilling out the human vitamin of youthful lunacy, that chaos of jeering voices and dancing tangled shadows in the long morning light. The Dystopianist was hungry for breakfast. He didn't know yet how the misguided safety cabbages fucked up the world. He couldn't say what grievous chain of circumstances led from the innocuous genetic novelty to another crushing totalitarian regime. He didn't know what light the cabbages shed on the death urge in human societies. He'd work it out, though. That was his job. First Monday of each month the Dystopianist came up with his idea, the green poison fog or dehumanizing fractal download or alienating architectural fad which would open the way to another ruined or oppressed reality. Tuesday he began making his extrapolations, and he had the rest of the month to get it right. Today was Monday, so the cabbages were enough.
The Dystopianist moved into the kitchen, poured a second cup of coffee, and pushed slices of bread into the toaster. The Times Metro section headline spoke of the capture of a celebrated villain, an addict and killer who'd crushed a pedestrian's skull with a cobblestone. The Dystopianist read his paper while scraping his toast with shreds of ginger marmalade, knife rushing a little surf of butter ahead of the crystalline goo. He read intently to the end of the account, taking pleasure in the story.
The Dystopianist hated bullies. He tried to picture himself standing behind darkened glass, fingering perps in a line-up, couldn't. He tried to picture himself standing in the glare, head flinched in arrogant dejection, waiting to be fingered, but this was even more impossible. He stared at the photo of the apprehended man and unexpectedly the Dystopianist found himself thinking vengefully, hatefully, of his rival.
Once the Dystopianist had had the entire dystopian field to himself. There was just him and the Utopianists. The Dystopianist loved reading the Utopianists' stories, their dim, hopeful scenarios, which were published in magazines like Expectant and Encouraging. The Dystopianist routinely purchased them newly minted from the newsstands and perverted them the very next day in his own work, plundering the Utopianists' motifs for dark inspiration. Even the garishly sunny illustrated covers of the magazines were fuel. The Dystopianist stripped them from the magazines' spines and pinned them up over his desk, then raised his pen like Death's sickle and plunged those dreamily ineffectual worlds into ruin.
The Utopianists were older men who'd come into the field from the sciences or from academia: Professor this or that, like Dutch burghers from a cigar box. The Dystopianist had appeared in print like a rat among them, a burrowing animal laying turds on their never-to-be-realized blueprints. He liked his role. Every once in a blue moon the Dystopianist agreed to appear in public alongside the Utopianists, on a panel at a university or a conference. They loved to gather, the fools, in fluorescent-lit halls behind tables decorated with sweating pitchers of ice water. They were always eager to praise him in public by calling him one of their own. The Dystopianist ignored them, refusing even the water from their pitchers. He played directly to the audience members who'd come to see him, who shared his low opinion of the Utopianists. The Dystopianist could always spot his readers by their black trench coats, their acne, their greasily teased hair, their earphones, resting around their collars, trailing to Walkmans secreted in coat pockets.
The Dystopianist's rival was a Utopianist, but he wasn't like the others.
The Dystopianist had known his rival, the man he privately called the Dire One, since they were children like those streaming into the schoolyard below. Eeny meeny miney moe! they'd chanted together, each trembling in fear of being permanently “It,” of never casting off their permanent case of cooties. They weren't quite friends, but the Dystopianist and the Dire One had been bullied together by the older boys, quarantined in their shared nerdishness, forced to pool their resentments. In glum resignation they'd swapped Wacky Packages stickers and algebra homework answers, offered sticks of Juicy Fruit and squares of Now-N-Later, forging a loser's deal of consolation.
Then they were separated after junior high school, and the Dystopianist forgot his uneasy schoolmate.
It was nearly a year now since the Dire Utopianist had first arrived in print. The Dystopianist had trundled home with the latest issue of Heartening, expecting the usual laughs, and been blindsided instead by the Dire Utopianist's first story. The Dystopianist didn't recognize his rival by name, but he knew him for a rival instantly.
The Dire Utopianist's trick was to write in a style which was nominally utopian. His fantasies were nearly as credible as everyday experience, but bathed in a radiance of glory. They glowed with wishfulness. The other Utopianists' stories were crude candy floss by comparison. The Dire Utopianist's stories weren't blunt or ideological. He'd invented an aesthetics of utopia.
Fair enough. If he'd stopped at this burnished, closely observed dream of human life, the Dire Utopianist would be no threat. Sure, heck, let there be one genius among the Utopianists, all the better. It raised the bar. The Dystopianist took the Dire One's mimetic brilliance as a spur of inspiration: Look closer! Make it real!