THE FUTURENESS Ch11: Arrivals/Departures

I’m fifteen years old.

My father’s in the garage, bent over his work to kill the Honda’s mind, when suddenly he looks up at me. I freeze, because I guessed I’d been jumpy again, and had jolted the table the brain cap sat upon. He plucked out an earbud.

She’s Italian, he said.

With his grin he resembled the no-jokers, who were popping up outside Dayton again to fuck with whomever they found. Maybe her driver had been one of their left behinds running for the woods.

Keep her, I told my dad.

She’s gonna call someone when I disconnect the EMP on her, you know? You know, little blockhead? You want to move out here, in with her, instead? Here, in the garage? Talk to her, live inside her? You never have to leave. I’ll clip her GPS, my friend, cover the windows nice and dark. You can live in the garage, inside the Italian Honda, Francesca!

I —

Her name is Francesca!

Dad —

She wants to meet you, bleeding heart man, feed you a bowl of her puttanesca. It’s in the trunk, papa.

The man’s wife had left him only a few months earlier. I didn’t, and still don’t know why. And she left him with me, fifteen, shitty and boring, with nothing to offer but complaints. I repaid him horribly for raising me by being with Michelle. He repaid me for that by becoming a psychonaut, emphasis on the first two syllables.

I’m in the future, and if you don’t leave Dayton, I’m going to come with my kitchen shears and take you out, bit by bit. After Xavier left, I still sat in the parking lot of the Golden Apple, doing my job. It just so happened the seasons changed to spring. Crisp air blew in lightly across the plains, and shadows of cars on the highway grew so unseasonably long they crossed the median. The unreturned postcard from Ms. Hayley’s fifth grade class balloon sat on my desk, next to a postcard from Xavier, the DaVinci drawing of the human form with Xavier’s grotesque message handwritten in mauve on the lower third: “more for more time,” and an X over one hand.

The future came in over the tops of the warehouses flanking the highways and flickered through the colors I posted, then drifted downward like a partially collapsed balloon as masses of time—tectonic plates grinding against one another—spawned undetectable fissures.

I just want out from under it. I’m not a preacher type, like what I found on the religious tapes. I’m not someone who can take this vision and bring it to others. It’s so stuck inside of me I couldn’t get my oldest friend—who’s now engineering the passage of pills to me and won’t confess—to see it. I want to get it out somehow, but I’m returning to my car parked outside the Golden Apple, container of to-go catfish in my hands, thinking that these old folks lining up to early dinner won’t listen to my premonitions of the end of the future, either.

I can feel it. I shut the car door, and inside the enclosed, muffled space there is someone else. I peel the calendrical skin from the rear view. Xavier sits in the backseat, opposite to me, sunglasses, a pale, granite frown, same brown suit.

“Francesca,” I said. “Explain the amateur surgeon in our space?”

Non capisco   

It was her voice, accent, but without any intonation I recognized except when my father rooted her mind in our garage and I, overwhelmed finally by the fact I’d stolen the car from a woman who’d taken a fatally wounded walk into the tree line, begged him to restore her. I’d learn Italian, I told him, and I did, in a way. I learned how to say, In English, please, fluently. In the dead woman’s honor? A teen’s dream of honor, at best.

I looked back into those sunglasses in the mirror.

“I taught you a few tricks fifteen years ago, but she’s hardened against new attacks. So, either my father gave you a backdoor—”

Xavier, stock still, whimpered under the strain of suppressing his laughter.

“—or you’ve kept up with this kind of AI, which isn’t close to fintech.”

“No.”

“Fuck. My father.”

“Wait. Rich, not your dad. I’ve kept up, but I’m not jacking cars. I have people for that.”

“Maybe you’d like to offer me a job, then. They’re fresh out of newspapers.” I pointed at the dash. “Is she backed up?”

Xavier said, “Hold on.”

Rich. Che succede. Un momento

“She’ll diagnostic for a bit, find nothing, apologize. She’s all there, don’t worry.”

“Mean.”

“We’re filtered for a second. I need to speak with you privately, Rich.”

“Get out of her head.”

“I know she was your first. I get it. This is a bit bigger than used cars at the moment?”

“What—Radio Kill Report is bigger? Did you even go back to Chicago? Are you stalking me? I’m done playing. Or tell me about skrip.”

“Doesn’t do what your dad claims. We fashioned it. It’s safer than aspirin. You’re not the only one taking it, but with you, we had to do it differently. Non-consensually, so to speak.” Xavier waved his hand. “Sort of. You were already choosing to pop unlabeled pills triggered by your father’s planted body language and some exoticism about the packaging that would tempt someone perhaps like you.”

“Francesca!”

“We’re filtered. Perhaps someone like you, who wants to see something more and know something more about what happened in the mall that evening. About what happened to Elizabeth Casey. To Gary and Lisa, who I know you still haven’t even met. And to you. All of us are especially interested in helping you understand what happened to you. And we’d like your help in looking deeper because—”

Sono tornato, Rich

“Um.” I could hardly get out more. “You’re back. How are, are you?”

Eccellente

I turned to face Xavier.

“Nothing better to do,” I said. “I’ll need a few questions answered.”

“You can ask on the way.”

“Where?”

“Over to the back wall of the Golden Apple. We need to see you stand where the kids allegedly blew off their heads.”

“Why?”

“To see what happens to you.”

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