Alexander Jablokov - Market Report.rtf

Alexander Jablokov

MARKET REPORT

Information on our buying habits is constantly collected and used by companies intent on selling us more of the some material. It may not be long before that data is used for other, more sinister, reasons as well, Alexander Jablokov’s latest novel, Deepdrive, is just out from Avion Eos.

I

slid out of the rental car’s AC, and the heat of the midwestern night wrapped itself around my face like a wet iguana. Lightning bugs blinked in the unmown grass of my parents’ lawn, and cicadas rasped tenaciously at the sub-division’s silence. Old Oak Orchard was so new it wasn’t even on my most recent DeLorme map CD‑ROM, and it had taken me a while to find the place.

My father pulled the door open before I could ring the bell.

“Bert.” He peered past me. “Ah. And where is—”

“Stacy’s not with me.” I’d practiced what to say on the drive from the air­port, but still hadn’t come up with anything coherent. “We…well, let’s just say there have been problems.”

“So many marriages are ended in the passive voice.” His voice was careful­ly neutral. “Come along back, then. I’ll set you up a tent.”

Dad wore a pair of once‑fashionable pleated linen shorts and a floppy T‑shirt with the name of an Internet provider on it. His skin was all dark and leath­ery, the color of retirement. He looked like he’d just woken up.

“I told Mom when I was coming…”

“Sure.” He grabbed my suitcase and wrestled it down the hall. “She must have nailed the note to a tree, and I didn’t see it.”

I didn’t know why I always waited a mom6nt for him to explain things. He never did. I was just supposed to catch on. I had spent my whole life trying to catch on.

“Lulu!” he called out the back slider. “Bert’s home.”

I winced as he dragged my leather suitcase over the sliding door tracks into the backyard. A glowing blue North Face tent sat on the grass. A Coleman lantern pooled yellow on a picnic table stolen from a roadside rest area. The snapped security chain dangled down underneath:

“Lulu!” he yelled, then managed a grin for me. “She must be checking the garden. We get…you know…slugs. Eat the tomatoes.”

The yard didn’t end in a garden. Beyond the grass was a dense growth of trees. Now and then, headlights from the highway beyond paled the under­sides of the maple leaves, but they didn’t let me see anything.

“Sure.” I sat down at the picnic table. “So how are you, Dad?”

He squinted at me, as if unsure whether I was joking. “Me? Oh, I’m fine. Never better. Life out here agrees with me. Should have done it a long time ago.

Clichés were my father’s front defensive line. He was fortifying quickly, building walls in front of questions I hadn’t even asked yet.

“Trouble?” I said. “With Mom?” Being subtle is a nonstarter in my family.

“And how is your fast‑paced urban lifestyle?” he asked

“We’re working a few things out. A bit of a shakedown period, you might call it.”

My parents’ entire marriage had been a shakedown period. I was just an interim project that had somehow become permanent. I swear, all through my childhood, every morning they had been surprised to see me come down­stairs to breakfast. Even now, my dad was looking at me as if he wasn’t en­tirely sure who I was.

“Well, to start with, Dad, I guess the problems Stacy and I have been hav­ing stem from being in the same profession—”

“You know,” Dad said, “your mother still has the darkest blue eyes I have ever seen.

“She does have lovely eyes.”

“Cornflower blue, I always thought. Her eyes are cornflower blue.”

Stacy’s eyes were brown, but I guessed my father wasn’t interested in hearing about that. “Cornflowers are not the flowers on corn.” It had taken me years to figure that out.

“That’s right.”

“Someone once told me,” I said, “that you can hear corn growing at night. It grows so fast on hot summer nights. A night like tonight.”

“You need quiet to hear it,” he said. “You don’t like quiet, do you, Bert?” He was already looking for an argument. “You can’t market quiet.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “There’s an ambient recording you can buy of corn growing. Cells dividing. Leaves rustling. Bugs, I don’t know, eat­ing the leaves. That little juicy crunch Call it a grace note.”

“And so you play it over your Home Theater system. With subwoofer, side speakers, the works? Pour yourself a single‑malt, sit back, relax?”

“You don’t listen to ambient, Dad. You let it wash over you. Through you. The whole point of modern life is never giving your full attention to any one thing. That gets boring. So you put the corn in the CD stack with the sound of windblown sand eroding the Sphinx, snow falling on the Ross Ice Shelf, the relaxing distant rattle of a horde of lemmings hitting the ocean, pop open your PowerBook to work some spreadsheets, and put a football game on the giant TV. You’ll get the Oneness thing happening in no time.”

“Are you getting it?” he asked softly. It wasn’t like his regular voice at all.

“The Oneness. Whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“There was a time when I was so close I could taste it…”

“Bertram! There you are!” Had my mother just come out of the woods? She was knotting the sash of a fluffy white terrycloth robe, as if she’d just stepped from the bathroom. Her gray hair was cut close to her scalp. She looked great. She always had. Even rubbing sleep out of her eyes, her feet bare. She still painted her toenails, I noticed, and they weren’t even chipped. “Franklin, weren’t you going to go get him a tent?”

“I was,” my dad said.

She hugged me, then tugged at the sleeve of my jacket. “Isn’t it a little hot for wool?”

“It’s tropic weight,” I said. “Gaberdine.”

“The tropics have nothing on Illinois in August.” With that last shot, my dad disappeared into the garage.

“Franklin’s right. Here.” An antique steamer trunk stood on end next to where the house’s air‑conditioning unit poked out of the rhododendrons.

Then my jacket was off, my tie was gone, and I was sitting at the picnic table with an iced glass of cranberry juice in my hand. Mothers do card tricks with comfort. All Dad had offered me was an argument—but then that was his way of letting me know I was home.

“Did the power go out, Mom?” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, no. How do you think I made the ice cubes? It’s just the way we live now. Out here in the country.”

Now that I had a chance to relax, I could see that the other backyards vis­ible had encampments in them too: tents, tables, meat smokers, greenhouses, even a Port‑O‑Let or two. I could hear people talking quietly, even at this hour, and smell the smoke of banked cookfires. Something was wrong, seri­ously wrong, with this exclusive residential community. I should have known it as soon as my mom gave me the cranberry juice. Her comfort meant that something was not right.

There were times in my childhood when everything had been stable. For a couple of years, for example, my dad had worked in a regular pet store, sell­ing neon tetras and spaniels to wide‑eyed children who would lose interest in them as soon as they got them home. We’d lived in a suburban house with a yard, all that, and I’d been able to tell the other kids what my dad did for a living. The TV shows I watched seemed to be intended to be watched by peo­ple living the life I then lived.

But during that time my mother had barely paid attention to me. TV din­ners had been the order of the day, and I remembered a lot of drive‑thru eat­ing. She thought I was safe, then, and could take care of myself.

It was times like when my dad tried to build a submerged house at the bot­tom of an abandoned water‑filled quarry and stock the water with ornamen­tal piranha that my mother would bake me apple cobbler and paint farm scenes with smiling cows on the riveted bulkhead in my room. She had al­ways intervened to keep the panic in my memories on a perfectly even keel.

“I should have known,” I said.

Ice cubes clinked in my empty glass and she refilled it. “Known what, Bertram?”

“That you and Dad could turn the most wholesome of carefully planned and secure communities into something disturbing. And here I thought, while driving around, that you two had finally settled down, so that I could visit you without fear. Nice neighborhood, Old Oak Orchard.”

She looked off at the glowing tents of the neighbors. “It is a nice neighborhood. Do you smell roasting joints from oxen and goats hissing fat on ancient sacrificial stones? Hear the minor‑key chants of the priests as they rip open the jugulars of bellowing kine with their bronze blades? Does that make you afraid?”

“Lulubelle.” My father broke a branch on a forsythia as he wrestled a heavy bundle out of the garage. My mother winced. “You’re frightening the boy with all this pseudo‑biblical ‘kine’ stuff. That’s cows, Bert, if you don’t know. Herefords, Black Anguses. Besides, Lulu, you know our whole con­cept’s not really about...that sort of thing. That’s not the point.”

“I thought we had agreed to disagree on the point, Franklin” I noticed that my mother had scratches up and down her arms, and that one of her little fingers was in a splint. Both Dad and I heard the danger in her tone.

He held up the tent. “It’s canvas, Bert. White duck. Heavy as hell. You know, I saw some hunters out in the Gila with one of these once. They packed in on horses, and fried up a mess of potatoes in a cast‑iron pan two feet across. My friend and I ate some kind of reconstituted gunk out of a plastic bowl. They were hunting elk with black‑powder rifles. The things looked like cannon.”

He’d told me the story before, but the actual physical tent was a new ele­ment. It was as if he now needed some real substance behind the memory. My father swore under his breath as he put the thing up. I knew better than to try and help him. It had all sorts of complicated ribs and locking joints. He pinched some skin and got real quiet. You could hear him breathing through his nostrils.

“Oh, come on, Bertram.” My mother chuckled. “You won’t see any animal­-headed gods in the Lopezes’ backyard, so quit staring. I was just…kidding.”

She was really being hard on me. She’d noticed Stacy’s absence, but wasn’t going to ask about it. I was sure it pleased her, though.

“It’s late, Lu.” My father looked hungrily at my mother. Men should not look at their own wives that way, and particularly not at the mothers of their sons.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s time for bed.”

It was peacemaking gesture of some sort. They’d been at war, but my ar­rival had brought them together. My mother smiled it me over her shoulder as she followed him into their dome tent. It was the same old story. My par­ents had always disappeared behind their locked bedroom door, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes when I was sitting down in the living room with uncomfortable shoes on, waiting to go to some relative’s house, and I wasn’t even allowed to turn the TV on.

I woke up. I hadn’t really slept. It was quiet. Still dark. I was thirsty. I walked across the lawn to the back door. The cut ends of the grass tickled my bare feet. It was a great feeling, a suburban feeling. The stars were weirdly bright. The Milky Way was something you wanted to wipe off with a sponge.

The sliding glass door to the kitchen wasn’t locked. As a child, I’d always asked for kitchen water rather than bathroom water. My mother would go downstairs for me. The stairs creaked and I would hear her and know that she loved me. My father would go into the bathroom, make a lot of noise so I knew he hadn’t gone anywhere, even flush the toilet, and then come back and tell me that it was the finest kitchen water there was. If I was thirsty enough, I would believe him.

The kitchen was dark. I felt the edge of a Corian counter top. I worked my way toward the sink. I saw the high faucet silhouetted against the window. Wet on my fingers. Something was soaking in the full sink. The water did not feel soapy. The glasses would be in this cabinet over here.

Something hissed at me. For a second I thought it was air‑conditioning af­ter all, despite how hot it was in the kitchen. Then I saw the eyes.

“What is that thing he’s got in his mouth?” my father said. He peered up above the cabinets, into the shadows cast by the lamp. “A vole? Do we have voles? Or is that a star‑nosed mole? Native or…recreated?”

“Franklin,” my mother said.

From a cookie jar shaped like a squat Chrysler Building she gave me a Tollhouse cookie. It couldn’t have been baked more than a couple of hours be­fore, probably about the time I was landing at O’Hare. The chocolate chips wore still a little liquid. They unfurled themselves across my tongue. I lay on the textured floor. I didn’t want to get up.

A magnet on the white dishwasher said CLEAN. The symbol for CLEAN was the smoking rubble of a city. I reached up and turned it over. DIRTY was that city whole, veiled in a haze of smog. A typical example of one of my fa­ther’s deep ecology jokes. Smog is one of those antique sixties‑type symbols he’s always using as if they were arguments.

This time my father heard the warning in my mother’s voice. He squatted down next to me. His knees cracked.

“Sorry’ Bert”’ he said. “I guess I should have told you.”

“Told me what? That you have animals in your sink?”

“It was a fisher.”

I caught glimpses of the creature as it snaked its way across the tops of the cabinets, some kind of rodent limp in its mouth. It looked like a big weasel. Its eyes gleamed down at me in the lantern light. Its eyes…

“A fisher?” I didn’t look at it. Frogs made a low thrumming noise in the sink. An owl hooted out in the living room. Things examined us from outside the circle of light. When I was little, and wouldn’t go get a drink of water myself, this was what I had known it was really like out there.

“Actually, it’s an extinct species of mustelid,” he said. “This one vanished about the time the ice sheets left North America. It’s part of a controlled breeding experiment, the reason we’ve moved here to Old Oak Orchard. We regress the DNA of animals that went extinct around the Pleistocene and im­plant it in related ova.”

“Oh, God, Dad. Remember that time you raised insulated sea turtles to give rides at that Aleutian beach resort?”

The resort had been run as some government benefit for impoverished Aleuts. All I remembered of the experience was thick clouds, rocks, and giant lumbering shells covered with barnacles, all roughly the same shade of gray. I didn’t remember the turtles having any heads. My only entertainment had been working on a seaweed collection. It had all climaxed in a riot by the dis­illusioned locals, who had invested heavily in beachfront cabanas and glitzy casinos, and blamed my father for the fact that sea turtle rides through chop­py ice water failed to draw more tourists. Most of the turtles had been stewed in their own shells on the rocky beach in a drunken feast. Sea lions had barked their approval somewhere out in the mist, which glowed orange with the burning cabanas as we pulled away in our fibreglass bidarka. My moth­er had made my very favourite chili mac while we were there, and tucked me into bed every night with a sweet lullaby in a foreign language.

‘“We were undercapitalised, that’s all.” My dad was irritated at having it brought up. “The failure wasn’t biological.”

“No, they never are—”

“You’re cranky, Bertram.” My mother supported my shoulders, and I sat up. “Not enough sleep.”

She had an almost suntan lotion smell, even though it was still dark. Some kind of collagen replacement cream. It was a comfort, to realize that my mother wanted to stay young. It was something to hold on to. The extinct mustelid slunk into shadows and did not come back out.

The lighter and fluffier my mom’s scrambled eggs, the worse things were—a classic rule. This morning, with the innocent light streaming in through the kitchen windows, they were like clouds. I had looked around the house, but most of its nocturnal dwellers seemed to have hidden themselves in the cup­boards and cabinets.

“Is Dad driving you crazy? “ I asked. The orange juice was metallic, from concentrate, so maybe there was some hope.

“Since when hasn’t he?” She smiled. “But this time I’m driving him crazy too. I came here under protest—who wants to move out to one of these bland compounds out in the middle of nowhere, even to raise extinct fauna? Really, that’s no different than playing golf until you die, don’t you think?”

I didn’t tell her how happy I had been to see the place, to feel its stolid nor­mality. Sodden, heavy scrambled eggs would have been a small price to pay to know that I was, at last, safe.

“But I’ve found things to do. I’ve found ways to enjoy this little place. And that, as you can guess, drives your dad bananas. I’m using it wrong, you see. I’m not enjoying it the proper way.” She produced a day‑labeled pillbox, and started filling it with red, yellow, and green pills. Sunday through Saturday. Her week was set up.

“And how are you enjoying it, Mother?”

She held up a deep‑green lozenge. “Do you think my body used to produce this, and then stopped? What gland do you suppose made it?” The pill had a particularly hard gleam, like a liquid‑oxygen tank on a Pixar-generated spacecraft in an SF movie.

“I don’t know.”

“You know how all these Pleisto‑kooks got together? They all used to be­long to the same Internet newsgroup. They’d trade breeding tips, give each other heads‑up on available DNA sequencers and incubators. Then, a bunch of them decided to live together and work on a big project. They bought into Old Oak Orchard en masse. Some of these people were quite wealthy.”

“It’s the latest thing, you know,” I said. “The transformation of virtual communities into real ones. One of those wonderful retrogressive steps that makes my job so much fun.”

She sighed. “I know mothers can never explain their children’s jobs right nowadays, and it always drives the kids crazy. But if you’d only have normal jobs, like, I don’t know, accountant, or wrestler, or weatherman, or some­thing…

“Wrestler?”

“Then we could just say it, and people would know what we meant.”

“I’ve told you what Stacy and I do. Call us experimental demographers. That’s close enough.”

There, Id brought up the dread name. My mom pursed her lips, but maybe it was because she didn’t like the OJ either. “That’s not really what you are, is it?”

“No, Mom.” I knew she could hear the sadness in my voice. “That’s not really what I am. Not anymore.”

“Oh, Bertram.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know who pushed whom, but she’s gone, isn’t she?”

“As gone as it gets. And my job along with her.”

“She meant so much to you…” She’d never liked Stacy, but she knew what hurt her son.

“The last job we did…” I said. “Stacy soloed, I only advised. She was good, real good. I’d taught her how to spot potentially self‑defined groups…she found a little community of interest among teenagers. A disaffected layer in a lot of high schools, all across the country. People think it’s all mass market­ing, but that’s not where the real value‑added stuff comes in, not any more. These kids didn’t identify themselves as any sort of group, but I could—Stacy could tell from what they bought, the kind of magazines they read, the web sites they hit, and music they listened to, and the street drugs they took, that they were looking for something. Something they hadn’t found yet. So she gave it to them.”

“What?” My mother was interested despite herself.

“The past. The real deep past. It just took a little marketing push, and they ­started mail‑ordering flint blanks for spear points, birth‑control dispensers in the shape of Palaeolithic fertility figurines, ink‑jet‑sprayed wall paintings to conjure up mammoths. It was just this group, but they were really into it. Their rooms at home must have looked like Altamira or Lascaux. When the trend tanks you won’t be able to give that Acheulean stuff away, but that’s off in…the future.”

My mother stood up and ran gnarled fingers through her short gray hair. She didn’t look young. I wouldn’t pretend that. She was old, she was my mother. But she had more light in her eyes than she’d had in years. She also had scratches on her hands, and calluses on her palms, like she’d been work­ing hard somewhere outdoors for quite some time. My mother had never been a gardener and, in fact, there was no trace of any garden in the yard. I’d looked for it.

“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” Her tone was bitter.

“Mom, I—”

“Talk to your dad. I mean, really talk to him. I think you still need a few lessons in what life is really like.”

She walked out of the kitchen. A few minutes later I heard the door to the yard ease open. I craned my head out the kitchen window, but couldn’t see where she went. I sat down to another cup of coffee. Something that looked a lot like a badger poked its head out from under the sink, saw me, and pulled back. The little door clicked back onto its magnet.

“Dad”’ I said. “I think you got some problems.” Mom had gotten me think­ing about the possible consequences of his new project. I felt like I was back on the job. It bugged me how much I liked that feeling.

“You’re telling me?” He spent some time putting the ball on his tee. “I thought your mother and I could work together on this. Instead, she made a bunch of new girlfriends and now spends her time hunting ungulates in the woods with spears. Is that anything a woman her age should be doing?” He swung at the ball with his driver. It sliced viciously, off into the dark woods that bordered the course. In all our years together, this was the first time he’d ever taken me golfing. I already didn’t like it.

“I…well, actually, you know, Dad, it’s really about time. It’s good for her to do something like that.”

“God, I knew you’d take her side.”

“I’m not taking her side!”

“Deer liver. I’m talking deer liver for supper, with forest mushrooms, fid­dleheads, all sorts of sick hunter‑gatherer crap. She just doesn’t seem to get the post‑technological nature of our enterprise. She’s a woman who skulks with the foxes.” He left the course and started hacking his way through the underbrush. I followed.

“Dad”’ I, said. “Are we chasing after her? Bugging her?”

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