Carbine: Stories

Account

 Account = —Hey, you’re that guy, a guy said. In the lobby. Some kind of hanger-out and where was security or was there no security? Besides, Bill did not know what the guy was talking about. He stepped back. Sometimes he felt like he was going up in an elevator. The guy moved away from him. All Bill wanted was to take care of his errand. Minimal human contact would suffice. Though that maybe was new; now that everything could be done without human contact, was the hunger for isolation greater than ever before? The Japanese were rumored to have functioning sexbots. Why would it not cross Bill’s mind? The world being, what it was. Pathogens being, what they were. Not that Bill in any way shrunk from life. He was in the lobby while others—among them his acquaintances—performed their transactions via machine. So who was the live one now? Who would be the live one later? The sky, for example, in China. Bring that up in a minute on the screen and there you were looking at that—Chinese?—sky. Bill was not interested in denying the facts; why would he be? The nonsense of the moment. The idiocy of the past. Well, time would lay it all to waste, would it not? And Bill. The end. The visceral fear, the cold paralysis in his bowel. The end. Bill could look forward to that. But he had to. Everyone did. Or California. The sky there. Sometimes he felt like he was floating on a raft. Or that he should get a picture for his wall. In the office. Get a picture and hang it up there. Others did. No policy disallowed it. Was it pisce pisce pisce? That bird call like a foreign language. And pisce. Fish? Always some fish, Bill supposed. He had noticed he was more sympathetic to men who shared his grandfather ’s surname than to people he met generally. This seemed as though it might be common to any number of people. Why should his experience be different than anyone else’s? When he was going up in the elevator, it felt like he was going up in an elevator. Maybe the guy was trying to sell him something, the false recognition the basis of his pitch. Establish a relationship. Maybe the guy was trying to beg and Bill had scared him off. Transaction not completed. Where had the guy gone? Man got all swallowed up. Man got all disappeared. More likely went around the corner. Find an easier mark. Maybe a victim of the cyclical debacle of the society’s willing ignorance. Which one? Or both? Bill had his paperwork in a manila folder. No one could fault him for that. Paperwork always made him uncomfortable though really he worked with paper. Always the fear some critical piece might be lost. Less an issue now with digital storage. But a pattern established strongly enough— Too tired to contemplate the tiresome thought. This was no California. For better or worse. Two sides to things. Half a life in these uncomfortable, necessary errands. Better than breaking sod with a spade in his Lordship’s field. Grip the loose sheaves tightly. Why? No complaint here. Nothing to wait in line to make his mandated election in a temperature-controlled environment. Of course, a butcher’s shop was temperature-controlled. He had the chance to get meat at close to wholesale. The problem was he could only get it in half-animal increments. Half a cow too much to store. Half a pig no small matter. Bill knew a guy. All quality. Straight from the specialty Account  butcher. But it was too much. Buying half a pig, while not a solution, was strangely compelling to him. The put up and store mentality of the Midwest , he assumed. Funny how deeply those notions ran in the culture and how they outlived necessity. He’d filled out the forms to move some money immediately and all for the movement of future monies into accounts that would, if everything went right, guarantee his future. It was simple. He had to make a mandatory election. It was the right thing to do. He was fortunate, though it would be a sacrifice, to have some money and the option to put it aside. No China this. But sometimes he thought he was nowhere. He was not from...