Cyberpunk Page 6

  "Difficult? The opposite. Sometimes in this crazy fucked-up world of show business you meet someone with a real beating heart, someone who matters to you, who knows what it's all worth. Rarer than you might think, unfortunately. Reg is the only thing that kept me going on that show as long as I did."

  "I'm surprised to hear you say that. Because his character was usually seen as the crab's tormentor."

  "I've taken my licks. That's the business, that's the character. Don't confuse show business for real life, Lethem. Compared to some licks I've taken, that show was all cake and candy and ice cream."

  "He flooded your room with sulfur oxide in an attempt to cause you to molt six months early," I said.

  "Heh heh. Yeah, that was a good one. One hundred percent the kid's idea, too. Good head on his shoulders. You know, a lot of the best bits came from him and me working together, batting stuff to the writers, free of charge. We'd improv in rehearsals—he was always cutting up, making me pee my pants. Talk about bitter, Loud never got credit for any of that stuff. Head writer walked off with two Emmys. Reg deserved better, much better."

  "It's an incredible story. Does he know how you feel about it?" I couldn't recall the last turns in Reg Loud's quite miserable tabloid spiral, except that five or six years earlier he'd resurfaced in a brief stint as a local morning talk show host, spewing right-wing survivalist bilge over the airwaves of some medium-sized Midwestern city, Indianapolis or Cedar Rapids.

  "Fuck you trying to imply? Of course he does."

  "No offense. I'm glad to hear it."

  "None taken."

  "I wonder if I could get a chance to talk with him for my story. Do you know how I could get in touch with him?"

  The crab fell momentarily silent, but cinched the glistening stump of his amputated leg deep under his lower shell, as if he'd now been involuntarily made to recall some particular hurt.

  "He wouldn't care to talk about Crab House Days," said the crab. "He's moved on."

  "What about Delia Watertree?"

  "That bitch."

  Delia Watertree, launched to fame as the coarse but irresistible Pansy Foorcum, was the only member of the cast who'd ascended to greater heights since the show's cancellation. The entirety of her subsequent career seemed a kind of long renunciation of the broad and overtly sexual appeal of the Pansy Foorcum character; in her stage and screen roles (she'd never glanced back at television work) she relentlessly played against her natural, peaches-and-cream beauty, favoring roles in glasses or bruise makeup or pants suits or buckskin, playing lawyers, frontier settlers, sexual-assault victims, suicidal writers, vanished aviators, and the like. Nevertheless, a measure of Pansy Foorcum's innocent lustiness thrived almost subliminally within the shell of her prestigious career, confirmed by its apparent absence, as though she and her audience were together rising above prurient thoughts in rewarding her with Oscar and Tony nominations for her nobler roles. Too, her quiet, reflective mannerisms still recalled the poignancy she'd evoked in spells of gentleness toward her sitcom sibling, the housebound crab.

  "She was lovely to your character," I said, speaking softly now. "A viewer would have thought you and Pansy were full of feeling for one another. You often seemed united against the others—Feary and your parents. As if you two alone shared a sense of dreamy possibility about what might lay outside the space of the house—beyond the circumscribed sensibility of the Foorcum family."

  "You go on telling yourself what you want to hear," said the crab. "Meanwhile I'll bet you watched her like the rest of America's teenage boys, with one hand in your pants and your tongue pressed to the screen."

  I chose not to point out the impossibility of the physical arrangement he proposed. It occurred to me that it might, in fact, be possible to watch a television screen while lapping at it with one's antennae. "I remember when you asked her not to go to the prom, since you couldn't go—"

  "Listen. You want the skinny on Delia? That little floozy used to cavort around the set with no underwear on, just to drive me crazy, knowing nobody else could see, knowing I'd never say anything. Believe me, the carpet did not match the drapes. She'd put her foot up on a chair and start re-lacing her high-tops, right in my face, trying to get me to flub lines."

  "That's astonishing."

  "Believe it. You know what else? At night, after the whole rest of the cast and crew had gone, she'd bring guys back and do them, sometimes two at a time, real marathon stuff, right in the next room, so I couldn't get a minute of sleep. What a mouth on her, too, always crying out ‘make me your little whore' and telling these guys it was the biggest thing she'd ever seen, how she was so frightened it would hurt her—"

  Now I was certain the crab was confused. "But, you didn't really live in that room—" I began. I wondered whether in fact his memory had slipped back to an earlier time, to that other family of which he'd sworn he'd never speak. Perhaps Pansy Foorcum had merged in his mind with an unnamed sister in another house, long ago. The difficulty, of course, was that it was equally likely that in his confusion he'd conflated Crab House Days with Crab Sex Dorm. That short-lived reality show had been notoriously lavish in its use of crab-point-of-view camera placements.

  The creature appeared not to hear me. He carried on muttering about Pansy's sexual theatrics, reproducing what he'd supposedly overheard through the wall, playing both voices aloud as if performing a Punch and Judy show—a private litany aired, it seemed to me, for reasons having nothing to do with our interview. At last he reached a pitch and then quit abruptly, his words replaced with the high whining sound he'd treated me to earlier, and then with the distinct yawn. "Keep that in mind next time you see her begging for money for African famine relief," he concluded. "She's probably got nothing on under her Florence Nightingale costume, either. That dame gets her jollies from pity."

  I opted to chalk the crab's freewheeling animus up to show-business envy, at the prestige accorded to the sole performer who'd shaken the career curse of the franchise. "What's in the cards for you?" I asked, not wishing to hear more. "Is this a firm retirement? Do you long to reconnect with your audience?"

  "I get calls every day, believe you me." The crab stirred a claw, his minor rather than major, which still lay un-moving. He ratcheted the smaller pincers wide and turned them toward his face, as if miming a telephone receiver.

  "I'm sure you do."

  "I'm telling you, some of the pitches I've heard. Crazy stuff. Hoo-wee. I had some rappers out here the other day. Everything nowadays is gangsta, gangsta, gangsta. Those guys are revitalizing show business, if you ask me. But I don't really see a place for myself in the mix."

  "So, you'll rest on your laurels," I suggested.

  "What fucking laurels? You see one goddamn laurel around here? If you do, it probably blew over from the next yard. Hah. Sorry, I just hate that word—laurels."

  "I only wondered if you're content not to practice your art."

  "Listen, I'm keeping busy." The crab withdrew and shuttered his claw now, seeming to grow reflective.

  "I didn't mean anything—"

  "I know you didn't, kid."

  "You've got nothing to prove to anyone," I said softly.

  "Don't patronize me."

  I fell to silence. The crab shifted, sighed, rattled. The day had turned, too, clouds deflecting the high bleaching sun, and announcing themselves as gray mountains in the oscillating mirror of the pool.

  "Look, Lehman. You want a scoop? I'm hatching a major comeback. You can be the first. I'm saying major major. You understand? When this thing blows, there'll be no keeping a lid on it, I promise you."

  "A premise for a show?"

  "Big show, of sorts."

  "Please."

  "Follow me. I'd tell you to walk this way, only you've heard that one before."

  Startlingly, the crab was on the go. He moved awfully fast for a being that had seemed wrought in rusted ironwork a moment before. Clicking his way off the tile-work, he slid across the grass, past me, and toward the left side of the house. The lawn dipped to a basement door there, portal to a half-submerged, windowless lower level with the appearance of a garage or workshop, perhaps. I stood, stuffed my pad and ballpoint into my pants pocket, and hurried to join him.

  "Go ahead, open the door," he said.

  I tried the handle, which turned easily, and pushed the door inside. The darkness was enough that from the brightness of the day I couldn't make anything out, within. I stepped back, uncertain.

  Crab House Days had, of course, made much of the conceit that its title character was trapped in his bedroom, yet I recalled from some footage from Crab Sex Dorm how he could transverse human doorways by tipping himself dexterously on one side. The crab did this now, gripping the doorframe neatly with his claws and virtually rolling himself through the doorway. Inside, he dropped back to the unpainted cement floor. I followed, leaving the door open behind me. The basement was cool and conveyed an intense marine smell, like that of an aquarium. Low fluorescent fixtures shone a dim green light, from what appeared to be special bulbs, perhaps like those for illuminating plants or animals in a zoo display of creatures unused to direct sunlight. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the dark I saw that we were surrounded by dozens of immense water tanks, the murk and silt within them glowing in the greenish light.

  Another figure stepped from the rear, startling me. It was Feary Foorcum—or rather, Reg Loud. Loud was cloaked in a white lab coat, and still wore his hair in his signature ragged punk cut. He was also still of a childish stature, though he'd grown stocky, and his once brattish features were withered and creased with deep lines of cynicism and age—he seemed still too young to be an adult, and far too old to be in his early forties, as a quick calculation suggested he ought to be. But then perhaps he had been playing younger than his real age on Crab House Days, like so many child stars have done.

  "Reg, this is Mr. Lehman. He's come to have a look at my quote-unquote comeback."

  Reg Loud stuck out a horny, trollish hand. "Pleased to meet you," he said in the terribly familiar voice, a sort of parroty squawk, with which he'd hectored both his parents and crab for all five seasons, filling their ears with his crank Libertarian views. "You're one of the first to see the babies."

  "Babies?"

  "Have a look."

  I squinted in close to the nearest of the tanks. I spotted them now, realized in fact that they'd been visible all along but that I'd mistaken them for sworls of colored shadow in the glow. Behind the glass swam hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, translucent green-yellow crabs. Each was perhaps three-quarters of an inch wide. They coursed over one another in a giddy chaos of youthful agitation, like puppies, or sperm.

  I moved to the next tank and found more. I was no savant, but a rough guess suggested there might be tens of thousands of the tiny crabs in the damp, humming basement with us there, a slushy riot of life, a throbbing army of creatures.

  "Maybe you can help me decide what to call it," said the crab. "I keep vacillating between Revenge of the Crab and Crab World Domination."

  "I like Crab World Domination," I said. "It suggests more continuity with your earlier work."

  "That's a point," said the crab.

  "They're all him, you understand," said Reg Loud.

  "Sorry?"

  "All him," Loud repeated. "They're clones."

  "I see. How soon will they be, uh, ready?"

  "They won't attain his mature size for twenty years," said Reg Loud. "But they'll be ready for release in three or four."

  "Not so much of a comedy this time," I mused.

  "You could say that," consented the crab.

  "Perhaps more of a disaster movie, or a cable miniseries?"

  "Do you know anything about global warming, Mr. Lehman?" said Reg Loud.

  "Of course."

  "You say you do, yet do you understand that the ten warmest years in recorded history have occurred since 1983? Seven of them since 1990. Some of us will be better adapted to the coming changes than others."

  "In other words," said the crab, "this really has nothing at all to do with television."

  "The evolution will not be televised," chortled Loud. "The mocked shell inherit the earth."

  "Don't worry, Lehman, we'll still need historians of television comedy, or rather we'll need them again in a few dozen centuries, when crabs develop television. Your work won't be in vain."

  "Are they all comedians like their father?" I asked.

  "We'll see, won't we?"

  "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Let's leave them now. Thank you, Reg."

  I took one last glance back at those rows of tanks that glowed, it seemed to me now, much as if lit by cathode ray. I wondered if the radiant, morsel-sized clones, who so resembled cartoons or plastic toys, would truly be fit to outlive us, to occupy some brave new world. It was hardly anything I'd mention to the crab, but I had an intuition his progeny might share his tropism for the human world, and be bereft without us. Perhaps this was my naive projection, an inability to fathom a universe without myself in it. But the crab himself had never known the sea, so far as I understood. He'd been born and raised in a landlocked state, in custody of a solidly middle-class, if not exactly loving, family.

  "Close the door," the crab commanded. He scrabbled up the hump of grass, and back to his tile shelf. I wondered whether he ever even so much as dipped himself in the pool. It looked unsullied by any of the secretions I now detected in both dried and fresh traces on the tile and lawn. I followed back to the poolside, but didn't retake my chair. I think we both sensed the interview was nearly at an end.

  "You get what you came for, Lehman?"

  "Far more, I'd have to say."

  "Well, I've got one question for you."

  "Certainly."

  He paused, perhaps sinking into himself again for a moment. I couldn't keep from thinking that the sight of the blank greenish tide of successors had made him every bit as melancholy as it had me. Before he spoke again he made another of his strange wheezy yawning sounds, and trickled his legs, including the amputated stump, along the tiles, quite softly. Each of his claws stirred, too, though they didn't open.

  "I really caused you to think of Keaton or Newhart? Because I just don't see it."

  I was astonished it still mattered to him. "It was a stray thought, only intended as a compliment."

  "Those figures are much milder than my character, at least after the first season. I always felt I was more in the line of a classic slow-burn specialist, someone like Edgar Kennedy or William Frawley or Beatrice Arthur."

  "There's validity in those comparisons," I admitted. The fact that the crustacean could even supply these names made nonsense of his earlier claims not to have known Keaton's films, and of his stiff refusal to consider tracing the lineage of influence behind his own work. But I was hardly keen to confront his inconsistencies.

  "Listen, nobody but you and me even remembers those names," he said, hardening again, as if he'd allowed an instant of vanity to bare his defenses. "You need to get yourself a life that's free of this kind of academic horseshit. If I can move forward without wallowing, it's the least you can do."

  Had he eschewed wallowing? It was another claim I didn't care to refute. "I'm grateful for the advice."

  "Mr. Boniface can call you a cab."

  "That's fine. I'll wait in front."

  "Lehman?"

  "Yes?"

  "One thing I ask. I don't want you to lie about me, you understand? I don't care what anyone thinks. Every word, every belch and fart, is on the goddamn record. You got this? Tell the truth about me."

  I promised the crab I would try.

  EL PEPENADOR

  By Benjamin Parzybok

  Pico sat on a child's dirty dollhouse and drew from the end of a bottle of Marzo's self-made sweetwine, which tasted a little of plastic residue and car oil and, like everything else, contained the fetid smell of the dump. The tin shed rattled and shook around him, hitting a harmonic and popping a nail from a tired hole at the roof's edge.

  The rattling meant the trucks had arrived and the nackers would be gathering at the new spoils. He thought he could hear their hydraulic skittering over the din.

  Pico downed the last of the wine and stashed it deep in one of the dollhouse bedrooms. Then he grabbed his tharpoon and tool belt from the wall.

  Outside the shack, he whacked his chest once with his tharpoon shaft and said Aha! The pepenadores were gathered at the fringes of the settlement. He joined them, weaving slightly, making sure to keep a distance from his parents and whatever commentary they may have for him. Used to be, when the trucks came everybody sprinted for the new stuff. But since the nackers came, they were second-tier dumpdwellers now, and had to rely on old buried finds. Just trash themselves, looking for more trash to sell or use.

  At one end of the lineup he saw Mouse and he tried to move inconspicuously toward her, ignoring the names jeered at him as he went down the line; kekker, nackanigmo, pajero. He kept his head down as he passed. Mouse wore a cowboy hat and an orange mechanic's jumpsuit with a missing arm. She liked to stand out, he thought, la chica is all full of herself. All the same, he admired the way her hair spilled from her hat, the cocky angle of her stance. He'd follow her to harvest when they all set out. Tag along quietly. Follow his late best friend's older sister, as he always had. He stood fifteen paces away so as not to draw her notice.

  Pico took out the shard of whetstone he kept in his pocket and worked at the tip of his tharpoon. Marzo's sweetwine gave him a happy boldness, a desire to knock someone off their feet, though he usually ended at the bottom of such a scuffle. He looked at the pepenadores around him. Some were old, buried beneath layers of clothes, little mole people who owned what they could wear. Some were young, kids his age. Most ignored him, sweat lines cutting the dirt on their faces. All of them were tense and focused, watching the trucks on the horizon of trash.