Walter Mosley - Futureland - Nine Stories of an Imminent World

“—because history doesn’t really exist except in the leaky jars of our heads,” Fera said, finishing the words that she had heard from childhood.

Leon grinned at her memory and then grimaced from an electric shock.

“When I said that, she blinked, blinked like she had just seen something that she had never suspected was there. After a minute she crawled into my lap and put her arms around my neck. That’s when I realized that she was hot. Not sex, but her body temperature was way up there. I thought she was sick but she said that that was normal for her. I’m ashamed for what I felt for that child but I refuse to be sorry. I asked her where she lived and she said in a hole that she dug under a bridge just outside of the town. A hole in the dirt. I took her to my house. What else could I do? I didn’t mean to do anything. She was a child. She needed to be held, wanted it. I held her and held myself back at the same time. We never stopped touching for the next few days. If I let her go she got nervous and shaky. We ate side by side and even went to the bathroom together. It wasn’t like sex. It wasn’t sex at all. It was more like puppies or kittens all on top of each other all of the time.

“I missed my classes. We ate outta plastic cans. Finally I told her that she needed more clothes and that I would buy her some, but she told me that she had another dress in a shelter she had built just outside town. I drove her out there. I remember it so well because I was miserable in that car. That young thing reached out to my heart and I was helpless.

“I was wrong. I crossed the line into unemployment and lawlessness and I didn’t even remember making a decision.

“The hole had been torn up pretty bad but only one thing was gone.”

“Maybe it was an animal,” Pell argued.

“But there wasn’t an animal mess, and the only thing missing was her record book from the orphanage. Someone who didn’t want her records to be public had gone in there. If she hadn’t been at my house they might have taken her too.”

“RadFems?” Fera asked.

“I never knew and neither did Nosa.” The hunching of his shoulders was deepened by a therapeutic shock. “All she knew were the sisters and a book full of charts and graphs that she was supposed to keep with her at all times.

“She was so scared that it infected me. She said that some of the other girls had disappeared. Nosa said that when her friend Titania had gone missing she decided to go out in the world and look for her. The teachers had taught them that the world was an evil place and that if a girlchild was lost out there the man-demons would destroy them. Men would break them open and bleed poisons into their guts. Then they would torture them with slavery, brutality, and brainwashing. The sisters told them that a girl tainted by the world would have to be put to sleep in order for another girl to come alive. She said that a few girls had disappeared and that they were always replaced by somebody new.”

“What did you do?” asked Fera.

“Well that was twenty-one years ago, but even then the government of Massachusetts, especially out in the west, was dominated by the FemLeague. I didn’t know what to think and so I drove us to New York City. I cashed all my accounts and drove away from every bit of security I had ever known. I was forty then and it was the dumbest thing by far I had ever done. I had an ex-wife. I had a family. But I left all that behind. We were married. Nosa had you and then she died.”

“What did she die of?”

“The doctors thought it was natural causes. You see, Nosa was the product of genetic tinkering. She was grown in a laboratory.”

“But the doctors who tested me said that I was normal,” Fera protested.

“You are. One generation down and being coupled with natural DNA and you’re fine. Better than fine. You’re the most perfect woman in the world. You’re my girl.” A long thrumming shock went through Leon then, but he never lost his smile or his eye contact with the strongest woman in the world.

“My sources tell me that you are due to get ten billion dollars from tomorrow night’s fight,” Allison Laurie told Fera Jones.

Fera heard the words and understood them but there were too many other things on her mind.

“You know that I represent Randac Corporation. We aren’t the largest company in the world, but on the island of Madagascar we’re the big dog. We have five seats in the parliament and a place on the prime minister’s advisory cabinet.”

“So? Good for you.”

Pell sat nervously at Fera’s side. He had begged her to take this meeting even though she was due to fight Zeletski in less than six hours.

“Of course you’ve heard of our theme park.”

“Uh-huh. Luna Land. Pipi and I wanna go one day.”

“If I can get you to say that to the cameras after you win the fight tonight, we will give you another ten billion dollars.”

Even the haunted images of her mother from the three small photographs that Leon had kept dimmed slightly at the mention of so much money.

“Ten billion?”

“Paid in Madagascar, where there are no personal income taxes.”

“Why? I mean how can you? I mean...”

“It’s advertising, Fera,” Pell said. “Millions of people will plan their vacation hoping to see you or to be where you were. You’ll make it look like something really important if you just say the word.”

“That’s right,” Allison added. “Women and men all over the world look up to you. You’re an example for everybody.”

It wasn’t until after the Luna Land rep left that Fera remembered.

“That’s almost exactly what Lordess said.”

“What, Fifi?”

“That stuff about people lookin’ up to me. It’s almost exactly what Lordess said.”

“Only,” Pell pointed out, “Randac will pay ten billion on the nail.”

“You want me to do this, Pipi?”

“It’s not for me, baby,” the Backgrounder said. “I ain’t nobody in this. It’s you. You got the professor father, the strength, skills. I just figured if you made enough money you wouldn’t have to fight and get brain damage, you wouldn’t have to end up in a chair like your old man. You could be somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Anybody you wanted to be. Somebody powerful. Somebody with clout.”

“You really think that?”

Pell kissed her on the lips. It wasn’t so much a passionate osculation as a careless acclaim, a declaration of something that had already come to pass.

“Well, we’re finally here,” Billy “the Eclipse” Bonner said to UBA boxing fans around the world.

There was no blackout that night. Every seat in the stadium sold for a thousand dollars or more. Movie stars, political leaders, gangsters, Backgrounders, and thieves were present. More women than men filled the 120,000 seats; 750,000,000 people around the world had paid the one hundred dollar pay-per-view price.

“You better believe it, Champ,” Chet Atkinson replied. “This is the most important night in the history of boxing. This is it. The battle of the sexes, the War of the Roses. Lady Macbeth and Don Corleone. D Day. Tonight Fera Jones goes after Travis Zeletski’s undisputed heavyweight crown in a fight they said could never happen.”

“All the regulars are here tonight, Chet, but there are some who never come to these matches. Lana Lordess, governor of Massachusetts and head of the FemLeague, is in attendance, as is the secretary of state. Prince Peter of Great Britain and Premier Hernandez of Cuba are also in the audience. They might do better to have political analysts than two barkers like us.”

“That may be, Champ, but we can worry about the world tomorrow. Tonight there’s a fight we have to get through. What are the main strengths and weaknesses we should be looking for?”