Joshua Mattson - A Short Film About Disappointment

The Tangerine went under the canal. On the other side, it was different. There was nothing worth mention, only redoubts of prosperity. I took out Millings’s card. A navigational arrow on the card informed me I was but three blocks away. His building was an early-century eyesore designed for Russo-Chinese Alliance bureaucrats on the take. Of course, the property became almost valueless during the Confidence Crisis and the subsequent uprising against private wealth. Since then, this neighborhood, once a third-rate business district for regional corporations, had become a series of shoddy compounds guaranteed by surveillance.

The elevator asked for my destination.

I said, Millings.

It said, Business or residence?

I said, Residence.

It said, We’re sorry, the Millings residence has not authorized any deliveries today.

I said, Business, then.

It said, Very good.

A big cheap room. The lake’s haze in the distance. Boxes piled here and there, of samples. Candy, cannabinoid sprays, tampons. Millings wealth one nickel at a time. Who would have thought there would be such a demand for fancy branded vending machines? If I understood the situation, the kiosks were no longer profitable, but the slices of real estate their thousands of kiosks were inserted into were immensely valuable. Almost nothing could be redeveloped in the city without buying a kiosk back from Millings Kiosk. I understood why Millings didn’t care for the family business. Squeezing developers did not fit his self-image.

Behind the desk, a man simulating water conflicts on his Pinger. He was playing Egypt and seemed to be in trouble from the Arabian Peninsula.

I said, Is Mrs. Millings in?

He said, Mrs. Rangor is in a meeting. If you wish to wait, I can ping her.

I said, Yes, thanks. Tell her Mr. Chivo wishes to speak with her about a personal matter.

He said, Please have a seat, Mr. Chivo.

She kept her maiden name. Maybe she was prideful. The secretary took another turn before pinging Mrs. Rangor. I reached into the box of samples to my left, as quietly as was possible, and slipped a handful of power cells into my pocket.

He said, The third door on the left.

I knocked, entered. Mrs. Rangor’s office was furnished with a sectional couch, three handsome paintings of a bygone vegetable, a plasma map of the kiosks in the Hub, color-coded by functionality or profitability, and a large desk, the surface of which served as her device’s workstation. Mrs. Rangor herself, a snarl in a nimbus of curls, gestured at a chair.

She said, How do you do?

I said, Not well, Mrs. Rangor.

She said, Do I know you?

I said, In a way. My name is Dan Chivo, of Chivo Industries. Last fall we met briefly at a thing. Your husband was very taken by my wife, Lila. He has been sending her messages again. Please inform him that if he continues to harass my wife for salacious photographs, I will seek legal satisfaction. I have friends at the Daily Central , the Hub Slaw , and the other content aggregators. I will make sure the headlines say “Millings Kiosk Scion Serial Sexual Harasser,” or something as obnoxious. Keep a leash on that man. I don’t know what sort of arrangement the two of you have, but please keep my marriage out of it.

Mrs. Rangor said, We have no arrangement.

Surprise in a holding pattern over her face with nowhere to land.

Mrs. Rangor said, Of course this behavior will be dealt with. We have had some problems in the past, but I did not know.

I said, Mrs. Rangor, I would appreciate if you kept my name out of this. I fear reprisals from your husband. Did you know he already had a man assault me in the street? Of course you didn’t. Do you know who this man may be?

Mrs. Rangor said, It was probably Uncle Al. I don’t know his last name. He was Rolf’s father’s fixer, they did things differently back before the Crisis. Rolf is trying to do things like his father would have, because his father didn’t care for him much. He pretends, but his father felt, why pretend? Rolf’s father paid for Al to get the vitality treatment, from friendship or from loyalty, I don’t know. So he is more active than he ought to be. That’s him in the photograph.

I snapped a picture of the picture of Uncle Al.

I said, Thank you, Mrs. Rangor. I will take my leave.

She said nothing.

I was blindsided by a seventy-year-old.

Damaging Millings’s marriage would have been unthinkable before his man, in that clumsy Broder homage, attacked me on the street, and destroyed the Zaccardi book. After that I felt, if my person wasn’t safe, then his marriage wasn’t. Knowing those lies would encourage his worst behavior. So be it. Millings needed to understand that he had no more power than the rest of us. It was a political grudge as much as it was personal.

As I strode through the lobby, pretending to be aggrieved, the power cells fell from my pocket. The secretary looked at them, my face, returned to his game. Arabia controlled the canal. The Nile had dried up. His options were few.

The Betternet was throttled in my neighborhood again. A person vandalized the Tolerance Kiosk in the park. Three days of slow data was the punishment. The culprit was not named nor was their address revealed, because they were a minor. In the past month, it has been cut when Goel, K., did not attend his mandatory biodiversity seminars, when Stevenson, T., was caught underreporting income from his snack carts, and when Lal, A., shouted a slur at a woman in front of her at the market. Since I live in a guest neighborhood, and I am not chipped, I can’t get another data source. I could only write this review at work, a place I do not like to go.

That the authorities do not completely shut it off but slow it down, so that to wait for a single page to load takes almost ten minutes, seems to me a pernicious form of torture.

It took four hours to get to the office. My rail pass is under review. Allegedly, I tripled my garbage ration last quarter, which, coupled with the malfunctioning sensor on my showerhead, made me a wasteful person in the eyes of the Usage Authority. They suspended my pass. The effort of appeal, of finding the right person to bribe, of writing one of those hateful Letters of Contrition, seems worse than waiting out the sentence. Wasters Walk, as the famous poster says.

I walked down the lakefront. Since spring, littering has been in vogue. It started in the northeast districts and now is established in the Hub. Every twentieth person dropped a little something on the ground. An enterprising guest set up a popsicle stand along the pedestrian path, because the sticks were small enough to escape the sensors on the cameras. Litterers got to feel cool without paying the fine. Downtown people were upending garbage cans from their condominium balconies. The rumor was the Cleanliness Authority had bribed celebrities to start the trend of littering, hoping to inspire a general movement in the populace to throw trash on the ground, to finance the cleanup of landfills the Hub had encircled. Rogier’s working on a documentary about the phenomenon.

A clear day. The bikeways were clotted. When I first came to the Central Hub, on a trip with my mother, I could not believe how many people were in motion. We took a commuter in from the node nearest our trailer. My mother explained no cars were allowed within the heart of the Hub, one hundred square miles.

She said, Someday you’ll live here, in one of these towers.

I almost lived in the towers, with Isabel. Our approved application came in the mail after she’d left.

Everyone every day. Trudging here, walking there, going up stairs, going down. Waiting for a train. Hoping to meet someone on the platform. Everyone perspiring and cross. Everyone tired, underpaid, looking forward to the peace of the evening. The birdsong of Pingers.