The New Order Page 13

  At Trinity it’s kind of Not Cool to say you love what you’re studying. At least, that’s what I’ve gleaned from my various broken bits of conversation and eavesdropping. Like, everybody has probably busted their ass to get here, and they’re always conscious, what with living in these incredibly beautiful medieval-castle-like places, that they’re superlucky and privileged, even if they have busted their asses, so they cop this attitude where they could give two shits about it and they don’t study and all they want to do is watch Australian soap operas and get wasted. So it’s a little refreshing to hear from somebody who actually appreciates being here.

  So I tell him the whole lie, the stuff about how I’m a navy brat and my dad’s on the Reconstruction Committee.

  Rab: “But you don’t hang out with the other Americans.”

  That’s true. I have, like, zero interest in hanging with the Other Americans, who kind of strut around like rich cousins.

  Me: “Oh, them. They can blow me.”

  Rab: “Yeah, they can blow me, too, mostly. Except I’ve met some really nice people from the Diaspora, too.”

  He’s got this honest, open thing going that reminds me loads of Jefferson, like, an innocent sort of embrace of the world and people and what they have to offer. Like being nice counts for something.

  Me: “There’s a friend of mine you’d have liked.”

  Rab: “We’ll get everybody together.”

  Me: “Yeah, sure.”

  Then—I’m not proud of this—I look at my new phone. Because there has been the tiniest lapse in the conversation, like, a millisecond, and I’m embarrassed, and my attention wants to flee to someplace more comfortable. Frankly, it’s been my only companion through all the cold days of mourning.

  This sort of flight from the present moment used to go down all the time back before What Happened; so much that it had been sort of agreed upon by everybody that it was okay—like, you could just be in the middle of a conversation with a friend and it was perfectly acceptable to bail for a bit and check Twitter or e-mail or your texts or whatever. People got used to being kind of half in and half out of conversations. It was sort of like being there and being someplace else at the same time, but the other place was this weird mental realm of quasi-communication, a kind of magic zone where you were receiving pulses of attention and interest from far away.

  Except here, it’s become cool to ignore your phone, like, to triumph over the seduction and remain In the Moment, and people take it badly if you just wander off to Internetville. Which is a problem for me because I have been away from working phones for so long and they’ve gotten so good at distracting you, like, miles better than what we had.

  Nothing interesting has occurred in the five minutes since I last checked it, though. I look up and see Rab watching me.

  Me: “I’m really sorry.”

  I blush, because this is the first person I’ve had an actual conversation with in the past week besides Titch, and I don’t want to accidentally tear the little thread suddenly tying me to the rest of humanity.

  Rab (shrugs it off): “Who’s your buddy?”

  This is not as strange a question as it sounds. Apparently, while I was scavenging for out-of-date canned tuna and exchanging gunfire with assorted psychos in the streets of Manhattan, Apple and Samsung and whatnot were amping up the performance of their phone software agents, like Siri and Cortana and whatever. They’ve gotten really good, like, they don’t sound like freaky robots anymore, and they’re all wired up to the Internet, and they’re learning as they go along, so there are times when you could almost think you were really talking to a living person. It’s not like that Scarlett Johansson movie where they can have phone sex with you, or anything, but they’re superhelpful, and what’s even cooler is that you can buy these personalities to lay over them. Like, you can have regular Siri, or you can buy a sort of bro version who is especially tweaked to talk about sports and tell you when soccer matches are on and stuff, or a hot-chick version (if you happen to be a total loser) who is always making you feel awesome and is down with porn and whatever. You can buy celebrity versions, too, like, all these musicians and actors have hired out their voices, so you can get a flirty Brad Pitt version. (Yeah, he made it out before the Sickness. Vital cultural asset.)

  The problem with the believability of these “buddies,” or “peeps,” or “personae,” as some people call them, is that they all kind of share the same basic wiring, which is that they want to sell you shit. Like, Brad Pitt will be all “may I say that you look especially fetching today?” but then suddenly he’ll be all “hey, I just found out that they’ve got the new fall outfits in at French Connection.” Which doesn’t really seem like Brad. But if you go deep, you can start tweaking the settings, so that you can opt out of certain ads. You can even up the personality features so that, instead of being on it all the time, buddies can exhibit more normal personality features, like spacing out every once in a while, and then apologizing when you call them on it. Like, there’s a stoner buddy who isn’t 100 percent reliable but who is really great at just hanging out and suggesting cool shit to search for.

  As you can imagine, buddies like Kine Budz Brah (that’s the stoner buddy) are not exactly what Apple and Microsoft had in mind, so technically they’re not allowed, but if you jailbreak your phone, you can use them. It’s just too big a business to stamp out.

  So who’s my buddy?

  I don’t really feel like talking about it.

  Me: “Who’s yours?”

  Rab: “Naanii.”

  He starts up his buddy app and a picture of a really cute, plump gray-haired lady in a sari appears. You can add plug-ins where the buddy moves on-screen and whatever, but most people prefer to just talk to theirs.

  “What can I do for you, darling?” A comforting elderly voice with a slightly lilting Indian accent. Rab smiles sheepishly.

  Rab: “She reminds me of my grandmother in Kolkata.”

  The “Naanii” buddy hears his tone of voice and chips in with a loving little chuckle.

  I can’t help but smile. A grandma’s boy.

  Rab: “I know, it’s lame. I spend way too much time tweaking her. You’d be amazed at what sort of character features you can get on the open-source sites.”

  Me: “I love it. Hello, Naanii!”

  Naanii analyzes the tone of my voice and responds, “Hello, dear!” then remarks, as if confidentially, to Rab, “She seems a very nice girl.”

  Rab: “All right, Naanii. Good-bye for now.”

  Naanii: “Good-bye, darling,” as Rab closes her app.

  Me: “Your buddy is very friendly.”

  Rab: “Yes. It can be a bit of a pain sometimes. She doesn’t always appreciate being closed. And she can be quite nosy. But—life wasn’t meant to be easy all the time. May I—”

  He reaches out for my iPhone. I nod, and he picks it up and expertly starts gesturing through my settings.

  Me: “What are you doing?”

  Rab: “I’m shutting off your microphone’s passive receiver. Don’t worry, I do this for everybody. It’s just that nobody thinks to do it. Now your phone won’t hear what you’re saying unless you want it to.”

  Me: “You mean… it’s always listening?”

  Rab: “The government snuck it into the latest telecom bill. It’s on page one-seventeen of the end-user license agreement you agree to.”

  Me: “I never read those.”

  Rab: “Nobody does.” (He hands the phone back to me.) “Now they can’t listen to your conversations.”

  Me: “They do that?”

  Rab: “Oh, yeah. They run everything through speech analysis algorithms. Say the wrong combination of words, and you’ll get a visit from the Met or your dad’s pals in the Reconstruction Joint Security Scheme.”

  I take a while to absorb this idea. Rab takes it as my feeling attacked.

  Rab: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Me: “You didn’t. Thanks fo
r letting me know.”

  He downs the rest of his bitter, then does the usual gathering-yourself motions that mean I’m about to leave, and I suddenly feel sad that he’s about to go, but then he says—

  Rab: “Shall we?”

  Me: “Shall we what?” Is he propositioning me?

  Rab: “I’m going to show you the town. Well, what I know of the town. It won’t do for you to just sit in the corner of the bar drinking Budweiser and talking to your top secret buddy.”

  At “top secret,” a jet of anxiety shoots through me, like he knows all about the deal with Welsh and the Foreign Office and MI this and MI that, and he knows that I’ve been lying to him, and suddenly I feel downright naked. But then I see from his face that he’s just teasing me because I wouldn’t show it to him (introduce him, I guess?).

  Me: “Okay. Shall we? We shall.”

  Only problem is, usually whenever I leave college, Titch or Taut Guy (actually his name is Vince) either accompany me or keep an eye on me from a distance. This makes me feel a lot like the president’s daughter in a lame rom-com or something, like I always kind of want to ditch them so that I can have adventures and whatnot. To be honest, I’ve mostly enjoyed the company, but I don’t want to spook my new friend by having us followed around by my own personal Chewbacca.

  Me: “Listen. Not to be all First Kid about this, but it might be an idea to give my bodyguard the slip.”

  Rab: “Ah. First Kid. Sinbad, Brock Pierce, Disney, 1996. Not to be confused with First Daughter, starring Katie Holmes and Marc Blucas.”

  Me: “Wow. Impressive.”

  Rab: “Depressing, actually. Brain space I would rather have for something else. You want to do a runner on your gigantic minder?”

  Me: “Yeah, Titch. He minds me. And he minds me going too far out in the world, I think, which is totally ridiculous because everything here is so goddamn safe.”

  Rab: “Well… there’s the fire exit in the men’s bog. The alarm is broken. Gives out onto Trinity Lane.”

  Trinity Lane, aka Pisspot Lane, according to Rab, is an echoey, spooky alley between Trinity and Caius (which, in another example of their desire to make everything harder than it has to be, British people pronounce “Keys”). It’s one of the spots in town where you can convince yourself you’re not in the present at all. We clop along the cobbles toward Trinity Street, the main drag.

  Me: “Where to?”

  Rab: “A random walk. Coin toss.”

  We get to the bottom of the lane and, the coin coming down tails, take a right past King’s.

  I feel kind of like a dick cutting out on Titch. I mean, we’re homeys and all, but I figure since he usually just chills outside the bar anyway, I can be back before he knows I’m gone. It’s still a couple of hours to last orders. Besides, it feels amazing to be out in the cool air, scuffing over damp paving stones.

  Somebody calls from across the street—a girl and a dude wearing purple college scarves that show they’re from King’s. “Hey! Rab!”

  Rab: “Hey, yourselves!”

  Me: “You know somebody from another college?”

  I overemphasize it like I’m joking, but in fact I’m a little impressed.

  High fives and greetings that wouldn’t have been out of place in Detroit before It Happened. The girl is called Soph; the boy is Michael. He’s from Northern Ireland, which apparently is different from Southern Ireland; she’s from “London,” which she says in a sort of embarrassed, unspecific way, which I take to mean she’s rich.

  Rab: “This is Donna. Not for the mother of Jesus, but the pop star.”

  Me: “I’m American.”

  Which is kind of stupid, but I want to get it out of the way.

  Michael: “Oh, we love fallen empires, don’t we, Soph?”

  Michael is small and sprightly. He seems to be giving Soph a good-natured hard time.

  Sophie (affectionately, to Michael): “Piss off.” (Then to Rab and me.) “We were just considering how we could find Oliver Cromwell’s skull in Sydney Sussex and steal it.”

  Michael: “If I took it back to Ireland, I’d be a fecking hero. Free drinks for life.”

  I do know sort of that Oliver Cromwell was some kind of English Civil War dude, but I have no idea why his skull is kept in one of the colleges, or why it would be such a big deal to Irish people.

  Michael explains the deal to me while we head to a party they’ve invited us to. (Basic deal: Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland and killed and enslaved shitloads of people.) He even illustrates it with a croony rendition of a song by some guy called Morrissey. Rab and Soph and Michael and I chat away, and they don’t treat me like a freak, and I start to feel like I’m not a freak, and somehow, with just this little bit of human contact in the right place in my brain, I start to get a sense of a future that isn’t just to the end of the day, and feel something besides grief.

  The party is at somebody’s digs (i.e., crib) in Portugal Place, which is sort of like off-campus housing but in these cute little townhouses. Your usual, music and cigarettes and beer and vodka, kids testing themselves out conversationally on one another, trying to get laid or make friends or just let go of themselves for a bit. It’s utterly ordinary. And utterly fun. For a few hours, I’m not even thinking about Jeff, much. Soph and I hang out, and I learn a bit about her, like she’s from this upper-crusty family, but she’s totally not down with her parents and their attitudes about the government and economics and whatnot. At one point, she’s talking about politics or whatever, and she’s telling me about how the US Navy bombed the shit out of Iran so that they could keep control of the Shatt al Arab, which is this choke hold that ships have to pass through for oil to get from the Middle East to the rest of the world. There’s still a carrier strike group hanging out there. Seems that the thing about the home country going down is that the military took it as a free pass to throw its weight around without anybody being able to strike back, so they basically sell their services to the highest bidder, at least that’s how Soph sees it. Needless to say, this is not how Welsh or anybody else put it to me. Soph is talking about the likelihood of a war with China and then stops and looks at me.

  Soph: “Shit, you’re not going to grass me out to the Reconstruction Committee, are you?”

  Me: “Grass you out?”

  Soph: “Oh.” (She laughs. Then, in a run of American-accent-inflected synonyms, she goes—) “Bust me. Turn me in. Shop me. Drop a dime. Turn stool pigeon.”

  It’s amazing how many American idioms these people know, but then, they’ve kind of been studying the infection of their culture by ours for decades.

  Me: “Hell, no!”

  I mean it, but then I feel terrible about my bullshit cover story, and I decide, then and there, that whatever I tell Welsh about, I am not saying shit about my new friends. There’s something good and real happening, and I’m not going to eff it up.

  After a while, Michael reappears, and he’s plastered. He says he made out with some dude but then the dude’s girlfriend showed up so it’s time for him to leave. Rab peels himself away from a group of crunchy-granola-looking kids he’s been holding forth to—he seems to be quite the Big Man on What They Don’t Call Campus—and he and Soph and I help Michael out the door.

  It’s been a long time since I was hanging out. Like, yeah, I’ve been around people, and, yeah, even my friends when we were on the Ronald Reagan, but that was all so fraught. I had forgotten what it was like to spend time with people just spending time, without there being something heavy going down. So just helping this dude home, making sure he doesn’t hurl on us, is a great, totally life-affirming experience.

  The streets are very quiet this late, and it’s surprising that I don’t see the bunch of guys until we’re almost on top of them. They’re probably not much older than us, but I can instantly tell that there’s a difference, mostly because of the hostility that’s radiating off them.

  They’re hanging around on the corner, drinking from tallboy ca
ns and smoking. Jean jackets and sneakers, shitty normcore haircuts. They’re eyeing the purple scarves that Michael and Soph are wearing.

  I’m getting a clear “townie” vibe here, like for sure they have done a scan of us and determined that we are students and they don’t like us. I guess you could say that we have scanned one another, like, superquickly and with 100 percent accuracy, because one of the guys throws away his cigarette butt in a sort of practiced tough-guy gesture and says, half to himself, kind of just putting it out there, “Fuckin’ poof.”

  Now, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure that “poof” is a mean name for a gay guy. Tough Guy must have, like, an amazing gaydar, which would make perfect sense, given that homophobes are often latent homosexuals trying to keep their feelings at bay; anyhow, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a little trial balloon, a pebble thrown into the pond of our awareness so that they can watch the fear ripple out. And sure enough, Soph and Rab just lower their heads and keep maneuvering Michael along.

  A squirt of adrenaline runs along my bones.

  I don’t really feel like pretending that I didn’t hear anything, so I keep on looking at them, which earns a “what you lookin’ at?” from the guy standing next to the guy who said “poof.”

  And, I know I probably shouldn’t do this. Like, I ought to have just done whatever would have gotten us home fastest and safest. But I suddenly feel that I’ve gone through just far too much in far scarier situations than this, and eff it. So I say—

  “A piece of shit in denim.”

  Pretty good, right? I’m not usually much at comebacks. And just processing this takes them a second, enough for us to pass through them, and who knows, maybe that would have been that, had the guy only laughed it off, but, unfortunately, it’s his buddy that laughs first, which means that instead of being a bro who’s cool enough to laugh off an insult from a chick, he’s a bro who’s been shown up in front of his other bros.