amid heaps of trash and lumps of fly-ridden shit.
I didn’t dare cut through Forsyth Park, so I took the sidewalk along Whitaker. The tic tic tic of a central a/c unit caught my attention. I marveled at the sound, at the audacious expenditure of energy, cooling all of the rooms in an apartment at once. The shift in ambient sound was subtle as you moved uptown, the proportion of popping gunshots to humming machinery changing with each block.
Screams of a man in terrible pain burst from an open second-story window. I pedaled faster—thinking of the reports of the flesh-eating virus and silently wished the poor bastard well.
I hadn’t been to Southside in a long time. Very little had changed. In fact, if anything it looked nicer than it had the last time I’d been there. Through the tall steel gates surrounding the passing neighborhoods I could see that some of the lawns were mowed. I didn’t venture too close to the gates, lest some private police take offense at my shabby clothes (the best I owned, for my trip to Southside), and beat me for being in the wrong part of town.
A car honked behind me. I moved to the side of the road and it whooshed past. I stayed by the side—there were more cars on the road up here, even a few trucks and SUVs.
When choices have to be made between oil to fuel luxury cars and oil for fertilizer to feed starving people, the choice is obvious: the oil goes to fuel the cars. Now that energy was scarce, consuming it ostentatiously was a status symbol. Leaving your porch light on announced to the world that you could afford to leave your porch light on.
Sometimes I hated these people, who lived so comfortably while the rest of us barely got by. Maybe I hated them because I always figured I would be one of them, I don’t know. We had nothing, and they had so much more than they needed. But they were just people, doing what people do, which is to try to keep what they have.
It cost me eight bucks to get into Snowstorm. If I hadn’t biked five miles to get there, I wouldn’t have paid it, and as it was I felt guilty. I didn’t have any business spending that kind of money when Jeannie was asking permission to eat some peanut butter. I went through big double doors and up a ramp that led to the club.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d stepped into the Alps. There were ski slopes that rose out of sight, piles of snow all over, snowmen with drinks clutched in frozen hands. People were dancing on a frozen pond. It had to be holographic, but it was so perfect, so solid, that it took my breath away. I made a conscious effort to keep my yokel mouth from dropping open and strolled through the place like I’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t realized how much the world was still progressing. Even through this awful time, people were still inventing things. I just wasn’t seeing it, just like people in third world countries never saw it.
There were cool rich kids everywhere, their hairstyles as varied as the flavors at Baskin Robbins: dreadlocks and Mohawks, Betty Page cuts, pigtails, red-and-white barber pole specials.
There was an Alpine bar perched in the corner thirty feet above the floor, on an icy cliff. It didn’t appear to be a holo, because the guys sitting at the bar weren’t that attractive. It looked like the place I’d be most comfortable. I watched a dude with blond little-Dutch-boy hair step on a steel plate that lifted him up to the bar, and I followed suit.
I took a stool next to a guy in his sixties with droopy red eyes and thinning white hair. There was a TV mounted among the bottles behind the bar, tuned to MSNBC. They were showing refugees pouring into California from Arizona and New Mexico.
“I just came from there,” the guy said, to no one in particular.
“From California?” I asked.
“Arizona,” he said.
“I’ve heard things aren’t good in Arizona.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” he said.
A big-eared guy in a business suit turned around.
I didn’t dare cut through Forsyth Park, so I took the sidewalk along Whitaker. The tic tic tic of a central a/c unit caught my attention. I marveled at the sound, at the audacious expenditure of energy, cooling all of the rooms in an apartment at once. The shift in ambient sound was subtle as you moved uptown, the proportion of popping gunshots to humming machinery changing with each block.
Screams of a man in terrible pain burst from an open second-story window. I pedaled faster—thinking of the reports of the flesh-eating virus and silently wished the poor bastard well.
I hadn’t been to Southside in a long time. Very little had changed. In fact, if anything it looked nicer than it had the last time I’d been there. Through the tall steel gates surrounding the passing neighborhoods I could see that some of the lawns were mowed. I didn’t venture too close to the gates, lest some private police take offense at my shabby clothes (the best I owned, for my trip to Southside), and beat me for being in the wrong part of town.
A car honked behind me. I moved to the side of the road and it whooshed past. I stayed by the side—there were more cars on the road up here, even a few trucks and SUVs.
When choices have to be made between oil to fuel luxury cars and oil for fertilizer to feed starving people, the choice is obvious: the oil goes to fuel the cars. Now that energy was scarce, consuming it ostentatiously was a status symbol. Leaving your porch light on announced to the world that you could afford to leave your porch light on.
Sometimes I hated these people, who lived so comfortably while the rest of us barely got by. Maybe I hated them because I always figured I would be one of them, I don’t know. We had nothing, and they had so much more than they needed. But they were just people, doing what people do, which is to try to keep what they have.
It cost me eight bucks to get into Snowstorm. If I hadn’t biked five miles to get there, I wouldn’t have paid it, and as it was I felt guilty. I didn’t have any business spending that kind of money when Jeannie was asking permission to eat some peanut butter. I went through big double doors and up a ramp that led to the club.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d stepped into the Alps. There were ski slopes that rose out of sight, piles of snow all over, snowmen with drinks clutched in frozen hands. People were dancing on a frozen pond. It had to be holographic, but it was so perfect, so solid, that it took my breath away. I made a conscious effort to keep my yokel mouth from dropping open and strolled through the place like I’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t realized how much the world was still progressing. Even through this awful time, people were still inventing things. I just wasn’t seeing it, just like people in third world countries never saw it.
There were cool rich kids everywhere, their hairstyles as varied as the flavors at Baskin Robbins: dreadlocks and Mohawks, Betty Page cuts, pigtails, red-and-white barber pole specials.
There was an Alpine bar perched in the corner thirty feet above the floor, on an icy cliff. It didn’t appear to be a holo, because the guys sitting at the bar weren’t that attractive. It looked like the place I’d be most comfortable. I watched a dude with blond little-Dutch-boy hair step on a steel plate that lifted him up to the bar, and I followed suit.
I took a stool next to a guy in his sixties with droopy red eyes and thinning white hair. There was a TV mounted among the bottles behind the bar, tuned to MSNBC. They were showing refugees pouring into California from Arizona and New Mexico.
“I just came from there,” the guy said, to no one in particular.
“From California?” I asked.
“Arizona,” he said.
“I’ve heard things aren’t good in Arizona.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” he said.
A big-eared guy in a business suit turned around.
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