Ace’s wife held their infant daughter at her hip.
The officer said “good luck” to Ace and turned away, the silent but ever-watchful sheriff hovering like a pet bird over his shoulder.
“We ain’t dead,” Ace shouted.
Linc could barely hear him over the engine Bishop had now started revving, getting the car ready to peel off.
“You can’t talk about us like we dead. We right here! See this here? This still a family! Ain’t gonna break that! Good luck to you, Officer!”
The rest of Ace’s words were lost in the smoke that billowed from the tailpipe. Bishop shifted into gear and the truck bumped along before shuddering off. No one in the truck bed had moved. Anybody walking by would’ve thought they were sleeping.
“Guess Ace ain’t comin’ to work today,” Jayceon said, arm propped beneath his neck, head bumping softly against the back of the truck bed. Linc heard implied violence in the kid’s voice and wondered what would happen if Bishop spun the car around and caught up with that officer.
Eamonn pulled his Flex out of his shirt pocket, tapped at it a little bit, then handed it over to Jonathan, who found himself staring at screenshots of homes that had been well put together, furnished, lived in, with numbers next to them that represented their bids. The cursor hovered over the main picture, a shot of the house’s front façade and its rose garden, its postcard image, and shot out faded shots of the house’s other sides, views from above, views of the expansive but well-kept backyard, the small gate that kept the place fenced in. The county treasurer, a wrinkled white man whose neck bulged over his shirt collar and the knot in his blue tie, smiled from the top-left corner of the webpage.
“What am I looking at?” Jonathan asked, facing the stars.
“Online foreclosure auction.” Eamonn scratched lazily at his chest. “Houses still being left, folks fell behind on their property taxes, et cetera.”
“Wait, I thought this whole place was abandoned. Is the city still going after these people?”
Eamonn shifted on the rooftop, turned to face Jonathan. “You came in through Fairfield Station, right?”
Jonathan nodded.
“Where do you think that money came from?”
Jonathan frowned, turned away from the auction.
“Look, stop by the town halls over in Westville. When the councilor mentions wanting to work with the ‘good’ residents, think about who he means.” He smirked. “You think this is forced relocation, right? Jonathan.” He put a reassuring hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, moved it down his forearm and wrapped his fingers around the other man’s. “There is nothing wrong with what we’re doing. This place is, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. We’re building it back up. They’re talking of expanding the maglev line here.” He nodded to the west. “And we got a new air filtration plant going up. Those people’ll get jobs. If they wanna stay, they can stay. We’re not kicking them out.”
Photo after photo of prepared homes flowed across the stream with each of Jonathan’s swipes. He pretended Eamonn’s hand wasn’t warm and pleasantly wrapped around his own. Maybe the someone who lived there wasn’t ready to give it up. Maybe her last name was Brown or something and maybe she had hypertension, wasn’t quite overweight, but waddled more than walked. And maybe she had a mole somewhere on the left side of her face and had her hair permed or had some sort of hot comb put to it. Maybe she was retired, or maybe she couldn’t retire because she was working in industries where that wasn’t done, but she did have disability checks. And maybe she just fell behind on the property taxes, taxes that had been waiting for her when she bought the house a couple years before, thinking she was taking a step up in her play at citizenship. Maybe, when she got the foreclosure notice on her Flex, her brother was asleep, having only recently come back from the hospital after his own surgery. And maybe she’d started to tear up and ask her Flex if “they” were really going to take her home from her, her and the Flex knowing exactly who “they” was. And here it was, on the screen before Jonathan’s face. A home where maybe all of that happened.
David would have had a field day talking Jonathan’s ear off about New Haven’s history of racialized housing policies, spouting a detailed and very erudite chronicle replete with riots and interstate highways, and maybe he’d pull up vids or shots of white folks throwing bricks through the windows of Black homes or some mayor’s appeal to calm, a thinly veiled command to maintain some asymmetrical status quo.
Jonathan closed the browser window, handed the Flex back to Eamonn. “What they got in Westville isn’t what I want. It’s not what David wants either.”
“You’ve got buyer’s remorse, and you haven’t even bought it yet.”
“It’s not buyer’s remorse.” It startled Jonathan how quiet his voice had gotten.
“You just don’t want to profit off of someone else’s misery. Is that it?” Eamonn did not smirk, nor did he chuckle. “Maybe this is gentrification, maybe it’s something else. You don’t know those people, and they don’t know you. Heck, they probably don’t even know about you.”
“They shut the water off for them and turn it back on for us.”
“How do you know your house has running water?” Eamonn asked.
What upset Jonathan more than anything else was how much he had begun to sound like David.
The calls had all blended together: David receiving news that Jo had been hospitalized after falling and hitting her head at home, his manager telling him he didn’t need to come into the office next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that. The first call had come while at work, half a dozen holographic screens displayed before him, the chips embedded in his fingertips glowing as he clicked and slid and swiped information from one source to another recipient, the images and news stories and numbers and acronyms somehow translated into stock prices and market share and the stuff that people richer than him used to get even richer. And the second call had come while he sat at his mother’s bedside, everything in the room an oppressive, violent white. She was awake and protesting and telling the attendant every way she knew how that she didn’t need to be here, then upon discovering the attendant was droid’d, calling her every variation of “toaster” imaginable.
But then—when she’d been asked to name the day of the week and she’d answered wrong and when she’d called him the wrong name before, after blinking several times, correcting herself—he’d had to leave.
Bereft of work, he passed many hours at The Viewer, wearing a groove into one bench in particular for much of the day. As ever, a creature of habit, he noted wryly. Outside the windows that seemed to extend forever in each direction, the stars glowed.
When he let his mind drift, it traced the patterns she’d shown him when they used to stargaze together. The stories—this character’s luminous smile, that one’s battle axe, that one’s flowing hair—like some sort of founding myth. He’d been a child, and she’d talked about some Wild West as though it were Atlantis. He’d tried to imagine an open plain and the thrill of fashioning a new life for oneself, of taking a place and making it home, of carving a slice of self out of the chaos and ambition and shootouts and panning for gold in rivers with your bare hands. Older, now, he knew it was a place she’d never seen, a place David experienced as twice-mythologized, filtered and filtered and filtered, copied and re-encoded and JPEG-compressed until generation loss had made it nothing more than brushstrokes and discoloration and thick pixelated black boundaries. But there’d been comfort in making a frontier out of the stars.
Then, when his cyberization allowed him access to greater information, he could trace deeper, more convoluted, more specific patterns. A burst of apophenia, an overworking of his neural circuitry, and geometric origami would form, patterns with whatever meaning he wanted to give them, designs waiting for a religion to claim them.
Now the stars seemed to randomly dot the dark. Thrown there by careless celestial fingers in puerile fits of reckless abandon. A drowsy, fatuous deity promising order and snatching his hand away at the last instant, laughing.
David began to tremble.
A small sign to his left indicated with an arrow the way to the smokers’ lounge.
He rose and followed the subsequent signs until he came to a screen made of glass, the other side obscured by a haze of smoke.
Thoughtless steps brought him past the first set of sliding doors into an anteroom that opened out onto the lounge. People, almost entirely red-bloods like Jo, filled the small space, hovered alone or in small groups, humming conversation in quiet joviality. Some of them stared as he had out the window that opened out onto space. David stood, frozen among them, and constriction returned to his chest. This was a different narrowing, a physical thing like an animal curling in on itself to protect from the wiles of a predator. He coughed.
He coughed again, more vicious than before.
“I think it’s supposed to be a cautionary tale.”
He spun at the voice, dulcet with a hint of rasp.
The stubbled speaker smirked and moved to his side. He had a slim leather jacket, marked along its front with small pockets, over a small gray hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled back. He looked at David for a second, appraised him, then turned his gaze toward the expanse. His atomizer’s smoke swung between his thumb and index finger before curling up. He smelled of peppermint.
“Want one?” He had snuck his hand into one of the pockets and pulled out a pack, white with a green triangle running down the front. “They’re menthols. Hope you don’t mind.”
