Lurkers Page 5

  ‘You’re saying I should give up my free speech.’

  ‘I’m saying that having free speech, and a phonecam, and a computer, and a modem, and the slightest idea what the backend of MySpaceDotCom even looks like, doesn’t lead directly to an unquenchable need to use them all every second of every day. I’m saying that some things were left out of the employee handbook back when people had the atavistic common sense to know better.’

  ‘We should know better because you say so,’ Hutch said.

  ‘Fine: I’m wrong. Next time, you and your phonecam can follow your boss into the bathroom and get all sorts of newsworthy shots. Then you can sit here telling us how right you are about everything until they stop giving you free Saltines and water.’

  I thought about that for a second.

  ‘To clarify: you can sit here in the building,’ I said, ‘not at my table.’

  ‘Y’know,’ the goth from out front began, ‘It’s kinda none of my business, but...well, I suppose I don’t know the history here, though....’

  ‘The history,’ I said, ‘is that it’s none of his business either. Including my opinion.’

  He slid out of his booth and approached, stopping beside Leslie and sitting on his heels somewhat attentively on the floor to her left, elbows on our tabletop. ‘Your opinion of him is none of his business?’

  ‘Not unless he lets it be; I’m certainly not releasing my opinion into the public domain.’

  ‘You lost me.’

  ‘It’s zerosum,’ I explained, ‘My thoughts on this idiot—on any idiot—on anyone: all zerosum. It’s functionally a paradox unto itself: if your selfimage is weak enough to be modified by my opinion, then my opinion’s gonna be that you’re equally zerosum and meaningless. Follow that through to conclusion, and I’ll have modified your entire existence into a shiny container of nothingness. Unless I’m cooler than we think; then I might be able to manipulate you into antimatter and end the universe. How rad would that be....’

  He laughed shortly. ‘Ending the universe would be cool?’

  ‘Ending the universe would be zerosum; that’s sorta my point.’

  He tilted his head slightly, curious but perplexed.

  I nodded. ‘In a hundred years, who’s gonna care.’

  ‘Care whether you slam people, or care whether you destroyed the universe?’

  ‘I think we can take it as read that, the universe destroyed, no one would be too concerned, since no one would be, period. As to my bedside manner regarding a borderline stalker in a restaurant...that falls under my Call a Cop Policy: it’s not against any law verbally to treat a selfinserting imbecile as anything less than an object of worship, making any castigation in the matter as meaningless as the imbecile in question.’

  ‘But you don’t deny that you could be nicer to people.’

  ‘I could be a lot of things,’ I allowed, ‘To varying degrees of cataclysm. Which is approximately where the irony begins to scream. Isn’t it curious that we—royally, myself not included—are willing to tolerate any caste of people except that caste unwilling to tolerate any other given caste.’

  ‘What’s that mean,’ he asked.

  ‘That, new, from the makers of the laughably inaccurate “reverse racism”, is reverse hypocrisy. That diversity, while by definition the amalgamation of conflicting hatred, is in application the perceived ability to accept and tolerate everyone but the gaybasher. That, maybe I just don’t understand Americans; but I find it odd that you guys are still beating yourselves up for fucking the injuns in fourteen ninety-two, but have already forgiven the Japs for nineteen forty-one. Is that just because Japan still exists and maintains a certain fungibility, or is there some simpler national masochism I’m misunderstanding.’

  The kid smirked. ‘I’m one sixteenth Cherokee.’

  ‘Oh who the hell isn’t,’ I said, ‘Strictly, genetically speaking, seven billion of us are one hundred percent African; susceptibility to sicklecell anaemia notwithstanding, any differences are aesthetic, making any inferences subjective, making—again—the whole thing zerosum.’

  ‘So you take no responsibility for your opinions.’

  ‘I take full responsibility for my opinions: they’re not plagiarised; I just don’t pretend that my opinions can hurt anyone who doesn’t subscribe to them—to whatever extent—by acknowledging them in the first place. Don’t like my ideas? Misidentify me as an idiot and walk away. Hanging around hoping to change a reasoned worldview with emotional buzzwords is the strategy of a fool.’

  ‘I’m not trying to change your beliefs; I’m—’

  ‘What beliefs.’

  ‘You just said...your beliefs...your worldview.’

  ‘A worldview isn’t a belief,’ I explained, ‘It’s a conclusion based on limited information. Given more information, it can change and even contradict earlier versions. A belief can’t change, since it’s the certainty that a condition is true, despite the lack of supporting evidence.’

  ‘Sure it can. The doorbell rings when you’re expecting someone to come over, and you might believe they’re the ones at the door. If it’s not, your belief changes.’

  ‘Your belief dies; there’s no point opening the door and seeing who it actually is, then believing that it’s that guy instead; just accept that it’s the other guy. I suppose you could play Visitor of the Gaps and believe that the first guy is also there, at a different door; but that’s getting into psychosis.’

  ‘But the guy could be at a different door.’

  ‘Sure. Door A observed, he could be at Door B. And, now that we know that Jehovah doesn’t actually drag the sun across the sky, we can think maybe it still lets whichever football team prays hardest be the one to win the game. There are always a few gaps left out there for these things to hide in. We’ve confirmed mathematically that there’s no way for an animal the size Nessie’s supposed to be to live in Loch Ness; still, thousands or millions of idiots run to Scotland every year, hoping to see it, or film it, or mate with it, or whatever.’

  ‘Nessie can’t exist?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s not enough food in Loch Ness to support an elasmosaur. Let alone a breeding population.’

  ‘What about Bigfoot then.’

  ‘A big dumb furry mammal? Fascinating. I can think of seven billion of those I’m already thrilled about. Who cares.’

  ‘So, the chupacabra...capybara...whichever it is.’

  ‘Coyote. That’s pretty well established now. It’s a mutant, which is kinda cool; but it’s a hairless coyote: nothing more.’

  ‘Okay. UFOs.’

  ‘What about them.’

  ‘Are they real?’

  ‘Sure. Unidentified Flying Objects exist. Even after they become Misidentified Flying Objects. Even aliens probably exist; it’s a big universe. Nothing suggests that they’re invading this planet, or even that they’d know about it.’

  ‘You can’t allow that aliens might be watching us?’

  ‘Can you allow that they might not be?’ I asked.

  ‘Um...yeah; they might not be.’

  ‘Then we’re agreed,’ I said, ‘They might not be. That’s as much as we can conclude for now.’

  SIX

  Around eleven, or close to it, the gangies arrived. It’s at this point that I could frontload the disclaimers, starting probably with don’t get me wrong but colon; however, if you’ve made it thirty-odd pages into the story without help form your lawyers, priests, or legal guardian caregivers, then I’m not in a hurry to insult your intelligence, let alone my own.

  Oh all right; just for you special little troopers making an effort to become grownups but at risk of backsliding and reverting to, like, democrats: BlackricanAmerican blackro black people of colour are astoundingly important to society and its workings because, uh...like...one of them probably once, uh...some of...erm...like, I might not personally care about basketball but...wow; thanks for being good at throwing shit, guys....

  Ever tried to apologise fo
r something when you hadn’t actually done anything wrong? Awkward, innit.

  Okay; to make the point itself: that I don’t pretend that blacks are better than any other misidentified colour in any important application doesn’t preclude my ability to recognise the fundamental difference between George Foreman and George Jefferson. That difference, in fact, can be identified by a single word: effort; the difference as I’m able to quantify it is a matter of contrasting the upwardly against the uppity.

  The latter classification would include the gangies.

  ‘Shit,’ one of them announced, magically implanting seventeen syllables into the word, seating himself and those following him at the Flanders’ former table for a fraction of a second before sprawling out and slapping the table for NorthAmerica’s attention: ‘Get some service up in here; damn!’ Cackling for a moment at his manufactured lulzriot, he glanced behind his seat to find Hutch starting vapidly at him. ‘Whoa; di’n’t see ya there all cool back like Fiddy; ’cept you be more like Fiddy Dollar!’ And he cackled again, in much the way you’d expect old plumbing to laugh.

  ‘Damn, man,’ the other male—older and quieter—assessed, ‘That cole; serious.’

  ‘I just playen,’ the first assured, ‘Don’t eat me now.’ And more laughter from the Pipes&Gaskets Section of Home Depot.

  Hutch of course was lost; I suppose, thinking about it now, that the boring little moron lacked prior reference: he’d never actually seen me deal with this sort of intrusion and therefore had nothing to fail properly to copy. He looked pleadingly in my direction, like I’d have had any interest in getting involved even if Hutch had been someone I’d wanted to save...should such creatures exist on this planet.

  The younger one turned back to the older one. ‘Muhfugger prolly do wanna eat me,’ he muttered, ‘Gayass muhfugger.’ And slightly quieter, scratchier cackling: residential grade pipes, rather than industrial.

  ‘Damn, Lamar...,’ the chick with the younger, cacklier one berated, ‘Just let it go, yo?’

  ‘Oh you gonna tell me leggo,’ Lamar contested, ‘Damn, girl: don’t gotta get all up like at; jam my foot up someplace an shit, get all mouthy me.’ He glanced back at Hutch again, nearly like people glance back to see if they’ve been caught being stupid, but more to catch Hutch catching him, since that was more properly the point.

  He didn’t catch Hutch catching him; he caught Hutch staring at me, looking for answers, and followed his gaze to meet mine.

  ‘Oh...,’ he sang, ‘Oh, I see. Uh-huh. Check it, Jamal: got whitey both sides; stumble inna gawdam klan meet here.’

  ‘Damn time we go eat, same shit,’ Jamal agreed, peeking round to see how white I might have been, ‘Ain’t no justice.’ His chick, trapped on the inside of the booth like Lamar’s, slumped down a bit and said nothing.

  Jamal, an inch from Leslie’s hair, started looking her over; feeling it, she moved slightly to the side. I shut the laptop again and waited.

  ‘Fuck you got there,’ Lamar said to the shiny, clicky thing I’d closed, ‘That a GameBoy, sumpin?’

  ‘Laptop,’ I stated. No inflexion.

  ‘Nah, man; laptop be y’lap; that a tabletop, sumpin.’

  ‘As you say,’ I allowed, unenthused.

  ‘Oh you all cool f’a whiteboy, incha,’ Lamar said, straightening up in his seat and obscuring Hutch, possibly on purpose. ‘Don’t nuddin scare likayou, do it.’

  We talked earlier about Steve King et al thinking only later of clever retorts and my arguably selfdestructive ability to think more quickly than some writers might. Lemmings and Germs: I present Officer Pythagoras....

  To Leslie I announced: ‘The dark one mocks me.’

  Another primary difference between the upwardly and the uppity is that the former will acknowledge the archaic futility of the colourwars and laugh with me at the latter for being spastic peacocks; no such animal was that night available: it was pretty much just me and this obstreperous little pufferfish.

  ‘The hell you just caw me you dumbass cracker!’ Lamar leapt to his feet but came no closer.

  ‘Oh damn,’ I said, ‘I...who knows; I’d hoped you were smart enough to catch it.’

  ‘Oh you think you funny now.’

  ‘My readers think I’m funny.’

  ‘I show you funny, muhfugger.’

  ‘With what: a minstrel show?’

  ‘Fuck’s that.’

  ‘You really had to be there,’ I said, slightly noting the irony.

  ‘The fuck you talkinbout.’

  ‘It was this thing: white guys spoofing black guys; forget it and sit down.’

  ‘Ah hell no,’ Lamar intimated, ‘Y’all don’t getta call me black; be a African American, muhfugger.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘Say what—whadda—whaddafuck you sane now you dumb fuggin cracker muhfugger.’

  ‘I doubt you’ve been to Africa,’ I said, ‘I seriously doubt you’re from there.’

  ‘My peep from Africa, cos you peep kidnapped us, brought us here.’

  ‘The English brought you here from Africa? I wasn’t told. I’d heard that the Americans brought you here from Brasil.’

  ‘You sane I from Sowmerica now.’

  ‘Insofar as the Americans buying slaves got them largely from traders in Brasil; yeah.’

  ‘Fucken school you get that shit from.’

  ‘Most recently? Eton. You?’

  ‘Don’t need no school muhfugger; just natural smart and shit.’

  ‘You’d have to be,’ I said, ‘to have a manufactured Chicagoan accent and no idea what the capital of Illinois is.’

  ‘Capit—the fuck cares the capital Illinoise, muhfugger; that whitepeep shit, know I sane?’

  ‘Only about every fourth word. But I don’t speak Portuguese.’ In point of fact, I actually do know some Portuguese, using it to approximately the effect to which I use English; I’ve got this Brasilian friend who calls me Malfador; it’s a petname.

  ‘Fuck that gotta do, anything.’

  ‘It’s the language endemic to Brasil. I thought we’d covered that.’

  ‘The fuck you problem, cracker.’

  Have we established that I don’t actually care about anything? Doesn’t matter: it’s not actually true. Because that idiotic question actually got me to laugh. Shortly. Once.

  ‘Well,’ I said, thinking about it for half a second, ‘You came in, started whimpering that white people were here, started talking to me without my permission, got up, got all froggy, proved that you lack the education available to a gardenslug, and made it out to be somehow my fault that you suck. And that’s just in the last couple minutes.’

  ‘So you got a problem wi’black peep.’

  ‘Only the stupid ones,’ I said, ‘Only the lazy, useless ones blaming an exaggerated history of discrimination and slavery for their modern disinterest in becoming functional members of society. Only the ones able to live in a nation of free education and unlimited opportunity—antitrust laws notwithstanding—yet incapable of raising their kids, staying out of prison, or even learning the basic conjugations of fucking verbs. Only the ones who castigate the others, with whom I lack a problem, for being UncleToms, having bothered to work the system and rise above the securityblanket of clichéd oppression from the man. Only you, for projecting your impotence to succeed out upon everyone who never even cared that you existed. Motherfucker.’

  Lamar gaped wordlessly for a moment, having understood none of that; then: ‘Ah, shit’s on now, muhfugger!’ And he started patting himself down either because there were invisible spiders in his shirt, or...I really can’t guess what the hell he was doing. Neither apparently could he; he stopped killing spiders and reached for the beltline under his jersey. ‘Cracker goan down, righcheer.’

  ‘By all means,’ I told him, ‘Cap me with your burner; that should end the stereotype.’

  I neither doubted nor in all honesty cared that Lamar probably did have a gun in his Adidas, and might well h
ave pulled it and used it [whether he could have hit me from four paces with less than fifty rounds at his disposal]; but, just then, the fuzz arrived.

  I guess Jessica had called the police, probably the moment these idiots had walked in the door. Or maybe it was just dumb timing: a couple cops will generally wander into this place around eleven, which must be a shiftchange, for free coffee and pie; a comic whose name I’ve now forgotten once claimed to have been arrested for leaving a restaurant without paying his bill, the charge being impersonating an officer—lulz.

  Here’s the cool part: cops being packhunters, appearing minimally in pairs, both officers arriving onscene happened to be black; also, they happened to have the same tired look I could feel my own face displaying for Homey Joe Gopher here. As I say, black guys willing to live up here in the world have as much or more contempt for these selfparodied meerkats as the rest of us have. The rest of us being we grownups refusing to tolerate the intolerable for the unnatural purpose of embracing all diversity but grownupism. The cops had their hands resting on the grips of their Glocks.

  ‘Hey there,’ the closest said to Lamar as the other backed away and muttered something into the radio clipped to his epaulette, gunhand still at the ready.