Shudder (3 page)

“Face me, face me, I want you to face me...” she sung softly to herself and giggled. She decided to allow herself a ninth cigarette.

After that, she would put the special sheets on her bed.

Anton stood on the corner of a bakery, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. It was a pretentious bakery, naturally. Only pretentious bakeries may survive in the city's center.

Trying to charm both conservative and modern office rats, it had a two-foot high plump plastic chef with the appropriate white hat by its front door, and on the door itself the picture of a blue-haired moekko girl eyeing a flying croissant with delighted, glinting, wide-eyed awe.

He was smoking his fifteenth cigarette for the day and trying to look inconspicuous. Although an albino—a condition which made him stand out somewhat even on streets of a 21st century city—he dealt with that when the need arose by use of makeup and huge oblong shades, turning into just one of many anonymous aging fashionistas.

He was fifty-two, five foot eight, and lean as some intense smokers tend to be. His hair painted a light orange, was still in considerable health. He was currently on something like a stakeout.

Anton was the director of the city's N.M.H. office. ‘N.M.H.' stood for ‘National Mental Hygiene'.

It was lunch hour and here in the center, the streets filled with office workers scrambling to get a coffee and some food into themselves.

Of course, that also included the ones who were scrambling to buy something fashionable, do some shopping therapy in the limited time before the office grind sucked them back in.

At this very moment, though, a number of people were diverted from their scrambling. A crowd was gathering at the base of a bank, looking up in agitation. On the fourth floor, on the ledge of a window, stood a fragile-looking, petite blonde, dressed in tweed pants, a purple shirt, and a thin red tie. She was obviously a junior something, who was crying, wringing her hands, and looking at the ground below through smeared mascara.

“Don't do it, girl,” a man shouted from the crowd.

“It's not worth it,” a woman standing near him added her opinion.

The girl did not answer, and whether she whimpered or not couldn't be heard above the noises of the city.

“Where
are
the police?” a third person demanded indignantly. Others concurred immediately.

The girl gave a forlorn wail, then shouted quite coherently, hands clenched into little fists, “I can't take it anymore!”

The crowd gasped and surged back as the girl stepped into the air and plummeted. Some of the spectators echoed her scream.

A man stepped forward.

He was an ordinary looking young man, in a brown suit, with lime green hair, probably a worker in advertising or design.

With unnerving confidence, he spread his arms… and caught the girl. As the screaming body made contact with his arms, he buckled and grunted but didn't fall. Gently, he laid her down on the pavement.

For about ten seconds he knelt stroking her hair and soothing her with baby words like, “There, there” and “Everything will be all right,” before the crowd finally digested what had just taken place and the clapping of hands and jubilant hooting commenced.

Within a minute two police cars, an ambulance, and a news team arrived. Business went back to usual, events were now back in sanctioned and governed channels.

Before being lead away, the girl turned to look at her savior. “I'm sorry I be a fool now, no more trying to killing me again,” she said with a shaky voice.

A grown woman hugged a surprised man beside her as she heard these words.

* * * *

Anton stepped on the stub of his cigarette and walked to his car. As he drove his green Moskva Opel back to HQ, he replayed the whole incident in his mind.

All in all, a successful operation. A satisfactory crowd had gathered and he could already see the news reports: “Stranger Saves Distressed Girl” and “A Miracle on Hamsun Street”.

The girl and the man who saved her were both professionals. They had signed declarations that they were aware of the hefty penalties were they ever to disclose their participation in such staged events.

Tomorrow they would be on their way to another town, where with a makeover they would be ready to carry out some other morale-boosting stunt. It was part of Anton's job to devise and oversee such events.

For the most part, his job was to collect and evaluate data with his team. Sometimes, now and then, when he identified an increase in some sort of tension in the city, he would begin offering his superiors plans for relevant scenarios to play out as a sort of counter magic.

A surgical strike on the city's morale may diffuse tension and avert an explosion of desperation-fueled violence, by adding a little shard of optimism, a belief that ‘real values' do indeed still exist and are even practiced, and that everything currently happening in life is just some sort of misunderstanding which just has to be resolved sooner or later.

With the help of a mathematician friend, good old Deus, who was also a programmer to boot, Anton had presented his would-be employers with a computer program that demonstrated through various entangled mathematical proofs that producing a positive situation in one part of the city may diffuse tension in another.

He had known all this intuitively, without the need of mathematical proofs, but he also knew that without some scientific mumbo-jumbo he would never convince the government to fund such a dubious initiative.

Now, six years later, the three biggest cities in the country were already using teams trained by him, and there was talk that the Japanese were inquiring into this new field of crime control.

As Anton drove in slow faltering lurches with the rest of the traffic, his mind automatically absorbed everything in his vision range, and if possible, classified it, and deposited it in various mental drawers.

The schoolgirls on the streets were wearing thinner ties this season, and tweed shorts were in full swing. Again. Many of the shorts were combined with shiny brown and red flat shoes.

The combination of ballerina skirts over black nylon tights also survived the whole year without disappearing, but the bowler hats of last spring were much less frequent this season.

Huge fake gems, a tongue in cheek imitation of formidable anal beads, were still hanging from the necks of many mature women, although the younger generation had already moved on to plastic sea shells. These multicolored shells hung from ears, noses, eyebrows; even some of the fake fingernails were now in the shape of tiny shells.

Other things appeared to stay the same for a fourth year running. Small blobs of white gel that keeps its form the whole day still made appearances in the hairstyle of the feel-good type of women.

The fashion-conscious men of the city were still divided into subculture-imitating fashionistas and postmetrosexuals.

The old-schoolers still dressed in suits and sport outfits, but made up less than forty percent of the pedestrians.

The lower class hooligans, the ‘nomies', who dressed in a mix of clashing elements from all available fashions, could also be observed skulking here and there, but their presence was still scarce on the streets of the city center during the day.

Come evening out they would go on the prowl in insecure noisy groups.

Anton lit his twentieth cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, and checked the pocket of his overcoat. He had two more packs, which meant he was okay for today.

A poster caught his attention.

A young woman in a modern combination of a white sleeveless shirt and wide yellow pants, barefoot, was eating a piece of toast with chocolate on it. She was smiling and holding her eyes squeezed tight, as if experiencing the approach of a colossal orgasm, and the chocolate was artfully smeared around her mouth.

Right above her head was written: “Hidden Pleasures From Kool Delite Choco.”

What made Anton take a second look was the chocolate around the girl's mouth. Only about three or four years ago, a pressure group managed to pass legislation forbidding the display of commercials in which children were shown with chocolate, ice cream, and similar substances, smeared on their faces.

In the past, these images would only have signified the pure childish delight born of eating something sweet, but these days there were other connotations, which made the contemporary adult squirm with unease at the image of a happy boy with chocolate all over his chin.

The industry had reacted fast. By legally acknowledging the sexual significance of foods smeared on faces, the pressure group had in fact opened up the gates to another dimension in which advertisers could successfully convey erotic hints

Anton remembered reading that since this new wave of messy sex legitimization had grown stronger in the last years, it had become almost obligatory for fashionable newlywed couples to smear wedding cake on each other's faces.

Naturally, almost half of the wedding cakes now were no longer white. Cocoa, coffee, and chocolate advertisers had caught on early to the new trend, and with a few sexual winks and nods the brown-colored sweets sales had climbed considerably.

Now the transition from using happy-looking children to using happy-looking adults in the advertisements was complete. Although only a minority still practiced messy sex games, if online polls were to be trusted, the concept itself was absorbed into the tapestry of erotic hints out of which the modern fashionable persona was woven.

Anton parked his car, went out, and smoked his twenty-first cigarette on the street, in front of the office building. It housed a different firm on each floor, and while every business advertised itself with huge plaques at the entrance, only Anton's firm acknowledged its existence in modest two-inch letters: ‘
N. M. H. Office.
'

He would write his report on the staged morale boost, and then would have about two-three more hours of surfing the web, of ‘general situation monitoring' as he named this when selling the concept, before going home.

The N.M.H. office was divided into four rooms. One was the monitoring room, where sat two workers, one watching and recording TV shows, commercials and news, the other reading magazines and newspapers, and site-surfing.

The total team of the monitoring staff numbered six.

Two always worked outside, ‘walking the beat' around the city all day, taking note of the posters, the graffiti, the music being heard in various places, the way the citizens were dressed, and the ways they interacted with each other.

They would, of course, also unobtrusively take pictures with their phones and record short clips.

The three pairs in ‘monitoring' worked in shifts of a fortnight, to avoid becoming too bogged down in their respective spheres.

After two weeks of watching TV like a maniac, to get to walk around town or read magazines was a welcome relief. To the one who lurked in the shadows for a fortnight spying on people, the chance to watch some TV instead also offered a much-needed temporary change of pace and perspective.

Every pair was also divided into a day and night shift, so that one would watch and record TV programs or crisscross the town on foot at day time, while the other one would do all that at night.

The rate of burnout was quite high, since all of the team members were constantly subjected to a bombardment of very particular types of information. They also had to watch out for hidden links between the different patterns of information, hidden links that any normal person would be doing his damn best to ignore.

They had to take down the murders, the rapes, the break-ins and the suicides, the children that were molested and the children that were molesters, and they always had to write down in what manner the news was presented. They had to know what books, movies and songs were the best-sellers of the season; they had to be up to date on fashion in clothes and in sexual behavior; they had to monitor the changing trends in pornography and erotica; they had to watch the political language used in the media.

Although Anton always stressed that it was up to him and him alone to work out the possible data correlations upon receiving the weekly reports from the junior analysts, naturally they all couldn't help themselves but go ahead and draw their own conclusions.

In the last two years alone, two monitoring team members had total nervous breakdowns, and while cocktails of antidepressants had stabilized them, one fellow, young Andrew, had completely snapped just three months after beginning work, and had shaved his head and joined a neo-Buddhist cult.

Anton knew that the monitoring team should in fact number at least twenty people, not these measly six, in order to adequately sift through the circulating information streams and not get squashed by overload, but the Interior Ministry officials always cited tight budgetary constraints, especially for projects of such suspiciously innovative nature.

The second room housed the two junior analysts, Michelle and Chen, both in their early thirties, but already with the slightly mad gazes of people who know far too much.

Their job was to summarize into possible trends the information submitted by the monitoring team people, and present their summaries to Anton. They also participated on some occasions in his brainstorming sessions concerning a staged event, or a subtle influence plan for the city authorities.

The latter approach Anton believed to be in the long run more effective than the occasional bursts of choreographed social solidarity, like today's miraculous saving of the suicidal girl. It wasn't easy to convince the mayor's office of the need of playing early Mozart instead of commercials in the subway, or of using specific color combinations in official posters announcing city events, to counter the influence on the mass psyche of the existing color trends.

Even when the relevant city authorities were convinced, it still took far too long to achieve far too little.

The third room in the office was the ‘conference room', where Anton would meet the junior analysts, the visiting officials, where presentations were made, and where staff birthday parties took place. A huge oblong desk took up almost all the space there.

The fourth room was Anton's private office. His lair, where he could hole up and chew over the gathered impressions.

On the desk was the half-inch thick monitor of his PC, lying face down, which began emitting signals of waking a second after Anton straightened it to work position.

He opened the middle drawer of his desk and took out an ashtray in the shape of a six-inch long Viking longship. Lighting a cigarette, he turned to the corner near the door, to the small metallic table, on top of which was his personal coffee machine, and below which was his retro stereo system.

Anton pressed the power button and the stereo lit up in a myriad of small bluish and yellowish lights, and after a lag of about two seconds, the music started playing. It was a collection of jazz-funk pieces from a little before he was born.

He took another intense suck at his cigarette and left it in the longship in order to not spread the smell all over the office. He exited his room, remembering to close the door. Taking his empty plastic bottle, he filled it up from the office mineral water container. He then quickly returned to his room, his cigarette having only grown half an inch of ash, poured the water into the coffee machine, and switched it on.

Five minutes later, he filled his personal coffee mug to the brim—his personal coffee mug was the size of a serious beer mug—and sat down in front of his computer.

It took him forty minutes to write his report, twelve minutes to edit it, and then it was time to surf.

Anton got down to his knees and felt for the small package that he had stuck to the underside of his desk. There was his stash of ersatz marijuana, called this season ‘buzzers'.

When circumstances had forbidden him from using illegal drugs, after a period of mourning and dullness of the mind, Anton had discovered a gray industry of substitute drugs.

The entrepreneurs in question were providing products that looked more or less like marijuana and had an effect more or less like marijuana, but did not contain in themselves even a single molecule of anything illegal, thus circumventing the impassioned attempts of the majority to stamp out the smoker for his own good.

Mixing up to twenty obscure but legal herbs achieved the effect of the substitute pot, and in their interaction, they brought about a buzz similar to that of pot proper.

Every year or two the media would make a big deal out of it, and the statesmen would react indignantly and ban the currently popular concoction. The ‘legal high' enthusiasts would just reshuffle the ingredients, and maybe add another obscure weed from Guinea-Bissau, to escape the formulas deemed illegal. Meaning, for another season, people like Anton, who worked in places with random drug checks but did not want to forfeit clarity of thought, could escape the humiliating return to the common levels of perception.

Although legal, or rather ‘still legal', the legal pot looked close enough to illegal pot, to make Anton devise the precaution of keeping it in his office and in his home, but try to have it as rarely as possible with him, when out between these two safe havens.

Everything was possible, and if the cops ever stripped and searched him, it would be an impossible task to convince them that what they had found in this small packet was not actually anything illegal.

Even if in the end, the law proclaimed him innocent and turned him loose, working in his position, he could not afford an incident like that in the first place. It had taken years of begging the administration to officially deem him ‘clean' and remove him from the list of drug offenders and after having finally achieved this, he wanted to keep his name off that list forever.

Anton poured out a small pile of his ‘buzzers' on the desk, secured the rest back into its hiding place, then took a cigarette from his pack and held it above the wastebasket. He squeezed and rolled it in his fingers, until a third of it was finally empty of tobacco.

He then smoothed out the crumpled empty part of the small white tube and sucked up the faux weed. He now had a cigarette the first third of which was marijuana substitute and the other two thirds—tobacco for dessert.

He went to his window and opened it. The view from the fifth floor was uninspiring. All he could see was the backs of the other buildings, which made up the perimeter of the inner yard, and a small slice of the bleak autumn sky.

Anton lit the cigarette and stood at the window, looking absently into the walls of the buildings, taking mighty swigs of coffee from his mighty coffee mug. In four minutes, as he felt his body and mind relax, he was finally really ready to submerge into the information patterns offered by the web.

He opened a new document and named it with the day's date. There he would copy links and make comments for future reference.

He then opened two news sites and two gossip sites, and a porn site, and very soon forgot the outside world.