Forecast 42

Forecast (Shy Scanlon)

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast.

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Chapter 14

Of course, there have always been those among us for whom emotion is an end in itself; the rub of love, for instance, being somehow more important for some then the object of that love’s abrasion. There have been these, and then those that, on top of this, proclaim the fact loudly, failing to hide it under a current of romantic effluvia, rather pressing it to the fore, as if they could thereby be protected from the eventual wane and scatter of characteristics which, when composed and controlled, described something lovable. And yet this is not always a deficit. Poets, musicians, painters and priests, great cultural leaders, are linked in this way. Still, the expression, but more native even than that – the experience itself: of love, of hate, of grief, all these inner goings-on distract some from the ultimate source, or perhaps goal, of the ability to feel in the first place.

It becomes something of an addiction. But it is not, as it may first appear, the narcissistic brand of self-interest, of vanity, that might otherwise be thought a first order threat to true connection. Because this is not a retreat into the self so much as an escape from the self. An emotion’s internal bloom does not reflect one’s own face, but distracts exactly from it. It is a nameless, universal equivocation of the self. These experiences transcend the finite, fleshy vehicle and open one up to some vast encounter with the anonymous nature of life. It is a release. A passage. A leap of faith. And it should not be undertaken lightly.

At least this is what the guidebook says.

The advent of REMO, or Re-experienced EMOtion, and its subsequent abuse, could probably have been foretold had people been interested as much in mapping out the consequences of our new technology as they were in using it. But when is this ever the case. Once the connection had been made that, by ingesting the by-product of emotional transfer, one could achieve some sort of heightened, or at least altered, emotional state, certain among us, people who might otherwise (in my opinion) have been called to greater things, spiraled down into the abyss within themselves, preferring to become part of the cosmos rather than part of one another’s lives.
Fortunately, other than the un-quantifiable loss suffered by a society whose potentially great contributors sacrifice social interaction for exploration into more remote regions of the self, REMO doesn’t cause too much trouble. Its addicts, despite a relatively lackluster bent toward prosthelytization, aren’t exactly a menace, and since they produce their own drug, in most cases the whole REMO culture has been safely nestled in between our preoccupation with issues we find more imminently worrisome and the benefit we reap by functionally ignoring such trifles, or at least denying we care. Still, REMO is considered a dirty indulgence in most circles, and the majority of people, it’s speculated, either use the drug rarely, or not at all. Helen is an example of the former category.

More accurately, Helen has only tried it once. But Zara’s night of experimentation is another count against her. In neither case, to her benefit, has it been her idea, nor, for obvious reasons, her REMO. Because she’d never been able to produce her own Buzz to begin with, the thought that REMO would have any noticeable effect on her was far from her mind. Besides, her parents had so fervently encouraged Zara to experiment with other drugs that her appetite for altered states had already, when REMO made its appearance, long since vanished.

But of all the ways Helen distinguished herself from Zara, one thing that remained consistent was their romantic resolve. Neither the intrepid Zarabarbarian, nor the fiercely domestic Helen, held anything more dear than the intimate bond they’d chosen to foster between themselves and their respective men. It was Asseem who’d suggested REMO the first time, and Jack who, in a drunken haze, slipped some into her drink the second, wanting Helen, as he put it later, to “have a little fun.”

“I don’t need drugs to have fun, Jack,” she’d said the next morning, squinting to see him from under her enormous REMOver.

“How do you know,” was, after a long pause, all he’d come up with, “what you need?”
But Helen knew, contrary to what she’d expected, that REMO did, in fact, have an effect on her. Quite an enormous one. And unpleasant. Simply put, it plunged her so far inside herself that she lost all ability to communicate. She was stripped bare of all social conventions – something she’d always already had difficulty with – and made mute by the sheer force of feeling that congested the internal corridors of her personality, bottlenecking her ability to translate intention into action, impression to expression, and will to power. For someone whose entire self-image was based on her knack for saying what she thought, when she thought it, this was more than merely awkward. It was terrifying. Fortunately, Zara’s experience with Asseem took place in his apartment, alone, and he took care of her, sensitive to the struggles inherent in articulation. They’d stayed together for the duration, Zara in a fetal position with her lover slowly stroking her forehead, playing soothing music, and doing all the talking.

With Jack things were different. They’d gone to a Forecast party – known for their extravagance and extra-curricular activities – and wound up in a room where people were tongue-tied to a pulsing ETM, the others taking turns standing in the conduction spot, giving the getter a full range of other people’s insides. After Helen had demurred two or three times, Jack made the decision for her, gathering a mouthful of the stuff and kissing his wife, spitting REMO down her throat. She’d known better than to “raise the issue” at the time, knowing Jack was just in it for fun, and Helen had taken her troubles to the coat closet, curled into its darkest corner, and stayed there until being called by the familiar voice of a certain forecaster whose acuity did not extend to the tumultuous weather of his own wife’s heart.

When Rocket licked the ETM, Helen’s first response had been a mixture of alarm and pity she might normally have reserved for people, and upon further consideration, having no reason to assume that, even if other animals could be affected by human REMO, the experience would be for Rocket what it was for her, she felt sheepish. After following Busy out of the ETM chamber and into the office, she noticed that he didn’t seem the least bit worried about the dog, doing nothing to follow up on the episode. She scaled back. She expressed a cool disinterest. She let him be. She tried instead to focus again on what Busy was speaking about, to resume the pose she’d used in the car to convince him of their affinity.

The room Busy had brought them to was small, square, and wore nothing on its walls. After shaking Helen’s hand, the man walked behind a simple desk and sat, motioning for her to sit in the room’s only other chair. There was nothing mechanical anywhere, and the only monitor on the desktop appeared to be off. She looked at Busy and attempted a confident grin. They exchanged some simple statements, he what a pleasure it was to be sitting there with someone other than Blain, she what an interesting place they were sitting in, that she was glad to be trusted with an insider’s perspective. The contrast of this near-naked room to everything else she’d seen of the baroque, metal-made pit-mine was slightly unnerving, and with the sound insulation, Helen found she had to intentionally keep her voice raised or it would drip out of her mouth like a leaky faucet rather than project across the uncluttered space between them.

Their attention turned to the dogs. Rocket was sitting, almost stolid, with Busy’s dog circling him, sniffing here and there, nudging, generally making a good-faith effort, it seemed, to engage the unfamiliar animal.

“Any guy off the street would either bark or bend over backwards to be nice,” said Busy. Helen looked at him and noticed that for the first time since she’d met him, Busy’s face betrayed something other than suspicion or appreciation. His eyebrows were bent upward on the inside, and though the corners of his mouth were squeezing out a smile, his lips pressed against one another for support.

“Dogs are just so damn…” he seemed lost in thought.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Helen tried, hoping to maintain their rapport.

Busy broke out of his state and slapped his hand on the desk. “And that’s what I like about you, Helen. You just seem to get it.” Helen watched as his face returned to an old stand-by expression. He relaxed, and pulled himself closer to the desk. As Busy launched into a rather long-winded explanation of the chop-shop cum drug production facility, she was reminded of her many hours sitting with her high school counselor, Mrs. Green, whose gym coach slash reformed hippy approach to Zara had always induced a measure of comfort coated with a pinch of pity. Far from the initial, rather imposing pose he’d struck in the parking lot along I-5, the man before her shrank even as his bombastic gesticulations took up more and more space. He was harmless. He was good natured and spirited and his once intimidating dog was a happy-go-lucky hound waiting for Rocket to give an inch.

“The truth is,” Busy continued, “that I’ve put a lot of time into making this facility the smooth operation you saw out there.” He sighed. “When I was hired there were maybe a few vehicles brought in on any given day. And now look.”
Helen nodded.

“And the REMO resale? My idea. But see – and this was just plain lack of foresight on my part – the drug production really changed the whole atmosphere of the place. Everyone’s so bent on being a big part of the REMO scheme, getting the most Buzz for their buck, that nobody shows much interest in just how damn amazing this facility is. People look away. They come in here and pretend they’ve just walked off the street for a pack of smokes and look at me with these big vacuous eyes when I hand them their change, like, Hey, man, good thing these don’t cause cancer…” He trailed off again. Helen was beginning to realize Busy didn’t have many people to talk to. Which was okay, she thought. She wasn’t quite sure what her next move should be, and she decided to go along with this peculiar man for the time being, feeling a little nostalgic as she was, and wanting to savor the sensation. She hadn’t felt nostalgia in years.

“But if they weren’t so determined to play into the system,” she noted, “it wouldn’t work so well, right?”

Busy’s eyes bore into her, but he smiled. “You’re absolutely right, Helen. It wouldn’t work very well at all.”

They sat, having reached this minor consensus, and looked back to the dogs. Rocket was finally showing some interest in his fellow four-legger, and a tidbit of tail-wagging earned him an increasingly eager playmate. Busy took this as his cue, and walked to the door, opening it to let the creatures tumble out, tossing each other around like dogs. Helen watched with disinterest left over from her REMO masquerade, but wondered, despite herself, if they wouldn’t get lost in those labyrinthine hallways.

She looked at her host and smiled. “Rocket is normally quite affable,” she assured him.

“Affable?”

“Friendly.”

“Right.” He didn’t seem put-off in the least by his ignorance. “Well this is a pretty strange place. I’m sure he’s just-”

“Yeah,” Helen finished.

Then silence.

“The wife,” he finally continued, having resumed his position behind the broad, bare desk, “didn’t like the idea of me taking Fred to work.” He looked at her, as if for assurance. “At first, you know.”

“You mean because of the noise?”

“Well, the noise, yeah…”

“Or-”

“Well he makes for some Buzz production around the house, I guess, and—”

Helen thought of her neighbor.

“Well couldn’t she figure out a way of turning his absence into Buzz?”

Busy’s face found some critical pose, then let go and lit up. “Helen that’s a great idea. Maybe we should put out some-”

“Lost dog signs.”

“Exactly!” He marveled. “Damn, Helen, you know I could use someone like you around here.” It was a flippant remark, but Helen realized that it wasn’t often she heard such open praise. It felt good. She traced the sensation as it wound around her relaxed intellect and danced along the border between thought and feeling. She was beginning to like this funny man.

“So you’re married,” she said.

He withheld his dismay with remarkable grace. “Grace. Seventeen years now.”

“Congratulations,” was all she could think to say. She couldn’t imagine.

“Right, well, I’m a busy man.”

“I see.”

Busy looked around the room as if it had been populated, at some point, by things to see.

“You know, Helen, I’ve been saying that for over a decade, and I still never intend the pun.”

“I don’t buy that for a minute,” she lied.

“You’re too kind, kid.”

Helen wondered if it was true. Busy leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He was obviously at ease, and she felt both delighted and disgruntled by the idea that she didn’t seem to pose a threat.

“You’d be surprised how hard it gets to keep your chin down, around here.”

“Well things are good, it seems.”

“Yeah but the wife, she gets a little tired of having to put in overtime on Buzz production for the household. I just get home from work and, well, you know, I usually have to admit that I had a good day.”

“Bummer.”

“Grace shouldn’t have to deny the dog in order to cook the roast all the way through. I should be able to come home and vent about a shitty day when I need to, give her a chance to relax.”

Helen heaved a deep sigh she thought might be appropriate, then surprised herself by feeling it. The parallel was an obvious one, but she didn’t expect it to matter, the standards one holds for oneself so distinct, in her mind, from those imposed on others.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “I can’t produce Buzz, myself.”

Busy frowned and cocked his eyes. This did not compute. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I can’t make ETMs work.”

Busy looked off at the room’s ghost appointments, and Helen was left with her own words repeating inside her head as if they’d upset their source and found another mouth to come from. This wasn’t something she told many people. She thought back as Busy’s face cycled through histories of itself, looking for something to match his mood, and couldn’t, she realized, remember the last person she’d told. Could it have been Jack? Actually, she’d told her neighbor more than once, but only in order to give Joan a chance to make a little extra on forgetting it. Helping people toward their errant goals was Helen’s most direct route to actually producing the stuff, and as she’d told her parents before, if there was a way to capture those emotions it would be another thing altogether.

Busy settled on perplexed, and gave it his best shot. “So you mean you don’t have…”
“Negative emotions? Hardly. Honestly, Busy, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just never worked for me.”

“Hmmm, I didn’t even know there was trick to it, you know? I’d always just put myself in the conduction field and-”

“Right. So it goes. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s not like I don’t have dirt to draw from.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Exactly.”

Busy paused, considering. “Well I gotta tell ya, kid, it’s pretty strange, but between you and me,” he leaned forward, “I think that makes you pretty special.”

Before Helen could respond to this the door broke open, letting three dogs tumble into the room and behind them Busy’s partner, Blain, who walked to a far corner and beckoned to Helen’s host. She grew tense. Busy stood, smiled, and shrugged before joining his partner, but he returned to her directly and held out his open hand. On it sat a pair of earplugs. She rolled her eyes but took the offering, an apology, and settled in to watch the dogs. Now fully animated, Rocket rolled around with the two new animals, which, though bigger than him, took care, it seemed, not to overwhelm the suburban mutt, instead spending as much time under as on top. Helen glanced now and then at the men in the corner, and tracked Busy’s typically loose expressions as they grew more steady, then stopped changing altogether, frozen into a hybrid of stern observance and what she could read only as sadness, a wistful look for which she had trouble imagining a source. They stood for a while without speaking, until Busy began on what seemed like a longer monologue, and the winces and wide eyes of his partner made it apparent that, whatever he was saying, it wasn’t something mutual.

Just as Rocket and the rest were winding down, Busy came up to Helen and motioned for her to take out the plugs. She hesitated slightly, but the man’s demeanor suggested more concern than anything else, and she pulled out the instruments, letting the panting and ambient hum of the office pour into her empty ears. She looked up at Busy, whose head, she noticed, was backlit by the ceiling light, awarding him with a halo of sorts, and she smiled to herself until she heard him say “You have any idea why there might be an APB out on you?”

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Onward to chapter 15 (Redivider).

Back to chapter 13 (Matt Briggs)