Concrete Underground (2010) (8 page)

I realized why it sounded familiar - it sounded a lot like Lily. I looked back over my shoulder and saw her sitting next to Columbine. The two of them were laughing wildly, each holding a martini glass, as they chatted like good friends.

I glanced back at the video monitors and caught a brief glimpse of one of the feeds, a grainy, monochrome image washed in blue. It showed a man sitting on the edge of a bed in a nearly empty room. A digitized numeric display in the bottom right corner read:
00033
.

I suddenly felt light-headed and took a couple steps back from the console, letting the headphones drop from my grip. Max reached out a hand to help stabilize me.

I closed my eyes and tried to regain my bearings, muttering, "Jesus Christ, the bum was right."

"Pardon?"

"I met a bum on the train a couple days ago - wild orange hair, crazy blue eyes. He said he used to work for you and was ranting about how you were spying on people."

Max smiled indulgently. "Spying implies a violation of trust, an assumption of privacy that is betrayed. We made no secret about the surveillance methods upstairs, so there is no assumption of privacy. Our equipment is in plain sight, and many of the art pieces themselves used it as an integral part."

"In other words, you 're saying it's okay to invade someone's privacy as long as you give some notice, however perfunctory."

"I'm saying that privacy as you understand it has become an archaic concept."

I smirked. "Of course you would say this. You've made selling your customers' private information into a business model."

Max scoffed, then responded in a raised voice, taking on an almost professorial tone. "People willingly give my company access to their information when they use our products. We take that information and use it to give them the best possible customer experience. I make no secret of my company's business practices. And I'm sure anyone who complains about the price of gas in an e-mail and then suddenly sees an ad for the latest hybrid car knows exactly what I'm doing."

"Spare me the corporate spiel," I groaned. "What about the people that don't want you tracking what they buy and what sites they look at and what they talk about in their e-mail?"

"Then they can patronize our competitors," he replied dismissively. "Or realistically, they should stay off the internet altogether."

"Are you serious?"

"Very serious," he replied, and I realized he was no longer talking to just me - the rest of the room was listening as well. "The web has truly become the great democratizer of information in the most literal sense of the word - rule of the
people
, plural. Information is no longer the sole property of any one person. The question isn't
why shouldn't you have the right to keep things to yourself?
It's
why shouldn't your business partners, your employers, your friends and family have the right to know who you really are?
"

"I call bullshit," I said. "Even if you accept that argument, it's only valid based on the assumption of a social good. But what's the social good in all this?" I pointed at the monitors.

"The same social good that exists in any real art - purification of the human soul. Hold a mirror up and make us confront who we really are."

"Now I really call bullshit."

Max laughed. "Let me put it to you this way - I put forth to you that the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us.

"Let me give you an example. You criticized my company for collecting users' personal data, but people are voluntarily and intentionally sharing the most intimate minutiae of their lives everyday, and they love doing. Even as we speak my phone is being bombarded by tweets, e-mails, blog posts, and social network status updates from personal and professional acquaintances. Privacy is passe; it simply no longer exists as a social value. No one wants to toil in obscurity. Fame has become the new social currency of the 21
^st
century. In the 19
^th
century the struggle was between the working class and the ruling class over the means of production. By the end of the 20
^th
century, the paradigm was made obsolete by new classes - the leisure class, the creative class, the consumer class. Now there's a whole new emerging class bringing another sea change, the celebrity class. Suddenly we have an entire stratus of people who are famous just for being famous. It doesn't matter if you aren't the most talented, or the most virtuous, or even the most beautiful, as long as people know who you are. We've built a brave new world where every man and woman can be a star."

His eyes locked in on mine as he presumably waited for me to respond to the depth and profundity of his argument.

"Jesus, are you still talking?"

Max broke into a chuckle and threw an arm over my shoulder.

"
Brave New World
, huh? That is the second Huxley synchronicity I've had tonight."

"
Every one belongs to every one else
," he quoted.

"Whatever. I just want you to tell people that I didn't lie in my article. Help me take some private information and hand it over to the masses," I said, relishing the chance to throw his own bullshit back in his face.

Max sucked on his teeth and made a disinterested expression. "I gave Lilian my statement, which she relayed to you accurately. I don't really have any interest in pursuing the matter further."

I didn't let up. "Why did you give me your statement in the first place?"

"Because, D, life is a game. And sometimes, to keep things interesting, you have to change the rules."

"I don't get what you--"

Suddenly, I felt a presence behind me. "We're all set, boss," said a loud, deep male voice.

I turned to see the man from the flophouse towering over me - the Bad Seed. He was wearing a black t-shirt with a distorted image of a bull that I recognized as a detail from
Guernica
.

"Ah, Saint Anthony. Always impeccable timing," Max said.

The two men shook hands, then the larger man hooked his thumb in my direction. "What's he doing here?"

"Oh, don't worry about him. He's a
journalist
," Max said, putting a derisive emphasis on the last word. "Mr. D Quetzal, I'd like you to meet Saint Anthony, my special advisor."

"Special advisor? What's that mean? And what the fuck kind of name is Saint Anthony?"

"It's a nick name," Max explained. "He's had it for years, on account of him being such a devout Catholic."

"Yeah, I bet," I scoffed.

"Saint" Anthony stared me down like he was two seconds from kicking the holy fucking shit out of me.

Max clapped his hands together to get the attention of the entire room. "Everybody upstairs. Curtain time in ten minutes."

"We're going back to the art show?" I asked.

"No," Max replied. "I mean all the way upstairs."

8. Everyone Needs a Good Scare, Now and Then

I stood on top of the warehouse's roof, watching about three dozen of the city's best and brightest stand around and freeze their asses off. And, truth be told, I was enjoying the spectacle, even though it meant I was freezing my own off right along with them.

The anemic, refugee-thin heiresses shivering in their barely-there party dresses. The effete dot-com executives in thousand-dollar "distressed" jeans trying to look unaffected by the cold that's cracking their lips and shriveling their dicks. It warmed my spiteful, jealous little heart.

Columbine was busy circulating through the crowd, handing out sheets of paper, one a head. When she finished, she came over to sit with me on the parapet.

"What's this all about?" I asked as I grabbed one of the leftover sheets off the stack on her lap.

"This is tonight's game," she explained. "Scavenger hunt."

I looked down at the paper in my hands, which contained a list of items neatly printed in three evenly-spaced columns. The items were pretty far out there, things like an albino, a monkey's paw, a transgender prostitute, an original Matisse, a three-legged dog, a pickled punk, an ounce of heroin, and a human spleen.

"Scavenger hunt?" I repeated skeptically.

"Yeah. You have to try to find as many of the things on this list as you can and bring them back."

I rolled my eyes. "Yes, I understand the concept of a scavenger hunt. I'm just wondering why a group of grown adults - the city's richest and most powerful bright young things, no less - would spend their Saturday night on one."

I heard footsteps behind me on the parapet, and then a new voice joined our conversation. "Imagine you were filthy rich, richer than any human being has any right to be. You can literally do and have anything you want. You've traveled the world, had the dirtiest sex imaginable, imbibed the filthiest narcotics. What would you do for kicks when you grow tired of the same old thrills?"

I craned my head to the right and saw Max standing atop the parapet, hovering over my head. He grinned like a deranged Japanese
oni
, the cold night air turning his breath visible as it streamed out of his nostrils.

"All right, kids, listen up!" he called out to everyone on the rooftop. "We're going to get started. I trust you've all had a chance to look over the list for tonight's game. I see a few new faces, so let me bring you all up to speed.

"The object is simple - whoever brings back the most items from your list by sunrise is the winner, and whoever brings back the least is the loser. Aside from that, there are no rules. Steal, lie, cheat, break and enter, wander around the bad parts of town, work your connections, get your assistants out of bed, cash in all your favors."

"So, what exactly do you get for winning?" I interjected.

He dug a small red metal box from his pants pocket. It was rectangular in shape, no more than five inches long and two high. "The winner gets what's inside this box,"

"And what's that?" I pressed.

"I swear to you, we didn't script this," Max said as an aside to his audience. A few light chuckles rippled through the crowd. "To find that out, D, I guess you'll just have to win."

"I guess so," I replied. "And what if I lose?"

Max turned to smile at me once more, but this time he didn't offer any further explanation.

"Weatherman says the sun rises just after seven. You have five hours give-or-take, children. I suggest you get moving."

As everyone else cleared off the roof, Max put a hand on my shoulder, indicating that he wanted me to stick around. I noticed Saint Anthony and Lily were also not moving to leave - Anthony's hand gripping her wrist tightly, her head hung sullenly.

Max paced back and forth along the parapet while his eyes darted back and forth among the three of us, that grin of his still fixed in place. This went on for several minutes, even after the last of the other guests had left. The three of us just stood there in the cold and waited for Max to do something. I was miserable, Anthony didn't even seem to notice the weather, Lily was shivering so hard I thought her bones were going to shake right out of their sockets, and Max looked like he was savoring every second of it.

Eventually, I decided I was sick of listening to Lily's teeth chatter, so I slipped off my jacket and offered it to her.

"No!" Max yelled. "Everyone will remain dressed exactly the way they are."

I held out the jacket to Lily again, but she refused it, keeping her worried gaze fixed on her employer.

"Look at this thing," Max declared, stamping his foot on the parapet. "Ridiculous." His eyes returned to us just long enough to make sure he had our full attention. "What purpose does it serve? Think about it. Would it really be so dangerous to have just a plain flat edge? Is this little bit of wall going to actually save lives?"

I shrugged.

Max continued, "And if someone is actually dumb enough to fall off the side of a building, are we as a species really better off with that person alive and procreating? So much of our energy is expended styrofoam-padding and sterilizing our existences to protect us from ourselves, from our own humanity.

"We realize just how hopeless and fatalistic our human condition is, how we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. So we try to trick ourselves into a false sense of security by dreaming up phantom perils, harmless straw men that we can build a wall around or bury under concrete and feel like we have control over our destinies.

"We pass more laws, we arm more cops, we build more prisons, and we lock up more of our neighbors in the name of our own freedom. Our fear of death drives us to poison ourselves with 'medicines' that at best only postpone the inevitable. And to what end? We still die of cancer, we still get sick - sometimes as side effects of the very drugs we take to keep us well. We still crash cars. We still make war. So where has all this gotten us as a species?"

"It's gotten me freezing my nuts off on a roof like a dumbass, wondering what the hell you're talking about," I offered.

"I'm talking about changing the rules of the game, D," Max replied. "If you don't make peace with your own mortality, you'll never know what it's like to truly be alive. The indigenous people who originally lived in this valley had a tradition of the vision quest - going out into the wilderness with nothing, surviving by your own wits, proving your worth as a human being and discovering who you really are in the fundamental core of your soul. But we've paved over the wilderness and blanketed the starry sky with GPS satellites. How many times have you actually stared your own death in the face, D?"

He paused more for effect than to actually give me a chance to answer, then launched right back into it.

"We as a society have made it too easy on ourselves, and it has made us fat and dumb and unimaginative. We sit in our offices and watch our TVs and plan for retirement and take out insurance policies and go on sad little stage-managed vacations, just not anywhere too dangerous or dirty, and we make sure we are all wearing our government-approved safety helmets and carrying our health plan cards in case something goes wrong. All that mad, innovative passion that elevated us above all other forms of life has been allowed to atrophy. We have stopped natural selection from purifying the species because deep in our heart of hearts, we are all terrified that we won't make the cut.