Ubo

20

EACH MORNING DURING Falstaff’s stay in the trash pickers’ home, the father prepared his smaller children for the day’s work by first liberally kissing their dark faces—a thorough covering of forehead, cheeks, nose, and chin.

It reminded Falstaff that for a parent every inch of your child was a precious thing to be cherished. And although he loved watching, Falstaff was vaguely embarrassed by this unadulterated outpouring of love. He didn’t deserve to witness such affection after the things he had done. Daniel… Danielbot should have been here instead. Or would this family have seen the bot as a monster and a threat?

It wasn’t just, and Falstaff hated his part in it. This father understood what was needed in desperate times, and those in charge of Ubo had not. In Ubo they had witnessed a great deal, and yet they had not witnessed enough.

Then, the children still giggling, the father pasted the strips of cloth and plastic to their skin in random layers. It vividly recalled Halloweens when Falstaffwas very young, and his mother had dressed him for the night. He wasn’t sure if the pickers’ get-up was a costume, exactly, but obscuring the wearer’s identity was part of the design. It also suggested damage and disease to predators—wild dogs and rogue humans—so that they tended to leave the ones dressed this way alone. The colors and methods of disguise distinguished among the various tribes and clarified who belonged to whom. There were occasional disagreements among these groups, but little actual violence.

Falstaff usually went with the family when they picked; customarily no family member was ever left alone. He also wore the layered strips, and it was an odd sensation, especially the way they came down partially over the eyes, like hanging skin as the result of some disastrous burn.

But he wanted to earn his keep, even though he had no idea what he was doing. There were fellows who went around to the various tribes with lists of what was in demand, what could be traded, and that’s what set the priorities. Falstaff assumed they were brokers of some sort, but he didn’t know the economics involved or how these lists were compiled.

The family he stayed with spoke a little Spanish, a little English, but also used a lot of other words he wasn’t familiar with, or words which had acquired additional meanings. A “dolly,” for example, was any impractical thing that made you feel better. A toy could be a dolly, but so could a photograph, or a good luck charm.

For the most part these people remained silent, relying on looks, gestures, touches. and they listened—to each other, and to the sounds outside.

He owed this family everything. They’d given him a soft, warm and dry place to sleep, and although it did smell a bit, he had become used to it. They fed him. They provided companionship, and they gave no indication that they were anxious for him to leave. He hesitated to call it love, although it was a reasonable facsimile thereof. It was an answer, a way to approach the world that worked for them. But he was a stranger, and he didn’t deserve such kindness.

When the family wasn’t working, they were reading—one room was almost filled with battered and stained but readable paperbacks. At certain hours of the day, when the parents had determined it was relatively safe, the children played music. There was a kind of violin made out of a stick, a can, and some wire, a square wooden guitar, a wind instrument constructed out of pipe and oval bits of metal. He assumed the children had practiced a great deal—the music was slightly jangly and nervous, but he found it oddly soothing.

Their “house” might have been an actual house at one time. They lived on the edge of a huge debris and trash field—their primary workspace. A stream of the trash had eddied down among some older structures, exploding the walls out, knocking them off foundations. The parents had hollowed out a hidden, womb-like space among all that. The structure was seemingly stable. There was an escape tunnel in the back, big enough for the family to crawl through in case of emergencies, although certainly not large enough for Falstaff.

He thought he might keep the name Falstaff. He didn’t know if Danielbot had understood what he was doing when he’d assigned him the name, but it might be his judgment and his punishment for what he’d done these past few years. Ironically he had little sense of humor anymore—it had been scoured out of him during his time in Ubo. Like Falstaff, he had been a liar and a coward. He’d lied to all of them. It had been his job, but now that seemed a pathetic excuse.

Sometimes, however, when these little children rode his back—four or more at the same time seemingly unable to get enough of him—he’d felt the high humor of Falstaff inside him, eager to come out.

Today the oldest daughter kept gesturing that she wanted to show him something. They’d been through this many times before—she was proud of this world of hers. He kept reminding himself that she’d never known anything better. She wanted to show it off to the newcomer. And the things she had revealed to him so far had been quite impressive. She’d taken him down into the old subway system where a jungle of vegetation and even a vegetable garden or two filled the abandoned cars. Another afternoon she took him into a friend’s abode where the fellow had filled several canvases with rotting organic matter. They stank badly, of course, but the colorful visual effect had been quite beautiful.

Today they walked a couple of miles through a series of ghostly abandoned neighborhoods—she was unable or unwilling to tell him why no one wanted to live there—to a towering apartment complex rising out of acres of rubbish. The pickers were out on the trash field in force, dressed in a variety of bright colors as well as the usual white, dull gray, and brown.

The front doors were heavily graffitied and so deeply scarred Falstaff wondered if at one point someone might have tried to drive a vehicle through them. Two guards were stationed on either side, armed with old-fashioned assault rifles. They eyed him suspiciously but smiled warmly when they saw his young companion, who greeted all four by name. Inside, the lobby was packed with pickers in their signature tribal outfits, food vendors, and a variety of other people he assumed to be guests of the pickers or hangers on like himself. All were animated and obviously excited.

That happy excitement was perhaps the most surprising thing he’d encountered since he’d left Ubo. Most of the faces he had seen before he got here had been guarded, suspicious, or simply afraid.

The elevators, not surprisingly, didn’t work, so they took the stairs, which were jammed with people in both directions. And although Falstaff felt some anxiety about the close proximity of so many strangers, everyone appeared to be in a celebratory mood. The landings were crowded as each had an out-facing window with people lined up to see whatever it was they were there to see.

Occasionally his young companion would clutch his hand. At first he thought maybe this was a childhood thing, a reach for adult support and comfort. But then he realized she was the comfortable one here. He was the outsider, and when she saw that he was a little uneasy or nervous in this vast crowd she was offering him support. He’d been aware of her watching him ever since they left her home—she knew what he was feeling better than he did.

This trip to the apartment tower was about more than bragging—it was her gift to him. He would really need to leave soon—he couldn’t bear such kindness, such love. He wasn’t worthy of it.

They exited onto the eighteenth floor near the top of the building. They stopped at an old woman’s apartment where they traded for some cold but tasty spiced burritos, three batteries for two burritos. A few more batteries and some quiet but firm bargaining (this lovely almond-skinned young girl was a force to be reckoned with) got them into the apartment down the hall, and two rickety chairs out on the balcony.

Falstaff peered out over the field of rubbish and the surrounding backdrop of buildings. In one sense it was Boston as he was afraid it had become, a dismaying ruin of trash and disintegrating structures and the fires beyond and the black boil of acrid smoke hanging above. He was high up enough to see what was left of Ubo out in the bay: like a ruined castle in the middle of a shallow polluted lake, its walls collapsed and blackened by the fire that had only recently expired. But there might still have been survivors, and maybe someday he would find them, if they didn’t find him first.

The field of trash spread out below him was not dismaying, but an amazing display of frantic activity as figures swarmed over the ground in a maelstrom of color, accompanied by a roar of cheered anticipation so loud and thunderous it frightened him with how the building shook. He kept looking at the girl for some kind of explanation—he had no real context for what he was seeing—but she simply pointed at his eyes and indicated that he needed to watch what was happening below.

There appeared to be one person in charge, a young man in a bright red T-shirt, long hair and a beard, who ran around at the base of the tower shouting orders to the pickers out in the field and various subordinates along the sidelines. But then Falstaff heard the yelling from above, and he leaned out from the balcony craning his neck up to see, and there was an arm coming out from the edge of the roof waving and gesturing with accompanying shouted orders. So whoever was directing this spectacle, whatever it was, did so from the roof, and his commands were relayed to the folks on the ground.

It occurred to him then that the field of trash the pickers were walking on wasn’t random—anything but, because the color showing to those in the apartment tower was an overall gradient of white or pale gray. It was a deliberate thing. Obviously you couldn’t get a random distribution of gray trash, and now and then when a gust of wind or the action of the picker’s feet caused some disturbance in the color palette, there were children dressed in white and gray who ran across the field with long sticks in their hands to make the correction.

Suddenly a great shout echoed across the field as a burst of bright red exploded in the middle of all that gray. Falstaff leaned forward to try to determine what was happening. The red appeared to be a great pulsing of flame and leaves like a rose made out of fire. But if he concentrated he could see that it was a mass of pickers with varying shades and shapes of red, pink, and orange on their costumes gyrating in a circle and showing different portions of their bodies to the audience above.

He hadn’t noticed them gather, but he now realized most of the field was covered with standing pickers, milling, moving about in both geometric and spiraling patterns, showing the gray predominantly, but there were glimpses of other colors in their costumes as well, further down their bodies and mostly hidden.

The entire field burst into a fireball, then blinked out. The crowd roared.

The people around him on the balcony began to chatter excitedly, pointing at the field, laughing, gesturing. The girl put her hand over his and smiled. “It’s animation, am I right?” he asked. “Like a cartoon?” The girl looked slightly confused, then nodded.

He’d seen somewhat the same principle at sporting events, decades ago. A group of people in the stands would turn over cards to say something a letter at a time, or to make a picture. But what he’d just seen involved dance and precise physical manipulation, a tight choreography. A thousand times more elaborate than what he’d seen at those old sporting events. It struck him then how all his years in Ubo had been as much a prison for him as it had been for the subjects. Life had gone on, people had loved and imaginations had evolved, and he’d had no idea. It was like putting on a new pair of glasses and discovering that your entire field of vision transformed. The sudden change in perspective was dizzying.

An old man nearby looked at him, put his hands to his head and made an exploding gesture. He laughed and Falstaff laughed with him. He didn’t deserve this, but he remembered that Danielbot had sent him here. He had permission to enjoy himself, to live. It was the only sane thing to do under the circumstances.

A resonating hum rose through the air, becoming rounder and more prayer-like as the mouths below gradually opened. Then the ground beneath the pickers appeared to be breaking apart to reveal the glowing coals underneath and the remaining ground turning black around them.

It was the pickers scuffling their feet, turning over the carefully-placed gray layers of trash to uncover the reddish layers and the black layers buried underneath.

A sharp-edged fissure appeared near the upper left corner of the field. It travelled down, widening, becoming a sword that crashed against another sword. Then there were fists and knives and a struggle of giant warring forms. The animation grew more violent as explosions of color were used to heighten the effect. A large bird escaped the center of the conflict but just as it almost achieved the impossible and left the boundaries of ground to soar up into the audience, a final slash severed its head.

The style of the animation was jittery and shaky, but the resulting energy was palpable. Every figure appeared electrified.

The field went to a mottled blue and black darkness except for one relatively small explosion of blood. But then that blood began to drip in linear horizontals and verticals as a geometric representation of a city rendered in red on a black canvas appeared, the details filling in until it might have been Boston or some other city on the old eastern seaboard. Falstaff could hear the girl’s small gasps and cries of excitement beside him.

The aural chorus had continued quite without his being aware of it, and then flames appeared scattered inside the lines of buildings and windows and within seconds another brightly animated fire had consumed it all with a resulting gasp from both audience and performers.

The dawn of pale yellows that next appeared was only an animation, a simulation laid over a skin above a nearly unlimited supply of waste, destruction, and loss, and yet no less thrilling for all that.

A small bird appeared above that yellow, flying jerkily from one side of the field to the other, as if battered by the wind. It disappeared off the far edge as the field turned so white it hurt the eyes. Years later surrounded by his friends Falstaff would still wonder if that bird had been real.

Afterwards they descended the stairs into the lobby. People seemed reluctant to leave. Falstaff understood this—they’d all seen something unique and magical, involving almost unimaginable cooperation. He wanted to stay close for a while, maybe meet the creator of the piece, see if any of the magic rubbed off on him.

There were tables of goods to trade—it appeared these vendors never missed an opportunity. Falstaff stopped abruptly. There on a table was one of the bot power packs.

“So you got out too. I’m glad. There are only two or three of us, far as I know.”

Falstaff stared into the stranger’s face, thinking he was familiar, but he couldn’t place him. His young companion gazed up at them, wide-eyed, but saying nothing. Then he saw the collar of the dark blue uniform under the gray parka he wore. “You were one of the guards, um …”

“Clemmons.”

“That’s right, Clemmons. We never talked, for some reason.”

“I kept to myself, pretty much. I never felt… comfortable there, doing what we did. No excuse of course, but still.”

“Well. Well.” Falstaff had no idea what to say.

“It’s better here. I wasn’t expecting that. This is my table. These people, they’re so generous.”

“Yes, yes they are,” Falstaff said. “They’ve found their answer, and generosity’s definitely part of it. Well, I hope to see you again.” He turned, feeling embarrassed, feeling caught, and hoping he never saw this man again.

“Wait! I have something for you.” The ex-guard held a battered pack out to him. Falstaff took it—it was heavy. He rested it gently on the table, loosened the top flap. It was the head of one of the bots. He felt himself recoil, but he didn’t let it go. He imagined how awful it would be if it slipped out and landed on the floor.

“I don’t know which one it was. I know I should, but I just don’t. It got pretty well blasted—the ID is heavily scarred over. I was going to trade it, figured I could get a great deal for it, but I just couldn’t. I hope you’ll take it, maybe you can wake it up somehow.”

Falstaff shook his head. “I don’t—”

“Please. We shouldn’t forget what happened there. Maybe some of that information, well, you should have this, you should keep it safe.”

Falstaff looked down. The girl was gazing into the bag. She reached into her pocket and pulled out half a burrito and put it into the man’s hand.

“Why, thank you,” the ex-guard said to the girl, then to Falstaff, “What is she doing? What does she want?”

“I think she wants the head, actually. She wants to trade you for it.”

“Surely you can’t—”

“If you’ll throw in the battery pack we’ll take both of them off your hands. For the burrito. Or rather, the half of the burrito.”

“But what would she do with it?”

“She’ll love it—that’s one of the things she does. And she’s curious, and very bright. I’ll help her—we’ll see what we can do, what we can salvage. I want to do that. I’d love to do that.”

Falstaff helped her carry it home.