Lost in arcadia a novel, p.7
Lost in Arcadia: A Novel, page 7
Now, with a final glace at herself in the mirror, she left the ring beside her jewelry box and headed to her car, surprised that she didn’t feel naked without it. She didn’t feel any difference whatsoever.
Autumn placed the contract on the seat beside her, making sure everything was there. She’d had her attorney file the divorce papers on the assumption that there would be no response. Instead, Electronic Arts’s lawyers contacted her and said that Juan Diego would be willing to sign the divorce papers only if she brought them to him in person. If that was all it took, she was willing to see him one more time.
Autumn drove her Prius up the winding hills leading into Mesa del Sol, the planned suburb of Albuquerque where EA and its parent (Monsanto) and related (e.g. Anonymous Propaganda, General Mills, and portions of the United States Defense Department ever since it became privatized) companies had headquarters or satellite offices. The compound’s light brown walls topped with barbed wire came into her view and she pulled into the security gate.
The guard, a white man in his twenties wearing mirrored shades, asked what her business was.
“I’m here to see my hu—to speak with Juan Diego Reyes,” said Autumn.
Perhaps taking her for a fan, the guard smirked. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but he doesn’t work here. At least not recently.”
“I understand that. But could you look on your list and see if there’s an allowance for Autumn Reyes?”
He sighed. “Just give me a second…” He typed her name onto a tablet. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am. I didn’t, umm, does that mean he’s here?”
“No problem. Could you just tell me where exactly it says I should go?”
“I guess so. Can I see an ID? It says here that you’re allowed in Building C, that’s the little one off to the left, Office 12.”
“And parking is…?”
“Right beside the building.”
“Thanks,” said Autumn, rolling up her window. The main parking lot was located on the other side of the compound near most of the offices, and there was no traffic, in vehicle or on foot, on her way to the small, unmarked building the guard had pointed to. Parking spaces alongside the building had numbers indicating who was assigned to each spot, but Autumn ignored these and parked in the first empty space she found.
Inside the unmarked building, windowless hallways and white floors glared from the harsh fluorescent lighting above. The doors to each side of her were stainless steel and heavy, so that the hallway looked as much like a clinically sterile corporate headquarters as it did a fortified bunker. She followed the row of identical doors down to the end, stopping finally in front of one that looked identical to the five before it and the six across from it, except for the cheap plastic “12” to the right of its handle. She slammed the handle down and opened the door.
He was lying on top of a disheveled bed with a laptop to his side. His head was propped up on his arm and the computer screen lit up his face, but otherwise the only illumination came from the blinking lights of a thousand diodes and what leaked in from the hallway. Autumn held the door open while she reached for a light switch. She flicked it on, and the man who was still legally her husband shielded his eyes.
“Did you have to do that? It’s so bright, my God. It’s like looking into a supernova.”
“Yes,” said Autumn. “You can deal with it.”
“Well, what is it you want?”
Autumn took a moment to glance around the room. Electronic equipment seemed to coat every surface, with uncoiled wires spewing out of not just the walls and floors but even the mattress he lay on. Mixed with this were equal parts dirty clothing and takeout boxes, giving the room a fetid smell like a wet trash bin. Juan Diego himself looked haggard, with dark circles beneath his eyes and several months of graying facial hair obscuring his face. He’d grown a belly but lost muscle mass, his skin starting to pull tightly around his bones.
She had heard rumors about his absence, of course. Even with everyone around her doing their best to stay tactful, she’d heard the speculation: that he’d been using his money to fund a full-time orgy, that he’d given it all away to ride the rails, that he’d never existed in the first place and was just a media construct of EA’s. Autumn had always assumed, though, that he had gone on his midlife crisis vacation for a year or two, whatever that might have entailed, then headed right back to living and working the way he had when they met—just another grad-school slob too immature to pretend he cared about the opinions and lives of other human beings. She found herself both gratified to be correct and more than a little disgusted by her present surroundings.
“I have the divorce papers for you to sign.”
“Fine. Leave them here and I’ll have them sent to your lawyer once mine have gone through them. I’m glad you came, though, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Just sign the papers now. Your lawyers said there would be no problem if I came in person. I’d like to get this done and then leave as quickly as possible.”
“You’re not interested in what I’ve been up to, what my—”
“No. Just sign.”
The divorce had been a long time in coming, but it hadn’t felt right, hadn’t felt necessary until now. With Devon’s graduation just a few weeks away, she needed to move forward too. In the fall she would be the only one in that huge house they’d purchased together, and she wanted something besides its sepulchral silence to greet her at the end of each day. She needed to see other people, or at least find out whether that was what she wanted. Autumn was tired of his presence haunting her life, and as he looked at her with his darkening hazel eyes, she was happy to find that she felt no more regret, no more anger. Just relief that this was finally happening.
“Fine. I will happily sign the papers. But that’s not why I wanted you here. There’s something I need you to consi—”
“I have nothing to consider. Neither do you. If you were interested in me, or the family, you would’ve done something ages ago. Don’t draw this out.”
“It’s not about us. It’s about your work with Glosster.”
Of course it was. He hadn’t mentioned a thing about her dress, probably hadn’t even noticed it, or the perfume she wore or that her hair still didn’t have a touch of gray in it. He hadn’t even asked about their children. Now and always, he just wanted her mind and what he could take from it. “Since when were you interested in publishing?”
“I’m not, exactly. But the technology you’ve been using over there, the research you’ve gleaned from the AdMRI, the patented work you’ve done mapping neural pathways and the human connectome.”
“Just sign the papers. I don’t have time for this.”
“Here, hand them to me.”
Autumn stepped over the cables and pulled the divorce settlement and a pen from her purse. He snatched the pen away and flipped to the back, scribbling his name and dating the paper with a crude signature. He practically threw it back into her arms.
“Aren’t you interested in reading the terms?” Autumn didn’t know why she asked, but perhaps it was because all of this had been too easy. She’d expected a fight, or at least an argument. Words that acknowledged, even passive-aggressively, some sort of regret. The reality of things, that he clearly didn’t care, perhaps had never cared in the first place, was harder to take. Autumn decided she was done here and turned to head back outside into the fresh air.
“I’m sure they’re perfectly fair. I just want you to listen to me for a second.”
“I want to know why you left.” She wasn’t planning on asking him, hadn’t wanted to hear it, but it slipped out anyway.
He smiled. “I thought you didn’t care.”
“Did you ever love any of us? Did you ever consider that it wasn’t just about you?”
“I don’t know. That’s a difficult thing to quantify.”
“Maybe for you.”
“I evaluated my priorities and realized there were more important things in life. I won’t say I don’t have any regrets, but what’s done is done. “
“There are no more important things—what you left was life. Me and the children, that was your life.” The only thing on hand to hit him with was her purse, which was too soft. Should she grab one of his computers?
“Not in a literal sense, no. Listen, things have been … a little out of control lately, and I don’t have time to waste arguing about the children. I can’t say I haven’t thought about them, if that answers your questions, but I’m sure they’re doing fine. There are more important things happening, Autumn, bigger than us, more important than family. I need to be able to access the work you’ve been doing on the AdMRIs. We need to understand how to take that raw data, the uncompressed brain imaging, and represent that on Arcadia. Flawlessly.”
“So this is just about the patents?”
“Yes, it’s about the fucking patents. I’m not crazy, I don’t expect you to be happy with this, or to work with me. I signed your paper, I just want you to consider my proposal.”
“…”
“…”
“How much?”
“I don’t even know,” said Juan Diego. “A lot. More than you’ll ever know what to do with. Money is the one thing we do have plenty of. You know we could just purchase Glosster.”
Autumn had no memory of a life without work. Even in preschool she’d been told by her parents to work hard so as to get into the right elementary school, the right middle and high schools, the right college. She never even asked for vacation days. But she’d grown tired. She couldn’t help but wonder, finally, what she’d done all of this for, whether life had some purpose beyond her job and what it could give her children. Maybe it was time to be done with all of that, maybe this was the beginning of the end, the goal she’d always been searching for.
“If I say yes, you’ll stay away. We’re done.”
“Of course. I’m pretty good at staying away. Let me call my colleague Victor in, he can tell you more about the details. That is, unless you want to talk to me about it.”
“I’ll wait for Victor in the hall.”
CHAPTER TEN
A lot of problems, it turns out, don’t really have solutions. You can ignore them or rearrange them a bit, you can rename them or redefine them or sometimes even redistribute them, but you can’t actually get rid of them. Not really. Once a glass falls and shatters, even though all the physical pieces are still there, each crystalline shard easily accessible, you still can’t reassemble the original glass. Eventually you have to confront the fact that many things only work in one direction.
That’s at least one explanation for where the Great Wall of Freedom initially came from, another being that a young Gideon Reyes came up with the idea because he really needed an “A” on a freshman marketing assignment and, only six hours before his deadline, realized that his previous idea wasn’t going to cut it. Not having enough time to work out a complex, nuanced idea, he opted instead to show off something big and impressive, praying that the class wouldn’t ask too many questions about it.
Methamphetamine was developed in Japan 1919 and subsequently used by doctors to treat asthma and narcolepsy, not to mention its well-publicized use by bomber pilots in WWII. By the 1950s, it was commonplace, one of the drugs of choice for everyone from college students to corporate lawyers to gutterpunks. Use of the drug decreased following passage of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 before increasing again in the 1980s and rising to epidemic proportions in the 1990s and beyond.
Meth was the most American of drugs, not just because of its universal clientele but because of the way it’s produced. Cocaine, marijuana, and heroin were all derived from plants, and plants require cropland, harvesting, rainfall, etc. They’re dependent on factors that can’t be completely controlled. The weed in your house right now is different from what your neighbor has because of varying levels of CO2, water, light spectrum, and soil pH, not to mention inherited genetic traits. Even the most highly processed heroin is dependent on these factors, and prices can fluctuate with a bumper crop or a fallow harvest. Anything organic is variable, which is why so many prefer crops are treated with Monsanto’s finest, a process that effectively turns organic produce into manufactured goods while they’re still in the ground.
Meth was produced indoors, and with the right resources could be made with the same factory precision as a silicon chip. It had an insane profit margin, even outstripping cocaine, so that even the most modest of operations could expect impressive growth. It not only made users more awake, it also gave them increased concentration, self-esteem, sociability, and aggression, helping a population of increasingly sullen introverts to socialize. And best of all, whether smoked, snorted, injected, or taken as a suppository, it’s startlingly, almost absurdly addictive.
It should come as little surprise that meth had long been illegal, considering that its side effects were extensive and truly ghastly and its production highly toxic and combustible. But the United States didn’t really begin cracking down on it until the 1990s, after the number of meth heads suddenly exploded. Especially in the Southwest and Midwest, where isolation was common—epidemic, really—the overnight proliferation of meth labs was universally seen as a law enforcement problem. Nothing could keep meth labs from cropping up, but pressure put a damper on the local manufacture of the drug and made it possible for other suppliers to break into the market. Surprising absolutely no one at all, those suppliers turned out to be Mexican.
The reigning drug cartel at the turn of the century, and throughout the next few decades or so, was Sinaloa. Large, organized, and with so much of the Mexican government in its pockets that it could practically operate in public, Sinaloa spent years building the meth market into a trade that, while illegal, could operate on street corners with impunity. For years there wasn’t much difference between the cartel and any other corporation, and certainly it was little worse than any other organized crime ring. That is, until the Zetas decided they wanted a cut of the business.
Los Zetas existed in some form or another since 1999, when the original core group deserted the Mexican military to join a drug cartel. Eventually they left the cartel, too, deciding that they’d had enough of being told what to do and at the same time shedding any restraint that had previously kept them back from pure sociopathy. They turned violence into a language, and the dead bodies they left, stripped of various limbs, sent messages to any who saw them. A missing tongue meant the victim talked, missing legs meant they had changed groups. A missing head didn’t mean anything different than it did in other circumstances, but that didn’t make it any less clear, and Los Zetas had a well-known predilection for beheadings. The main message, though, wasn’t in the particularities of each victim but in the sheer quantity of bodies.
Sinaloa had always been about the business, as profit-minded as any publicly shared company on the Nasdaq. The Zetas were equally concerned with dollar signs, but unlike the older cartel, they were shortsighted and, what’s worse, lacked the familial scruples that allowed Sinaloa to rise to the top. Rather than restricting themselves to drugs, Los Zetas kidnapped, killed, extorted, raped, robbed, and more in order to turn a quick buck, including selling from Sinaloa’s territory rather than the shrinking number of areas the cartel didn’t claim. Initially outgunned, Sinaloa found itself literally blown away by the new competition.
The war between the Zetas and Sinaloa escalated. More than ten thousand were killed annually, many of whom were merely bystanders or only peripherally involved with the drug trade. Entire cities became uninhabitable. If you looked down from one of the taller buildings in El Paso, the border between countries was unmistakable: on one side, a modern American metropolis with Walmarts and office buildings and McMansions to the horizon; on the other, a mangled ruin of broken glass and chipped concrete, bullet holes in every surface and roving street gangs that seemed straight out of Mad Max.
For a while, the American government’s solution to the problem was to ignore it. Mexico had become the country’s noisy neighbors; they made a lot of ruckus and dealt drugs at all hours, but so long as they stayed in their own yard, you wouldn’t call the cops on them for fear of possible retaliation. But after a string of disastrous Mexican presidencies, the problem grew worse. Most of northern Mexico gradually became a war zone like Juárez, and violence began seeping over the border with alarming frequency.
The United States found itself at an impasse. It had attempted to combat the spread of the war through funding for Mexican law enforcement, but results had been minimal at best. It couldn’t move to a more gentrified continent, and if lawmakers still waffled on legalizing marijuana, there was no way they’d budge on methamphetamine. So what was the country to do?
President Haight, quick to change subjects from his end-of-the-world prediction that hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped, did what he’d done many times in the past: he asked the publicity firm Anonymous Propaganda, whose recent success working behind the scenes of his presidential campaign only confirmed the importance of consulting them for all major governmental decisions, if they had any bright ideas. To Haight’s surprise and delight, they did.
