Life in the Fast Lane

by Mike Morris

“Joe Sullivan, Television Detective,” he said briskly, shoving me aside, looking at the small apartment with distaste. His crew followed with holocams, mikes and booms, gouging bits out of my wall. He shoved a mike in my face. “Well, Mr. ‘Loser’ Sherbo,” he sneered. “We finally tracked you down to this miserable hole, and now Mr. and Mrs. public will see once again how we deal with deadbeat dads and cowardly wife-beaters.”

“I’m not married,” I started to say, but he had already struck a pose for the cameras.

“This criminal left five sweet kids and a grieving wife six months ago without a credit to their name or a piece of bread to eat. Hungry and cold, they went to the local police to track down this miserable degenerate, who has been living in luxury while they starved.” A hologram shimmered slightly in front of me; a morose woman with five beady eyed infants. The largest child was unemotionally kicking her ankle.

“I’m not.” I started again.

“Oh yes you are,” the television detective snapped, and a slab of a man handcuffed and chained me. “Straight to the lock-up, where you will be kept until you get a job and support your family.”

“How can I..” I tried again, but he had shut off the mike.

“OK, guys,” he ordered, “In fifteen minutes we do Maggot O’Malley and his Holy Bikers. Make sure to get pictures of them beating up welfare bums and degenerates.”

“I am not..” I yelled at him, but he slapped a limpet on my face, and a bomb exploded in my head. When my eyes cleared my room was empty, and an excruciating voice was commanding me to proceed to the nearest precinct station.

Three weeks later, when I got back to my tiny apartment, what was left of my belongings was being kicked down the corridor by Mrs. Crennelli’s evil spawn. Her husband, scratching his dirty under vest regarded me with a gleam of respect in his piggy eyes.

“Don’t want no bigamists and child molesters here. People sayin’ them girls was onny thirteen, fourteen years old.. Jeez, if ida known, ida got em away from ya. Poor little things,” he drooled, thinking about it. “Damn, you’re a sly bastard,” he added admiringly, disappearing into his apartment.

I salvaged my backpack, and stuffed a few belongings into it. I wondered what other rumors were flying round. I could spend a fortune on a TV news ad, pointing out that the charges had been, reluctantly, dropped, and that the TV detective had sent me a form letter apologizing for the error. The morose wife had sworn that she wouldn’t be caught dead with a wimp like me. Unfortunately, three weeks in jail had cost me a fortune in rent. A fully furnished cell with food (literally) thrown in was not cheap, nor was the security fee I had to pay the privatized jailers to keep me alive. I stuffed what was left of my property in a plastic bag. I thought about various ways to get hold of one of those motorized shopping carts they had in the upscale shopping malls now. Some of them were even heated. I could scrunch myself in one of them and sleep for a while.

I was broke, which was why I was finally out of jail, and of course no-one wanted a bigamous pedophile on the payroll, innocent or not. My final pay, less the fine for quitting the job without notice, was enough to buy me a hamburger and fries.

I ordered a hamburger and fries at Joes Place, and he listened sympathetically. No, he couldn’t let me stay for a few days. His customers would probably burn the place down, me being a bigamous pedophile, even though I was innocent. Just then a customer walked in and he roared about bums and criminals invading his business, and threw me out, slipping me five credits in the process. I was in deep trouble.

These days, America is an efficiently run insane asylum. It was just a question of everything getting bigger and better and faster, something that the USA was superbly suited for. Scams, sleaze and squalor led the way. After the spectacular political rise of a well-known TV celebrity and his cabinet of talk show hosts, things started to go downhill rapidly, and many of us looked back on the puritanical administration of President Clinton with a certain amount of nostalgia.

I was one of a long line of middle-class academic achievers, which marked me as a troublemaker right away. I failed the mandatory talk show participant course and obtained abysmal marks in the karaoke and (very) basic humor classes, forfeiting all hope of getting a degree. As our president was fond of saying, “If you can’t make ‘em scream, or rip off their clothes, or beat each other up, what the Hell are you doing in show business.” And despite my disgustingly high IQ, I failed to realize for an amazingly long time that, in this brave new world, the only paying business was show business.

Robots and computers took care of everything else. Television ads glorified the new mass-produced trailer parks and bowling alleys, and the remaining airtime; five-minute news breaks every hour concentrated on the joys of sex, pizza, and bowling. Since what was laughingly called the news services now ignored riots, economic collapse and war, the general population was happy as pigs in shit, except for those who were being burnt-out, starved, or killed. Three-quarters of the electorate loved the government, and the out of luck minority had a short life span anyway. America had never been so stable and contented.

I wandered down the sidewalk, head down against the rain, half-reading the sidewalk ads. A final spurt of technological innovation had seen the marriage of technology and nanobiology, and the new computer display skins had procreated out of control before being banned, along with just about everything else, apart from booze and sex, by the new regime. “Hillary for President” ads from the past screamed hoarsely at me. “Tobacco kills!” Some of the skins were pretty senile by now. “Adopt a bomb,” one commanded me confusedly. I turned up my collar, and tried to ignore them. It wasn’t easy. One of them attached itself to my trouser leg, and I shook it off with a snarl. “Meet me in the fast lane,” it said as it crawled away.

I pounded the streets. All around me, honest citizens were sitting in their warm cubicles, watching talk show re-runs. It was getting colder, and I began to shiver. As a homeless (though exonerated) criminal, I was unable to apply for work, welfare, or a passport. So now, I was a vagrant, which made me a real criminal. Unfortunately, since I had no money, jail was not an option. I felt lightheaded, and some nagging sense of wrongness, which had been bothering me for hours, kept slipping away. For some reason, I was still walking towards the center of town, the grimy rain trickling down my neck, and the display skins worrying my trouser leg like small dogs.

Then it hit me. The most persistent one was following me. It looked a bit healthier than the others, thicker, and sort of blue instead of gray. But they didn’t follow people. They only spread by breeding, or accidental attachment. Maybe it had gotten stuck on me somewhere. “The fast lane!” it said urgently. “Meet me at the fast lane.” Damn thing was talking to me! I shook my head. I had to be delirious.

“Go away,” I told it. “Let me die in peace.”

It clung to my wet shoe. “Fast lane,” it said plaintively. I kicked out and flung it into the road. It disappeared under a churning garbage truck. I staggered on.

Close to the city center, skyscrapers crowded against the freeway. Gutted and used as distribution silos, they were ringed with guards and electric fences. Beyond the wire, boxy apartments gave way to a shantytown of corrugated iron, wood and cardboard. The freeways and ring-roads covered downtown like a concrete spider-web, and under them, makeshift hovels mushroomed. Some were covered in blue plastic, like flowers in the rubble. When I cleared the shantytown it was dawn, and I was wandering around under the road system. The city center was a traffic hub, and trucks swished along, high above my head, zooming over and under each other on the soaring roadways. Almost all of the traffic, far above me, was remote controlled. No one drove nowadays. I had no idea why I was here. The roadways were too high to offer any shelter, and this part of town was deserted. At least I could expire in peace. I stopped at one of the huge, reinforced concrete pillars that seemed to be gently swaying in the damp air. I was shivering badly now, and the world seemed unreal. I wanted to rest, but something drove me on, aimlessly. I started to slide down onto the ground and blissful oblivion.

“Meet me in the fast lane!” It was sliding towards me, almost sliced in half, looking distinctly frazzled. “The fast lane,” it repeated, and I could have sworn it was looking at me like a big torn blue eye. I blacked out.

When I came to, the sun was shining high above between two spans of road, and the ground was dry. I felt stronger, and clear headed in an empty sort of way. I’d been hallucinating. Then I saw the Skin. It looked sick, it hadn’t mended properly, but it was still haunting me. “The fast lane,” it croaked, and limped away towards dead center of the transportation hub. I followed it. If I was crazy, nothing much mattered anyway.

The central column was huge, maybe twenty feet around, and the Skin circled it to where a rusty service ladder stretched up into the distant sunlight. It had turned a muddy gray. It looked like the eyes of my grandmother as I had watched her dying years ago. “Up,” it urged, weakly. “Up, Up!” I grasped the flaky rails, and looked up into the sun, where the ladder stretched into the distance. I put my foot on the first rung, and then hesitated. Gingerly, I stooped down, lifted the cold unresisting Skin, and dropped it into my backpack. Then I started to climb wearily skyward.

My arms and legs were shafts of pain when I reached the top, and a demon was drilling a hole in the back of my head. The ladder stopped about ten feet below the overhang of the roadway, and I stared stupidly at the concrete above me. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against the cool surface and thought about falling, effortlessly, to the ground below. Why had I allowed a jellyfish billboard to talk me into this? When I roused myself I noticed the outline of a door in the concrete. There was no handle, no hinge that I could see, but it was a door. Frantically, I pounded on the concrete. The sound of my feeble blows was lost in the thick material. I pounded until my knuckles were skinned and the concrete was unmoved. Then I realized that the Skin was struggling in my backpack. Gripping the ladder with one hand, I fished it out. “What,” I asked, feeling foolish. It tried to wriggle away from me, and I pressed closer to the concrete to keep my balance. Suddenly, it gave a clumsy squirming leap and landed with a plop on the door. I thought it was going to slip and fall six hundred feet to the ground below, but somehow it held on and fastened itself to the concrete. It started to wriggle and pulse clumsily, and the door swung open silently, almost knocking me off the ladder.

The skin slithered inside and disappeared into the darkness. I looked down at the ladder, vanishing into the distance below, sighed, and hauled myself wearily into the musty warm darkness. The skin glowed dimly ahead of me as it limped along the gently curving tunnel. I staggered after it. After what seemed hours, it stopped, shimmering in the darkness. Eerily, it turned its faintly glowing blue eye on me. “In the fast lane,” it said. In an Alice in Wonderland sort of way, it made sense. Above us, trucks and transports were whooshing along five lane concrete freeways, carrying the lifeblood of the country coast to coast, and I was talking to an animated advertisement in a service tunnel in the middle of a million tons of concrete. It made as much sense as the madhouse outside, I thought.

I realized why it had stopped. The horizontal tunnel ended, opening on to a vertical pipe, about as wide as my shoulders. It went up, to the street above, and down, into the bowels of the earth. Down through the concrete.

“Hey,” I said. “Fresh air,” I saw dimly, through the drain above me, thin shafts of sunlight, flickering on and off as the great trucks cut off the sunlight overhead.

The thing glowed palely at me. “Down,” it told me sadly.

It was an hallucination. I was dying, under the freeway. It was pretty comfortable, quite warm. I must be pretty far-gone. I wanted to sleep.

“Down,” it said again.

“I’ll just go up, and lie in the sunlight,” I told it.

“Die,” it said.

“I know, that’s Ok, I don’t mind. In fact, I’ll just lie down right here. I can see the sun. That’s good enough.”

Its pale blue eye looked at me balefully.

“Die,” it repeated, “Me.” I swear it sighed. “You kill me,” it said.

It was unbelievable. I was dying, and this slithering sandwich board was trying to tweak my conscience. My eyes started to close, I wanted to sleep. A truck rumbled by overhead, and I thought of the skin disappearing under the garbage truck, after I had kicked it into the wet, dirty roadway. I opened one eye. The thing was still looking at me with that one, giant baby-blue orb. It could have made a fortune on the Soaps. “Jesus,” I told it. “Just shut up, or I’ll drop you right down the middle of the shaft.” I got up wearily, and stretched towards it. It flowed up my arm, and into the knapsack.

“Rest,” it said, with a contented sigh. I groaned. Even my hallucinations had no respect.

At least it was easier going down. I started to count, tiredly. “About six hundred feet,” I thought. “Twelve hundred rungs don’t make a right.” I was babbling. I counted to thirty, my knees popping at every step. Eleven hundred and seventy to go. How long before my numb hands let go, and I fell down, to the middle of the earth. I could be asleep before I hit, I reasoned.

Suddenly, without warning, the side of the tube facing me opened up. A blaze of light hit me, blinding me, and out of it, a familiar voice spoke to me.

“Took your time, Sherbo. Where the hell have you been?”

I fell, exhausted into outstretched brawny arms, and was dragged into a large, book-lined study.

I was falling, turning gently, down the rabbit-hole, into the middle of the earth. All around me, doors opened into houses where rabbits and moles stared at me in astonishment, and in one instance, where a large frog, startled in the act of washing dishes, threw a soup bowl at me. Spiraling down with me, the skin winked his big blue eye.

When I woke up, I was between silk sheets in a round bed in a large, dim boudoir. The wallpaper was pastel blue with large pale yellow flowers. Matching lace curtains framed the windows, and a polished table with a lace cover hosted a sprig of heather and a silver bowl. I turned my head, wincing as my neck cracked, and a couple of cuts opened up. I saw the skin, stitched together with blue thread, sleeping contentedly at the foot of the bed. Strangely, it was a comforting sight, the only familiar object in a surreal universe. “Stitches,” I said idiotically, “I'll call you Stitches.” I slept again, and woke in the same room, smelling soup. Stitches was gone. I looked out of the window and saw the Nevada desert. In the distance the New York skyline was framed in purple and green, and the Las Vegas strip marched towards the arid mountains. It was wonderful, artfully lit, and skillfully painted on pale concrete. Apparently insanity had improved my imagination considerably.

“Do you like it?” The girl was small and pretty and vaguely familiar. “I painted it myself.” She took the top off the silver bowl and started ladling soup. I decided the asylum was much better than the real world. I wanted to stay here. I liked being crazy.

“Almost as beautiful as you,” I croaked. “I’ll check out the casinos.” I figured the crazier I sounded, the longer I could stay in this paradise.

She frowned and felt my forehead. “You must be hungry.” She eased my creaking body into a sitting position and started to feed me. For a while, I pretended to be weak, just to see the cute little frown on her forehead, but I couldn’t fake it for long, especially as the soup took hold. Her name was Molly, and something about her was naggingly familiar. I’d have remembered seeing her before, but although I didn't know her, something about her face was very familiar. She told me she lived in the freeway and that her family held the LA region freeway maintenance contract for life. “So we live where our work is,” she finished. It seemed to make as much sense as anything else. “We let the Shantytowners do a lot of the unskilled work,” she told me.

I thought about the brawny arms that had dragged me into the bowels of the freeway system. Suddenly, I remembered who belonged to that familiar voice. Five years slipped away like a bad dream, and I was the main man, the guru, City Hall computer whiz-kid. I'd somehow landed the job despite my social background, and I was so good that they just had to keep me. I worked twice as hard, and produced ten times as much, as anyone in the department. And I loved the job. I knew, and I improved, all the systems the politicians would let me get my hands on. I could do anything with the network, and even the clunky old mainframe code that still churned away, keeping the city chugging along. Then Malone came along, and worked on me for weeks, with his smooth words and his potato face, and his so reasonable little request. “A snip for someone as gifted as you, Sherbo,“ he said. It wasn't even anything important, except to Malone. It got me fired from my dream job.

“You have to be careful,” I told Molly urgently, “I just remembered, the guy who pulled me in here, little broad guy with a red face. Watch him, he’s the biggest con artist in LA.”

And right on cue, Malone strolled in, unchanged after five years, right down to the wicked grin on his potato face. “So that’s all the thanks I get for saving your miserable life, Sherbo,” he sneered. He advanced menacingly on the bed and I realized how weak I was.

“Stop teasing him, Dad,” Molly interrupted, and I realized why she looked so familiar. I had, not for the first time, placed my aching foot firmly in my mouth, if not halfway down my throat. But how could I be blamed for that? Who would have believed that an ugly criminal troll like Malone would have such a beautiful, sweet, innocent daughter. Something deep in my brain sounded a tiny soft warning, but I looked into Molly's big blue eyes and did my usual hatchet job on what was left of my common sense.

Malone laughed and produced a bottle of whiskey, seemingly out of thin air, like some mischievous leprechaun. Close to his radiant daughter, he seemed almost human, transformed in the warmth of a personality of someone who was, after all, his own flesh and blood. He handed me a crystal glass with at least two inches of amber liquid which soon slid down my throat like a soft explosion. I looked around at the clean room, the silk sheets and lace curtains. All in all, Malone and his daughter seemed to be doing pretty well for themselves. I decided to make the most of their hospitality. After all, Malone owed me.

For the next few days, I explored the premises, recuperated, and chatted with the delightful Molly, who responded enthusiastically to my attentions, not surprisingly, since I was the only male, apart from her father, who she had laid eyes on in weeks. There was plenty of room inside the freeway. Molly and her father had a labyrinth of cave-like chambers inside the supporting columns, and Malone, with his usual ruthless thoroughness, had scooped out passageways under the freeway bed, potentially weakening the whole structure. But freeways are what Los Angeles does best, and I felt like I was living in a huge rock solid castle. There was plenty of room, even for the other concrete dwellers, slithering around inside the freeway like snakes in a pipe.

I had almost forgotten about Stitches, and was ready to dismiss him as a starvation induced hallucination when I stumbled upon three skins, playing cards in a generator room near the roadbed.

“Hey, Sherbo,” Stitches seemed pleased to see me. “We friends now.” Five cards slowly turned up on his screen area, a full house. “Have a nice day!” He flashed at his partners in red and gold firework letters. “I win again,” he crowed, extending a pseudopod into a bare electrical socket. Lights dimmed, momentarily, and Stitches whooped like a man who'd just taken a large belt of whiskey. “Whee, that's good,” he said. “I think it makes my brain grow.” He shimmied towards the others. “Meet my friends, Sherbo,” he said. “You name me, and I give them names, also.” His big blue eye winked at me. “Meet Joe and Joe,” he said. “They're not too bright, and I win all the time.” Disconcertingly, he flowed on to my shoulders. “Wanna play some time,” he asked. “We sneak up here most evenings. Leave the wives and kids down below.”

“Wives and kids,” I repeated stupidly.

“Yeah, Minnie, Maisy, and Maisy, and the Juniors. Minnie's pretty smart, she used to sell pharma..., Pharma..., Pills to doctors and hospitals.”

Funny thing was, I was glad to see him. It seemed like we'd been through a lot together.

I must admit that the next couple of days were the best I'd experienced in a long time, something I'd have thought impossible with Malone on the scene. I'd lived in a rich businessman's house once, trying to teach his bovine daughter the rudiments of a third grade education. He soon realized that his darling eighteen year-old was interested in extracting something entirely different from me, and my life on easy street was over. During those short weeks, however, I'd gotten a good idea of how the moneyed class lived, and Malone and Molly lived like royalty compared to the rich tycoon and his nymphomaniac daughter, albeit royalty of a strange and unreal kind. King of the trolls fit Malone's position well. The service tunnels inside the freeway extended a long way, and Malone had made the best of them. His wine cellar was magnificent, or would have been had it contained anything other that Irish whiskey. His billiard and trophy room, where he entertained what passed for the leaders of the shantytown, would have done credit to a rock star, or one of the gold-plated rappers who had flourished in the waning years of the twentieth century. Stitches and his tribe did most of the housework. “All they ask for,” said Malone, “is an occasional jolt of electricity.”

While Malone had stamped his personality in the bowels of the service tunnels, Molly had floated towards the sky. We spent a lot of time together in her favorite rooms, which sucked the LA sunlight through innocent looking ventilation grids and the occasional opening between concrete blocks, illuminating the pastel colors and fanciful frescoes of her imagination. The whole setup was so appealing that I was almost able to close my eyes to the fact that their luxurious lifestyle was maintained on the basis of systematic and thorough highway robbery.

They hijacked the trucks that thundered endlessly overhead. Only about one in ten of these monsters contained a human driver. The rest were slaved together by radio. The particular concrete bowl of spaghetti above our heads was the busiest in LA, and most of the considerable engineering talent in the city had gone into making it safe. Automatic warning lights and relays could slow the convoys of trucks to a crawl, and Malone, Molly, and even the skins could climb aboard without trouble. Malone's operation was as simple and crude as the odd crate falling off the back of the truck. His contract with the city of Los Angeles stipulated that he take care of the local stretch of highway, and the trucks that rolled over it. Malone took care the trucks rolling over the highway were not overloaded. Relieving the trucks of some of their burden ensured less wear and tear on both the vehicles and the concrete they rolled on. Molly helped her father loot the system with innocent enthusiasm, and I knew that sooner or later they would try to drag me into the game.

“We're doing the world a favor, Sherbo,” Malone told me heartily, one day in the billiard room. “Who do you think feeds the Shantytown scavengers. They'd all be dead or starving if it wasn't for us. Why do you think LA Shantytown has grown so big?”

I wondered out loud why Malone had brought me to the bosom of his family instead of letting me exist on his handouts down below.

“Why, you're like one of the family,” he said, all wide-eyed innocence. “You're almost like a son to me.” He paused, seeing that he'd gone too far, even for an idiot like me. “Well,” he continued, “I guess I owe you for the dirty trick I pulled on you a few years ago.“

“Tricks,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he said, a little put out. “But I've always liked you. “ I must have shown my amazement because his voice changed, much to my relief. I had begun to think I was still dying under the freeway, living out my life in a fantasy world. ”You've got brains, boy,“ he said sharply. ”No sense, but a lot of brains. I need someone to cook the books for me. I need someone to fix the computers so they can lie about what we're doing here.“ He stared at the damp concrete behind me. ”Things were fine when we were taking a little bit here, a little bit there. Nobody noticed, or at least, nobody cared too much. But now, you know how many people are in that shantytown below? About fifty thousand.“ He looked at me seriously. ”Fifty thousand bellies to fill. You know, we provide almost half of all the food and supplies they have. And still, they have to beg and lie and steal, just to survive.“

“What's in it for you,” I asked him flatly. For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me.

“I should have let you starve for a while,” he said grimly. “Let you beg and scrabble for an old piece of bread or a half-eaten hamburger. People like you need to know what it's like to be poor.” He ran his hand through his graying hair and sighed. “No. I can't blame you for that last remark. When have I ever thought about anyone but myself; and her.” He looked upward towards where Molly was painting, close to the sunlight.

We were quiet for a moment, and then he broke the spell, as if ashamed to have shown part of himself that wasn't selfish and conniving. “Anyway, my boy, I have a job in mind for you. It's a sort of con job that even you can pull off. If it works out, I'll even let you stay here, help me run the whole operation. I tell you, boy, we're about to become big-time operators.”

I looked at him. “You want me to become assistant head of a large criminal organization? You must be out of your mind. I'm the only person I know who doesn't cheat on his taxes.“

His blue eyes twinkled mischievously. “The title is under boss, and you don't pay taxes now. In fact you're already a criminal. Vagrancy is a serious crime. Think of it, you can be a starving criminal, or a rich one, helping other poor slobs to survive.” He leant over the slate table and sank the black. “Ten bucks you owe me,” he said absently.

I spent the next two games losing non-existent money and telling him that there was no way that I was going to become his right-hand man in crime. Ethical arguments left him cold, but I finally wore him down with a long recital of my major shortcomings as a potential criminal.

Finally he said,“OK, Sherbo, you're right. I don't know what made me think I could turn you into a thug. I know you have too much integrity and common-sense for that. Look, I won't bother you about it again. You can stay with us, help Molly decorate, supervise the skins.” He stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings?”

He had finally realized that he couldn't con me. Well, the old leprechaun was being magnanimous about it. I felt almost grateful to him. I shook his hand and he slapped me on the back. “Should have known you were too slick. We still friends?”

“Sure,” I told him. “You know, I owe you. Anything to help, so long as it's legal.” I tried to extricate my hand, but he held on to it, looking at me warmly.

“Don't worry,” he said. “As long as we're friends.” He continued to hold my hand. “I'm just thinking, though,” he mused. “You know, there is one small thing you can do for me. Perfectly legal, now we know where we stand.”

“Sure, sure, anything,” I said, showing him that I could be magnanimous too, and he proceeded to tell me about his plans for organizing Shantytown, and his problems with a local scavenger politician called Harold.

“You know,” he said, “Harold cares for Shantytown in his own way, but he's too confrontational. He's a little local tyrant who's arming his men for a fight with the outside. Now, you and I know that's crazy, bound to lead to disaster for all of us, but Harold's a fanatic, and he's upsetting a lot of people, splitting Shantytown into two camps. He needs someone to talk some sense into him, someone educated like you. Sure, he's a big fish by Scavenger lights, but he's too limited to be an effective leader.“ Malone pulled a pint of whiskey from his pocket and offered me a swig. I took some to be polite, and he went on; ”He's beginning to be awkward about the food distribution, trying to get an unfair share for his constituents. You know what politicians are like.“ Malone took a quick drink and handed the bottle back.

“Yeah,” I said hoarsely. The whisky tasted pretty good.

“Well, you're just the man to talk to him,” Malone continued. “With that silver tongue of yours. Weren't you in politics yourself?”

“I guess,” I mumbled confusedly, taking another swig. “Well, I was in the debating club at college.”

“That's right, I knew you had the gift of the gab. Brains and a talent for oratory, that's how I always thought of you, Sherbo.”

I rubbed my eyes, which seemed to have gotten a little blurry. “Wait a minute, Malone,” I said suspiciously. “Nobody can blarney like you. Why don't you talk to him?“

Malone looked at me sadly. “Sure, I'm a pretty good con man, but I don't have the intelligence for this kind of thing. Last time I spoke to Harold, well, I was a bit undiplomatic, you might say. I mean, something like this, politics,” he shook his head.. “Well, for that, you need brains and good judgment, the sort of thing that comes naturally to someone like you.”

I had to agree. “I was always very persuasive in the debates,” I agreed. “I have a certain gift of persuasion. I'm very persuasive,“ I repeated, finishing off the whiskey. I recalled that, five years before, Malone had persuaded me out of a large sum of money, and the only decent job I had ever held, but that was five years before, and I was wiser now. ”Still,“ I thought sagely, ”better make sure he realizes I'm a different person now. He better know he can't fool me twice.“

“I realize,” Malone went on, “that you're a different person from the last time we met. You can't be fooled, I know that. Someone like Harold will be putty in your hands.” He rummaged absently in his tool drawer and fished out another pint of whiskey. “Anyway, I'll be right there to help you, right there, me and Stitches. Between us we can't go wrong.“

“Stitches,” I said slowly, trying confusedly to sort it all out.

“I'll explain it all,” he said.

That's how, the following night, we came to be in the back room of the only bar in Shantytown, a drinking place for derelicts, buried under the rubble of the old Coliseum and a few thousand tons of garbage in the middle of the city of tents and cardboard shacks.

The trip down to the surface had been easy. Malone grabbed two large sacks, we climbed into a sort of dumb-waiter and dropped a couple of hundred feet down a service shaft in the middle of the massive main support column. I stood under the soaring concrete ribbons, four and five decks looping over each other and listened to the night sounds, while Malone breathed the warm evening air like a tourist just off the plane. “Nice to be out for once,” he said, looking at the dim fires of the settlement, listening to the thin sounds of scavengers, human and otherwise, a few hundred yards away. “Here, take this sack,” he ordered, striding off confidently. I followed him, gingerly.

He seemed to know most of the scavengers who flitted like ghosts between heaps of trash and blue plastic tents, pale faces flickering in the light of the endless small fires. The area was surprisingly tidy, and every recyclable scrap was neatly bundled and stacked. A few kids played in the dust, and a woman, naked and unconcerned, was washing in an old water-filled tank, and talking to a peculiar Latino in a tattered tuxedo, pants held up by a rope belt.

A thin young black man stepped from one of the tents and waved at Malone. “He keeps his little area in pretty good shape,” Malone whispered to me. Used to be an engineer until he annoyed some local bigwig.

“Got anything for us, Malone?” The man asked.

“Nah, just some chocolates for the kids, Tony.” Malone might have been visiting friendly, but distant relatives. He pulled a couple of neatly wrapped cartons from one of the sacks, and Tony handed them to one of the older kids.

“Share 'em out properly,” he ordered sharply.

“Meet Sherbo,” Malone waved at me. Tony's gaze flicked disinterestedly across my face. “He's going to fix things with Harold.”

Tony looked at me again, this time with interest. “Him,” he said. “You sure?”

“No problem,” Malone told him. “Look, let's go inside. We got stuff to talk about.”

I squatted down by one of the fires and smiled at the young girl who had distributed the chocolate. “Hi,” I said inanely, “What's your name?”

“She's called Pat, after my grandfather, Patrick, and my grandmother, Patricia.” The naked woman approached, wrapping a sheet around herself. “Go play, now,” she ordered, “while I talk to this man.” She was a couple of years older than me, attractive, the sort of woman who would have been full-figured on a normal diet. She started to comb her dark hair with an old comb and I was aware of her strong arms and long fingers. I must have been staring because she strode off to one of the tents and came back wearing a flowered dress.

“Modesty's the first thing you lose”, she said, sitting beside me. “But it's a trade-off. If I didn't wash, I'd feel less than human.” She sounded well-educated, and very feminine and human. I told her so and she finished the sentence for me, “for a scavenger.” I floundered, because she had read me correctly. “People don't recognize me any more,” she said, “and that's a relief.” She wouldn't tell me any more about herself. Curious, I asked how long she had been a scavenger.

“Seven years,” she answered, surprising me. “It was a lot worse before Malone came along.”

“Um,” I answered, neutrally.

“I know he's a rogue, but his heart's in the right place.” She looked at me with a disturbing directness. “When he first finagled himself into the road-maintenance job he used to think like you.” I made some gesture of denial, but she went on. “It's natural. You see us like this, and you know you could never live like we do.”

“I've been on the streets,” I told her, thinking of my trek through the city, with Stitches one blue eye haunting me, all the way to the door into the freeway.

“And you figured that you'd sooner die than be a scavenger.” Again, that direct look. I couldn't argue. It was true. I told her that, after a while it was a lot easier to give up than to figure out how to stay alive. Without Stitches, I wouldn't have made it. She sighed. “I didn't have that luxury. Pat was four years old. I had to stay alive. And Malone helped.“ She sighed again. ”Didn't have to. There was no love lost between us. But he did it, for Pat.“ She settled herself more comfortably. ”And then he started helping the others.“

I asked her how someone so obviously talented and educated as herself had ever gotten into this mess. “How did you end up here?” She retorted. I told her, it was just an accident, a crazy chain of events that couldn't happen again, and she looked at me as if I'd told her I was the tooth fairy. “There are thousands, millions of scavengers, all over the country,” she said carefully. “They didn't ask to be scavengers. They're just as well-educated and hard-working as the drones in the state apartments. More so. Look around you. You'll fine more teachers, engineers, scientists here than out there in the concrete suburbs.”

I was about to gently change the subject when a thought struck me. “You knew Malone before? This Malone?” I must have sounded surprised because she smiled again.

“Sort of.”

That was all she would say about Malone, so we talked some more about life in Shantytown, her face calm in the dim light of the fire, her educated voice soothing and musical.

“What's your name,” I interrupted. “Christine,” she answered. “We're pretty old-fashioned in my family as far as names go. And you're Sherbo, the guy who's going to fix Harold and his crew.“

Before I could answer, Malone and Tony came out of the tent. Malone looked hard at Christine and she smiled at me and disappeared into one of the tents. “Nice lady,” I said to him, and he nodded. Tony was looking at me with a peculiar stare. “You sure he knows..,” he started to say. “He gets his final briefing at the Garbage Tavern ,” Malone said quickly. “We're going there now.”

On the way, I tried to ask Malone about Christine, but he was uncharacteristically silent. We trekked through different 'neighborhoods' , across piles of rubble, between the little fires that burnt day and night and the recycled rubbish of the real city that lay outside the loop of the downtown freeway system. One little band of Scavengers lived in a village of rusted-out cars and trucks, the residue from some forgotten junkyard. They were friendly but watchful, and Malone handed out cartons of powdered soup as we passed through.

“This stuff is just token merchandise - free samples,” he told me. “Helps us move through. We normally deliver direct and in bulk.“ He grinned when I asked what he meant. ”Well, I ain't talking about UPS,“ was all he would say. I noticed that the further we got into Shantytown, the more we detoured, skirting makeshift barricades of old oil cans, rotting furniture and rubble that sliced across our path with increasing frequency.

“Idiots,” Malone grunted. “Working together, they can barely make it. If they start fighting amongst themselves...” He broke off. “Aha, my boy,” he yelled “there she blows.” The Garbage Tavern loomed out of the darkness, the biggest structure, no, the biggest garbage dump I had ever seen.

“It's a big pile of garbage,” I told Malone.

He looked hurt. “At least wait till you try their whisky,” he said. “Before you criticize.” We approached the looming junk pile. “Used to be the old Coliseum,” Malone remarked. “Then, along came the fancy Staples Center, and people started to come less and less, so they put a big bubble dome over it, but it made no difference because by then the good citizens of this town had started to shut themselves up in their little boxes, watching their other little boxes, and the gates closed for the last time, and the weeds pushed through the concrete. Finally the bubble dome broke, and the LA Coliseum became the LA garbage can.”

“But,” I said lamely, and a little man leapt out of the ground in front of me like a demented troll. He looked like Malone’s half-size brother, same potato head and red bulbous nose, all reduced in scale.

“Malone,” he boomed in a giant voice. “Dooley,” Malone yelled back and I expected them to go dancing off into the dark mountain of junk that used to be the Coliseum, a pair of goblins, disappearing back into the ground. Instead, Malone gestured towards me with a flourish. “Dooley,” he said. “This is the man.“

”Sherbo,” he continued, “this is my cousin, Dooley.“

Dooley looked at me, disappointed. “He's not Irish, then.”

“We can't all be so lucky.” Malone clapped me on the back. “But he's got a silver tongue and a heart as cold and hard as an Englishman's, and that's a rare combination. You'll see, he'll bring Harold around for us.”

I wondered, in this dark, phoneless town of Scavengers, just how the news of my mission had spread so quickly. Christine, the half-size Dooley, probably half the population of this crumbling city between the freeways, all seemed to know our business. Presumably, the mysterious Harold had also heard.

“Come on, you two,” Dooley the dwarf suddenly disappeared up to his nose, and I made out a rough passage snaking into the depths of the garbage pile.

I had felt like I was falling down the rabbit-hole when I arrived, half dead at the freeway, with Stitches in my backpack. This time, though, I was fully conscious as Dooley dodged and weaved through the garbage pile. The passage was well-used and struts and planks shored it up for most of the way, giving it the appearance of a hastily built, badly designed escape tunnel, through which the prisoners of Shantytown could flee to a pale imitation of the bars and restaurants that existed in the real world. Occasionally, we had to duck round an old stove or rusty car body that was too big to smooth down.

Finally, Dooley stopped, so suddenly that we almost banged into him. A heavy oak door, scavenged from an old hotel or long-gone bank, blocked the way. Dooley picked up a rock and hammered on it. It looked as if it was used to this sort of wear and tear. After a few seconds a muffled voice mumbled something unfriendly. “It's Dooley, you old fool,” Dooley boomed in his giant voice, and the door creaked open to reveal the interior of the Garbage Tavern.

It must have been the food court at one time, and it was pretty big. Dooley disappeared back to his watchman duties, and we wended our way round rickety tables to sit at a red plastic decorated counter top. A dozen Mickey Mouse faces grinned up at us, and Donald Duck leered from behind a motley collection of beers. Old soda fountains seemed to contain generic whiskey and vodka, and even more dubious alcoholic concoctions. Somewhere, a generator hummed, keeping the dim lights alive and the air breathable, while a juke box struggled with the variable electricity to produce a recognizable tune, and a few ragged scavengers danced in the gloom. All in all, it compared favorably with the bars on the surface, on the other side of the freeway.

The barman smiled toothlessly at us. “On the house, gents,” he said slapping down two tumblers of whiskey before I could protest.

“That's Ryan, the richest man in Shantytown,” Malone told me, watching the man's retreating back as he hurried to serve another customer. “Nothing but a bum,” he continued, unaware of the irony, “until he stumbled on this place.” He looked around at the crumbling walls and rusty pipes. “Still hooked into the sewers after all these years.” Malone finished his whiskey and wandered around to the other side of the bar. “Come on, finish up.” He reached under the counter and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Let's have some of the good stuff.” “I get to drink free here,” he explained. “I ship in the booze at reasonable prices, and all the furniture and equipment.” He gestured at the rickety tables and the ragged dancers, as if they were all part of his munificence. “Pretty soon I'll have him hooked up to the LA grid, and he can donate his generator to one of the communities, although I know the bastard will want to keep it as a backup.”

He saw me watching one of the dancing couples and grinned. “Yes, he even gets an occasional outsider in here.” I was looking at an odd couple dancing lightly among the tables. He was the Latino man, still dressed in a dirty ragged tuxedo, pants kept up with a length of rope, but she had on a smart dress and new stylish shoes. Even in the dim light her skin glowed, fresh from a shower and she looked larger than life among the shantytowners.

“Quite a story to those two,” Malone continued. “Her name’s Betty, and she's the daughter of a well-known actor, and the man with her was a professional dancer. They met, they fell in love, and daddy told her a dancer was not good enough for her. She laughed in daddy's face, so he ruined the guy. Poor slob couldn't get a job, couldn't leave town because daddy had tied him up in some sort of contract dispute. At first, he was too proud to accept money from her, but then he took it to survive, so daddy got him thrown into jail on some trumped up charge. I guess he was slowly starving in there, and daddy promised to get him out if they never to saw each other again.“

“Quite a story,” I agreed. I thought about my conversation with Christine, about shantytowners being real people with real and complex lives.

“Oh, the story's not finished yet,” Malone answered. “You see, she was ready to give him up, just to save him. To save his life really. Daddy was going to get him a job in Seattle, or somewhere far away. He promised his little daughter that. Then he had Carlos the dancer beaten up and thrown off the freeway. It was just a little low freeway; daddy just wanted to cripple him, you see. But Carlos hit a telephone wire on the way down and bounced off onto a pile of old furniture and crap, and ran off into Shantytown.“ Malone paused and served us two more drinks. ”Somehow, Betty found out he was still alive, so she grabbed a few things, makeup and jewelry and changes of clothes and fled to find her lover.“ Malone sipped his whiskey and gazed at the couple floating to the music of the discordant jukebox. “She almost lost her mind wandering around Shantytown, and then when she found him, she got sick and almost died. Couldn't take it. Shantytown was too much for her. She would have died, along with a lot of others, but Carlos persuaded, no, ordered her to go back. He brought her to me, and I drove her out and called daddy.“'Yes sir, your honor, I found the poor wee thing wandering about by the freeway, sir, and seeing as she's sick, your honor, I got her to tell me where she lived, and I brought her to yez right away, sir.' Bastard offered my money, but I wouldn't take it. 'I'd just like to call on the wee thing, make sure she's all right when she's rested, that is, thank you sir.' Well, he wasn't very happy about that, but I had saved her life. So, I fixed things so she can see him occasionally, in here where it's pretty safe.“ He watched the thin young man, whirling his elegant partner around the rickety tables, floating across the crumbling floor, two people unaware of their surroundings, totally immersed in each other. ”Sometimes I think they'd both die if they weren't able to see each other occasionally,“ he murmured. “He'd give up and lie down and die in the garbage, and she would find some way of drugging herself out of the bright, vicious life her father provides for her out there.”

Malone had surprised me again, showing compassion for the young dancer and his shallow girlfriend. “You did a good thing, Malone,“ I told him awkwardly. ”You can be proud.“

“Jeez,” he said, “here I'm talking a bunch of nonsense and we have to get you ready for Harold. Ryan,” he yelled, “we'll be in the back room for a while.” And he grabbed a full bottle and dragged me past the dancers to a small door which led to a small, comfortable room. Inside, with the door locked, the discordant sounds of the jukebox faded to a steady hypnotic thump thump as the Shantytown dancers enjoyed their brief moments of happiness.

“OK,”, he said, all businesslike, pouring me another drink. He relieved me of the second sack and dumped Stitches out on the table. “Right, roll up your shirt,” he ordered. Puzzled, I did as I was told, and Stitches, yawning, wrapped himself around me. Other than a slight tingling sensation, I felt nothing.

“Now, will you tell me just how Stitches is going to help us,” I asked.

“Stitches is the way,” Malone said, “that we communicate with each other.” He patted Stitches, curled not too comfortably around my stomach. “Now, I know you’re not going to need much help, but, just in case – I’ll be right there with you.” It was quite hot in the room, and I had trouble focusing. Malone droned on. “Say something sub-vocally. You know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I told him, not quite sure what he was talking about.

“Then don’t say it out loud,” he told me irritably. “Keep your mouth shut and say something, very softly.”

“You mean, like this,” I muttered inaudibly.

“You mean, like this,” Malone parroted.

I whispered the first paragraph of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, so softly that even I couldn’t hear it, and Malone repeated it back, word for word.

“How do you do that?” I asked, astonished.

“Stitches,” he grinned. “He’s sensitive to the slightest vibration of your throat. He’s extended a thin filament of himself up by your neck.” My neck started to itch. “So don’t scratch,” he said.

“But how does he tell you,” I asked.

“Broadcasts.”

I didn’t know Stitches could do that,” I said, surprised.

Malone looked at me balefully. “He’s a living billboard. He was designed to broadcast. Regular voice, radio frequencies, subliminally.” Malone poured us another drink. “OK,” he said monotonously, “let’s just go over it again, take it easy, listen to what I say, remember what I say.” He droned on in a monotone quite unlike his usual forceful tones. I began to wonder if I had taken a little too much whiskey. We’d had quite a journey, and the Garbage Tavern, and this little room were quite relaxing. I didn’t want to miss what Malone was saying, I didn’t want to get lost, and I certainly didn’t want to mess up my assignment.

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