The Bright Spot Read online

  “Of course they were efficient. They were workware. I can’t believe you didn’t notice. Totally zoned out.” It wasn’t clear whether she meant me or them—accurate in either case, I suppose. “Have you ever seen that before? A workware crew?”

  “No, never.”

  “Next thing you know they won’t need us actors anymore. They’ll just load up the roles and turn them loose.”

  “I need you,” I said, putting my arm around her shoulders.

  She nestled against me. “Me too.” After a while, she said, “They won’t remember a thing. They did it as much as we did, but they won’t remember.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was still talking about the crew. “It doesn’t always block the memory, does it?”

  She cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Okay, stupid question. This wouldn’t have been one of those times.” I remembered hearing that the soldiers guarding top secret installations now were all workware. It saved the army a ton of money on security clearances. You didn’t need them if you could wipe their minds clean at the end of the day like a pane of glass, shatter it if necessary.

  We made it home just before dark and spent the evening down at Murphy’s watching Chinatown, one of my donations to the collection. But even Polanski couldn’t get my mind off James Dumfries and Galatea Ritsa. This wasn’t just about a lost love. It was about her death. A murder, most likely. But I was just as late to the crime as I was to the funeral. Forty years. I should just forget it, I told myself repeatedly, which only helped it burrow deeper and deeper into my brain. Everything depends on it. Everything. Everything. Who wrote this dialogue? I wanted to know. Just what “everything” are we talking about here? Give me nothing anytime. Much easier to play against nothing than everything, much easier to play a complete Nobody than Everyman.

  Sunday, we took the bus to the park, with Buck sitting in my lap. It was like holding a sack of hams, a little too heavy but not too bad. The lapdog gene did its job, and he didn’t squirm. Some people gave us dirty looks. Technically, dogs weren’t allowed. Technically, lots of things weren’t allowed. But this was a driverless route, so there was no one to enforce the rules, and just as many people wanted to scratch his cute little head as wanted to toss him out the window. The two camps could fight it out if they wanted. By the time they settled it, we’d be there.

  I usually loved the park, but not that day. I kept imagining Galatea struck by some speeding vehicle, bouncing from the hood, dead on impact. As I watched her cartwheel through space like a broken rag doll, I felt a panicky urgency to change the past. All I had to do was figure out what to do. Something different, of course. Find Kennemeyer. Whoever the hell he was. And he only knew what to do then. Chances are, I thought, he’d be as clueless as I am now—the only time that really matters, according to all the deepest thinkers. It was over. It was done. There was nothing that could be done about it now.

  Then Bam! There went Galatea again, and I was off to the races. I must’ve been great company, my mind caught in an endless loop.

  “Lu,” I finally asked her, “do you know anything about this James Dumfries guy?” We were lying under some pine trees watching kids feeding geese in the pond down below. Buck snored on his back, having just delved the eternal now with a tennis ball for a half hour.

  “So that’s what’s been bothering you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Nick. You’ve been on another planet since we did that job. Do you feel guilty? Is that it?”

  “Don’t you? Here’s this broken-down old guy, and we spend our Saturday helping him relive the worst fifteen minutes of his life, so that Salvador can pick his pocket and split the take with us. We could’ve been here instead. We should’ve been here.”

  She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at me. “What can we do about it now?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I just feel bad about it.”

  She touched my cheek. “You’re so sensitive. You didn’t even know who he was, and you’re all worried about him. I can’t believe I know something you don’t for a change. James Dumfries invented workware.”

  Of course. That’s where I’d seen him before. In school. One of the Famous Men one learned to recognize in an endless lineup of Famous Men. Of course, he was much younger when he was famous than the man I saw yesterday. But he just did the science, if I remembered right, the thing they called the DNA computer, though it wasn’t exactly either one. The workware came later, an application of his work, I guess you’d call it. I said as much to Lu.

  “He still ended up rich, apparently.”

  “Not after Salvador gets through with him.”

  “What’re you saying? You want to give your share back to Dumfries? Would that make you feel better?”

  I thought about it. “If I could find him.”

  She studied me, trying to figure my angle. I didn’t know if I had one, except to buy my conscience off, which I’d never known to be quite so noisy and persistent before.

  “It shouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “If you find him, you can give him my share too.” She pushed me back in the shadows under the pine boughs and climbed on top of me, pinning my arms above my head. “You’re some kind of guy, Ted.”

  “Who’re you calling Ted? You mixing me up with some other guy?”

  “No. I know exactly who you are.”

  “And who is that?”

  She didn’t answer at first, not with words anyway. “Here he comes now,” she whispered in my ear, and nibbled at the lobe. “I think he’s put on some weight.”

  “It’s broad daylight, Lu.”

  “Don’t worry. Buck will bark if anybody gets too close.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “I don’t think you’re as afraid as all that.”

  She kissed my mouth and unzipped my pants, and I was in no position to disagree.

  Talk of giving Dumfries his money back came cheap, since we weren’t about to be paid tomorrow. We had some time to talk ourselves out of anything too noble.

  Maybe we were stupid, but we’d agreed to wait for the big money transfer until it was certain everything had gone according to plan. We got a small cash advance—about the equivalent of a week’s ReCreation wages—and the rest was just a promise. If the deal went sour, Salvador said, this would protect us. As long as no electronic money changed hands, nobody could connect us with him and the crime. That’s why he got the big take, he said, because he was taking the big risk.

  It also occurred to me that Salvador might not get his dough right away either, and that was what the delay was really all about. Maybe the old guy had to die first. Salvador might have forgotten to mention that part of the plan. To protect us, no doubt.

  So when a month went by and the money hadn’t shown, I thought what Lu thought, that Salvador had screwed us. But I also thought what I said out loud: “Maybe the old guy didn’t die like he was supposed to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Salvador explained the deal, he said Dumfries was loaded, but had nobody to leave it to. Maybe meaning that Salvador got the old guy to leave it to him, name him in his will—as payment for his time travel.”

  “So Salvador wouldn’t get anything until the guy died.”

  “Salvador strikes me as someone who would have that angle covered. He wouldn’t like too much uncertainty.”

  “So you’re saying ...”

  “That Salvador planned on killing off Dumfries— maybe one of those side effects would get out of hand— but it didn’t work or he lost his nerve. Or maybe he just plain screwed us and is rolling in dough.” Which is why, I was tempted to say, you don’t do business with someone on a strictly virtual basis in the first place, but I managed to keep that opinion to myself. That was as easy to change now as Galatea Ritsa’s rendezvous with a speeding automobile.

  Whatever had gone wrong, we could hardly complain to the authorities that we’d been cheated out of our sha
re of the take, so we tried to be philosophical about it. Instead of easy come, easy go, it was never came, never went. It was a day’s work well done. Art for art’s sake. The end of our short-lived career in crime.

  Meanwhile, Billy and the Big Guy kept us busy. It was starting to inch into the getting-noticed category. There wasn’t exactly a buzz, but there were murmurs here and there, and the demand for episodes was a gradually steepening curve. We didn’t lose our artistic integrity. Wally banged them out as fast as we could make them.

  If the only consideration was money, Lu and I would’ve told ReCreation to take a flying leap at the moon for the pittance they were paying us, but fame was another matter. You couldn’t buy fame. Not with the amount of money we’d attempted to scam off Dumfries anyway. If all you had was money, it had to be a bundle, or you had to spend it on incredibly stupid things. And rich-guy fame wasn’t the right kind anyway. We were actors. We wanted to be famous for pretending to be other people. Go figure. So just so long as Billy and the Big Guy looked like it might possibly become a hit—no matter how lousy the pay, no matter what kind of stinker it was—we weren’t about to quit.

  And to tell you the truth, it was starting to grow on us. The roles of Victor and the She-Creature were fun to play—smoldering slapstick and repartee we mostly adlibbed, though Wally’s writing skills were definitely improving. It wasn’t often you got to be funny and sexy at the same time—in virtuals anyway. Even William was getting into his character, so that he was the noblest little shit you ever met in your life. And Stan’s earnest monster made even the mayhem poignant. It was like Gandhi finally being pushed too far and dismembering a few bad guys for the good of us all. You could almost believe it hurt him more than it hurt them. At least their misery didn’t last as long. Stan did this soulful misunderstood look to the heavens at least once an episode—a look that must’ve had every middle school girl who ever took in a stray bawling her eyes out.

  Without the Salvador money, we didn’t have to think twice about whether we were going to stick with ReCreation. We just wished we had better contracts. Billy and the Big Guy would have to hang on for at least a year before we made any real money—fix-the-roof money, as Lu called it—and the chances of that were slim indeed. Not that it bothered me. I was used to not being rich, hanging out in the upper crust of poverty, knowing it was a long way down from here, and it went all the way to the bottom. Lu knew all this too, but it bothered her more. She wanted to know what had become of Salvador. She didn’t like being cheated.

  Me, I kept thinking about Kennemeyer. Whoever the hell he was. And then I had to go and ask somebody who he was, and somebody had to go and tell me, and that’s when the real trouble started.

  It was a late night at Murphy’s. Dell was at it again. This time his son Clinton showed up to take him home.

  “Come on, Pop. It’s time,” Clinton said to his father.

  It looked past time to me. Dell hadn’t made any sense in over an hour and wasn’t likely to get up out of his chair on his own. He’d chemically bonded with the plastic. Then there was the little matter of the two-block walk home. Dell wasn’t that big, but he was bigger than Clinton, who was a wiry kid, a college sophomore, the only one of those in the neighborhood.

  “I’ll give you a hand with him,” I said.

  We got on either side of him, draping his arms over our shoulders, and walked him down the alley. Dell even managed to take a few steps, and the accomplishment went to his head. He started trying to talk again.

  “Clinton’s a serious boy,” he told me. “Into poli-tics. Demonstrations and shit. Very, very serious. Don’t he look serious to you, Mr. Bainbridge? What kinda name’s Bainbridge anyway?”

  “Theatrical,” I said. That gave him something to think about, and he wasn’t quite up to it. His feet gave up the effort of pretending to walk and got all tangled up together.

  I didn’t have to ask what Clinton demonstrated against. I’d seen his Workware Is Slaveware T-shirts. I didn’t have to ask why either. We were carrying plenty of reason down the alley, and he was getting heavier with each step.

  “Fucking shit,” Dell shouted, his final thought for the evening, and lapsed into silence. By the time we got him home, he was out cold. We flopped him onto his bed in his painstakingly neat room off the kitchen and started getting him out of his clothes. “I can get him from here, Mr. Bainbridge. Thanks for helping me with him.”

  “Call me Nick. We’re just getting to the hard part. He’s dead weight. I’ll help you finish the job, so one of you doesn’t get hurt.”

  The only injuries were mine, cracking my head a couple of times on the sloped ceiling. When Dell was all tucked in, Clinton thanked me again and offered me a cup of coffee for my trouble. I surprised him by taking him up on it. We sat at the kitchen table and made small talk about me and Lu and about his schoolwork. He was the one who pushed it into serious territory.

  “Why do you hang out with that burned-out bunch at Murphy’s, Mr. Bainbridge ... Nick? You seem like an intelligent man.”

  “There’s plenty of intelligent folks at Murphy’s.”

  “Who think life comes down to two choices: workware or drinking your life away in some junkman’s backyard.”

  “What’re the other choices? Know-it-all student? Underpaid actor? Suspected dissident? A little time at Murphy’s might do you some good, Clinton—loosen you up a little. You never know.”

  He started to take offense, but shrugged it off. He wasn’t mad at me. He wasn’t even mad at his dad. “Maybe you’re right. I just get so crazy when I see him like this. Bitter and used up. I remember what he used to be like. Things shouldn’t be this way.”

  “So you’re looking to change them. Good for you. Have you studied on it much? Workware?”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “You might say that. It’s kind of an obsession with me.”

  “What do you know about James Dumfries?”

  “What everybody knows.”

  I had to laugh. “Everybody usually doesn’t know everything they should. Take me. I’m a smart guy. I was a straight-A student for a while, but I don’t know much. Most of what I learned, I learned for some test. Once the tests were over, I was glad to let it all go, to make room for whatever I was interested in that week, usually a woman. I only really learned what I wanted to. I liked stories, novels, plays—anything made up—so I read those, watched a hell of a lot of movies. I remember those. Makes me seem smart. But science? I don’t know a Krebs cycle from a motorcycle, a neutrino from a cappuccino. And I’m even worse with history, politics, and geography. I learned all that stuff, but I don’t know any of it. So tell me, what is it everybody knows about James Dumfries but me?”

  I was flattering him in a roundabout way, and he didn’t seem to mind it much. I suspected Clinton wanted to be famous too, but not for pretending to be anything he wasn’t, and one thing he was, was smart. He told me what I wanted to know like we were in a senior seminar—and him only a sophomore:

  “James Dumfries headed the research that led to Freedomware back during the war. They were trying to make better desert soldiers, mountain soldiers, swamp soldiers, space soldiers. It was supposed to retune their bodies and minds for optimal performance in these harsh environments, increasing their chances for survival. He imagined postwar applications like firefighters and stuff like that, but he had no idea. He thought he was doing a good thing, helping boys make it out of the war alive. He wasn’t looking to make workers who never got tired, never got bored, never got interested, couldn’t steal, couldn’t talk back, couldn’t remember what the fuck they’d been doing all day, day in and day out. And he certainly didn’t mean to create the illegal perfect whores, perfect boxers, perfect killers workware makes possible. I don’t know what planet he was living on, but he had neglected to consider the commercial applications. He spoke out against it when workware was first introduced, but nobody cared. Workware was going to create all these jobs, you see. That was the big promise. Wha
t machines had once done, man could do again, they said. It was cheaper even. Machines were expensive and complicated. Potential ’ware workers grew in ghettoes around the world at no expense whatsoever. Workware was their opportunity to make something of themselves.”

  His bitter grin gave you chills. Clinton didn’t pull any punches. He and his dad weren’t so different after all. But Clinton had the good sense to stay sober. For now at least. It was a long hard fight, taking on the Man, with many opportunities to fall. That’s what I’d heard anyway. I prided myself on staying out of His way.

  “Had Dumfries always been a good soldier before that?”

  “All that’s still classified, but according to several sources, he fought with the military all the time.”

  “What about?”

  “Command issues mostly. They wanted a more centralized military command structure. He wanted it more localized.”

  “Is that the answer I give on the test?”

  “Sorry. You see, the way workware is now—because it still works exactly like the old Freedomware—is that there’s a chain of command you can’t see. A crew is transmitted a specific set of instructions by a central command, and these instructions can’t be changed by anyone in the crew. The military brass were afraid their control might be compromised somehow. Changes could only come from above. So like if that paving crew runs into a problem, a pipe where it’s not supposed to be or something, they suspend operations and send a signal to their company headquarters in Florida or wherever, they assess the problem through the workers’ senses, then send the new orders to the crew. You don’t even notice it. Takes seconds. Dumfries wanted more localized control, so that an officer in the field could reprogram his troops even if the central command was destroyed.”

  “How big is a crew?”

  “Any size, depending on the task. One or two, thousands. Whatever’s needed.”

  “Yeah. I can see why he lost that debate. What happened to Dumfries after he spoke out against workware?”

  “I don’t know. He dropped out of sight. He was idolized for something he hated doing. That must’ve been pretty awful. There were lots of rumors that he lost his mind. He’d be close to ninety by now.”