Echolocation in the 2030s. (S.)

They used to call Larry Fiskovitz 'the Chameleon' on account of how readily he could quit/pause in conversation with a potential buyer, rechecking his script, weighing the pros & cons, presuming outcomes, just in the pinch when the buyer'd say Yes or No, and, usually, get them to say Yes, or at least think of it. 

He was never trying to be manipulative. But once you're trying to persuade the Masses, once you're trying to persuade "the average person," where they live, how they live, what they ought to be living for...well, you've got so many bombs, so many supplements & pharmaceuticals, and so many non-drug/weapons like furniture & decoratives...and at some point you've got to sell more of them than the proverbial next guy. So.... 

He was a serious person, but he didn't exactly want to be. Wherever he came from, whatever it did to him (personally) he believed a certain due of eclecticism was in order. I mean, how often do we say No One Has All The Answers--and then just leave a gangton of un-answered questions behind us, leave a gangton of answers in the hollow wake of our unused imaginations? 

He'd get his silly daily assignments every day, the sheets and sheets and sheets of potential buyers, and something in Larry knew how to read them and decipher them better than...usual...and he'd try to get down to the human-level of where someone he was talking to was at. And he wasn't trying to get into a bigger apartment. And he wasn't trying to get a newer car--or any car, for that matter. And he wasn't even sure if he wanted kids, wanted to be a dad or not. He always just thought that if he had more money, he could provide a better life (however little better) for Carol June. 

Carol June was his sweetheart. 

He had a couple "girlfriends" before Carol June, but they'd never count the way she counted in his emotions, his decisions. 

Sometime after 2030, most people were doing reappraisals on things. The New Election had sunk in. Trump was gone--but some people were still saying Long Live Trump--and the new president either didn't know how to talk them out of it, or they didn't want to talk them out of it. 'Narcissism' was such a household-word, like 'monster' had been in the earliest-2000s, that it both had weight & a weight you could easily ignore. Larry seemed to get that decision/spectrum better than anybody. He was the Mark Twain* of personality & commerce: he knew when the almost-right was necessary, and when to throw down the right word like he was Lord Zeus appealing their freedom. 

For instance: one time, when he was trying to sell Ketamine, at a massive group-cost discount to a potential buyer in Illinois who'd been 'confidently' sure Xanax was working just as well and did most of the same benefits/services as Ketamine, Larry persuaded them by saying, "Even if they think there's withdrawal, they perform the same or better because there's nothing like Withdrawal." That either got people on his (proverbial) team, or the ones who were there liked Larry a little bit more... 

Speaking of Carol June... She and Larry met in 2030, when he was 29. She made a big deal of how Larry had the same birthday as one of her crazy cousins--or the same birthyear, at any rate, even tho Larry wouldn't so much as take more than a few hits off a joint was being passed around and her crazy cousin would probably eat the thing if someone else dared him to. Larry didn't even get kind-of offended. He thought it made him sound Tough. Larry wanted to "eat Carol June alive" with her permission. 

And Carol June never took bad advantage over him. She was a little younger than him (just by a year or two) and she mostly had the same stoic ambivalence as him, somewhere between uncertainty and a desire for affirmation. By 2034, when most of this happens, they had their little apartment in the working-class part of Manhattan and they were mostly okay with where they lived even if they thought they could do better, and Larry just had to earn & save a little more money in order to get somewhere that they'd think they could have a kid. 

That's when Larry hailed a cab driven by Jerry Ratbaum.

**** 

*Samuel Clemens. 

**** 

Jerry was the opposite of what Larry was: He wasn't a friendly, thoughtful chameleon--He was a dilettante, interloping furniture-sucker. Before He got His job with the Winehauser/Meyers Cab Company, He worked full-time and often overtime as a Resident Counselor in one of the seemingly innumerable New Life Centers in the Five Burroughs. (*They also have quite a few locations in the Greater New England Area, places just north of Florida, and a smaller percentage in the southwestern states, practically none near Washington and Oregon, and a scant handful or so in the Midwest: all almost/kind of drawing, esoterically, a spiral of either frequently unsuccessful or perfectly unnecessary drug/behavior treatment programs. Makes you think.) 

When He was a counselor, the people in charge had given Jerry His own office. He pretended He didn't like it, or that it wasn't as good as the other offices in either that building or the other ones in the general Queens area, or He pretended He didn't really need a private office for anything since standing in the building's hallways would be perfectly fine for discussing clients' issues and so forth. There was/is a saying about the people/folks who actually work in those places: All that really changes from one to another is the names on the degrees, certificates and framed pictures of family members that none of them are ever happy or drop more than some neutrally pleasant compliment when they talk about them. And never any anger, bitterness of the least amount of genuine hostility, of course. Like there's some unspoken commandment that you have to be a human-robot to keep one of those jobs. 

It's weird. 

Really, a lot of us could've seen this coming since the 2020s, if not sooner. At that point, the general/overall public was leaning, becoming, growing towards being apparently 80% Fuckhead from a once-upon-a-time average of about 20% Fuckhead. We're not suggesting our beloved Mr. Denis Johnson had all the answers. But he had most of them. By about 2030 or so, 6 or 7 out of every 10 conversations between two young guys were just about what kinds of soap they used on what days and if they let themselves change the order or not. It was like some unbelievably annoying, horrid-minded schmuck in American Corporate (TM) made a personal study of Bringing Out The Dead, Fight Club and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and made the decision to interpret everything as retarded as possible. Live and learn, we suppose. 

At that point, Jerry was just about at His personal peek, as they say. He might've stayed working at New Life forever if it weren't for ________ attacking Him with a ball-point pen they'd brought from home. 

As it happened...by 2032...Jerry was driving for Winehauser/Meyers and toying with the idea of calling Himself Mohammed--to fit in better. There are a fuckton shitgang of auto-recorded conversations in the cabs from those days proving this. Obviously, you have to be really, really careful to use selective-hearing to distinguish the bona fides from the phonies. But they're there. 

To restate what we just stated in the last story: Jerry picked up Larry at the corner of Broca & Marigold. 

Then, it all went sour. 

**** 

The only person that any sane, conscious person could even begin to consider as a credible witness to when Larry Fiskovitz accidentally assisted Jerry Ratbaum's accidental suicide near the New York/Canadian Border was a young woman with her then-7 or 8-year-old girlchild, whose names we, the collective author's of these documents have unanimously chosen to withhold for all the classic, obvious reasons of privacy & personal safety. Neither she nor her child had anything to do with this horseshit, nor should readers presume they have a serious chance at discerning her from millions-if-not-billions of others who might meet the quite intentionally vague descriptions of their respective persons. To state the glaringly obvious: We're trying to catalogue the desperately self-important bad example bullshit life of a moron so uncannily a moron as Jerry Ratbaum--not incorporate that waste of life's "methods." 

So. Larry realized what a jam he was in just as soon as he was in it. He didn't exactly panic, but he didn't exactly not-panic, either. Human amygdalas, like all animals--predatory and non-predatory, alike--have the capacity to hold perfectly still in terrifying or overwhelming situations. Think of the exchange between Omar Little & Brother Muzone on The Wire: when they've got pistols on each other and then they just talk it out. That's a bona fide disciplined amygdala. Lots and lots of dorsomedial-hippocampus work well, well, well done.  

And that's about where Larry Fiskovitz was when he was wondering what he was gonna do about this "guy" it really looked like he had a deliberate hand in killing. ...A moment to recap how the car actually crashed is in order: See, to the best of our knowledge, if & when there was an Afterworld, it was 'cause the Ancient Greeks had willed & hoped & written about it so much that it actually, indisputably was put into existence, and that's where Lord Sisyphus would go when his Earth-time was up: It kept changing from one death to another. By 1925/'26, it was hardly an idea that would even take him--and then when he died he was hardly more than the Space Baby in 2001 (which is originally Arthur C. Clarke's, by the way. 😄) and then Samantha (Fitzgerald) wanted her "boy" back so much, and she didn't die for another hundred-plus years, that her heart-energy got so big it brought Sisyphus in the way of 2036--crash/landing in 2034, fucking up the cab-ride where Larry had accidentally stepped into some modern/primitive carriage bringing his crazy-ass to being a goddamn human sacrifice. 

So. 

He needed a serious plan. It's always when you should have figured out the day before the day before you realize: Fuckin' shit, I need a serious plan. 

Then, as though the most agile & keen angel-gods of luck would have it, as luck would have it: his phone rang. 

"Larry?"

He'd ordinarily have said, 'Speaking,' but he felt as though if he spoke his heart might fail from the effort. 

"Larry?" 

He recognized the voice. It was an older man's voice, and in some deeper region of Larry Fiskovitz's brain, where the supplemental cortices loop down thru the hippocampus even when a person might be half-dead in a coma, Larry recognized it was Terry Scalisi. Terry was a third-cousin of Carol June's. "Larry!" 

"What?" 

"Where are you?" 

The woman and her girlchild just stood there glaring in disbelief, watching Larry talk on his phone. 

"I'm..." 

Larry, you were supposed to be home hours ago. Carol June had a surprise for you! For fuck's sake, where are you?" 

His eyes moved over the landscape, Niagara Falls somewhere back there, just out of sight, but where you could hear it. "I'm near Canada, I think." 

"What in which god's name are you doing near fucking Canada? Fuckin' shit, Larry..." 

"Listen, Terry: it's not my fault. I didn't even know the guy. I just wanted to take a cab ride the way people used to. This fuckin' psychopath..." 

A moment passed. "What fuckin' psychopath?" 

He looked at Jerry where Jerry lay on the ground with the bullet from Jerry's gun in Jerry's chest. 

The woman had taken her girlchild to counsel, explaining something only they could hear. 

"This guy from the city. I never met him before." He had an epiphany. "You can check it. You can narrow it down from..." He scanned his recent-memory. "Winehauser/Meyers. That's the cab company this, this... Just talk to who you have to talk to to get a Casual Warrant for anyone who drove from the Burroughs to the Border in the last twelve hours and they'll catch it." 

"I keep telling you to stop doing everything on a whim." 

"Well, then they wouldn't be whims, then, would they, Terry?" 

"Sometimes I wish my cousin had just married one of her drug-addict friends." 

"What?" 

"I said sometimes I wish my cousin had just married one of her drug-addict friends." 

"Well, then you'll need a reliable rubber-glove for the second part, won't you?" 

"It's illegal to throw your own feces in the state of Massachusetts." 

"So, move." 

"You feelin' better yet." 

He got it together. His brain went back up to a healthy size and his death-fear was replaced with gratitude, like a non-sexual orgasm, like a thrilling serenity. It was like ten-thousand years of lies had been washed away and everything antediluvian had rose to the surface of its geo/neurological coma and Larry could practically see/hear back to the moment of his birth. "A lot." 

"You have some cash on hand? You can get a hotel or something?" 

"Yeah. I'm near a pit-stop." 

"Don't take any cabs." 

"I'll think about it." 

"And Larry?" 

"What's up." 

"We're getting a lot of new work over here, lately. It's what me and Carol June we're waiting to talk to you about." 

"Sorry for that." 

"We'll talk about it when you get here. I gotta talk to some lawyers." 

"Tell them I said Hi." 

"I was already going to." 

They got off the phone and sooner than later, Larry got his life back. Sisyphus wouldn't reappear for another two (2) years. And the New War wouldn't happen for almost 4. There's crime everywhere. But to them, like us, it's all just work. 

****