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Then I met a girl in Dance Calisthenics -- Shayluba somebody -- who'd been with Jimmy for a while. She said it was great at first, but he started saying how he was really bad for her, he was incapable of commitment because of the girlfriend he'd had in high school. They were too young, it ended badly, and he'd been an emotional dumpster ever since, but maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched.
"Was her name Wakulla Price?" I asked.
"No, actually," said Shayluba. "It was you. He pointed you out."
Jimmy, what a fraud and bullshitting liar you are, I thought. But then I thought, What if it's true? What if I'd crapped up Jimmy's life just as much as he'd crapped up mine?
I tried to forget all about him. But somehow I couldn't. Beating myself up over Jimmy had become a bad habit with me, like biting your nails. Every once in a while I'd see him drifting past in the distance, which was like having just one cigarette when you're trying to quit -- it starts you off again. Not that I was ever a smoker.
I'd been at Martha Graham for almost two years when I got some really terrible news. Lucerne called me and said that my biofather, Frank, had been kidnapped by a rival Corp somewhere to the east of Europe. The Corps over there were always trying to poach on our Corps -- their undercover thugs were even more cut-throat than ours, and they had an advantage because they were better at languages and could pretend to be immigrants. We couldn't do that to them, because why would we immigrate there?
They'd bagged Frank right inside the Compound -- in the men's room of his lab building, said Lucerne -- and shipped him out in a Zizzy Froots delivery van; then they'd carted him across the Atlantic Ocean in an airship wrapped up in gauze bandages and disguised as a patient recovering from a facelift. Worse, they'd sent back a DVD of him in a drugged-looking state, confessing that HelthWyzer had been sticking a slow-acting but incurable gene-spliced disease germ inside their supplements so they could make a lot of money on the treatments. It was blackmail pure and simple, said Lucerne -- they'd trade Frank for a couple of the formulas they wanted, most notably the ones for the slow-acting diseases; and, in addition, they wouldn't make the incriminating DVD public. But otherwise, they'd said, Frank's head would have to kiss his body goodbye.
HelthW
yzer had done a cost-benefit analysis, said Lucerne, and they'd decided the disease germs and formulas were worth more to them than Frank was. As for the adverse publicity, they could squelch it at source, since the media Corps controlled what was news and what wasn't. And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing. So HelthWyzer wasn't going to pay up. They said they regretted Lucerne's loss, but it wasn't their policy to give in to blackmail demands, as that would encourage more kidnappings, which were numerous enough as it was.
Therefore Lucerne had lost her top-wife position at HelthWyzer, and the house along with it, and under the circumstances, which were unfortunate, she'd decided to move to the CryoJeenyus Compound and take up housekeeping with a very nice man she'd met through the golf club, whose name was Todd. And she certainly hoped I wouldn't go overboard with grief about Frank the way I went overboard on all my other emotions.
CryoJeenyus. What a scam that place was. You paid to get your head frozen when you died in case someone in the future invented a way to regrow a body onto your neck, though the kids at HelthWyzer used to joke that they didn't freeze anything but head shells because they'd already scooped out the neurons and transplanted them into pigs. They made a lot of gruesome jokes like that at HelthWyzer High, though you never knew whether they were actually jokes.
The upshot was -- Lucerne continued -- that money was tight. Todd wasn't a senior vice-president, he was only an accounts manager and he had three young children of his own to support who would have to take priority over me, and she could hardly ask Todd to pay for me in addition to everything else he was paying for. So I would have to stop coasting along at college, and leave Martha Graham, and take responsibility for myself.
I was out of the nest in one swift kick. Not that I was ever in much of a nest: I'd always been on the edge of the ledge with Lucerne.
This is Irony, I thought. I'd learned about Irony in Dance Theatrics. There was Lucerne, who'd told a slanderous whopper about being kidnapped, and now poor Frank, my biofather, really had been kidnapped, and probably murdered as well. It was clear that Lucerne didn't feel much of anything about that. As for me, I didn't know what to feel.
Before the spring term exams the various Corps set up interview booths in the main hallway. Not the serious Corps, the science ones -- they wouldn't bother recruiting at Martha Graham, they wanted numbers people -- but the more frivolous ones. I wasn't eligible for these interviews because I wasn't graduating that year, but I decided to go anyway and take a chance. I wouldn't get any of the jobs on offer, but maybe they'd take me on as a floor scrubber. I'd done some floor scrubbing at the Gardeners, though naturally I couldn't say that or I'd get stamped as a fanatical greenie weirdo.
My Dance Calisthenics teacher said I should talk to Scales and Tails. I was a good enough dancer, and Scales was part of SeksMart now, which was a legitimate Corp with health benefits and a dental plan, so it wasn't like being a prostitute. A lot of girls went into it, and some of them met nice men that way and did very well in life afterwards. So I thought I might try for it. I wasn't likely to get anything better without a degree. Even a Martha Graham degree was a lot better than none. And I didn't want to end up as a meat barista at some place like SecretBurgers.
That day I managed to line up five interviews. I had butterflies in my stomach, but I sucked it up and smiled, and talked my way in, even though I wasn't on the graduating list. I could have done six -- CryoJeenyus was looking for a Comfort Girl to sooth the relatives who were getting the heads of their loved ones and sometimes their dead pets frozen -- but I couldn't work there because of Lucerne. I didn't ever want to see her again, not only because of what she'd done to me but also because of how she'd done it. Like firing the maid.
I saw the hiring teams from Happicuppa, and ChickieNobs, and Zizzy Froots, and Scales and Tails, and finally AnooYoo. The first three didn't want me, but I did get an offer from Scales and Tails. Each Corp had a team doing the interviewing, and Mordis was part of the Scales team -- there were some SeksMart higher-ups there too, but he was the man on the ground so it was really his call. I did a routine from Dance Calisthenics, and Mordis said I was exactly what he was looking for, such talent, and if I came to Scales he'd make sure I wouldn't regret it. "You can be whoever you want," he said. "Act it out!" So I almost signed up.
But the AnooYoo booth was right next to Scales, and on that team there was a woman who reminded me a lot of Toby at the Gardeners, though she was darker and had different hair, her eyes were green, and her voice was huskier. She took me a little aside and asked me if I was in trouble, and I found myself explaining that for family reasons I had to leave college. I'd do any kind of a job, I said; I was willing to learn. When she asked me what family reasons I blurted out about my father being kidnapped and my mother not having any money. I could hear my voice going trembly: it wasn't all acting.
Then she asked me what my mother's name was. I told her, and she nodded: she'd take me on at the AnooYoo Spa as an apprentice, and I could live right on the premises, and they'd train me. I'd be working with women, not with men who'd be drunk and violent as they often were at Scales, even if it did have a dental plan; and I wouldn't have to wear a Biofilm Bodysuit and let strange men touch me. It would be a healing atmosphere, and I'd be helping people.
This woman really did look like Toby, and strangely enough, the name on her tag was Tobiatha. That was like a sign to me -- that I'd be really safe there, and welcomed, and also wanted. So I said yes.
Mordis gave me his card anyway, and said that if I changed my mind he'd take me on at Scales, any time, no questions asked.
53
The AnooYoo Spa was located in the middle of the Heritage Park. I'd heard a lot about it because Adam One had been so against it -- he'd said that many Creatures and also Trees had been destroyed to build a pavilion to vanity. Sometimes on Pollination Day he'd preach a whole sermon about it. But in spite of that, I felt happy there. They had roses that glowed in the dark, and big pink butterflies in the daytime and beautiful kudzu moths at night, and a swimming pool, although staff couldn't use it, and fountains, and their own organic vegetable garden. The air was better there than it was in the middle of the city so you didn't have to wear nose cones so much. It was like a comforting dream. They put me to work in the laundry room folding the sheets and towels, and I liked that because it was peaceful: everything was pink.
On my third day there, Tobiatha came across me as I was carrying a stack of clean towels to one of the rooms and said she'd like to talk to me. I thought maybe I'd done something wrong. We walked out onto the lawn, and she told me to keep my voice down. Then she said that she could tell I'd partly recognized her, and she had certainly recognized me. She'd hired me because I'd been a Gardener, and now that they'd been outlawed and the Garden destroyed we had a duty to look after one another. She could see I was in trouble, beyond not having any money. What was the matter?
I started to cry because I hadn't known about the Garden. It was a shock: I must have had it in my mind that I could go back there if things got really bad. She took me to sit down beside one of the fountains -- so the rushing water would blot out our voices in case there were any directional microphones, she said -- and I told her about HelthWyzer, and how I'd been in touch with the Gardeners through Amanda before I'd lost my cell, and I didn't know anything about the Garden after that. I didn't say anything about being in love with Jimmy and how he'd broken my heart, but I did tell about Martha Graham, and about Lucerne cutting me off in that abrupt way after my father had been kidnapped.
Then I said I had no direction in life, and I felt numb inside, like an orphan. She said all of that must be very disturbing; she'd had a difficult time too when she'd been my age, and something similar had happened to her, about her father.
This new version of Toby wasn't nearly as hardass as she'd been when she was Eve Six. She was mellower.
Or maybe I was older.
She looked around and lowered her voice. Then she told me she'd had to leave the Edencliff Rooftop Garden in a hurry and get some alterations done on herself because she'd been in danger there, so I'd have to be very careful not to tell anyone who she was. She'd taken a risk with me, and she hoped she could trust me, and I said she could. Then she warned me that Lucerne came to the Spa sometimes, and I should be aware of that and try to keep out of her sightline.
