I'd certainly appreciate any constructive comments anyone has to make. I realize that there is not anything really to the story, but my aim is to draw readers in and establish characters and settings.
R
Sound first.
Birds, maybe grackles. A sparrow perhaps. Not a
finch.
A raven chuckling? Not easy to hear, but there
it was.
A dog barking, but not incessantly; more a
happy nipping like a best buddy welcoming his boy home from school.
The dinging bell of Mercer's Drug Store.
Chatting girls. Boys and such and giggles and an occasional squeal:
teenagers.
A car. Fast car. Loud, really. The radio is
playing an Elvis tune. Treat Me Right? No. Teddy Bear.
Ahh, smell now. Sensual, inviting.
Summer. Lilac bush nearby. Bread baking.
Freshly mowed grass.
Billy Watson kept his eyes shut a little
longer, savoring the sounds and smells. Once those senses were
satiated, he opened his eyes. The sights were still blurry but soon
came into focus showing him at the corner of Main and First in front
of the Golden Bank and Trust. He checked himself carefully and found
his body encased in a gray suit with a red tie. Arms and legs seemed
to be working fine. He smiled; another successful jump into Golden,
where he served as the town doctor. He checked his watch where it was
counting down from 5:57:45, his standard six-hour shift had begun.
The Bank & Trust was the second largest
building in Golden, and where his office was located. None of the
people walking up and down the wide sidewalks noticed him or
acknowledged he had appeared out of thin air. In the distance, Billy
could see storm clouds forming and a booming of thunder rolled over
the town. It occasionally rained in Golden, but the real show was in
the lighting and thunder, which would never cause any harm. Instead
of turning and walking into the Bank & Trust, where he had an
office on the second floor, Billy hurriedly took off to the park.
Billy whistled as he crossed the street in
front of the hardware store and hopped the curb. From the distance,
he could hear the rumbling of what he knew was a 1932 Ford Coupe
painted candy apple red with flames on the side getting ready to make
a run down main street. The car belonged to Jerry Walker and Dan
Stevens was probably helping with the tune up. Who else could it be?
Ever since Jerry had gotten here, he spent his time working on and
driving street rods. Jerry had found a kindred soul in Dan. In the
material world he had been Gerald Boucher, a bald accountant who
every day went to work in a gray office and worked with gray people.
In Golden, Jerry would always be 17 and have an affection for fast
cars and teenage girls with pony tails and poodle skirts. Dan
Driscoll was the perfect sidekick for Jerry. In life, there are
always leaders and followers; Dan was a follower. He spent a lifetime
as a mechanic in a Dodge dealership, and although he obviously knew
more about how a car worked than Jerry ever would, Dan was always
there to hand Jerry a wrench or lend a hand when a transmission
needed to be changed. Neither Jerry nor Dan questioned their
relationship, it was what it was and the pair were inseparable. The
only issue Billy ever had with them was trying to keep them from
racing up and down the streets in their hot rods, but there really
wasn't anything he could do to stop the friends.
Walking down the sidewalk to the park, Billy
realized he was whistling the tune of Red River Valley – an old
cowboy song and one of his grandmother’s favorites. The song was
about loss and leaving. Somewhat fitting for Golden. Billy’s mother
used to sing it to him when he was very young. The song had been
taught to her by Billy’s grandmother. Before disease had taken her
body and left her mind intact.
Billy didn’t know his grandmother as she once
was. She was a ghostly figure through most of his life as his parents
struggled with the stress of maintaining a household under the shadow
of her illness. He would look through photo albums containing little
moments of her time captured, printed and organized chronologically.
Billy had wondered how someone whose charm sprang forth from the two
dimensional confines of a photograph could become a skeletal human
form cosigned to a life hooked to numerous life-maintaining machines
in a nursing home. An existence, yes, but not living. Golden was
designed for living.
Now Billy was going to meet the grandmother he
had only knew through pictures and the recollections of his own
mother. He was nervous. Would she like him? Would she even know who
he was?
The walk to the park was short – most
everything in Golden was only a brief stroll. A few residents chose
to drive, but mostly just the ones who enjoyed driving. Billy headed
north on Main Street, past the Chamber of Commerce, the Town Hall and
Mercer's Drug Store, which had a soda fountain and a couple of booths
where you could grab a bite to eat while waiting for your pills.
There were a couple of people in the drug store, and Billy waved as
he passed by. He knew each resident by name. He knew where they came
from, their hobbies, their victories and defeats. And with most, he
knew about what haunted their dreams. He was, after all, their
doctor; although he knew little about their physical ailments. He was
more interested in their brains. In Golden, people didn't get sick,
but sometimes their minds did.
He took a left on Third Street, after stopping
for a minute to look in the window of the five-and-dime. Third, like
all of the ancillary streets in Golden, was shaded by a canopy of
elms lining both sides of the street. A small boy in a pedal car
drove straight toward him and Billy stepped to the side without
acknowledging him. The homes he passed all had well-groomed yards,
huge front porches and fresh paint. He made a mental note, though, to
tell Ollie that maybe they looked too perfect. Maybe he would ask
some of the residents what they thought. Golden, at times, seemed a
little too perfect and maybe that's what kept it from being ideal.
He finally came to a low white picket fence
surrounding Golden’s main park. The park took up a whole block and
was dotted with trees, a gazebo and a playground. More residents sat
on park benches and waved at Billy as he passed by. Lillian Weaver
stopped him to complain about her hands. She looked to be about 20
years old, with dark hair and startling blue eyes. Her hands,
however, looked to belong to an 80-year-old woman. Billy held them
for a moment, inspecting them, then told Lillian to drop by his
office in about two hours and he would see what he could do. She
kissed him lightly on the cheek, which caused him to blush, although
no one in Golden would have been able to see him blush. He begged off
Lillian and made his way to the playground.
A small girl with rust-colored hair was busy
building a sand castle. The girl’s pink pail and matching shovel
were working furiously at scooping sand and packing it as she sang
the same song Billy had been whistling a moment before.
“Ruth,” he called out. She looked up,
unable at first to determine where the voice had come from, almost
deciding it hadn’t existed at all. He called out again and walked
toward her. She looked up at him when he was four paces away and
smiled. Billy had a friendly face, that was almost a requirement to
be a doctor in Golden, although the face he wore there wasn't really
his own. He appeared much older than his own 34 years.
“Hello,” she said. “You look familiar, do
I know you? I’m sorry, but I don’t remember your name.”
“My name is Billy Watson. I work here. I'm a
doctor. I help people like you – to make sure you’re okay and
answer any questions.” He knelt beside her so that he could look
her in the eye, to see if there was that spark to which he'd become
familiar; the one that told him a patient was able to understand
Golden. Her green eyes studied him carefully. Her face was young and
smooth, but her eyes looked upon him with the affection that a
grandmother reserves for her grandchildren. His patients, no matter
how young they looked, were all old souls. They had all seen so much
in their long lives.
“Where am I? I feel like I’ve been asleep
for such a long time. Is this … heaven?”
She got up and brushed the sand off her
coveralls. Billy stood almost two feet taller than her. Her
sun-bleached brown hair was tied back in a braided pony tail. Her
freckles looked as if they had been splattered on by the light flick
of a paint brush – she was a fair-skinned girl who had spent too
many summer days out in the sun. Her coveralls came from a different
era, more work clothes than a fashion trend.
“Where am I?” she repeated.
Billy pondered the question. He was never sure
any answer he gave was satisfactory to Golden’s new residents. He
was never quite sure how to tell his patients that their brains and
bodies were hooked into two supercomputers, and that millions of
cell-sized electronic microbes coursed through their blood stream and
attached themselves to nerve endings, keeping their bodies alive
while Golden was forged in their minds. Most new residents reacted
with indifference when they learned their corporeal bodies were
actually floating around in a vat of an electrically charged
glutamate goo in an induced coma. Most of Golden’s residents
suffered from diseases like ALS, cystic fybrosis or renal failure –
disorders that robbed them of their bodily functions and left their
minds to suffer. Most were old and came here for a retirement they
never thought could exist. One computer watched over their bodies and
the other transformed their fantasies into something tangible.
“It’s not heaven, here. It’s kind of like
a dream that you can control. This town is called Golden, and it was
created for people like you,” Billy said.
“Like me?”
“People whose bodies don’t respond to their
thoughts anymore. This place was designed as a way to give folks like
you a nice retirement.”
She nodded. Most knew from the beginning that
Golden wasn’t genuine. Most remembered their long fall into their
own thoughts, where the real world repeatedly folded in on itself
until it made no sense at all.
“This is new technology?” There was a trace
of excitement in her voice making Billy smile. She seemed just as he
had imagined, inquisitive and not at all archaic. He nodded his head
and she immediately asked how it worked. Billy explained the basics
as they walked down back down Third Street, to Main and south to Elm.
Billy explained, Golden was a small town laid
out in a simple grid of 15 tree-lined streets. Main Street stretched
north and south a half mile in each direction from First Street.
Going north, the east-west streets were numbered up to five. South of
First, the streets were named for trees – Elm, Oak, Ash, Sycamore
and Poplar. The east-west streets were two blocks long. Running
parallel to Main were four streets, McKinley and Foster Roads to the
east and Baker and Gerris to the west. There was no need for many of
the buildings, but there was an abundance of parks, tall shade trees
and a few places to throw a line into the water. It was the kind of
mid-century American town found only in Hollywood backlots to signify
a time that had long since passed. It was the ideal community in the
minds of its residents, and its creators.
Main Street was lined with businesses with big
windows and brick facades. There was the drug store, of course, and a
hardware store. There was also a fix-it shop, butcher shop and an
auto shop. There was a fire station, which was really extraneous
because there were no fires in Golden. And there were also dentists,
lawyers and doctors. There was the town hall, which was rarely used,
and the largest building was the school at the very north of Main
Street.
It was a small town and Billy loved to walk
along its pastoral streets to clear his mind. Golden was populated by
anywhere from 15 to 42 patients and close to 300 Seegees, computer
generated “people” who looked liked anyone and no one. Golden
lived up to its name. The temperature was usually comfortable, the
sun shined constantly. Billy waved at two of his patients, Carmen
Lugo and Ken Franklin, who were holding hands and sharing an ice
cream as they walked. He met with all of the patients at least once a
week to make sure everything was going okay, some people broke down
mentally – they couldn’t handle Golden. Some had other physical
problems that manifested itself in Golden, but no one had ever been
pulled out of the town once they were placed in. All residents knew
that their time in Golden was temporary and that Billy was their Grim
Reaper – the man who would eventually come to take them their
deaths.
All new residents were taken to Fred’s house
for an unofficial orientation. It was easier for a resident of Golden
to explain the town and its rules; and no one had been a resident of
Golden longer than Fred. Billy was just a visitor to the town and
could not use the computer interface in the same way residents could.
While residents had millions of cell-sized nanoprobes attached to
their nerve endings, Billy only had a thousand or so designed to have
an eight-hour lifespan. It made it easier for Billy to transition
between the two worlds, but it still took a toll on his body.
Before they could make the half-mile walk to
Fred's house at the corner of Oak and McKinley, Ruth had grasped how
the computers could turn her thought of a Granny Smith into a
seemingly real apple. She took a bite and grinned when she tasted a
sweet, delicious fruit.
“I haven’t used my real teeth to bite into
an apple in years,” she said, taking a second crunchy mouthful.
“This is delicious! It's just how I remember!”
“Of course it is, you made it, so it is what
you expected,” Billy told her. “The computers work together to
stimulate the neurons in your brain to fool you into thinking you
just took a bite of apple. You can even put a worm in it if you
want.”
“Why would I want something like that?”
“You would be surprised what people want when
they come to Golden. It isn’t always pleasant. Almost everyone who
lives here are suspicious of comfort and will put a thorn under the
saddle just to make sure they are still alive. Plus, there are some
things about Golden – some rules – that keep things from getting
out of control. As you probably noticed, the rules of gravity are the
same here as in the real world. We can't have everyone flying around
and picking up buses, you know.”
Billy didn't say anything about the problems
that arose in Golden from time to time; the invincibility most
patients come to feel or even the sadness some residents experience
because they know none of if is real. Better to keep those things to
himself, he thought, no sense in frightening Ruth. He did explain
that as with everything mechanical, there had been bugs to work out.
Some people, especially those with a psychosis, didn’t adapt well
to Golden. People suffering from a brain injury or suffered from
diseases of the brain like Alzheimer's usually were missing important
parts than to be anything other than savants in Golden. But the
bigwigs with the Golden Foundation were hoping research Billy was
doing as part of his job would one day make them viable patients.
“Who pays for all this?” Ruth asked,
finishing her apple. “How did I get chosen? I can't afford anything
like this.”
“Golden is funded through several sources,
but mostly from private investors who hope some day that they will be
able to make a profit on the service. The government, though, holds a
pretty tight rein on what we do here. Through a charter granted to
the Golden Foundation by the USDA, Health and Human Services and a
half-dozen other agencies we are required to share everything we
learn here and look out for the safety of our residents. And,”
Billy said, not wanting to go too deep into the interference the
government imposed on the Golden Foundation, “in order to operate,
we are required to invite at least half of the population of Golden
from a pool of candidates who cannot pay. For this, Uncle Sam pays us
a grant. About half of our current residents are paying their own
way, but it's a small amount compared to the actual cost.”
“Really?” she said. “How many residents
are there now?”
“With you, we now have thirty-two, but we
should be getting more in the next couple of weeks.”
“Paying customers?”
“I'm not at liberty to say,” Billy said. It
was difficult to keep information from a blood relative, but rules
were rules. “We respect our residents' privacy, and as a matter of
course, that was one of the issues that held up our charter. The
government was demanding too much access to information on the
activities of our residents.”
Ruth thought for a moment then reached into her
pocket a pulled out some bubble gum. She opened the wax packaging and
stuck the gum in her mouth, relishing each chew while silently
checking out the comic adventures of Bazooka Joe.
“So there's no cameras in here watching my
every move, then?”
“Well,” Billy explained, “seeing as we
are essentially talking to each other's minds, there wouldn't
technically be any cameras. There is no record of your activities in
Golden and the only thing we monitor is your vital signs. It's
difficult to track 'movement' within Golden and the Foundation's
board agrees that is an extraneous expense; we are unable to 'see'
what parts of the town you explore. Your privacy is important to us,
so you don't need to worry about that. For you, Golden offers
whatever you want.”
“So I can wish anything into existence. If I
want a big car or big boobs, I can have them?”
Billy nodded. “You can have anything you want
within reason. There are some things that our computers are not
capable of reproducing, but, for the most part, you can fulfill any …
desire or dream that was deferred in your youth. We give folks
another chance at what they’ve always wanted.”
As they mounted the stairs up to Fred’s
porch, Ruth was busy creating a purple Popsicle and putting it into
her mouth. Fred was in his usual place on the porch in front of an
IBM Selectric typewriter. Billy noticed a half-filled ashtray with
discarded marijuana roaches and a bottle of Pepto-Bismal sitting on a
TV tray next to the typewriter. Fred hunted and pecked at the
keyboard with amazing speed, a technique perfected over many years
working a typewriter. Billy cleared his throat as he and Ruth stepped
on the porch. Fred quickly removed his hunting finger and held it up,
never taking his eyes from the manuscript as the pecking finger kept
working. As quick as it was up, it was back at the keyboard. He
jabbed the keys furiously, grinning like a madman.
Fred stopped and laughed. He was a tall man
with a with unkempt blond and gray hair. The most prominent feature
on his face was an unkempt gray beard and mustache. Fred’s blue
eyes twinkled with mischief and he always wore an unbuttoned cabana
shirt over a plain white T-shirt, which somehow made his little pot
belly stand out. As usual, he was wearing cargo shorts and a pair of
reading glasses was perched on the end of his nose. While most
residents of Golden went out of their way to look young and fresh,
Fred went out of his way to to look the opposite, which could never
really hide the fact that at one point in his life he had teen idol
good looks. That's why he was famous.
“Farts are even funny when you write about
them,” he said giggling and taking a swig off the Pepto. Billy
couldn’t help but laugh, too. Ruth looked at both men, waiting
until she was introduced. Fred remembered he had guests and turned to
them, fishing a breathe mint out of his pocket and sticking it in his
mouth. The roaches and the ashtray disappeared, Billy knew that Fred
liked to keep his smoking hidden – especially from people he didn't
know. It was the worse kept secret in Golden.
“Billy!”
“Freddie!” Billy shouted back in the pair’s
standard greeting to each other.
“I was just writing about farts, Billy.”
Fred took another gulp of the stomach medicine. “Me and the old man
had a routine – for the late nightclub shows – he would sneak
around the stage while I was making fart noises. We had one bit where
he was a guest at a high society party. It always killed, even at
some of the classier places we played.”
From behind Billy, Ruth could no longer wait to
be recognized.
“You …You’re Freddie McKenzie!” Fred
didn’t miss a beat. A hat appeared in his hand above his head as if
he had just removed it from his head and he scrunched his face up and
gave a weird chortle. In nearly two blinks of an eye, Fred regressed
in age, his hair grew in and lightened, the facial hair disappeared
and he seemed to grow a little taller. He looked like a college
student, his face hairless and fresh.
“I yam?” he said, stretching the words into
a comic grin.
Now it was turn for Ruth and Fred to laugh
together. Billy was not surprised at his grandmother’s reaction to
Fred, all the new residents knew him. To a lot of them, he was
Freddie McKenzie of the famous McKenzie Family, stars of stage,
screen and especially television, where America watched Fred grow up
every Thursday night for 11 years on “Andy and Agnes,” his
parents' sitcom. Freddie had the most stellar career of the McKenzie
Family, moonlighting as a teen heartthrob when he wasn't on the set.
Fred chose his disheveled appearance in Golden because he had said it
was what he was most comfortable with and “required the least
amount of thought,” he had once told Billy. But every time someone
recognized him from his teen idol days, he would easily shift to that
image. Billy suspected that Fred spent some of his nights charming
some of the female residents as famous Freddie McKenzie, although the
older man would never admit that. Of all his patients, Fred was the
toughest nut to crack. Most people would talk about everything with
Billy. Fred would talk for hours and say almost nothing, so Billy was
always careful to observe Fred, looking for small openings in the
window to his psyche. And occasionally, Fred would let him see.
Fred may have been a star when he was younger,
but he also had talents that reached far beyond fart jokes and hit
records. Golden would not have been possible without Fred's genius,
nor Freddie's seed money. Billy may not have been confounded by
Fred's greeting – he'd seen it several times – but he didn’t
expect the little girl standing next to him to turn into a teenager
right before his eyes. He knew it was the computers making an
adjustment to the Ruth’s concept of self image, just as Fred had
done and something Billy had witnessed many times, although rarely
with so little effort. Both the reason she aged and the technology to
do so both had been Fred's dream and life's work.
“I never missed an episode of 'Andy and
Agnes' and I bought all your records,” Ruth said, dancing from side
to side with excitement. “I stood in line for three hours once to
get your autograph at the Bijou, but you left before I could get to
the front of the line. And now you are right here. Are you real, or
are you one of those computer generated things Billy was talking
about?”
Billy hoped she wouldn’t have too intense of
an adrenaline rush, which could cause the computers to get a little
confused. When that happened, they sometimes had to take a patient
out of Golden and reboot the the resident's avatar. On rare
occasions, it could take the whole system down, but that had only
occurred once, which is why there is no skydiving allowed in Golden.
It was one of the few glitches with the system that Ollie and his
team were trying to fix.
“Do you think it would be all right if I got
your autograph?” she asked. An autograph book and pen appeared in
her hand. Fred grabbed it and began thumbing through it, looking for
a blank page while reading the names out loud. Billy had never heard
of most of them.
“Ralph Bellamy, good guy. Gloria Grahame,
crazy gal. My pop fired her once, you know? She kept showing up on
set drunk.” Fred paused on one page. “Johnny Mancini? Who’s
that?” Ruth blushed.
“He was my first autograph. Johnny was Tommy
in Brigadoon. I had such a big crush on him.”
“Brigadoon, huh? I played Jeff in a revival,”
Fred said. “I loved that show. Were you in the show?”
“I played Meg,” Ruth said. “I so wanted
to play Fiona, so … Well, Fiona got to kiss Tommy, you know? And
that stupid Anita Folsom was Fiona. I was so jealous, they ended up
nearly getting married, all because of Brigadoon...”
“Whatever happened to him? To Johnny?” Fred
asked. Ruth aged another 10 years in an instant. Her face was not so
carefree anymore, and in her eyes, Billy could tell she still loved
Johnny Mancini.
“He got killed during the war. Vietnam. His
name's on that wall in Washington, but I never got to see it.”
“There's a lot of names on that wall,” Fred
said, walking to her and hugging her. After a minute of silent
remembrances, Ruth pulled away, older but still attractive. Fred,
too, had aged, not quite to his normal look, but close.
“I’m sorry Mr. McKenzie, I didn’t mean to
get emotional on you. You just seem like you understand. There aren’t
so many of us left, you know?”
“That’s quite all right,” Fred said with
a slight bow. Taking her by the elbow, he led her to a small sofa
that appeared on the porch. “Why don’t you lay down and take a
nap?”
Ruth climbed onto the sofa, closed her eyes and
went immediately to sleep. Billy sighed, as she turned back into a
little girl once more.
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