Prophet (26 page)

CARL HAD DINNER
with Mom Barrett right after the Five Thirty News and was back out in Dad Barrett’s shop in time to catch the Seven O’clock. Now he attacked that canvas, that portrait, with a growing anger. Where was that man anyway? Who was he?

The face on the canvas was lifeless. It was perfect, it was impressive, it was strong . . . but it was lifeless, as lifeless as that gray screen
when the television was turned off.

So what did I expect?
Carl thought.
I’m not looking at my father—I’m looking at a machine. Well, my father isn’t looking at me either. There’s a machine between us, always there. Even when we sit in the same room, at the same table together, it’s there. He talks to me just like he talks to that camera. His words come from a teleprompter in his head. My father is television. Yeah, a machine who expresses love on cue cards, caring in TV scripts, compassion—or lack of it—in policies and excuses.

Carl had a ticket to a rock concert that night, and by now he was ready for it. He was ready to go out and rock himself silly. Maybe by tomorrow, when he came in for a landing, things would look different. Perhaps something would finally connect.

He cleaned up his brushes, turned out the lights, and got out of there.

On not much more than a whim, John drove to a large shopping mall on the north end of town and started walking aimlessly past the storefronts, looking at clothes, gifts, clocks, toys, cameras, anything to get his mind off . . . well, things. Dad. Annie Brewer. The job. News and newsworthiness. What was it Leslie Albright called it? A shark or a whale, or something like that, a big beast that swallowed everybody without their really knowing it and then just swam away with them inside, wherever it wanted.

Well
, he figured,
before I get swept away with all this, a change of scenery might help to get everything back in perspective. You brood on stuff like this too long, everything starts looking bad.

He passed a computer store. Yeah, he was into computers. Maybe he could find an interesting innovation, some new software, a new toy. He went inside, past the displays of desktop and laptop models with their VGA screens flashing colorful demos, all seeming to call to him, “Buy me! Buy me!” He loved this stuff. Say, here were some new notebook-size computers.

“Hello,” said a salesman, “can I help you?”

“Well, sure. I’d like to check out these notebook computers here.”

Something about this salesman looked so familiar. He stood there rather still, wearing a dress shirt and tie, with computer monitors flickering and people going about their business in the background, and it just looked like he was—

“Hi, this is Tim Miller in the Tyde Brothers Computer Showroom. Coming up this week in Tyde Brothers’ Incoming Tyde Sale, a startling development in notebook computing as the Martin-Androve 486 weighs in at only 4.4 pounds. Also this week, the controversial Bookkeeper II system is trying for a comeback, but will it make it? We’ll see what the customers have to say.” A telephone warbled. “More after this.” Reporting live from the newsroom . . .

The salesman picked up the phone and engaged in a brisk, copy-perfect conversation. “Well, in this age of rapidly changing computer technology it’s no surprise to find that some people are having trouble keeping up with it. Our software specialist Hank Baxter has been looking into a new program that promises to help those of us who can’t tell a bit from a byte.” He handed the phone to another man. “Hank?”

Hank took the phone and spoke in a resonant voice. “Tim, its makers claim it’s the software of the decade, and though critics said it wouldn’t succeed, Dumbyte, the DOS Tutorial for Idiots, has virtually sold itself . . .”

John expected a cassette to roll at this cue, but thankfully nothing happened. He slipped quickly and quietly out of the store.
What have we done to these people?
he wondered.

CARL HAD GROWN
up in LA. He was used to crowds. But for some reason, as he was swept along by the river of people flowing into the large arena, he was bothered, almost frightened.
I couldn’t turn around if I wanted to
, he thought.
I couldn’t get out of here.

JOHN WAS HAVING
trouble staying in one place for very long. He tried to look at some jackets in a leather store, but couldn’t stay long enough to try them on. He thought he might check out some pens in a stationery store, but there were too many; he’d never be able to see them all. He had to keep moving.

He came to a camera store. Sure . . . He enjoyed photography and had a pretty good camera himself. He stepped inside, not knowing what he’d find. Even as he went in, he had a feeling he’d better find it fast.

Here was a nice, lightweight video camera standing on a tripod. The prices on these things were coming down slowly but surely. Pretty soon every home would have one of these.

“Hi,” said the salesman. “Pretty nice camera, huh?”

“Sure,” said John. “What can you tell me about it?”

The salesman suddenly pointed in John’s face. “Hey! John Barrett? NewsSix?”

John smiled kindly. “Yeah, that’s right.”

The salesman turned to the older guy behind the counter. “Hey, look who’s here!”

The older guy looked and asked, “Who?”

The salesman just waved him off. “Never mind. Hey, John, a lot of your news footage comes from little jewels like this one, huh? Home video. It’s a whole new wave, right?”

The salesman started showing John the features on the camera: the zoom lens, the automatic white balance, the high-speed shutter, the backlight feature, the calendar and clock, the battery pack, the AC adapter socket, the remote cable attachment, the . . . He was taking too long . . . One-button review, the leather carrying case, the ninety-day warranty, the . . .

John thought he saw a woman behind the camera counting down with her fingers. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

John interrupted the salesman. “Well, in the few seconds we have left . . .”

“Hey,” said the salesman, “I’ve got ’til 9, no problem.”

John caught himself. “Oh . . . sorry.”

CARL HAD A
ticket with a number on it, so he knew he was entitled to that one seat with the same number, but he also knew he would probably never sit in it.

He was right. When the lights in the arena went down, everybody in the place stood up and stayed that way, bellowing and shrieking as one huge hysterical organism, blasting out a sound shock so loud it made your cheeks buzz.

Carl was on his feet too, hollering and breaking loose, waving his arms, cheering, just venting everything. He was among friends, thousands
of them.

The band came onstage in the dark, groping through thick stage fog. The anticipation of the crowd was like an electric charge.

Lights.
A flurry of brilliant shafts waved and groped through the fog—red, blue, pink, purple, gold. Five musicians, like ragged wraiths from the sixties, seemed suspended in boiling clouds.

Then came the
sound.
The
sound.
The crowd gave itself to the sound. It pounded through their chests, grabbed them by their guts, clutched their hearts, cut into their minds. It led, they followed; it soared, they flew; it crashed, they cried; it thundered, they roared; it leaped, they danced.

It took them it took them it grabbed them and took them it ripped them and it tore and it pounded and took them the drums and the lights and the cry of the strings and the smoke and the sweat and the volley of screams took them on. And on. And on. And on.

And Carl was dancing—but suddenly found himself asking a question he never had asked before, a question he never had even thought of before.
Where are we going? Where are you taking us?

He stopped dancing. He looked all around—at the sea of arms, faces, and rumbling, quaking bodies. He clapped his hands to the beat, but soon that stopped too. He couldn’t shake the question from his mind.

Where are we going? Where are you taking us?

JOHN TRIED NOT
to hurry through the mall. There was no need to hurry. Good grief, he’d been hurrying all day long; all he really wanted to do was slow down, take it easy. Finally he stopped and got an orange drink, then sat on a bench just to hold still, sip the drink, and watch the people.

Shopping malls are great for people-watching. Here you can see all kinds: ladies shopping in twos and threes, taking their time; a few husbands tagging along and wishing they weren’t; moms with kids in strollers; kids with treats; kids fighting over treats; and always—always—a kid screaming bloody murder because he sees something his parents won’t let him have.

Then there were the older kids, the teenagers, both junior and
senior high schoolers, walking fast and talking fast, sipping, chewing, munching, teasing, flitting from one store to another like hummingbirds after pollen.

Hm. And they all looked the same, as if they all lived in the same big family, sharing and handing down all the clothes, as if they all lived . . . well, in this mall, and every store in the place was their closet. The same styles kept going by him—styles in pants, dresses, jewelry, hair. And then John noticed something else. Had he started counting the rock, television, and movie stars, not to mention cartoon characters, radio station call letters, and movie titles, that passed by on a T-shirt or on a jacket or on shoes or purses or folders or shoelaces or in the form of a toy or painted on a toy just to sell the toy, he could have counted steadily until the place closed. It was an odd feeling, like having hundreds of billboards driving past him instead of the other way around. Somebody was making a lot of money from all this stuff.

Or fluff. Yeah, fluff. At the station they had their own version of it, and that’s what they called it. This was, of course, the light feature material, the human interest stuff, the “dispensable news,” the show biz. It wasn’t necessary, nobody’s life would be measurably changed by it, it rarely had anything significant to do with anything else, it wasn’t harmful as far as anyone knew—it was just . . . fluff.

In a sense he was watching fluff walk by. It all took time to watch on television, it all took money to consume, it all demanded a significant niche in the culture, but none of it really mattered. As a matter of fact, very little of it was even real.