The Artificial Mirage (2 page)

The spell was broken when the police came smashing through the windows, causing the laser projections of charts and reports to scatter and diffuse. There was a blur of synthetic and natural colors as he saw a broker he didn’t recognize get cracked on the head with a baton. Time slowed down, and it seemed like an AR replay of a game. A flurry of fragments of clear plastic and glass dispersed through the air. He turned and looked as Lauren was pushed to the white ceramic floor at the edge a rendition of the company logo. Her delicate face, which had withstood years of steroid-enhanced whitening treatments, was already showing the effects of being bruised. He felt a stray piece of glass hit the side of his head. He looked down at the blood from his head dripping on the vintage emerald Givenchy tie that Lauren had bought him in Macau. He looked up and made his way to the balcony overlooking a sea of brokers’ white shirts and blouses soaked in blood. His positions, his accounts, and all of the charts and graphs lost all significance. Even his thoughts of Lauren were transmuted into something that was neither lust nor adoration. Seeing an opportunity to respond, he descended onto the main
floor and used the full force of his body weight to punch a policeman in the back of the head.

What happened after that, he was informed a few days later, was a series of carbon fiber blows to his head that required the insertion of a few plastic plates that later began to fuse with the rest of his skull. The prison authorities had decided it was more cost-effective to give him synthetic replacements than to grow bone from his own DNA. But he was beyond vanity and the burden of keeping track of elapsed time. Somewhere beneath the veil of Saigon’s smog, Lauren was alive. And then he remembered his dong-dollar position hadn’t been closed.

2

C
harlie sensed he was starting to look normal again as he traced his fingers over his disappearing facial and cerebral scars. He turned and looked over his shoulder at his warped image in the full-length metal mirror embedded in the unpainted gray concrete wall opposite his bed. His dong-dollar position had lost momentum and reversed course from the trading aberration that would have doubled his account. Everything that was in his name or could be attributed to him was in the process of being seized. A group of three policemen in uniforms he had never seen before had shown him the chart from a phone projector on his cell wall. The chart indicated his impeccable timing and the subsequent erasure of the gain and the decline to a loss beyond the value of his account. He smiled defiantly as they filed out of his cell to the warning chime of the door as it swished shut and locked.

Chi Capital Markets had been a charade. When the team of policemen had confronted him in what had seemed like a hospital bed in a private hospital, he thought they were joking. Again and again they asked him how he could not know what was going on in his company. His title was senior vice president, so they found it hard to believe that he had no knowledge of the operating capital that was actually present. It wasn’t until he was removed from the hospital and moved to a prison cell that he became convinced they weren’t joking.

The guards were all white women in black uniforms who spoke Vietnamese among themselves. He guessed they were a subcontracted company, but they ignored him when he asked them anything nonessential. They began an incessant daily routine of hosing him down with a fire hose for hours and keeping him awake with strobe lights and Vietnamese pop music. After a few days, he gave up caring who they were.

The irony that poverty was the end result of his life spent in the pursuit of money never left his mind. Nothing could be more embarrassing. The trade had been perfect, and his timing impeccable. But Chi had been
playing with a shadow account. Why had he traded his own account at Chi and not a large brokerage back in the United States? His anger was tinged by the knowledge that he had been a part of Chi. He thought about every transaction and sale he had made with Chi and his own confident laughter, which he could still hear.

The oldest of the guards towered at least a foot above him. Her pasty white head was draped in a mop of silken strands of gray and blonde hair that ended abruptly at her neck. A pink AR monocle was fitted into her left eye. She was the one responsible for moving him to a cell with bars and blasting him with cold, pressurized water while the AC was on its highest setting. There was never any malice in her face or demeanor; she could just as easily have been watering plants. This latest session felt like the third time in less than twelve hours. He was becoming feverish, and the cold water dissipated his self-inquiry temporarily, but his regrets and self-disgust came back within a few minutes of returning to the tropical warmth of his cell.

Money had no purpose without Lauren. But with money forgiveness and forgetfulness could be had. Laws could be made up along the way with money. But not now. Now he was a victim decrying his circumstances, the embodiment of everything he hated. He wanted to return to his old self, but it was like watching someone else’s life. He was stuck in a pattern of thinking he felt helpless to interrupt.

The blonde left him in the dark. He was shivering in a ball on the wet concrete floor when the dim yellow lights brightened. A different guard with dark red hair and brown freckles squatted in front of him between the bars of the cell.

“You know what, Charlie?” She spoke in clear American English, but it was clear she wasn’t American. She smiled at him like she was telling him the punch line to a joke he would never get.

“What?” Charlie held himself in the fetal position on the floor and looked up at her polished black shoes and dry uniform.

“I believe you. I believe you were a useful idiot.”

And that was the end of his conversations with them. The blonde came in with a towel and returned him to his cell. After that, the guards seemed to regard him with sympathy as they passed his cell. Occasionally, they even inquired about his thoughts on his food, which was always lukewarm rice and some cabbage-flavored nutritional paste squirted on one side like toothpaste.

Since his incarceration, he had been completely cut off from the outside world. His custom AR glasses had been seized, and he had not been permitted to use any other communication devices. He wondered what day it was as he stared at the line where the wall met the floor. Lauren, the police had informed him in an unusual departure from their policy of keeping him in the dark about everything, had been released after only a few days of interrogation because she was only an assistant. Days passed, but it might have been weeks. He wasn’t going to bother wondering what was going on with Lauren or what was going to happen to him. He was going to breathe. Now. And everything around him would fade. He crouched on the unfinished concrete floor with his eyes closed. He felt granules of sand on his fingertips. He imagined an AR display of Lauren in a clear plastic version of her business suit walking through a pristine city of crystal and gold along a river of fire. It was there, but it wasn’t. He squinted in a vain attempt to hold onto it, but it was gone. He wanted to know what time it was when two women in completely different gray uniforms walked into his cell.

“We are going to let you go, Mr. Charlie,” one of them blurted out.

“Why?” he said.

“We believe you are telling us the truth about the level of your involvement with Chi Capital Markets. You will have to appear in court. And then you will be deported.”

“Deported? Why do I have to leave Vietnam?”

The officer who hadn’t spoken and seemed to hold seniority pulled out a battered gray device from her left front jacket pocket and set it on the matte amber plastic coffee table bolted to the floor. It quickly flickered on and projected the camera’s perspective on the wall. She adjusted it until Charlie was centered in the frame.

“Read this,” the other officer said as she projected a statement for Charlie to read to the left. His name and prison ID number appeared at the bottom of his image.

“‘I understand that my employment visa will continue to be valid, but I am not permitted to leave Vietnam. I am permitted to search for any other employment during this time.’”

“What will you do now? Your assistant has left Vietnam. Will you try to contact her?” She seemed to be following a scripted response.

“Where did she go?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do you mean? If you know she’s left, then there’s a record of her ticket.”

“Unfortunately, we do not have access to that information. We are not police. We are a private company specializing in financial problems. I am sorry, Mr. Charlie. Good luck.”

“Who the fuck are you guys?”

The officer who seemed to be in charge put out her hand and smiled. As Charlie prepared to shake her hand, she responded by laughing and slapping him on the back.

“We are a legitimate organization. I assure you that everything you have told us will be archived and disseminated by the proper local bureaucrats…I mean…if that is your concern?”

“No, that isn’t my concern. I don’t care who you are. I just want to leave. I’ve got thirty days. When do they begin?”

“Now.”

“Good.”

The patience he had been practicing was replaced with a need for experience, any experience that didn’t involve fire hoses. An officer he had never seen before entered the room with a plastic shopping bag containing his clothes, wallet, AR glasses, passport, and phone.

“You can change in the men’s room across the hall.”

“The men’s room, eh? How come you’re not Vietnamese?” Charlie said as he looked up at her braided blonde hair tied up in a bun with black netting, still somewhat stunned not to be the tallest one in the room.

The woman looked down at the two other officers with an unbelieving grin. “Because I’m Dutch.”

“Oh yeah? Good for you. I’ll go change.”

The three officers were waiting for him in the hallway, which was more brightly lit than anywhere he had been in the prison. There was a long hallway with white walls and brass fixtures and a gray carpet the same shade of gray as the walls of his cell. It seemed like it might have been a law office at one time. Maybe it still was.

The four of them walked to the elevator up to the lobby level and through the large marble-floored lobby with a grand tile mosaic of Ho Chi Minh on the left wall and seven similar likenesses projected to look like
Warhol lithographs on the opposing wall. He was taken to a small room where his clothes and personal belongings were handed to him unceremoniously in a black plastic bag. He dressed quickly and turned over his uniform to the front office guard and signed in the space indicated on the clunky gray pad. The officer nodded and indicated with her right arm like a doorwoman at a five-star hotel that Charlie was free to leave.

The heavily tinted sliding glass doors opened gently, and he was hit with the afternoon light. It was an overcast day, like it was just about to rain, but it still felt painfully bright to him after being underground for three months. He walked down the stone steps, and no one seemed to notice.

The air felt crisp. He crossed the street to walk through the park. When he got to the opposite curb, he put on his AR glasses and tapped the left frame three times to turn them on. The world came alive. Everything was vividly accessible and understandable. The girls who were dancing in the park had their likes and dislikes and fuzzy bears and photos of friends swirling around them. Most of it was in Vietnamese, but it didn’t matter because it was pulsing with life. Even the trees, which had just a moment ago been brownish trunks with limp greenish leaves tinged with soot, were spewing out their scientific names and photos comparing them with other trees; distended fragments of thought were hanging suspended around them as virtual graffiti awaiting virtual dissolution from the park manager. There was a 3-D holographic rendition of a row of 1950s-esque robots circling one of the trees and marching in place. Throughout the park, people were scattered in large and small clusters moving at different speeds. Some had web profiles and professional association memberships embossed on rippling clear scrolls of glass the length of their bodies floating around them; it was very expensive programming meant to impress. Three older men were taking turns with bows and arrows in a traditional AR archery match, while some young boys were chasing each other around and weaving through the clusters of people with AR crossbows. The world was finally beginning to feel user-friendly again.

As he walked through the city, the ads that targeted his profile seemed more and more inappropriate to his current status. A new season of upgraded chips came flurrying down like snow, and the latest Burberry nanofiber neck scarves that purported to be “softer than silk” sliced into his path and flew around like runaway kites. A herd of zebras looking up in the sky drew his
attention to his daily scheduled reminder, which appeared in blue metallic script against the gray sky:

Poverty is a state of mind

After following a green AR mist down several nameless alleys, he checked into Motel Green, an indistinguishable section of unpainted concrete with its name hovering in a green sphere above the entrance. The solar cells on the roof were large and bulky and protruded over the alley, keeping it in the shade. An old Vietnamese man with a white cane and a green three-piece suit sat in a lounge chair in the lobby, playing fetch with a blue AR poodle while a solitary cleaning bot meticulously swept the worn but already clean floor tiles.

Charlie plunged into one of the large black lounge chairs embedded with gel ampoules. The green light above carried the iconic Motel Green soundtrack that began with the welcome menu. He flicked through the menu and purchased three nights and twelve hours of AC with his only available account. The solar cells had probably finished paying for themselves long ago, but the hotel still charged for AC like it was an expense. He looked at the man playing with the dog and recalled how in the past he might have created a larger dog to attack it. Instead, he observed the man with his creation, happily oblivious to him and the rest of the world. He grabbed his bag and started walking up the stairs to his room. A message icon popped up as he reached the third floor. It was Tonya. She was still using the Chi intro page with the horses being chased by tigers.