Without looking up. “By Mark? Are you kidding? He’s usually pretty bad about that. He gives you a good reference when you go on to do other things. Mark pays in experience; that’s what he’ll tell you.”
Vienna Roberts had, when she was in the midst of a good self-esteem day and was able to assess herself accurately, exactly one undeniable ability, often commented upon in her mediocre report cards and letters home from schooclass="underline" she spoke the truth to power. She was raised up to do just this. Vienna Roberts, when driven into the emotional tones that might best be described as defiant, could summon in herself such a reservoir of put-downs as to lay low any antagonist. And it was in this mood that she tailed a couple of the makeup under-assistants in no better position than herself, demanding of them where Schott might be pinned down, only to be told that Schott was well on his way to another shoot. When the assistants were asked where this next location was, they admitted that the next location was an airplane hangar outside of town. And when asked about the particulars of the next project, the under-assistants looked warily at each other and one of them whispered to Vienna Roberts that the product that was being photographed next was the Pulverizer.
“What’s a Pulverizer?”
“A Pulverizer,” said the under-assistant of eyeliner and rouge and self-paling creams, “has to be seen to be understood.”
She hitched a ride out with them. It was not that the under-assistants, who were driving an algae-powered van that was so far beyond its 200,000 mile checkup that it could have quit at any moment, and which was not possessed of air-conditioning, wanted to bring along a churlish young leather goods store employee with delusions of adulthood, but perhaps the under-assistants, like all good people, favored stories in which the downtrodden have their moment of speaking the truth to power. The van had no reliable shock absorption, and so the conversation pixilated as though being run through an old eight-millimeter film projector.
“You know Mark is a really generous man, right?” said the one under-assistant, whose assumed name was Orion. “He’s really involved with all the border charities, and with border groups that are about trying to increase awareness of the unique culture of the border area. He helps a lot of border jumpers across. And he pays off a lot of people to make things right when there’s a danger of slavery. So he’s a good man. And it’s not like he really mistreats us, because he is doing so much good. And if he uses an economic model that’s about barter or payment in services, that doesn’t mean he’s trying to steal. And I don’t know if he told you this, but if you’re sick or something, he can lay his hands on you.”
“I’m sure he’d be happy to.”
Orion said, “He cured Mitchell’s chlamydia.”
“But did he cause the chlamydia too?”
“You aren’t talking seriously,” Orion said.
Mitchell, it turned out, was the other assistant. Mitchell nodded supportively.
“When he cured the chlamydia, he said he could also do spider veins, alopecia, and canker sores.”
“Alopecia?”
The airstrip where the shoot was to take place was located at the abandoned Rio Blanco International Airport. That airport was meant, in a different time, to connect the city with the affluent coca-producing regions to our south. During the Panama Consensus, in which it was held that taxing coca and allowing limited consumption would ease the cost of drug interdictions that the NAFTA ruling body could no longer bankroll, Rio Blanco had appeared to be in a good position to benefit. Longer runways were paved, additional terminals built, a rail link to the city was pondered. But then the political winds changed direction, and the Panama Consensus was labeled appeasement, and now the airport lay mostly abandoned, but for freight carriers who came in one end, off-loaded, and got as quickly out of the lawless Southwest as they could. It was here, in hangar number six, that Vienna Roberts, when she ought to have been at field hockey practice, witnessed a demonstration of the Pulverizer.
It seems, in retrospect, that the Pulverizer was a quaint piece of machinery, not at all as advanced as she might have expected. But in hangar number six, a Pulverizer was hooked up to a standard-issue wrist assistant, its nanoprocessors and online resources, and this computing power was attached to a harness, which was fashioned of a black synthetic rubber material and doubtless manufactured in a sweatshop somewhere in the Sino-Indian world. Across the front of the harness was affixed the Pulverizer itself, which, Vienna observed, was a long, retractable metal antenna, at the end of which was a large rubber missile in the graduated bulb shape that was suitable for, well, a certain consenting-adult type of activity, and this harness was, it appeared, being worn by the same girl who had been Vienna’s gambling pal at the Indigenous Ventures shoot. What she was going to Pulverize, in fact, was a young Hispanic boy of unimpeachable comeliness, who apparently needed to make big money fast. This was Mark Schott’s beneficent way of insuring that the Latino American boy was not pressed into wage-free service down in more tropical latitudes. In fact, since it was a still photograph, this young man didn’t have to get Pulverized. He just had to look willing to be Pulverized, while Vienna’s friend was meant to look willing to do whatever it took. All this for a well-funded online-shopping emporium that specialized in such things. Well, as her parents often pointed out, it was the twelfth quarter of recession.
The Hispanic boy wore some kind of wireless skin-response monitor of his own, one that assessed particular kinds of arousal, based on pulse, body temperature, blood pressure, vocalizations, and so forth, or this was what Vienna later learned in the literature. A voice on the set shouted Quiet, please! The generator hummed. The Pulverizer made a satisfying noise when it began. It sounded like one of those household cleaning robots, or maybe like an antique windup toy. Flash photography commenced. Before long, everyone on the shoot was sweating and furiously rehydrating, and the Pulverizer, which was a little balky in temperatures at which asphalt routinely melted, was sometimes Pulverizing, and sometimes it was looking more like a Wilterizer. It was in the midst of a temporary malfunction, when Mark Schott called Setup number five!, that Vienna got close to the man, close enough to do what had to be done, close enough to bring herself to the attention of the assembled. She remarked, in due course, about how it was not professional, given everything that Schott had said to her in the store, that he would just leave her to fend for herself without even pursuing the matter of compensation, which was a word she often heard her mother use. A worker had nothing to give, Vienna Roberts said, stealing lines from broadsides that were often lying around the house, but her labor, and her labor was a dignified thing, a thing worthy of respect, and when an employer exploited that labor, why that was as good as a declaration of war; that was part of the imperial menace that had brought this country to its knees, that had made a once-proud people weak, soft; many were the decades, many were the dark days of history when the oppressor would pry loose from the unlucky multitudes their precious labor, keeping for himself the coffers of minted currency that rightfully belonged to the people—