George nodded back that he was ready, reached up, and caught the fob, which featured a stylized V embossed behind the buttoned side.
“What’s this for?”
“You,” V.T. said. “Consider it a signing bonus.”
“But I haven’t signed anything,” George said, thinking, So much for the “crime doesn’t pay” paradigm. In his case, crime was pretty much his résumé, curriculum vitae, and job application, all rolled into one.
“Do you know about those fMRI studies that show the brain making decisions before its owner has had a chance to catch up?” V.T. asked.
George shook his head.
“Asked to choose, say, between a red pill and a blue one,” the CEO explained, “the brain raises its hand, ‘I know, I know,’ while the body it inhabits is still making up its so-called mind. There’s an actual, measurable gap between the two.”
George blinked. As the owner of a brain, he was finding all this talk a little disconcerting.
“We did some of that work here,” V.T. said, clearly proud of the fact. “You’ve heard of Q-Labs, correct?” He said the words like he was asking if George knew what a candy shop was; that’s how Quire’s latest hire understood it anyway. He didn’t bother answering. The question was clearly rhetorical; whoever did Quire’s advertising had made sure of that, along with the message V.T. proceeded to spell out.
“It’s important that you understand that Quire profits are turned back into Quire innovations to benefit all humankind,” the company’s CEO said, going on to explain that ever since taxation became tantamount to treason, the government’s willingness to sponsor pure research had shriveled to the size of your average congressional testicle. As such, it was up to corporately financed subsidiaries like Q-Labs to move humanity as a species forward.
“You might want to explain that to your buddies on PinkoCommiesRPeople2,” V.T. suggested. “Hacksaw Sixty-Nine,” he added.
“You’ve been following my posts?”
V.T. nodded. Waited. Said, “As soon as you’re ready.”
George’s escort leaned in and stage-whispered, “He means now.”
George asked for confirmation with his eyes, and V.T. confirmed in words. “It would be nice,” he said. “Show of good faith.”
George took out his phone, swiped, tapped, and began thumbing. He trolled his own last post on the site, the one in which he’d advised his fellow anarchists they had nothing to lose but their blockchains. He started out soft.
“Hey, a-holes, this right here’s the invisible hand of the marketplace giving y’all the one-finger salute!”
The comment was met with immediate and predictable results.
“Blow me . . .” “Dickweed . . .” “Hope you enjoy that capitalist splooge, cash sucker . . .”
George handed his phone over to his new boss. V.T. scrolled, nodding. “Oh, here’s a good one . . .” He handed the phone back.
One of the site’s regulars was going off on a rant about how he was such a “privacy phreak” he wouldn’t even use his turn signal.
GimmeLibberT: “I ain’t telling the man which way *I’m* turning, bra.”
George smiled. “That’s some serious white privilege there, dude.”
“?????”
“1: u know u aint getting accidentally cop-shot for pulling that crap and 2: u let the whole ABC soup know what u had for breakfast on Q yesterday.”
“Naw, bra, just my Q-mates.”
“Yo, bro, Q changed TOS again.”
It was, in fact, Quire’s frequent changes to its terms of service that brought V.T. to George’s attention as a legitimate target. How things had changed . . .
“Crap,” GimmeLibberT typed, followed by the redundant “poop” emoji.
“Toodles,” George posted back before dragging that part of his life into the little trash can at the bottom of his screen.
Before leaving the Quire executive suite, George decided to raise a finger of his own. “Uno?”
“Sí?”
“What was that story about?” George asked. “The one about the brain scan.”
“You,” V.T. said. “And the fact that you accepted this job before you ever did that thing with my”—pause—“I mean, your car.”
That’s right, George thought, I’ve got a car now. He looked at the fob he’d been clenching so hard since getting it; there was a stylized V outlined in white against his reddened palm.
V.T., looking at his new hire stare at the fob, finally thought to ask, “You have a license, right?”
George was about to say, “Not yet,” when the car gifter turned to his escort.
“Get the kid a license,” he said. “And maybe a new birth certificate while you’re at it. Something where the DOB is a little more conducive to being gainfully employed.”
The escort nodded, and that was that: they were leaving George’s first meeting with the man himself, the teen already wondering whether he’d be able to afford the insurance on his new ride when it occurred to him he hadn’t asked about other forms of compensation, like salary, benefits, how leave worked if he didn’t want to ever leave. But before George could raise a finger or say, “Uno” (or maybe “Dos”), the door to the Quire executive suite had already closed as definitively as any other door he’d ever walked out of for the last time.
11
Strange as it is to say, dementia can have a sweet spot. Especially in a family where there’s been some bad blood due to bad attitudes, behaviors, ideas, habits, opinions, grudges—pretty much due to any forgettable thing. Because despite all the grief and suffering and premature mourning they’ll cause for the survivors, those plaques and tangles slowly gumming up the works of recall can, for a time, provide the perfect memory hole in which to bury hatchets. After all, who wouldn’t like to forget some part of their past?
Pandora’s fellow in hyperexpressiveness, Jim Carrey, starred in a movie called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which targeted forgetting played a central role. It was too bad dementia didn’t work that way, more selectively and consistently. But the disease followed its own logic, not working all at once, but progressively, peeling away the years like onion layers, the outermost brittle, brown paper a breath could break, while underneath the memories remained supple and powerful—and liable to bring forth tears for all the contradictory reasons people shed them.
During the first few visits, Pandora found Gladys on the good side of both the facility and her disease, meaning she could still make her own meals but would have trouble telling you what she’d had for lunch—especially if it hadn’t been rendered more memorable by, say, the smoke detector going off. This last Gladys addressed directly at one point during an early visit. Turning and pointing an arthritis-crinkled finger at the blinking light over the doorway, she said: “I’m watching you.”
“Who are you talking to, Gram?”
“Him, that,” Gladys said before waving her hand dismissively. “Smokey the Bear over there. I know they’re waiting for me to set it off. That’s when they turn on the camera and start recording, looking for one more slipup before they send me across the hall.”