The Mere Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

were a curious person. And the repair crews weren’t wearing uniforms. Everyone and everything seemed to be a civilian. Civilianization had a new look.
    I was excited. Nadine practically swooned, it was mass art direction from the bottom up. Oh, the tremor of glamor. Could I really be on the path to a new light? This could happen, as well as that. And that! Opportunity had knockers. Maybe I could end up as someone special.
    As soon as I began to imagine myself as a person deserving of love, instead of just happy to have it, Bond’s face loomed over me as that of a VERY GREAT MAN . Since he could never help me before, he had never mattered. Now that there was the promise of “help,” he mattered a lot. Before, I did not ever think about him; if his name flashed in front of me I blipped. But now, his potential benevolence situated him centerfield of my consciousness. Now, I cared about him. I became worried over him. Suddenly, I realized, I was now terrified of a man I had previously ignored. The effort to make him less powerful had actually made him ever so much more so. Now there was so much that he could take away from me that I had never had in the past.
    The nightmarish imaginings of possible future deprivations were unending. I’d spend hours thinking of what I might never have unless Bond said okay. And you know what? I discovered that to be afraid of losing something that you never actually wanted is a very humiliating experience. If I didn’t suck up to this angle-headed glibster, I would not be able to be glamorous, as I now wanted to be. I would not be able to earn the living that Nadine and I had never imagined. The funds that would enable my true love to get away from the keyboard and smear paint instead. I also had some desires on my own behalf that I was too ashamed to articulate.
    I passed a bonfire of shirts with advertisements on them, logos and pictures of dumb products that were fattening and tasted bad. People had decorated their bodies with these items for years and never asked why. They had never asked why Tommy Hilfiger didn’t have to pay them to advertise his business on their chests, nor had they ever wondered how they had been convinced to pay Tommy Hilfiger instead. Well, that weirdness had come to an end. From now on clothes would have designs and colors or any words the wearer had thought of themselves. They could also be plain white. The people tending the fire were relaxed. They could have been anyone, and so then could I.
    “What’s happening now?” I asked. “Have all the big chains gone out of business?”
    “Nope,” a sloppy, quiet guy muttered, tending his ashes. “Just out of public view. They’re still gonna be bigger than ever. We just will have nicer things to look at when walking down the street. We won’t always be reminded.”
    Invisible chain stores or invisible chains?
    Another Sophinisba innovation. One suited to aesthetic principles.
    Now I could answer my own question.
    Was I trapped where I wanted to be?
    The answer? Not yet. But maybe soon.
    I wanted to be trapped in a life where I called the shots. Where if I said, “ Should we wait for a subway or take a cab? is a question about race and class,” it would be okay.
    Tao Jones went up three points.
    And little girls are socially constructed, so they are made out of our minds.
    Committed to improving, I began to accept my newly required tasks. I would have to start reading all those boring writers like Harrison Bond, actually finish their books. I would have to remember their derivative and limp “ideas” so that I could care about them. I would have to follow The Brand New York like baseball, see who got traded, who was a star. I would have to study the terrain so that I could rise to the top. And once there, stay close to my enemies, watch their every move.
    Yuch.
    I panicked.
    I didn’t want to take in information that I don’t want. It’s the insistent extra. Horror finding me. Horrifying me.
    Why was