2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [42]
Kathy was already up and sitting at breakfast when he walked in. She looked at him for a long time. “You don’t look well.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look white as a sheet.”
“No, I don’t. By the way, I have a job interview this week.” Kathy was surprised, and excited. Money was such a big problem now that additional income would be extremely helpful.
“What kind of a job?”
“Construction coordinator.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not sure. Bob Seagram called me and said he heard of an opening and thought I had the kind of experience that would be a plus.”
“I don’t remember Bob Seagram.”
“Bob worked with me at Saturn and moved to Toronto five years ago. Loves it there.”
“What do you mean, Toronto?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’?”
“The job is in Toronto?”
“Apparently.”
“You can’t move out of the country.”
“Why not?”
“Because what am I going to do?”
“Honey, I’m a burden to you here. Financially and every other way.”
“I don’t want you to leave this house. You can find a job here; you don’t have to move out of the country.”
Her father loved her so much. She really did care for him. He got up to give her a hug and that was the last thing he ever did. He blacked out and fell on the floor, and Kathy became hysterical. She called Emergency and described the situation, and they said they needed to confirm a beating heart before they sent a resuscitation team. In the new world, if the patient was already dead, there was no hurry; they would just ask the caller to cover the body, leave the room, and wait. Only if the person had a real chance at surviving would someone come.
Kathy was asked to put a transmitting device, a device that every residence was required to have, on her father’s skull. Through the transmission of medical information they would tell her what their decision was. After sixty seconds Kathy heard what she was most afraid of. A passionless voice told her that the person lying there was dead. She was told to cover the body with a sheet or a blanket and wait in another room. She started screaming and throwing dishes and smashing her fist against the wall. “What the fuck! What the fuck!” And then she started to weep uncontrollably.
She covered her father as instructed and left the kitchen. And then the strangest thing happened. She looked up Max Leonard. She had not seen him since that meeting, but he was whom she wanted in her life at this critical moment. Her father had died less than a minute earlier and she wanted to be held and comforted and told everything was going to be okay by a man she’d only met once.
* * *
Max Leonard had just turned twenty-eight. He was born into a lot of money, raised in Maine, and the irony was that his parents, who were still living, were rich enough to take care of themselves and would never be a burden to him. But he had always been different. He was rebellious before he even knew what the meaning of the word was. And he wasn’t like his other friends who had dough. Most of them were either spoiled or drugged out or in business with their families. Max thought it was all bullshit.
When he quit college, much to his father’s dismay, he had joined CareCorp, a group of young people who worked for a year with underprivileged families within the United States. He was sent to a town in West Virginia. He had had no idea when he was summering on the beaches at Bar Harbor that people lived like this less than a thousand miles away, and Max became very close to his adopted family.
He learned about life in a way that schools didn’t teach. For example, it appeared to him that people who came