The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [17]
All of this is just as she remembers it, but there have been some changes, too. The customary “Mid City Sucks” T-shirt has evolved into several hardier, more virulent strains, such as the “I Paid a Malaysian Textile Worker’s Monthly Wage for a Middle City T-shirt” T-shirt, and the still more eye-straining “I Got Insulted, Robbed, Raped, Jailed, Hooked on Crack, and Gang Raped in the Mid” T-shirt. The Narcotics Anonymous meeting hall and the Scientology recruiting office have been supplanted by two theme restaurants: Medea, where you can have a meal vaguely resembling your murdered offspring, and GrossOut!, where you can dine surrounded by blown-up photographs of rare skin diseases, Siamese twins, radiation victims, flamethrower victims, cannibals gnawing on roasted hands, women eating feces from men’s anuses or menstrual blood from other women’s vaginas, jars of pickled mutant fetuses, cross-sectioned heads, and maggots feasting on cats’ carcasses. And the old wino mime with the sign saying he was trying to raise $1,000,000.25 for wine research has been forced out by an invasion of slicker operators: the mime who screams at passersby, the mime who mimics different people using exactly the same mannerisms, the mime who feels for a way out of an actual glass box.
It was never exactly a cultural mecca, but still, Ursula can’t help feeling there’s something insidious about the changes here. In high school the one thing she learned in her blow-off Earth Science class was that Earth and Venus started off almost exactly the same, the only difference between them being a temperature variation of about four degrees, which tiny difference caused a tiny bit more water to evaporate from the oceans, trapping a little more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which trapped a little more heat and caused the temperature to rise a couple more degrees, which caused more water to evaporate, and so on, until the planet was a seven-hundred-degree hellhole of corrosive gas. The lesson concerned a brand-new theory known as chaos, and she never forgot it: in chaotic systems, slight differences in initial conditions can over time produce massively divergent outcomes.
Ursula has the eerie feeling that she’s now witnessing the early stages of a similar kind of experiment. There’s something off balance here, and that certain something—she’s almost prepared to admit it—may very well be irony. Excessive amounts of it have been released into the atmosphere. The city is already too cool for its own good, and the temperature is dropping. Soon it will be supercool, too cool for living tissue. The only survivors will be a race of disaffected, lounge-posing, ad copy–writing, indie film–watching androids.
The epicenter of the impending catastrophe may in fact be this very stoop, overlooking a cappuccino and tattoo parlor on one side and a combination religious-icon and sex-toy shop on the other, to perch on which her tireless trainer, Javier Delreal, has unerringly brought them for the purpose of people watching. Apparently this is a ritual of his, and it involves not only sitting on this stoop but also drinking beer. They have the stoop but not the beer, which is making him anxious.
“You know,” he says, “it isn’t just a matter of beer. It’s a matter of tallboys. In paper bags, the little paper bags designed specifically for tallboys.”
She pretends not to listen, having by now determined she can do this without risking her job. He doesn’t seem to take offense. She leans over the book on her lap, sketching the various new hairstyles bobbing past and giving them fanciful names: The Whirl. The