Alexander Jablokov - Market Report
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2024-11-25
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Alexander Jablokov
MARKET REPORT
Information on our buying habits is constantly collected and used by
companies intent on selling us more of the some material. It may not be
long before that data is used for other, more sinister, reasons as well,
Alexander Jablokov’s latest novel, Deepdrive, is just out from Avion Eos.
I
slid out of the rental car’s AC, and the heat of the midwestern night wrapped itself
around my face like a wet iguana. Lightning bugs blinked in the unmown grass of my
parents’ lawn, and cicadas rasped tenaciously at the sub-division’s silence. Old Oak
Orchard was so new it wasn’t even on my most recent DeLorme map CDROM, and
it had taken me a while to find the place.
My father pulled the door open before I could ring the bell.
“Bert.” He peered past me. “Ah. And where is—”
“Stacy’s not with me.” I’d practiced what to say on the drive from the
air-port, but still hadn’t come up with anything coherent. “We…well, let’s just say
there have been problems.”
“So many marriages are ended in the passive voice.” His voice was careful-ly
neutral. “Come along back, then. I’ll set you up a tent.”
Dad wore a pair of oncefashionable pleated linen shorts and a floppy Tshirt
with the name of an Internet provider on it. His skin was all dark and leath-ery, the
color of retirement. He looked like he’d just woken up.
“I told Mom when I was coming…”
“Sure.” He grabbed my suitcase and wrestled it down the hall. “She must
have nailed the note to a tree, and I didn’t see it.”
I didn’t know why I always waited a mom6nt for him to explain things. He
never did. I was just supposed to catch on. I had spent my whole life trying to catch
on. “Lulu!” he called out the back slider. “Bert’s home.”
I winced as he dragged my leather suitcase over the sliding door tracks into
the backyard. A glowing blue North Face tent sat on the grass. A Coleman lantern
pooled yellow on a picnic table stolen from a roadside rest area. The snapped
security chain dangled down underneath:
“Lulu!” he yelled, then managed a grin for me. “She must be checking the
garden. We get…you know…slugs. Eat the tomatoes.”
The yard didn’t end in a garden. Beyond the grass was a dense growth of
trees. Now and then, headlights from the highway beyond paled the under-sides of
the maple leaves, but they didn’t let me see anything.
“Sure.” I sat down at the picnic table. “So how are you, Dad?”
He squinted at me, as if unsure whether I was joking. “Me? Oh, I’m fine.
Never better. Life out here agrees with me. Should have done it a long time ago.
Clichés were my father’s front defensive line. He was fortifying quickly,
building walls in front of questions I hadn’t even asked yet.
“Trouble?” I said. “With Mom?” Being subtle is a nonstarter in my family.
“And how is your fastpaced urban lifestyle?” he asked
“We’re working a few things out. A bit of a shakedown period, you might call
it.” My parents’ entire marriage had been a shakedown period. I was just an
interim project that had somehow become permanent. I swear, all through my
childhood, every morning they had been surprised to see me come down-stairs to
breakfast. Even now, my dad was looking at me as if he wasn’t en-tirely sure who I
was. “Well, to start with, Dad, I guess the problems Stacy and I have been hav-ing
stem from being in the same profession—”
“You know,” Dad said, “your mother still has the darkest blue eyes I have
ever seen.
“She does have lovely eyes.”
“Cornflower blue, I always thought. Her eyes are cornflower blue.”
Stacy’s eyes were brown, but I guessed my father wasn’t interested in hearing
about that. “Cornflowers are not the flowers on corn.” It had taken me years to
figure that out.
“That’s right.”
“Someone once told me,” I said, “that you can hear corn growing at night. It
grows so fast on hot summer nights. A night like tonight.”
“You need quiet to hear it,” he said. “You don’t like quiet, do you, Bert?” He
was already looking for an argument. “You can’t market quiet.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “There’s an ambient recording you can
buy of corn growing. Cells dividing. Leaves rustling. Bugs, I don’t know, eat-ing the
leaves. That little juicy crunch Call it a grace note.”
“And so you play it over your Home Theater system. With subwoofer, side
speakers, the works? Pour yourself a singlemalt, sit back, relax?”
“You don’t listen to ambient, Dad. You let it wash over you. Through you.
The whole point of modern life is never giving your full attention to any one thing.
That gets boring. So you put the corn in the CD stack with the sound of windblown
sand eroding the Sphinx, snow falling on the Ross Ice Shelf, the relaxing distant
rattle of a horde of lemmings hitting the ocean, pop open your PowerBook to work
some spreadsheets, and put a football game on the giant TV. You’ll get the Oneness
thing happening in no time.”
“Are you getting it?” he asked softly. It wasn’t like his regular voice at all.
“The Oneness. Whatever it is you’re looking for.”
“There was a time when I was so close I could taste it…”
“Bertram! There you are!” Had my mother just come out of the woods? She
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：16 页
大小：97.56KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-25
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