The Transition

Like most problems, mine was simple to understand and impossible to solve.

I needed to get home, to brew Alexys her evening mug of dandelion root tea and pour Sheila her evening mug of vodka, to finish that catastrophe of a novel, to in short, return to my life. Not the work life I submitted to or the life of my friend’s openings and readings and dinner parties, but my own private, domestic life. And that life existed between the exposed brick walls of my fifth-floor walkup.

Simple enough. Head home, wiggle the key around in the temperamental lock, enter the apartment where Alexys’ kettle needed heating, Sheila’s vodka pouring, my failing novel life support, all three, in their own ways, depending on me.

A simple, solvable problem.

Right?

Wrong.

The Transition, changed, well, everything. Made the winners losers and the losers winners and even made some winners mega-jackpot winners and most losers absolute losers and if you were neither a winner nor a loser, then, well, it probably killed you.

Me? I’m still breathing, still wondering if I’m a winner or a loser, or if after everything I’ve been through am just lucky. Or maybe unlucky.

And while I’d have liked to have stayed in my Parking-Spot-Suite, writing in my little black Moleskine journal, plotting how to get back home, how to find Alexys and Sheila, and figure out how to resuscitate that catastrophe of a book, getting home was impossible, contacting them inconceivable, departing Elyxir Lyfe’s corporate campus suicidal. Not to mention I had a career, responsibilities, a new, gleaming post-Transition life to preserve, one with its own laws and desires and that were if anything, more pressing, more real, for example impressing the Elyxir Lyfe CEO, who held the keys to my future and who I needed to film that very morning, the shoot with her dangling over me like a guillotine’s blade. The Transition skyrocketed the stakes of a typical work day.

I dressed, trying to ignore my neighbors shaving, brushing their teeth or tidying up their own Parking-Spot-Suite, completing any of life’s daily ablutions that’d previously been hidden behind walls of privacy. En route to the front gate I got caught staring at an older woman, I think she worked in accounting, flossing her teeth in a car’s sideview mirror. Embarrassed and flustered, I pretended to check my phone and out of habit dialed Alexys. I hurried on down the parking garage, pressing the receiver to my ear. Thanks for calling Elyxir Lyfe, droned the internal recording. The number you’ve dialed is outside our service range. Please hang up and dial again.

“Careful on your commute,” warned the guard at the parking garage’s front booth. The monitor on her desk hummed with infomercials I’d produced and she pulled back her pink hair, lowering the volume to a whisper. “A Cult breached the perimeter a couple hours ago. Security chased most of them out.”

“Another breach? It’s the fourth time in the past week,” I complained. “And I’m already late for my shoot with Sandra.”

“Wouldn’t wanna miss that,” the guard said and suddenly, though it was much lower on the post-Transition totem pole, I envied her job: binge-watching Elyxir Lyfe videos, tucked into her Ticketing-Booth-Studio. All things considered, not a bad gig. Peering down the sidewalk connecting the Parking-Garage-Suites to Elyxir Lyfe, I opened the blast gate. The guard doffed her silly grey cap. “Have a good one!”

Checking one last time for Cults, I sprinted down the sidewalk; I was halfway to Elyxir Lyfe’s bulletproof front door when a sight stopped me in my tracks: behind the landscaping’s wild, overgrown hedges, I saw someone chained to a tree trunk. Stripped to his tidy whities, a leather BDSM mask buckled over his head. I didn’t know who it was until I got close enough to see the yellow ducks knitted into his blue socks.

“Excuse me!” I shouted, waving my arms, trying to get the guard’s attention, but her face was glued to her TV. What can I say, I produced some sticky corporate propaganda. Pacheco’s chest rose and fell, at least he was breathing. I cupped my hands over my mouth. “Help! Pacheco, the copywriter, he’s tied up.”

Even after the Transition, even after all the ways everyone’s lives had been smashed together, Pacheco had remained an obedient Boy Scout. Seated before his desk at nine; out the door as the clock struck six-thirty, showing off his duck socks on Casual Fridays. Yet, unlike almost everyone else at Elyxir Lyfe, he never threw away the family photos pinned around his cube. A memento of them in the backyard, lined up in order of height, Pacheco in his yellow duck socks, next his whale of a wife, followed by their three porkers, and last but not least, a black Chihuahua, curled up beside the last kid’s sneaker like a period at the end of a sentence. In his cube massaging Elyxir Lyfe copy and translating it into Spanish, surrounded by those memories, Pacheco soldiered on as if nothing at all had changed, as if he still had a home and a family waiting for him at the end of each workday. Which made watching Pacheco buckled into a BDSM mask all the more unsettling. It didn’t matter if you clung to the past or if you’d done like everyone else and flushed it down the toilet – one could always be stripped to their socks and cuffed to a tree.

“Pacheco? You OK?” I asked, poking the filet of his pec. Chains bound his wrists and ankles, a padlock hanging on his neck like a pendant. I wiggled it around, trying to free him, but Pacheco wasn’t going anywhere without a key or a hacksaw. The black swirls painted around his belly button, nipples and neck made my skin crawl. Oh, and who can forget, the BDSM gimp mask. Who knows what they’d done to his face. The Cults, if they didn’t slit your throat, entertained themselves by torturing their victims and when they got bored, sold them off for a spoonful of rice. They didn’t even care about money since currency had was worthless in their neck of the woods, having been replaced with tins of tuna or sacks of beans. I’d heard rumors of them poaching unsuspecting employees with promises of cash, only to leave them like Pacheco as a warning. It made no sense, but life outside of the corporate city states made little sense to anyone. With the keys I still kept from my old apartment I tried jimmying the lock. I’d seen Sheila do it countless times, but I was no Sheila and after a few tries, gave up. “Don’t worry Pacheco, I’ll get some help.”

Back on the sidewalk, other Parking-Garage-Suites residents made their own mad dashes towards Elyxir Lyfe’s front gate, briefcases clutched to their chests, ties reeling out behind them. The older woman I’d seen flossing sprinted past without wasting so much as a sentimental glance at her crucified colleague. Or the idiot trying to free him.

“Call security!” I shouted after them, but none stopped. I didn’t blame them, I had to fight back the urge to join the stampede. I was shaking the chains one last time to ensure I couldn’t free Pacheco on my own when I noticed a rucksack a few feet away. Unzipping it, I found wads of cash and what looked like a hand written invoice. $20K, paid to Anthony Pacheco, for crate of Elyxir Lyfe Excalybur Shakes. I couldn’t believe it. Pacheco stealing Elyxir Lyfe protein shakes and pawning them off to a Cult. Or I guess I could believe it. Twenty thousand bucks and you could buy your way onto the Roof, the boutique luxury residences where all Elyxir Lyfe executives lived. Maybe my time had arrived to forget the past and literally move on up the corporate ladder. I was zipping the bag back up, about to stash it in my Parking-Spot-Suite, when the grim reaper of Corporate Comm strolled by.

“Max, you get promoted to the gardening department?” Jacquie laughed, sipping a Pyneapple Fyz. What I wouldn’t have done for a Fyz. Her security detail even had one. “What you doing in the bushes?”

“It’s Pacheco,” I said, hiding the bag in a shrub, before clambering out onto the sidewalk. “A Cult caught him.”

“At least they left him his underwear,” she remarked, sucking down the Pyneapple Fyz. “Wouldn’t want anyone going blind, would we? By the way, everything’s set for today’s shoot, right?” she asked, seamlessly changing subjects. “It’s Dane’s first time filming with Sandra so everything must be perfect.”
 “I prepped the studio earlier,” I lied, looking back at Pacheco, who’d begun stirring. I needed to get that dough out of there before he woke up. “You should head up to set, check it out now.”

“We need to elevate,” Jacquie cut me off. “Dane doesn’t understand why our productions are so, well…they always look the same.”

“You know who I work for,” I said, alluding to my boss, who I knew she didn’t like. “I just follow Jim’s orders.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Jacquie said, rolling her big brown eyes and taking another drag of her fragrant beverage. “Anyway, the shoot starts any minute, right? Or are you babysitting Pacheco?”

“It’s just that,” I said, scrambling for an excuse to stay so I could squirrel away Pacheco’s dough before he woke up. With that kind of money I’d be wining, dining and driving golf balls out over the ruins of LA on the Roof by sunset. Pacheco moaned a little. It was now or never, but I couldn’t come up with one. You see, I’d always respected Pacheco because there’s something to admire in a man clinging to hope or delusion or both. He’d risked his life for the money precisely because despite everything that’d happened since the Transition, he’d never adapted to the new world. But I had and knew not to pass up a security detail accompanying me on the final stretch to the front gate. “And yes,” I replied, stepping from the thigh-high crab grass back onto the long-dead sidewalk screens, kissing the money goodbye forever. “Let’s get moving.”