Chapter Excerpt From: twisted stems

by Elliot Worth Ortega

1 

“Okay now look here please,” she says. He tilts his chin up, holds it while the stout lady  scans his face with the device. He recognizes her by the swirl of her black hair. Notices her  hooked nose this time, flat, like an anchor. Nervous on the chair he watches while she types  his information into the laptop with single deliberate fingers, long fake nails glued with glitter, pattering the keys before quietly unpackaging the new needle from its sterile plastic sleeve.  Asks, “Ash yes?” with a smile that reveals more gum than teeth. He nods, lets her short fingers gently take his wrist and expose his inner arm. He can tell by her pinched smile, lashes aimed  down, that she’s watching a video, the way her eyes are glazed over, oblivious to the deeper  dimensions of corporeal suffering in him. Decades stacked of it. She, faraway, floating behind  invisible glass. Everyone behind glass. He wishes he hadn’t forgotten his sunglasses today as  the overheads bleach his tender brain while the elastic gets tied tightly around his pale bicep,  making him acutely aware of the blood flow that’s become restricted. Pulse banging at the  rubber wall, pumping up against his eyeballs. Heartbeat, a soft siren in a skull full of crushed  fiberglass. Too much body awareness right now. Spirals him into an irrational worry as he  wonders whether there is too much, or too little, blood circulating in his head.

“Ready?” 

He nods again, twists his skull away from her in a way that makes the broomstick in his throat protrude from beneath his microscopic gabardine neck skin, home to tiny tinseled  wrinkles where he’s told himself over and over that he would, but never did, moisturize. Jaw  shut like a bear trap; he prays the prick won't puncture through the backside of his vein until  finally her languid marshmallow voice hums “ok you can relax now” with that brackish  MexiCali accent he likes. The permission she gives him reminds him to relax the bones in his  fist. Remembers to breathe. “Not so bad right?” He watches her gather the excess plastic to  toss into the bin. She laughs at something. He's sure now she's got the chip as she bends  down, his eyes on her onyx cinnamon bun hair where the vagus patch scar, beneath hair,  hides the implant. Eyes follow the sleeve of her white cloak, land on the awful purpled sight of  the tube draining his apparently valuable life juice he’s been told is safe to extract, bi-weekly,  knowing soon it will be complete again, the cash payment for his plasma, money materialized  instantly into six twin digit bills. It's always the same deal. More dependable, this clinic, than  any client he’d ever had. 

New looking bills; five twenties and a ten. 

In front of the clinic the bright sunlight hits like a battering ram. He makes sure one  last time it's all there, cautious when counting the cash due to the potential bus stop threats  that loom this side of town. You'd think the rank smell would notify you of their presence. But  with half of them wearing camo print, and the way they snuck up on you with the hunter's  silence of their bare feet, you rarely stood a puncher's chance.  

It happened to him some weeks back. After a similar donation, a crusty lipped  cigarette-butt-of-a-man zeroed in on him from across the street, cornering him inside of the  bus booth awning, his mildew breath a stab of hot rot as he asked– lower-case words like a  jagged knife– for one of the bills he'd sniffed from a block away. This guy was big as well.  Shoulders wide and dense like stone, with a shirt that fit him like a garage fits on a bike, with  serious eyes that had a way of cutting through your bullshit before the lie even crossed your  lips. These street urchins, the hard ones, they made you taste the shame in lying.  

Ash remembers a time when you could disregard the people that haunted the streets as  some kind of societal residual. Scum on boiled milk; a peripheral, separated aspect of the  functional cogs that actually mattered in the world. But in this new regime, street walkers are  more than an after-thought, a sub-clause. You can no longer chalk their unsheltered condition up to drugs or misfortune or karma. The Nouveau-Poor is what they're calling them. Political  in nature. Sunburnt, many of them, analogue orphans of empire, barely scraping by. They’re  everywhere these days – their nomadic pop-up towns and makeshift tents, a perpetually  ventilated and exposed existence similar to the ancestors– spreading their lives out like car  boot sales, across empty lots for weeks at a time, before getting broken up by the hillbilly  gestapo – or even worse for the brown ones who get plucked and cuffed and escorted away  never to be heard from again. This is the sad fate for the sector of Americans who never  managed to secure a mortgage before the coronation. Their numbers are rising. He's read  articles about how these analogue tribes migrate across the country with the seasons: chasing  warmth, wandering away from the unpredictable rifts of cold ocean rain, nuzzled in their  squirrel tail hats and opossum pelts, with slits of mole skins assembled into hand-sewn gloves, and, for the lucky few, feet warmed by boots lined with beaver tail to shelter toes frozen to the  bone due to the increase in sweeps of arctic winds– regionally uncharacteristic– whirling and  whipping down and biting at their slits of exposed skin, cracked lips and wet eyes tough in the  lampless rural nights during silent raids on government-owned farms. Crystal jewelry,  feathered hair, weary craned necks draped in layers of blankets– these modern roller suitcase  caravans of new nomads scattered along the freeway lapels with their loot crammed in their luggage, mothers nibbling yellow onions raw while thumbing the soil off unnaturally large  radishes for their young. This is what it looks like to live fully unplugged. No tokens or socials.  Routinely denied the right to fresh water, forced to beg for alms at intersections, urine dark as  dusk. Ash wonders if he could do it. Knows how hard it has become to stretch his dollars  compared to before, like shaking pennies around hoping they'll breed. 

There is a distinction to be made between the Nouveau-Poor – the newly impoverished  population that, after rejecting digital dependency, has been shrugged onto the streets – and  these lone wolf loiterers he sometimes collides with in the shade outside of the clinic. These,  the old dogs, are seasoned urchins who have been houseless long before the reform of 2028.  Veteran vagrants who have had to survive alone since youth by honing their ability to see  through your skin. These were people who had seen things. Consumed your scraps. With  hunter's ears they could hear you counting change in your head, and with their eyes alone  could flip their faces into ugly mirrors, making you slip into a throbbing guilt just for  withholding the little cash that you had. But how could he, Ash, an unbathed man in his early  forties, dressed in a wrinkled cream suit he'd thrifted in his twenties, explain to this dirt creased man in peeling sneakers, tan jaw like a mossy rock, that he was not das kapital's  lapdog; that he, too, had watched every industry get swallowed up by the Big 6; he, too, lost  hope as every industry was gradually eroded of its grip, until the majority of careers were  more like bars of soap and there was no way out of saying “ok” to the extractive “fast  economy” subscription model. Ash is one of the many who has said no to subscribing, no to  the brain chip, no to going cashless, and no to training the very machines designed to replaced him in the first place. 

“Aw come on, man. Just gimme that tenner man I know you don't need it like I do man  come on.”  

Ash angled his nostrils away as the big man lurched toward him. Once he had Ash  pinned in the corner of the bus stop between two different graffitis, he felt something prod his  torso. Nearly knocking over a wine bottle full of piss, worried there was a knife angled  between two of his ribs, Ash's eyes swung down like an axe, catching a glimpse of the beggar's  dry unarmed (thank god) hand as it repeatedly poked him with a fingernail so long it could cut a steak, and in the process noticing – tertiary to the first impression of the man's black  cuticles, followed by the newly peeled forearm scab growing beads of yellow dermal oil– a  small blood spotted sticker on his arm, just like the one Ash had on his.  “You gave plasma too?” Ash asked the beggar while peeling back his sleeve to show him his identical sticker, an act that somehow untangled the entire sandcastle tension like an  airplane flush rids all evidence and smell with a harmless and instant woosh. “Twice a week,” answered the big man, no longer interested in Ash, whose gaze now  dove through the flaccid hole in the man's droopy lobe, no longer gauged. “Easy money.” “You off the network?” 

“Nobody's off the network,” said the man. 

“I mean the chip.” 

“Sure I got the chip. Wasn't gonna just sleep on the street anymore. That's a young  dog's life. Not me. The way I see it, let 'em put advertisements in my head. Fuck it. I've seen  worse. S'long as I got a bed and food, now, fuck it” –– the guy snorted some kind nasal spray  while Ash wondered why a man with a home still looked like he'd woken up in a gutter, also  aware that he likely fit the same bill–– “plus i'm on the cheapest subscription model so it's  chill. I got a one bedroom spot in Tustin. It's a tier 4 neighborhood so I only gotta watch like  four hours a day and I'm good.” 

“That's what I do to pay the electric.” 

“Oh. If you got the scar then why are we using our mouths?” 

“This skull's still smooth,” Ash corrected him with a flick of the eyebrows. “Fuck. So you got a mortgage or what?” he asked. 

“Yeah. I'm living in my ex-wife's house.” 

“Shit. Let me get in on that. Nah I'm playing. They're gonna buy you out eventually  though,” he said, turmeric fingers tearing the tip of a tinfoil wrapper. “ I know some  unplugged people who had homes too. They said no to the buy-out offers they got in the mail.  Gets hard to say no, though, when they bust your windows in the night to scare you into  selling. Shit. I even heard about people getting their houses burnt down and the insurance  companies show up but can only compensate you with tokens so they kinda force you into the  system”– they were facing the road at this point, the john lighting a cigarillo that smelled  sweet like vanilla– “Still, I can't complain man. Things are easier now than they ever been for  me. I never had nothing until now.” 

The street john kept jabbering like he wasn't accustomed to hearing his own voice and  was enjoying the way it sounded on the hot sidewalk while Ash, his interest fizzling, wondered about the bus. 

“The way I see it, all you gotta do to survive is meet the minimum. Then you're wavy.  It's gonna happen either way right?” the man scratched his snow globe scalp. “I did a trial 

period in the Synthetic Culture Department as well, but no dice. Which is crazy cus they  accept everyone there right? Then they tried moving me to the Cognitive Maintenance  Department. Guess this wet brain ain't made to train no machine.”  

Ash noticed that the man's eyes had begun to flick up and down. 

“Can you see any ads right now?” 

“Nah,” the man answered plainly, pawing at the back of his head to rub the grooved  skin of the scar. “I just hear them. Little jingles, you know. Shit it's not so bad.” Then his eyes  glazed over altogether. His face was puffy like pancake batter as though he were still drunk  from the night before. The bloodshot whites of his eyes as they flicked up, then again.  Probably scrolling. “Sorry. Forgot to hit play on this video.” 

The man's eyes became vacant. 

“Remember when silence was free?” asked Ash, but the guy didn't respond. He seemed  to become itchy, severed from the world around him.  

“Listen man, if you need cash or whatever I got someone who buys things. Even organs. They don't even gotta be healthy either.” 

“Thanks.” 

“I know a lot of sellers too. Cash only,” he continued, “What you need? I got old books.  Sourdough bread. Heirloom Seeds. Titty milk. Chicken feed. Burner phones. I'm telling you  we got everything. Burned CDs and DVDs so you don't need tokens for the monthly. Spices.  Pigeon meat. Can get you sex too. Either side, don't matter. We got lots of second hand clothes as well remember those? And Blue Rays disks so you don't gotta watch what the bullshit they  make on these platforms. I mean it. Whatever we don't got I can get you alright? But it's gotta  be cash only.”  

“I'm good.” 

“What's that mean?” 

“It means no thanks.” 

The man coughed like an exhaust pipe, spat it on the floor, then gave Ash a sweaty dap,  and that was the last of it.