I went back to the hotel for lunch. The wind had picked up further and was
tossing stray randrops at anything in its path; my clothing was waterproof but
not particularly warm, and I frankly envied the passersby their hats. For that
matter, I wasn’t happy about the way that my bioplastic clothes made everyone
give me startled looks. Still, it was only a block and a half, and then I
ducked back inside the lobby, went to the glass doors to the restaurant,
stepped inside.
Maybe a minute later I was settling into a chair in a
comfortable corner, and the greeter was on his way back to the door, having
promised the imminent arrival of a waitress. Stray notes of piano music rippled
through the air, resolved themselves into an unobtrusive jazz number. It took me a moment to notice that the piano
was actually there in the restaurant, tucked over in a nook to one side. The
player was a skinny kid in his twenties, Italian-American by the look of him,
and he was really pretty good. Some musicians play jazz laid-back because the
fire’s gone out or they never had any in the first place, but now and again you
hear one who’s got the fire and keeps it under perfect control while playing
soft and low, and it’s like watching somebody take a leisurely stroll on a
tightrope strung between skyscrapers. This kid was one of those. I wondered
what he’d sound like with a bunch of other musicians and a room full of people
who wanted to dance.
As it was, I leaned back in the chair, read the menu and enjoyed
the music and the absence of the wind. The waitress showed up as prophesied,
and I ordered my usual, soup and sandwich and a cup of chicory coffee—you can
get that anywhere in the post-US republics, just one more legacy of the debt
crisis and the hard years that followed. I know plenty of people in
Philadelphia who won’t touch the stuff any more, but I got to like it and it
still goes down easier than straight coffee.
Lunch was good, the music was good, and I’d missed the lunch
rush so the service was better than good; I charged the meal to my room but
left a tip well on the upside of enough. Then it was back outside into the wind
as the kid at the piano launched into a take on “Ruby, My Dear” that wouldn’t
have embarrassed a young Thelonious Monk. I had plenty of questions about the
Lakeland Republic, some things that I’d been asked to look into and some that
were more or less a matter of my own curiosity, and sitting in a hotel
restaurant wasn’t going to get me any closer to the answers.
Outside there were still plenty of people on the sidewalks,
but not so many as earlier; I gathered that lunch hour was over and everyone
who worked ordinary hours, whatever those were here, was back on the job. I
went around the block the hotel was on, noting landmarks, and then started
wandering, lookng for shops, restaurants, and other places that might be useful
during my stay: something I like to do in any unfamiliar city when I have the
chance. There were plenty of retail businesses—the ground floor of every building
I passed had as many as would fit—but none of them were big, and none of them
had the sort of generic logo-look that tells you you’re looking at a chain
outlet. Everything I knew about business said that little mom-and-pop stores
like that were hopelessly inefficient, but I could imagine what the banker I’d
talked with would say in response to that, and I didn’t want to go there.
The other thing that startled me as I wandered the streets
was how little advertising there was. Don’t get me wrong, most of the stores
had signage in the windows advertising this or that product or doing the 10%
OFF THIS DAY ONLY routine; what was missing was the sort of corporate display
advertising you see on every available surface in most cities. I’d figured
already that there wouldn’t be digital billboards, but there weren’t any
billboards at all; the shelters at the streetcar stops didn’t have display ads
all over them, and neither did the streetcars; I thought back to the morning’s
trip, and realized that I basically hadn’t seen any ads at all since the train
crossed the border. I shook my head, wondered how the Lakeland Republic managed
that, and then remembered the notebook in my pocket and put my first note into
it: Why no ads? Ask.
I was maybe six blocks from the hotel, by then, looping back
after I’d checked out the streets on the west side of the capitol district, and
that’s when I tore my shoe. It was my own fault, really. There was a cluster of
moms with kids in strollers heading down the sidewalk, going the same direction
I was but not as fast. I veered over to
the curb to get around them, misjudged my step, and a sharp bit of curbing
caught the side of my shoe as I stumbled and ripped the bioplastic wide open.
Fortunately it didn’t rip me, but I hadn’t brought a spare pair—these were good
shoes, the sort that usually last for a couple of months before you have to
throw them out. So there I was, looking at the shredded side of the shoe, and
then I looked up and the first store I saw was a shoe store, I kid you
not.
I managed to keep the ripped shoe on my foot long enough to
get in the door. The clerk, a middle-aged guy whose hair was that pink color
you get when a flaming redhead starts to go gray, spotted me and started into
the “Hi, how can I help you?” routine right as what was left of the shoe
flopped right off my foot. He started laughing, and so did I; I picked the
thing up, and he said, “Well, I don’t need to ask that, do I? Let’s get you
measured and put something a little less flimsy on your feet.”
“I take a men’s medium-large,” I said.
He nodded, and gave me the kind of look you give to someone
who really doesn’t get it. “We like to be a little more precise here. Go ahead
and have a seat.”
So I sat down; he took the remains of the shoe and threw it
away, and then proceeded to use this odd metal device with sliding bits on it
to measure both my feet. “9D,” he said, “with a high arch. I bet your feet ache
right in the middle when you’re on ‘em too long.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I take pills for that.”
“A good pair of shoes will do a better job. Let’s see,
now—that’s business wear, isn’t it? You expect to do a lot of walking? Any
formal or semi-formal events coming up?” I nodded yes to each, and he said,
“Okay, I got just the thing for you.”
He went away, came back with a box, and extracted a pair of
dark brown leather shoes from it. “This brown’ll match the putty color of those
clothes of yours pretty well, and these won’t take any breaking in. Let’s give
it a try.” The shoes went on. “There you go. Walk around a bit, see how they
feel on you.”
I got up and walked around the store. My feet felt
remarkably odd. It took me a moment to realize that this was because the shoes
actually fit them. “These are pretty good,” I told him.
“Beat the pants off the things you were wearing, don’t
they?”
“True enough,” I admitted. He rang up the sale on some kind
of old-fashioned mechanical cash register and wrote out a bill of sale by hand;
I paid up and headed out the door.
Half a block down the same street was a store selling men’s
clothes. I went in, and came out something like an hour later dressed like one
of the locals—wool jacket, slacks and vest, button-up cotton shirt, and tie,
with a long raincoat over the top, and my ordinary clothes in a shopping bag.
I’d already more than half decided to pick up something less conspicuous to
wear before my shoe got torn, and money wasn’t a problem, so I bought enough to
keep me for the duration of my stay, and had everything else sent back to the
hotel; the bill was large enough that the clerk checked my ID and then called
the bank to make sure I had enough in my account to cover it. Still, that was
the only hitch, and quickly past.
From the clothes store I headed back the way I’d come,
turned a corner and went three blocks into a neighborhood of narrow little
shops with hand-written signs in the windows. The sign I was looking for, on
the recommendation of the clothes store clerk, was barely visible on the glass
of a door: S. EHRENSTEIN HABERDASHER. I went in; the space inside was only
about twice as wide as the door, with shelves packed with boxes on both walls
and a little counter and cash register at the far end.
S. Ehrenstein turned out to be a short wiry man with hair
the color of steel wool and a nose like a hawk’s beak. “Good afternoon,” he
said, and then considered me for a moment. “You’re from outside—Atlantic
Republic, or maybe Upper Canada. Not Québec
or New England. Am I right?”
“Atlantic,” I
said. “How’d you know?”
“Your clothes and
your shoes are brand new—I’d be surprised if you told me you’ve been in ‘em for
as much as an hour. That says you just came from outside—that and no hat, and
five o’clock shadow this early in the day; I don’t know why it is, but nobody
outside seems to know how to get a proper shave. The rest, well, I pay
attention to lots of little things.
How’d you hear about my shop?”
I told him the
name of the clothing store, and he nodded, pleased. “Well, there you are.
That’s Fred Hayakawa’s store; his family’s been in the business since half an
hour before Eve bit the apple, and his clerks know a good hat, which is more
than I could say for some. So are you in business, or—”
“Politics,” I
said.
“Then I have just
the hat for you. Let’s get your head measured.” A measuring tape came out of
his pocket and looped around my head. “Okay, good. Seven and a quarter, I
should have in stock.” He ducked past me, clambered onto a stepladder, pulled
down a box. “Try it on. The mirror’s there.”
With the hat on,
my resemblance to a minor character from a Bogart vid was complete. “Absolutely
classic,” the haberdasher said from behind me. “Fedoras, homburgs, sure,
they’re fine, but a porkpie like this, you can wear it anywhere and look real
classy.”
“I like it,” I
agreed.
“Well, there you
are. Let me show you something.” He took the hat, slipped a cord out from under
the ribbon. “In windy weather you put this loop over your coat button, so you
don’t lose it if it blows off. If I were you I’d do that before I set one foot
outside that door.”
I paid up,
accepted the business card he pressed on me, and got the loop in place before I
went back outside. The wind had died down, so the hat stayed comfortably in
place—and the adverb’s deliberate; it kept my head warm, and the rest of the
clothes were pleasant in a way that bioplastic just isn’t.
You know what it’s
like when some annoying noise is so much part of the background that you don’t
notice it at all, until it stops, and then all of a sudden you realize just how
much it irritated you? Getting out of bioplastic was the same sort of thing. In
most countries these days, everything from clothes to sheets to curtains is
bioplastic, because it’s so cheap to make and turn into products that the big
corporations that sell it drove everything else off the market years ago. It’s
waterproof, it’s easy to clean—there’s quite a litany, and of course it was all
over the metanet and the other media back when you could still buy anything
else. Of course the ads didn’t mention that it’s flimsy and slippery, and feels
clammy pretty much all the time, but that’s the way it goes; what’s in the
stores depends on what makes the biggest profit for the big dogs in industry,
and the rest of us just have to learn to live with it.
The Lakeland
Republic apparently didn’t play by the same rules, though. The embargo had
something to do with it, I guessed, but apparently they weren’t letting the
multinationals compete with local producers. The clothes I’d bought were a lot
more expensive than bioplastic equivalents would have been, and I figured it
would take trade barriers to keep them on the market.
I kept walking.
Two blocks later, about the time I caught sight of the capitol dome again, I
passed a barbershop and happened to notice a sign in the window advertising a
shave and trim. I thought about what S. Ehrenstein had said about a proper
shave, laughed, and decided to give it a try.
The barber was a
big balding guy with a ready grin. “What can I do for you?”
“Shave and trim,
please.”
“Your timing’s
good. Another half hour and you’d have to wait a bit, but as it is—” He waved
me to the coatrack and the empty chair. “Get yourself comfy and have a seat.”
I shed my coat,
hat, and jacket, and sat down. He
covered me up with the same loose poncho thing that barbers use everywhere,
tied something snug around my neck, and went to work. “New in town?”
“Just visiting,
from Philadelphia.”
“No kidding.
Welcome to Toledo. Here on business?” Instead of the buzz of an electric
trimmer, the clicking of scissors sounded back behind my right ear.
“More or less.
I’ll try to talk to some people up at the Capitol, make some contacts, ask some
questions about the way you do things here.”
“Might have to
wait a day or two, according to the papers. Did you hear about this latest
thing?”
“Just that there’s
some kind of crisis.”
The scissor-sound
moved around the back of my head from right to left. “Well, sort of. Tempest in
a teapot is more like it. Something in the budget bill for next year set off
the all-out Restos, and so one of the parties that’s had Meeker’s back says
they’ll bolt unless whatever it is gets taken out.”
“Restos?”
“You don’t have
those out your way, do you? Here the two political blocs are Conservatives and
Restorationists; Conservatives want to keep things pretty much the way they
are, Restos want to take things back to the way they used to be. Okay, lay your
head back.” I did, and he draped a hot damp towel over the lower half of my
face, then went back to trimming. “Used to be about half and half, but these days
the Restos have the bigger half—all the rural counties going to lower tiers,
and so on.”
“Hmm?” I managed
to say.
“Oh, that’s right.
You probably don’t know about the tiers.”
“Mm-mh.”
“It works like
this. There are five tiers, and counties vote on what tier they want to be in.
The lower the tier, the lower your taxes, but the less you get in terms of
infrastructure and stuff. Toledo’s tier five—we got electricity, we got phones
in every house, good paving on the streets so you can drive a car if you can
afford one, but we pay for it through the nose when it comes to tax time.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He took off the
towel, started brushing hot lather onto my face. “So tier five has a base date
of 1950—that means we got about the same sort of services they had here that
year. The other tiers go down from there—tier four’s base date is 1920, for tier three it’s 1890, tier two’s
1860, and tier one’s 1830. You live in a tier one county, you got police, you
got dirt roads, not a lot else. Of course your taxes are way, way down, too.”
He put away the brush, snapped open an old-fashioned straight razor, and went
to work on my stubble. “That’s the thing. Nobody’s technology gets a
subsidy—that’s in the constitution. You want it, you pay all the costs, cradle
to grave. You don’t get to dump ‘em on anybody else. That’s what the Restos are
all up in arms about. They think something in the budget is a hidden subsidy
for I forget what high-tier technology, and that’s a red line for them.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said
again.
“They’ll get it worked out. Go like this.” He
drew his lips to one side, and I imitated the movement. “Meeker’s handled that
sort of thing more’n a dozen times already—he’s good. If we let our presidents
have second terms he’d get one. Now go like this.” I moved my lips the other
way. “So they’ll drop whatever it is out of the budget, or put in a user fee,
or come up with some other gimmick so that everybody’s happy. It’s not a big
deal. Nothing like the fight over the treaty, or the time ten years ago when
Mary Chenkin was president, when the Restos wanted to get rid of tier five,
just like that. That was a real donnybrook. This close to the Capitol, you
better believe I got to hear all sides of it.”
He finished
shaving, washed the last bits of soap off my face with another hot wet towel,
then splashed on sone kind of bay-scented aftershave that stung a bit. A brush
darted around my shoulders, and then he took off the neckcloth and the poncho
thing. “There you go.”
I got up, checked
the trim in the big mirror on the wall, ran my fingers across my cheek; it was
astonishingly smooth. “Very nice,” I said. While I got out my wallet, I asked
the barber, “Do you think Toledo’s ever going to go to a lower tier?”
