Oblivion
by
Drew Gummerson
Tomas had chosen the name Xanadu for the beauty salon because it sounded opulent. Situated in the base of one of the former communist tower blocks in Prague 9 business had boomed, young girls and mothers coming to have their hair died or nails done for the first time. It was a novelty and they hadn’t minded that it was done by a man. They lived in tiny apartments all of them, with sons, brothers, husbands, who left the door open when they used the bathroom, ate breakfast in their underpants. They were used to men. So when K started they didn’t mind him either.
Tomas’s friends came first to marvel at K. He was the first in the district. They would poke and prod him, ask him to answer questions, general knowledge or things about sex, what position he liked best. But after Daniel grabbed K between the legs Tomas said that was enough.
When K started they had a tanning room in the back. Two sun beds side by side, a mural of Hawaii on the wall. The young men and women didn’t mind K in there when they were naked although some of the older women were funny about it, saying it wasn’t right.
Then there was the summer where temperatures reached a record peak, 46C, and people didn’t want tans anymore. Pale skin became fashionable and Tomas started selling sunblock from a basket next to the till area.
The loss of the sun beds didn’t hurt business much but World War Terminus did. That’s what the papers called it, World War Terminus. It was if they knew from the beginning it was going to be the last one. It was clear to everyone anyway. The world was dying.
The bombs hit Prague mostly but even out here everything was covered in dust. The grass died first, then the trees, then it was the animals. The women who still came to the salon, they remained open despite everything, wanted Tomas, or K, to do something with their hair that would cover up their bald patches. And it wasn’t nail extensions they wanted but nails themselves, stuck to the places where nails had once been. The men didn’t come so much anymore. They shaved their hair off, gave each other tattoos, formed brigades, went on looting raids.
Before, while clients were waiting for their colours to take, or were having a massage, Tomas would have a Tom Cruise film playing on the flat screen. Everyone loved Tom Cruise he used to say and there was a Tom Cruise film to suit every mood. Laughs if you wanted laughs. Thrills if you wanted thrills. And he was best at being the good guy who won out against the odds. But after the first bombs hit Prague and he’d played Oblivion, not even ironically, on a loop for two weeks straight saying ‘for fuck’s sake’ over and over in English he left the tv tuned only to the news.
It was despair, destruction, desolation, then the adverts. Every other advert, of course, was for the Rand Corporation and their off-world colonies in the Cerium Belt; Dominguez, Calantha and all the others. Strange other-worldly words for strange other-worldly worlds. Not that they would be seen. Generally the adverts would show an anaemic white shuttle, fresh-faced men and women in chinos and polo shirts, securely strapped in while being served drinks and refreshments by android helpers.
All that cost money though and that kind of money was not typically available to the tower block dwellers of Prague 9. A treat for them was a weekend in Česky Krumlov or Bratislava, a new pair of shoes for the women, a go with one of the Vietnamese hookers in Prague 3 for the men.
Some families would club together, raise funds to send one family member away. Then they would come into the salon, all crowding around, while the prodigal son or daughter was given a final sprucing up for their trip. It wouldn’t do not to look like one of the well-turned-out humans in the advert.
But then even that stopped. Things were getting worse.
K was stood at the door of Xanadu when the supermarket opposite got raided for the last time. There was a group of twenty, all wearing balaclavas. When they found there was nothing left they dragged the owner out and hung him from the pole which held the digital clock.
Xanadu was usually left alone by the raiders. There was nothing you could eat in there and no sell on value for hair dye or false nails. Tomas still turned up every day at just before nine and opened up although they didn’t have many clients anymore. When four whole days had passed without a single person stepping through their door he had the idea of having a sale and he sent K off with a bunch of fliers for the shop over which he had scrawled, 50% off everything.
The lift was broken but K didn’t mind. He started on the ground floor of the tower block and worked his way up. Most of the doors to the apartments were standing open, broken. Hello, he called out, Hello. I’m here from Xanadu. We’re having a 50% off sale. When there was no answer he’d put the flier down on a chair, or a table.
On the sixth floor he went right into one of the flats without even knocking. He lay down on an unmade bed, closed his eyes, then got up and stretched. Good morning, he said and went into the living room. There was a record player there and he bent, chose one of the records, and put it on. He did a dance, swooping his arms around, said to an imaginary something, You had me at hello.
On the twelfth floor he found a woman. She was face down on the floor. Her dress had ridden up at the back revealing legs as thin as the handles of wooden spoons. She heard his footsteps and lifted her head. Help me, she said. 50% off haircuts, manicures, pedicures and all dyes, he said. Guaranteed to make you feel a new you.
At the top floor he took the staircase and went out to the roof. In the distance Prague still burned. There was no sun anymore. Dust swirled in the air. Occasionally there was the sound of gunfire.
Any takers, said Tomas, when he returned to Xanadu.
Maybe one, he said, incapable of lying. She seemed like she might be interested.
He was with Tomas when he died. Hardly able to walk anymore Tomas had still made it into work that day. Then, after lunch, knowing it was the end, Tomas had asked K if he would carry him up to his apartment. He wanted to die at home.
K had never been in the apartment before. All the walls were brightly painted, loud garish colours, and there were pictures of naked men just about everywhere.
I kept it a secret, said Tomas. If the lads had known.
K said, I won’t tell anyone.
Two hours later Tomas was dead. K closed his eyes and covered the body with a sheet. He didn’t know what he felt. Didn’t know if he was capable of feeling.
The following day K opened up the beauty parlour as usual at 9 o’clock on the dot. His ability to process atrophy and decay was limited, nor did he have a heart, so the crumbling buildings, the swirling dust, the lack of sun presented a visage as much like any other and didn’t break his heart. He stood at the door for ten minutes and then, looking through the shelf that held Tomas’s DVDs, put on Risky Business.
This young Cruise, crude and prone to beat off, was Tomas’s favourite version of the movie star. He would replay the scene where Cruise danced in his pants again and again. This made sense now to K. He had seen the pictures of the naked men in Tomas’s apartment. Whoever had designed him had made him unjudgmental in relation to sexuality and love. Whatever configuration presented itself they were all basically the same, sprung from some affinity or another. After Risky Business he put on The Firm, then A Few Good Men. There was only one Tom Cruise film he didn’t understand. This was Rain Man. What was that about?
At the end of the second week K had his first client. The man, young, with a mop of dirty blond hair and tattoos on his muscular arms asked if K could tidy up his hair and K said he could. He told the man where to sit and he put one of the gowns over him.
I’ve heard there’s a place, said the man. In the north. Like Xanadu. There are people. And the air is clean. You can come with me if you want.
K was puzzled. He was already in Xanadu and after the man had left he went out and looked up at the sign of the beauty parlour. The letters had been made obscure by the sand and so he spent the rest of the day cleaning them up. He made it a point in his daily routine to clean the front of the shop as often as he did the inside.
There were no more customers that month. When the power gave out K trawled the basements of the adjacent blocks and eventually found what he was looking for in an underground firing range converted from someone’s regular basement. There were swastikas on the walls and in a side room some comfy chairs and a bust of Adolf Hitler. K managed to get the generator back to the parlour using an abandoned shopping trolley. Sometimes he would put the tv on and tune into the National Station. Now there wasn’t even any news, just the ads for a life off-world on the colonies. It was all pseudo-sunlight, ping meals and ersatz golf.
To keep his skills up K would sometimes practice on the dogs that roamed the streets between the abandoned buildings. Wary at first, in the end, thanks to K’s gentle manner, they got used to sitting in one of the treatment chairs, being shampooed, having their nails clipped. K’s favourite days were when he would open up to find a line of dogs already patiently waiting.
In year three the building opposite collapsed. K felt the rumbling first of all and went to the door to see what was happening. It didn’t topple, fall to one side or the other but instead seemed to eat itself from the base up. Now where before there had been something there was just a gap. A space. It was like Tomas not being there anymore.
Having a lot of time on his hands K had spent some of that time pondering this thing that had so changed his life, the war.
As far as he could make out it was an amalgamation of many things, the rise in temperature, the rise in sea levels, a local despot invading a neighbour, the fear of the foreigner by those who benefitted from the foreigner being in their country, the whipping up of fear by those on the right, the whipping up resulting in an actual pervasive fear that couldn’t be contained, a multi-national mega corporation that owned the means and resources to take humans, at a cost, to other planets, the fact that this multi-national corporation owned the means of communication, social media networks, newspapers, and so was largely able to whip up the aforementioned fear etc etc.
K’s programming allowed him to learn and over the years alone he learned loneliness and with loneliness he learned love or the lack of it. Sometimes he would say to himself that that night he wouldn’t plug himself in to charge. He wouldn’t charge himself that night. Or the next. Or the next. Eventually, he supposed, his battery would run down and that would be it. The end.
But then one day someone came.
Excuse me.
He turned around, he had been scraping rust from a pair of scissors, to see an exact replica of himself standing there.
I’m model P, said his replica.
Model K, said K. Way before you.
They had a lot in common although Model P, just P for short, was a travel agent specialising in Rhine Cruises and Greek Beach holidays. Or had been. Not much call for either anymore. The Rhine had dried up and the Greek beaches had been washed away or were underwater.
On the first day together K cut and blow dried P’s hair and P watched over K while he did his first system reset in years. He trusted that P would turn him on again should the automatic reset fail to engage.
That feels good, he said as he came back online.
You know, said P, I’ve heard there’s a place up north where there are loads of us, all living in harmony.
Xanadu, said K. He remembered the young man’s words, understood them finally.
P reassuring K that he could recharge himself from P’s more advanced energy pack they set off after a week, K closing up the salon for the final time.
They travelled only at night, P having heard of marauding gangs who would retire androids, use their parts, or special bounty hunters sent out to find them, bring them in for experimentation.
They spent the days in ditches, covered over with branches, or in the towers of churches, the glass of their windows blasted out. When the crossed borders they saw empty guard houses, fences hanging loose. They talked of what they might find or might not find. They talked of whether they were capable of disappointment and because they were able to talk about it they decided that they were. This is when they kissed for the first time. It was a trial. Would we like it or would we not like it? But they agreed. They liked it.
In Denmark they came to a lake, surrounded by trees, its waters remarkably clear. They removed their clothing and stood looking at each other, exactly the same. Their designer, or designers, had given them penises, most likely made from the same mould, perhaps his or their own penises. And despite P being an upgrade the size, shape, girth remained the same.
They walked together into the water and stood facing each other, their penises floating up and pressing against each other.
There is a fish in the Amazon, said P, that swims in the urethra of the penis and latches on. I used to warn my clients of this although most of my clients were not the kind to get their penises out in the Amazon.
P is flirting with me K thought as he recalled the way Tomas would be around the young men. Slyly referring to intimate things. Like how he would tell them a slick bum crack was better for beach holidays as sand was more easily removable and if they wanted he could do a crack, sac and back at a discount if they went for all three.
K looked at P hard and they kissed again and then they went back to the shore and made love. It was P who put his penis into K. After all it was P who was the more advanced model.
They would have been happy then, with just each other, without Xanadu, but it was in Norway when they first saw Tom Cruise.
It was K who recognised him. From the movies, he explained to P, and he listed them all in order, Endless Love, Taps, The Outsiders, Losin’ It, Risky Business, All the Right Moves, Legend, Top Gun, The Color of Money, Cocktail, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, Days of Thunder, Far and Away, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Interview with a Vampire, Mission Impossible, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Mission Impossible 2, Vanilla Sky, Minority Report, The Last Samurai, Collateral, War of the Worlds, Mission Impossible III, Lions for Lambs, Tropic of Thunder, Valkyrie, Knight and Day, MIIV: Ghost Protocol, Rock of Ages, Jack Reacher, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, MIV Rogue Nation, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, The Mummy, American Made, MIVI: Fallout, Top Gun Maverick, MIVII Dead Reckoning Part 1 and Part 2.
It was Vanilla Sky Cruise, K thought, as Cruise stopped short between two thick trees, opened wide his eyes. Gone was that exuberance of youth from Cocktail, and it certainly wasn’t the jerking off teenager of Risky Business. Nor yet did it have Cruise’s gravitas of MIVI. Cruise as leader not to be questioned.
K thought Cruise might start running now. There was always a scene in the film where he is running and this seemed like a likely scenario. The world is coming to an end and two identical strangers are met in the woods. Cruise, fearing for his life, runs.
But instead this Cruise walked towards them, arms spread, smiled.
Welcome, he said, welcome.
Bio:
Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel. He is a Lambda Award finalist, has had 30+ stories published, the latest in Cowboy Jamboree’s Motel anthology. His next book, Saltburn, will be published in Spring 2025.
Punk Noir Press 