All the Lives He Led-A Novel Read Free Page B

building here or there, or taking the occasional computer net down, in the old days. New York was still a pretty good target for the crazies, too, though usually on a smaller scale. It was a slow day when we didn’t hear guns going off somewhere or see smoke coming out of a building. Some days it was a relief to go back home at night, because back in Staten Island we weren’t much bothered by terrorists. Once, I remember, a bunch of descendants of the old Lenni Lenape Indian tribe got liquored up and shot up a police station in Freehold, New Jersey, because they wanted their ancestral lands back. But even if you counted the one-eighths and the one-sixteenths among them there weren’t enough authentic Lenni Lenapes left to signify.
    Anyway, I knew very well that there was nothing in New York for me. Nothing anywhere else in North America, either, it looked like, because even the parts of the continent that had been spared by damn Yellowstone were full of young people exactly like myself. Even the native East Coast kids couldn’t find jobs at any decent pay, because us refugee kids were taking any jobs there were for practically nothing.
    It wasn’t much of a life for a growing boy, and that’s a fact.
    I did manage to stay out of jail most of the time. The reason for that was because when the cops did happen to pick me up, they mostly preferred to deal with whatever municipal ordinance I had infracted by punching me out in some alley to save the paperwork. So my life was pretty much crap.
    I did know how I might be able to make it better, though. I knew where the money was, and I knew it wasn’t anywhere near Staten Island.
    As a kid, like every little kid, I had fantasies of running away, maybe to what was left of the Amazon to start a career as a highwayman, or maybe as a sheriff who put the highwaymen away, or running off to the semi-mythical Stans, those rogue countries that had faced down the whole rest of the world by the threat of starting World War Last.
    And maybe I had another reason for venturing out into the wide world—like maybe looking for my Uncle Devious, who was more appropriately known, though not by us, as the Reverend Delmore DeVries Maddingsley. And maybe then making him cough up whatever he had left unspent of my mother’s trust fund that he had embezzled.
    That wasn’t realistic. I knew that. But what I also knew was that any place would be better than Staten Island.

2
    HOW I BETTERED MYSELF
    You have to be twenty-one years old to wear sex-preference jewelry or to sign the Indenture for foreign employment. I didn’t care about the jewelry but I signed the Indenture the day I made the cut.
    My mother went to the Egyptian consulate with me. My dad wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have anything to do with it at all, because he was still pissed about the fact that the well-known Kansas City real estate firm of Daniel S. Sheridan & Associates was never going to turn into the firm of Daniel S. Sheridan & Son. Certainly not back in Kansas City. It would be at least another twenty years before they cleaned Kansas City up. And not anywhere else, either, because who needed a real estate business anymore when most of the country’s real estate was buried under a gazillion tons of ash and pumice from the eruption of the super-volcano at Yellowstone National Park?
    So I left the consulate’s office in the old World Trade Center Memorial Building owing somebody in Egypt 2.5 million US dollars for airfare and training.
    All right, that sounds worse than it was. When you translated that into euros it only came to a little over €18,000, but it was still a lot of money. It was more money than I and my dad and my mother put together could hope to earn in the rest of our lives in the refugee villages. But it was a good investment for us to make, because a week later I was being airsick on a four-decker en route to Cairo.
    I don’t know if you’ve ever crossed the Atlantic, but if that was what you wanted to do