Makers

He velcroed his camera’s wireless eye to his lapel, tapped the preset to correct for low light and motion, and hit the joystick. The wheelchair stood up with wobbly grace, and began to roll forward on two wheels, heeling over precipitously as it cornered into the main space of the ride. The gyros could take it, he knew, but it still thrilled him the way that a fast, out-of-control go-kart did, miles away from the safe rides back in Disney.

The chair screeched around a corner and pulled into the first scene, a diorama littered with cross-sectioned cars. Each one was kitted out with different crazy technologies—dashboard gods that monitored and transmitted traffic heuristics, parallel-parking autopilots, peer-to-peer music-sharing boxes, even an amphibious retrofit on a little hybrid that apparently worked, converting the little Bug into a water-Bug.

The chair swooped around each one, pausing while the narration played back reminisces by the inventors, or sometimes by the owners of the old gizmos. The stories were pithy and sweet and always fu

Then on to the kitchen, and the bathrooms—bathroom after bathroom, with better toilets, better showers, better tubs, better floors and better lights—bedrooms, kids’ rooms. One after another, a hyper museum.

The decor was miles ahead of where it had been the last time he’d been through. There were lots of weird grace-notes, like taxidermied alligators, vintage tourist pe

He paused in front of a fabric printer surrounded by custom tees and knit caps and three-dee video-game figurines machine-crocheted from bright yarns, and was passed by another chair. In it was a cute woman in her thirties, white-blond shaggy hair luminous in the spotlight over the soft-goods. She paused her chair and lovingly reached out to set down a pair of appliqued shorts with organic LEDs pulsing and swirling around the waistband. “Give it a plus-one, OK? These were my best sellers,” she said, smiling a dazzling beach-bu

Wow—they were getting user-generated content in the ride. Holy crap.

He finished out the ride with a keen hand on the plus-one/minus-one lever, carefully voting for the best stuff and against the stuff that looked out of place—like a pornographic ceramic bong that someone had left in the midst of a clockwork animatronic jug-band made from stitched-together stuffed animals.

Then it was over, and he was debarking in what had been the Wal-Mart’s garden center. The new bright sun made him tear up, and he fished out his shades.

“Hey, mister, c’mere, I’ve got something better than sunglasses for you!” The guy who beckoned him over to a market-stall had the look of an aging bangbanger: shaved head, tattoos, ridiculous cycling shorts with some gut hanging over them.

“See these? Polarizing contact-lenses—prescription or optically neutral. Everyone in India is into these things, but we make ’em right here in Florida.” He lifted a half-sphere of filmy plastic from his case and peeled back his eyelid and popped it in. His whole iris was tinted black, along with most of the whites of his eyes. Geometric shapes like Maori tattoos were rendered in charcoal grey across the lenses. “I can print you up a set in five minutes, ten bucks for plain, twenty if you want them bit-mapped.”

“I think I’ll stick with my shades, thanks,” Sammy said.

“C’mon, the ladies love these things. Real conversation starter. Make you look all anime and shit, guy like you can try this kind of thing out for twenty bucks, you know, won’t hurt.”

“That’s all right,” Sammy said.

“Just try a pair on, then, how about that. I printed an extra set last Wednesday and they’ve only got a shelf-life of a week, so these’ll only be good for another day. Fresh in a sealed package. You like ’em. you buy a pair at full price, c’mon that’s as good as you’re going to get.”

Before Sammy knew it, he was taking receipt of a sealed plastic packet in hot pink with a perforated strip down one side. “Uh, thanks…” he said, as he began to tuck it into a pocket. He hated hard-sells, he was no good at them. It was why he bought all his cars online now.

“Naw, that’s not the deal, you got to try them on, otherwise how can you buy them once you fall in love with ’em? They’re safe man, go on, it’s easy, just like putting in a big contact lens.”

Sammy thought about just walking away, but the other vendors were watching him now, and the scrutiny sapped his will. “My hands are too dirty for this,” he said. The vendor silently passed him a sealed sterile wipe, gri

Knowing he was had, he wiped his hands, tore open the package, took out the lenses and popped them one at a time into his eyes. He blinked a couple times. The world was solarized and grey, like he was seeing it through a tinted windscreen.

“Oh man, you look bad-ass,” the vendor said. He held up a hand mirror.

Sammy looked. His eyes were shiny black beads, like a mouse’s eyes, solid save for a subtle tracery of Mickey Mouse heads at the corners. The trademark infringement made him grin, hard and spitless. He looked ten years younger, like those late-teen hipsters whose parents dragged them to Walt Disney World, who showed up in bangbanger threads and sneered and scratched their groins and made loud remarks about how suckballs it all was. His conservative buzz-cut looked more like a retro-skinhead thing, and his smooth-shaved, round cheeks made him boyish.

“Those are good for two days tops—your eyes start getting itchy, you just toss ’em. You want a pair that’s good for a week, twenty dollah with the Mickeys. I got Donalds and Astro Boys and all kinds of shit, just have a look through my flash book. Some stuff I drew myself, even.”

Playing along now, Sammy let himself be led on a tour of the flash-book, which featured the kind of art he was accustomed to seeing in tattoo parlor windows: skulls and snakes and scorpions and naked ladies. Mickey Mouse giving the finger, Daisy Duck with a strap-on, Mi

In the end, he bought one of each of the Disney sets.

“You like the mouse, huh?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I never been. Too expensive. This is all the ride I want, right here.” He gestured at the dead Wal-Mart.

“You like that huh?”

“Man, it’s cool! I go on that sometimes, just to see what it’s turned into. I like that it’s always different. And I like that people add their own stuff. It makes me feel, you know…”

“What?”

Suddenly, the vendor dropped his hard-case bangbanger facade. “Those were the best days of my life. I was building three-dee printers, making them run. My older brother liked to fix cars, and so did my old man, but who needs a car, where you going to go? The stuff I built, man, it could make anything. I don’t know why or how it ended, but while it was going, I felt like the king of the goddamned world.”

It felt less fun and ironic now. There were tears bright on the vendor’s black-bead eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, younger than he’d seemed at first. If he’d been dressed like a suburban home-owner, he would have looked like someone smart and accomplished, with lively features and clever hands. Sammy felt obscurely ashamed.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I spent those years working a straight job, so it didn’t really touch me.”

“That’s your loss, man,” the vendor said. The printer behind him was spitting out the last of Sammy’s contact-lenses, in sealed plastic wrap. The vendor wrapped them up and put them in a brown liquor-store bag.