Fun City Punch (Joe Dylan Crime Noir, #5)

by James Newman

  “I’ve never met your mother.” I shrugged. “And I hope you aren’t playing with this little girl here.” I gestured to the girl who switched to performing Moonlight Sonata by the B, the beautiful Beethoven.

  The melody brought back last night’s dream, father leaving, heading back to America. That large empty room and the blocks of plastic, mother losing her mind in the bedroom that I was never to enter.

  She played on.

  “Good heavens no. I’m harmless,” the predator continued raising his stumps. “I’m just a man of the world, walking up and down and to and fro in it. She is my helper. A simple choice for her: education, musical lessons, some money or the street, and we both know what the street can do to a child or adult. I think Honey made the right choice, don’t you agree? But of course, choice is not something you have much of anymore, right?”

  “Perhaps...”

  “Nonsense. No ‘perhaps’ about you. Just a list of certainties, a dull creature. You are open to this meeting. You are ready, our child. The simple truths that bring you here are so obvious.”

  “Such as?”

  “You disagree with my theory of love?”

  “Some souls are burned some aren’t. That is all,” I said.

  “Go on...”

  “Well, those whose souls have been burned stay here.” I looked at the girl playing the keyboard. The sad song rose above the sounds of laughter and the hum of dance music from the bars. I continued speaking slowly, in time with the music: “There is still a world out there where two teenagers meet at high school and fall in love. I mean real love. They hang out together, share their first kiss, finish high school, college, get a house together. They argue when money is tight. They are both on the career ladder. They wear matching sportswear and order pizza delivery. One day she harbors a tumor and he’s right there, sees her through it. They have children and stay together because there is love that keeps them stuck together like glue.”

  “Yes,” the man-with-no-hands continued, “and then one day she gets bored and blows the gardener. Mexican, perhaps, certainly handsome, probably hung. Husband finds out and bangs the intern who introduces him to scientology and a bohemian lifestyle, body painting, micro dinning. He digs it. They strap up to the e-meter together and study engrams. He becomes a clear. Wife gets the house, the kids, and the car. He gets resentment and an acute case of hemorrhoids after the intern takes off with a young guitar player from Rock Springs. He takes up fishing and drinking before brunch and watching hard-hitting television series. An interest in pornography blossoms in his fragile mind. Develops a social anxiety and general dislike of the western woman, or any woman, for he knows no difference. Never been east. Spends time reading, travel guides he likes especially. Reads about a place called Fun City. Buys a return ticket and forgets about the return. Finds what he thinks is love and love takes him for the life savings and the Rolex from his wrist. He’s as good as dead by forty-five. His soul has been burned. Dusted.”

  “A good old fashioned fairy tale.”

  The man-with-no-hands raised his hands as if to clap before realizing he couldn’t. “You see, you’re getting the hang of it.”

  “I’m guessing this type of individual isn’t good for the economy?” I said.

  The man nodded slowly and pointed a stump to the young girl at the keyboard. “Get Joe Dylan a glass of water, Honey.”

  Honey fussed with a glass and poured soda water into it. She walked slowly over and handed me a glass. I noticed a healed scar on the child’s cheek, street tattoos, as they were known.

  “And what is this love?”

  I shrugged, drank some of the water. “A kid once told me it was a mixture of attraction and admiration. Here, no one admires one another. The recipe if you want to call it that is a card full of credit, a head full of blind lust and desire and a pair of brown thighs,” I told him. “There is no love here. This is Fun City.”

  “And that is why I choose to live here. My first love was the piano and now...” the man-with-no-hands raised his stumps. “I am teaching this child to play, plus, she helps me out with menial tasks. She was working on the streets, Mr. Dylan. Selling chewing gum and polishing shoes. Here, she has escaped the gang who put her to work and she has a chance at an education. I’m teaching Honey to read and write English.”

  The child smiled and began Einaudi’s Oltremare. She was obviously born to play. I mean, most children aren’t born to play or write or dance or anything. Most children are born to spend two thirds of their life working a job they hate to make money to buy bullshit they don’t need, but some, and they were few, only needed the musical instrument, the paper, the floor and organically the rest flowered. Some were put here to entertain and enlighten others and Honey was one of those. It was as if the keyboard was playing her, or perhaps she was somehow channeling energy from the man-with-no-hands who continued: “Plus the excitement and unpredictability of Fun City keeps me amused. Did you know there’s a mob who go around the city picking up their own subjects and inserting tequila shot glasses into their rectums? They film it and use the footage in game shows. And the human safaris in the north? Billionaire businessmen fly in and hunt the poor, unarmed, and uneducated. Man has an innate desire to be cruel and vicious to his fellow man, no? Some have tried to stop the decadence by offering militant relief from the imminent Armageddon.”

  “Perhaps the Armageddon has already arrived. Perhaps this is the waiting room to Dante’s inferno,” tried to catch the man’s eyes, yet they wandered furtively. Honey played on and on. For a moment I thought the man-with-no-hands was about to stand up and dance.

  “Honey,” the man-with-no-hands said to the child, “fetch my medication.”

  The child stopped playing and softly padded to a cabinet and opened a drawer and took a bag of pills. She took two out of the bag and walked over to him. He sat with mouth open as she placed the two tablets in that awful hole filled with rotting cavities. She fed a bottle of beer into him the way one might feed milk to an infant. He drank steadily until the bottle, empty, was taken from his mouth and put down to rest back on the cabinet by the girl, Honey, who returned to the keys and to the beautiful Ludovico.

  “Ahhhhh. Tramadol. Goes well with alcohol. Like red wine and cheese, wouldn’t you say? Please, Honey, give Mr. Dylan some tablets. It is rude to let our guests go without.”

  I shook my head. She kept playing. “I would indulge again, but whatever it is they put inside me...Besides... Tramadol is a good step along the highway to morphine. Ten percent.”

  “All I know is that they prescribed it for me in the hospital and I’ve had a slight penchant for it ever since. It feels like, like, swimming, swimming underwater. You ever listened to Morphine?”

  “It’s junk,” I said moving my face closer to the man’s face. “You will drown on that shit.” I changed subject. “What happened with Hugh Simmons? Well, let me tell you what I think happened. Hugh was under the investigations of SPIDER. He was implanted. He lost control, and parts of the brain were being interfered with.”

  The handless man shrugged and smiled.

  Honey resumed playing the keyboard. The song I vaguely recognized from a long time ago. One of the songs my father played while flicking through files in his office. Ludovico’s song; a melody that rose and fell like a storm spinning across a tropical island before settling to the first spring day following winter.

  “Yes. I know about you, Mr. Dylan. I know about your taste for opiates and alcohol and the low life, so don’t you be waving the finger at moi. I know that you have moved from one lousy hotel to the next sleeping in rooms infested with roaches and rats. Who do you think paid your hospital bill?”

  “Never underestimate the cruel hand of evil, old man. Evil disguised as kindness is the worst kind of evil there is.”

  “I know your desire to escape back to the real world, and I know what stops you from doing so. You are pure yet you are flawed, you are perfect for this assignment. For one, you are tra
pped here in Fun City. You will never escape. The object inside your brain, I can help explain in due course how that came to be.”

  I looked at the man. His face covered with welts and his nose ballooned into a red bulbous mess of blue veins.

  “How do I remove this implant?”

  “You will find a way or you won’t. Do you know how difficult life is without hands? Opening doors, closing them, reading, eating, wiping, dressing, writing, drinking? Have you ever sat down and thought about how much you use your hands?”

  “It is pretty much all I ever do. I’d add Yo-yoing to that list.” I caught the neon lights through the open window, the cackle of witches, magic dust and dirt raining down onto concrete. I thought about how I had used hands in the past to fight enemies and to raise glasses with friends, to caress women, all of this now gone, impossible, forever. Honey began a new sad slow haunting melody, Primavera, let it calm me, slowly at first and then as the heartbeat accelerated as the notes lifted us out of the Penny Black window. The city was dirty. The filth layered all shops and houses, a fine layer of dust. The dirt was invisible at night. Night fell and a strange beauty fell alongside with it, the beauty both visual and audible, the naked thighs, the shapely breasts, the sound of laughter, and the clinking of bottles together. Both the young witches and the Johns thought they were beating a system that had been stacked against them and for some this was true yet for most they were passing on diseases and lies and trading in shattered dreams. The song reached the middle climax, a flurry of notes; a burst of strings came from somewhere and then settled back to that haunting melody. They were brokers of escape from the traps that were set out for us the moment they left the soft warmth of the womb and crawled their way at first into hope and joy and then into institutions such as families and schools who taught them to obey rules that made little sense. Some rebelled and some were neglected by institutions and families and it was those lost souls, less adapt to survive who were vacuumed into the Fun City night. I considered the man-with-no-hands to be one of these lost types.

  Trapped by the illusion of escape.

  And why not?

  At night, the city was spotlessly clean or more to the point, dark. The night made up for the cruelty of the sun’s microscope. The women wore glitter on their faces and were experts at make-up, salons abounded performing miracle hair dos and hospitals performed cut-rate cosmetic surgery, no Gamer was complete without an operation or two. They saved their winnings to buy breast jobs from unlicensed surgeons who left awful scars. Nose jobs withered within a year. Honey continued to play...The song slowly rose and fell... I often walked past an elderly transsexual who begged topless in the street – one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen. Sometimes you take a wrong turn. Make a bad decision. The road to hell is patched up with open sewer grates and best intentions. What is there to do other than keep walking through the damp dark streets, the nine circles, the old hotels, dusty rooms, windows looking down onto the hopeless sludge of missed opportunities, light a cigarette in the rain? Disgusted by it, the rain beats down and down and down, down, down on the hustlers, the witches, freaks, tourists, lost, confused. Stub it out. Concrete, everywhere concrete, glass and metal. The girl kept playing that sad song... All those years living in cheap hotels with cheap girls, banging your head against trash every morning and shaking into the afternoon. Screams from next door, some monster pounding away as if his life depends on it and perhaps it does. Eating cans of cold sardines and wading through orange peels, cat piss, syringes, condom wrappers and the rain, always the rain and a liver that hurt to the touch. Angry poverty driven thoughts tunneling down into the epidermis of those years, angry avenues of youth playing blackjack with thieves and hookers, dwarfs, dealers, the misshapen downtrodden dregs of human existence; unrepentant justifiers of pure sin sold wholesale to the lowest bidder. Now the song raises again a waterfall of notes cascading around the walls of the Penny Black Hotel like music on the streets of an unfamiliar town. The man-with-no-hands closes his eyes and tilts back his head. The pure ones... the artist woman who smeared paint on the walls and broke all the furniture... who came at us with a knife and then we had to leave with nothing but fear and the clothes on our backs. Maybe we could hustle a game of chess for money with the man from Ukraine who said he once killed a man, and maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. The pure ones... Kurt, The Sea View, Honey played her song...The Mermaid Hotel. Father left once more, mother remained crazy. Maybe we will do it again, but it’s a chance and a chance is all any of us ever had. Penniless halfway through the journey of life; penniless one can enter the gates of hell or stand at the gates of heaven and watch others passing through...

  The Pure Ones...

  The music suddenly stopped, the room hummed with silence.

  A man who had both an inquiring and acquiring mind and a complex soul who had asked deep questions of a world that elicited cruel answers. I then saw Kurt crouched on the floor, hands gripping his head, chamber music blaring through grate speakers, his reflection in the mirror, broken, he walks zombie-like towards the balcony, taps a box of cigarettes from his pocket, lights one, and slides the balcony door open.

  “Makes you kind of introspective, doesn’t it?” The man said.

  “What?”

  “The implant.”

  “Tell me your story?” I said. “Skip out the parts about childhood. People generally aren’t interested in childhood horror stories. Let’s start with the hands.”

  “It happened offshore,” the man-with-no-hands said. “I’d been a programmer. Do you know what a programmer is?”

  Told him I had an idea.

  “The business sold for 8 billion dollars.”

  “That’s a lot.” I said. “Keep spilling.”

  “You are just a drifter, a flusher, a loser in the armpit of the world.”

  “What is it they want?”

  “Drifters, Losers...They prey on bums... Bums like you, Mr. Dylan.”

  “Why?”

  “For research. Market research. Look, Mr. Dylan, you are an intelligent man, you should see it. If you spend several billion dollars on a product then you want to see if that product works. We can’t simply trust the Trust Machine. The controlled experiments can only go so far, you see. Rats in a cage mean not a thing no matter how some may argue that the cage is representative of society and the rat being a social animal an ideal subject. We are all rats in a cage the trouble is not many realize the cage.”

  “Rodents are cruel and predictable.”

  “Sure, but most people are not, even on a good day, as worthy as rats...At least not in an experimental study. So they need to do a little field research. To prey on the ones that nobody cares about. You know, the downtrodden, ex-military bum who coming back from a tour finds no purpose in life and walks into the bank with a high-powered assault weapon... Gets caught, stews in a prison and then hits the street disenfranchised where he meets the crazy woman who shouts at buildings and dabbles in crystal meth. They prey on the deformed and the deranged long since disowned by their families and friends. Victims of a society long since flushed down into the sewers marked Failed Experiment. Capitalism hasn’t worked, Communism hasn’t worked. It is time to start something new, something they call transhumanization. The weak and the troubled, the lost and the hurt. The rogue agents, private dicks, whores, addicts... Anybody who is no use to or a danger to the control machine. Anyone who is a drain to resources...A waste of space, an abuser of oxygen, can be changed, you see, Mr. Dylan, molded to conform within the...”

  “The control machine?”

  “Call it what you will...”

  “Well, it has a nice ring to it. I was spiked by a member of this dehumanization movement?”

  The man-with-no-hands laughed a low roar. “You were Spidered. It seems some of us programmers have a sense of humor. The program has a kink in her design. It’s still being tested. These introspective thoughts will come and go. Congratulations, Joe, you’ve become part of the pr
oject.”

  “Spidered?”

  “Yes. S.P.I. Specialist Precision Industries, until that is they joined up with Dynamic Engineered Robotics, or as they merged, or transfigured, S.P.I.D.E.R, Inc. These were my old employees. ”

  “Cute. And the hands? What happened to your hands?”

  “A warning. A farewell leaving present. It seems that I was becoming close to finding out the reasons for their operations. You see every technician or programmer has his or her job. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, each employee works on a piece and only the two real players know how the whole thing fits together.”

  “You got too close?”

  “They considered me safer without hands.”

  “Why don’t you get a new set, the advances in nerve realignment?”

  “You don’t understand, Mr. Detective. This was part of the deal. I can go on living with no hands or be killed. These people are dangerous.”

  “Can they be got at?”

  “Perhaps. Think about the Chinese tourists.”

  “You are saying the brain implant specialists are the same mob?”

  “No, but chew it over.”

  “What do they want with me?”

  “Nothing,” the man-with-no-hands laughed. “Absolutely nothing...You are simply a human guinea pig, a rat...Cruel and predictable...”

  He laughed again. The girl stopped playing the keyboard for a fraction of a second before she continued playing music darker than a raven’s promise.

  “Alone in the dark,” I said to myself as the girl played.

  And for a moment, I was.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE RAT came closer to Trixie’s face. “Do you know the difference between guilt and shame?”

  Her eyes glassy, Trixie nodded twice slowly, before her head fell forward, semi-conscious, she heard the rat continue his monologue.