There were pay phones near the snack machines. I went to one and punched up Gaby’s home number. I didn’t feel she’d be at the candle shop. I didn’t even expect her to answer a call to her flat. But she did. The pay phone’s vidscreen lit up, and at first I thought I had a wrong number.
“Yes?” said the stranger in the monitor. It was a woman with no hair. It was Gaby with no hair.
“What the hell did you do that for?” I cried. Peripherally, I saw the two white-bloused women glance over at me.
“Do what?”
“Your hair, your hair, damn it!”
“It was my hair,” she said in a drab, nonchalant voice. More a dry truism than defensiveness.
“I loved your hair!”
I loved Gaby’s voluptuous body as well, and her rounded, pretty face. But without the framing curtains of her deep, dark hair, her face looked too round. Too full. Almost as if the soft lower part of her face was wider than the bare top of her skull. I’d seen women who looked beautiful bald, or with just a layer of stubble, but it didn’t seem to suit Gabrielle.
“Look,” I went on, babbling heatedly, “you better buy yourself some acceleration cream and slather it on good, my dear, because your hair was beautiful and this look is not you.”
“You act like you know me better than I do, Christopher.”
“I know what I like, and I like hair. So grow back your hair.” I tried to lower my voice so as not to seem like some domineering boyfriend to those two nearby women.
“You don’t know me,” she said. And then the new face of Gabrielle was gone.
“Jesus Jumping Christ,” I muttered, whisking past the two women, embarrassed, returning to my favored spot closer to the coffee machine. “Crazy. Who needs this? Jeez,” I said under my breath.
I wanted to cut it off with her. She certainly seemed to want to cut it off with me.
But more than that, I wanted my old Gaby back.
If she had parents I might appeal to them, but one time as we lay in bed she had told me that her mother had simply disappeared one day when Gabrielle was thirteen. Her father thought she’d been kidnapped and murdered. Gabrielle thought she might have run off with some other man. But Gabrielle told me that deceased friend Maria’s theory had been that mom had become lost in the city somewhere, and couldn’t find her way back to familiar streets. Trapped forever in the maze. It was ridiculous, of course. She could simply phone home. Stop a forcer to ask for assistance. Ask for directions. But Maria had insisted it happened; people vanished, seemingly into another city superimposed with this city, and couldn’t cross back again, couldn’t even communicate again with that former place. It sounded like more spiritual bunk to me. Or at least, like she was referring to an alternate dimension, instead of a literal labyrinth within the solid, material city itself.
Her father had thrown himself off the top of a seventy story building when Gabrielle was sixteen. He’d become alcoholic. For three years he’d sat up alone at night at the kitchen table, muttering to himself, weeping. He missed his wife, whether victim or betrayer. So he’d flung himself into the canyon of the city -- flesh and anguish reduced to an anonymous blot like news ink – like a sacrifice tossed to a volcano god.
Late that afternoon I ran from my office building down the street through the rain to the nearest subway kiosk. Steam rose from a grille in the sidewalk near the kiosk, and I plunged through the vapors to duck into the underground.
This was a station for the orange line, which would take me back to my neighborhood. It was humid and damp as a Laundromat and smelled like a gym. The wall and ceiling tiles alternated black and orange. People called it Halloween Station.
Soaked, I stood on the platform waiting for the tube. I didn’t look over at the group of black youths to my right. You just didn’t directly look at people unless you really had to. Just a glance might warrant a death sentence in the code book of some youth gangs. These boys wore shiny red jumpsuits, each one big enough to fit all his friends in, and on their heads each wore the latest style for black teen age gangers: a black fez with a tassel colored for their group. These ones had orange tassels. The orange line was their territory.
To my left, an obese woman was wrapped in a circus tent of a cloak, slick and dripping with rain, the hood pulled up around her face.
No one mentioned the dead man I saw down on the train bed, though they must have spotted him, too. Another suicide, like Gaby’s dad? Someone pushed into the path of a rushing, hovering tube, maybe by that gang right beside me? (They were talking in reverse English, in the current manner of black youths and the many white kids who sought to emulate them.)
The clothes had been torn off his body. So had both legs, one arm, a few fingers on the remaining hand, and the head. The one-limbed torso itself was grimy, a bit scuffed, but fairly untouched, lending an especially unpleasant contrast to the raw points of disconnection. I flicked a look at the obese woman, to see if she were gazing down at the body, but the hood hid her features. Again, I didn’t glance at the backwards-talking boys.
Identity obliterated. Once this man had been a beloved child. (A mother had teased a finger into that belly button to make him giggle.) Someone’s brother. Maybe a husband. (A wife or girlfriend had kissed those nipples.) Maybe a child awaited his return this very moment. A sacrifice of meat tossed to the roaring subway god.
I thought of Gabrielle again. Bald. Her voice druggy. Transfigured.
A tube was coming; I could hear the distant sound like a hurricane blowing through the confining, arched and tiled tunnel.
I looked from the dark maw of the tunnel back to the torso. I hoped the body was far enough away from the actual path of the tube that I wouldn’t have to bear witness to further obliteration.
When my eyes fell on the torso again, I saw a thin black arm pull itself into the neck stump and disappear. It had looked like the limb of an insect, but also like the fast arm and hand of a monkey. A skeleton monkey, the bones burned black.
It could be some vermin, I thought. Or a mutant that lived in the subway. But I couldn’t imagine an entire animal or being secreted away inside that truncated corpse, so I had to attribute the glimpse to my imagination.
My tube pulled in. Advertisements flowed like colored fluid along its silver flanks. Gratefully, the abbreviated cadaver had previously tumbled out of the direct path of the hovertrain. Naturally I let the fez-wearing boys pile in before me.
The door slid shut behind me. Though the seats were mostly empty, I chose to stand and hold an overhead bar with a padded grip. I lurched a bit as the tube whooshed into motion once more, and as it pulled out of Halloween Station I looked out the row of windows at the platform where I’d been standing. The obese woman still lingered there. She hadn’t boarded. And she might not have been a woman after all. Her skin, it seemed in the second that I saw her before utter blackness replaced my view, was a light blue in color.
***
IF I WASN’T so awkward with women, so nervous and shy about asking them for a date (it always seemed to me that she’d hear my offer as, “Do you think you and me could fuck some time?”), I’d be able to put Gabrielle behind me. After all, I loved her, but was I really desperately in love with her? Well – was that even a realistic level of emotion to expect from any relationship? I’d only really felt that sort of desperate hunger for women who wouldn’t go out with me at all. That kind of intensity is mostly longing, and you don’t long for what you have.
Sitting at my computer at home, I idly watched the ad banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Phixitol promised to boost my self-confidence, to correct low self-esteem and better my self-image. But though I knew I was already nothing more than a chemical soup cooking on a burner of electrical discharges, like many people I had this fierce determination to work with the hand I’d been dealt, to jealously guard the random configuration of protoplasm and anxieties that was the only me I was familiar with. Loss of one’s self is terror.
Didn’t
Gaby know that?
It’s just the sex, I tried to tell myself. And her hair. Both are gone. Let her go.
Instead, I leaned forward and ran a netlink search on the book she had gotten from Maria, in an effort to better understand what had so obsessed her.
I misspelled it, but the computer interpreted my intent and brought up the proper name which I hadn’t clearly remembered:
THE NECRONOMICON.
Immediate information told me that the volume was a grimoire – a sorcerer’s spell book – that had been written by an Arab author, Abdul Alhazred, in Damascus (wherever that was on old Earth) in the 8th century. Original translations had been in Latin, Greek, and English. 800ish pages depending on its version.
Now, as to accessibility; a notation came up that informed me the book was not available on the net for reading or transmission – unless someone (like Gaby) had it in a personal recording and was willing to send it. Hm. However much one thought that any information was available on the net, there was always some obscure or generally uninteresting little particle that managed to slip through the cracks, and hide away in the tangible world. Working as closely as I did with the net, I’d encountered this more than once. I’d found the experience to be extremely frustrating, mystifying, and oddly gratifying. Reassuring. But a nuisance to me, today.
All right, then to seek out a hard copy version. An actual book. Though there was no direct link to SELLERS: THE NECRONOMICON, there was a link to SELLERS: OCCULT BOOKS. I took it.
I weeded out the netlink only book sellers, cut the list down to physical bookstores located in Punktown (I could try nearby, larger, but vastly less interesting Miniosis later if need be). There were a good number of those that specialized in occult books. Names like DELIRIUM BOOKS. MINISTRY OF WHIMSY BOOKS. NECROPOLITAN BOOKS. MYTHOS BOOKS...
I randomly clicked a link for a store with a name that was intriguingly less dramatic.
DOVE BOOKS.
The name suggested books about crystals and channeling; it conjured visions of misty places and rainbows; I pictured long-haired naked men and women sitting around and holding hands and speaking in too-soft, too-friendly voices, with too many cats at home. But still, I went with my impulse and visited their home page.
A man appeared on the screen and swiveled in a chair to face me. “Hello!” he said amicably. “Welcome to Dove Books. I’m Mr. Dove. How might I help you?”
For a moment I thought the man addressed me personally, but then I realized it was an interactive recording. Mr. Dove had the aforementioned gray flesh cracked with black veins, silvery unblinking eyes, no nose and a drooping black-lipped mouth. Pinkish gills pulsed subtly at his neck. If he were an alien, he was one I hadn’t seen or heard of before. I had the impression he might be a mutation or even genetically engineered (for an underwater colony?) instead. In any event, he waited for my reply.
“Um, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for a book called The Necronomicon.”
The recorded Mr. Dove hesitated, as if pondering my request, or reluctant to answer it. At last he replied, “That’s a rare book, and you would do better to see me in person about its acquisition. Dove Books is located at 14-B Morpha Street. Our hours are...”
“How about related books?” I asked impatiently.
Another hesitation. “I’m sorry – there are no related books.”
“Similar books.”
“I’m sorry – books similar to your request would also be categorized as rare. You should see me in person regarding this subject matter.”
“Jesus Flying Christ,” I hissed. I guess I wasn’t going to find out in advance if a visit would be worth the effort. Then again, he hadn’t outright said he didn’t carry the book. “What’s the address again, Mr. Fish?”
“Mr. Dove,” he corrected me pleasantly – he’d make a great customer service rep. “Dove Books is located at 14-B Morpha Street. Our hours are...”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, clicking back to my desk page. 14-B, huh? The “B” meant that it was the street directly below Morpha Street. The underground portion of Punktown.
***
I WAS PICKING up Gabrielle’s bad habits – I took the next day off from work. It was one of those days I’d been expected to be in the office, but I promised to do whatever work I could at home. I tried to look appropriately droopy and drawn when my boss saw me on her vidscreen. I didn’t have to force the look much.
I welcomed my quest. It was more of an excuse than anything else, really. Work was so tedious, so repetitious, a numbing mindless mechanical routine. Ants conveying information instead of eggs from this place to that place. I might as well be a robot. Or a zombie. Rescue me again, Gabrielle, with your white flesh and your smell of candles, your eccentricities and your wild temper, your nonchalance about work and your love of the irrelevant! Work all seemed so meaningless, indeed ant-like, in the cosmic scope of things – so why not openly embrace the meaningless, the anarchy, as Gaby did?
I took a tube from my neighborhood directly to the B level of Morpha Street, without having to experience the carnival-like throngs and the colorful dangers of the upper Morpha Street. The subterranean version was actually more sedate. Relatively speaking. I pressed my forehead to look out as we pulled into our station. I hadn’t been to this area in ten years...hadn’t even been in any of the underground districts in a year or more, apart from tube stations and their adjacent gift shop/snack bar/waiting areas.
The ceiling was high above us, like a solid sky – with conduits and cables, pipelines and plumbing, hulking complex machinery in place of clouds. Lamps projected diffused light in place of Oasis’ sun. An old shunt line whisked along a cable supported from the ceiling. The small train’s passing sent a luminous rain of sparks drifting down, though most of it faded before it touched street level, or pattered harmlessly off the flat roof-tops of the smallish tenement buildings that were snugged shoulder-to-shoulder along either side of the street. Girders criss-crossed the ceiling, and skeletal metal columns like fossilized trees supported it at intervals. The overhead lights dimmed at night, but blazed half-convincingly now. At least it wasn’t raining down here, except for the leaks that dripped here and there.
I disembarked, and wandered out from under the platform’s little roof beneath the roof, refamiliarizing myself with the lay of things. Punktown was an ever changing, ever growing thing, but at last I recognized a vid store I used to go to back when I went through my Japanese movies phase before their misogyny finally outweighed the erotic charge for me (anime, and live movies with plenty of rape and horrifically real violent effects, with translated titles like White-Stocking Girl 2: Die, Pink Flower Panties, Die!).
14-B...I wanted 14-B...
I found it after only wandering for several minutes, and without even having to cross the street. It was housed in a building of pale violet bricks, the top of which uncharacteristically tapered jaggedly to a point just short of impaling the concrete sky. I couldn’t go in, at first, because I’d purchased a bad coffee from a vendor robot who could probably do my job better than I did (selling coffee down here might be a welcome change for me). I had this thing about throwing away coffee, though, however poor in quality, so I paced the sidewalk and finished it off before I slipped between the young Choom prostitutes who lingered outside the purple structure’s front step. I tried not to look at them, especially the one who was entirely naked except for some black barbed-wire tattoos that wound like diseased ivy or diseased veins around her flesh as white as a cave lizard’s. Chooms, of course, are one of the most human-like of all humanoid races -- the native people of Oasis – and these prosties would have been indistinguishable from Earth colonists if not for the wide mouths that split their heads from ear-to-ear, their jaws full of rows of heavy molars evolved for the chewing of the tough native roots they still favored. Their considerable mouths were painted bright red upper lip and bright blue lower lip (indicating, I guess, what pimp they belonged to).
“Hey, handsome, whe
re you going?” one diminutive girl asked me, not the nude one, touching my elbow. “You think old books are more interesting than me?”
That was a good question. And I was flattered by the “handsome” line, even coming from a prosty, but I felt my face flush and I only smiled back at her before ducking into the shop which a sign identified as DOVE BOOKS.
Inside it was quiet, and gloomy like when the ceiling lights were dimmed for night, and the air had that pleasant musty/mildewed smell of old books.
And there directly facing the door, behind a counter, was Mr. Dove in the gray translucent flesh. He lowered a book with a tattered cover he’d been reading, and I caught the title: The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Maybe he was trying to diagnose himself.
“Hello!” he said. “Can I help you with something special today, sir?”
“Ah, well...” I didn’t like to be helped or even talked to by store people; I liked to browse on my own. But in this case I gave in and asked, “Do you have a book called the Necronomicon?”
“My goodness,” said Mr. Dove, and he came out from behind the counter. “Wherever did you hear of Al-Azif?”
“Al-Azif?”
“It’s another name for the book you mention. It has various translations.”
“Oh. I read about it a little on the net...”
“I see. The net. Well, that book is exceedingly rare, and sorry to say I don’t have a volume of it to sell. I myself have only seen portions of it.”
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