The Cleanup

by John Skipp; Craig Spector

  And they shuddered, in unison, as the moment was upon them; and the onslaught of orgasm sealed itself in one long soul kiss. Their bodies stuck together, slick with sweat and sweet tongue-nectar. Their breath hitched, joyous and ragged. Muscular tremors echoed through them like gunshots through Carlsbad Caverns.

  "I got . . . a question," Mona barely managed. Billy smiled. "I think I . . . know what it is." Still gasping as well.

  "How come we're so goddam good together, no matter what else is going on? Can you figure it out?"

  "Nope. But I'm not about to complain."

  Mona nodded, then slowly pulled out from around him. "Oh," they agreed in unison. She flopped over on her back beside him and stared up at the ceiling fan, whistling mutely overhead. The soft breeze was cool on their naked bodies. The temporary silence was golden and sweet.

  "Earth to Billy," she called out softly, at last. They rolled onto their sides and faced each other, fingers reaching out gently to stroke each other's flesh.

  "I don't want to stop touching you," he said.

  "So who's stopping you?"

  "I don't ever ever ever want to stop."

  "That might become awkward when I'm dancing."

  "How about if we trade skin grafts?"

  "Oh, God." She sighed and rolled away for a second. "You know, loving you is not the easiest thing I've ever done."

  "No pain, no gain."

  "No brain," she said, pointing at his skull. He made a Mongoloid face. She rolled her eyes and looked away; when she turned back to him, her mock exasperation had been replaced by honest concern.

  "You're afraid of something, aren't you?" he asked her quietly. She took a moment before nodding. "You wanna tell me about it?"

  "I don't know. Let me think for a minute."

  "Come on. Confession is good for the soul."

  "So is silent meditation."

  "So's an electric carving knife. Out of the three, I'll take confession any day."

  "Okay, okay." She turned away sharply. "You wanna know what I'm afraid of?"

  "That was the general idea."

  "I'm afraid of what's going to happen to us. I really am. It just seems like everything else about our lives is drifting apart . . . like love is just about the only thing we really have in common. And I don't know if it's enough, all by itself, to keep us together."

  Billy let out an enormous sigh. She turned to look at him, but now he was turned away, eyes glued to the whirling blades of the fan.

  "I'm just trying to be realistic," she continued. "This is a major turning point in my life . . ."

  "And mine."

  ". . . and I don't really know what the future has in store," she continued, as if he hadn't interrupted. "Dave's talking about taking me on the road, you know. What happens if I'm gone for four, five months? Are you supposed to just sit around and wait for me?"

  "As if I wouldn't do that anyway."

  "But why should you have to?"

  "Because the woman I love has something important to do, and I've got plenty of my own stuff to do, and why the hell shouldn't I wait for you? Jesus! It's not like I've got something better to do!"

  "Don't get upset."

  "Who's goddam fucking upset?" he asked. Then he laughed. She didn't join him. It wasn't all that funny. "No, listen, baby," he continued. "I don't know how much loving me restricts you. That's not what it's meant for. All I can rightly claim on you is first dibs; and even then, only for as long as you're into it. If you meet someone along the way, just make sure you don't tell me who or where they are, because I'll have to kill them."

  "You're so understanding."

  "Gentle too." Pause. "Is that all?"

  "I don't know. I . . ."

  "Is it Dave?"

  "Well . . ." Long pause. "There is that little matter, yes."

  "He's got the major hots for you."

  "That's true."

  "And vice versa?"

  "Ummm. . ." The words a little appeared in her mind. She found them tacky, and refused to say them. It didn't make them go away.

  "I heard that," he said, grinning ruefully.

  "Heard what?"

  "'A little."'

  "What?" For a second, cold terror stole through her. Then she figured that her face must have betrayed her. "So you're a mind reader now, huh?" she said, struggling to sound nonchalant.

  "I have many powers, my dear, of which you are scarcely aware."

  "Like the power of presumption."

  "For example." He gave her an intimate, conspiratorial wink.

  "And what if I were to tell you that I don't want Dave . . . that I don't want anyone but you?"

  "I'd be thrilled, of course." He smiled. "But I wouldn't stake my life on it lasting forever. Like you said: we don't know what tomorrow may bring. And I've got a long way to go before I'm bankable enough to pull an equal load with you."

  "So?"

  "So Dave is."

  "Again"—a bit heatedly—"so?"

  "So I'm not any more of a chump than you are. If love were enough, we'd be married by now. It's got to be backed up by action, both for each other and for ourselves.

  "I'm not even remotely successful right now. You are. Dave most certainly is. If you wanna talk realistic, then you've gotta cop to the fact that Dave can take care of you much better than I can. He can help more than I can. He's got something in the neighborhood of 87,000 clear advantages over me."

  "But he doesn't love me like you do."

  "How does he love you?"

  "I'm not sure you could call what he feels for me love at all. He says he loves me. . ."

  "But he says that to all the girls?"

  "Just about." She laughed. 'Not really. Mostly he charms them into bed, gives them autographed records, and waves bye-bye. Or at least that's what I hear."

  "But he's more serious with you—"

  "You know something?" she cut in abruptly. "You sound like you're trying to sell me on him. And I'm not so sure that I like it."

  "I'm just trying to be realistic." He had the good sense not to mimic her voice. "And I want you to know something."

  "What?"

  "I want you." His eyes came around to bore into hers now. "I want you forever. Till the day I die." She tried to look away. He wouldn't let her. His hands held her face in position. "And I am going to do everything within my power to both earn and keep you. But I will not be held responsible for dragging you down."

  "Okay."

  "If you go with the rock star, I'll understand."

  "Okay."

  "I'll kill myself, but I'll understand."

  "I'll kill you!" she exclaimed, grabbing his throat with both hands. He rolled onto his back and let his tongue loll out limply. She giggled and squeezed. He gurgled and flailed. She threw herself on top of him and kissed his lips into silence.

  "Be a rock star," she whispered when their mouths disengaged. "You have what it takes. I believe in you. Whatsername from Polynote believes in you. Everyone who really knows you believes in you . . ."

  "So what else do I need?"

  "Round Four," she whispered slyly.

  "Oh, God," he groaned, face contorted in mock-horror. His limp penis shuddered in agreement. "It'll never play the violin again!"

  "Don't be so sure," she replied, taking him in hand. She made two expert motions, and Billy made sounds that he didn't even know were in him. Paganini arose, for the fifth time tonight; in the interest of fair play, Billy dipped a pair of rigid fingers inside her.

  "Never stop," she moaned. Her face glowed, in profile, beside him.

  "Never ever," he agreed.

  Then they came together, once again.

  In earnest.

  As if for the last time.

  SEVENTEEN

  CHRISTINE

  Six hours and as many Old Peculiers later, Christine had a fairly good idea of how to package things. Her earlier attempts to locate ineffable Roger Ferris had come to naught, and she was damned if she was going t
o leave this message on his machine.

  So she opted to forge ahead on her own, brainstorming a packaging-and-marketing strategy that would singe his short hairs. By two-fifteen she had a solid preliminary concept.

  She also had one Old Peculier too many.

  It wasn't that she was drunk; it was just that the smoke and clamor of the pub was exceeding its normal bounds. Which were considerable. Her eyes were red, her concentration was flagging, and the preponderance of yuppies and junior-yups was making her queasy. When the door swung open and another half-dozen piled in, she decided to take her leave.

  The floor tilted a little more than she'd expected. She lurched a teeny bit, narrowly avoiding the waitress fully laden tray, veering into a trio of undergrads instead. All of them took a moment to glare at her. "Life's a bitch," she informed them solemnly. "And then you die." They blanched visibly.

  No big deal. The world went on. The waitress was long gone, and the undergrads grabbed her vacated table. Maybe she was drunk, after all. No, she thought. It was just that the place was so ungodly crowded, the tables packed together like dead lemmings at the bottom of a cliff.

  The clientele of the Peculier pub was alarmingly young and painfully normal. Preppies, rapt in their collegiate cocoons, plus a spattering of their fully metamorphosed elders in primo yuppie form. No matter how she approached it, it was hard to take. She'd grown up in an age when the young people at least made a pretense of caring more for principle than capital; naive and bubble-headed though it was, they'd been light-years ahead of anything these droids had to offer.

  Christine was thirty-four: she'd reached the flower of her youth in the psychedelic defiance of the '60's. She'd been to Woodstock. She'd roamed the Village, bare-footed and blasted on purple microdot and the metaphysical message of love, burning into her nervous system like a neon tattoo. She'd fallen deeply for the music, which seemed to offer so much: a sense of purpose, a sense of unity.

  A sense of hope.

  It had taken another decade for her to put the pieces together. But she had straightened up, working her way into the business, accepting and adapting to the changes in taste and the times that were an inevitable part of forward motion. She'd been too young for the last one. She was determined to be ready for the next, which she felt was imminent. And she'd worked toward that readiness with a willful tenacity that would've terrified half the people in this room.

  Six more clean-cut college proto-droids reeled in through the doorway as she reached it. She slid out past them and into the night.

  It was 2:25 in the morning.

  The Greenwich Village nightlife was tapering off. Scattered pockets of pedestrians and scanty traffic passed her on her way down Waverly, heading for the cozy little Jane Street brownstone she called home. Her long blonde hair shimmered in the passing streetlight; next to the illuminated headlights and neon logos for Miller and Stroh's, it was the brightest thing there.

  As she made her way toward Jane Street and Ninth Avenue, she thought about Roger and the crazy sex-and-drugs-and rock 'n' roll business in which she had become embroiled. The rock 'n' roll was a consummate blast: it was great to be so close to the heart of the big-name acts, even from the tangential perspective of administrative assistant. Just being that close was more than a rush, she felt; it was an implicit facet of her unfolding destiny.

  And the drugs weren't really a problem; not for her, at any rate. She'd gone through all that years before. She had about as much desire to do coke as she had to flush gold bullion down the toilet. And as for the psychedelics, well . . .

  What did Alan Watts say? she thought. "Once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone." Drugs were no big deal.

  But the sex—

  Something scuttled in front of her. She gasped as a rat the size of a football scrambled out of the gutter to her left and across the street. It wobbled into the shadow of an illegally-parked truck and was gone.

  "Speaking of Roger . . ." she muttered, and giggled in spite of herself. After all, she was letting him get away with being such a scumbag. She was partly to blame. But only a little.

  "It's necessary," she told herself. She treated Roger's twisted needs with the same acceptance that a Grailer would grant a swamp that lay in the path of the Quest: an unpleasant, and unavoidable, leg of the journey. And never mind the stink.

  Which was why she'd let Roger fuck her into promotionability. Which was why she'd put up with the ropes and the rubber and the hideous lingerie and the insipid misogynistic fantasies.

  Which was also why she was a little afraid of backing away from him now, even though he was beginning to disgust her beyond the pale. She was too damned close. Too close to moving into a position of clout. Too close to her destiny. It is not, she reasoned, the worst concession I've had to make since Utopia showed me the two-by-fours propping up its false front.

  On the other hand, she added, maybe it is.

  Because Roger Ferris was a scumbag, and no shimmering vision of her glorious future could mince her around that fact. He was smooth and funny and really sharp (so long as you ignored the subtext); he was handsome and charismatic (so long as you stuck to the surface); he was good at his job, and he knew how to treat people (so long as you weren't his subordinate). And forget about bed.

  Past the first thirty seconds, it was hard to like Roger. All you could do was acknowledge him as an integral part of the landscape. He was there, immutable, and you would either have to go through him or somehow get around him if you wanted to get anywhere at all.

  She'd found a way through him. It had worked, but it wasn't pretty.

  She wondered if she would ever feel entirely clean again.

  Christine Brackett turned briskly onto Greenwich Street and the last leg of her journey. She felt, deep in her heart, a small shred of the Light: a speck of innocence kept clean and glowing as a halidom to her youth and a portend of her destiny. She was a good bit less than thrilled with the world in which she lived, and the Light that shimmered at the core of her being had been growing slowly dimmer for a long, long time.

  But she didn't want to die.

  So when the sudden rush of motion came out of the tiny construction site, behind and to her left, her spirit flared up like a Roman candle. She started to spin, body tensing in accordance with adrenaline and the will to survive. Her eyes, as always, focused on her assailant with psychotropic clarity—

  The gloved hand clamped down on her throat, squeezing off her air supply, holding her painfully in place. There was a striking and total gestalt flash of the face: sunken eyes hiding under the shadow of the hat's brim; piggy nose, puffy lips, and fat jowls; an Italian grandmother's growth of beard, wispy and thin, with a dimple the size of a pencil-tip eraser at the chin.

  Christine Brackett tried to scream, but no sound would come. The killer had seen to that. Her body refused to move, though her mind and her spirit screamed for her to run!

  But it was too late for that.

  The blade whirled. It put a blackhead-sized dimple in her flesh, sliced through it, forging the way for the widening and serrated edge that sawed a great puckering groove through her left lung and lodged within her exploding heart before the pain had a chance to register in her brain.

  And that was only the beginning of the end.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE CITY OF HOPES AND DREAMS

  Billy awoke, from a dreamless sleep, to the lilting strains of the garbage trucks on Tenth Avenue. The leap from sleep to wakefulness was clean and instantaneous. No fog. No fatigue. Not a thought in his head.

  Mona's clock, still bright-faced on the nightstand, pegged the time at 4:35.

  The garbagemen were as loud as the trucks. They didn't give a shit. They had, Billy realized, one of the most hideous, thankless jobs in all of Manhattan, keeping eight million people from being buried under their own excremental excess.

  On an ordinary night, Billy might have been pissed. But this was no ordinary night. All of his senses were crystal-clear
. Every creak of the truck's grinding jaws, gnawing rot. Ever flapping-jawed joke or complaint from the men. Every garbage-can bang or Hefty-bag fling. The idiosyncrasies of the engines. The rumble of rubber on damp concrete.

  Most of all he was aware of Mona: the heat and scent and sight of her, beside him in the bed. There was something so impossibly perfect about it, so unspeakably beautiful, that his rational mind was uncustomarily pleased to be silent while his senses drank her in.

  I love you, he thought to her, smiling. His right arm was around her curved shoulders, holding her close. The light through the window was sufficient to reveal every curve of her body through the covering of the sheets. Her face, in sleeping, was tension-free: soft, oblivious, too gorgeous for words. This is almost too good, he told himself, tasting her on his tongue.

  But I gotta get up, another voice, also his own, informed him. No way I'm gonna get back to sleep. I'm wide awake.

  Quietly, carefully, he pulled his right arm out from under her, eased himself away. She let out a short, sweet mewling sound, curled herself around a pillow, and was still again. It was clear there would be no waking her; not even the fifty-megaton rumbling of the trucks was enough.

  It took a minute to assemble all his clothing off the floor: it had been rather literally thrown off, in all directions. The whole ordeal of dressing silently in the dark was slightly arduous.

  Cleaning up my room was easier, he mused. It prompted a laugh that was hard to swallow. The thought wish I were already dressed flashed across his mind.

  And, of course, it worked.

  And then he went naw, and silently undressed, and then put his clothes back on again by hand. It was too easy.

  Billy took one last adoring look at Mona, then snuck out through the door. Grabbed his jacket off the living room couch. Tiptoed through Lisa's room, thinking God, this must be beautiful-woman Heaven as he peeked at her sleeping form.