by K. W. Jeter
TWENTY-TWO
I POINTED the Hudson toward the low-rent district.
Even lower-rent than the usual areas I hung out in. I had a plan finally cooking in my head, going from the general intent of killing Identrope to the specific details of how to go about it.
There was always a heavy recruitment by Identrope going on in the Madlands’ entrance subzone. Basically, the flophouse district of the pseudo-L.A., the crumbling industrial outskirts of the city; it was where people hit when they were first making the transition from dabblers in the zone’s pleasurable effects to full-fledged habitués, unable to tear themselves away. Also your basic wino zone, except instead of sluicing their brains away with fortified Mad Dog and Wild Irish Rose (though there were plenty of empty short bottles of those littering the gutter, too; it came with the territory drawn up from the archives), the down-and-otters were the ones who had already stayed too long in the zone and were just about to go under the n-formation tide.
As a matter of course, Identrope’s enticements went over big with this subject population. You got your old-timers who were coming to the end of their string in the Madlands, and who needed to check into the web quick; plus a certain percentage of the relative newcomers would suffer a collapse of bravado as soon as the first n-formation symptoms showed up, and these would go hotfooting it immediately to the sanctuary of Identrope’s embrace. This wasn’t even counting all those from outside the Madlands, who’d caught Identrope’s show on the air and came straight to the zone to dive into the salvation. Naturally, the low-rent district on the city’s outskirts would be where these faithful types would first be spotted.
The notion I was working on was that I could blend in with a small group of converts who were about to make the trek up the web. If I stayed in the middle of them and kept my head down, there was a good chance that Identrope or any of his minions wouldn’t recognize me—these mass altar calls were usually handled like running a sheep-dip. Once I was up there, I could slip away and get into the headquarters, and wing it from there.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it at least had the virtue of simplicity. And if I had to abandon it at any point along the way, I wouldn’t be giving up much.
The only other preparation I had made was to dig a little 9mm out of its hiding place, duct-taped to the back of the toilet in the second apartment. It was a short-barreled piece, so long-distance accuracy was not one of its virtues. But I figured I’d be working up close with Identrope when the time came. If I needed to, I could put the muzzle up to his head.
The 9mm hung in my inside jacket pocket; I could feel the weight against my heart whenever I cranked the Hudson’s wheel around to make a corner.
Out on the streets, the low-rent types were doing their usual listless promenade. Little clusters of them hung around the dirty windows of flophouse lobbies, peering in to see the flickering TV screens in the dark corners, past the old rummies sprawled on sagging couches. The blank faces all looked to see if Identrope had come on yet; that was what they were waiting for.
Those were the newcomers or the true believers. The zone habitués touched with the first signs of n-formation did a zombie shuffle up and down the cracked sidewalks, stumbling off the curbs into the strata of yellowing trash in the gutters. They wandered across the streets without even looking to see if there were any cars coming along to flatten them.
This was a depressing, dead-end territory. What didn’t smell like piss smelled like fried food, dark grease soaked right into the brick walls. My heart didn’t sink so much as draw back in my rib cage, looking for the nearest way out.
There were some likely candidates for my concealing herd of sheep. I’d have to park the Hudson down some alley, and get out and walk around. Enough people looked ready to go, to make the trek to the promised land—I could organize them easily enough myself, and get them heading toward the web’s downtown anchor point.
Through the windshield, something caught my eye. A face different from the others. It didn’t have that blank, waiting look, that vacant expectation of either disaster or salvation. The face had the normal human qualities, ideas, and dreams moving behind the eyes. And sharper than usual; those eyes had hunger in them, too.
I only caught a glimpse of the face; not enough to make a positive ID. One of those flashes, a blur, as though seen in a car zipping by in the opposite direction. The milling crowd on the sidewalk swallowed up the face.
Like trying to remember a dream, when there’s only a little piece of it left in your head when you wake up. And you can’t get rid of that piece; it just keeps rattling against your skull as you tug and tug on a piece of string that goes nowhere.
I pushed down against the steering wheel, raising my butt off the seat, the top of my head brushing against the Hudson’s roof liner—just so I could try and see over the crowd, to spot this guy again. No luck.
An open space at the curb—or there would be if one of these wandering assholes would get back up on the sidewalk. I nudged the geek with the nose of the car, and he barely noticed. I had to goose the accelerator hard enough to shove him sprawling onto the cracked concrete.
I parked and got out. Craning my neck, I looked around for that face I had spotted.
“Hey—” An aggrieved voice howled behind me. I turned and saw the guy I’d knocked over with the car. Unshaven, smelling like three weeks on a flophouse mattress, with pink infected eyes. He lifted up his hands, the palms abraded raw by his landing on the sidewalk.
“Hey—” Louder; it seemed to be the limit of his vocabulary.
I pulled a dollar out of my pocket and thrust it at him. “Buy yourself some Band-Aids.”
The dollar fluttered to the guy’s greasy shoes. He was still waving his stigmatized hands around as I pushed my way through the other shuffling figures.
The crowd parted before me, closed up behind. I thought I saw him, the face, up ahead.
Hands grabbed the front of my jacket and pulled me around. “Wanna buy a parrot?”
“What the—”
A bearded face this time, a real beard, not just somebody with no use for a razor. Salt-and-pepper, foliage thick. A hat with a grosgrain ribbon around the crown.
“A parrot!” The bearded guy had a seriously demented look in his eye. “Doesn’t talk! You don’t want a bird that talks!”
“Yeah, you’re right about that.” I didn’t want any goddamned birds at all. I tried to unclamp his boulder-like hands from my jacket, but failed.
He let go of his own accord, so he could pull open his sweat-stained shirt. A big yank, elbows out; he threw his head back, with his chest swelling up.
At first I thought he had an extensive tattoo job. Birds, green feathers glistening. Then the tattoos moved.
This was an n-formation development I hadn’t seen before. A new twist on cellular anarchy. The man’s body was changing into another species, fragmenting into several different individuals. A riot of tropical birds, compressed beneath a thin transparent membrane that looked ready to split open at any time. The birds would burst into the city sky, screeching their sudden freedom. His bones would be left maybe, ribs like denuded tree branches.
A beady eye, near where his clavicle had once been, looked at me. I turned and fled, diving into the crowd’s yielding mass.
Now I didn’t want to find anything except the Hudson again. I’d gotten turned around by the bird guy—one of the more baroque manifestations of the n-formation disease’s humorous approach to reality—and couldn’t tell down what street I’d left the car. The business about finding the face I’d spotted—that had been a whim, I told God under my breath. Just one of those momentary brain spurts. Just let me find the car and get out of here. I was having an open-air claustrophobic reaction—the dread of other people’s bodies close up to mine
I bumped straight into somebody’s chest, the impact nearly knocking both of us over. The man grabbed my arm to keep himself from falling backward. I looked around at him and saw the face.
>
This close, I knew immediately where I’d seen it before. A million times.
It was my own face. The one that I’d been born with. That I’d left sleeping blankly up in its hiding place in Identrope’s web.
And here it was, walking around on its own, my original body attached beneath it.
“Watch where you’re going, why don’t ya?”
My face didn’t recognize me.
TWENTY-THREE
I TOOK him someplace to get a cup of coffee.
Didn’t even know what his name was. Or what my name was—I mean, what name that original body of mine was operating under. Or whatever.
He eyed me—with my eyes, whoever was walking around behind my face—with deep distrust, when I came on friendly toward him
“I don’t exactly know what it is you’re after, mister, but why don’t you just fuck off? I don’t think I’d be very interested.”
Where’d that shitkicker persona come from? The way he talked intrigued me even more. He sounded like he came out of some museum of cracker mannerisms.
“Hey—” I laid a carefully gauged hand on his sleeve. “Don’t get into a sweat over it. I just want to talk to you for a couple minutes. All right? No big deal.” I pulled on his arm—my arm, formerly—and gave him a salesman’s smile. “Come on. What’s it going to cost you?”
I let go and took a few steps away. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him standing there on the sidewalk, the liquid crowd swirling around this stone. His face, my old face, was a study in doubt. Then he shrugged and followed after me. I could read that one easily enough: he didn’t have anything else to do, or place to be.
A couple blocks away, I steered him into what looked like the coffee shop of the dead. There were as many flies on their backs as doughnut crumbs under the counter’s plastic domes. We grabbed the only booth that didn’t have somebody sleeping in it, facedown on folded arms. The coffee the waitress brought us had been simmered to kerosene.
The guy with my face gulped down half his cup, the chemical taste notwithstanding, and eyed the decrepit, age-cracked pies in the cabinet behind the counter. It didn’t thrill me that somebody walking around inside my body was that desperately hungry. I ordered him a slice of whatever looked recently edible, and watched him wolf it, head lowered to his shoveling fork.
He was halfway through a second piece before he slowed down, possibly to take a breath. I sat across from him, arm draped over the back of the torn plastic seat, watching him. He looked up at me as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“See?” I nodded toward the one and a half empty plates. “I told you it’d be worth your while.”
He studied the constellation of crumbs on the table, as though they spelled some important message in code.
“Been a while since you ate?”
His turn to nod. “Yeah. Sometimes I forget.”
“Sure. We all do, fella. It’s the pace of modern life.”
My old face darkened with anger. “You shouldn’t make fun of me, mister.”
I raised my hand in a pacifying gesture. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” I’d had a little time to study him. My suspicions were starting to gel. “What’s your name, fella?”
Silence. I’d expected as much.
His walking around in my original body went a little way in clearing up some mysteries. Such as what I’d observed a few times before when I’d been sneaking around Identrope’s web, and had thought I’d found signs of the body having been tampered with. No third party had done it; it seemed obvious now that this guy, the mind inside the body, had been doing it all along. Unplugging himself and climbing down the web to go for a little stroll, then going back up and tucking himself in. The only problem with that explanation is that it didn’t cover what he was, that he could do something like that. And where he’d come from.
“You don’t have a name?”
A shake of the head. “Not rightly.”
“What do people call you?”
“Don’t call me nothin’. I don’t talk to folks much.”
That seemed obvious. The guy used his voice like somebody who’d never driven a car trying to figure out how the pedals worked.
I tried a different tack. I’d been catching a familiar radiation from him, something darker and even more personal than just seeing my own face. “What do people call . . people like you?”
His head jerked up as though he’d gotten an electric prod in the spine. Eyes wide in alarm, then narrowed in suspicion, trying to decode the message in the face across the table. “What do you know about that?”
I smiled at him. “I know all sorts of things. Like what people talk about. Or what they whisper. Things they’re afraid of. That’s why you have to be careful, isn’t it? So they don’t find out.”
He watched me with a wordless, animal-like apprehension.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw that the place had gone empty, as if on cue. Big vacant spaces wrapped around us, the walls and Formica counter being wheeled silently away. I turned back around and leaned over an empty coffee cup, my current face close to my original.
“I know what that word is. That you hear all those people saying, out there on the street.”
His hands twisted together, squeezing the knuckles bloodless. “What they call me . . . if they knew . . .” A blue vein ticked at the corner of his brow. “D . . .”
He wanted to say d-ranger, but he could only squeeze out the one syllable, the single letter.
I eased up on him “So they’d call you D. If they knew. That must be your name, then.”
He looked at me with desperate gratitude, his face studded with sweat. “Yeah . . .”
“Okay, D.” It was as handy as anything else would be; I had to call him something. “You come from up there, don’t you?” I used a tilt of my head to point upward.
“Up there?”
“The web.”
He nodded. “There’s this big burning thing all the time . . .”
“Yeah, right. What happens? I mean, when you’re up there.”
A shrug. “I don’t know. Sometimes I just . . . wake up. Hungry, like.”
He couldn’t mean hungry in the ordinary sense; when I went on my usual maintenance visits to the web, I always made sure he was hooked up to Identrope’s nutrient lines.
D read what I was thinking “Not hungry for food. Something else.”
“And this is where you come for it?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I can find it here.”
“What is it?” I didn’t figure he’d know the term o-positive; I wanted to hear how he’d describe it.
“It’s . . . stuff.” His gaze drifted away from me. “You can’t see it. But it’s there. It’s inside . . .” He gestured toward the dive’s door and the street beyond. “Them. It’s like glue, or something. It’s what keeps all those people out there from falling apart. Becoming . . . other things.”
That was an adequate definition of the o-positive substance’s reality-organizing ability. The guy inside that old body of mine wasn’t stupid, at least. I would’ve hated for a complete moron to have been walking around with a face that used to be mine
He went on talking; I didn’t have to prompt. As though he were making a confession to me.
“I don’t hurt them. I just take a little bit at a time. They can spare that much, can’t they? And I don’t take it all from one person. I spread it around, just a little sip from a whole bunch of people. So’s they don’t even notice it missing. That’s all right, ain’t it?”
“Sure.” I nodded sympathetically. I’d done worse in my time.
D looked at his hands spread flat on the booth’s table. “I’d be lying to you if I said it was just ’cause I didn’t want to hurt ’em. I don’t care about ’em one way or the other. Some of these people, you see ’em out there, you can tell they want to be dead or something, but dead some way so they’d know they were; like sleeping, but different.” He shook his head, human complexities o
paque to him. “So it’s not that; it’s just that I can’t take too much of that stuff from them. ’Cause I’m sick. But not really. Not sick like them. It’s all complicated, mister.”
I knew what he was trying to say. Complicated sicknesses were my specialty.
D’s problem was that he was infected with the n-formation disease, but had found a way to live with it, just as I had. More than that: n-formation had enabled him to be in the first place. In a true way, he was a creature of the disease, as though a virus had learned to walk like a man. I had tried to keep that original body of mine infection-free, but the Madlands’ effect had seeped in despite my efforts. Maybe from the proximity of all those other infected bodies on Identrope’s web; maybe from some deep underlying perturbation in the reality field. At any rate, I was sitting across from the result.
A precarious balance had to be maintained by this D fellow. I could see his situation right from the get-go. He wasn’t tapping off the o-positive substance from the Madlands habitués and selling it, the way I had been; he was living off it. On a food-versus-merchandise basis, that put him on a moral level above me. I didn’t mind. But D’s life—such as it was—was also dependent on the n-formation disease that he carried and that enabled him to tap the o-positive. Consequently, he had to be careful not to tap too much of the o-positive, or he might actually cure himself of the disease, or at least throw it into remission, and then he’d starve to death, unable to get any more o-positive. At the same time, he couldn’t tap too little of it, or the disease might blossom into full-fledged multi-cancer, and then his little ass would really be fried. The guy was on a tightrope made out of razor blades.
My analytic mode, sitting across from D and taking him apart with my eyes, kept on rolling. It suddenly struck me where the guy’s cornpone personality came from, or at least where I had first encountered it. D’s manner and appearance was a dead-on take of that ancient 1930s Dust Bowl refugee Tom Joad; not the precise Steinbeck character, but Henry Fonda in the movie of The Grapes of Wrath. With my expertise in rooting around in the archives, I should have spotted it sooner.