by Emma Bull
The unfocused camaraderie vanished from his face and voice. “ ’S not Midsummer anymore.” His sunken eyes were bright with resentment.
“Just curious. I don’t care if you drink.” Thump — a second pointed sentence between the shoulders of Cassidy’s amour propre. No doubt the picador also thinks of it as self-defense.
Cassidy frowned down at his knotty fingers. There was a freshly scabbed cut on the back of his left hand, and I wondered, with a jolt of disgust, if he remembered how he’d come by it. In a few seconds that thought came back in my face. Well.
“How’ve you been?” I said, in lieu of apology.
He shrugged. “I’ve been like me, I guess. Like last night, only sweatier.”
“Did I see you last night?” I asked after a moment. My spine felt as if someone was about to hit me there.
“Course you did,” he said, looking hurt. “I bought you a drink.”
“That was nice of you. Where were we?”
“The Merciful Trap. Don’t you remember?”
“Let’s pretend I don’t.”
He’d had too much beer to notice the way I said it. “And you think I have a drinking problem. Yeah, you were burnin’ it last night. Dancing, buying rounds. You asked the band for a bunch of songs I never heard of.” He smiled at me. “They threw you out when they poured one round more than you could swap for.”
He hadn’t had too much beer. He must have watched my face shut up during that recitation, and known that it was an even trade for my unkindness. “Ah. I’m surprised you’ll be seen with me after that.”
“I’m savin’ your reputation,” he said. “Hey — will you introduce me to the redhead? The one with the shoes?”
“What redhead?” I asked, frightened.
“Oh, hell. You really don’t remember? Or are you just being a shit? When they tossed you at The Mercy, she went with you. And the guy dressed in gray, too, with the silvertones. They were worried about you.”
I wished I’d had the sense to be worried about me. But I couldn’t have. I hadn’t really been there. “What was I drinking?”
“Beer.”
“Was I taking anything else?”
“How should I know? You weren’t even drunk when they threw you out. Just kind of warmed up. You were maybe a little crazy, but not like you were dosed.”
“Such fine distinctions. If I wasn’t drunk, why don’t I remember anything?”
That startled him. “I don’t know. Hey, are you just saying you don’t remember so you don’t have to introduce me to the redhead?”
I smiled. “Me? The one who guarded fire for the Devil? Would I do a thing like that?”
“Like what?” said Dana from behind me, in her whiskey-liqueur voice. Of course; what was Leander without Hero? Cassidy was drunk, so it followed that Dana must be within striking distance.
She trailed a hand across my shoulders as she came around the table, sat in the chair between us, and laid her palm over Cassidy’s long, sharp-boned fingers. Dana couldn’t talk to anyone without touching. For someone like me, an acquaintance with Dana was a torture akin to water dripping slowly on one’s forehead.
“Cassidy thinks he’s found a chink in my obliging nature.”
“Shut up, Sparrow,” Cassidy said. Oh, Cassidy. I could have told her it was three redheads, and Dana wouldn’t have cared.
I’d have said Dana took her style from Bette Davis movies, if I thought she’d had access to them. Maybe she practiced in front of a mirror. Those Dana had access to. Her suit was metallic brown, fitted close to her tiny waist and just-ripe hips. Her silvery-blond hair fell forward over one shoulder, the end knotted off halfway down her breast with a black velvet ribbon. Her skin was smooth and faintly, rosily tan, all over her face and throat and disappearing between the lapels of her jacket. She had a supernatural artifice about her that made one want to pour water over her head just to test the strength of the illusion.
It occurred to me suddenly that it was a remarkably expensive illusion. The fabric and tailoring of the suit suggested the money that the nightbabies, in their mud and rags, pretended not to have. What was it that Dana did, when she wasn’t disturbing Cassidy?
“So, did you see me out carousing last night?” I asked her.
“No. Were you?”
“Cassidy says so.”
“Then it must be true.” She riffled a fingertip over Cassidy’s jutting knuckles, as if they were piano keys. Cassidy looked overwrought and a little ill. Alcohol and unrequited love will do that. Dana’s attention remained on me, the intensity turned up full. She’d caught a whiff of the bizarre; her nose never failed her. “Did you have a bang time? You don’t usually get radded up, do you?”
I would not tell Dana about the blackouts. The genuinely freakish always moved Dana to pity. She would exclaim over me; she would advise me, with relish; she would recommend the counsel of her friends, who were legion; and worst, she would pet me. Then Cassidy would probably be sick on the table. “I woke up today feeling as if I’d missed my own funeral,” I said. True, so far as it went.
Dana shook her head. “Is something troubling you? You shouldn’t zero yourself out, sugar. You could dig yourself a hole awful fast.” She clutched my shoulder. “You’re so thin already.”
“Like coiled steel.”
She let go. Her coral liptint was faintly luminous; when she pressed her lips together, they made a glowing rosebud in her face. “Well, at least if you ruin your health, you’ll have your friends.”
“Whew,” I said.
But she wasn’t done. Now she was squinting at the bruise on my face. “And where’s that from?”
“I walked into a door.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “I only want to help.”
“Then it’s too bad you weren’t there when I met the door.” Cassidy, who had looked hurt, now looked affronted as well. He was busy, since he had to be affronted for two; Dana wasn’t doing her share. I hadn’t the heart to watch him work so hard for long. “Well, it’s been an interesting day, and I’m past helping, that’s all. I got sunstroke, rode around with a madwoman, square-danced with Jammers, and was spoken to in tongues. Bare civility is the best I can do.”
I spotted my mistake, and cursed myself for a boiled-brained idiot. Dana’s eyes, and Cassidy’s, were opened wide. Cassidy’s lips parted as if there were a membrane of soap between them and he meant to blow it into a bubble. But Dana got the words out first.
“Jammers! Sugar, did they say anything?”
I closed my eyes, took a breath, let it out. “I don’t remember,” I said.
Cassidy shook his head, very grave. “You should try to. Jammers are kind of like holy innocents. They say what the universe wants you to hear.”
My pal, the helpless drunk, wanted to interpret my oracle. Maybe he was giving up on interpreting Dana. I steepled my fingers and studied them, to keep from meeting Cassidy’s eyes, and said brightly, “Is there anyone in this damn place taking orders, or is it help yourself tonight?”
“Oh, Sparrow, come on,” Dana said. “Was it scary?”
Well, that was my opening. I could make a great story out of it — Dana would love it.
“It was like walking through a cloud of human-sized gnats. It was annoying. They stink.” That would have gotten me nine eggshells on my doorstep from a hoodoo, but I didn’t think the Jammers would mind slander. And Dana’s sense of romance could never tolerate bad smells.
“Y’know,” Cassidy said, “the Jammers are the only people who aren’t alone.” I looked at him, but his eyes were on some middle distance over my shoulder. “I mean, none of us can know what’s going on in each other’s heads. We all agree” — he shrugged, hunting words — “on what color the sky is. But how do we know we’re seeing the same color? That’s lonely, man, that’s cold.” He shook his head.
“But the Jammers are supposed to be in each other’s heads all the time, right? So there’s always somebody who knows exactly what it’s like
.” He stopped, and blinked.
It was one of those moments of genuine, unalloyed thought that sometimes came on him, appearing out of his mental mists like synaptic ghost ships. I found that my gaze had fallen on Dana, and that she was watching me with the idle patience of a cat.
I stood up. “I have to go. I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.” Cassidy’s bleak and startled face was a rebuke. I pushed the glass across the table to him and strode out, heading up again.
I didn’t get far; Dana’s confiding, confining hand on my arm stopped me. “Sparrow,” she said, low against the background noise of the Fair. “You can’t be alone all the time, honey. If you’re in some kind of trouble, and I can help, you come to me, hear?” Perfect skin, flawless hair, costly clothes, and the time to involve herself in other people’s business. If throwing money and influence at the problem could solve it, she probably could help. “Thank you, Dana,” I said. “But there’s really nothing wrong.” This time when I moved off, she didn’t follow.
Maybe secrets are toxic to the organism. Maybe, when kept long enough, they always produced the intellectual and emotional nausea that had suddenly made me want to match Cassidy drink for drink. Born alone in our skulls; living alone there; dying alone. With the grave, then, to keep the secrets. For a moment I’d wanted, desperately, not to be alone, the way people in hiding for too long will dash out into daylight, in front of the guns, just to end the waiting.
I walked through the Fair: shrill and brittle and tawdry, a savorless night with anger lying just under its curling edges. A while ago this had been my country, and I’d returned to it relieved and glad. Now it was as welcoming as a carnival midway. Give us your money and get out. Strings of bulbs giving half their rated light reflected in puddles of what might have been water. Hucksters called from their booths as if everyone’s first name was Hey.
There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. The dead should feel right at home.
I bought a ticket on the GravAttack, hoping that speed and spin, fear and adrenaline, would wash me clean. The closed wheel smelled of rust, sweat, and hot alcohol from the generator; my fellow rubes shrieked; pitch-dark alternated with flashes of light; and centrifugal force mashed my back into the padded bay. I felt as if the wall of my body cavity would give way and let my organs out — but my mind wasn’t so fragile. My mood survived the ride undisturbed.
So I unfolded my last paper portrait of A. A. Albrecht and bought a ride on the Snake’s Tail from a vivacious man dressed in tinsel. The drops fell on my tongue from the little tube in his hand. It tasted like spearmint and red pepper. In five minutes the Night Fair stretched from sea to sea, shining.
I was turning the pages of a rotting paperback at a junkstall (each newsprint page crackled brightly as I turned it, like static electricity in the dark) when a hand closed over my arm. “Hello!” said its owner. “How are you?”
He was tall, with a great, fine white smile that was only a little enhanced by the Snake. He wore a lovely silver-gray suit, like a politician or a talk-show host. His hair, which curled, was a delicate pink, like the inside of a shell. His skin was fine-textured and pale. Over his eyes and ears he wore a pair of silvertones, which would be making his world as bright and beautiful as mine, except that his would be real and mine was a hallucination. My spike of jealousy confused me. So did the feeling that I was supposed to recognize him. “All recovered?” he asked, his fingers tight on my wrist. He was pulling me away from the junkstall.
I didn’t recognize him — but of course, this was the man in gray that Cassidy had mentioned. Still in gray twenty-four hours later. An affectation. I scorned affectation. I tried to scorn him.
“No, no,” he said, laughing. “Myra’ll have my ass if you scoot away now. We’ve got us a conversation to finish.” He pulled me toward the middle of the pavement. Why was he laughing? He was hurting my wrist. At the end of the block where the crowd thinned, I could see a woman standing under a pair of oil lamps. Her hair was the color of dark cherries.
The air went out of my lungs. It had been knocked out, I realized. Riding the Snake’s Tail does that, sometimes, reverses cause and effect. I was sitting in the street, and the man in the silvertones was no longer attached to my wrist. Now he was holding on to someone else, who seemed to be having trouble standing up. He had stopped laughing. The someone else was creasing the lapels of the lovely gray jacket, but other than that, I got no clear impression of him. Next to all that silver and gray and fragile pink, the newcomer seemed like a dim spot on my eye. Down the block, the woman with the cherry-colored hair was coming toward us.
“Jesus, I’m awfully sorry,” said the newcomer, who was still having trouble standing up. “I really don’t — oh, jeez! God, I’m really sorry.”
The man in gray had fallen. A noise like a blast of whiteness came from behind me, and I realized it was a truck horn. Then the truck was between me and the man in gray, and the other one, who’d been having trouble standing, was half dragging me across the street.
I was beginning to feel like a snatched purse. The Snake was tapering off a bit, and I could almost conceive of events outside my mind that might be urgent, so I pulled against his grip.
“Stop that,” said my new companion, in such an ordinary voice that I did. He hurried me up four steps and pushed me down into a hard seat. Just before a pair of doors flew open before me onto darkness, I realized I was m a car for the haunted house ride, I tried to bolt over the side, but the stranger pulled me back. Don’t worry, said his voice, unaccountably pleased, near my ear. “There’s nothing here that’s not dead.”
2.1: You have to invite them in
A skeleton dropped, phosphorescent with grave mold, in front of us, and was snatched away just before its toes brushed my face. The man next to me said, as if he hadn’t noticed, “You don’t want to go back out there yet, anyway. Those two’ll be right behind us.”
The corridor ahead was misty white with webbing; a hundred little movements, of things the size of my fist, scuttled in the haze. I ducked just as the car plunged sharply about four feet. It put my stomach directly under my tonsils, but we passed untouched under the things. I was reasonably sure they weren’t real, anyway.
The car flung around a corner, where a woman in white rotated at the end of a rope. Her face was swollen, purple, and authentic. My self-control was feeling gnawed at. “What is this?” I said.
“It’s a rescue. We kinda slow tonight? Here comes our stop.”
The tunnel in front of us was an illusion, painted on another door that swung open and pitched us into a hall of mirrors. The stranger yanked me out of the car as it took a ninety-degree turn, and I fell full-length on the floor. I could hear the next car hurtling through the doors, so I scrambled. A mirror yielded before us; I caught a glimpse of us before it folded back, our faces strange and wild in the dim light. Then we passed through stuffy blackness and out into the sharp-edged gloom of the Night Fair.
We ran for perhaps six blocks. I had no choice; his hold on my wrist was adamant, though not painful. We stopped when I stumbled for the third time, my breath sore in my windpipe. We’d reached the chainlink border of the Fair. He let the wire stop him and rolled until his back was against it, propped up on the fence. He was panting, too, and clutching his left side. His eyes were closed, his face set in concentration. I dropped onto the curb and took inventory of him. Not every stranger rescues me from the pink-haired, bug-eyed monsters. Or whatever he’d just done.
He was a little sharp-featured, but a wide mouth and dark thick eyebrows saved his face from austerity. His hair was foxy brown, glossy in the oil-lamp light. I could imagine people telling him he was handsome. Bad for his character, probably. He had a tapering, athletic look, and long legs. I was surprised at how much the six blocks seemed to have taken out of him. He looked more durable than that. He wore a polished cotton jacket in the style the SouthAm meres had affected, back before the Big Bang. It might have b
een that old, too; the glossy finish had dimmed along every surface subject to friction.
He opened his eyes, and they seemed to take a moment to clear, as if he’d been in pain and it was passing away. His eyes were darker than I’d expected, piercing as the stare of some fearless animal. They fastened on me and he grinned, wide and crooked.
“Well, thank you,” he said.
“What?”
“Never mind.” With the whole of his mobile face, he was laughing at me. He just wasn’t using his lungs.
I folded my arms over my knees, as if I was prepared to stay where I was in spite of him or an entire migratory flock of gray-suited, pink-haired men. “So, what the hell did you do that for?”
He looked confused for a moment. Then he dropped down onto the curb next to me, stretched out his legs, and leaned back on his elbows. “Nothing personal. I’m figuring to get to heaven on the strength of my good deeds.” His grin was strictly nonporous; nothing would get past it.
I looked at him, my mouth partway open in case some telling comment came to mind, and waited for the explanation that was owed me. He would realize it soon, that he owed me.
“Okay, okay. But you gotta keep this to yourself, all right?” He shifted on the pavement, settling in for a long chat. “I’m an agent from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Those folks back there are ops of the Nic government in exile. See, they thought you were one of our guys.” He shook his head. “Probably figured to torture you for the location of our headquarters. ”
I made my eyes big. “Then if they try again, I just have to click my heels together three times to get away?”
“You got it.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Oh! I’m sorry.” He smiled and stuck out his right hand. “Mick Skinner. Call me Mick, or Skinner, or whatever you want.”