by Emma Bull
He had a quarter twist of accent that I thought might be Texas. There was no guile in his face, only an alert sort of sweetness (except for those eyes). It annoyed me. Either Mick Skinner was the village idiot, or he didn’t rate me high enough to deserve a little cunning. Unless that was the most thorough cunning of all.
Then I recalled that the people in the City who would know his joke could be numbered on one hand and leave fingers left over. Only a few more would have gotten mine, about the heels. But he had.
Stiffly, I said, “If you work for the City, I just live here.”
He smiled the impenetrable grin. “Hell, no. I just got here. Not long ago, anyway. It’s not a good thing to work for the City?”
“Depends on the work.” I stood up. “From the samples you’re giving out, I’d say you’re a traveling fertilizer salesman.”
“And you’re not buying.”
“You want something to grow around here, try sprinkling some truth on it.” I looked at him expectantly.
“Ooo-kay.” The truth, to judge from his face, gave him less pleasure. “They thought you might be me.”
I waited for something more; when it didn’t come, I said, “Gosh, we do look so much alike.”
“They don’t know what I look like. They’re hunting on the basis of something else.”
“What?”
“Just something else. Last night I — in the bar, you did things they thought were a giveaway. So they bagged you.”
In front of the brownstone that edged the sidewalk was a ruined wrought-iron fence. I caught and held it to keep me still. Last night. My whole downtime seemed to have been in the spotlight last night, illuminated for everyone but me. “You mean they expected you to order drinks you couldn’t pay for and get kicked out of a club?”
He seemed to find that quietly funny. “Nooo. That was when you began to act like somebody else to throw ’em off the scent. Too late, though.”
Now I had motives, too, out of my control, beyond my comprehension. I wished that the curb was twenty feet high, so I could throw myself off it. And drag Mick Skinner with me. “What else do you know about last night?”
A swift look up into my face. It wasn’t startled or guilty or meaningful at all; it was just a look. “Nothing,” he said.
“And how do you know it?”
“I was there.”
“The hell you say. In what capacity?”
“An observer of the human condition.”
I figured out, then, what his eyes reminded me of. I’d once seen a pet wolf, tame as any dog, loyal and trusty and true. But around the eyes was an incipient feral craziness, a sense that this animal didn’t figure the odds like a real dog did. Skinner’s eyes made his most earnest expression seem ironic.
I pushed off from the railing. “Sure. I’ll go find the guy in the gray suit and ask him.”
“No!” Skinner sat up with a wince. “My God, don’t go making deals with those people, they’ll peel you like an onion. Your one chance now is to make sure they mark you for an innocent bystander.”
I was shaking. Maybe it was anger. Maybe not. “You listen to me. You have no business knowing one goddamn thing about my life. You have no business giving me advice. If I bump into that guy again, I’m going to tell him what you look like and where you are. Then you’ll all be out of my hair.”
Skinner scrubbed at his face with both hands. My getting angry hadn’t scared him. “Well, for your sake, I hope it’s that easy. Jesus, I’m beat. You from around here?”
He spoke as if the question were friendly, the answer inconsequential. But that line of inquiry is one of my least favorite. “No,” I said. And, “Indiana,” I lied.
“Kee-rist. You came up the river? When?”
“Long time ago. I don’t remember it.”
Skinner shook his head. “Last time I passed that way, you had to be careful somebody didn’t eat you. I didn’t mean that far back, though. D’you live around here?”
Now, what was I supposed to make of that? “Yes and no.”
He worried that in his head; I took pleasure in watching him do it. “Let me put it this way. I need someplace to crash tonight. You know anybody might lend me a corner?”
The Snake is a strange set of chemicals. You think it’s worn off long ago; when it really lets you go, you think someone opened a trapdoor under your feet. Suddenly you see the world with the ghastly accuracy you took it to escape from in the first place. In the middle of Mick Skinner’s speech, I fell off the Snake’s Tail. All distortion, illusion, alteration of mood, emptied out and left me beset with a clear head. With it, I recognized several things: First, that I wanted to go home.
Second, that Mick Skinner did not owe me. I owed him. I didn’t know what the man in gray had wanted; but my wrist still ached where he’d had hold of it. I had been given a drug the night before by someone who was not concerned that I have a good time on it. And tonight I might have ended up in something vile, if this bastard hadn’t carried me off like a bandit stealing a chicken. The obligation might have been forced on me, but I couldn’t deny that I had one to Skinner.
Third, that Mick Skinner had just asked a favor of me.
With a strong sense of martyrdom, I accepted all three revelations. “You have any problems with tall buildings?” I asked.
He looked up, startled, shaken out of a focused expression that looked like an exercise in mind control. “Hell, no.”
“Some people do,” I added, hopeful. But of course, none of them were him. No mercy for me tonight. “Come on. I owe you.” I turned and headed up the street, not waiting to see if he followed.
The possibility had crossed my mind, as I spoke, that I was going to commit suicide after all, that I’d chosen my method in showing a stranger where I lived. I didn’t trust Mick Skinner. But like that wolf, there was something straightforward about him, that was part of his alienness. He would do what was smart, what made sense. I just had to keep watching him for signs of hunger. That, at least, was the rationalization.
A block later, he said cautiously, “And I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”
“Did I say I liked you? I said I owed you.”
“No, you don’t. They thought you were me; it was my fault. I’d have felt bad if they got hold of you. Purely selfish on my part.”
“Philosophical tail-chasing,” I muttered. He walked beside me in contemplative silence, as if he hadn’t heard me anyway.
The only break in that silence happened at the sight of the car. It was long enough that in parts of town it might scrape walls when it turned, black enough to have been cut from Death’s own tailcoat. The windows were black, too, the windshield one-way, the engine no louder than snow falling. It appeared like a cruising shark at the end of the street, and Skinner swatted me into the deep shadow of a courtyard entrance. “Back!” he whispered.
“What are you—”
“Turn your face away!” The black car swept slowly past.
“What was that?”
“Trouble,” Skinner said firmly, but would say no more.
There were a number of places around the City where I could spend the night. There was a room on the second floor of the Underbridge, behind the sound balcony; it even had its own outside entrance. There was a squat in an underground garage, which was more comfortable than it sounded. But there was only one place I thought of when I heard the word “home.”
On the south side of the Night Fair there was a rose-red sandstone office building, dating from the far end of the twentieth century. It was over half empty, like many of the buildings in the Fair. On the third and sixth floors, the windows were wide, many-paned arches set in ornamented openings like baroque half-moon picture frames. On the seventh floor, jutting from the mansard roof, were dormers with arched tops, like wide-open cartoon eyes. It was an interesting structure.
Home was a corner of the seventh floor, and the rooftop, somewhat. Or, certain things that were mine took up space on the
roof. The stairway that rose out of the lobby inside the front doors was railed with ornamental cast iron, and wrapped level by level around the open center of the building to the third floor. Where it stopped. The back stairs were nearly rotted away; it would have been safer to climb the sandstone bare-handed than to try them. The lobby elevator was ruined; the car was jammed in the shaft between the second and third floors, and the cables were ripped out. The doors were boarded shut.
I was the only tenant above the third floor, because I was the only one who knew where the service elevator was, and that it worked.
I saw the place with Skinner’s eyes when I brought him in the side entrance. The shabby grandeur missed being romantic and fell back on pitiful: the broken black-and-white marble floor, the gouged oak wainscoting, the bits of mirror clinging to the wall above it. The hall smelled like cooked cabbage, and I heard an old-man voice behind one door, singing a pop song with only occasional reference to the tune. The huge brass light fixtures were all defunct; instead there was a swagging of wire from the ceiling, with a bulb every twenty feet. It was dim, but it worked, and no one there could have afforded the juice for the original wiring. Still, it depressed me suddenly, and I blamed Skinner for that.
I unlocked the door to the basement stairs, and led Skinner to the service elevator. He looked around dubiously. I wasn’t inclined to offer him reassurance, so I turned my back on him, dug a pair of wires out of the seeming ruins of the control panel, and crossed the bare ends. I kept what I was doing out of Skinner’s sight. If he missed killing me on this trip, I didn’t want to have shown him how to get upstairs and try again. The cage shuddered and began to climb at an irregular pace, mostly very slow. But silent; I’d used a lot of lubricants to ensure my privacy. Inside the elevator was the inspection certificate, light brown with age and dated 1995. Skinner looked at it and made a clicking noise with his tongue.
“Is this the only way up,” he asked, “or are you doing this for my benefit?”
“You could still find room on the sidewalk for tonight.”
He shook his head, smiling faintly. I didn’t seem to be scaring him.
We ground to a halt on the seventh, and left the box of the elevator. High above the rest of the tenants’ cooking and living, my hallway smelled like decaying building: dusty, dry, abandoned. I fumbled with locks, and opened the door onto the darkness of what had been a reception area. It was an empty room; a last defense against anyone who broke in. Sound bounced off bare walls, the light switch didn’t work — anyone would have concluded that they’d picked the locks for nothing.
I thumbed a box in my pocket that had once opened garage doors, and the bulb lit in the corridor behind the front room. Skinner jumped. “This is it,” I said sourly. “Enter freely and of your own will, and leave something of the happiness you bring.” He laughed. A lot of people wouldn’t have gotten that one, either.
I walked the streak of light from the open doorway and was home. The left-hand room must have held supplies, once; it was just big enough for my wadded-cotton mattress and a chest of drawers. The middle one, which was larger, I’d turned into the living room-and-kitchen. The dormer windows were covered with black felt (a light in the top floor might have attracted attention). I’d hung a sink on one wall, stealing water and drainage from the john beyond it, and had a propane stove on a metal cabinet and an old RV propane/electric fridge next to that. There was a wooden desk that served as countertop and table, and things to sit on, including a leather-and-chrome armchair that looked like a compound slingshot, and a shabby upholstered wing chair. There was also a shelf unit of books, enough to be convincing. I went in and lit the gas lamp over the sink.
Skinner stopped in the doorway, and I watched his gaze go straight to the books. He walked forward and began to read the spines. He touched one now and then, never actually taking a book down. I found myself almost wanting to show him the third room.
“Pale Fire. I haven’t seen a copy… ” His eyes and fingers wandered on. “Four Quartets. ‘The Lady’s Not for Burning.’ Oh, God, The Prisoner of Zenda.” Suddenly his drawl thickened to parody. “Land sakes,” he said, “have you read all these?”
My insides gave a leap of anger. He’d betrayed me into a momentary thaw of attitude, only to dump the resulting ice water over my head. Then I recognized the familiar sound of self-ridicule. My books had caused some failure of reserve in him, and he was only repairing the damage. “Have you?” I asked.
He was a little white-lipped. “Some of them,” he said.
“If you walk off with one, I’ll rebind a few in your hide.”
He ran his thumb down a ragged Britannica spine. “What do I do to get a little slack around here?”
“Sorry, all out of slack.”
He squeezed his forehead between thumb and fingers, which almost hid his face and the turned-up corner of his mouth. “Guess I’ll just get some sleep, then.”
“In here,” I said, and stepped back into the corridor. He followed. I showed him into the little bedroom, and lit the candle on the dresser. “What about you?”
“I’ll sleep in the next room. The sink works like a sink, the icebox works like an icebox — if there’s anything in it; I don’t remember — and the toilet, which is through there, works like a toilet. Whatever you do, don’t smoke in bed, and don’t wake me up.”
I was in the corridor already when he said, “You don’t remember anything that happened last night, do you?”
No. But I never said so to you. “What makes you think that?”
He was standing in the half-open door, that vitreous grin in place, eyes alight and untrustworthy. “Because I do remember.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that I know. You ever want to find out what went on all those times you can’t recall — Just ask me nicely.”
With that, the bastard shut and locked my bedroom door.
I could have broken the door open, I now realize. Or apologized lavishly through it, and begged for an explanation. Under ordinary circumstances, I’m sure I would have. Instead, I stared at the blank wood until the insides of my eyes hurt. Then I walked down the corridor to the third room, the one I didn’t show him, unlocked it, went in, and locked it behind me.
(Mick Skinner knows about last night, said my head.)
The third room was accessible through the false back of a closet. It was the largest of the rooms I called mine. It no longer had windows; sunlight does damage, and the sun, at least, I could stop. The heat, too, though not so thoroughly; the thermometer at the duct from the swamp cooler on the roof showed 78 degrees. This was the only room that wasn’t furnished like a thrift-store campsite. The steel shelving covered most of the wall area, the chair was meant to be sat in for eight hours at a stretch, and the light, when I needed it, was strong and steady. This, after all, was the terminus for the cable that came down from the roof, from the batteries that charged off the windmill disguised as a rusty roof vent.
(Mick Skinner knows what happened to me, said my nerve endings.)
I moved around the room touching things — my talismans, the trappings of my sect. More books: the ones I needed to keep that room working, and the ones that would disappear (and their owner with them) if it were known I had a copy. Thought-contraband in fiction and nonfiction. The video monitor fifteen inches, with three switchable levels of resolution. The record/playback hardware: three videotape decks; a video editing board; three audio cassette decks, one digital; a CD player; an eight-channel reel-to-reel recorder; a turntable, probably used in a radio station; two 120-watt amplifiers from the middle of the last century, probably likewise, but heavily modified for my purposes; a six-channel audio mixer with EQ and other enhancements; two pairs of headphones. And the diamond: a studio-quality recording CD unit and a case of blanks.
(Mick Skinner knows…)
And, of course, the archives. They were mostly copies; I’d sold the previous generation of each one after I’d dubbed
it, to collectors rich enough, crazy enough to own something rare and powerful and useless. Then I’d taken the money and spent it on hardware, and on more product, and the media to record it on.
Audio- and videotapes, their mylar bases fragile with age. Vinyl audio disks, brittle as porcelain. Audio CDs, their information becoming vague as if with senility. Two thousand movies, four thousand albums, music and words and pictures like voices whispering from a sweet, sunny past, degrading every time they were played.
It ought to have been depressing — just as every day should be depressing, because it leads to the grave. On bad days I sat in the next room and thought about the value of the plastic tape shells alone to a reprocessor, never mind the mylar, I could be rich… But they were like slaves on an underground railroad, outlaws I hid from the sheriff. Who’d keep them alive, if I abandoned them?
(Mick Skinner knew about…)
I sat in my valuable, comfortable chair and contemplated the possible distractions. I’d found a new CD two days before; I’d check that over. I rolled the chair over to the rack, powered up the CD player, and plugged headphones into the amplified jack. The insert under the scarred plastic of the jewel box was a faded drawing of five bemused-looking people sitting or standing around an immense antique car with a startling paint job. It was only one page, front and back, with a ragged edge — there had been more, once. The name of the group wasn’t familiar. I cleaned the silver rainbow disk, set it in the tray, closed the phones over my ears, and put my feet up.
The first cut opened with a sweet whine of fiddle, the tsk of a cymbal, a muttering of bass. Two women’s voices traded lyrics, as if they were telling each other a story.
Pretty Tommy Belmont was shooting up in back,
Fixing up his hair and digging through his pack.
He said, “All I want is for you to cut me a little slack.”
He never even knew what I was saying.
Angela the dancer said she never heard the shot.
Maybe she was lying, and maybe she was not.