by Ian McDonald
Crouching, hands over eyes (See-No-Evil), Mas flinches at the touch of my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s over, Mas. Let’s go.” I want this thunder-eagle country and the evil it has forced me into far behind me. Curled around the thick, padded handlebars, my palms burn as if freshly branded. All masters of the dark arts agree: there is a terrible, seductive joy in the practice and use of their power. It felt good all those other times when I used my power, when I felt like God, that there was no authority on earth could deny me. The masters never mention that there is a price for that thrill, as there is a price for everything, and the price is pain. It can be emotional, it can be spiritual, it can be physical. But it never misses. The pain will always find you. It cannot be begged off, bargained with, wished away.
We first met in a large, high-ceilinged, windowless room, the pain and I, echoing and resonant, the kind of room where the door merges into the wall behind you and seems never to have been. Gray. All gray. The chair: gray. The Bosch industrial robot: gray. The only color: the dyes in their plastic tubes; the needles poised above them.
“Will it hurt?” the blind woman in the red glasses asked as she strapped my wrists to the arms of the gray chair, opened the fingers one two three four and thumb five, taped them down.
“It will hurt,” I said and because she was that particular kind of coward that cannot bear another’s pain, she slipped the disk into the robot and closed the door behind her.
The physical pain was the least part. The true pain was the sense of violation, that the dyes the flicking needles were stitching into the palms of my hands were spreading through my bloodstream, along my nerve fibers, branding me within as indelibly as I was marked without. In Kafka there is a long and terrible story about some engine of execution that wrote a man’s crimes into his flesh with needles. Crimes past: but what about crimes yet to be committed? Can the punishment precede the crime? If there is a point at which the long death and rebirth of Ethan Ring is focused, it is the points of those five colored needles.
Burning. My hands are burning so hot I am afraid to look at them. I want to stop. I want to cry out. I want to plunge them into deep, cold water. Guilt. Burning. Heat. Heat is an energy, energy I can use to push me on, push me away, push me through to the place beyond guilt. Push through. Push through. Or the things you have sealed up inside another life will push through into you. Into him. Into me. Me. Him.
SUZY MAGEE ANNETT, AGE size and three-quarters, westbound with her mother to some kind of marital reconciliation by the ocean, had stared for most of the semi-orbital flight at the new plastic socket one and one half centimeters behind the lobe of Ethan Ring’s right ear, ringed by a halo of red itching scar tissue to which the eye could not but be drawn because they had shaved half his skull to accommodate it.
“Mummy Mummy Mummy that mans got a hole in his head,” said Suzy Magee Annett, unable to contain herself any longer, and was told not to be so nosy about other people and go to sleep and when he thought they were finally asleep he took out the tap and slipped it into the socket and so learned that the European Pacific Rim network had uncovered a Pan-Islamic mole and that he was being sent to find out what he knew and take it away from him. Except that Suzy Magee Annett was a bad little girl and watched through half-closed eyes the disgusting fascinating spectacle of a man with a worm in his head.
They had the man in one of the last Barbary Coast wooden houses to escape the Race Wars. He was naked and fastened to a deeply beautiful Shaker chair with brown adhesive tape, which seemed excessive to Ethan Ring. He was a deeply beautiful man.
“Leave me,” said Ethan Ring, picking at the flaking skin around his implant. He showed the man his right hand and said, “Tell me your secrets.”
While the man taped to the Shaker chair spooled off names and addresses and informants and dead drops into a microtaper, Ethan Ring printed out the Hokhmah fracter and hid it in the palm of his gloved left hand.
“Forget it,” he said, opening his left hand. And it was gone.
“That’s it,” he told the others, handing them the microcassette.
“Good,” they said. “Now do the rest. Take it all away.”
“Everything?” he said.
“Everything. We want them to be afraid of us. Very afraid of us.”
So he went back to the naked man and took away all the numbers that might have identified him. License, passport, ID, Social Security, buckcard, credit accounts, e-mail, street name and number, locker number. Gone.
His friends. Gone.
His lovers. Gone.
His enemies. Gone.
His brothers, his sisters, his aunts and uncles and cousins and father and mother. Gone.
The next day Ethan Ring came and peeled the last ten years of his life off like the rind of an orange. College years. Dawn at Zabriskie Point. The time at the Faculty Club pool. The time on the floor in Belsize Park. The adrenaline ecstasy of making it to the top of Half Dome. Getting drunk in Paris in the rain. Dancing in the snow at Noo Year. Gone.
Teenage years, high school angst and acne, first fucks. Gone.
Vertiginous adolescence as the vast incoherencies of the adult world began to make sense. Gone.
Childhood, prechildhood, the neural rainforest of memories, impressions, sensations he had forgotten he had ever forgotten. Gone.
The third day Ethan Ring took away everything he knew. How to drive a car. How to speak Spanish. How to cook an omelet, how to ride a bicycle. The names of the twelve nearest stars. Gone. The words to old Elvis Costello songs. Gone. The interstate route map and the Northwest Pacific domestic timetable. Gone. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. The Trout Quintet. Meat Loaf. Gone. History. Geography. Physics. Chemistry. Biology. Art. Music Gone. Reading. ’Riting. ’Rithmatic Gone.
Only one thing remained.
“Tell me your name.”
“Titus Witters. My name is James Titus Witters,” said the naked man taped into the wooden Shaker chair. “Please, man, not that, leave me that…”
Gone.
“He’s yours now,” said Ethan Ring. He got into his hire car, tried to drive back to his hotel, and got caught in the twelve-block gridlock caused by Mrs. Marta Radetczy age sixty-eight’s inadvertent stepping into the path of a V.W./G.M. biopower Bagels’R’Us truck. Otherwise he would have driven past the Pendereski Gallery without noticing that it was celebrating that very night the gala opening of a new work, entitled Fantasia, by hot hot new talent Luka Casipriadin.
He thought the suit made him look like a riverboat gambler but the man in the hire shop was adamant that it was very suave, very chic, very sir, sir. From the far side of the crowded room she recognized him—his undisguisable red hair, he supposed, even more conspicuous half shaved away—and came cutting cleanly through the shoals of society/charity/arty/party/drinky/dopey and doc.
“You look like a riverboat gambler.” She ran the palm of her hand along the line of his jaw.
“You look like a dream found in a gutter one hour before dawn, down with the needles and guns and dead.” He ran his fingers through the short stubble on either side of her crest of black hair.
“I love it when you talk mucky,” she said, drawing him away through the throng of cocktail glasses, lip gloss, and Cartier pill-cases. Her fingers caressed his socket. “Your bosses must think a lot of you to fit you up with one of these. Come on. Got something to show you. Preview of coming attractions. For your eyes only.” Outside on the fire escape a light drizzle was falling. She swung over the rail and dropped into the neon-shadowed alley, landing surefooted, cat-coiled. A two-finger whistle: “Yo! Oddjob! To me!”
Stirrings in the shadows, clicking, whirrings, a gleam of light from a polished surface. A Dornier Hi-performance Industrial Robot stepped into the alley, bobbing on cantilever legs, gleaming yellow carapace spotted with rain. Luka rested a black gloved hand on its curved plastic skull.
“Here. Catch.” She skimmed a black something up at him. A snatch of immaculate
kid-gloved hands: an Olivetti/IBM Mark Twenty VR-tap.
“The difference between this new bioprocessor stuff and the old clunky noninvasive gear has to be experienced to be believed,” she said. “Obviously, you were sent by God; Ethan Ring in San Francisco with a shiny new hole in his head. You get the deluxe wide-screen edition. One word of warning: be not fooled by the name. Fucking Walt Disney this isn’t.”
Fucking Walt Disney this wasn’t.
“We’ve all got them,” Luka explained as they slipped through the rain-wet streets, splashing through puddles of neon Timor and Vietnamese, the riverboat gambler and the fetish queen with their robot skipping behind. “But we’re afraid of them, we’re afraid that if people find out they’ll think we’re dark and evil and perverted or silly and stupid and fatuous, while in their own heads, those other people are exactly the same. Exactly the same.” Around them fin de siècle brownstones and leery chromium-age office blocks erupted into organic volcanoes of lilac-scented blossoms or stretched into window-studded trees whose trunks upheld the cotton-candy sky; manhole covers became smirking demon faces; every mailbox was a welcoming vagina with lolling forked tongue and grazing pedicabs, bizarre bucolic hybrids half man/half bicycle, bounded like startled gazelles from predatory taxis circling like checkerboard sharks.
“The processing equipment’s aboard Oddjob; we’re hooked in real-time through a mega-plex infrared link. Micro-cameras on the headband. Come a long way from Umberto Boccioni.” The Bay Bridge uprooted booted feet and went buckarooing over Oakland while a fifteen-year-old girl confessed a long and labyrinthine dream into Ethan Ring’s middle ear. Luka pulled him toward the gateway of a covered market that shapeshifted into ideogram-stained teeth, a swallowing neon-lit maw. Within, the biogas-lit stalls with their pendulous racks of edibles and smokables became the pulsing organs of a post-cybernetic bodyscape; the bustling crowd, shouting in a dozen different Southeast Asian dialects, were swarms of platelets, macrophages, and antibodies.
Above the inner voice of a man describing a fantastic mescalin voyage beneath the linked geodesics of his own skin, Ethan shouted, “You’re a sick woman, Luka Casipriadin.”
“These aren’t my head dreams,” she shouted back. “This is some poor bastard of an HIV IV victim’s dream of one final DPMA trip into himself to battle the disease that has, by now, probably killed him. They’re all live. All real. 0898 FANTASY—at the tone leave your darkest dream, your brightest hope, confess it to Luka absolute confidentiality assured.”
“Except you blow it up over three city blocks and people pay to have it shoved through a little hole in their heads.”
“They all knew what I wanted to do with their fantasies. Logged five thousand calls in the three months I kept the line open. Tapped some deep, dark confessional urge in the population of the Greater Bay Area. You think I’m sick, you should hear some of the ones I didn’t use. I’d like to think that some of my sources will come and look at it and feel that their openness about their fantasies will help other poor repressed bastards.”
“Even for you that is a singularly weak self-justification.”
“Isn’t it just?”
The puckered, neon-spangled rectum of the market shat them and their yellow Dornier out at the foot of twenty stories of First Pacific Rim Bank morphing into a naked twenty-year-old man with fabulous black hair and muscles. As a fifty-something woman’s voice whispered sweet sexual imaginings to the accompaniment of a reconstructed Julie Andrews singing a pornographic version of “Favorite Things” (“Naked black sailors all tied up with string”), powerlines snapped and came twining through the air to coil and knot around the straining leviathan.
“Fucking hell,” said Ethan Ring, thinking of the man in the Shaker chair in the last wooden house in San Francisco.
Onward.
Through faerylands and Disneylands and petit Arcadias two blocks by three, heavens and hells, through blizzards of dollar bills while palm trees bent their mop heads close together and sang old Prince numbers in close harmony and cathedrals took off like gothic rockets beneath skies filled with plump Georges Méliès desmoiselles dressed as shooting stars and comets until, beneath a floodlit Coit Tower ecstatically transubstantiating into a Hieronymous Bosch cromlech/mushroom/phallus complete with dancing nymphs, flying sharks and goose-stepping storks, she kissed him. Hard. In the mouth. With much tongue.
“I could tie you up with string,” she said and pulled the tap out of his skull and vanished all dreams and yearnings and fantasies in a candy-colored pop! “Ethan, I’m sorry. Those years, what I did to you. I’m a coward. I’m like Buddha, I like to think I’m living in a perfect painless world of art and artifice, then comes the first sign of hurt and I press disengage. Fuck, even for me, that’s a singularly weak self-justification. Okay, Ethan Ring, here I am, if you’ll have me.” She slapped the Dornier’s yellow shell. “Get the hell home, Oddjob.”
They ate things cooked in aluminum foil in a Timorese sampan restaurant. They took a mopedcab down through the old Italian and slightly less old Vietnamese and newer Indonesian and new North Australian and newest Southern-States-white-trash-shanty districts to the bridge where they told the driver to wait for them, which meant that they were not going to go halfway and throw themselves off. They drank bourbon in a bar and got drunk but not too. They went back to Ethan Ring’s towertop suite with its view over the Euclidian geometry of city lights interrupted by the Mandelbrotian mathematics of the Bay.
“Wouldn’t you love to stand naked in front of that window?” Luka said, sitting on his bed and heaving and grunting at her boots. Ethan slipped off his riverboat gambler’s jacket and brocade waistcoat and was unfastening his pearl shirt buttons when she noticed.
“That would be a lot easier if you took your gloves off.”
A pause, while something like a spiked fist reached into his chest and tore out his heart.
“Ethan, what have you done with your hands, Ethan?”
He told her. His head reverberated to a vertiginous white roar as he told her about what he had done to his hands, to himself, to the man in the Shaker chair. He stood at the window and watched the transparent dirigibles filled with cold-gas holograms for diet Coke and Volkswagen-G.M. and Chanel 15 drift across the beautiful city until he heard the door click shut and lock behind him.
RAW FIRE; BURNING DOWN my throat. I cough, retch, fire goes down into my lungs. I spew up a spray of phlegm and bile and burning.
“It’s all right, Eth. Take it easy.” Another splash of liquid heat across my lips, down my throat. Distant monosyllables; Japanese. “Old Suntory, Eth. For the shock.”
Mas. My voice is a ghastly rattlesnake rasp. I push the glass away.
“You’re all right now. The Tanazakis say we can stay here until you are able to go on.” Feeling behind my right ear my fingers encounter only the plastic disk of an empty socket. Touch solidifies the unfocused color field surrounding me into objects: a rectangle of light is a window filled with concrete-colored sky, a lozenge of fitful cerise and lilac a neon sign, a circle in the bottom right corner of the streaming window: a sticker, PROTECTED BY TOSA SECURITIES INCORPORATED. I try to struggle free from the bed; Mas’s hand is on my chest.
“Easy, Eth. You’ve had a bad shock.”
“Mas…”
“You came off the bike. You hit a rut. You were riding like… like something possessed, a demon. It’s a miracle you weren’t impaled on the cane.”
The dogs. The cane field. I remember. A young woman—eighteen, twentyish—enters with tea.
“The farmer got you into the back of the pickup and brought you here. You were shaking all over. Like a fit. Like epilepsy.”
That’s the bargain it makes. You use it, it uses you, and more, each time. I take the cup of tea between my gloved hands, savor the good, clean scald of it.
“I’ve called her, Eth. She’s hiring a car, she’ll be here by morning. She’ll be able to help you.”
She? I want to ask, she?
but a middle-aged woman has appeared at the side of the bed and is pressing self-adhesive tranquilizer dots to my acupuncture points. She…?
BIBLE STORIES FOR BUDDHISTS: The Good Samaritan found the traveler by the side of the road and brought him to an inn. In the three hundred and twelve years since Ruichi Tanazaki I, inspired by a vision of the face of the Daishi in the tea leaves at the bottom of a bowl, opened his teahouse for the succor of weary henro, successive generations have added and enlarged and expanded until now the Tanazaki-ya stands as a marvelous miscegeny moteldinergaragegiftshopgasstationpharmacybathhousebarbershopkaraokeparlorcathousepickupjoint; a true and honest tribute to the spirit of vernacular building that finds its highest expression in roadside architecture. The Smithsonian should have it heli-lifted whole and preserved, with its motley, polyglot crew of Tanazakis, generations ten through twelve, for the delight and elucidation of future, poorer descendants. Wandering in post-tranq blur through the warren of extensions, annexes, and additions trying to find Mas, I feel like an unnoticed animal stowing away on some surreal ark sailing up through history. I keep arriving in the same bar snug where a small peer group of salarypersons with their jackets off are toasting each other and singing along to a sat-tel pop channel. Every time, they are that little bit drunker, that little bit more nicely out of tune.
The diner is unlit save for the neons along the self-serve bar and the unregarded television glow from the booth where Mas is talking with the girl who brought me tea. They are the sole occupants. Comic book on poles and crushed plastic beer cans litter the melamine tabletop: I feel vaguely blasphemous at having interrupted a private moment. Mas introduces the girl, Mariko. The perfect hostess, she bows and brings beer from the cool cabinet; very cold, very good.