Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  Blah blah blah. McNihil wasn’t surprised that the broken airliner was a nest of pirasites, that aging-hippie combination of pirate and parasite, with their warped premillennium notions about information, concepts-and concepts about concepts-being as real for them as the world outside their shaggy, graying heads. The business he’d come up here to take care of was with a copyright thief, but at least one who was doing it for money, rather than from some outdated crackpot ideology. That was the kind of thing that ticked him off even more than simple, straightforward larceny.

  It was just like these ’net-twit types as well, to have a bug up their collective ass about what’d become the popular usage of the verb connect. These idiots had never gotten it through their soft skulls that the only ones who really believed connecting was an unalloyed good thing were people who had something to sell and rapists, two categories that weren’t that far apart in this world.

  McNihil took a knife from his coat pocket, flicked its small blade open, reached over, and sliced through one of the thick black rubber bands. It sounded a pizzicato viola note as it snapped loose, followed by a twanging chorus, a chain reaction all the way down the length of the gantry. The articulated device swooped out of control, hinge pins squealing as the eyeless head jerked up toward the gray-clouded sky. The violent motion ripped loose the phony card reader; it went spinning in a high arc across the street.

  McNihil was impressed in spite of himself. With a certain childlike, pure delight in random destruction-You never grow too old, he thought, for this kind of stuff-he watched as the gantry went wild, raking its terminal claw in the airliner’s row of broken-out passenger-section windows. The gantry end snagged in the window hole closest to the raised tail, with enough force to snap loose a few critical bolts and struts. The dead plane shivered and began to disintegrate, the remains of its laminated exterior peeling away like shed snakeskin, the structural elements wrenching loose from one another. The urban scavengers who had been making their homes in the fuselage were revealed as their sheltering curtain rags were torn away, the network of spun ropes snapping and whipping in air. A Brueghelian scene tilted in the midst of the city, of compressed, interwoven sleep and copulation, chemical ingestion and little meals prepared on tinder-fed campfires. Tilted to briefly vertical, the awake and sleeping inhabitants, in narcotized or other dreams, tumbled down the fuselage’s central aisle as the hooked gantry swung the other direction, upsetting the wreckage’s fragile balance. Their screams and surprised shouts echoed off the surrounding buildings.

  With a metallic groan, the downed 747’s spine snapped, the rusted cylinder folding in the middle at a ninety-degree angle. Rag-ensembled bodies dropped to the ground below, the fortunate ones being able to shake their dazed heads and scramble to their feet before more debris fell upon them. McNihil had prudently backed away, retreating to the littered sidewalk on the other side of the street. From there, he watched as the broken fuselage now arced sideways, the motion uprooting the nose section from its grave in the tunnels. The operators of the panhandling gantry could be seen behind the cockpit’s shattered windows; a gray-bearded face displayed terror as the figure desperately clung to the useless levers and ropes.

  The L-shaped wreckage finished its sideways roll, coming to rest in the middle of the empty street. Creaking metal sounded in basso, accompanied by the smaller, bell-like notes of rivets and bolts clattering through the struts, as the 747 continued to disintegrate in slower motion. The inhabitants, those who were still alive and relatively uninjured, stood in the clouds of billowing dust, commenting upon the loss of their home with emotions that ranged from hysteria to fatalistic amusement.

  McNihil checked his watch. The unplanned destruction of the pirasite colony had been entertaining in its way, but a distraction from what he’d come here for. He was already a few minutes late for his appointment, and there were still some details he had to take care of before meeting up with the guy. He shielded his eyes from the dust and partial sunlight, scanning across the street-level fronts of the surrounding buildings. There we go, thought McNihil; he had spotted what he was looking for. Leaving the wreckage behind him, he strode toward a small transient hotel a block away.

  “I’m going to be needing a room in a little while.” The jittering neon outside read End Zone Hotel; the place had a pro football motif, yellowing posters of numbered and helmeted players on the walls, from a time when there’d been those kinds of teams anywhere in the Gloss. Now the words seemed to have taken on a different meaning: the hotel’s lobby looked like one of hell’s waiting lounges, for those damned from sheer inertia. Not even half-devils, thought McNihil. Quarter- or eighth-devils, at the most. God probably couldn’t be bothered to hate them. “I’ll pay for it now.” He dropped old-fashioned cash into the battered chrome drawer extruded toward him.

  “Then it’s your room right now, buddy.” Behind the overlapping layers of steel grilles, the desk clerk roused himself long enough to pull the drawer back and count the money. “Hour rate works out the same as the day rate. You only get a break if you stay a week or longer.” One yellow-tinged eye regarded him with suspicion. “You don’t look like you’re going to be around that long.”

  McNihil glanced over his shoulder at the humpbacked upholstered chairs and sag-spined sofas, Salvation Army castoffs, that furnished the lobby. The furniture’s occupants had assumed the same coloration, the exact tone of dirty-gray putty he knew would be edging the clouded windows upstairs. The chairs and the nominal people in them looked as if they were made of the same substance, as though the sweaty cushions had been caught in the act of giving birth to blank-faced human beings, or the seated figures, legs and crutches sprawled in front of them, were slowly devolving into last century’s seating arrangements. McNihil glanced back at the desk clerk. “You got that one right.”

  “Want the key now or when you head back here?”

  “It can wait.” McNihil pulled several items out of pockets and deposited them in the tray. “But I need you to hold on to some of my stuff for a while.”

  The desk clerk pulled the drawer onto his side of the counter and looked at the objects. “You gotta be kidding, mister.” The biggest and heaviest of them was the black shape of his tannhäuser. “We don’t get involved in that kind of trouble.”

  McNihil slid more cash under the bottom edge of the grille.

  Nodding, the desk clerk tucked the money into his shirt pocket. “Now we do.”

  “Good.” McNihil pushed himself back from the counter. “Take care of everything and see how much better you feel.” He put his wallet away slowly, making sure the clerk could see the other bills’ corners sticking out of it. “Later on.”

  As McNihil was heading out of the End Zone Hotel’s lobby, he glanced over again at the figures slumped in the decaying sofa and upholstered chairs. A half-dozen of them, still looking vaguely human, tundra for spiders to begin laying their gray nets over. A bigger web had already been spun: sustenance checks had obviously been pooled, so that a multi-apertured I.V dispenser could be rented. The surgical-steel box sat on the lobby’s threadbare carpet, at the base of a chrome tree with clear, fluid-filled bags hanging from its short branches. An octopus network of tubes ran from the unit’s central control mechanism to the hypodermics of the connectees, the needles taped down to the arms of the ones fortunate enough to still have usable veins there; other lines snaked up trouser legs or were fastened onto necks like long, skinny, reverse-flow vampires. The most decrepit of the figures had the line trailing into his open fly, as though the sharp metal and polyethylene tube were his final lover, searching for any place where his blood still flowed.

  From the other tube, the big one of the television mounted on a plywood shelf in the lobby’s upper corner, mumbling junkie dialogue seeped out. McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced up at the screen. On it was the popular hypo opera He’s Never Early, He’s Always Late; transactions involving little folded slips of paper and glassine envelopes were going on among
the professionally disreputable-looking actors. A long time ago, back when he’d still been working as an asp-head, McNihil had done some heavy copyright defense for the show’s producers, laying into a Thai cable start-up that had tried to clone the central concept without paying royalties. He was glad to see that the show was still running, though he’d never been able to figure out the charm of it. For the decaying, knocked-out figures sprawled around the lobby, it must have brought back memories of their younger days. As he watched, needle-tip penetrated flesh on the screen; blood flowered up a calibrated cylinder. He turned his head, hearing the steel box click and hum; the thin hoses trembled. The gray faces turned grayer and half-lidded eyes unfocused as the synchronized hit, triggered by a data wire plugged into the back of the TV, rolled up their brainstems.

  The show, McNihil knew, prided itself on authenticity, or enough of a simulation of it to get the ratings. On the screen, at the other end of the cable, the actors probably weren’t chipping at the same low-grade opiate as this audience-AFTRA regs usually insisted on blissful fentanyl-but it certainly wasn’t sterile Ringer’s solution being shot up. That’s entertainment, thought McNihil as he headed for the door.

  Outside the transient hotel, he found himself thinking of the last dead-really dead-person he’d seen. Which had been the one named Travelt, lying with blank eyes on the carpeted floor of a cubapt farther south on the circle. A little movie with no action unrolled behind his eyes, on the smaller screen of memory. That poor bastard would’ve been exactly the kind of fool to imagine that there was some sort of low-rent glamor to that sad congregation in the hotel lobby, that his sheltered exec life had kept him from all sorts of dark fun. Imagining things like that, and then acting upon them, was what had most likely left Travelt staring up at the ceiling, his breath all clotted blood in his throat. Which was just a little too late to acknowledge the hard lesson he’d been taught.

  Unencumbered by the tools he’d left with the desk clerk, McNihil headed toward the movie theater off the little urban park. By now, the dead 747 had finished collapsing, its disjointed wreckage strewn across the grassless raw earth and the surrounding streets. The destructive work that the Noh-flies had begun was complete; the city’s dispossessed who’d made temporary shelter from the fuselage now stood around or scrabbled with their black-clawed hands to drag their meager property from it.

  “Hey! That’s the sonuvabitch! That’s the guy!” A voice called after McNihil as he passed by. “He fuckin’ did it!”

  He recognized the voice as that of the panhandling gantry’s operator, now undistorted by the tube-and-funnel arrangement. The face behind the beard was cave-pallid from what had probably been years down in the buried nose section of the airliner. Even this zone’s diminished sunlight was enough to force the red eyes into teary, squinty blinking. A dirt-encrusted hand pointed an accusing finger toward McNihil.

  Soon there were a dozen or so ragged figures trailing after him on the sidewalk. He stopped and turned around to face their bearded leader.

  “Look,” said McNihil. “Too bad about what happened. But I’ve got business to take care of. And you’re cramping my action.”

  “Screw that.” The one with the beard hunched over troll-like, as though his confinement in the airliner had permanently bent his spine. “You owe us, man.” A grimy paw, the flesh-and-dirt equivalent of the articulated gantry, extended toward McNihil. The crowd behind the bearded figure emitted a mumbling, angry chorus. “Pay up. Card or cash.”

  A familiar adrenaline ticked through McNihil’s bloodstream, as measured and evocative as that produced by the machine back in the hotel lobby. Part of him could sit back inside his skull as his hands grabbed the front of the other man’s shirt, gathering the tattered cloth into his fists, then lifting the other into the air. The line of McNihil’s white knuckles pressed up beneath the bearded figure’s collarbone.

  “I tried to tell you.” McNihil turned and slammed the man’s spine against the nearest building wall. “I’m busy. And I don’t like being harassed for small change.”

  Pinned between McNihil’s doubled fists and the wall, the bearded figure did a spastic butterfly dance.

  “I knocked your squat down because I don’t like you.” McNihil leaned his weight into the other man’s chest, hard enough to make a pink tongue protrude through the beard. “I meant to do it,” he lied. “And I wasn’t nearly as pissed off then as I am now.”

  “Urrf.” Mottled patches appeared on what little of the bearded man’s face was visible. “Agk.”

  The others, who had been following behind, had now backed off a few meters. Their faces showed that they hadn’t been prepared for the violence level to go up another notch.

  “Now I’m going to put you down. And then I’m going to walk in one direction, and you’re going to walk in another. Got me?”

  Above McNihil’s fists, the bearded figure nodded.

  Wiping the backs of his hands against his trousers, McNihil watched the squatters scurry away. In the distance, back at the block-long park, fires had broken out in the 747’s disassembled wreckage, from overturned camp stoves and the few bits of electrical wire shorting out. Black smoke coiled toward the sky as McNihil turned and headed once more toward the movie theater.

  What a putz, thought November. She had watched the whole bit, from her vantage point in a shadowed alley. From here she had been able to see her target, the former asp-head, come striding onto the scene, heading for what he was probably telling everyone was a business appointment. Right-she nodded to herself-same business as before.

  The little knot of homeless-more homeless now-were making their way back to the smoldering plane debris. November turned her head, letting the shuffling figures fade from her attention. She hadn’t come here, stationed herself to wait for McNihil’s arrival, on their behalf. They couldn’t pay her tab, they couldn’t even get her close to making the monthly nut that kept the breath in her lungs. Inside her fist, the sweat-damp skin of her palm itched; she could feel the red numbers crawling across her life line, red numbers that she didn’t want to open her hand to look at. She was the only one who could see them, and right now she didn’t need to. Not after that last encounter with her finance company’s representative.

  Her gaze swung across the narrow city streets and the boarded-up or burnt-out storefronts. And back to the figure of McNihil, disappearing into a little fly-by-night movie house without a glance behind himself.

  Hard to believe this guy had ever had any cop moves at all. November shook her head, reflecting on the teeth of the slow gears, the inexorable machinery of time. They get old, she thought, they lose it. That was probably a big reason she’d put herself on a short leash, become a fast-forward. When she couldn’t cut it, when the numbers in her hand pulsed down to zero and the minuses beyond, it’d be a quick end. She wanted to avoid having that happen just yet, though.

  A ticket stub from the little rat-hole theater was in the pocket of her jacket; she’d already been in and discreetly checked that McNihil’s “business” was there, scrunched down in a center-row seat and watching some stupid cartoon with a tub of butteroid popcorn in his lap. McNihil was running late, in risk of blowing the connection he’d come here to make. But he’d have to be late, considering the mess he’d made in the streets.

  Real subtle. November sighed, feeling sorry for the poor old bastard. Why not just show up in town and blow up the whole place, like some old vintage Schwarzenegger flick? She smiled at one corner of her mouth, thinking maybe that was the real reason McNihil had gone to the movies, in hope of picking up a few destructive tips.

  She didn’t feel like following him into the theater. She knew that he’d be out soon enough, with his “business” in tow.

  With the red, invisible numbers ticking down inside her palm, November leaned back against the alley wall and waited.

  TEN

  BRAIN CELLS IMPLODING INTO SOME TERRITORY OF OPIATED BLISS OR GUNS, WOMEN, AND ANGST

  All ri
ght,” said the business. His hand rooted around in the grease and unpopped kernels at the popcorn tub’s bottom. “This is a good part. I really wanted to see it again.”

  From the next seat over, McNihil glanced up at the screen. This month’s disnannie, all bright cartoon colors and state-of-the-art CGI, was playing. A week ago, it’d been fresh and coming over the wires to the upscale movie houses. Now its earnings had already dropped off enough for it to be printed out on old-fashioned film reels and dumped at flea-pits like this. There hadn’t even been a marquee or a pretense of a ticket window outside, but just an old woman on a folding chair, a debit-card reader and a cashbox on her schmatta’d lap.

  “What’s it about?” McNihil pushed away the popcorn tub that the pimply kid extended toward him.

  “Beats me.” The kid shrugged. “I never pay attention to that story stuff.”

  The kid was in his early twenties; that was what McNihil pegged him at. All skinny arms and legs, folded up in the seat with his knees against the one in front of him, looking like a whooping-crane carcass dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans. The reflection of the movie images made bright, shifting rectangles out of his glasses.

  “It’s the visuals,” said the kid. “You just gotta go with that.” His hand operated by itself, feeding more fluffy shrapnel into his mouth. “That’s all that’s important.”

  “Really? How can you tell?” In places like this, the standards were always shoddy. McNihil pointed to the wedge of light, filled with dust motes, above their heads. “They’ve got their projector element canted backward. Look at that keystoning on the screen.”

  “Huh?” The kid bent forward, spine arched, squinting through his glasses. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You can’t see it? The image is wider across the top than the bottom. That’s why everybody looks like some kind of hydrocephalic.”