Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “You don’t,” murmured the smiling barfly, “have much of a choice.” Her bruised-looking eyelids had drawn down to an expression of postcoital satiety. “Do you?” The barfly peeled her languorous form away from the male prowler; she stepped forward and knelt down directly in front of McNihil. “Because… it’s all memory now. That’s what we deal in here. We don’t have any other merchandise… and we don’t need any.” She reached forward, past the tannhäuser in McNihil’s doubled grip, and placed her fingertips on his brow, as though in blessing. “It’s what you gave us. All of you; it’s what we were created for. You wanted memories, memories other than your own, memories of things that hadn’t happened to you, but that you wanted to have happen to you. All the pleasures of remembering and none of the risks.” The barfly stroked his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good deal, though. Maybe you gave us more than you got back in turn. Maybe you really didn’t get anything at all… and we got part of you.” She wasn’t smiling now; her voice had turned harsh and grating. “The ability to feel, and suffer… and remember. Everything that made you human, that made you different from the things you created… that’s what you gave us.” The barfly’s hand pressed harder against McNihil’s brow, as though her lacquered nails could pierce the wall of bone. “It wasn’t,” she whispered, “a good deal for us, either.”

  He tried to push himself away from her, his spine indenting the padded surface behind him. “I’m sorry…” McNihil raised the tannhäuser between himself and the woman. “But I wasn’t the one… who did it…”

  “No… you’re not.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “But you’re the one who’s here. So you’ll do.”

  The bullet had dropped from the male prowler’s fingertips and rolled against the toe of McNihil’s boot. In the bullet’s wetly polished metal, he could see himself-his real face, the one without the mask that had been stitched on at the clinic; his face in that other world he’d left behind. That was what small, shining things had always done for him: mirror reflections that didn’t synch up with all the rest that his eyes saw. Just as though the bullet had left another hole, which let the other world leak through.

  There’s more where that came from, thought McNihil. He placed the tannhäuser’s muzzle against the kneeling barfly’s forehead, the blond curve of her hair trailing across the barrel’s black metal. “You know… I’d do this…” He folded one finger across the weapon’s trigger. “If I weren’t such a nice guy…”

  “But you are.” The barfly didn’t draw away from the cold circle resting just above her half-lidded eyes. “You’re too nice. That’s your problem.”

  “Maybe.” McNihil lifted the tannhäuser from the woman’s head, angling the muzzle toward the bar’s low ceiling. “But I’m working on it.”

  Her gaze followed the weapon’s new trajectory. “That’s not a good idea,” she warned.

  “They’re my memories,” said McNihil. “At least they are now. So I can do what I want with them.”

  “We can’t let you do that.” The male prowler, non-wound still exposed on his upper chest, stepped forward, reaching for the tannhäuser. “It’s not allowed-”

  “But you must have.” McNihil squeezed the weapon tight in his fists. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. Or have happened-doesn’t matter which. I wouldn’t remember it happening.” He managed a smile of his own. “But I can see it plain as day.”

  The tannhäuser roared again, as though it had suddenly recalled the second verse of its low-pitched aria. McNihil’s spine jolted as the recoil knocked him back; a blinding spark, the same color as the flash from the tannhäuser’s muzzle, jumped across the contacts inside his head.

  “Watch out-”

  He couldn’t tell which of them shouted that. The barfly had scrambled away from him as soon as he’d pulled the trigger, as though she was desperate for shelter. Any kind of shelter; McNihil’s eyes focused well enough that he could see where the bullet had struck the bar’s ceiling. Fierce light poured through the hole, the radiance filling his vision and piercing all the way to the back of his skull. The doors of the small dark rooms inside his head shattered and tore from their iron hinges.

  Above him, the ceiling grew more luminous, heat pressing against his face like a new kiss. The annihilating light flooded in as the bullet hole ripped open wider, the ceiling giving way like the cheap fabric of the male prowler’s jacket. McNihil could no longer see that figure, or the barfly or any of the others. The tannhäuser grew too hot for him to keep in his hands; it fell and clattered away on the floor, pitching and tilting now with the sudden upheaval of the earth. His empty hands shielded his eyes, but with no effect; the light passed through red flesh and shadow bones, relentless.

  He could just make out the bar’s ceiling falling away in tatters, as a sky of flames broke over him.

  “Now we’re making progress.”

  She heard the medical technician speak, somewhere over by the vital-signs monitor. November opened her eyes; she had already propped herself up against the hospital-bed pillows, so she could watch whatever the techs and doctors and nurses were doing, if she’d wanted to.

  The tech glanced over at her. “Dreaming again?”

  She nodded yes. The lights from the corridor outside the room seemed unusually bright to her. Because it was night, thought November. In the dream. She’d been someplace where it was always night. Both inside and out…

  There was only one of the med technicians in the room this time; each visit the burn-ward crew had made, there had been fewer of them. She supposed that was a good sign. This one didn’t ask about whatever dream she’d been having, but just went about his work, reading off numbers from the various gauges and indices on the equipment screens, then punching them into the little handheld data transmitter he carried. He even hummed a little tune, barely distinguishable from the sighing of one of the machines.

  November laid her head back against the pillow. The dream was still somewhat intact inside her head, the images and general sense not as fractured as when she’d been pumped full of the major anesthetics. Woozy drug sleep had given way to fifteen-minute catnaps, which ended abruptly when she felt her newly grafted skin tightening over her flesh. She missed being hammered underneath the big drugs; those pharmaceuticals had seemed to cancel gravity, sequentiality, guilt… everything unpleasant turned to sweet, filtered air. Getting detoxed from them, her bloodstream flushed out, the red contents scrubbed clean in something that looked like a miniature clothes washer and then I.V.’d back into her-that had been like returning to the orbit of some planet she wouldn’t have minded seeing the last of.

  The dream… With her eyes closed, November could view its basic setup. She carefully held her breath, fearing that any exhalation would shimmer and dissolve the image.

  Not an ocean this time, or anything to do with falling: she’d dreamed of a building, a big one, an old one with rows of windows from top to bottom. It took a little while for her to recognize it, as she let her vision zoom in, movielike. The hotel, thought November. What was it called? Something terminal… the End Zone Hotel; that was it. Her spine contracted in a full-body flinch reaction, as the dream hooked up with her own memories. She remembered just enough-it was encoded in the deep layers of her nervous system-to sense again the heat of the flames, scorching down into her lungs. Even before the hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, and sent her falling down inside, the place had been an exact hell. Even before the fire, she thought; just a different, bleaker kind.

  Strangely, in the dream-she could see it now, in retrospect-the End Zone Hotel burned but was not consumed, as though some Old Testament deity had checked in. From her floating point of view, November could see the flames rising behind the grime-thickened windows, the glass either intact or shattered by the heat into shards diving like transparent knives to the street below. The tattered curtains went up in lacework of smoke and sparks; she could look past them just a little bit, enough to see a f
ew of the sagging beds combusting, the smoldering mattresses coughing up the heavier, darker clouds of hourly rate passion. She couldn’t see anyone there, though, whether sleeping in flames or beating a wiser retreat from the ongoing, apparently endless inferno. That made her wonder where they had all gone. The dark ocean she had seen before, maybe, with its gelled waves slowly lapping against the hotel’s lobby doors…

  “Won’t be long now.”

  November’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

  “For you getting out of here.” The med tech held up the black rectangle of the data unit. “See?” Green numbers tagged with a little happy-face symbol marched across the one-line screen. “You’re rated in the top ten percent of all serious burn recoveries in the Gloss, or at least at the hospitals linked on this system.”

  “How nice. Does that mean you guys get a bonus or something?”

  “Maybe.” The med tech gave a noncommittal shrug. “Depends upon the year-end review for the whole division, and if the performance ratio comes in under the insurance companies’ cost-efficiency targets. We’re not doing too bad so far.” He regarded the data unit with obvious satisfaction. “They’re crunching your numbers down in Accounting right now; that’ll probably perk up the averages quite a bit.”

  “So soon?”

  “So soon what, sweetheart?”

  She nodded toward the device in the tech’s hand, as though the numbers had already spelled out good-bye. “I’m leaving here?”

  “Of course. Did you think you were going to be here forever?” The med tech shook his head. “You’re all put back together, believe it or not-”

  “I don’t.” November instinctively wrapped her arms around herself, as though there were pieces that might fall off otherwise. “I feel like I’ve got needles all over my skin, the kind that aren’t any fun-”

  “That’s a good sign. Means all the neuro work went off okay. It’ll settle down after a while.”

  “And I’m still on that thing.” She pointed to the I.V. drip; a clear tube ran from it to the bandaged patch on her arm. “How would I feel if that wasn’t pumping away?”

  “Honey, aspirin’s stronger than what you’re getting off on right now.” The tech glanced at the label dangling from the dispenser’s hook. “Baby stuff. You know the drill: you’re at the point where if you want anything good, you’re going to have to get it on the street.”

  The thought of it made her hands sweat, with both fear and anticipation. As good as the stuff in the hospital was, there was better walking around beneath the metal-raining skies. “I’m still not sure… that I’m ready…”

  “Ready or not, you gotta trot.” The med tech started punching off the displays on the gauges and monitors. “Your boyfriend, or whoever it was, didn’t pay for you to become a permanent resident here. Even if he’d wanted to-” The latex-gloved hands tossed the data unit into the air spinning, and caught it again. “That’s just not available. This is a hospital, not a hotel.”

  Hotel. She kept thinking about the one in the dream, her own internalized End Zone, after the med tech had left. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see it burning; the real one, she supposed, would’ve been ashes by now.

  She heard someone’s footsteps come into the room-probably another tech or the same one as before-and didn’t bother to look. Maybe it was someone from the accounting department; she’d sensed the machines around her switching off one by one, the clicking and sighing noises falling silent, the electrical presence diminishing as the final data was processed down in the hospital’s insurance computers.

  The footsteps stopped by the side of the bed. “They told me-” The man’s voice startled her when it spoke aloud. “That you’re just about to roll. Right on out of here.”

  “Christ… it’s you.” She found herself staring up into the encompassing gaze and unpleasant smile of Harrisch. The burning hotel’s afterimage evaporated like steam; November hadn’t even been aware of the transition from closed eyes to open. For a confused half-second, she had wondered how the DynaZauber exec had come to be looking out from one of the End Zone Hotel’s flame-shrouded windows, before she’d realized he was there with her, outside any dreaming. “What the…” November reacted by reaching up for the call buzzer that the nurses had pinned to the side of her pillows.

  “Looking for this?” Harrisch held up the little box with the big red button, the wire dangling down to the floor. “There’s really no need for it.” He laid the buzzer down on top of one of the machines, well beyond November’s reach. “I’m just here for a bit of conversation. I imagine you’re feeling well enough for that. Aren’t you?”

  November pushed herself up higher on the pillows, drawing as far back from the exec as possible. “What do you want?”

  “Why so nervous?” Spreading his empty hands apart, Harrisch let his smile fade. “Is there something I’m doing that’s making you afraid? What is it?”

  “You gotta be kidding-” November looked around herself for something she could throw at the exec, something hard rather than soft, that would do real damage. Musing about dreams and their meanings was over for the time being. “Get the connect out of here.” She wondered if she could scream or shout loud enough to get the attention of anybody passing by in the corridor beyond. That’s the problem with hospitals, November thought grimly. They were so damn loud, nobody ever knew what was going on. No wonder people die here. “Just get out,” she said again. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “That’s a rotten attitude to take.” Harrisch appeared genuinely wounded. “What did I do to deserve that from you? Employed you, paid you… made your whole life possible, the way you wanted to live it. If it weren’t for people like me, farming out the work outside the corporation, freelancers like you wouldn’t exist. You oughta thank me.”

  “Your ass, connect-head.” November’s initial panic had been replaced with a simmering anger, the way it always was, given enough time. “I wasn’t even working for you this time-you were just stringing me on with the possibility of a job-and you nearly got me killed.” She reconsidered the words. “‘Nearly’… shit. You did get me killed. Cooked up like a connecting flounder.”

  “Seems rather a harsh way to put it…”

  “Deal with it, pal.” November felt the back of the hospital gown pull open against the pillow as she folded her arms across her breast. “You left me hanging out there, looking like yesterday’s burnt toast. The only reason I’m alive-the only reason I’ve been brought back from the dead at all-is because somebody else popped for the bill here. Somebody who had a lot less reason to do it than you should have.”

  “Please.” Harrisch sighed elaborately. “You might like to try to see these issues from my perspective. DynaZauber corporate practice is a strict implementation of Denkmann’s Pimp-Style Management™ philosophy-or to put it another way, PSM is the codification of what we just do as a matter of course. We really wrote the book on a lot of those things, almost more than Denkmann did. The ego annihilation, the perpetual screw; all that stuff.” A note of pride sounded in Harrisch’s voice. “So you can just dispense with any notions about loyalty being anything other than a one-way street when you deal with DZ. We take, we don’t give-even when you’re on the payroll, that’s how it works out. Anything else would violate the essential sadomasochistic underpinnings of our management style, and then the whole system falls apart. And we’ve got too much invested in it to let that happen.”

  “Aw, man. Spare me.” I’m lying here with a new skin stitched on because of these jerks-she didn’t need a lecture on why getting connected by them was supposed to be such a wonderful thing. “If getting connected by you people comes without lubricant… I’m a big girl now. I’ll deal with it. Easier than listening to you sonsabitches.”

  “You know-” Harrisch sat down on a corner of the bed; November had to draw her feet up beneath the blanket to avoid him. “Some people come through experiences such as you’ve been through… and they’re better
people for it.”

  “Oh, I am; believe me.” November glared at him. “I’m just not going to waste it on you.”

  “I see.” The expression on the exec’s face was one of sly assessment. “And who does get the benefit of your transformed nature? Or let’s put it another way: who are you hoping will get it?” Harrisch leaned closer to her; he smelled of expensive cologne and adding-machine printouts. “Maybe it’s that poor bastard McNihil. Because you’re so grateful to him.”

  “Hardly.” November wished she had found something to throw at this smiling apparition. “He’s taken-remember? Even if I was interested in him, which I’m not. He’s got that major bent for his dead wife. Not exactly the kind of thing it’s possible to walk in on.”

  “True.” Harrisch gave a shrug. “Unless… he wanted you to.”

  “Give it up.” Her short laugh held contempt. “This shows why you were having such a hard time recruiting him. You don’t know how his mind works.”

  “And I suppose you do? Tell me then: why’d McNihil pay your bill, for the skin grafts and all the rest of it? He must’ve had a reason.”

  She regarded the DZ exec warily, then shook her head. “I don’t know why.”

  Harrisch slowly nodded, deep in his own thoughts. “I don’t, either,” he said after a moment. “Kind of a mystery. I was really hoping that you might be able to clue me in on it. Because there’s always a reason.”