“What time is it?” He rubs his eyes.
“Ten.”
“Ten?”
Gita looks different somehow. She’s thinner and more put together.
“Are you dressed up?” he asks.
She smiles, glad he noticed. “Wedding anniversary.” Her face reddens as she attends to the coffee at her desk. “Had a lovely dinner at a bistro in Pasadena.”
“And then you came back?”
She stirs her coffee with a spoon. “We had a fight.”
“Oh, Gita.”
“Go home, Eliot.” She shakes a packet of artificial sweetener and tears it open. “I’ll mind the shop.”
In the bathroom, Eliot pours a few drops in a hanky and flushes to cover the sound of his inhale. He folds his tie into his pocket. Unbuttons the top of his shirt. Washes his face in the sink.
He hates to leave without some new lead or clue to follow up on in the morning. If he gives it another fifteen minutes, another hour, could this be the night he finds Iris along some rest stop on the information superhighway? Not bloody likely. Tired as he is, she could spit in his face, and he wouldn’t recognize her. Better to get some sleep, he decides. Start fresh in the morning. Tomorrow’s a new day. Every day another chance to find her. Go at it with a clear mind in the morning, stop wasting time while you don’t have your faculties, your stamina, your wits.
“Take care, Gita,” Eliot says on the way out. He throws a stick of chewing gum in his mouth and waits for the elevator. The doors open and there’s a woman inside.
“There you are! I knew You couldn’t hide from me forever.”
Ah, shit, it’s his boss, Erica Santiago. All done up in her tight, black mini with her hair down and her tits fluffed and that great ass she’s always parading around. But nothing in her appearance could ever distract from the giant, hairy mole nestled above her lip like a possum ready to pounce.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” she asks.
“I was uh … catching up on activity reports.” Eliot pushes the button for the lobby and takes a position to her right so he won’t have to look at the mole.
“Have you eaten dinner?”
“Actually, I have,” he lies.
“Great. Then we’ll just go for a drink.”
Her car stinks of cigarettes and stale coffee. She drives fast and parks at the Ritz-Carlton where they take a table on the fiftieth floor. Blood-orange candles and tablecloths the color of a dark bourbon. The room rotates 360 degrees. The lights of the city glow around them like fireflies lost in the gray spew of exhaust drifting north from Heron.
“I brought up your name at an executive meeting,” says the Hairy Mole. “I recommended we transfer you to the Paolo Alto office and make you a junior VP.”
Eliot tries his best to ignore it, but there’s something hypnotic about the mole, the way the thing jumps and dances around her mouth as she talks.
“You’d be working in the office adjacent to mine, which means we’d be seeing a lot more of each other.”
It used to be only heartbeats had moles, and bots had unblemished skin. Then these “mole placement” shops started popping up around town. While heartbeats were having theirs removed so they could look like androids, androids were having moles implanted so they could look like heartbeats.
“I appreciate your consideration,” says Eliot, “but I couldn’t leave my brother alone in Los Angeles.”
“Oh, nonsense,” says the Mole. “You can commute from Paolo Alto on the vactrain in an hour. You could see him every weekend if you want.”
“I’d have to give up my apartment.”
“With the pay raise you’ll be able to afford a hotel.”
“Again, I appreciate the consideration.”
She hides her disappointment by stabbing a cocktail sword through the maraschino cherry in her drink.
“Why are you always rebuffing me, Eliot?”
“I’m not rebuffing you.”
“Don’t you want to get ahead?”
“I’m happy where I am,” he tells her. “The money’s fine. I like where I live.”
“I worry about your lack of ambition.”
Eliot sips his drink and checks the time on his pocket me. He wonders how short he can cut the evening without offending her.
“May I ask What happened in your meeting with Dale Hampton?” The Hairy Mole twists the plastic sword between her fingers. “What happened to the three thousand bot lease he came to Los Angeles to negotiate?”
Eliot leans back in his chair as if he’s struggling to remember the incident.
“As I recall,” he tells the Mole, “we were too far apart on the numbers.”
“What was he asking?”
“It averaged out to a hundred per day per bot.”
“You should have taken it.”
Eliot shakes his head. “The way Monroe crushes bots, we would have been sending replacements every week. We would have lost our shirts on that one.”
“Of course, they crush bots. The more bots they lose, the more we have to build. That increases demand for metal. And extracting metal is their business.”
Eliot sips his drink and shrugs. “I’m sure some other provider was happy to fill the order.”
“Two in fact, but Monroe isn’t satisfied with either. The Patels break down in the cold, and the Kindelans started to radicalize. There’s been crime. Runaways. Protests. Some Monroe executive found a bomb under his landing pod. Anyway, they want to send them all back to Cuba and buy a new pool.”
“If you want me to make the deal at a hundred,” says Eliot, “I’ll call Dale tomorrow.”
“No need. I already did. The meeting is set but on one condition.” She smooths the tablecloth, bringing her hand dangerously close to his. “Dale wants to buy the Satine 5000 we have in the showroom. He wants him sent to Texas before the two of you meet.”
Eliot feels a squeeze in the pit of his stomach. “Dale wants to buy Tim?”
“The bot has a name?” The Mole grins unkindly. “How cute.”
Eliot rubs his bottom lip with his finger as he tries to figure out some way to save Tim’s ass. If he tells the Mole the truth about what happened in the showroom, she’ll spare the Satine a trip to Texas and send him to Green Valley instead. The bot will be terminated, separated, and rendered, which is probably a better fate than what awaits him in Texas.
“We can’t sell the Satine to Dale,” says Eliot. “I need him in the showroom.”
“We’ll get you another.”
“I need the one that’s there. We work well together.”
“Eliot, this is an important contract. We’re talking about three thousand bots for a five-year term. Plus replacements. Plus a company store.”
“Tim’s the best we got, and Dale’s a drunk who doesn’t keep his word.”
“I’m sending him the bot.”
“I’m begging you not to.”
“Begging?” She laughs and repositions herself on her chair. “You won’t accept a promotion, you won’t go to Paolo Alto like I asked, but you’ll beg me to throw away a three-thousand-bot contract for a mannequin?”
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“How?”
“Anyway I can.”
“Hmm.” She uses the sword to place the maraschino cherry between her teeth. As she chews, the stem sticks out so that it looks like the hairy mole on her lip has a tail. “Are you seeing anyone?” she asks after she swallows the cherry.
Oh, God, thinks Eliot, how to respond? He can’t tell her the truth, though as he considers it, in the moment, he isn’t really sure what the truth is. If Iris were a heartbeat and she were dead, then no, he would be single, not seeing anyone. But she isn’t a heartbeat, and she’s missing, probably chopped up into a thousand parts, in which case—what is she? Damaged beyond repair? If not, it’s possible Iris can be brought back to life, which means, yes, Eliot is seeing someone, but, of course, he can’t tell that to the Mole. He can’t admit
that he’s committed to a being whose heart spins instead of beats; it’s socially unacceptable. Illegal in fact. It would get him fired and arrested.
“I am,” she gives her answer to a question Eliot didn’t ask. “Seeing someone that is. Though it hasn’t reached the condition of a relationship. And it never will since such relationships are frowned upon in our society.”
This last part, of course, piques Eliot’s interest.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised,” says the Mole. “Think we don’t know about you boys and all those strip mall massage parlors? Well, the ladies have their fun, too, you know. We aren’t just getting our nails done or our bikini lines waxed, if you understand my meaning.”
Eliot slowly raises his glass and sips his drink. “This is common?” He asks.
“More than you think.” Her high-heeled shoe kicks at the loose fabric on the leg of his pants. “The way an android makes love is very different from the way a heartbeat does. They don’t procreate sexually, of course, so in the bedroom, they have a way of making a woman feel more protected than penetrated. They aim to serve after all. A woman could get used to such a thing.”
“You can get arrested,” Eliot reminds her.
“But you can’t get pregnant. At least not yet.” She laughs at her own joke, then turns more serious. “Which I guess is the problem.”
“What is?” Eliot asks.
“Well, I’m not getting any younger. And with the birthrates falling from all the crap in the air and the food and the water, there’s a chance I might already be sterile. You could be as well for all we know, though there’s really only one way to find out.”
The quick drink Eliot agreed to has become something far more poisonous than he anticipated. It’s no longer the case that he merely has to fuck her to save Tim’s ass, now he has to get her pregnant as well. And he has to do it while looking at that hairy rodent on her lip.
The botress approaches to see if they’d like another round. Eliot asks for the check.
“Already?” says the Mole. “I thought things were just getting interesting.” She squeezes Eliot’s hand above the table.
“I love your earrings,” says the botress.
“Excuse me?” the Mole snaps, making it clear the android’s small talk overstepped a boundary.
“I-I’m sorry,” the botress stutters, “I-I just said I liked your earrings.”
The Mole realizes from Eliot’s expression that it’s more to her advantage to accept the compliment.
“Thank you.” She flips her hair back to better show off the jewelry. “They’re from Japan.”
“They’re beautiful,” says the botress. “I’ll get you another round.” She hurries away as the Mole’s attention turns back to Eliot.
“Now where were we?” She smiles as her hair falls back to cover her ears.
But Eliot can’t remember where they were in the conversation. He can’t even hear any sound in the room, nor feel anything other than the stutter in his chest. During the brief exchange with the botress, he had caught a glimpse of the Mole’s jewelry, enough to see what looked like a red fleck on the stone in the left earring.
Did I imagine that; he wonders. Was it some hallucination left over from the dream I had at my desk? Did I see it because I wanted to see it or because it was actually there?
“All of a sudden, so quiet,” says the Mole, her fingers stroking the back of Eliot’s wrist.
He reaches across the table and pushes aside her hair. The Mole coos and closes her eyes at his touch. He rubs the smooth brown stone with his thumb to make sure the red fleck isn’t a bit of dust.
“If you want to get out of here,” she whispers, “there’s an all-night lounge not far from the river. They’ve got private rooms with whirlpool baths. We can get a his-and-her massage.”
“Where’d you get the earrings?” he asks, his fingers squeezing the curve of the stone.
She touches her lips to his wrist.
“Where’d you get them?” He pulls the earring closer to examine it in the light.
“Ow. Eliot.”
“Where’d you get them?”
She grabs his wrist to relieve the pressure. “At an antique store.”
“Which antique store?”
“You’re hurting me.”
“Which antique store?” Eliot pulls of the earring stretching the skin on her lobe.
“Eliot!”
“Which store?”
“Pound’s! Pound’s Antiques in Beverly … Hills! Jesus!”
He lets go and leans back in his chair. His pulse is quick and his hand shakes, but he can hear again. A couple at another table looks over, and Eliot looks back. The couple returns to their meal.
“Jesus, Eliot. You really hurt me.”
The Hairy Mole puts a cocktail napkin to her earlobe to check for blood.
ELEVEN
Pound’s Antiques
It’s a small shop on Canon Drive next to a store that sells a hundred flavors of something with the consistency of ice cream but isn’t ice cream. Eliot must have driven by a thousand times without ever noticing the joint. Why would he? He isn’t one to antique.
The door buzzes; he enters. He sees in the back a bald, fussy proprietor, with a waxed mustache and a paunch. He uses a pair of pince-nez eyebranes and a large, steampunk earpiece to argue with someone on the line.
“I’m a very giving person, Raoul, but I wouldn’t mind a little reciprocity. I wouldn’t mind a little respect.”
Eliot assumes the proprietor is that same Pound whose name is on the window.
“I spoil you. I give you everything you need or want.” He barely acknowledges Eliot’s existence before disappearing into a backroom to continue his argument in private.
Alone in the store, Eliot browses the racks of vintage electronics near the front window. He sees an HDTV set, the thick, heavy kind manufactured before brane tech made liquid screens as thin as a layer of paint. He sees PCs, Macs, and old laptops that predate quantum computing. They have real, physical keyboards instead of hologram controls. They have old flash drives and hard drives, still used by crooks and privacy nuts worried about keeping their data out of the cloud where it’s more easily hacked.
“Because I’m not twenty-two,” the voice yells from the backroom, “and I don’t see what’s so awful about a night at home.”
Eliot looks through a shelf of old Barbies, American Girls, Elmos, and Teletubbies. A written tag reads DON’T PULL THE CORD next to a naked, sexless doll with a string on its belly. He passes the selection of aluminum cans and plastic bottles. He notices an Arrowhead Water container left over from when a lake by that name sat in the mountains east of L.A. He picks up an old Snapple bottle, empty, the kind that people collect.
“Are these real?” he calls out to the backroom.
The proprietor leans out from behind the wall and raises his pince-nez eyebranes. “Everything here is authentic,” he says.
“My brother collects these,” says Eliot. “You know they used to have these sayings under the bottle caps.…”
“Hold on.” Pound walks to the front of the store and changes the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. He lowers his eyebranes and yells again at his caller. “Stop lying to me Raoul. I don’t believe you in the least!”
Again, Pound ignores his lone customer and vanishes into the backroom, so Eliot moves on. He walks to an aisle stacked with laminated newspapers, glossy magazines, and old books made from paper. How sacred and heavy they feel in his hand. To think, they used to kill trees to give life to words, destroyed life for stories and news and—he can’t help but think of it—for words. For sentences and paragraphs. And stories. What’s so sacred about stories? Eliot wonders. Why so necessary to mankind when all other species seem to survive without them? There’s an old graphic novel with a cartoon robot on the cover. The machine has stiff joints, thin legs, and headlights for eyes. Eliot reads the back cover to see what the book’s about, but the words bore him, so he puts it down.
“Raoul, is someone in my house? Did you invite guests over without permission? I’ll have you rendered if you dared!”
In another aisle, Eliot finds CDs, Blu-ray disks, and vinyl. Jazz, opera, classical. He reads the sleeve of an old Miles Davis recording and is astonished to see the enormous disk contains only ten songs, five on each side. You actually have to flip it halfway through to hear the recording in its entirety.
He puts the record away and walks to the counter where, locked beneath the glass, are a pair of Glocks, a Smith and Wesson, a Berretta, and a Winchester rifle. They’re the old kind, the ones that shoot bullets instead of light pulses or exploding rounds.
“I’m coming home, and I want to see who’s in my house!” says Pound. “I’m hanging up on you. I’m very upset!”
The jewelry, also, is locked in a case. Rings, necklaces, and bracelets made of mined stones and old metals. No hybrids or manufactured rocks. Eliot sees a range of eyeball pieces with the signature red flecks. He looks closely, judging whether they were designed by Iris. It is possible, after all, that someone got the same idea and produced similar work. But this similar? he wonders. This same style, this same level of craft?
“What about these?” Eliot calls out.
Pound reenters and slams the eyebranes on the counter. He glances toward the jewelry beneath the glass where Eliot stands.
“Late twentieth century. Indian. Heartbeat made.”
“Indian?”
“Yes. Indian.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“At auction. Estate sale rather. The brooch is five hundred and the necklace three seventy-five. If you’re serious about buying, I can take them out. Otherwise, I’d just assume leave them in the case.”
“Do you carry parts for a C-900?”
“Sir, this is an antique store. If you’re looking to buy limbs, I recommend a chop shop in one of the many bot cities south of the freeway.” Pound drums his fingers against the counter. He checks his wristbrane as Eliot looks again at the red-flecked jewelry. They seem made of the same materials Iris used to smuggle out of Mun’s factory. Same colors, textures, and curves.
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