by Naomi Foyle
“So how long’s it gonna take?” he demanded.
Rattail conferred with the Scalper. “Three, maybe four hour.”
“That long?” He grimaced. “Can your buddy there hand the Scalper the instruments? I got a sensitive stomach for this kind of thing.”
“Ye, ye. He very interesting to see how it work.”
“Is there a sofa I can crash on? You can wake me when it’s done.”
“Ye, ye, right through here.” Rattail pointed at a gray metal door which led into a pleasant enough staffroom, for a morgue. The sofa was a bit short, but hell, he was the Sandman. He could sleep anywhere.
16 / The Anbang
“Precious Threshold Spirit: please bless my guest Sydney and honor us both with your wisdom as we pass into the heart of my home.” Kneeling on the mat in front of the door to the anbang, Da Mi bowed low and touched her forehead to the floor.
Sydney did the same. The dark floorboards smelled lemony and the grainy wood was uneven beneath her fingertips. Closing her eyes, she added her own thoughts to the prayer: Please help me to not let Da Mi down.
When she sat back up, Da Mi was taking a shank of Korean silk knotwork from a hook beside the door. Hidden in the folds of ribbon was a small brass key. Da Mi turned the key in the lock, grasped the door handle and pushed.
The blackness of the anbang seemed to swell into the room. A fingertip of anticipation shivered up and down Sydney’s spine.
“Follow me,” Da Mi whispered, and her tight red skirt disappeared into the darkness. Once her toes had crossed the threshold, Sydney shuffled on all fours after her.
Da Mi closed the door behind them. It was pitch-black. A floorboard creaked. Then there was the tearing sound of a struck match and the smell of sulfur, and Da Mi was lighting three tall white candles on a table against the far wall.
It didn’t seem right to speak. Sydney remained silent, on her knees. Floating like a net behind Da Mi was a tall patchwork lattice of carved wood. As her eyes adjusted to the candlelight, Sydney could see that the translucent white paper between the slats was flecked with thin pink petals.
“That’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“It’s a traditional screen,” Da Mi was kneeling in front of the candles. Her voice floated in the room like feathers in the air and her shadows danced up the walls. The anbang was tall enough to stand up in, but Sydney didn’t dare get to her feet. Instead, she sat back on her heels and took in the whole effect. To her left stood a piece of furniture a bit like a black leather sun-lounger, except there was a jumble of black flaps and straps wrapped around its chrome frame. To her right was a low table with a long drawer, like a desk for someone who didn’t mind sitting on the floor. A briefcase and two silk cushions, one white and one red, were tucked beneath the table, on which sat a wafer-thin laptop, a leather notebook, black padded goggles and a sleek joystick.
“That’s Virtuoso stuff, isn’t it?” Sydney asked reverently. “I’ve seen it in magazines.”
“The best virtual gaming technology money can buy.” Da Mi slid on her bottom over to the laptop table. Pulling out the cushions, she gestured to Sydney to join her. “Wait till you try it.”
“I thought it could still make you feel sick.” Sydney sat cross-legged on the white cushion and admired the detailed stitching on the goggles. The headpiece resembled an upside-down crown, or a black lotus, its four triangular petals designed to cover the player’s eyes and ears.
“Ah, but you’ve been drinking colloidal gold; that will prevent the symptoms if you’d like to make a voyage.”
“Really?” Sydney clasped her hands together and gave a little bounce. Every kid in Seoul was longing to try a Virtuoso ride, but no gaming company had dared mass-market the product yet, in case two players out of fifty got motion sickness and fell off their scooters on the way home from the videobang. So that meant the technology was just for those few who could afford the $50,000 price tag—or who had friends who could. “Wow, thanks, Da Mi!”
Tiny vertical lines formed between the scientist’s eyebrows. “Sydney, I have to let you know that what I am offering is not a game. Tonight I’d like you to enter a Satvision immersion that has inspired my present project. I don’t want to spoil the impact of the ride, but it could have an emotional effect on you. Do you trust me when I say this is a vital part of your induction to the project?”
The only emotion Sydney felt was excitement, brimming out of every pore. She nodded eagerly and reached for the joystick. Da Mi picked up the goggles and tugged them down over her head. The crown got caught for a minute on her hair clip and the two women giggled. It felt like being at a sleepover, playing around with stuff they knew they shouldn’t be touching. Finally, the mask was fitted snugly over Sydney’s head. The two side petals covered her ears and the eye pads sealed off all incoming light.
“Okay in there?” Da Mi asked, tidying Sydney’s hair. She sounded very far away.
“Great!” Her own voice was muffled now, with a faint reverb. “Let’s go!”
Sydney’s mind was a vast orb of silent darkness. Her body was hidden somewhere beneath her, swaying gently like a plant at the bottom of the sea. Gradually, she detected a faint, echoey hush in her ears, then distant specks of light appeared in the emptiness around her. Remembering the joystick, she turned slowly in a circle, became a revolving point in an enormous black field. On her second rotation, the echoes grew more insistent, almost musical, and the stars got brighter but fewer. From way off in the distance a misty blue marble began rolling slowly toward her. Mesmerized, she steadily threaded her way past meteors and satellites toward the shrouded beauty of the Earth. Soon she was hovering above continents and seas garlanded with wisps and whirls of cloud. Amber lights twinkled across the land masses. It was like snorkeling above a giant coral reef.
Now she was drifting above the Mediterranean Sea. Somewhere in Italy, a red light was blinking. More red lights were flashing further east. She zoomed in closer: wow! These were areas with high Satviz-rez. She could go down to any one of them and float around the streets, imagining all the people who lived in the dinky houses there, worked in the beehive office blocks. Where did she want to visit tonight?
Wiggling the joystick, she swung out toward Asia, passing more and more red lights as she crossed India and Thailand and swooped up over China. Mentally waving to Seoul, she entered the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean, then pointed herself at Vancouver. In no time she was hovering above the sprawling red beacon. Sydney dived down for a closer look at the city and the red light diffused, its fiery glow sinking into familiar grid of streets and buildings. Now, strangely, just when she knew where she was, the joystick didn’t seem to work anymore; instead of directing herself, she was being pulled along: past English Bay, over Chinatown and into Gastown, right past the hotel where she used to work and into the new upmarket end of Hastings Street.
It’s a bit freaky, not being in control anymore, but maybe this is part of the emotional experience Da Mi talked about, Sydney thought. It was also sort of nice not having to make decisions. So she relaxed, just let herself surf the sunset between the condominiums and converted warehouses, and back down to the seam between the renovated district and old Gastown. In a cute touch, Christmas decorations were hanging between the antique street lamps—and wow, look: there were even people down there, just a few, hunched up in winter jackets, walking dogs or smoking cigarettes. They were all immobile statues, bathed in that weird red light.
Sydney was nearly down at ground level now and she could see that most of the shops were shut. There was a Christmas tree in the window of a grocery store, a tilted angel at its tip. Peering into the store, she could make out a calendar on the wall. No way! It was from last year, and all the December squares had been crossed off up until Christmas Day.
Sydney frowned. Where had she been last Christmas? Oh yeah, with Annie and Jolene: burning a chicken in Annie’s apartment off Commercial Avenue and hiding Jolene’s MoPho so she couldn’t
talk to that creepy client who liked sticking wine bottles up inside her. He paid double for the trouble, but still, Christmas Day: the freak could wait.
That had been a fun day, she remembered, drinking Baileys and brandy cocktails, doing strip-teases for each other. It would be cool to see if she could peek in at the window, see Annie twirling her nipple-tassels for the neighbors. Jeez, that had been a laugh.
Pushing the joystick, Sydney tried to lift up and out of Hastings, but instead, she was drawn toward the figure of a woman in a mini-skirt and knee-high boots, standing at the entrance to a narrow alley. A Native woman, with strong cheekbones, she would have been attractive once. But though the street was still bathed in red light, it wasn’t making her look good. She had a big puffy bruise on her cheek, a tattoo on her neck and scabs and sores on her scrawny legs. A junkie. No wonder she was out.
A sour taste rose up in Sydney’s throat as she remembered what Annie’d always told her: You have to swear to yourself never to do needles or crack. Or you’d end up like this hard case: living in some flophouse on Hastings instead of your own small apartment; working the stinking alleyways of Chinatown instead of doing it in clean hotel beds; taking any diseased loser who came up, instead of picking and choosing amongst nervous first-timers and loaded jetsetters who tipped a hundred bucks if you so much as stuck your pinkie up their butts. Never do that without being asked, Annie had told her. Always make ’em think they’re getting extra.
For a second, Sydney wondered if she could signal to Da Mi that she’d had enough of Satviz, but then the hooker stamped her feet and exhaled a cloud of scarlet smoke into the air.
Weird. Was this a movie now, then, or still real life like she’d thought? As Sydney puzzled, the woman smiled, revealing black, gap-ridden teeth. A jowly man in a bulky overcoat had stopped to talk to her. He was a white guy, maybe mid-forties, with beetling black eyebrows that met in the middle. Sydney winced as the woman unbuttoned her jacket and let him look at her tits. He appeared to like what he saw. The pair turned down the alley, and Sydney found herself following, sucked along like a dust mote in their wake.
The alleyway was cast in blood-red shadow and lined with industrial-sized garbage bins. Sydney flinched, glad she couldn’t smell the overflowing refuse, which must have come from a Chinese restaurant: despite it being Christmas, kitchen steam was blowing out of a small round window next to a loading dock. At least one rat was burrowing in the rotting piles of boiled chicken bones and moldy egg-fried rice, but the hooker and her john just drifted through the crimson cloud to the bottom of the alley, where they stopped in front of a soggy-looking mattress, slumped against the wall. There was no doubt what it was used for: the ground here was littered with crushed beer cans, empty wine bottles and used hypodermics and condoms. Sydney grimaced as the couple haggled, over what—twenty, thirty bucks? She shifted the joystick again, trying to back out onto the street, but she remained inside the alley, jammed between the garbage bins, staring in horror as the man suddenly grabbed the woman by the hair, pulled her down onto the mattress and punched her in the face.
Without warning, Sydney’s mother’s voice slashed into her head: You keep away from Blaine. We don’t need trash like you in our home.
“Stop,” Sydney whispered, squeezing her eyes tight shut, but her mom’s voice rose like a chorus of bats in the darkness:
There’s places for sluts like you. They’re called brothels and jails.
Take that, you little whore—and don’t blame me if you end up on the streets.
One day you’ll pick the wrong man to tease. You’ll end up six feet under, and don’t think I’m paying for flowers.
The words swirled round and round, making her dizzy, sick to her stomach. She had to do something to make them shut up.
She opened her eyes and her mom’s voice faded, washed out by the scene in the alleyway, where the greasy-haired man in the overcoat was clamping his hand over the woman’s mouth and forcing her legs open with his knees while he fumbled at his belt clasp. The hooker kicked and tried to push him away, but the john had his flies opened now, and as he began shoving into her, Sydney’s mom’s voice screeched again in her head.
You’re asking for trouble, dressed like that, you’re begging for some man to rape you. When he does, don’t you come running to me.
This was horrible, horrible, horrible. But it was a game, right? So did she have to do something to help this woman? Did she have to save her, protect her, show her mom whose side she was on? Her heart hammering in her chest, Sydney tried again to force the joystick forward, to get closer, thinking she might be able to pull the attacker off the woman, but she remained suspended in the picture, unable even to rotate. It’s not working, Da Mi. The game isn’t working. She tried to speak, but her lips were glued together. She closed her eyes, but the afterimage of the struggling couple was burned onto her retinas, so she opened them again, to see the woman’s arms beating weakly against the man’s back, and the man twisting her head sideways, as if he were about to break her neck. Now the rat was sniffing at the woman’s cheap black boots. Sydney couldn’t watch a moment longer. Gasping and shaking, her heart clenched tight as a fist, she reached up and tore the goggles off her head.
The anbang was a blur of black and white. On the Virtuoso screen Sydney could see the man was pulling out a knife, raising his arm above the hooker’s head. With a click of the mouse, Da Mi blanked the laptop screen, then she turned to Sydney. A single tear was tracing a slow path down her impeccably made-up cheek. The scientist opened her arms.
17 / Blind Date
“Dr. Kim want see you, Mr. Joh-nee.” Rattail giggled as he shook Johnny awake. Johnny peered at his watch: just gone five a.m. He heaved himself upright and staggered back into the morgue.
The smell of disinfectant was slightly stronger than before; otherwise all signs of the recent surgery had been erased. Bullfrog was standing by the gurney. A small plastic bag, demurely tied up by the handles, was plumped by the door: discarded hooker face, no doubt.
“Where’s the Scalper?” Johnny asked.
“He take cab.”
“Why?” Johnny was puzzled. “I didn’t pay him yet.”
“He say you and him go for drinks, you pay him then. He tired, had to go, and me and my friend we want clean up, make girl look pretty for you.”
“What? Oh fuck off, Rattail. I told you, I like ’em with blood pumping in their veins.”
“Yeah, but I think you want look.” Rattail placed his hand on Johnny’s arm.
Johnny shrugged it off. “I inspect work, Rattail,” he said brusquely and stepped over to the gurney. The plastic wrap was pulled down to the woman’s shoulders. Kim’s stern face was united to her hairline and jawbone, framed by a thick red line and clear, neat stitches. The lab would take care of the seams later, he’d been told.
As Johnny contemplated the eerie image of his arch-rival on a mortuary slab, Bullfrog peeled back the wrap that was covering her body.
It was like a 3D version of those emails you got sometimes, of Condy’s head stuck on some Playboy bunny body, riding a hairless stud-muffin with the face of some grateful English toff. “Haha,” Johnny smirked.
Bullfrog stroked the woman’s thigh. The porno patch had been combed. “Yeppeuji?” he asked.
“Pretty girl,” Rattail needlessly translated, with a transparently false sigh.
“Wa-chuh dis,” Bullfrog said in mangled English and plucked the woman’s flaccid nipple between his thick fingers. He twisted it once, twice, and it hardened. The Koreans laughed, and Johnny felt a not-unpleasant twinge in the pit of his stomach.
“Is cold,” Rattail explained. “But you don’t like girl cold?”
“She’s not so bad to look at.” Johnny heard himself say. “It’s the place that gets on my nerves.”
“We take her back into lounge, where you sleeping so good. Heater on. Very nice.”
Johnny hesitated. But nah, this was too gross, even for him. “I told you, I�
�m not into stiffs.”
“You touch her. Smooth skin, very nice. Inside very warm. My friend, he put little heater inside, jelly too. Hot, wet, very nice.”
Rattail nudged Bullfrog, who pulled the woman’s legs apart, proudly displaying her glistening snatch. Manipulating the lips, he exposed the clit and then, reaching inside, pulled out a little battery-operated hand warmer, the kind you could buy at any Seoul subway station. This one was dripping with KY.
“She’s okay,” Johnny admitted, his voice a little choked.
“You want some time together?” Rattail wheedled. “Is only two hundred fifty thousand won extra.”
“With you two peeking in the keyhole? I don’t think so.”
“No, no: we go coffee shop upstairs. Back in half-hour. We give you key.”
Johnny paused, his eyes on the prone figure splayed out before him. His balls were aching now.
Ah what the hell: you only live once.
“I’m not paying for it, buddy. I got you this gig.”
The two conferred. “Two hundred won only,” Rattail said. “My friend take some trouble prepare her all nice, and he have wash her out after.”
“Hey, I’m using a condom—no way I’m fucking a dead whore without a rubber.”
The Koreans muttered to each other again.
“He have to pay guy at incinerator.” Rattail jerked his head toward the bag by the door. “One seventy-five.”
“One fifty. Final offer.”