Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  Something’s wrong, thought Azusa, looking away, staring sightlessly at the far-off Interface. Total despair gripped him: the burst of satisfaction he derived from deftly handling the Patti F. crisis had disappeared, replaced by this ominous, fatalistic presentiment. When Milch had shown him just now his target in the gunsight, the solitary MFer standing dangerously close to Dr. Adder himself, on his motorcycle, right out on the sidewalk in front of his black iron gates, the certainty of disaster had tightened around himself. Even though Azusa knew that with Milch all shots, regardless of their perimeters, were the same, this seemed too close. Of course, he thought, that’s what appeals to Milch about this shot. Snuffing this MFer will be like laying a gift at his own hero’s feet.

  He turned back to watch Milch move the gun slightly, perfecting the alignment of the gunsight’s cross hairs. The crowd was silent as stone: what they could not see, craning their heads toward the Interface’s distant image, they could imagine. The only sound dropping into the vacuum was the new girl’s fragmented chant, which grew slightly louder, as if Milch had discovered a volume control deep within her, and then crystallized into sudden intelligibility.

  Azusa watched in horror as Milch lifted his face from the gunsight and stared, blanching, at the girl’s mouth. Unheeding, lost in who knew what high school cheerleader exstasis of memory, she softly crooned, “Fight on, for Buena Maricone.... Ever faithful we will be—”

  “Alumna,” croaked Milch, his face bloodless, the injection’s psychic insulation shattered. The girl’s groin started to buck and rear beneath his hand in sudden spasms of pleasure. Azusa tore desperately at the backs of the Rattowners in front of him, struggling to reach Milch and the gun.

  At the end of the street, Limmit turned around and looked back. Something seemed to tug him toward its depths. Mary pulled him gently back around by one arm and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  He drank in her sober, concerned face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  He sighed and reached behind him for the wall of the building to lean against, but it was yards away. “You’re right. Maybe it’s L.A., the Interface itself. I feel like I’ve been drained. Like my blood all went down the sewers or something.” He shook his head slowly. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this at all.”

  She smiled. “Who is.”

  The MFer lurched forward, shoving Droit aside. “Fuck you!” he screamed at Adder, then staggered toward the motorcycle, both arms upraised, revealing large ovals of sweat in the gray coat’s folds.

  On the steel-capped toe of his boot, Adder caught the MFer in the stomach and shoved him back, stumbling. What a night, thought Adder, grinning. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lyle opening his mouth to receive Pazzo’s kiss. “Save it till you get home!” he yelled at them. “You disgusting fairies!”

  Wrenching aside the last Rattowner, Azusa flung himself at Milch. The air seemed to thicken into a heavy, viscous liquid, through which he crawled agonizingly slowly. He could see the gunsight’s small circle of light from which Milch had torn himself away, and the cross hairs, controlled by the spastic hand frozen upon the gun, dancing from one body to another in the tight knot of people clustered around the motorcycle on the Interface. Everything on the roof seemed to be moving at a fraction of real-life time except for that small circle of light, jerking from one possible victim to the next. Even the girl’s song and Milch’s scream oozed, rumbling, into Azusa’s ears.

  Still miles away, Azusa saw Milch’s hand clench slowly around the gun’s trigger. He heard a low, throbbing roar begin, which quickly modulated up into the gun’s deafening report. The slow air thinned out suddenly, and he plowed shoulder-first into Milch, tearing him free of the weapon and the girl. They skidded across the rooftop into the massed legs of the gaping Rat-towners around them. Twisting his neck around, Azusa could see the bullet’s white tracer trail arcing down toward the Interface.

  “Look back there,” said Mary, pointing down the Interface. “Just so you can’t say your entire night’s been wasted—now you’ll recognize him when you see him. That’s Adder there, on his famous machine.”

  Limmit followed the direction of her outstretched finger to the small clot of people a long distance down on the street. It was hard to see much from this far away. He had a brief impression of a grinning, knifelike face, when the sound of a small explosion, muffled by distance, hit his ear. It seemed to come from somewhere high in the darkness; he looked up and saw nothing but the lightless shapes of L.A.’s buildings. He turned back in time to see a red spot, like a rose or a small vein bursting in his own eye, appear down the street where Dr. Adder was.

  Nothing could be heard over the roar of Adder’s motorcycle. Pazzo’s head shattered without warning between Lyle’s hands. A faint tingle like electricity burned his lips as bone splinters and fragments of pulpy tissue flew in a nimbus of vaporized fluids. Blood welled from the neck of the body collapsing and twitching like a puppet, washing over the larger pieces of facial structure that had already fallen to the sidewalk. Lyle’s hands closed together on something warm and damp, and he went into great, back-arching, vomiting convulsions, Pazzo’s tongue being expelled from his mouth like some blood-swollen leech.

  “Shitfire,” said Adder. Stunned. The cycle’s engine died, snorting and coughing as if drowning. “Somebody just got Pazzo.”

  “Really?” said Droit, looking rapidly from Adder to the corpse and back again. He took out his notebook. “Could you describe your reaction to that?”

  ❖

  “Es wird mirganz angst urn die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denk,” sang the small, yellow plastic radio. It was just before noon; some earth tremor had toppled the radio from the window sill onto the floor, switching it on. Limmit woke at the sound, tangled up in sweat-soaked sheets. Panic-stricken, he jerked his bare feet to the cold wooden floor and looked around for some place to hide the still-smoking pistol in his hands. He looked down at them and saw that they were empty, the palms pink but bloodless. A dream, he thought stupidly, as the last fragments evaporated. Something to do with last night. The music flowed on, all atonal strings and horns whining. Slumping, spine curved, against the wall at the head of the bed, he ran his tongue over corduroy-textured teeth; he had never awakened in Phoenix with a mouth like this.

  On the other side of the bed, Mary slept on, exposed, the bed coverings in a puddle at Limmit’s feet. He watched her even, childlike breathing raise and lower gently her dark-coffee breasts and their nearly black aureoles. Her eyelids with their dark lashes lay unmoving, untroubled by REMs or other night phenomena. If she was dreaming at all, it was of immobile, sunlit landscapes free of last night’s sudden, conclusive splash of violence. From which Mary had pulled him to this room, after he had run halfway up the Interface, a fear clenching his heart, to see Dr. Adder vanish completely behind his iron gates, leaving behind the mangled corpse for the suddenly numerous police and silent crowd.

  He pulled himself across the bed, closer to her. The wet stain in the middle of the bed had evaporated, absorbed into the night air’s humidity. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, causing her eyelids to flutter and then open, regarding him calmly. “What’s that music?” she asked softly.

  “Wozzeck, ” he said, leaning back against the wall. “By Alban Berg.” He knew it from the small collection of tapes, all German vocal works, left behind in Phoenix with his paperbacks. They had belonged to his father: the only material remainders of that shadowy yet distinct figure that had ever come into his possession, other than the black briefcase now stored beneath the bed.

  Ein guter Mensch, Limmit echoed the opera’s captain inside his own head, der sein gutes Gewissen hat, tut alles langsam .... Wrapping her arms around his bony waist, Mary, ignoring the incongruous radio, said, “It’s nice to have you back.” She smiled, turning her face away from him shyly, as if she felt it foolish, a small betrayal. Just like, thought Limmit painf
ully, the first time years ago. His heart constricted with the memory’s pang. Wasn’t there one single gesture of hers, one word or smile or anything that couldn’t slip like this through all his defenses?

  At the Phoenix Egg Ranch, Limmit’s mother had died when he was ten. He hadn’t cared much for her, finding her only interesting as a link through the past to the vividly remembered image of his father. Given to alcohol and depression, she hadn’t given the young Limmit many details about Lester Gass, other than the often repeated fact of his having stranded his wife and five-year-old child at the ranch, one of the many enterprises he controlled or had a hand in. Still clear in Limmit’s mind was the image of his father’s face, staring at him from the door of the helicopter that was bearing Gass aloft, until both helicopter and father disappeared into the Arizona sun.

  Not much provision had been made for young Limmit upon his mother’s death. He moved in with R. C. Cuthbertson, the harmless old fart who was running the brothel back then. The old man had been his mother’s only friend on the ranch, feeding her alcohol and sympathy in exchange for brief hand jobs. When Limmit grew older and ran into disciplinary problems at the company-run high school, Cuthbertson, in the manner of a wise old uncle, introduced him to the contents of the brothel’s drug cabinet.

  This is a ssssnap, said young Limmit to himself, oozing through his scholastic career. The world and its contents shrank into a level, featureless plain. The high school was actually little more than a holding pen, detaining its occupants until they were old enough to go to work among the chickens. The teachers appreciated Limmit’s new cooperative attitude, even though he did seem to slouch a lot and only mumbled in response to questions. For his own part, Limmit felt warm and comfortable, insulated from the other adolescents, whom he had never (except for the overfriendly Joan) really seemed to fit in with. He had always felt a barrier, compounded partly of his own mixed feelings about his father, between them and himself. Fuck ’em all, he would fuzzily repeat to himself.

  At age eighteen, upon graduation, Limmit discovered that he had somehow, while wrapped in his cozy private miasma, neglected to fill out the form, a routine matter for all students, requesting exemption from Selective Service processing. Notified of his subsequent induction, he craftily filled his suitcase with what he calculated to be a sufficient supply of his favorite downers from the drug cabinet, enough to last his three-year hitch. They were all confiscated from him upon stepping off the bus that had brought him and the three or four volunteers from the ranch’s graduating class to the army training center near Salt Lake City.

  After boot camp, young Limmit found himself in the Army of the Northern Midwest, under the leadership of General Abraham Romanza, spending most of his time toting one end of a huge metal tube studded with various lensed devices over the gentle agrarian hills of Ohio and surrounding states. No one ever saw General Romanza. At one point in his military career, young Limmit read on the wall of a field latrine that the general spent all his time back at GHQ, chasing army nurse tail and personally farting on any and all requests for transfer of duty— and Limmit believed it. The Midwestern Liberation Front, led by the feared Anna Manfred, was reaching some kind of zenith and blowing up autonomic farm machinery by the long ton, leaving square miles of accelerated two-month wheat rotting in the fields. This waste was overseen only by the smoldering hulks of the giant combines that had had the entire agricultural responsibility, from seeding to reaping, to themselves. The Army of the Northern Midwest, Limmit included, trudged through the fields, chasing in slow, methodical soldier fashion the revolutionary bands.

  As it turned out, too methodical: one of Anna Manfred’s lieutenants deduced that the army’s search pattern, supposedly random, was in fact a simple mathematical progression, a semispiral based on the set of primes. Once the pattern, which had indeed been set up by General Romanza’s big military model computer, was figured out, all of the army’s future moves were easily calculable. Which fact greatly helped the MLF in setting up an ambush (ill-famed since in military circles) some eighty miles out of Cleveland.

  Most of the troops died immediately in the crossfire. Young Limmit and the other half of his tube-toting team, a Spec. 4 named Jetsam, were pinned down in the combined wreckage and impact crater of their division’s hot-lunch copter. For the rest of the afternoon, they disposed of slowly cooling coffee and sandwiches, only slightly singed, and listened to mingled weapon and death noises. To pass the time, Limmit sorted through the company’s mail sacks, which had burst open in the copter’s crash. Dead letters: there were not going to be any recipients for them, let alone an actual mail call. Not surprisingly, none were addressed to him. He opened them, extracting letters from home, seminude Polaroid snaps from girlfriends, dear johns from others, small packages of crushed cookies, socks, et cetera. The contents of one small package were more interesting than the others.

  Evening came, and they were surrounded at an indefinite distance by an unknown number of revolutionaries. Limmit had little conception of them other than what had seeped through from an army indoctrination film six months earlier at boot camp, which he had mostly slept through. A woman’s voice crackled metallic over a bullhorn: “Imperialist lackeys ...” (“Shee-it,” he could hear her comrades laughing among themselves, good-natured from excitement and success, at the melodrama.) “How’s this,” continued the bullhorn to both groups. “Hand the tube over to us undamaged and we’ll give you your lives and safe escort out of here. That’s a promise.”

  To young Limmit’s surprise, Spec. 4 Jetsam yelled back “Nuts!” to the unseen enemy, sincerely dredging up a fragment of some old movie seen at boot camp. Limmit had thought these conditions excellent. Jetsam disagreed, fervently proposing instead that they wipe out about forty-five degrees of the encircling revolutionaries with the one projectile they had for the tube. Young Limmit didn’t bother pointing out the remaining degrees of pissed-off neo-Bolsheviks that would descend upon them after they had shot their wad, only slipped between the Spec. 4’s ribs a six-inch, superbly balanced and honed blade he had removed from an undeliverable package earlier in the day. He wiped the blade on his pants leg, inserted it into the boot sheath the doting parents of their undoubtedly dead son had thoughtfully enclosed, tossed the tube over the rim of the crater, and made a separate peace.

  The surrounding revolutionaries turned out to be only seven in strength, three men and four women, a fact that didn’t shake Limmit’s belief in the correctness of his surrender. Somewhat autonomous within the MLF, they stayed behind, mopping up, while the rest of Anna Manfred’s troops regrouped to the east. The leader of the little band was Mary Gorgon.

  True to their word, within reason, and impressed with his quick-thinking execution of the reactionary Spec. 4, the revolutionaries fed young Limmit a mixed diet of Marx, Lenin, Malcolm X, Peter Camejo, and others, none of which impressed him very much, en route to a drop-off point from which Phoenix would be accessible.

  “Why Phoenix?” asked Mary. It had been his request.

  He didn’t answer. The chemical burden of his high school fog had dissipated enough to let a certain native cunning and ambition, his father’s heritage, emerge. Or else his rare, if not singular, spurt of positive action in instinctively snuffing Jetsam had catalyzed him into no longer being content to be an object moved by other people’s forces. At any rate, at that point he was already formulating plans for his return to Phoenix.

  (The plans were never put into effect. Even though he still carried the handy blade inside his boot, it had not been necessary to actually use it on old Cuthbertson, in order to clear his way for the assumption of the position of brothel-keeper. The mere showing of the knife to him in private was enough to send the old man into a fatal syncope. After that, Limmit seemed to run out of steam, the ability and willpower of his father no longer being secreted from Limmit’s glands. He was will-less, content to let things ride until a year and a half later when Joe Goonsqua had shown up.)

  “Have
it your way,” said Mary. The life of a revolutionary for her, he knew: good times with high moral purpose, touch of fatalist quixotic. Sometimes, watching them sing ancient Cuban guerrilla songs around the campfire, he suspected her and them to be in it solely for the fun of it. That they wished it would never end, by defeat or victory, because they would never find anything else that was such a kick. Came daylight, however, and he knew that wasn’t the case. He realized that she was ready to die for some vision of a far-off humanity, even taking on faith the validity of her own actions. Did it really do any good? It probably wasn’t even appreciated by its supposed beneficiaries, snug in their gigantic residential complexes on both coasts, or accorded anything beyond nuisance value by its enemies. Sometimes, on a lunar basis tied in with her menstrual cycle, she doubted. Even so, there was always a mischievous pleasure she found in this stuff.

  Two nights before they reached the drop-off point, she took him aside to make her most forthright recruiting pitch. “Come on and join us, old E. Allen,” she said. “Lotta laughs waging people’s war.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I really think I’d like to see a little more of the world before I get my ass shot off.”

  An army plane, using infrared scopes, spotted the band on the ground below. As if young Limmit’s words were a cue, it released a small covey of thermotropic personal missiles at them. Only two missed, distracted by the campfire, the others bursting like jam-filled plastic bags the internal organs and shattering the major thoracic bone structure of everyone but Mary Gorgon and Limmit. Through the rest of the night, he watched her cradle in her arms the one who took longest to die, the rest having expired almost immediately upon impact. Her tears mixed with the blood that seeped into her rough shirt as she gently rocked back and forth, crooning to the stiffening body. He had thought she was so hard.