There he was. It wasn’t the dream any longer. Gemini stood in the doorway of the tiny apartment. She placed one hand on her stomach, the other on the notch between her throat and her breasts. He was running to her, at her, smashing everything in his path. Plates and glasses shattered. Pots and colanders clanged. Coffee-makers and blenders exploded into millions of shards of glass and plastic.
And then, right then, is when the world ended. It ended when Anand moved.
“So, where do you stay?” Anand asked the man he’d helped –
But there was only silence. Silence and the patter of the stranger’s sneakers on the pavement behind him. The skin on the back of Anand’s neck, below his hedometer, cringed at the feeling that the man was staring holes into him.
“Any idea why those boys attacked you?” he tried to restart the conversation.
But the stranger was silent, seeming to study the buildings and the clouds and the staircases they passed. The intensity with which the man looked at everything frightened Anand. As though the man were a child, seeing the world for the first time. Anand wondered whether he should be bringing the stranger home with him. Yet the thought of walking into that apartment alone, confronting the hurt in Cyan’s gaze, was more terrifying than whatever the silent stranger probably wouldn’t do. So he continued walking, and the footsteps continued behind him.
He paused before he turned the key in the lock, his heart pulsing in his hands. The stranger’s breath on his neck was louder than the north wind. A stench of rotten fruit hung about the man. This didn’t feel right at all. But what could he do now?
He opened the door.
Before Anand could react, the man pushed past him. Anand could scarcely believe it – the man ploughed through the middle of the apartment, through his kitchen utensils and cutlery and crockery, sending it all into a hurricane of destruction. The stranger was making his way toward Cyan, his arms outstretched.
Anand moved without thinking. The key he had used a moment ago found its way between his middle and ring fingers, and he formed a fist around it. The man was now almost upon Cyan, and then he was. On her. His arms wrapped around her. She was screaming in muffled shock, and he was grasping at her. Tighter. Was he trying to strangle her?
Anand thought no more about it, as he drove the key as hard as he could into the man’s spine.
He felt polyester and skin part. Muscle shredded and split. And then bone. Something cracked. The key caught, and grinded against something gristly as he forced it further.
The man let out a whoop, more of surprise than pain, and flailed his arms behind him to seek out his attacker. Anand tore the man from Cyan, and threw him to the floor. He would never forget the look on the man’s face as he fell, his eyes wide as vanilla dumplings.
The dull clanggg that reverberated through the apartment was at least two notes lower than Master Dzogo’s meditation bell. But it lasted just as long. Cyan pushed herself to sit, so she could see what had happened to Gemini. Her hands shmooshed into something wet. She paid the sensation no heed, and focused on Gemini instead.
His head lay on the side of a soup pot. His bloodshot eyes gawped at the ceiling in what looked like astonishment. She inhaled sharply, readying to bellow the horror from her lungs. But a hand on her mouth cut her short.
“Shhh,” said Anand.
He hurried to the door. Locked it.
“That’s …” She lost her breath. “That’s, that’s …”
Anand placed a hand on her chest, touching the hummingbird rise and fall of her breast. “Did he hurt you?” he asked. His hands searched her abdomen for a wound.
“That’s Gemini,” Cyan finished.
“Gemini, your husband?”
Cyan’s jaw was slack. Her eyes fixed on the body on the floor. It wasn’t moving. None of it was moving.
“Cyan, is that your husband?”
It really was Gemini. She was dreaming him. Had she brought him here? Was this still a dream?
“Cyan!”
She snapped her head round to look into Anand’s face. The skin of his forehead, which was usually taut and smooth, was more wrinkled than the back of Master Dzogo’s hand.
“Who is that, Cyan?”
She turned back to the body. But her eyes couldn’t focus on that space. That dead space on the floor. Between the broken plates and the wall and the smashed blender, there was something dark and big and impossible.
She curled her fingers into balls, and that’s when she noticed again the wetness. The tanginess, as Gemini’s blood on her hands clotted and darkened.
There was a gasp. A gurgled, frothy curdling of fluids and vapors. The sound had come from the thing on the ground.
Chapter 8
One small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day.
– Unknown
The Tax Man was in love with suffering.
With each person’s memories he repossessed, the losses and the yearnings and the disappointments mounted. His head was crammed with them, and as they trickled into his heart, his world grew texture and color. The brown walls of Shangri, the gray sky, took on meaning and quality.
What had appeared to him as slums, were now laden with memories. That cocaine bar, where he used to pick up Pleasure Monsters – he liked to use the knuckledusters on them – appeared in the memories of an old woman he’d repossessed. The paramedics had found her dead on the scene, cold and rubbery on her kitchen floor. But twenty years earlier¸ her eyes had flashed amber in the mirror of the cocaine bar, as she laughed and flirted with a transient sailor.
He’d never paid attention to the clouds. But yesterday the paramedics had been called to the Joke Bureau for a coronary. The man was sitting in his chair, lips thin and blue, while his colleagues buzzed about. Donys managed to revive him, but the chances of permanent brain damage were high, and The Tax Man had needed little excuse to repossess the man’s memories. These were some of his favorites. Who would have known that such a funny man (he’d produced last year’s top-selling joke journal) could have been so miserable.
The joke man was a lottery winner, but his wife had died in childbirth. He’d raised the boy the best he knew. Tried to teach him Shangri’s central principle: be happy, but no more than your neighbor. The joke man tried to be happy, to forget the way his wife had bled out while his son came into the world. He tried to forget her shocked screams, her sobs, and then her silence, as she’d slipped away. He focused instead on the boy, but he saw his wife’s dead face in the child every time their eyes met. And he remembered the way the joke man and his wife would lie on their balcony at sunset and watch the clouds. Those formless shapes that birthed and died on the north wind.
“Rhinoceros!” his wife would shout into the sky.
“Praying mantis,” he countered.
“A duck with three legs.”
And it would go on like this, as the black sun sank behind the Wall every evening. Until they were guffawing and touching and kissing.
The joke man missed his wife.
And now, when The Tax Man watched the sky and its broiling clouds, he saw unicorns and manta rays and dinosaurs. There was a world of stories floating above his head every sunset, and he hadn’t known all these years. But he knew now.
Repossession after repossession, through the memories of others, The Tax Man’s world grew shapes and shadows. Every building held meaning, and each person he passed was significant to somebody. There was a peace in the knowledge that the world meant something. And he wanted more. More memories. More meaning. More of this feeling. He wanted it more than the estate the Tax Bureau had given him. He wanted it more than the harem of staff that served his every whim when he plodded home after a long day’s work. He wanted meaning more than all the hedons Shangri could offer.
His cellphone rang.
Florence gave him a look. The sound was sharp and illegal on the morning air. Cellphones were outlawed this side of the Wall, for all but public servants. The Tax Man enjoye
d talking on his in busy places, to mark his difference. His power.
“Got the tracking results you ordered on uh … Gemini Rustikov.” His supervisor’s voice was distracted. “Messaging you coordinates.”
The phone vibrated against his ear.
“Got them.”
“Sort this out. Case has been open too long. Negative utility accruing to your file,” said his supervisor’s hard voice.
The line went dead.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time. He was riding in the back (and where was Donys today?), flying along the highway to a multiple-pedi on the ghetto boundary. “At least six fatalities, many critical,” he’d heard over Florence’s radio. The Tax Man had licked his lips at the thought. The memories. But now that damned Gemini Rustikov was ruining his day again.
“Turn around,” The Tax Man said.
“What?” Florence called from the driver’s seat.
“We’re going back to the hospital. Official business.”
Florence said nothing as she swung the ambulance around. Donys would have glared at him with those hard, resigned eyes, had he been here. But he wasn’t. Where was Donys? When he was done with this Gemini Rustikov business, he and Donys were going to have words.
“Want another?” the barman asked. To Donys’s lubricated brain, the man behind the bar had pecs bigger than the Buddha’s.
“Yeah,” Donys slurred, “whhhhhy not?”
His shift at the hospital had begun without him hours ago. Donys didn’t know how many hours, but Florence would be counting the minutes – that dyke. And The Tax Man.
The Tax Man.
The brute had been riding with Donys every day this week. Yesterday, they had been called to an extra-crispy. Guy had poured boiling oil over his chest. Third-degree burns to be sure. Nipples peeled right off when they stripped his shirt.
Donys calmed him, gave him pain meds. Ten minutes, and they’d be back to the ER. Printed skin was readily available for burn victims. Not a pleasant recovery, but not impossible.
“You’re okay,” said Donys. “We’ll sort you out at the hospital.”
And there it was. The needle. The Tax man shooting morphine right up Extra-Crispy’s arm. Didn’t take five minutes, and Extra-Crispy’s eyes had glazed over. His bubbling chest ceased to rise and fall.
Donys had a spot behind the hospital, among the ferns, where nobody walked. In the past it had been a place he could jerk off without being bothered – he’d always had more than enough altruism credits to afford a few extra hedons. But now, the place among the ferns was for crying. Long, drawn-out tears that pooled on his lower-lip. Nothing he did was making a difference. The Tax Man was killing his altruism.
This morning when his alarm went off, Donys couldn’t lift himself out of bed. His body froze to the goose-down duvet. His legs wouldn’t budge, not even a twitch. He couldn’t go into work again. Watch The Tax Man euthanize every patient he saved. He couldn’t do it.
But he could go to BIGS. He needed a serviceman. Just one, to start the day. But when he got to BIGS, it happened too quickly. Fifteen minutes after he’d stepped through the doors, he’d been sucked off by a serviceman with a tongue blessed by the Devas. He thought of leaving then, but stuck around instead, and watched some of the other patrons fucking. An hour later, and he’d fucked another serviceman. And then another.
With every serviceman he fucked, his hedons increased, but without an increase in his altruism credits. His deficit widened.
He stopped off at the bar between engagements. Drank. Fucked. Drank. Fucked. And repeated. He’d lost count how many times.
“Whewee, stranger!” A man whistled beside him.
“Uh,” mumbled Donys, trying to turn to face the man without falling off his stool.
“You got ya’self a problem right there.” Clad only in a faded white towel just like everyone else at BIGS, Donys noticed the man was withered and gaunt. Not his type. But loud. “That hedometer a’yours is high enough to feed a Brownie village, and ya’ ain’t got altruism credits to match.”
The barman scowled at the man.
“Name’s Blayze.” He offered Donys a slap on the shoulder that nearly sent him sprawling.
“I know a guy,” Blayze lowered his voice, “could hulp you with your altruism creds.”
The cobwebs in Donys’s head cleared. His cock hurt.
“What sort of guy?” Donys whispered.
Blayze cocked his head toward the change rooms. “Follow me.”
Donys had to kick the starter of his Suzuki three times before his foot landed on the sweet spot. He was sloshed. He followed Blayze’s bike out the parking lot, white morning light splintering in his head. The silhouette of his straw mane flouncing in the wind made Blayze appear as a scarecrow in the afternoon light.
They drove out of the business district, the Wall flanking them as the buildings and the people devolved the further they rode. Donys had never driven this far out – his apartment was close to the hospital, in the more affluent part of town. Here, the men and women stared at the ground as they lurked along the sidewalks, their shoulders hunched, their necks invisible behind tattered collars.
Fear gnawed at his gut, as they stopped outside a blackened building. Chunks of plaster and brick were missing in places, revealing a rusted steel skeleton. The building was populated, but with what?
As Donys dismounted the bike, and walked across the crumbling pavement with Blayze, the humiliation at having to enter such a place threw him back in time. It was his Hedometer Ceremony, and he was ten.
“Your bowtie!” his mother shouted. “It’s no good at all. Henry!” she called to his father, “Henry! Fix your son’s tie.”
His father was too busy with his own tie in the mirror.
“Fine,” his mother said, grabbing the bowtie too tightly. “I’ll do it. I do everything around here,” she mumbled.
“What do you want, E-v-e-lynne?” his father stuck his head around the doorway. Little Donys knew his mother hated it when Henry drew out her name like that. She ignored him. But when they got into the car, she thought better of it.
“You know,” she was tapping the window as a metronome to her anger, “I hope he doesn’t turn out like you.”
Donys sat in the back seat, watching their unblemished alabaster faces hurl insults at each other the rest of the drive there. They didn’t stop when they left the car. They continued in barbed whispers as they entered the hall to applause. So many white faces stared at him, smiling benevolently. At his dark skin. He was foreign, alien. Adopted. And they were all there to see him. To examine him. And to bring him into their world. Henry and Evelynn couldn’t Breed. But they could have him. He was the next-best-thing. And as the guests clapped and cheered his Hedometer Day, Donys had blushed behind his dark cheeks. The world was watching.
Now, Donys followed Blayze across the crumbling pavement, feeling dozens of bloodshot eyes crawling along his back, on his Suzuki with its customized red trims. They stared at him through broken windows, from passing bicycles, from cars sputtering along the cracked street.
With his leather jacket and foamy sneakers, he was something Other. Something dangerous and desirable.
Blayze jabbed one of the many buzzers beside a rotten wooden-door. He pressed it five times. Four quick taps, then a pause, and a fifth. Donys heard an electric bzzz, and the door receded slightly. Blayze took Donys’s forearm, and hauled him inside. They climbed six flights of stairs. When he touched the banister, his fingers came away tacky. He didn’t touch it again.
Blayze led him to an apartment at the end of the corridor. The door was open. Dozens of holo-screens floated over every square inch of the dank room’s walls. There was no central light, and Donys scraped his shin on an overturned wooden stool in the dark. The scratch burned as Blayze shouted to a young woman buried in tattoos and headphones, “Brought another one. I SAID, I brought you another one … yeah, for an altruism hike.”
Blayze’s grip on his for
earm tightened as he dragged Donys to a single-seater couch. Edges of the torn leather pricked his thighs.
The young woman removed her headphones, and slid her chair behind Donys’s.
“2036 model,” she said, tapping the screen of his hedometer. Each knock against the glass echoed through his hang-over. “Not easy to reset these.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what you always say, TBone,” Blayze said, slapping her across the shoulder. “He’ll pay the fee.”
“What fee?” Donys asked.
TBone turned Donys’s head back to center. “Dude, I’m working here.”
“Oh, TBone takes a cut a’ your current hedon reading,” Blayze said, staring at a holo-screen playing a porn vid Donys recognized from BIGS.
“How big a cut?” Donys didn’t like the feeling of TBone jabbing at the back of his skull. Felt like TBone was tapping on his brain.
“Fifty percent,” Blayze said distractedly. He watched the screens, stroking the bulge in his pants.
Donys pushed away from TBone’s fingers. “Fifty! No way.”
“You don’t have a choice.” TBone tugged Donys to the back of the chair. Her hands were strong. “Your deficit is eight hundred percent. The Tax Man sees that, and he won’t bother with the knuckledusters. You gonna lose limbs. Taking half your hedons more than halves the deficit, and I’ll raise your altruism creds to cover the remainder.”
Donys fell silent while TBone continued her work on his hedometer. Blayze was now heavily involved in the porno, and, thankfully, had moved to the opposite corner of the room to jerk off.
“Why you called TBone?” Donys asked. If he was going to put his life in this dyke’s hands, he might as well get on good terms with her. Donys was skilled at finding favor with people.
“I can take the meat right off the bone,” she said.
“Huh?”
“The hedometer. I can remove it without any damage. Have to take it off so I can adjust it without killing you. Then I’ll put it back. No harm done, and your deficit will be down to nothing.”
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