I knew other children for days, maybe a couple of weeks and then they were blown away on the wind and lost up in the mountains. My mother talked to me as if I was a child, because holding onto that belief was the only way she could carry on; and her parents, with whom we stayed at the coast, were not inclined to talk much to the son of their son-in-law.
But I didn’t say anything to the old man; I lapsed into tearful silence instead. The dam was already too strong. To let it break would have felt like a betrayal. I wanted to be happy, as everyone does, and I think I understood that if I started letting things out of the back of my mind they would sour the front forever.
“He’s wrong,” the old man said suddenly. “He’s wrong in a very bad way.” My heart lurched at hearing someone say that, at hearing a grown-up say the words that I believed in every corner of my heart. I wiped my eyes and kept silent.
“When you get older, some things won’t seem so important,” he continued, eyes calmly on the people down at the waterline. “Few years ago, I used to chase a lot of things. Now I don’t hardly even remember why. But then I’m old, and fit to die, so what difference in what I say?” I stirred slightly, embarrassed, and he laughed. “What you gonna do when you grows up, boy?”
“I’m going to have a job,” I said, and he nodded. Maybe he knew what I meant, maybe not.
“What about ice cream then?”
“I’m going to have it all,” I said, firmly and seriously. “I’m going to have it every day, and more than one flavor, and I’m going to have big cones with nuts and fudge.” He began to laugh, and then, at the light in my eyes, stopped. “I am.”
“I hope you do,” he said. “I really hope you do. When I was your size I used to love toffee apples. You like toffee apples?” He raised his eyebrows at me, but I didn’t know. I’d seen toffee apples, but never had one. “They’re good. Maybe even better than ice cream, though I’d admit it’s a close-run thing. My mama would take me to the fair when it came around and I’d always have an apple. They were real hard and I’d have to turn my head on the side to use the big teeth there or they’d all break into little pieces.” I smiled at this, and he grinned, and in his face, behind the paper skin, I saw for a fleeting moment, someone my own age, someone to run and play with.
“Teeth don’t break,” I objected. “They’re harder than stone.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I didn’t know better then. And I’d always say when I grew up I was going to have a toffee apple every day, and I was going to stay up late every night and watch TV until my eyes went square and no one was going to get in my face. I thought that’s what being a grown-up was about. I thought that’s what it was for.”
For a while I didn’t say anything, sensing some dismal news was on the way, some revelation that I didn’t want to hasten. My mother was still down at the far end of the bay. A shadow from the late-afternoon sun crept across the rocks toward her.
“What happened?” I asked, eventually.
“I growed up,” he said, and seemed inclined to leave it there.
“And? What?”
The man’s eyes seemed far away. “I stayed up late, I watched TV, and I had a pretty good life,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ve had a toffee apple in more than forty years.”
“How come?”
“You forget,” he said, and shrugged.
“I won’t. I’m going to do everything. I’m going to do everything and do it all the time and no one’s going to stop me.”
“Good,” he said. “I hope you do. There’s worse ways to live your life than remembering what you want. You remember, son, and take what you want when you want it, and don’t let anyone get in your way. Try to bend the world around you while you still have the time.”
He sat there for a few minutes longer, looking somehow older and further away, and then he gingerly stood up and stretched.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“That I am. Now look. There’s five dollars on the rock beside you. You pick it up, Spend it how you want. But then go down to your mama, and take her by the hand. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, grinning up at him, eyes squinting in the sunlight. Then he was off, stepping carefully over the rocks, and I watched him until he was gone, I glanced at the rock where he’d been and sure enough there was a five-dollar bill on the next boulder, weighed with a pebble. I looked at it a while and then I picked it up, but I didn’t buy a cone. I made my way down to the sand and found my mother, and when she wasn’t looking I slipped the bill in her purse. She was careful with money, and must have noticed it almost immediately, but she never mentioned it. Or maybe she did, because when we changed buses at Williamsburg on the way home she had both a soda and a coffee, and when I came back from the bathroom I found a small bowl of ice cream waiting for me at the table. That was Mom for you. She always knew how to say things without opening her mouth.
I’ve often thought about the old man, about how chance words can touch people’s lives in ways that are impossible to predict. Bend the world, he said, don’t accept having less than you want and blow a hole in anything that blocks your way. Armed with that notion, many people could have gone on to carve themselves a life that culminated in something approaching peace. It was good advice, and well meant.
I was just the wrong person to give it to.
At two a.m. I was back on 8, stumbling toward Howie’s place. Sitting in a bar on 30 I’d suddenly remembered Mal’s body, remembered it in the form of a line of small maggotlike creatures marching along the bar toward me and holding up little signs, “MAL’S DEAD,” said one; “PROBABLY PRETTY GROSS BY NOW” read another. When I looked more closely I saw that the maggots were in fact spares, limping and crawling with whatever limbs they had left. David was there, and Nanune. Whoever originally synthesized Rapt must have had some sense of humor. I’d only taken a moderate dose, not sure after five years how much I could stand. The news was I could have stood a lot more. I’d lost a couple of hours, but that was all. I was melted and seeing things, but I knew where I was; a particularly ill-favored bar on a dangerous floor, my shirt wet with whiskey that hadn’t made it as far as my mouth, my head burning, and a naked and dying fifteen-year-old shaking her wasted body at me from the top of the next table. I was the only person near her, and I hadn’t even noticed she was there. Everyone else in the bar appeared to be fucked up on Oprah, babbling about their lives to anyone who would listen, too wound up in themselves to tell whether it was day or night.
I didn’t want to be here anymore. I was falling too fast, and I wasn’t Rapt enough not to care.
I settled my tab with the barman, who was uglier than three types of shit in a one-shit bag. Another sixty dollars gone. Tilting my way out into the avenue, I burnt my finger lighting a cigarette from a nearly empty packet which I assumed was mine, and stared baffled at the moving shapes in front of me. Most of them resolved enough to reveal themselves as unimportant, and I made my way as best I could toward a men’s room. Inside, I dabbed at the stains on my clothes, rinsed my mouth out, and stared at myself in the mirror. The Rapt was beginning to fade, and the fog of sound had thinned to a haze. I decided I could cope and laughed hollowly at myself. Calmly appraising how fucked up I was took me back far more than walking into a police station would ever have done.
I took a local elevator down to 8 and walked unsteadily down the main street, buffeted by straight people. My mind was poised too precisely between caring and not caring to make any headway toward deciding what to do about anything at all. One of the things Rapt does is take you to a place between all options, where everything and nothing matters and you can just hide away. Once you’ve been there, snug and dead, you never want to leave. I passed a young couple standing on a corner, arms entwined and lips smacking against each other. The sound made little yellow sparks amidst the general background hum of mustard brown. Either I could hear a conversation which was taking place about a mile away, or my mind was making it up and muttering darkly to
itself. It wasn’t a very interesting conversation, which figured. I was also slightly frightened of something unspecific, but that was okay. I don’t mind a little fear; it’s an old friend.
I was a couple of turns from Howie’s when I suddenly found myself crouching down by the side of a building with no memory of having done so. I looked up and saw passersby staring down at me, mildly amused. I let out a heavy, shaky breath, and realized that my hand was inside my jacket and gripping my gun. Maybe this should have reassured me, told me something about reflexes which were still miraculously intact. St didn’t. It-made me feel very bad indeed. For a while the street ceased to exist around me and I slid unthinkingly down the wall, heart beating hard and sweat appearing from nowhere on my forehead and neck. The foliage on the ceiling appeared to shift as one and a sky blackened above it, hot at the edges with liquid orange flames. I heard sounds, distant cries and a siren, and it took me a long moment to realize the sounds were coming from inside my head. Then I realized I was repeating a sentence to myself; something about wall-diving, and a mountain.
I stood up shakily, deciding that the Rapt maybe hadn’t been so weak after all, and lurched round the corner in search of some beer to calm it down. I noticed that I was hungry, and realized I hadn’t eaten in two days. I beguiled the rest of the walk by imagining seventeen different ways of having a cheeseburger, given three sets of variables: the condiments, the relative amounts of lettuce and pickle and tomato and onions, and the number of patties, up to a maximum of three. By the time I got to Howie’s, I had every intention of ordering them all at once.
Howie was standing at the bar, benignly watching the crowds and listening to the band in the corner. For once I’d arrived when the bar was full. It seemed to take me a long time to get to the bar through the hot mass of people being noisy, and I watched Howie all the way. He had a large piece of cheese and a jar of peperoncino rings in front of him, and he was slicing slivers off the former to create something to ladle spoonfuls of the latter onto. Each time he completed this maneuver he popped the result into his mouth and then immediately started again. He was doing this quickly and efficiently, as if under match conditions, and it was doing my head in.
He looked me up and down when I reached the bar. “Bought that truck yet?”
“No,” I said patiently, and waved at the barman for a beer.
“Thought not,” Howie said, through a mouthful of cheese. “And you can stop avoiding my eyes—I clocked your pupils as soon as you walked in. Welcome back, jack. You need some more?”
“No,” I said. I was beginning to like the word. No seemed to fulfill all my current needs. I was about to take a sip of beer when suddenly my mouth dropped open. “What are you doing here?”
I was talking to a woman whom I now saw was sitting a little farther along the bar, behind Howie. Apart from her dress being red rather than blue, she was dressed exactly as I’d last seen her. It was the woman I’d run into in the women’s restroom the first time I entered New Richmond. Helping me to recognize her was the fact she was engaged in exactly the same activity now as then. She was busy cutting a line on a mirror, so Howie answered for her.
“This is Nearly,” he said. “An employee of mine.”
I didn’t ask in what capacity. I remembered my conclusion from last time. The woman looked up and winked at me, and the faint glimmer in the back of her right eye proved me right. It also reminded me how attractive I’d thought her, and that I’d been right about that, too.
“Hi,” I said, and Howie laughed.
“Jack’s not one of the most sparkling conversationalists of our time,” he said, shaking his head, and then took something out of his pocket and slapped it on the bar. “Or one of my most reliable suppliers.”
I picked up the object and stared at it. It was the RAM chip I’d sold him the day before, though in my current condition it looked rather different. I thought I could see old datastreams moving through the clear Perspex, ones and zeros flipping back and forth. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Possibly nothing. But it isn’t RAM.”
“Shit,” I said. “Then I owe you money.” I had about a hundred dollars of it left, mangled into three different pockets. “I’ll pay you back,” I added lamely, slipping the chip into my pocket.
Howie waved his hand, dismissing the idea and making me feel’ about so high. There I was, when I should have been thinking about the spares, worrying about looking like an idiot in front of one of Howie’s girls. I guess I hadn’t been out much recently. She didn’t seem to be thinking worse of me, but then she was probably stoned enough to think that Ebola had been kind of cool.
“Some guy came looking for you, Jack,” Howie said, screwing the top back on the jar of peperoncinos.
I frowned. “Who?”
“Don’t know. He didn’t say. Big guy, blue lights in his head.” Howie looked serious. “He didn’t look like especially good news.”
I remembered the dealer out in the Portal, the one who’d hidden the killer’s body. For no reason I suddenly felt cold. “What did he want?”
“To see you. He left a package instead.” With an upward nod of his head Howie signaled to the barman, who reached below the counter and brought up a cardboard box about one foot square. He put it down on the counter and I stared at it.
“Cool. A present,” said Nearly, voice languorous but loud. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Where’s Suej?” I asked.
“In the back,” Howie said. “Eating red beans and rice.”
“Have you checked on her lately?”
“No, why? What’s wrong?”
I picked up the parcel and walked quickly into a quieter area of the bar. The box was heavy, something solid inside. As I opened it I heard Howie in the background sending Dath to check on Suej. Time seemed to be speeding up, rushing toward something that I couldn’t yet see.
I opened the box.
“Holy fuck,” said Howie, who was by then standing behind me. Howie has seen unwelcome things, but I’d never heard him sound like that. At the tone in his voice Nearly teetered off her stool at the bar and headed toward us.
I closed the box, hands shaking. There are many things you don’t want to see on Rapt. This was something you don’t want to see at all. Something so unnecessary, so indefensible, that my eyes seemed to dry as if in a strong wind.
It was Nanune’s head.
Howie kept staring at the box, mouth open. Slowly he turned his head toward me. “Who the fuck’s that?”
“One of the spares. Someone who did no harm to anyone in her entire miserable life.” Without knowing I was going to I lashed out a foot and kicked one of the tables across the room. This left me very calm and still, humming with murderousness. Half the bar stared at me, trying to work out if I was dangerous or just experimentalist cabaret. “Did the fucker who left this say he was coming back?”
Howie shook his head, still dazed. “No, thank God.”
“Then I’m going to go and find him,” I said, lightheaded with fury and remorse. There are times when the higher mind goes on holiday, sensing it’s the reptile brain which is required. The man with the blue head had the spares, and he was going to kill them. Why, I didn’t know. But it was clear that that’s what he was going to do, and likely that he’d killed Mal, too. That was enough for me.
“Jack?” I turned to see Suej hurrying toward us, Dath behind her.
“Howie,” I hissed. “Get rid of that fucking box.” But Suej had already seen it, and seen me. She knew what I looked like when something was very wrong.
“What’s in there?” she asked.
Suddenly, there was a shout from the front door and Paulie entered at the run, hand reaching into his jacket.
“Howie,” he said urgently. “We got trouble.”
“Who?”
“Four of Vinaldi’s soldiers.”
“So? I’ve paid the man.”
“I don’t think they’re coming to collect.” Paul
ie’s eyes flicked across to me. “Not money, anyway.”
Howie had just enough time to start asking me what the hell I’d done now, before the front window of the bar exploded, showering colored glass over the nearest patrons. In slow motion I reached for Suej, grabbing her and yanking her round so my body was between her and the door. I saw Howie’s and Dath’s hands emerging with heavy guns, and I saw Nearly’s face, mouth hanging open, alone in a moment of truth. Things could get worse than everyday life, and that’s just what they were about to do. Without thinking I reached out and grabbed her, too.
“Go!” shouted Howie. “Out the back!”
The last half of the sentence was drowned by the noise of the other large window imploding. Ten yards away, out in the street, stood a line of Vinaldi’s men. Loving every moment, serious as children playing their favorite game. The bar was chaos, swirling with shouting people trying to get the hell out of the way.
“Fuck off,” I said. “This is my problem.”
Howie pivoted toward me. “Just run, for once in your damn life. And take Nearly with you.” He lashed out an arm and shoved me heavily in the chest before turning to push his way with Dath to join Paulie at the door. At the sight of the three of them, I realized there wasn’t much I could add. I grabbed Suej’s arm.
“You coming?” I asked Nearly.
“Oh, yes,” she said, eyes still on the men outside. “They look like no fun at all.”
I shoved my way through panicking people, dragging Suej behind me. Nearly clattered along in the rear. In the storeroom, I stooped without slowing to pick up what little possessions we had.
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