Contraband

by George Foy

  On the ECM, the pilot booted up the first floppy and loaded a conversion program. He punched in passive-radar, fitted the half-sucker over his eyes, and moved the small joystick to the left of the pak’s keyboard.

  The top half of the sunglasses blossomed with an array of lights; blue dots, pink squares, lines connecting the shapes. In between, clear space only. The display was in 3-D, and that was the point; it felt as if he could walk in that space, among those patterns, touching them with his fingers, pulling them into curves and altered webs. When he pushed the joystick forward, he did move, in fact he flew, zooming behind the connections, hovering to pick up info on the different targets identified by the ECM.

  ‘DX, trafrad, 015,218.’ The info came in little boxes outlined, for some reason, in a delicate pink.

  ‘PD, trafrad, 112, 42. UAV, suvrad, 125, 088.’

  The last contact was an unmanned surveillance aircraft to the southwest. The pilot turned and lifted his head, peering through the clear bottom half of the glasses out the windows of his spire, but saw nothing. BON, or the cops, often flew UAVs over Brooklyn, sniffing for fortified apartments out of which the Guyanans or the Rwandans traded their ice and smack.

  Then he removed the half-sucker, and put it away.

  He thought, if he’d had all this equipment last week, he might have saved the Citation. The thought got him completely depressed.

  To kill that mood, he opened the letter from his mother, long pages in Czech about how the chickens and dog and cat were doing, and how much food she’d laid in for the winter.

  His parents had seen their homeland invaded four times in thirty years from varying directions. Now they lived in a wonky-jawed old farmhouse smack on the New York-Quebec border, from which they figured they might see the next one coming.

  The pilot dozed, and read about his father’s conjunctivitis, until it was time to go to the White Angel’s.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Let me taste your neck, darling. It’s so white.’

  Amy Dillon, as Ilona, in A Hunger for Blood

  The White Angel held court in a pink mews house off MacDougal Street. The house had a cobblestone forecourt, iron gates wrought in the shape of exotic plants, and magnolia trees that she always festooned with dead Spanish moss and Christmas lights for parties.

  The pilot liked the Christmas lights. They reminded him of stories about Victorian families who drove home through the snow in sleds, horses neighing in the sharp wind, harness bells jingling, stars bright as polished pins; back to fond servants, guiltless silver, the smell of eggnog, the toys made of painted wood – easy myth-time of industrial man. He parked his old 650 between a Bavarian car and a car from Sweden. He stood in the dappled light of the magnolia for a while, sipping vodka from the silver hip flask, watching the glowing windows for a glimpse of Carmelita.

  A constant stream of taxis and limousines schmoozed up to the gates. They dropped off passengers in a sequence of chunky slams, leather footsteps, and light remarks. Car helmets were casually tossed in a box by the door. The passengers wore long black cloaks. Their faces were powdered white, or covered in polyester fur, artfully pasted and combed. Hues of lipstick never before seen in nature smeared their lips. Occasionally, a pair of three-inch incisors, molded in enamel, stuck out from the corners of a mouth; some of the hands wore real wolf claws, unbelievably expensive, glued to the fingernail.

  At the door of the town house a wispy man in a lavender cloak checked invitations printed on Amalfi paper.

  A street person, a tee-dee, followed one of the limos to the door, staring through the smoked windows at a VCR showing music videos. The lavender-cloaked man got ready to warn him but when the limo moved off the tee-dee followed, eyes still fixed on the screen, hands fumbling at a dead Walkman, shuffling his blown-out Nikes.

  The pilot sighed. He removed his City coat, took a cloak out of his saddlebag, and put it on. He scooped God out of the City coat and held him up to eye level.

  ‘I’m gonna need somebody to talk to,’ he told the rat. ‘Try to stay sober.’

  He stuffed the rat gently in the cloak’s pocket and, clambering over a low wrought-iron fence, made his way to the back yard.

  Unemployed actors were replacing empty crates of Doyen-Kruyff champagne with fresh ones and dumping bags full of half-eaten canapés into metal bins by a brick wall. When no one was looking, the pilot walked to one of the trash bins and leaned over it, dragging dramatic retching sounds from his vocal chords.

  A thespian with great hormone confusion asked him a question that had no logical answer. The pilot pretended to wipe his chin on his cloak. He mumbled something about the bathroom. The actor flicked his fingers, shooing him through the kitchens and up the back stairs.

  The upstairs consisted of one enormous room with artists’ sky-lights that could be opened by electric motors in hot weather. The room dripped colored candles, sweated crystal and diamonds, swam in music and forced chatter. A fire snapped in the chimney. Tables twenty feet long creaked under silver-plated trays full of rich and thickening sauces. A sideboard steamed with cartons of Tibetan food, gloppy but rich in cachet. A swing seat stood on trestles in one corner. Six-foot-high VDTs mounted in three corners of the room showed sliced episodes of the latest fad series, a weekly drama entitled Real Life.

  In one corner, wedged on couches provided for the purpose, guests wearing the doglike face-suckers of full VR moved their limbs slowly, together, like pair-swimmers, in rhythms that matched those displayed on the TV screens.

  Every other square inch of space was filled with people in white faces and Nosferatu fashions.

  The pilot snagged a glass of champagne from a tray carried by an unemployed actress in Romanian peasant dress. He wondered why, whenever the White Angel held a costume party, everyone dressed as drinkers of human blood and eaters of human flesh, or their prey. The answer was obvious, but it was precisely the obviousness that bothered him.

  He drew the cloak tighter around his neck and walked around the room. On a stage to one side, a Shift-shin combo wailed. A thin pale man blew on didjeridoo and thighbone trumpet. A Mongolian breathed mouth-music, a black man with a bored expression laid down a George Collins riff on bass, and a black woman who resembled him sat at the mainframe, sampling Lamont-Doherty recordings of surf and underwater eruptions into the overall beat.

  A bamboo cage six feet high stood next to the thighbone player. The cage was empty. The pilot assumed it had been intended for Carmelita.

  Bubbles tickled inside the pilot’s chest. The bubbles stemmed from something other than carbonated wine. She hadn’t pulled this stunt in a long, long time.

  God stirred uncomfortably. He had sensitive ears, and the Shifta-Shinjuku sound was heavily amplified. The pilot found a delicate marble staircase with banisters made of alabaster figures; succubi, incubi, little sculpted naked putti. He went back downstairs, looking for what the party had to sell, because every party had something to sell, whether it was a physical product or an image, an idea the giver wanted his guests to take away with their coats and hangover and heartburn; even a debt, in payment for another sale, at another party.

  The product of this party, the pilot knew, would be very clear, green like the inside of dandelion stems and crystalline. It would come in small, delicately folded spills of turquoise wax paper. It was, in two words, jisi yomo. The White Angel was the largest purveyor of the South American stimulant for the City’s Safe People; its young, wealthy, and bored; and she sold her wares at parties like this one, in bedrooms with gilt-framed mirrors, in bathrooms with upholstered chairs.

  The White Angel herself sat in a wicker throne near the staircase, attended by tall homosexuals. She looked hard at the pilot as he walked by. She was trying to figure out where she’d seen him before, who he came with, how much money he had, what he had to hide, what he was ashamed of, how much she could sell to him, how much she could sell him for, how she could find his darkest secrets and use them in ways that suited he
r purposes.

  The White Angel’s name was Evangeline Morgan. She came originally from Alabama, like the song, but with no banjo on her knee, and no monkey on her back; only a scarlet damage somewhere deep, as well as an honest desire to flee the damage, and a kinked need to drain it by passing it on. She had plenty of tunes to play, and an eye for making people dance.

  Evangeline was five feet high, and weighed 320 pounds. She had a laugh as deep and rich as chocolate fudge, a tight smile, and the sharpest, meanest eyes you ever saw.

  The sharp mean eyes met the pilot’s. She saw the search in them. None of her guests ever searched for anything, except jisi.

  ‘Keep a tail on that square-up,’ she told one of her bodyguards. ‘Shake him down when you get a chance.’

  The pilot spotted the bodyguard on his tail. He slipped through the kitchen into a bathroom, locking the door behind him. From the bathroom another door led to one of the bedrooms.

  In a corner of the bedroom a 68-inch TV showed lively reruns of UAV footage from last year’s occupation of Silesia. Tanks exploded in bright fireballs. A missile’s camera dove on a bunker full of Polish soldiers. The lens was so sharp you briefly could see faces inside the gunports as the missile accelerated until it all disappeared in white heat. German troops, smiling, waved EU flags.

  The attached face-sucker hung, unused, on a nearby stand.

  In the opposite corner, a New England girl who made a living out of being the daughter of a US senator talked to a Southern girl who made a living out of being screwed up from inherited wealth.

  ‘I drank my own urine in Bhutan,’ the rich folks’ daughter sighed. ‘It was bitter. But it completed the cycle I’d started so long ago. You know?’

  ‘The world I love is doomed,’ the senator’s daughter sobbed, dabbing greenish powder on her gums. ‘Who’s going to care for Jennifer Bartlett when the bombs fall?’

  ‘That’s why I lived in Mumbai,’ her friend moaned. ‘Everything has already happened.’

  ‘That’s why I’m an actress. Because to have all roles is to have none. It is the identity of zero,’ the senator’s daughter countered.

  ‘I’ve been fasting for three weeks,’ the rich folks’ daughter shot back. ‘I can taste our deaths on the wind.’

  A British woman who made a living out of having been a rock star twenty years before, and the man who made a living off of her, strode into the room, pushing the pilot from his place at the door. The senator’s daughter jumped off the bed, wiping her teeth.

  ‘Christine!’ she shrieked. Utter sparkling delight had replaced the despair in her tone. ‘I was just thinking about you!’

  ‘Her name’s Claudine,’ a voice came from under the bed, ‘but she’ll talk to you anyway. It’s as close as she can come to suicide without actually doing it.’

  Everyone looked at the bed. A man who called himself a prince, though his dynasty was founded by brigands and murderers and whose grandfather in any case had been thrown out of his country by angry iron-ore miners eighty years previously, took from his cloak pocket a large plastic decal with the family coat-of-arms, a black, two-headed duck, engraved on the front.

  ‘I stick this on every helicopter in which I ride,’ he confided to Claudine in Italian. ‘Women adore it.’

  ‘Where’s the jis’?’ Claudine said in a voice like busted cola bottles.

  The rich folks’ daughter, suddenly coy, lifted a glass tube with the clear round mixing bowl attached. In the relative silence that followed, the sound of sucking, and compressed gas, was loud.

  The pilot walked around the bed and looked underneath. There was very little light but he could just make out the features of the man lying in the spidery gloom.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ PC said. ‘Nice cloak.’

  ‘What are you doing under the bed, PC?’ The pilot found a chair. He was feeling light-headed. Ghosts of fever still hung around his brain. The skunky smell of jisi yomo made his nostrils ache.

  ‘Figuring out how to accept decay gracefully,’ PC said, ‘like the rest of the phonies around here.’

  The jisi yomo ran out. The rest of the phonies left, seeking another source.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ The pilot’s voice was puzzled. ‘I thought, I mean, well, it’s a party, PC! You need more champagne?’

  ‘Of course I need more champagne.’ There was something wrong with PC’s consonants. They were mushy, as if he had too much saliva.

  ‘You want I should get you some?’

  ‘No,’ PC mumbled, sliding from under the bed and removing a denture of werewolf teeth from his mouth. He stretched his lips first one way, then the other.

  ‘Come on,’ he continued. His words now were more distinct. He lifted the cloak from his left wrist where three genuine Vacherin watches furnished time and altitude in sixty major cities. ‘Something happened, we have to talk.’

  ‘It started a month ago,’ PC explained a few minutes later, after they had snuck a full bottle of Doyen-Kruyff from the kitchens. They were sitting in a balcony recess now, half hidden by red brocade. Vampires clotted around them, drifted apart, clotted again, sniffing discreetly. A werewolf unfolded his hands, while another helped open his cloak. All stared in admiration at the black splotches in the palms and above the heart that marked the first stages of stigs. Evangeline’s bodyguard floated through the crowd, searching for the pilot.

  ‘Everything seemed fine,’ PC went on in a bemused tone. ‘I was meeting fifteen women a week. That was a perfect average. They were lovely, smart, talented. And I suddenly realized I wasn’t having any better luck than in the old days, back when I was just meeting seven, or four, or two.’

  ‘What do you mean, luck?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Would I ask?’ The pilot cut up some shrimp canapés with his switchblade and fed them to God. He gave the rat a glass of flat champagne to wash it down with. The rat stuck his nose in the bubbly and sneezed.

  ‘I mean, I couldn’t feel enough for them. There was always something wrong. I dunno. Zoe, in September, she was too bright. She knew it, too, talkin’ with her was like a constant chess game. Denise in early August was real quick, but she had this big sadness inside her she had to protect, she was like juggling razor blades. Late August, Tareesha, what a sweetheart, she was so easy to be around even though she’s mostly bone tired, doing a first year internship in, like, pediatric oncology, but there was this thing about her chin, I dunno. Finally I got upset about this. I mean, two and a half years, man, I’d met over two thousand eligible women, and always something wrong, where does that leave the Plan? So I played my desperation card. I went to a private dating service. Not online, you know, you had to go there, actually talk to them – the real thing? In fact, I went to four of ’em.’ PC refueled with champagne.

  ‘They were real high-tech, and private, and super-expensive,’ he continued. ‘Fresh-cut orchids, mahogany desks. You know. Elegant ladies in Italian shoes to do the interviews. Pimps of the cyberdude, Jack, Madams of the lonely. That’s me, the new man, emotionally sterile outside the ’nets, the rave scene . . . They were complete as hell, too. You got up to, like, 450 different parameters. Hair color, maybe whether your potential partner likes olives, what she thinks of Adorno, whether she knows who Adorno was. Sexual tastes, even, I couldn’t believe the variables. VR run-bys, the works. I scanned 832 women and that was after preselection. They had pheromone samples, favorite perfumes even, my nose burned, after. I was a problem client. And you know what I found out, from all of this?’

  ‘No,’ the pilot said. He was looking between the marble columns of the balcony, watching the bodyguard, scoping the crowd in case Carmelita showed up.

  Roberto, he thought suddenly. Her brother should be back from the last job by now. That meant he was probably hanging out in the Weather Café, over at Newark, as he did after most flights. Roberto would know where Carmelita was.

  ‘I found out I didn’t know what I wanted.’ PC waved his champagne glass so
hard it sloshed. ‘No, that’s not true – I found out I wanted too much. It was impossible! I wanted the perfect woman, or else I wanted women who weren’t perfect, but in specific ways. I wanted one woman, I desired them all. I needed one woman to share my bed, my life, my automatic tsampa machine – but still I wanted the thrill of meeting someone new every week. Someone – you know – that look, that fractured instant, that little shaving of a glance, that eentsy-weentsy spark of curiosity, in the eye, you know? You’ve seen it, it’s happened, like, a head turned as the bus goes by, a look that lingers one ten-thousandth of a second more than it should in that situation. I wanted—’ PC’s voice was getting louder, the color in his cheeks was high ‘—to fall in love with someone, man, but what I’m really in love with is so hard to define, it’s so small, like slivers, like bits, almost geological tests or, or core samples of woman; you know, woman with a capital W, all the little crumbs and details, how she shakes her head to clear the hair from her eyes, the way she stands straighter when she’s angry; the little thrust of her hips when she’s buttoning jeans that are too tight (Amanda did that); or the kiss of her fingers on a glass; or the arc between her ribs and that extra swell above her hipbones, you know, the subcutaneous fat that’s for keeping babies warm; the taste of her, between her legs, like lemon and fresh scallions and coconut milk and mineral spring water, and there’s a touch of boiled cinnamon and alfalfa honey added, just a touch (especially Zoe); the color of her inside, like that coral glow in the deepest part of the perfect spiral inside a conch shell; the lift, the balance and weight in her breasts; the way she curves her movements, man, like a half-zero, instead of cutting them like we do, the—’