Contraband

by George Foy

  But the pilot had gone already, trotting up 29th Street, disappearing quickly in the snow.

  There was a way into the TransCom Building no one but Obregon’s people knew about. You slid your UCC through the turnstiles to get into the Lexington Avenue subway. Then, keeping an eye out for trains, and stepping well clear of the live rail, you walked along the downtown track to an emergency fire exit. The exit brought you straight to the third basement and a backup freight elevator in the north bank.

  As a ‘security guard,’ the pilot had pass-cards to everything. He got off two floors below his own and climbed into the airco system through a maintenance hatch.

  Travel through the lower airco was not easy. You had to scramble on hands and knees along the square horizontal ducts, and climb thin rungs of corrugated iron up vertical inspection chutes. The pilot choked on dust and soot, scraping knees and shoulders at every turn. The only light came through cracked welds and holes in the pipes. Luckily this part of the system was old and holey and the pilot could see enough to find his way.

  At the junction with the airco pipe that led to his apartment he heard the voices of men. He followed another, even smaller conduit around the back of the kitchenette. He long ago had unfastened a panel in this duct to serve as an escape route. In the absence of urgency he’d used it to store extra supplies, in case the apartment got blocked for any reason. By opening the panel and easing open the cabinet door behind, he could see the refrigerator and part of the lounge through a vista of containers holding chicken noodle soup, Worcestershire sauce, baked beans.

  Every light was switched on. The shoulder of a blue corduroy suit was visible through the kitchenette entrance. ‘Brodin’s not gonna look at it that way,’ the blue suit was saying.

  ‘Maybe he warned him off.’

  Something fell and smashed. A door squeaked continuously.

  ‘Well he had to be in on it,’ the invisible voice continued, after a minute or two.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guard. Who d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘It was him, who used the bogus service. No pro would do that.’

  The blue suit’s left hand held one of the pilot’s fake UCC cards. The hand flipped the card, without pause, finger over finger and back again.

  ‘What was he babbling about, on the stretcher?’

  ‘He was hallucinating.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about?’ The card flipping, back and forth.

  ‘Parking,’ the invisible man said. ‘Traffic. He said the Hutch was blocked all the way to the Merritt. Crap like that. Made no sense.’

  The card stopped flipping.

  ‘I thought it might be some kind of code,’ the blue suit said, ‘nonrandom substitution, but—’

  ‘They’ll find out at Oakdale.’

  The pilot felt a cold spot develop on the base of his spine at the mention of Oakdale. Shit, piss, damn, blast, he said to himself, silently. Obregon, I’m sorry.

  ‘Anything there?’ the invisible man continued.

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘Control said he had good wire.’

  ‘TA was negative. Maybe he was offline.’

  More breakage. The suit put the card in its pocket. The pilot eased backward into his duct, wondering what ‘TA’ was. The sound of squeaking doors was louder now but there were no doors in the ducts. There was no light either, and all his flashlights were in the apartment. He held his breath, crouched lower on the aluminum. Something quick and furry hopped around his legs and stuck a sharp nose between his fingers.

  ‘God!’ he whispered, and a spark of pleasure burned among the accumulated backlog of bad feelings. It blended with another ember lit from Rocketman’s escape. Light wrestled dark for supremacy inside his duodenum.

  ‘God,’ he repeated softly. ‘Well dag, old man. I think you an’ I just been evicted.’

  The rat was wriggling mightily in what the pilot chose to recognize as some type of rodent ecstasy. He picked up God and stuffed him in an inside pocket of his jacket.

  Then, very carefully, he crawled back the way he had come.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Never allow your own bodily secretions to enter into contact with those of your partner.’

  Centers for Disease Control

  Atlanta

  Guidelines on Countering the Spread of Sexually Transmitted

  Epidemics in America

  PC met the woman around the time the pilot and his rat were being thrown out of their apartment.

  He encountered her at a private party sponsored by Orgasm Records at the Hostage Bar and Grill on Great Jones Street.

  The Hostage was named for the latest, and most fashionable, crime since car-gassing. Because you could use UCC-cards to buy everything from breath mints to automobiles, people no longer carried real cash and it no longer was possible to mug them and make a profit; nevertheless men from North Newark had worked out a way to make a living without going back to fast-food jobs. Dressed in Versace monkey jackets, carrying laptops and cellphones, they would infiltrate Short Hills, take as hostages the family of, say, a memory-derivatives VP, and then phone the VP at his Beaver Street office and demand that he withdraw a weighty quantity of dead presidents on his card. At a prearranged time and place the family was bartered for the cash.

  PC was in the upper bar of the Hostage when he first saw her. She stood with a gaggle of Safe People, all looking exactly alike. At first glance she looked like Safe People too. She had short blonde hair, streaked blue and bobbed in the popular neo-flapper style. She wore a black Israeli ‘commando’ jacket that had probably cost eight hundred bucks, and Northern Territory emu-skin boots. Her nose was flawless, her neck was like close-grained wood from the kind of tree you would cut to make cellos. Her hands were bare, her shirt cracked open to the waist, revealing an absence of stigs, and she looked easily away from the Virtix screens, demonstrating her immunity to TDF.

  If she had the Plague, it was not visible. Her stance, too, was supple as a tree’s, he thought; straightness in the curve, strength in the give. Perhaps it was something in that stance that set her apart from the exercise-club physiques around her.

  PC was with Safe People himself; eighteen or twenty of his closer friends. They stood around their terminals, talking on cellphones or watching the 3-D videos the place was famous for. Five of them wore half-suckers with a radio link, and within their subgroup these people moved in rhythm with the action on the screen. An AGATE armored car approached a fortified ranch in El Sobrante while an Apache chopper, hovering behind the house, rocketed a jeep full of card-nappers. Flames bloomed, orange, brown.

  On another set, Ned Reynolds showed dramatic footage of American F-25s blasting the shit out of an oil rig full of Mexicans. No one at the table was quite sure which Mexicans.

  ‘Darkworld,’ someone commented.

  ‘Fry the slime,’ Blake Nugent said, leaning forward with the Apache’s weapons officer.

  ‘Gad, Ted, like, what have you done to your hair?’ Sue Levine commented. ‘I saw it on ET.’

  The girl with the blue-blonde hair turned toward their conversation. Her eyes met PC’s. Their gazes locked. The look was like nuclear fission, pulling in the total normalcy of atoms and then releasing all the unbelievable energy it took to keep things so normal.

  ‘You’ve got eyes like a supernova,’ he told her.

  She smiled, and turned back to her group.

  PC grinned at her neck. It still worked, he thought. He’d only had two mimosas but one look at those pupils and he felt as drunk as he’d ever been in his life. His stomach was full of crickets and his heart rate way up. He no longer needed food, champagne, or oxygen to sustain life. All he needed was another look at her eyes; that long green, reminding him of the deepest, freshest spring on the planet, with little flecks of silver like the rare fish of Managordo Lake – that sense of purity and pain at the heart of it, as if she’d dived to the very nub of things, and seen t
he end.

  He racked his brain for something else to spark her interest. All he could think of was the same things everyone else talked about. Adornista bombs, the El Sobrante card-napping, Brooke Denali’s love life. Or, turning it on its head, the lack of interesting things to say . . .

  God, he thought. Have I really become so unbelievably lobotomized that I can’t think of anything original that does not concern this woman’s foglamps? But the woman solved this problem for him by turning around and asking, ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Brooke Denali. Is she, or isn’t she?’

  They talked easily. If the material was not particularly exciting, PC believed, it had more to do with the environment than with their inner natures.

  She lived in NoCo – North of Columbia University. He owned a co-op in a big, prewar art deco building on Riverside and 100th. They shared a taxi north. He turned off both his cellphones; it was a message of commitment. She understood the codes, accepted the message but in the dark he could not read her eyes. She came to his apartment. Another major commitment, in this age of Plague, he thought.

  He played Shift-shin, one of the latest bootlegs from Karachi, with five-power stochastics and real-time video capability that required both decks and a synthesizer as well as his PC to play. He offered her Doyen-Kruyff, which she declined, and jisi yomo, which she accepted. She used a 9-mm cartridge hung around her neck to dump a measure into the round glass bowl of the works. She heated the powder to exactly the right shade of turquoise, and sprayed in the nitrate at the perfect instant. The skunky smell of the cooked drug perfumed the air around them. He watched her ankles as she leaned forward to suck in the mixture. She had truly wonderful ankles. His father had been an orthopedic surgeon and an affinity for clean hocks had rubbed off on the son. Once the jisi was done they touched each other, delicately. On the Shift-shin mix they heard the harmonics of snowfields, strange gasps and cries of compacted crystal, just this side of avalanche. Next steps were reached, in feel, in talk.

  Her name was Sara. She was afraid. Her mother (Sara said) had ignored her in favor of more entertaining hobbies. That was the source of one fear. The Plague, and stigs, were everywhere; that was another. The fears fed on each other. She was bound to contract a disease as she sought in men what she’d missed in her mother. It was no coincidence that both stigs and the Plague were transmitted through sexual contact. The diseases no longer were fatal, of course, but the treatments were so humiliating, and so expensive, that they might as well be. It was how the stars would pay her back for not being worthy of her mother’s love.

  ‘Horseshit,’ PC told her, and kissed her forehead. Hope shouted hallelujahs in his chest.

  But it wasn’t horseshit – or at least, the fear was real. This became apparent as they went through the various angular progressions, from vertical to horizontal, of serious physical contact. At the armchair stage she would not touch his lips. At the couch stage she would not directly touch his cock, but he dismissed this in the wonder of seeing her breasts, which were milk-white, small, and perfectly conical, like volcanoes in Iceland; snow-covered, mathematically exact due to the laws of gravity and the consistency of lava flow. Only the tips glowed red, from the heat within.

  On the floor she shucked off his pants and her skirt. The curve of her ass was so smooth and pure it made him want to sing. Like her breasts, her buttocks were very white. Her pubis had very little hair and he could follow the cleft in it from the small dimple at the top, through the deepening valley to the gorge that disappeared in the little space that nature had evolved between her thighs, to give her freedom for movement, and arousal. But when he followed the valley with a finger she stopped his hand.

  ‘Wait,’ she whispered, and took a pink plastic box from her handbag.

  The box was a dispenser. She pressed a button and waited twenty seconds. A light flashed. With long, graceful fingers she pulled from it a sheet of thin, clear plastic, like cellophane, but very soft, for it sagged in the middle when she drew it to one side. When PC asked her what she was doing she put a finger to his lips. She pushed another button on the dispenser and the sheet was cut free. She held the plastic high and pushed him gently to the floor. ‘Be still,’ she said, ‘you’re going to like this.’ She laid it gently on his mouth. The plastic was warm and gluey. It stuck to his lips almost as if it had melted there. She kissed him hard through the transparent film.

  The film was very malleable and resilient. She put most of her tongue in his mouth without breaking it, and when she retracted her tongue the plastic snapped back. It was a good heat conductor. Jesus, PC thought, breathing through his nostrils; but he let her kiss him.

  As she kissed him she put a large piece of plastic around her hand and caressed him with it. His cock was not fussy. Even through the barrier it did what it did best. But despite his own arousal a sense of deprivation grew in PC’s chest, as if he had already come.

  Sara unrolled a new sheet of film and pulled it between her legs. She straddled him and slowly lowered herself onto his mouth. The sight of the moisture coating the inside of her thighs, smearing the transparent sheet, made him groan, but the feel of plastic on his tongue intruded between his nerve endings and the brain. The girl arched her back as he licked her. Her hands pressed hard on the plastic around his face. ‘Sara,’ he mumbled against his own saliva collecting on the glossy surface.

  ‘Honey,’ she answered. ‘Honey.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  She sat up in the half light. The Shift-shin sampled the sound of tectonic plates grinding forty miles under Hokkaido. A bagpipe keened, a Stratocaster whined. On the Virtix screen, huge tubeworms undulated around a hot gas vent 24,200 feet below the surface of the Pacific, in the lower Kermadec trench.

  ‘You’ve never used LayWrap?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you know what it’s for?’

  He ripped the plastic from his mouth and licked his lips to get the taste off.

  ‘It’s for the Plague,’ he said tiredly, ‘it’s for stigs. I know what it’s for.’

  ‘You don’t use latex?’

  ‘Just condoms.’

  ‘It only just came out,’ she said diplomatically, ‘it can take a while, to get used to. Let me help you—’

  She took a tube from her handbag and smeared jelly over her stomach, her thighs, her buttocks. The jelly smelled of lilacs and shrimp. She squeezed jelly on her fingers and dabbed it inside her. She pulled out more film from the pink box and covered her stomach with it. The plastic skated on the jelly. She removed the old plastic from between her legs, pasted two fresh strips of it around her thighs and laid a rectangle carefully between the top of her buttocks and her bellybutton. She even took a length of film and wound it around her neck like a scarf, so that PC began to suspect there was more than just fear or need at the bottom of this procedure, that she had grown used to plastic, and relied on it. Finally she lay on top of PC and guided him into her.

  The film felt tight and smooth. Her skin was smooth but the plastic was much slicker. He did not get the same sensation of smoothness from the plastic as he did from her skin. The film crinkled in all the wrong places. It bunched up in the angles where her thighs folded. The world, the sexual night was filled with the sticky grip of plastic, the fake wetness of its sound, the artificial heat of its touch. She was pumping herself up and down on him. The film expanded with heat, so that with every pump he penetrated deeper inside her. He was feeling something, some kind of sensory input was getting through – this was not so different, after all, from using condoms – but condoms did not cover your face, or her hands, and what pleasure he did feel was meager and trickling and as nothing against the deepening sense of utter loss inside him. He put his hands on her thighs and stopped her movements.

  ‘What is it,’ she said. She was breathing hard. ‘Fred, what’s wrong?’

  Her eyes were so sad, he thought.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he repeated. ‘It doesn’t feel good
.’

  He could see hurt flood the green, changing its color. ‘It’s not you,’ he said, ‘it really isn’t. It’s just – it’s – it’s—’ The loss converted into frustration, and leaked.

  ‘It’s that goddamn plastic,’ he burst out. ‘It’s like fucking garbage bags! It’s like having sex with a packaged lunch! It’s like going to bed with mail-order! It’s the lust of deli meat! Oh, God, Sara.’ He pulled himself out from under her. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, more quietly.

  The security buzzer rang. Someone was downstairs. He ignored it.

  She looked at him steadily. He looked back at her. There was too much pain there, he realized suddenly, to allow anything out but fear, and its acolytes.

  ‘If I could only fuck your eyes,’ he said, ‘without plastic,’ and it came to him that these were the saddest words he had ever uttered, because this was either the 2,166th or the 2,167th attractive, eligible girl he had met since he got to New York, and he was no closer to losing his heart to Sara than he’d been with the first.

  The buzzer rang again, insistently. As he got up to answer he realized, not for the first time, that he wanted to change his life completely, and he had not the slightest idea how to go about it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘On the same day that LSD became a controlled substance, the Oracle hosted an outdoor gathering called the Love Pageant Rally . . . Rock bands played for free, and a master of ceremonies read a manifesto entitled “A Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: The freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness . . .”

  At the appropriate moment hundreds of people placed a tab of acid on their outstretched tongues and swallowed in unison. The next year in the Haight would be quite a trip indeed.’