I wake into the murky sluice of a hangover. There's a dull pounding in my head and a taste in my mouth like dead earth. I haul myself out of bed and into the bathroom, rinse my mouth with water, and then I move to the desk and sit down and stare at the window. I'm only half aware of time passing, a semi-conscious movement akin to breathing. After a while I force myself to get dressed and leave the apartment. I go to a small cafe where I order coffee and toast and eat it with the limp thoughtlessness of a mental patient.
I work. I write about what happened last night and the things that came before and I write all of this. I should be doing the work I'm paid to do, the editing for foreign students at the university, the free-lance stuff with local magazines and the work on video games for my friend's company in the capital, but I can't be bothered. Putting it down like this is the only way I know how to make sense of it. Besides, a hangover isn't conducive to any other kind of writing.
When I'm finished I leave the cafe. The morning is bitterly cold. I have nowhere to go and nothing to do, and I find myself walking in the direction of the share house. Someone is bound to be there, whether Richard or Daphne/Pandora, or whatever it is she's calling herself today, and talking to either of them has got to be better than listening to myself think.
Reaching the house, I find a man smoking by himself at the far end of the porch. He isn't wearing a shirt, and aside from an old pair of gray track pants, his brown skin is bare to the cold. He nods at me and then turns back the street, one arm pulled in close to his chest in a vain attempt to keep himself warm.
"Pandora here?" I ask him.
"Who?"
"A girl, about this tall." I point to the space around my chin. "Dark hair."
"Never seen her," he says. "But I just moved in yesterday."
"I see."
"You live here?"
"Friends do."
"There's not many people home right now," he says. "What's your name?"
"Isaac. You?"
"Luke. Luke Coulter." He walks the short distance to shake my hand.
"Nice to meet you," I tell him.
"Yeah likewise."
He turns away, and I move to the front door, stamping the snow from my boots before entering. The living room is empty, and so is the kitchen, and as I take the stairs to the 2nd floor I begin to wonder if I've wasted my time coming here. I bang twice on Richard's door, loudly, but there's no answer, and it's the same thing at Pandora's room. I'm about to give up when Taylor sticks his head around the door at the opposite end of the hall.
"Thought I heard someone knocking," he says, his voice coming high and staticky through the modulator.
"Seeing if Richard was home," I answer.
"Yeah well, come in here a minute," he says, throwing the door open and disappearing behind it before I have a chance to answer. There is a reluctance to move, as if the hallway were much longer than it appears or the muscles in my legs had been numbed by anesthetic, but boredom and loneliness are powerful motivators, and in the end I force myself to walk the short distance to his door.
It is dark inside the room, and filthy. The bed is unmade and clothes are strewn across the floor. Both the night stand and dresser are covered in piles of used dishes, and the small garbage can by the desk is overflowing with balled-up wads of tissue and the remnants of instant noodle packages. There is a sweet, cloying scent in the air, as of damp linen and rotten food. In the far corner, almost lost in the gloom, I notice a glass fish tank very similar to the ones in Nathaniel Parker's bar.
"Nice room," I say, causing Taylor to snort, the sound emerging like a line of binary code. He sits down at the desk and leans back in his chair, possibly staring at me through the night-black lenses of his glasses. His head is backlit by a pair of laptop screens, each of them displaying some sort of chart or graph, with a stream of data scrolling along the lower edge.
"How are you doing?" he asks.
"Doing fine."
"You feel any different?"
"Different from what?"
"From before."
"Like I said, I'm fine. What's with the line graph?"
"It's stock information. I run data from a few different exchanges through a program that translates it into sound. Here..."
He swivels around in his chair and calls up a program on the left-hand screen. A sound like a whale call fills the room. Its piercing cries fluctuate wildly until all at once they are swallowed in a deep, penetrating fall of bass.
"That's some company's stock crashing," Taylor announces. "A lot of people just lost a lot of money."
He clicks the mouse, and the whale call is replaced by the confused chirping of a flock of birds.
"Turn it off," I say. "I'm way too hungover for this."
"I usually keep it on when I work," he says, muting it.
"Why?"
"I like to think about what's generating the sound. The price fluctuations, buying and selling. The economy is the sum of hundreds of millions of daily interactions, maybe billions. Distilling all that into sound is interesting. There's no real music in it, no harmony. It hurts the ears."
"Fun hobby," I remark.
"You still haven't seen it yet?" he asks suddenly.
"Seen what?"
"That line on your face."
My jaw tightens. Taylor remains seated in front of me, his expression indecipherable behind his modulator. A shiver passes the length of my spine.
"What are you talking about?"
"You know what," he responds. "You did it too. The mantis. You're not completely blind now."
"Blind to what?"
"All of it," he says, and his voice changes, deepening and cutting through the drab room like a discordant note.
"What do you mean?"
"You've seen it. How thin this all is. The holes in everything."
"How high are you right now?"
"You know what your problem is?" he asks me. "You don't know what you're looking for."
"I'm not looking for anything."
He shakes his head.
"No. You came to me looking for Kelly, but that's a dead end. It's not important. Not compared to that line."
"What line?"
He gets out of the chair and walks to the fish tank.
"Here," he says. "My own experiment."
Moving closer, I can just make out the mossy floor of the tank. Several pale mushrooms are poking out from the dirt, each of them capped by a delicate, misshapen crown.
"I take it these aren't for cooking," I say.
"No. I added powder to the ground."
"And how'd that work out?"
"See for yourself."
He puts a hand into the tank and uproots two mushrooms. Handing me one, he undoes the strap on his voice modulator. It occurs to me that I've never seen his face before; his mouth is wide, with thin, almost feminine lips, and his skin has the unnatural smoothness of cast porcelain. Quickly, he downs the mushroom and puts the modulator back in place, securing the strap around the base of his skull.
"It tastes like shit but you're going to want to eat that," he tells me.
I look at the thing in my hand, bone-white and nearly weightless. Faint orange lines snake beneath the surface of the cap, vivid as exposed veins.
"What else do you have to do today?" he urges.
He's right of course, and somewhere along the line I must have stopped caring what I put in my body; I shove the mushroom in my mouth, chewing carefully, and several times I have to repress an urge to vomit. Once I've swallowed, I attempt to dislodge a number of clinging bits from my teeth and the roof of my mouth, the rancid, undead taste of the thing causing me to shudder.
"It doesn't take long," Taylor murmurs, sitting down on the floor with his back to the foot of the bed.
I sit down next to him and stare at the blank surface of the opposite wall. There is a tightening in the small of my back, the nerves or tendons there winding themselves on a spring of bone. Shivers of electric current
stem from the base of my skull, and the floor is an undulating plane of water.
"No," I say. "That didn't take long at all."
I look at Taylor. His head is bent back on the mattress, his neck exposed. I can hear the follicles of his beard growing with a sound like the clawing of a caged animal. I look at my legs stretched out in front of me, and then I look away from those, because they don't seem like mine. Struggling, I rise to my feet (or someone's feet, the feet I have to work with.) Everything in the room is intrinsic to itself, distinct as shards of cut glass, which is the same as saying the room doesn't exist: only the objects comprising the room exist, the walls, the bed and the things on the bed, the discarded clothing. Taylor, sitting on the gently rolling carpet.
He turns his head to look at me, too slowly. His neck is made of plastic: a doll's head turned by invisible hands.
"I'm tripping out," I say.
"Go to the bathroom," he tells me. His voice is flat. I can't look at him without seeing his glasses, and the modulator growing from his mouth.
"Why?" I hear myself asking.
"Look in the mirror."
He turns away then, shutting down, and I am alone in the room. I go to the door and open it, passing into the hallway and onto the hard, wooden floor. I make my way to the bathroom, where I stand in front of the mirror. In the glass is the reflection of a man with a yellow line on his face.