The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound – the no-sound of the first dark sea…(Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lightning that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.
Many of the refugees were armed.
Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintained in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession.
The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and territories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.
Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search, a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent to find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a length of brushwood.
In the jacket’s back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket’s lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.
He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle’s wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the ‘lawyers’ who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?
– Rosebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View.
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape – into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.
Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust…
– and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn’t met you yet; you’re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle –
– and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tape ends.
The inducer’s light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know – stolen credit cards – a burned out suburb – planetary conjunctions of a stranger – a tank burning on a highway –a flat packet of drugs –a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape – is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.
The Belonging Kind
John Shirley and William Gibson
It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo’s, or Sad Jack’s, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he’d first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke…she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.
Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.
He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It was called the Backdoor because you entered through a narrow back alley. The alley’s walls crawled with graffiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
He wasn’t very good at conversation with strangers, not at parties and not in bars.
He was fine at the community college where he lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with the head of his department about sequencing and options in conversational openings. But he could never talk to strangers in bars or at parties. He didn’t go to many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
Coretti didn’t know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn’t look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn’t liked her saying that, because it was true.
He hadn’t ever had a girl like the one who sat with her back arched slightly in the undersea light that splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light was screwed into the lenses of the bartender’s glasses, wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the green of young corn, like a husk stripped away, showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that night. And, that night, her eyes were green.
He pushed resolutely between the empty chrome-and-Formica tables until he reached the bar, where he ordered a straight bourbon. He took off his duffle coat, and wound up holding it on his lap when he sat down one stool away from her. Great, he screamed to himself, she’ll think you’re hiding an erection. And he was startled to realize that he had one to hide. He studied himself in the mirror behind the bar, a thirtyish man with thinning dark hair and a pale, narrow face on a long neck, too long for the open collar of the nylon shirt printed with engravings of 1910 automobiles in three vivid colors. He wore a tie with broad maroon and black diagonals, too narrow, he supposed, for what he now saw as the grotesquely long points of his collar. Or it was the wrong color. Some
thing.
Beside him, in the dark clarity of the mirror, the green-eyed woman looked like Irma La Douce. But looking closer, studying her face, he shivered. A face like an animal’s. A beautiful face, but simple, cunning, two-dimensional. When she senses you’re looking at her, Coretti thought, she’ll give you the smile, disdainful amusement – or whatever you’d expect.
Coretti blurted, ‘May I, um, buy you a drink?’
At moments like these, Coretti was possessed by an agonizingly stiff, schoolmasterish linguistic tic. Um. He winced. Um.
‘You would, um, like to buy me a drink? Why, how kind of you,’ she said, astonishing him. ‘That would be very nice.’ Distantly, he noticed that her reply was as stilted and insecure at his own. She added, ‘A Tom Collins, on this occasion, would be lovely.’
On this occasion? Lovely? Rattled, Coretti ordered two drinks and paid.
A big woman in jeans and an embroidered cowboy shirt bellied up to the bar beside him and asked the bartender for change. ‘Well, hey,’ she said. Then she strutted to the jukebox and punched for Conway and Loretta’s ‘You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly.’ Coretti turned to the woman in green, and mumured haltingly:
‘Do you enjoy country-and-western music?’ Do you enjoy…? He groaned secretly at his phrasing, and tried to smile.
‘Yes indeed,’ she answered, the faintest twang edging her voice, ‘I sure do.’
The cowgirl sat down beside him and asked her, winking, ‘This li’l terror here givin’ you a hard time?’
And the animal-eyed lady in green replied, ‘Oh, hell no, honey, I got my eye on ’im.’ And laughed. Just the right amount of laugh. The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass.
‘The name’s Coretti,’ he said, his verbal poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing tough-guy mode, ‘Michael Coretti.’
‘A pleasure,’ she said, too softly for the other woman to hear, and again she had slipped into the lame parody of Emily Post.
‘Conway and Loretta,’ said the cowgirl, to no one in particular.
‘Antoinette,’ said the woman in green, and inclined her head. She finished her drink, pretended to glance at a watch, said thank-you-for-the-drink too damn politely, and left.
Ten minutes later Coretti was following her down Third Avenue. He had never followed anyone in his life and it both frightened and excited him. Forty feet seemed a discreet distance, but what should he do if she happened to glance over her shoulder?
Third Avenue isn’t a dark street, and it was there, in the light of a streetlamp, like a stage light, that she began to change. The street was deserted.
She was crossing the street. She stepped off the curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair – at first he thought they were reflections. But there was no neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared, color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors bled away and in three seconds she was white-blond. He was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began to writhe, twisting across her body like a shrink-wrap plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabulous animal. When Coretti passed, it was green foam, fizzing, dissolving, gone. He looked back up at her and the dress was another dress, green satin, shifting with reflections. Her shoes had changed too. Her shoulders were bare except for thin straps that crossed at the small of her back. Her hair had become short, spiky.
He found that he was leaning against a jeweler’s plate-glass window, his breath coming ragged and harsh with the damp of the autumn evening. He heard the disco’s heartbeat from two blocks away. As she neared it, her movements began subtly to take on a new rhythm – a shift in emphasis in the sway of her hips, in the way she put her heels down on the sidewalk. The doorman let her pass with a vague nod. He stopped Coretti and stared at his driver’s license and frowned at his duffle coat. Coretti anxiously scanned the wash of lights at the top of a milky plastic stairway beyond the doorman. She had vanished there, into robotic flashing and redundant thunder.
Grudgingly the man let him pass, and he pounded up the stairs, his haste disturbing the lights beneath the translucent plastic steps.
Coretti had never been in a disco before; he found himself in an environment designed for complete satisfaction-in-distraction. He waded nervously through the motion and the fashions and the mechanical urban chants booming from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the pose-clotted dance floor, amid strobe lighting.
And found her at the bar, drinking a tall, lurid cooler and listening to a young man who wore a loose shirt of pale silk and very tight black pants. She nodded at what Coretti took to be appropriate intervals. Coretti ordered by pointing to a bottle of bourbon. She drank five of the tall drinks and then followed the young man to the dance floor.
She moved in perfect accord with the music, striking a series of poses; she went through the entire prescribed sequence gracefully but not artfully, fitting in perfectly. Always, always fitting in perfectly. Her companion danced mechanically, moving through the ritual with effort.
When the dance ended, she turned abruptly and dived into the thick of the crowd. The shifting throng closed about her like something molten.
Coretti plunged in after her, his eyes never leaving her – and he was the only one to follow her change. By the time she reached the stair, she was auburn-haired and wore a long blue dress. A white flower blossomed in her hair, behind her right ear; her hair was longer and straighter now. Her breasts had become slightly larger, and her hips a shade heavier. She took the stairs two at a time, and he was afraid for her then. All those drinks.
But the alcohol seemed to have no effect on her at all.
Never taking his eyes from her, Coretti followed, his heartbeat outspeeding the disco-throb at his back, sure that at any moment she would turn, glare at him, call for help.
Two blocks down Third she turned in at Lothario’s. There was something different in her step now. Lothario’s was a quiet complex of rooms hung with ferns and Art Deco mirrors. There were fake Tiffany lamps hanging from the ceiling, alternating with wooden-bladed fans that rotated too slowly to stir the wisps of smoke drifting through the consciously mellow drone of conversation. After the disco, Lothario’s was familiar and comforting. A jazz pianist in pinstriped shirt sleeves and loosely knotted tie competed softly with talk and laughter from a dozen tables.
She was at the bar; the stools were only half taken, but Coretti chose a wall table, in the shadow of a miniature palm, and ordered bourbon.
He drank the bourbon and ordered another. He couldn’t feel the alcohol much tonight.
She sat beside a young man, yet another young man with the usual set of bland, regular features. He wore a yellow golf shirt and pressed jeans. Her hip was touching his, just a little. They didn’t seem to be speaking, but Coretti felt they were somehow communing. They were leaning toward one another slightly, silent. Coretti felt odd. He went to the rest room and splashed his face with water. Coming back, he managed to pass within three feet of them. Their lips didn’t move till he was within earshot.
They took turns murmuring realistic palaver:
‘…saw his earlier films, but –’
‘But he’s rather self-indulgent, don’t you think?’
‘Sure, but in the sense that…’
And for the first time, Coretti knew what they were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind.
Something in him yearned for a confrontation. He reached his table, but found himself unable to sit down. He turned, took a deep breath, and walked woodenly toward the bar. He wanted to tap her on her smoo
th shoulder and ask who she was, and exactly what she was, and point out the cold irony of the fact that it was he, Coretti, the Martian dresser, the eavesdropper, the outsider, the one whose clothes and conversation never fit, who had at last guessed their secret. But his nerve broke and he merely took a seat beside her and ordered bourbon. ‘But don’t you think,’ she asked her companion, ‘that it’s all relative?’
The two seats beyond her companion were quickly taken by a couple who were talking politics. Antoinette and Golf Shirt took up the political theme seamlessly, recycling, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard. Her face, as she spoke, was expressionless. A bird trilling on a limb.
She sat so easily on her stool, as if it were a nest. Golf Shirt paid for the drinks. He always had the exact change, unless he wanted to leave a tip. Coretti watched them work their way methodically through six cocktails each, like insects feeding on nectar. But their voices never grew louder, their cheeks didn’t redden, and when at last they stood, they moved without a trace of drunkenness –a weakness, thought Coretti, a gap in their camouflage.
They paid him absolutely no attention while he followed them through three successive bars.
As they entered Waylon’s, they metamorphosed so quickly that Coretti had trouble following the stages of the change. It was one of those places wth toilet doors marked Pointers and Setters, and a little imitation pine plaque over the jars of beef jerky and pickled sausages: We’ve got a deal with the bank. They don’t serve beer and we don’t cash checks.
She was plump in Waylon’s, and there were dark hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peterbilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a frantic minute in ‘Pointers,’ blinking in confusion at a hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to please –You aim too, please.