17
“Oh my GOD—Marty! Holy shit! Did you see that friggin’ GIRL?”
“What girl? No. Where?”
“Back there. She just passed us on the left. Turn around, man. Look—Jesus!”
Marty Corman turned around to check things out. Twenty steps away and moving fast, about to disappear among the pedestrians trailing in her wake. Blonde hair, long, curling upward slightly at the shoulders. A slender girl-woman—for you couldn’t tell her age from this far behind. But there was an elegance in her walk and a way she held her shoulders, a gracefulness in the way she swung her arms, that foretold that man-oh-man! this cutie was a fox, all right. Kenny could spot them, sure enough, but he was a pussy when it came to meeting chicks in the flesh. But Marty—Ah, Marty had no qualms at all. Hell, what was the worst they could do? Worst they could do was say no: and even if they spit in your face, you’d get a taste of what their mouths were like. He turned and followed, Kenneth Vincent in his wake.
Language would be the sticking point, but with what he wanted, Marty knew, he could make himself understood. These Eastern European women—shit, half of them did porno in their spare time anyway—so what was the problem in taking on another couple horny guys? The two of them caught up with her at the curb, waiting for the signal to change so she could get across the street. Marty tapped her on the shoulder like a person who had run into some long-lost high school friend.
“Izveni,” he said. He’d only learned a few Russian words, but he’d done his best to pronounce them right. You only needed a phrase or two or three in every language to make it with a girl. And he had learned those few apt phrases well: Two chicks in Hamburg—“Guten Abend,” he’d said. That smelly, black-haired Emilie in Lille—“Pardon, ma’m’selle” had worked just fine. Warsaw was easy—shit, with the Polish girls, you didn’t hardly need to even speak. In Italy—“Buona sera, com’e bella!” Christ—that had even gotten Kenny laid, and Kenny wasn’t exactly a fuckin’ Mr. America, that was for sure.
Not that he was either. A little pudgy around the middle, red hair, freckles, a bumpy nose. Still, the girls responded less to your handsomeness than your derring-do. If nothing else they were flattered at the attention, and flattery got you everywhere, right into those fragrant little pants most times. With enough persistence he almost never got turned down.
The girl turned. Holy shit! That face! Kenny hadn’t been exaggerating. This gorgeous thing was out-of-the-park, drop-dead beautiful. Magnificent. He wasn’t all that picky—hell, how could a pudgy red-haired, hump-nosed tourist from the States expect to be—but THIS girl—she was out of his league, out of his universe. For maybe the first time in his life, Marty Corman was at a total loss for words. Russian words for sure, but even English phraseology escaped him utterly. Luckily, the girl was the one who opened up and spoke:
“You are Eeng-lish?”
A pretty Russian accent, easily understandable. But looking at that face of hers, he couldn’t even stammer the most rudimentary response. Luckily, unaccountably, it was Kenny who piped up to save the day.
“Umm, yeah—or no, I mean. We speak English, yeah—but we’re from the States.”
“Your Russian pronunciation, it is very good.” This she addressed to Marty, the tapper on her shoulder who’d said izveni; and, thankfully, the time elapsed by now had resurrected shell-shocked Marty’s shackled tongue.
“Spasebo,” he answered. His courage had returned in part: “Tui ochin krasni.” That was about it. He only had one or two other phrases left before he’d need to repeat some of the minimal verbiage he’d already used.
“Nyet. Vui krasni. ‘Krasni’ means ‘red’. You are red—your hair, it is red, this word mean. I have yellow hair—‘gialni’—Maybe you wish to say ‘krasivi’, which is word to say ‘beautiful’. Also ‘krasni’—it is masculine. If telling girl this thing, you would need say ‘krasivaya’. And if you wish to say that thing to me, person from America, I very kindly thank you.”
“OK, OK, your English is way better than my Russian. So that helps—I did mean to say beautiful—I mean, like, really beautiful, like off the charts beautiful.”
“Charts? Ya nye punyimaio—I do not understand ‘charts’. Is this another compliment?”
“It is, I promise you it is.”
“Well, you are very kind. But you must excuse me please, I will now need to go.”
“Go? Where go? We’ll go with you. To keep you company, I mean. To practice speaking Russian. Can we do that?”
“If you wish. I need to be to my job in—what is now time?” She looked at her watch. “In fifteen minutes, I need to be.”
“OK, great. We’ll walk you to work. Where do you work?”
“I am dancer. I go to practice now.” With which she started off. The light had changed, twice now, and the walk signal had lighted for the second time. She crossed, and the two young men crossed with her. Halfway down the succeeding block, Marty went to put his arm around her shoulder, but she moved it off.
“Talk OK, but no touching. In America OK maybe, but not good for touching here. OK for some of girls, but not OK with me.”
“Why not?”
“Just not—OK? You want girl for touching, you can meet anyplace. Go to bar, go to concert, lots of girls to touch. Poor girls, need to feed little kids. Russians poor, Americans rich, take advantage. It is bad I think. Do you not think it is bad?”
“OK, OK, I’m sorry that we bothered you. But … you really are a special girl. Can I…. Can I at least shake your hand?”
She put her hand out, shook his goodbye, and left. Marty didn’t follow.
“So what was that all about, Mr. big shot, Mr. Casanova? You finally meet your match?”
“Hey, don’t be a smart ass, Kenny. That girl is something else.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m in love. Seriously. Meaning this girl’s the girl of my dreams. I mean—did you see her? I’d give anything to have her for even just one night. But just one night wouldn’t be enough for me. This one’s a keeper, I’m telling you. There’s gotta be a way…. Look, we’re supposed to fly out—when? Tuesday morning?”
“Yeah, that’s what the schedule says.”
“Well, I’m gonna cancel it, Kenny. I’ve gotta have that girl. One way or another, I made up my mind.”
“Yeah, right. Hey, she’s way out of your league, Marty. This is one gorgeous female you’re never gonna get.”
“Oh yeah, good buddy? You wanna make a bet?”
Liliana made it to the Bolshoi on time. Today was only a warm-up exercise, to meet again with the choreographer, practice moves, and limber up. She wasn’t a star—not yet—but everyone said she showed promise, not too far in the future, to be up there with the best. Not that she needed to be the best, only to perform in some of her favorites one day, and after that, maybe teach—Petrouchka, Pulchinella—Stravinski was her composer of choice, although The Firebird was never at the top of the list.
Even as a lesser member of the Company, she earned a decent wage. Russians loved ballet and filled the theater every night. How lucky she was to be born in a cultured country like this—and at such a time. Freedom that her parents hadn’t known when they were growing up. Here, now, you could say anything, do anything—not against the President—that was not a clever thing to do. But if you kept your politics to yourself, no one would ever bother you. And there was money to be made in the new Russia, lots of opportunity. She and her mother had everything they wanted—even now they did when she wasn’t yet a star. What a shame that her papa had to die so soon.
She changed her clothes, taking off the blouse and skirt, putting on her leotards, her slippers. The mirror cast her image back with honest flattery: Yes, she was pretty. Thin like all the other dancers, but she had some curves as well. It wasn’t the best thing to have curves, to have something up here in your chest, but she was good enough at dancing that the ballet masters had forgiven her that. Her hair was long and full, bu
t it could be wrapped and tied. Being a dancer didn’t mean you couldn’t still act and look like a girl when you wanted to.
That strange American man: Many men approached her, but not as forcefully or brazenly as that one had. Poor man—a little sad. Something missing in your life, in your upbringing, in your whole way of looking at the world, to go up to a stranger the way he did. And to touch her—Just imagine! She was young, and there would be lots of time for touching when she met someone she cared about a lot. Her mama had always told her one day she’d meet a special person and she’d know right away he was the one. Till then there was so much more to do. There would be lots of time for touching when she met the special one.
“Privet, Liliana,” said an accented voice behind her—Maria, the American girl here on a study program from … from….
“Otkuda tui, Maria?”
“Umm—Kto? What?” And Liliana tells herself: Two months she is here and only has learned few words. But she is nice, a good companion, and it is good that they speak in English so she can learn that language pretty well.
“I ask you where you are coming from in America. I forget. I apologize for this forgetting.”
“From Philadelphia. You’ll have to come and visit when the Company goes on tour.”
“Yes, I would like. I like very much. Thank you very much for asking me.”
“Did you get any more of those, like, matches from the website?”
“No. Only just the two. They look like a lot, but not exact. I am writing to one of these two. She also is American. From mm-mm a place in Florida State—Is place named Jacksonville?”
“Yes, Jacksonville. It’s in the north.”
“Florida is in the north?”
“No, but Jacksonville is in the north of Florida. The state of Florida is in the south. The matches I got—they sent three of them so far—and they’re amazingly close. It’s like looking at a picture of myself—two of them are anyway. I wrote to the first one already—a girl named Sonya in Honduras—And it’s amazing—she’s just like me in every way. She studies dance, and says she was a tomboy as a kid, just like I was, and….”
“‘Tomboy’—what means this word ‘tomboy’?”
“Oh—kind of like a girl who acts like a boy—climbs trees and hangs out with guys rather than girls and, like, plays rough games and stuff.”
“And you do these things? You should not do such things, Maria. If you are a girl, you must be a girl. Look at me, I am not afraid to be a girl. Be careful if you write to girls who want to be like boys. This is something that is not good. I met another American today who was not very good. You must try and never be like him. Very forceful, very crude.”
“Oh, lots of American guys are like that. We do things differently in America than they do them here. That girl you’re going to write to—she’ll tell you all about it when she writes you back. Jacksonville, Florida is the same as everyplace else—
“Oh and by the way: Don’t be too disappointed if you don’t get a perfect match, Liliana. I don’t think there’s another woman in the whole wide world who’s as flat-out, drop-dead, incredibly beautiful as you.”
Hey, Sandy!”
“Yeah, Leonard, what can I do you for, my friend?”
“I was gonna ask you….”
“Yeah? What were you gonna ask? You need another pair of rotors? Or is it brake pads this time?”
“No, it’s not about a car, Sandy. I was gonna ask…. Hey, that place you’re mailin’ pitchers into—It’s like a dating site or somepin?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Ditten you take some pitchers of Tommy for some kinda, like, dating site?”
“Oh that!—No, Leonard, it’s not like that at all. What it is, is this website that matches people up by looks. You send a picture in and they put it through a computer or something and match you up with somebody who looks just like you. And it can be from anywhere—anywhere in the world. There’s, like, millions and millions of people who’ve sent their pictures in, so I guess the matches can be pretty close, since they’ve got so many millions to match you up with—You see?”
“Kinda. So you sent somepin in?”
“Well, Tommy must have told you what I did or you wouldn’t be asking me.”
“OK, so what’d you do? I’m askin’.”
“I sent Tommy’s picture in.”
“And why’d you do that? To surprise him?”
“No, not to surprise him. To find somebody who looks like him. Tommy’s a sweet kid, but he’s not too interested in dating girls right now—or anyway he’s not that interested in dating me right now. But I like the way he looks—no that’s wrong: I’m obsessed with the way he looks—and if I can find somebody who looks like him and is interested in girls—or specifically this girl right here in the parts department of Dworkin GMC—that would be worth the twenty bucks it costs. Even a guy in Australia would be worth the twenty bucks.”
“OK, I get it. So that’s what it costs? Twenty bucks?”
“Yeah, it used to be free—it was free when I signed up—but they started charging twenty bucks a week or two ago when they put more info in. I guess they can tell you if you’re gonna get diabetes when you get to be sixty-five and stuff like that.”
“So—you get any pitchers back yet?’
“Yeah, three so far, one in Alaska, one in Poland, and the other one is in—someplace else in Europe somewhere. They’re kinda close, but not quite close enough—As to looks, I mean—But otherwise—and here’s the amazing thing—two of the three guys in the pictures work with cars. And … this is amazing too—two of them are helping to support their families just like Tommy is, and getting degrees—engineering, just like Tommy, and….”
“But they don’t look like him, huh?”
“Not exactly, no. Like I said, they’re close, but something’s missing—They’ve got the hair right and the mouth right, and that little dimple in the chin, but…. It’s the eyes, I think. You know how Tommy has those bright blue eyes? I’ve never seen anybody else anywhere with eyes as brilliant blue as his.”
18
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Words and imagery streamed torrentially through Alexander Daugherty’s fervent brain like raindrops in a deluge, too many to count, too rapid in their transit to keep track of. It wasn’t that he lacked the verbiage when he had the need to speak; it was the fact that concepts evocative of requisite verbiage sped by so rapidly that his language couldn’t possibly keep pace. His brain was like a bullet-train at speed and the words were like the faces in the crowd the train had passed along the way. By the time you picked one out to focus on, it was so far gone as to be of no damn earthly good.
No, Alex was not the kind of guy to have a conversation with. Nor was he the person you could get a handle on by looking at his face—for he never really looked directly at another person’s face. Nor did his gestures tell you much of anything he was thinking—if you had the extraordinary good fortune to see those gestures in the flesh. Truthfully, no one would have the faintest clue from anything that Alex did or showed or manifested perceptibly in any other way—
But, whether anyone could sense it or not, old Alex Daugherty was the sort of sneaky little bastard who tended to have something up his sleeve. Yes, old Alex the Imponderable, Alex the Unintelligible—that guy could put one over on you from time to time, most generally when you were turned to look the other way—And Alex put it over on everyone concerned in the whole damn FaceMate matching process, that morning when he scanned BOTH their pictures in.
What was he thinking? Why would anyone go to the trouble of matching up a dead girl anyway? What function could it possibly serve? Alex knew the story, alright—Rajiv hadn’t
made a deep dark secret of it. Which meant that Alex knew up front that Ben sure wouldn’t want to see whatever match-mate for Lizzie his supercomputing gizmo kicked out. Maybe Eddie would be interested in an offhand sort of way—for nostalgia or whatever—but if he was, what in the world could ever come of it? “Yeah, this other girl kind of looks like Bennie’s girlfriend Liz,” he’d say, perhaps. And that would be the end of that.
So why? Maybe that compulsive nature that Alex labored with wanted to prove to himself, and to Rajiv as well, that even a dead girl can be matched, drop-dead gorgeous though she well might be. Maybe a special-needs sort of person like Alex has some extraordinary foresight into the future sequence of events that no one other than a gifted weirdo really understands. Maybe this; maybe that; who knows?—But whatever the reason, whatever the cause, Alex started a train of crazy events in motion that could never be reversed. For good or pretty goddam awful, it all comes down to that.
So bottom line, regardless of motivation, into the enormous digital file-base the double images had gone, straight from their Mylar covering, just before noon the day before today. They merged themselves into a humongous group, alright—Over two hundred million pictures in there now, all told. In they went and got processed, got analyzed, got digitized and magnified and had their profiles calculated from the frontal views, their underlying bone structure separated out, compared, contrasted; the overlying musculature defined; the extent and positioning of the superimposed fat, skin, dermal pigmentation. All reduced to bits and bytes of numbered imagery, then matched against a million file types that were relatively similar, then a thousand file types that were very, very close, then a hundred that were—damn!— they were pretty near identical, then….
Eye color—check. Hair thickness—check. Brow line—check. Frenulum, temporal bulge, nasolabial furrow….
Whirr-click-beep…. A day after scanning in—twenty-seven hours, to be exact—now, today, Alex sitting at the ready, all attention toward the screen….
FaceMate Page 14
