Fools

by Pat Cadigan

  —check the line?

  —walking along some twisty dirt road out in open country, knowing that the cliff is waiting at the end of it. I’m not alone but like in one of those silly elementary dreams, I can’t turn my head to see who they are, or even how many. Ail I know is, when we get to the edge of that cliff, one of us is going over it.

  And Sally is chewing and chewing, in time to my heartbeat. Or someone’s heartbeat.

  You want to check the line?

  No, not yet. We’re getting closer to that cliff. One of us is going over it, as sure as God made little green brain cells. And while we’re on the subject, who is God now, anyway? God is

  Chewing. Flecks of food glisten on the lips and I think I’m going to let fly with the bad old technicolor shout right there.

  You’ll get some odd effects off the mirror.

  She’s chewing right the hell at me, trying to block it. But I’m a memory junkie; anybody’s but mine; and I’ll take it. This is my life, and this is my life, and this is—

  Chewing. The edge of the cliff is ragged, as if a giant hand came along and broke off whatever was there before, and this is what’s left, this is—

  —the line? He’s stuck in my mind like a fish hook, like he’s really there, too, dangling, one more filament among all those loose ends—

  —in deep water, just holo water but sounds like a karma-gram to me. I can tell it’s a bleach-job by the way his skin soaks up the murky blue light and reflects it. Hair like a patch of darkness—

  Like a tapestry that’s become unraveled. The sound of his voice is warm and textured enough to wrap up in like a blanket. All the threads are still there, but the picture is gone. You just have to wave them all back together the way they were. Or you could make an entirely different picture.

  Memory of a smile like a blessing.

  Yah. Oh, yah. Someone else’s memory of someone else’s man. Is this what she got Famous for? If it isn’t, it’s gonna be, if this is what the carriage trade gets when they come in and say they wannabee Famous, too, so strap ’er on and let ’er rip—

  Does he know she kept him? Does he know it’s on a hair trigger and he’s alive because she put up the mirror when they did it?

  You realize, of course, this means the truth is what you make it. Try not to forget that.

  Lover boy, you don’t have to tell that to a memory junkie.

  Did you want to check the line?

  We’re at the edge of the cliff. Long walk finished, journey over, the proverbial moment of truth is at virtual hand: my hand. This is what I Do. We all have one Thing we Do. Chewing is Sally’s, but this is mine, this is

  Over.

  Over the edge of the cliff, that’s the line and that’s the end of the line: surprise good-bye.

  Sorry it has to end like this, but I couldn’t let you stay and you wouldn’t go. Better you than me, because I’ve got a life to go back to now and all you’d leave me is

  Chewing. Sally’s image gets up and pomes toward me with this look on her face like whatever she’s chewing is poison. Her gaze moves in a slow left-to-right scan, and I can feel the process going on inside her: reality check. I already know what the result will be. My reality doesn’t fit hers, or hers doesn’t fit with mine.

  Chewing: her bad old Thing was a signal to something. Someone?

  Someone else. Whoever should have been looking into this mirror at her isn’t supposed to be me—

  Abruptly, someone says in a cheery little voice, What’s the good word? I was in the pawnshop twice last night, but it was me only the second time. The first time—

  Sally tries to clamp down on that, too, but she’s been too open to me, because that bad old Thing, her signal, got an answer somehow, the right answer, the answer that told her go ahead, this is the one.

  Except I’m not the one. Mistaken identity. Except it isn’t. I am the one, because I threw somebody over a cliff who didn’t want to go, somebody who offered me the only thing that could have stopped the long fall and the surprise good-bye. And somebody else, the one that called me to the cliff in the first place to throw that someone over, she never knew what happened until it was too late. So now I’m the one.

  I have half a moment to think Sally’s one of those silent psychos, the ones who are never crazy outside where you can see it. The one what? Who does she think she’s been waiting for, Neo-Jesus? Or just her One True Love?

  The mirror goes blank. I don’t have to check the line , now, I know what’s coming up next. It’s too stupid, too sickening, and there’s no way to stop it.

  This is going to put me off mouths for good, I think.

  Just before it happens, I finally understand that I’m not standing in front of the mirror anymore, but in it.

  Sally turns her head and spits.

  * * *

  You know it’s going to be a bad day when you come to in some rude Downs joint with a famine fancier standing over you like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on holiday, and there’s some ratatat hypehead you can only vaguely remember tapping his foot for you out in the waiting room. Worse when you realize those connections the famine fancier is holding have just come out of your eye sockets. All I could think was migod, over and over like a mantra.

  “I said, that’s all.” She wound the wires around one bony hand. Those skeletal fingers touched my eyes.

  Migod, I thought, I’m going to be sick.

  She looked pretty amused, touching either side of her mouth daintily with her little finger, as if she’d just finished a hearty meal. Christ, what could she have eaten? I didn’t want to think about that, nor about how I could have possibly thought letting someone like this run around in my head was a good idea.

  Well, it hadn’t been me, of course. That was just one of the hazards of being a Method actor. Without warning, you could fall into character and run off, especially if you were close to a performance date, when a character was always on a hair trigger.

  Normally, though, Sir Larry’s had some of the staff on wrangler duty, ready to flip us back to normal with a code word if it looked like a character was getting out of hand. Sir Larry’s was terribly conscientious about that these days, ever since the time Em-Cate’s game-girl character had achieved escape velocity and hid out at the shore for three weeks. They’d finally found her working out of a house of ill repute that she’d set up all on her own and which had been responsible for a minor crime wave at the very height of the vacation season. What a monster hue-and-cry there’d been about that. I smiled at the memory, though I shouldn’t have—if any of the subsequent lawsuits had gone to court, Sir Larry’s would have been wiped out. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person—just a nasty bitch like Em-Cate.

  And so: what had happened to the wrangler who should have been watching me? And what had I been doing the night before? I was wearing my party clothes, so I must have been out somewhere. But the last thing I remembered was—

  —throwing someone off a cliff—

  I winced with annoyance. The damnedest associations can trigger leak-through from a character.

  “Something wrong?” asked the famine fancier.

  “If you actually meant to scramble my brains, no,” I said, a bit snappishly.

  “Oh, you’ll be spotty for an hour or two, till it really takes,” she said, tucking the connections into the top of her system. “Don’t try to worry anything into coming up. After the associations resettle, things will start occurring to you all on their own, without any prompting.

  “Oh, very comforting,” I said. “You won’t mind, then, if I sit around here till things start popping.”

  She found that pretty amusing. “There is a back way out of here, you know.”

  “How considerate.”

  She laughed. “You’re not the first person who’s gotten her memory back in here and decided she didn’t want to go out the same way she came in. Go all the way down the hall and turn left. If you change your mind again, though, you’ll ha
ve to come around the front, because the back door won’t open from the outside.”

  I put the turbo on my exit, swerving around a desk with a mostly empty platter on it.

  “See you around the ward,” the famine fancier called after me. One of those witty farewells. I shuddered at the idea that she’d been touching my mind. Famine fanciers had to be the most obscene creatures on God’s green earth, and they proliferated only in lands of plenty. Migod, I thought as I pushed-out the back door into a narrow alley, don’t let me have come in to get a diet from her.

  No, the hypehead I was dodging had brought me in here. Or rather, he had brought my character in. That much I could remember, thanks to leak-through, but not much else. Except that he wasn’t the type who would just fuck off quietly, even if I showed him that the person he’d thought I was, was just a character from a play. Maybe especially if he knew—

  I’m pumping you out. And every time I come face-to-face with you, the motherfucker goes off the scale and I have to shut it down.

  That had to be a line from the play. Migod, I hoped it was.

  You want to check?

  Sovay’s image floated in my mind. I didn’t know why my mind had seized on him to play ringmaster for my associations. Well, actually, I did know; I was just surprised, even now, that he’d been the one to stick.

  Migod, I thought suddenly, looking back at the exit I had just come out of. I hadn’t done that with that hypehead, had I? Or, well, not me, but my character. That would have been just like Marceline, but I couldn’t get enough leak-through to know for sure. The things I endured for my art.

  The alley ran the length of the block and came out on a side street. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, and it was obscenely early in the morning besides. Didn’t I ever sleep when I was in character?

  I felt in my pockets. Mad money still there—what a relief. I’d be able to take a taxi back to Sir Larry’s. And wasn’t I going to nuke somebody when I got there. At least one wrangler would be looking for a new job by lunchtime, and a certain director was going to lose a lot of sleep worrying about a lawsuit.

  The thought of lunchtime made my stomach turn over. There was nothing in it except for that minor burning sensation you get from drinking poison like cube coffee. Now that I was aware of it, the minor burning blossomed into a full-scale ache, most of it hunger. No pleasure in that, thank God, which meant I hadn’t caught the famine fancy from that awful woman.

  What I should do, I decided, was find some place to sit down, get something to eat, and let my spotty memory un-spot in peace. Then I could go back to Sir Larry’s and read the riot act from a more informed position. In fact, the more I thought of it, the more I thought it would be better if I didn’t go rushing back there as fast as my little legs would take me. They couldn’t do the play without me—I’d made sure that was written into my contract—and my prolonged absence would definitely throw the fear of God into some people.

  And all I was really suffering from was a little characterization amnesia. Some people, like Twill, who was always so wound up he had to have his reality affixed after every performance, or Sovay, who was almost too serious even for me, would have panicked if they’d found themselves in a Downs hypehead joint sans a chunk of memory. But I’d always said that if you were going to work the Method a hundred percent, you couldn’t let a little thing like a blackout stampede you. After all, whatever you didn’t remember the character probably did, and you just had to get the leak-through reenabled.

  Which was not to say that it didn’t feel funny, and I’d seldom felt funnier than I did right then. Not to mention being too hungry to think straight. I went over a block on the vague recollection of having been to a video parlor/doughnut shack there, but when I got to what I thought was the right place, there was a dreamland there instead. They weren’t open for business yet, but they were testing their sidewalk holo display and there were unicorns and gryphons and djinn and exotic dancers flickering in and out of existence all over the sidewalk.

  I stopped to watch. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen the same kind of thing a hundred billion times before, and very few of these places ever showed much in the way of originality—I mean, migod, if overuse of gold-scaled dragons were a felony, a lot of people would have been doing life without parole. But it was diverting to see the place running through its catalog, promising all sorts of inspirational visions and signs and wonders and whatnot. All you could really get in there were your own boosted dreams, of course—if you wanted real visions and signs and etc., you went to a dreamfeeder and paid real money for the good stuff. But few people in the Downs could afford that kind of freight—if they could, they sure wouldn’t have been living in the Downs.

  I became aware of the turn of my own thoughts. Watching the sidewalk show was helping to unbind my mind and reenable leak-through. That was just the way I’d been taught to do it, of course—you keep yourself distracted with something attention-getting but not too demanding and pretty soon the gears of memory would engage. And if mine didn’t, I thought smugly, Sir Larry’s Storefront Theatre would be out-of-pocket for the patch job, not me. They were notoriously stingy about that kind of thing, but they’d have to take responsibility this time.

  “Cuba?”

  I jumped. The pimp had materialized at my elbow as if he were a holo himself. For a moment I thought he was a holo. He was a wiry little man in scream-green ersatz-angora, the kind of fuzz that ought to have balloons stuck all over it.

  “I said, ‘Cute, huh?’ ” He jerked his head at the display. I looked; a gryphon was preening itself on its hind legs.

  “Never really thought of gryphons as ‘cute,’ ” I said, “but as they go, it’s not bad.”

  He stroked my arm and I drew away, resisting the urge to wipe the place where he’d touched. “I didn’t mean the gryphon, I mean the real animal. Wait for him, he comes back any second now. There. Don’t miss him.”

  A well-developed exotic dancer dressed (barely) like Hercules with cheap gilt on his hair and some genuine dancing ability did a turn around the projection area, threatening to remove his loincloth.

  The pimp nudged me and I drew away farther. Now I was hugging the wall. “So? Cute?”

  “Cuter than the gryphon,” I said. “Go away, I’m null-and-void.”

  “Sure you are.” He felt the material of my jacket between his thumb and finger. “That’s why you dress uptown and cruise downtown. Come on, taste the good life. Don’t miss that train.”

  “Told you, I’m null-and-void. Really. Spent the trust fund in a thrillsville. I’m on my way home to beg Mommy and Daddy for a loan.” My character would have handled him much better, I was sure, but it seemed like I could never fall into character when it would have been most advantageous. Offstage, anyway.

  “Sure, and I bet your taxes must be killers. Deduct it, business entertainment.”

  I brushed his hand off and walked away. Hercules danced across my path and I veered around him, even though it’s really nothing to walk through a holo image, or have one walk through you. But I never could stand it myself. It made me feel like a ghost.

  “Tonight you’ll wish you did it!” the pimp called after me. I didn’t doubt it; I was always rather suggestible when I came out of character.

  I spotted the video parlor/doughnut shop several doors down, next to a soundtrack shop that promised ZILLIONS of GREAT TUNES To Enhance Your Holiday or Your Day-2-Day—Or Let Us CUSTOM-COM-POZE The **PERFECT SCORE** For YOUR Life, From REAL COMPOSER ANALOGS!!! Today’s specials, I saw with some amusement, were Bernstein, Mozart, and Elf man.

  Right. They were probably holding hands under the table with an obsessive-compulsive clinic. Doctor, I just can’t get this damned tune out of my head. All right, just hold still, this won’t hurt a bit, one thousand dollars please, next. I could hear a little of the Elf man as I went into the parlor; it certainly was catchy.

  The doughnut aroma hit me like a fist in the face; a moment later, my mouth was wate
ring so much that my salivary glands stung. Totally illegal, of course. Appetite gas was against the law in establishments that provided any kind of entertainment or diversion, even just video, the idea being that the entertainment was enough inducement for the customers to stay and eat. And even if it had been legal to gas the trade here, the concentration had to have been about five times the limit allowed in the available space. God, I thought, living in the Downs was like living under siege in a minefield.

  I went over to the doughnut counter anyway. The gas was active in my system now and if I didn’t eat here, I’d end up somewhere else, pounding down a dinner for eight or worse.

  I took a tray from the dispenser and lined up behind a scruffy local in one of those technicolor quilt-suits everyone had been wearing last year. The colors were barely moving; it needed a recharge but quilt-suits were so passé, I couldn’t think of a single place that would have done the job.

  As if that were my worry. Well, when you were waiting for a memory boost to take, your mind would wander. A bit of the old carbo express was probably just what I needed. Or what I thought I needed. I chose half a dozen assorted artery-killers from the counter, three of them dripping custard. But I also managed to force myself to take one edible poly. Damn that gas.

  I dug a couple of small bills out of my mad money without displaying the wad and stepped up to the collection box, looking for the cash slot.

  “Won the lottery, did we?”

  The local in the quilt-suit was eyeing the money with a half smile that had more in common with rictus from nerve damage than it did with any real expression. I made a polite noise and pushed the currency through the opening on top.

  “You know, that don’t give change,” she said, brushing at strawlike hair the exact shade of chicken gravy (damn that gas).

  “It don’t? Doesn’t?”

  “’Zack change for cash customers or losers-weepers. That’s how they make up the overhead and pay for frig-gin’ gas. You oughta know that.” Her gaze went to her own tray and then to mine. She had one doughnut.