Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘I can’t use my hocus pocus, Iggy. This is going to wake the babies.’

  Etching a small cross into the plaster with her fingernail, she closed her eyes, drew back her head, and furiously butted her target. The building shook, and Primavera disappeared behind a veil of atomized ferroconcrete. ‘Shit!’ she yelled. ‘My fucking skull!’ In the corridor: screamed orders, the whine of walkie-talkies, the click-clack of safety catches disengaged. The dust cleared; a man-sized hole gaped in the embassy’s masonry.

  I got to my feet, my legs stiff and cumbersome.

  ‘Help me out of this,’ said Primavera. I unzipped her dress; filleted, it fell wriggling to the floor with the sound of raw steak hitting a gridiron.

  ‘You’re hurt,' I said. A purple weal was blossoming on her forehead.

  ‘Stupid! I'm a doll. My important bits are all down there.’ The door began to melt. ‘You want to hang around and say goodbye?’

  Taking my hand, she jumped.

  We fell through the hot night and hit the stagnant water of a klong. I kicked my feet, intent on resurfacing; but Primavera, cleaving to me like a wicked mermaid, seemed equally intent that I should not. I opened my eyes; the water stung them; I screwed them shut, retreating into blindness. I had seen only Primavera’s face, lit by its two green lanterns; the dim play of torchlight through the depths. I began to struggle; Primavera put her arms about my neck and I felt her lips on my own. She blew, and oxygen filled my lungs. As we touched bottom, Primavera loosed her hold, leading me across a scrapmetal jungle, stopping only to refresh my lungs with kisses that, for so many, had proved de luxe and noxious.

  When our heads breached the surface we found ourselves in a narrow soi leading to the Sukumvit Road. The green light of a million-pixel Coca-Cola sign lit the water;

  a taxi floated nearby. Dragging me by the collar, Primavera swam to the little boat’s side. It was empty. We pulled ourselves aboard and lay, exhausted, staring up at the dawn-fractured clouds. It still rained, but the storm had passed.

  ‘I think,’ said Primavera, ‘I think I know why she did it.’

  ‘Kito?’ I said. ‘Money, of course. No honour amongst dolls.’

  Primavera shook her head. ‘The Americans have got something on her. At least she thinks they have, but—’ Primavera gave a short scream and doubled over, clutching her belly. ‘She’s the only person who can help me, Iggy.’ She spoke through gritted fangs. ‘These nanomachines: they’re turning me into a demolition site. They’re taking me to bits.’ She held her breath, and then released it in a long sigh of pleasure. I put my hand on the pale flesh below the suspender belt.

  ‘It hurts that bad?’

  ‘It’s faecal, Iggy. Really faecal.’ She lay back. Mascara ran down her cheeks in a delta of black tears. ‘Some of the best nanoengineers in Bangkok work for Kito. And she’s got all these laboratories, all this stuff.’

  ‘You’re crazy. She betrayed us.’

  ‘They blackmailed her, Iggy, and I think I know how. It’s something I heard. At the embassy. In my mind. Something I dreamed. If I can prove to Kito that she’s got nothing to fear...’

  I leaned over the gunwale and voided what remained of the Mickey. The streets were coming to life. Food stalls were opening for business. A column of monks passed by, collecting alms. I checked my money belt; my electric baht were intact.

  ‘We’ve got to hide,’ I said, ‘clean up, get some clothes. Then we’ll talk. Sensibly.’ I crawled to the stern and lowered the boat’s long rotor arm into the water. The outboard had been modified to guzzle synthetic gasoline. (Filthier, said those who remembered, than the real thing, the gas—banned by the West—was another of Bangkok’s lucrative black market industries.) I treated the engine to a little mechanical foreplay until, at last, it growled a response. We drew away, trailing black smoke, black foam.

  We entered the big waterway of Sukumvit with Nana behind us, her lights winking out with the arrival of the day. The scent of spent passion, the sharp bouquet of sex, lingered in the air, the smells of a thousand bars mixing with those of a thousand cars. The Bangkok rush hour was in its early morning heat. My clothes began to steam; Primavera hid her face from the sun. The city was warming up its daytime stew of smog; simmering, the smog rose past my ankles like some second-rate special effect. As a sop to the European Parliament the Thai government had proscribed environmental nanoware. It was good public relations: it placated some of the West’s fears (Europe had outlawed all nanoware at the outbreak of the doll-plague); it only affected the poor (the kingdom’s rich lived in high-rise air-filtered condos); and left untouched the huge underground nanoindustry upon which much of Bangkok’s wealth was based.

  Cowboy, the Triad-controlled pornocracy that was Nana’s chief rival—Primavera had offed Terminal Wipes, its Red Cudgel, last year—fell to the black cloud of our exhaust. From a sky walk a banner proclaimed Welcome to Fun City. No more wars. Just squabbles, big and small, over the turf of artificial realities. Fun was the world’s universal currency. Primavera had killed for it. Who wouldn’t? That’s life. (That’s death.) That’s entertainment.

  I turned into a soi, narrowly avoiding a Toyota Duck, and then into a short-time hotel called the Lucky. The attendants, seeing us approach, swept back the curtains that partitioned one of several parking spaces; we entered, and the curtains swung shut. A little quay surrounded us; in one comer, the door to our room. I fed some baht into a nearby teller. A short-time hotel—a house of assignation for adulterers—would, with its concern for discretion and anonymity, provide a temporary bolt hole. We disembarked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shopping and Fucking

  Primavera peeled off her stockings and underwear and skipped into the shower; when she emerged it was to take some baht from my money belt, turn the pages of the TV, and shop. ‘I’ll order for you,’ she said, as I dashed into the bathroom. The stench of the klong had become intolerable.

  I was still showering when Daimaru’s Zen bullet service delivered our goods. Re-entering the bedroom I was confronted by a candy-coloured assortment of boxes, wrappers and parcels, the living contents of which had been slopped onto the floor. Shivering, their raw nerves exposed, the clothes seemed to plead to be worn and so be put out of their misery. I kicked them aside.

  ‘Real girlygirl, no?’ said Primavera. ‘What do you think?’ She was holding a pink top and skirtlet against her nakedness and appraising herself in a mirror.

  ‘I think I’m bankrupt.’

  ‘As if you ever used a bank. As if they’d ever let you. There’s life in your card. Just. Human boys worry so.’

  She let her clothes slip; momentarily, they pawed at her ankles. The room grew cold; again I was drugged. And this time the Mickey was Primavera’s. Call it psionics. Doll pheromones. Her allure was in the air, an ultrasonic whistle, and my hormones responded with a yap Irresistible, that siren call.

  Was she beautiful? No; like all her kind she possessed, not beauty, but the overripe prettiness that is the saccharine curse of dollhood. Beauty has soul. Beauty has resonance. But a doll is a thing of surface and plane. Clothes, make-up, behavioural characteristics, resolve, for her, into an identity that is all gesture, nuance, signs. She has no psychology, no inner self, no metaphysical depths. She is the glory, the sheen of her exterior, the hard brittle sum of her parts. She is the ghost in the looking glass, the mirage that, reaching out to touch, we find is nothing but rippling air. She is image without substance, a fractal receding into infinity, a reflection without source and without end.

  She is her allure.

  Primavera’s eyes misted. ‘I can read your mind, Iggy. Have you really always felt like that? Always? But it’s the truth: I don’t have a soul. I’m Lilim, a daughter of Lilith.’ She sat down on the bed, her back to me, and began fumbling with lipstick, blusher and eyeshadow. Long orientalized fingernails clattered like the sword play of miniature samurai as her tiny hands reapplied her mask. Working with a desperate vigour—‘Wha
t you see,’ she was saying, ‘is what you get, is what I am’—her face was soon coated with its varnish of inviolable chocolate-box prettiness.

  ‘Look at me,’ I said.

  Sad clown of desire, she had tried to drown herself beneath a flash flood of artificiality. Her eyes wore aureoles of peppermint green, and the sliced pomegranate of her lips matched the rouged circles that emphasized her round toytown cheekbones. The skin was bleached, her war wound—the purple badge of courage on her brow—powdered with a camouflage that blended with her sickly complexion.

  ‘Primavera, I—’

  ‘Who wants to be human anyway? What’s so great about being human? I’m glad I’m a doll. I don’t care if I am going to die. I believe in everything Titania told us.’

  I sat down by her side. ‘I’m sorry I ran away,’ I said. ‘It’s because I don’t want to be like them. The Human Front. And—and all the others.’ I stared at the floor.

  ‘Sometimes I’m ashamed to be human. What we do. What we feel. I want to love you, Primavera. I’ve always wanted to love you.’

  ‘But the blood gets in the way?’ she said. ‘I know, Iggy, it’s like that for me too. We’re the same: we want to love, but we love the blood more. The pain. The humiliations. All the deaths, big and little.’

  ‘I wasn’t running away from you,’ I said. I put my hand on her thigh. ‘If you could let me...’ My throat tightened. ‘Don’t you remember? In Calais. Don’t you remember what you said? What you almost said...’

  She regarded me with uncharacteristic shyness. ‘Fuck off,’ she said softly, beseechingly.

  ‘I believe in Titania too. I’m on your side. I don’t like humans, I like—’

  Primavera put a finger to my lips, her nose wrinkling in an allergy of indecision. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘humans stink.’ She grabbed the towel that I had used as an improvised sarong. ‘Sometimes, Iggy, you’re so full of shit. I know I can’t love: I’m a doll. But you’re a doll junkie: you can’t love either.’ She jerked the towel from my waist. ‘You think you like dolls. But I know what you like.’ She picked up the remote and shut the endlessly turning pages of the TV.

  ‘Let’s play,’ she said, standing. Wading through her newly-bought clothes she soon came upon our playhouse’s key prop. I secured her hands behind her back; she turned round, pressed herself against me.

  ‘Bastard,’ she whispered. ‘Boy-slime. Hypocrite. Prig. You think you’re better than the others, don’t you? Better than the Human Front. The medicine-heads. But I know what you like. Oh yes, Iggy, I know...’

  Her teeth scratched at my ear, and the thick pulse of her clockwork heart beat against my own. Her plasticky flesh warmed, grew tacky, its illusion of soft wantonness betrayed only by the rib-cage, hard as vat-grown steel, adhering to my solar plexus and imprinting its decal of black and blue. Breathless, I ran my hand down her hair, the crenellations of her spine, to settle upon her sacrum, the small trephination of which—its concavity hidden beneath an epidermic seal—I teased with my knuckles. She wriggled with disgust.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘tell me what I like.’ Her tongue, rough as a cat’s, scoured my tympanic membrane.

  ‘You like what all boys like...’ She was broadcasting directly into my head. ‘You like the sound of torn silk. Flesh on cold marble. All the no sir, please sir, no sirs...’

  I pulled her head back and kissed her. She drew my tongue from my mouth as if it were a bloated leech, her teeth piercing it; and then she drew the blood.

  Her saliva hit a mainline. The rush brought me to my knees.

  ‘Bitch,’ I tried to say; but my mouth had filled. I haemorrhaged onto the floor. Jumping up, I lashed out with my foot. Primavera fell, broke from her bonds, clawed at me with razor-tipped fingers. Taking her by the hair, I dragged her onto the bed.

  ‘Dead girl. Lilim,’ I said, each syllable spraying blood. I collapsed and my wounds turned the counterpane scarlet.

  ‘You b-bastard. You fucking boy-slime!’

  ‘Robotnik!’ My words had become little more than gurgles. I sat up. ‘I’ve got to do something about this,’ I said with the voice of a half-drowned man. ‘Maybe you should get a doctor.’

  Between Primavera’s depilated thighs her labia opened with the terrible grin of a prehistoric fish. The vagina dentata gnashed and snapped.

  ‘But we’ve not finished playing doctors yet,’ she said.

  Her other lips turned back and the ice picks that were her canines entered my flesh a millimetre above the left nipple. Saliva and blood ran down my chest in a rivulet of sarsaparilla.

  Night fell. We were speeding through the graveyard of the world, crashing over rocks and bones. Her kiss was death, of the future and of the past; all dissolved, all promised to cease. But desire carried us beyond the grave. The night was ours.

  Lightning...

  The dead shook their fists; we felled them like skittles, breaking them beneath our wheels. ‘Oh?’ said Primavera. ‘Did I hurt you? Did I hurt you? Did I...’

  Thunder boomed; the coach sped on. Into darkness, rain and sleep.

  Spreadeagled on the bed, I observed myself in the ceiling mirror as Primavera applied sticky plaster and lint to my wounds. After satisfying her thirst, she had rung room service and ordered—in addition to other pharmaceuticals - a cauterizing agent for my tongue.

  I raised myself by my elbows, dropped ice in my Singha, and cooled my mouth’s fire. About us were the remnants of our lunch: bowls of noodles, a plate of lightly fried grasshoppers (bite their heads off, suck their juices, Primavera had advised), and a cuttlefish soup spiced with rat-shit chilli that had spread over the thinly carpeted floor. Magazines and comics that Primavera had ordered over the fax sopped up the carnage.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, ‘this is the last one,’ She smoothed the plaster into place. ‘There. All better!’

  ‘That was quite a party.’

  ‘We party too much. Some day it’ll all go too far.’ She lit a cigarette, inhaled a mouthful of smoke, gargled with it, then expectorated a grey-blue plume into the air. ‘But if my programme won’t allow me to love you, Iggy, at least I can love your blood. It’s so delirious. It’s so...’ Above, the mirror held us like malignancies trapped within a specimen slide as Primavera sought a superlative; but a doll’s appetites are untranslatable; she sighed, and drew a fingernail across her left breast. ‘I lost my brooch. In the restaurant. In the fight.’

  ‘I’ll get you another.’

  ‘It was special.’ She put the cigarette between my lips. ‘Iggy, before they catch us—if they catch us—promise: you’ll kill me, won’t you?’

  I studied her in the mirror. What kind of life was she? Dead girls, they called them. Sets of formal rules, without free will. Imitations of life. Souldrained. To destroy such ones was not murder, they said. But if Primavera died, then I knew I would die too. I lived in the nothingness at her heart, my life mortgaged to her allure.

  ‘You could do it,’ she said, in her little girl’s lisp, ‘you know, the way you want. I’d buy you a scalpel. Just like the one you had in England. You could—’

  She was inside my mind; she turned to me and frowned.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just can’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Junkie.’ She sneered. ‘What’s the matter—scared? You’re not going to live much longer than me anyway.’ I replaced the cigarette in her mouth, shutting her up.

  ‘This business,’ I said, ‘about seeing Kito. Why don’t we try to get help from one of the other pornocracies: Cowboy, Patpong or Suriwongse? They all employ nanoengineers.’

  ‘Iggy, sometimes you’re like a little child. I’ve offed people in all those places. We can’t risk it.’

  ‘But you’re willing to risk walking into Nana? Kito never liked you, Primavera, and she likes you even less now.’

  ‘Kito will help. I know it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Easy,’ she said, snapping her fingers, ‘we tell her abou
t Titania!’

  I picked up the remote. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ Deselecting the shopping channel, I surfed the phosphor-dot sea from World News (something about an African famine) to the latest Thai ghost movie, Phi Gaseu 26; from an interactive game show (win your own dreamscaper) to a francophone channel called Alliance Française (the world still Frenchified in its tastes, despite the demise of the world’s fashion capital). Alliance was running Trans Europe Express, a colour-dubbed piece of Old Wave shit. But what was this? Some louche-looking guy tying a woman to a bed. I turned up the sound...

  Primavera snatched the remote and killed the transmission. ‘Titania wouldn’t mind.’

  Primavera, Primavera, Primavera Oh! Did you really think that I minded. About your crazy porcelain queen? I cared only that you cared. For that rabid vision. For everything she had said that made you walk tall. To have betrayed Titania would have been to betray you.

  ‘What do you think all this ordure has been about?’ I said. ‘The HF are on to Titania. They want to know how we escaped.’ Primavera slammed her fist into the mattress. ‘We don’t tell anybody about Titania. She saved our lives. If it hadn’t been for her you would have gone to the slab.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Primavera. ‘You should have told me. I just wanted to tell Kito that it wasn’t her that started the doll-plague. That’s how the Americans frightened her, don’t you see? It’s how they blackmailed her. And we know the truth.’

  ‘What’s Kito got to do with the doll-plague?’

  A sharp intake of breath; Primavera ran to the bathroom. I followed and discovered her kneeling before the suam and vomiting blood.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s yours. But something’s going wrong. Inside.’ I helped her to her feet and half carried her back to the bedroom.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ I said. ‘Sleep.’

  ‘No!’ She staggered to the dressing table. ‘I have to see Kito. I have to get her help. I won’t tell her too much. I won’t betray Titania.’ She picked up the dismay of my thoughts. ‘You stay here. Human boys can be such... such scaredy cats.’