Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  ‘Let me get you to a hospital.’

  ‘Don’t mention the word ‘hospital’ to me.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘Don’t be a pin.’

  She took a hypodermic from the dresser and filled it with Virgin Martyr. Hypo and scent bottle—the bottle, black and engraved with the image of a crucified girl—trembled in her hands, like the sceptre and orb of an olfactory queen with delirium tremens. She injected, and her eyes revolved, white as two boiled eggs.

  ‘Ahh,’ she sighed, ‘that smells so good.’ The hit subsided and she began to comb her hair. ‘If Kito won’t cooperate,’ she said, ‘I’ll kill her. It’s simple. But it won’t come to that.’

  ‘Why...’ I said; a dying fall. Why had I come back, why was I her slave? I knew the answer. So, it seemed, did the photo-mechanical above the bed. She laughed, mockingly. They were like that, those starlets. A hacker had introduced a bug into their two-dimensional world that was designed to make you feel small. Human melancholy activated it. Some prank. I took the poster from its hook. Wafer thin, it tore easily; the paper dolly ducked. I tore again, and she retreated to the poster’s margin.

  Ignatz the slave. Ignatz always back returning. Why? Why? Because a junkie always runs away; always comes back. That’s the way it is with junkies.

  Primavera giggled in triumph. ‘Because I’m the dolliest. Isn’t that right,’ she said addressing the mirror, ‘aren’t I just the dolliest of them all?’

  The photo-mechanical, with the aid of a half-torn mechanical octopus that had been her 2-D friend, switched her pose from soft to hardcore, pouting with sexual defiance. I tore her in two; what was left of the poster fibrillated with her scream.

  ‘Leave that poor photo-mechanical alone,’ said Primavera. ‘Hooligan. You’re as bad as Mr Jinx.’

  ‘Then it’s true what they say... ?’ I scrunched up the poster, tossed it in the trashcan, and knelt down to inspect Primavera’s purchases. Clothes slithered through my hands, their fibres insinuating themselves into my pores with sartorial flirtatiousness.

  ‘Dermaplastic,’ I said, extricating a soggy pair of trousers. ‘Why couldn’t you get me something normal? Something ordinary?’

  ‘If you are coming,’ she said, ‘here...’ She handed me an aerosol. ‘Spray me. I can collect the other stuff when we’re through with Madame.’

  She moved to the centre of the room and held her arms and legs in a St Andrew’s cross. I shook the can. When I had finished, her body, with the exception of the ghost-white face, was coated in a patina of glossy black gelatine.

  ‘How soon will that dry?’ I said.

  ‘Almost ready. It’s the latest. Oo! There—its nerve endings are coming alive!’

  To complete her ensemble she stepped into crippling stilettos and clipped gold rings to her nipples and clitoris. I took longer to dress, queasy at wrapping myself in what felt like someone else’s skin.

  We pigged out on TV until late evening (Primavera almost won a dreamscaper); then, leaving behind a chaos of half-eaten food, used bandages, broken glass, cigarette butts, syringes, blood-stained sheets and teeth, we slipped out, ready to retake the night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Going to A-Go-Go

  ‘Like I said, what’s Kito got to do with the doll-plague?’

  We were on the skytrain, Nana-bound. I had my panama pulled over my eyes, fearful of recognition (we were only two stops from Kito’s lair); but Primavera bathed in the furtive glances of every voyeur aboard.

  ‘Don’t you know what they’re thinking? Another der-matoid junkie, that’s what, another “skinny” addicted to artificial flesh.’

  ‘Of course I know what they’re thinking, stupid!’Her broadcast jammed my amateur wavelength. ‘What do I care? They’re all robofuckers anyway. Bipedal phalloi, Madame calls them. And you’re a fine one to call me junkie.’

  ‘Yeah, well what if someone in this crowd identifies us?’

  As a concession she reached into her shoulder bag and donned a pair of widow-black shades. Then, shaking out her hair (a weekly investment in a bottle of hair dye had, for three years, provided her sole disguise; contact lenses? no, no, not her), she turned her back on the skytrain’s throng and gazed out into the night. Her feral teeth worried at a hunk of gum.

  ‘So?’ I thought. ‘Kito—doll-plague; doll-plague—Kito. What’s it all about?’

  Below, the Big Weird sparkled like a fathomless black pond infested with a million phosphorescent water lilies: corporations, banks, hotels, condos, that Buddha—in the shape of a million giant holograms—guarded and preserved. The monorail, visible as it snaked round a bend, was almost over Nana.

  ‘Well?’

  Primavera’s eyes had glazed. She was staring into the distance, where the needle-like tower of the Siamese Space Agency pointed a covetous finger at the sky.

  Unreal. A reflection. A shadow cast by nothingness. As if I care. I’m a vanity of vanities. Proud. Monstrous. Without shame. I’m talking to you, Dr B. Where are you now? Still got your head between some little girl’s thighs? Still playing the Pied Piper? Blue Mondays at the clinic. Mid-menarche in mid-March. It’s cold. Wet. And I’m thirsty. How are we today? Dying, Dr B. Dying into the new. My flesh’s like nougat. My brain’s like hubbly-bubbly. And I see things, you know? Crazy things. Like corridors. Corridors lined with doors. Endless, endless. Mirrors seething within mirrors. And behind each door, behind each mirror, another world. Another time. Primavera, you know you mustn’t open those doors? Yes, doctor. Or break the mirrors? Of course, doctor. And the pills? Every day, doctor. Morning, full moon and night. And the hemline neurosis? Yes, much better, really much better, Dr Bogenbloom...

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Sex diseases,’ whispered Primavera’s mind. ‘Madame is a past mistress of sex diseases.’

  ‘She makes them?’

  ‘Not any more. But years ago she fought a lot of trade wars that way. Europe would sabotage her dolls, so she’d cook a virus to sabotage theirs.’

  ‘But that,’ I said, a sliver of comprehension jemmying loose my tongue, ‘has got nothing to do with the doll-plague.’

  ‘No,’ said Primavera, ‘that’s just the point.’

  ‘ Nana Plaza,’droned a synthetic voice, ‘ please alight here for Nana Plaza.’

  ‘Now be quiet,’ said Primavera, ‘and follow me.’

  Our carriage emptied. We lost ourselves in the crush, borne along by a scrum of male libertinage (Nana was dick-slobber city; a heterometro): farangs mostly, garbed in the tired, emulative threads that the Weird had been producing for more than a hundred years. I picked out accents: American, Australasian, pidgin European ... A glass escalator—as big and as wide as those staircases in ancient Hollywood musicals—dropped us to the streets. The band struck up, and the streets went into their routine. It was the big number about narcissism, sex and greed: a song Nana knew by heart.

  We were in the Plaza, a tiered arena of go-go bars that ascended, circle upon circle, like a neon-lit wedding cake celebrating the marriage of man and doll. The Plaza’s upper limits were still developing: steel tanks, seeded with nanoware, were growing next year’s bars. From the lowest stratum, conflicting sound systems, in a cacophony of half tones and quarter tones, smeared the brain with white noise. Pungent smell of barbecued squid, open drains, gynoidal pheromones and all-night pharmacies. ‘MOLECULAR ROBOTS—HORMONES—GENE SHEARS - CSFs’: on-off, on-off, the lights.

  They were looking at me. Everybody was looking at me: farangs, through steins holding enormous philtres of beer, dolls with gimlet-eyed quid pro quo, holotoys stalking me, hopelessly rubbing themselves against me, that balloon seller trailing his stock of decapitated hydrogen-filled heads. Nana was full of eyes, the eyes of madmen and madwomen. And now the eyes, a market of circles and ellipses, were on fire...

  Killer visions stormed my ascending nerve tract.

  I began to twitch; my right arm was convulsing. My clothes had been seized with a fit.


  ‘Iggy, stop it! This is no time for...’

  ‘I can’t help it! It’s, it’s, it’s...’

  Dermaplastic is a somatic textile, a sense amplifier. Microscopic fibres hardwire the material’s periphera.

  nervous system to the wearer’s own.

  Primavera understood. She reached to the back of my trousers—an area just above the coccyx—and tore away a handful of second skin. The convulsions ceased.

  ‘I got its cortex,’ she said, crushing the white plastic until its customized melanin ran through her fingers. ‘Bad trip, eh? The electromuscles will relax now. That’s the last time I shop by Zen. How do you feel?’

  ‘Like nothing a blood transfusion couldn’t cure.’

  Nana was bisected by the Sukumvit Road, and we had to take a skywalk to cross the water and reach that farrago of restaurants, tailors, jewellers, surgeries and bars that had been known ever since the belle époque as the ‘French Quarter’. To this demimonde of cut-price style came the ruined aristocracy of Europe’s information elite to pretend to the snobbery they could no longer afford.

  ‘Look,’ said Primavera, ‘Martian jewels!’ She elbowed past two window-shoppers, pressing her nose to the glass. The shop radiated with neo-Lalique confections ostensibly made from the candyfloss rocks of the red planet.

  ‘We don’t have time,’ I said. ‘Besides, you know they’re not real.’ The man whom Primavera had pushed aside looked at me angrily, then—mumbling something in what sounded like defunct powerhouse German—ushered his female companion away. Their kind were everywhere: Europunks fleeing from reality. Boys and girls looking for their lost toys.

  A muggy breeze swept an ankle-deep smog across our path, carbon emissions collecting with methane bubbling from the nearby klong (and with other pollutants so novel and so peculiar to the Big Weird that they might have been awarded a conservation order) to form cheapo house of horror atmospherics. A tourist cast a cigarette aside; Primavera and I shied away. A flash; a whoof of combusted air; and the farang turned to us, half in apology, half in accusation, his face blackened as if by an exploding cigar.

  We headed for the Grace Hotel.

  In the doorways of Tin Lizzie, Robogirl and Kiss and Panic, mechanettes ran through their repertoires of solicitation. Ridiculous, those creatures (but ‘men like their women ridiculous’ ran the automaton-nerds’ blurb), the phallocentric night tripping their tropismatic switches as they tensed before the scrutiny of the throbbing multitude like bowstrings burdened with arrows of desire. Primavera took my hat and pulled it over her ears, too near, now, to the queen bee to risk identification from her hive of workers. ‘It’s not the gynoids I worry about,’ said Primavera, ‘it’s the proprietors: all the farangs Kito has hanging on her skirts.’

  ‘Like Willy Hofmannsthal?’ I said. Hofmannsthal—an old, old man (more android than man), whose body was a patchwork of flesh, steel and plastic riddled with tissuerepairing nanomachines—sat outside his bar, the Doll Keller. I steered Primavera to a newspaper stall, bought a magazine (little figures danced across the cover) and employed it as a fan in an attempt at concealment. ‘This is too obvious,’ I said. ‘In here...’ We entered a jeux vérités arcade.

  Walking along its length, screams, laughter and other vocal intensities greeted us from each gamester’s booth. Maybe they were murdering their mothers, taking over the world, or fucking St Ursula and her 11,000 virgins before wasting them with napalm. Alpha-wave monitors on each door gave notice of those who, in their drugged sleep, had awoken while still in REM to the dreamscaper’s martinet urging. Primavera put her hands over her ears. ‘Shut up!’ she cried. ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ But the arcade was deaf with reverie.

  As we ran out into the streets the Grace rose before us, the cosmetic surgery of its deco-clad exterior unable to conceal its antique cancers. At its summit, a penthouse: Kito’s nest. The eyrie of vanity, spitefulness and deceit.

  A small boy with the face of an angel tugged at my leg, looked up at me big-eyed with ingenuousness, and made a little wai. ‘Please sir, ten baht. Very hungry.’

  Primavera’s fist crashed into the child’s skull. It ran away, circuitry leaking from its left ear. ‘Madame really should get rid of those things,’ she said.

  ‘So how do we go in?’

  ‘Front door. No heavies. We’ll go through the coffee shop.’

  ‘But it’ll be packed.’

  ‘So no one will notice.’

  Taking me by the arm, Primavera squired me through the portals of Kito’s fortress.

  ‘Just like the old days,’ she said. I gripped her arm. In fear? To comfort? But what comfort did Primavera need? The vampire had scented blood. It was fear, my fear, that I betrayed. ‘Relax,’ thought Primavera, ‘this is doll business. Go easy. Your job’s just to make me seem human.’ In embarrassment, I eased my grip.

  Smiling at the bellboys, I assumed my role, and escorted my ‘sister’ (such had been our double act during our sojourn in the Weird) into the coffee shop’s mélange. A year, two years ago, our act had been so disarming. We’d looked innocent; sweet. But these days—with me like a Photofit of a kid who’d escaped Borstal, and Primavera the image of a teenage parricide—the act was proving thin. Thin indeed.

  ‘I’ll take care of you,’ I thought, adding over her mental sigh, ‘really, I mean it.’ She wasn’t listening; she was trying to unravel a hundred compacted wavebands that were the babblings of human desire. Farangs, dreamy, or dark-faced with self-loathing, were making liaisons mad, bad and egregious with the gynoids crowding the lounge.

  We squeezed past dolls nostalgic, zoomorphic, ludic.

  repros—ball-jointed, porcelain-skinned ‘antiques’—proffering brass umbilical keys; a Felis femella, whose prehensile tail attempted a tourniquet about my arm; and the cephalopods, zombie dead and see-through Sallies. (For other jeux d’esprit the palette of the human body had moved into the realm of abstract expressionism.) There were traditional models of course: clich és of femininity microdressed in doll-couture tropique, who, in their Mlle Butterfly sub-tongue, offered standard conveyor-belt sex. But the Grace’s clientele had spent too long on that night-shift; jaded, they sought the frisson of the new.

  ‘Corpse grinder?’ said something that seemed to have fallen from a threshing machine.

  ‘X-ray sex?’ asked a translucent Sally.

  ‘Action painting? You want me oil? Gouache? Watercolour?’ The doll’s flesh began to drip onto the floor.

  ‘Become your trousers?’

  ‘Love suicide?’

  ‘Sunset Boulevard?’

  ‘Do fucky-fucky with knife?’

  Several bijouterie were in evidence; not the real thing, but converts. For some men, to lie with one whose humanity has been compromised is the mark of the perfect rakehell; and since Thai bijouterie were freaks, whose rarity made their favours often impossibly expensive, there was a bull market for village girls for whom mechanization provided the only alternative to poverty. (In Nana there was a bar— Pretty Girls Are Human Too—full of such posthuman schismatics..

  ‘It’ll be humans next year,’ thought Primavera.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Sure. Everything’ll come full circle. Gynoids are going out of fashion. A doll may do the weird on you, but she’s got no free will. A trick’s got no real power over her. But a human ... A human you can really humiliate.’

  ‘Is that what it’s about?’

  ‘You know it.’

  We approached the bar.

  A pianist and a singer—doll boys tutti frutti to their cybercamp hearts—were performing a cocktail lounge version of ‘Oh doctor, doctor, I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘That fucking song,’ I said.

  Primavera’s fingers skittered across Formica. ‘Hey, Pongpet!’ she said, calling the barman. ‘Remember me?’ She lifted her shades, her eyes flashing as they emerged from eclipse.

  ‘The green death!’ The barman stepped back, dropped a Mekong soda, reache
d out despairingly for a com; but Primavera, her claws hooked into his shirt, had already pulled him flush against the bamboo lintel.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Pong,’ she said, ‘but if I don’t get what I want, I’ll... Well, remember the last time you fixed me a Bloody Mary?’

  The barman nodded with servile eagerness. I looked around; no other bar staff (no one came here to drink); and the sex talk of machine and man was unabated.

  ‘Madame say you go home, Miss Primavera. For holiday.’

  Primavera spat out her gum and secured it to the underlip of the bar. ‘Pong, I want you to take us to your kitchens, your stockroom—wherever your dumbwaiter is. And I’m not talking about one of your friends.’

  Keeping hold of our press-ganged accomplice, Primavera scissor-jumped the bar; I followed more modestly.

  We passed through a beaded curtain and into the coffee shop’s kitchen—one of several that the hotel possessed. Primavera had by now stowed her sunglasses in her bag, and the kitchen staff—a boy and girl about our own age—immediately put a table between themselves and the green-eyed fiancee of death. The boy picked up a cleaver.

  ‘ Mai!’ cried his companion. ‘ Phi see kee-oh! Phi pob!

  Phi Angritt! Dtook-gah-dtah Lilim!’ Though we shunned the public, preferring to be as shadows amongst shadows, the legend of the green death had become part of the legend of Nana. The boy cast his weapon to the floor.

  I bound our captives with a ball of spidersilk that Primavera had produced from her bag, and then gagged them with dishcloths.

  ‘Is that it?’ said Primavera, pointing to an aluminium hatchway in the wall.

  ‘Dumbwaiter,’ said the barman.

  Primavera knocked him cold.

  ‘Get in, Iggy.’ She slid back the hatch. ‘All these things terminate at the penthouse.’

  ‘We can’t both—’

  ‘We can.’

  ‘It’s too small.’

  ‘I said we can.’ Primavera looked down the tiny ski-jump of her nose with minx-like dismissiveness. ‘I may be sick,’ she said, ‘but I can still origami.’ Tossing her bag aside, ankles together, legs parallel, knees locked, she fell forward from her waist and curled her arms about her calves, head emerging from between the vice of her thighs. She spasmed, searing the eye with anatomically impossible configurations. In seconds she was rolling across the floor, a black plastic beachball.