by James Newman
EIGHT
I HAD Sloane’s credits.
Frankie the Rat was as low as they came, but I’d reached the same depths as he, and figured he could help me snare Trixie by supplying me with some of the S.
Out along the tunnel and into a dive bar.
I found a regular informant in the shape of a dwarf transsexual cocktail singer named Rachael, who stood on the bar of the five credit dive in the tunnel hustling tourists. Rachael sang Lou Reed’s Sad Song. Spasmodically jerking the microphone to and fro like a little leaguer ready to bat, the words were like jolts of electricity that rattled the dwarf on each and every syllable. The lines lightened the weight, yet there was still a great burden above those diminutive shoulders. The bitter stench of her rotting soul, the impossibility of another world, dark dimensions, and mountains of despair haunted her dreams like the silent unjust and untimely death of a sibling child.
Freaks had multiplied in the city.
Gone were the days of a handful of mutilated souls begging on the streets. Now there were established bars and zones where these human oddities exhibited their wares for serious credit. They exhibited their deformed, crippled and mutilated bodies to kinky sex tourists who traveled to Fun City explicitly to engage with the City’s circus freaks. Medical tourism became mutilation tourism the way the polo neck replaces the crew neck, the Lego brick replaces the space hopper. The sideshow made a living hosting fringe sporting events, beauty pageants. They filmed, starred in, and produced television shows and ran a monthly bazaar. They formed rock groups and launched world tours returning with wonderfully exaggerated tales of excess and sodomy on the road. They spoke out on their life-enhancer accounts. They found a collective voice and a platform to scream and whispered forth their equal rights. Collectively, the pariahs screamed coherently. Together they were whole for they had finally found a home and that home was Fun City.
The dwarf wore a T-shirt that bore the inscription:
KING SIZE
She lowered herself without really needing to.
“Where do I find the rat?”
“Rats? Everywhere. Hell, there’s probably one sitting in your crib right now, brother.”
“One large rat goes by the name of Frankie. He peddles scopolamine.”
“Try the Cactus bar,” she said. “And be careful of that creep, he doesn’t like to pay before he plays.”
I tipped the miniature chanteuse a credit and stood up from the bar, past the beer bars and pool bars that lined either side of the tunnel before walking into the neon rainbow splash that lit the Red Zone like a perfect disaster.
The Cactus bar’s clientele was as prickly and dry as the plant that gave it the moniker.
I knew the best way through the network of Fun City tunnels, walked collar up with paranoid eyes wandering beneath the Eyes of the city. Grace Jones pulled up to Lionel Richie’s bumper from a passing pink Lamborghini and dug into the scene while Lou walked on the wild side. Madonna wrapped in a neon pink plastic raincoat walked a savannah cat on a leash down Happy Street. It began to rain, slowly at first, and then it gathered momentum. Thunder cracked overhead, past a woman who tugged on my collar saying words incomprehensibly
Russian maybe.
Recognized her from a long time ago.
What was her name?
It wasn’t?
No, couldn’t be.
Took a right leading to Happy Street.
Five Fun Police officers stood around a desk pulling in citizens for routine inspections.
A hand touched my shoulder.
“Account check.”
“Sure, baby,” I held out my life-enhancer device and the officer scanned it across his life-reader.
“You are close to zero, Mr. Dylan, but not for the first time, I see. Last night, you were in a bar known for promiscuous, immoral behavior?”
“I was listening to jazz.”
His smile was like that of an alligator as he sent me on my way with a push and a grunt. “Jazz,” he muttered. “Your credit score is in order. Move on now and remember we are watching you.”
As if, I didn’t know.
Outside the Cactus Bar stood Frankie the Rat.
Mooching around, looking for a connection, Frankie’s rodent face twitched beneath a pork-pie hat. Frankie-the-Rat crinkled up the rodent mask that gave him his moniker. At a glance, you wondered if he had another six months left in him. The end of the week would be pushing it for the Rat. The Rat however had a trick up his sleeve. He was expert in the preparation of the Columbian Hallucinogen mind control drug. It worked as a recreational but it also worked, in the right hands, as a controlling agent. Once blown into the face of a passerby, it rendered the victim completely at the Rat’s control. Theft, rape, murder, nothing was beneath the Rat and with scopolamine at his disposal, he could have, with the puff of powder, whatever his rodent-like mind desired. Scopolamine was a kick that could get me closer to Trixie, but it was also a risk in the Rat’s hands. I figured to relieve him of as much of it as I could. Trying to light a cigarette with a cheap disposable lighter, I approached the Rat and lit his Death Cloud Red with a windproof flame. “Frankie, you holding the S?” Best to get straight to the point with the Rat, I figured.
Before the Rat, a bare-chested tattooed male go-go tout opened the red velvet curtain allowing sight of six or seven dancers shifting their weight from one foot to the other obliviously in time to the Germanic house band playing Television’s Glory. Hand the dancers a blouse and serve them a portion of gruel and they’d look like a criminal line up. Without that, they were pure crime. Realizing I was not buying the ticket, the tout closed the curtain, snarling like a mangy dog.
Frankie sucked on the cigarette, his eyes lighting up like an idiot masturbating. “Oh, yeah. I’m holding. But what you wanting with the Borrachero?”
“Borrachero?”
“Yeah, The Borrachero, the Devil’s Breath. The Drunken Binge. The Last Ticket...The natives who make this shit call it many names.”
“Need a G.”
“A gram? A gram can kill ten men. You know how to prepare it, how to take it? What happens if you or somebody you wigs it and it comes back to me? Joe, listen, I’m not in the right shape for The Punch. You get caught with this shit and my life is dusted. You want to kill me? Here take this knife,” The Rat took a switchblade from his pocket. “Kill me now.”
“I’ll take a gram on credit and nobody finds out about this, Frankie.”
“What if I just blew a little at you like this,” Frankie blew some powder from his palm as the other hand rose to my face and his fingers twisted in an elaborate fashion. “With the right dose and the power to hypnotize, I can make you bark like a dog. BARK!”
I did so like a Labrador and the Rat smiled.
“And with the right twist of the fingers I can turn you back to how you were before. SNAP!”
“Where did you learn that?”
“A Columbian witchdoctor showed me the ropes.”
“Hit me with the S.”
We both knew that loans and bartering were illegal in the City, but hell, most things fun were. But sometimes the S bought more than money could, and I needed more evidence on the Sloane chick. Mostly I needed to see her again. Hope simmered then evaporated from Frankie’s rat-like face. “You recall the last time I bailed you out?”
“Yeah, I paid you back.”
“Six months later.”
“Look,” I took off my watch and passed it to the Rat. “Take this as insurance.”
I remembered as a child my father wore a gold wristwatch that he was especially proud of until one day, as the bills mounted up, he wasn’t wearing that watch anymore. That shit stays with you, but the S had to go with me if Trixie were to follow.
“What you figure me for? You bought that piece of junk from some punk right out here on the street,” Frankie’s head twitched from side to side as he spoke. Like a creature popping up from a burrow, looking left, looking right over the savannah.
“This, Frankie, is a priceless family heirloom. My father gave it to me. His father gave it to him. I’m crazy trusting you with it.”
Frankie took the timepiece and weighed it in his hand. He took a small bite of the gold casing, testing the strength of the metal between his teeth. “Seems legit,” he said putting the watch in his pocket. He raised his hat with one hand and took out a wrap nestled in his nest of hair and passed it over. “I’ll give you forty-eight hours or I pawn the son of a bitch.”
“Sounds more than fair,” I said. “Be seeing you, Frankie.”
At Happy Hour, the streets kicked to the beat of a carnival freak-show. Cameras flashed at bikini-clad women who held signs encouraging entrance into their employer’s bars.
FIVE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
TWO TRANSSEXUALS
TWO FAT GIRLS AND
A DWARF
Thunder cracked the night sky open like a jackhammer smashing a goldfish bowl. Lightning struck a skyscraper in the CBD. The rainfall was caught for the most part by shop awnings and rooftop guttering gathering in oily puddles atop the bloated drains. Fun City was battered by a monsoon season and each year the canals overflowed and the city promised to do something about it the following year. Nevertheless, this never happened and the residents had gotten used to the City barking on about a national water shortage while they, the residents, were paddling their asses in a canoe to work each day. Fun City, a city mainly populated by tourists and the owners of businesses that profited from the show put on by the actors, performers, the shoe shine man, and the sad-eyed lady from the east who’ll read your palm for a credit and probably fulfill your fate. Yes, I’m one of the few foreign residents below fifty and employed in the city. However, I too, rely on the problems of tourists and foreign residents, to keep my head above the water.
Walked past a group of men in motorcycle leathers chatting to a dominatrix passively smoking a Death Cloud Red; smoke drifts up, having no other choice, but to give itself to the night sky. A youth walks past with an ocelot on a leash. Here’s a man on stilts. There, a bearded woman. Grace nightclubbing, drifting, swelling, curling through the streets. A nun with a Polaroid camera takes a snapshot of the zone before crossing herself and clutching her rosary beads examines the print in lurid up close detail.
Into a corridor bar with a sign above it. Checked the GPS on Trixie’s life-enhancer account. It placed her in or near the joint and I figured she’d be in it.
THE VERY SPECIAL BAR
Inside, cool, as if entering a cave, more than a cave, a corridor-type saloon houses a quick-smile barmaid and a rack of booze above her. Large bearded man drunk with a tiny conjoined twin attached to his chest. The twin is shouting about not trusting the machine, and I was about to ask him what he meant until a dwarf doorman kicked him, or them, back out onto the street. I glanced at the row of drinks above the bar. B52’s were either an American air bomber or a lit shot of the dark stuff. I ordered two of the latter, drank one, and picked up a menu and leafed through it as inconspicuously as a dick in a freak bar could.
A wheelchair bound waitress wheeled herself over to my booth and asked. “What you having?”
“Chicken 65,” I answered. She swiped my card of the 0.65 credits and rolled it back towards the kitchen.
Sitting next to the bar, a woman procrastinated effortlessly. Took a closer look. Trixie. She smiled and approached. She pointed at the drink, said, “One for me?”
“Why the hell not?”
“Sure?”
“Yeah, get two more.” Raised the second B52 and knocked it back in one fluid movement.
She smiled and I wondered where they came from and why they did it. The truth was there wasn’t an answer. Beautiful women were like raindrops. Only a few ever landed on you, most dripped away into that puddle of other former love disasters drying out; dying in the tropical Fun City sun. But some fell, and when they fell, it felt like rain. “What’s a place like this doing with a babe like you?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said. Her eyes were large and brown with long lashes. She wore those army issue boots and a khaki tank top. Her lips were still welcoming. She had good shape, Trixie, but I couldn’t help wonder which way she had put the Sloane guy through the liquidizer. “But I still think you’re heat. Some sort of Gamer or under-cover dick.”
I lifted my hat and slid out the bag of S. The freak bars had a strict no camera or audio policy. She took the packet from me and held it in the palm of her hand. “Mind if I powder my nose?”
“Please do.”
She walked to a door marker LADIES. I waited around for her to return, checked the audio clip and switched it to record. Trixie walked to the table slowly, looking left to right, as glamorous as a woman entering a freak bar from the LADIES could ever be.
She sat down and lit a Death Cloud Blue. “When I was younger I knew I was different from other little girls and boys.”
“I can see that.”
“I first knew it while changing for swimming.”
“You were different. That’s okay, everybody’s different.”
“I was more different.”
“Ahuh.”
“Well,” she smiled mischievously, “I had a beanie, but I also had a pepa. You ever see the movie Carrie?”
“Read the book.”
“That scene when she’s in the shower?”
“Sure.”
“Well, that was me...”
“Right.”
“I wasn’t part of either the boy’s or the girl’s gang. At least not at the time, later, my parents took me to a specialist. They took me out of school. I could never have looked at the boy’s faces again. When we are young, we are so sensitive. So I went to this specialist who referred me to another specialist. What makes specialists so special? They um and er, and prod and probed as if I was a piece of meat for sale in the supermarket, you know? There were three choices: either be a boy, be a girl, or stay the way I was. I took injections, twice a day, and moved to a girl’s Convent school. Around this time, I began to play around a little.”
“Girls do that?”
“Girls and boys. Don’t think I’m a man hater, I like boys.”
“Really?”
“Yes, do you want to hear my story or not?”
“Continue, please.”
The Chicken 65 arrived. I pushed the plate of barbecued meat into the middle of the table and we both picked at it.
“I found that, if I angled it just right, the naughty girl and the naughty boy could meet.”
“Meet?”
“Only if I could time it right. Sometimes, you missed the groove, you know? Anyway, it doesn’t matter... one side of me or the other would squeal, but sometimes we squeal together. Then it had to happen.”
“What?”
“Well, I never thought to use anything, being as I was, just by myself.”
“No.”
“I did it to myself.”
“You did it?”
“It felt good.”
“Good?”
“But then, you know, I just grew and grew.”
“Grew and grew?”
“Yup.”
“Pregnant?”
“Right, and I decided to keep the baby.”
“Uhuh.”
“Yeah, I named him Ben.”
“You’re joking?”
“Not much of a detective, are you?”
“You’re not much of a hermaphrodite, Trixie.”
“Only one way to find out for sure.” Trixie lit a match from her army boot and put the flame to her cigarette. “You know you want to see me, and I know my husband had you follow me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why be sorry? You were just doing your job, right?”
“Well...”
“Well, nothing, I’ve left him. I have an apartment next to the beach. I’m not going back to the Punch.”
“They won’t take you, Trixie. They will deport you out of Fun City.”
“Sure they do. And the trombone player?”
“I blew him out,” she said.
“Shame. It looked like you had something solid.”
“You know, sometimes all of it, it scares me.”
“You seem like a capable woman.”
“Capable of making the wrong decisions?”
“Sure. And the right ones. What scares you?”
“Rats. I hate their tails and I hate their twitchy little noses. I told you this.”
“Right. What else?”
“Technology scares me. There’s a new bug that can eat through metal. The city is developing this. Drone bomb them on enemy lines, they say. Technology gives me the creeps. Who knows what they did to my mind in that place.”
“There’s still a lot of things they can’t do, Trixie.”
“Yeah, but it’s close. It’s closer than you think. Much closer,” she grabbed her glass from the bar and drank the contents in one hit. “And you, Dylan, what is it you want?”
“Most the time I want out.”
“Out of what?”
“The life, the city.”
“But this is the most exciting city on earth.”
“That and dangerous. You said yourself the technology?”
“Yes, the technology, the machines, thought control but that could be found anywhere, no? The world is getting smaller and smaller as the tech is getter wider and wider...”
“I guess that’s true. What is it you want, Trixie?”
“To be free. To experience life! Art!”
“Art?”
“The artist is a whore,” she said. “She tells you stories and she gives you pleasure. She lets you cum inside her. She lies, but you love those lies and hope deep down that they are true lies. Like the whore or the Gamer, the artist shows us the life we wished we had, but hadn’t had because we were too concerned with being just normal. The artist is the most important person in the world, she shows us who we could and should be.”
“She does?”
“If she is a good artist, she will.”
