Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  Bullfinch swallowed a final snore in a gurgle, then awoke. His wattled, enfolded face peered innocently up at her. Breaking into an ingratiating, tongue-lolling smile, he wagged his stubby tail.

  Shenda found her anger instantly dissipating.

  Most empathetic people found it impossible to stay mad at bulldogs for long, as they were so mild mannered and goofy looking.

  Especially one colored like a canary.

  The employee at the animal shelter—a bearded, spectacled fellow with some kind of East European accent and a nametag reading jan cluj—walked Shenda back among the cages so that she could make her choice. Ambling down the wet cement aisle, she found herself wanting to take every one of the abandoned yelping mutts home. But it was not until she saw the bright yellow occupant of one cage that she stopped decisively.

  “What’s the story with this one?”

  “To my eyes, which are admittedly not of the most expert, our friend is the variety of English Bulldog. Was picked up on Kindred Street, near the college. Of tags, none. Meeting his maker in—” Jan Cluj checked the page slipped into a galvanized frame wired to the cage “—five more days.”

  “But what about that color?”

  Jan Cluj shrugged, as if the matter were of little interest. “It is unnatural. Most assuredly obtained chemically. I accuse some likely college boys. They are insufficiently studious and given to madcaps.”

  Crouching, Shenda extended her fingers through the wire separating her and the yellow dog. He snuffled her fingers eagerly and sloppily. She stood.

  “There’s no roots showing, or normal-colored patches the dye job would’ve missed.”

  Exasperatedly: “Dear lady, the dog is as you see him, fit and active by medical ukase, most normal save for his hue. Explanations are superfluous. Will you have him?”

  “I will have him.”

  After signing the relevant forms, Shenda took the happy bounding yellow dog straight to a grooming salon known as Kanine Klips (recommended by Pepsi, who had her poodle, French Fry, done there regularly), where she had the anomalous bulldog dipped and clipped.

  Then she waited for his normally colored fur to grow out.

  Three years later, she was still waiting.

  The dog was some kind of genetic sport. His naturally unnatural coloration was a shade most commonly associated with avian life forms.

  Shenda had resisted naming the bulldog until he assumed his true form. Called him “Hey, you!” and “Here, doggie!” for weeks, out of some kind of feeling that to name him wrongly would be to warp his personality. But when the true state of his freakish coat became evident, there was no other possible name for such a specimen.

  “Bullfinch,” said Shenda with weary patience, “get up off that tablecloth please. It’s time for you to go out and do your business.”

  Bullfinch obeyed. He arose and trotted over to the back door of the house. Shenda opened it and the dog went outside into her small fenced yard.

  While the criminally destructive canine was busy outside, Shenda gathered up the precious tatters, surveyed them mournfully, estimating possibilities of repair, then, clucking her tongue, chucked the rags into the trash.

  Bullfinch re-entered the house. Promptly, the dog went over to the wastebasket and dragged the ruined fabric out and over to his bed. With great care and exactitude, employing paws and muzzle, he arranged the cloth atop the puffy cushion to his liking. He plopped his rear haunches down on his new dog blanket, and sat regarding his mistress.

  Shenda gave up. “I don’t have time to play no tug-of-war with you, Bullyboy. My day is fuller than usual. And it starts now.”

  As if to say, Mine too!, Bullfinch nodded his weighty corrugated head several times, then lowered his forequarters and was soon asleep.

  Shenda showered and groomed. Those toenails had to go! In a robe, towelling her hair dry, she flipped on the bedroom radio automatically, thinking to catch the news, but then hardly listened. She put her panties on ass-backwards, caught herself, swore, and re-donned them correctly.

  Dressed in baggy Gap jeans and a green silk shirt, she ate a chocolate Pop Tart standing up at the sink, washing it down with a tumbler of chocolate milk. Her face was blank, as if her mind were vacationing in a more alluring country than her body.

  “ —cell-u-licious!” declaimed the radio.

  Shenda snapped out of her fugue, looked at the clock, and exclaimed, “Louie Kablooie! Bully, I’ve got to run! You got plenty of kibbles, and tonight I’ll bring you a real treat. Promise!” She scuffled on a pair of open-toed Candies, grabbed up a courier-style satchel and her car keys.

  The door slammed behind her. Bullfinch opened one eye, then the other. Seeing nothing that needed his attention, he closed them and returned to sleep.

  He could fly. He really could. And that airborne tennis ball was no problem.

  3.

  Frozen Furniture

  No dreams, pleasant or otherwise, but rather a mechanical device, awoke Marmaduke Twigg from his Midas-golden slumbers.

  Like every other member of the Phineas Gage League, Twigg was physiologically incapable of dreaming. The relevant circuitry, along with much else, had been chemically and surgically excised from Twigg’s altered brain.

  As a consequence, he was radically insane. And in the worst possible way.

  The mania didn’t show, didn’t impede his daily functioning. Indeed, Twigg’s brand of insanity increased his cunning, ingenuity, deftness, manipulative social skills and will to power. Minute to grasping minute, hour to scheming hour, day to conquering day, he appeared to himself and others as a single-minded superman, apparently a paragon of efficient, rational action. Perched on the very uppermost rungs of the social ladder, Twigg seemingly owed all his accomplishments to the secret devastations willingly wrought on his gray matter.

  Yet it was as if a dam had been erected in the brains of Twigg and his compatriots, a dam behind which fetid black waters were continually massing.

  A dam which must one day give way, taking not only the well-deserving Twigg and his peers to their vivid destruction, but countless others, the more or less innocent and the less or more complicit.

  Right now, of course, such a fate seemed vastly improbable.

  Twigg thought—rather, knew—that he was a new and improved breed of human, superior to anyone not a League member.

  He knew that the world was his oyster.

  The only thing left to determine was at precisely which angle one should work the knife into the hapless stubborn bivalve, and how best to twist the sharp instrument properly.

  Crack!

  The shell halves fell apart.

  And the raw meat was sucked greedily, gleefully down.

  Twigg lay sleeping on his back in the exact center of the mattress of his enormous four-postered canopied bed. His chest- folded arms were clad in ebony silk salted with white dots. Beneath his crossed arms, crimson satin sheets and a crest-embroidered white duvet were drawn up in unwrinkled swaths. (The crest on the coverlet depicted a heraldic shield enclosing crossed iron rods with a superimposed eye, and the Gothic initials PGL.) Resting in the middle of a softer-than-down pillow, Twigg’s unlined face seemed the ivory mask of one of the lesser pharaohs.

  Suddenly, without visible stimulation, Twigg’s pebbly eyes snapped open like rollershades, and he was instantly alert.

  Twigg could feel the small unit consisting of pump and segmented reservoirs implanted inside him stop its gentle whirring. The same device (which regulated many hormonal functions previously so crudely performed by now missing gray matter) had sent him efficiently to sleep exactly four hours ago, during which time he had not stirred a limb.

  He knew that most of his servants—especially those who had the least personal contact with him, knowing his peculiarities only through rumor—jokingly referred to him as one of the undead. But Twigg cared not.

  All the lesser cattle were the true phantoms, without substance, ineffectual. Only he and his kind were
truly alive.

  Twigg’s breakfast would soon arrive, carried to him by his loyal factotum, Paternoster. In the meantime, he flew the jetcraft of his mind over the varied terrain of his day.

  Meetings, public and private: legislators, aides, ambassadors, presidents, CEOs, media slaves. Acquisitions and sales: companies, divisions, patents, real estate, souls. Phone calls: conferenced and one-on-one. Presentations: from scientists, PR experts, lawyers, brokers, military strategists. Wedged into the interstices: meals and an intensively crafted scientific workout.

  All of it absolutely necessary, absolutely vital to keeping all the delicately balanced plates of Isoterm’s myriad businesses spinning.

  Yet all of it absolutely tedious.

  But tonight. Tonight would make up for all the boredom.

  For tonight was the monthly meeting of the Phineas Gage League.

  Twigg smiled at the thought.

  His smile appeared like fire burning a hole in the paper of his face.

  Memories of his own entrance into the League trickled over his interior dam. These were not so pleasant. The initiation rituals were stringent. Had to be. No whiners or losers or weaklings allowed. Cull out the sick cattle right at the head of the chute. Still, the shock and the pain—

  Twigg reflectively fingered a small puckered scar on his right temple. His smile had disappeared.

  To recover his anticipation of this night’s pleasures, Twigg reached up to stroke one of his bed’s four canopy supports.

  At each corner of the enormous imperial bed stood a life-sized naked woman, arms upstretched over her head, thus pulling her breasts high and flat. Each woman supported one corner of the heavy wooden frame that held the brocaded fabric canopy.

  These caryatids were each one unique, sculpted with absolute realism, down to the finest hair and wrinkle. They were colored a uniform alabaster. Their surfaces were absolutely marmoreal, as unyielding as ice. Twigg’s hand, lasciviously molding the butt of one woman statue, neither dented nor jiggled the realistic curves. Rather, his hand slid over the human rondures as if they were curiously frictionless.

  The door to Twigg’s bedroom, half a hundred feet away, opened. A man entered, bearing a domed tray. He crossed the carpet with measured elderly steps.

  Twigg bounded out of bed lithely.

  His black pajamas, it was now revealed, were embroidered with hundreds of identical white termites.

  “Ah, Paternoster! Well done! On the table if you please!”

  The old and crabbed servant—longish hair the shade of old celluloid—set his burden down.

  The table was a large piece of gold-rimmed glass borne aloft on the backs of two kneeling naked men arranged parallel. One of the humaniform trestles was a middle-aged paunchy type; the other young and lean.

  Twigg moved to an antique desk of normal construction, where a high-end computer incongruously sat. He powered it up, eager to begin his day of bending and shaping, betrayal and coercion. Simultaneously, with seeming unconcern, he questioned his servant.

  “Birthday this week, Paternoster? Am I correct?”

  “As always, sir.”

  “Not thinking of retirement yet, are you?”

  A fearful tremor passed over Paternoster’s worn features. “No, sir! Of course not! I served your father for his whole life, and his father before him! How could I even think of retiring!”

  “Very good!” Twigg ceased his typing. As if pondering a different topic, he said, “I must find a hassock for this room! Well, I’ll get around to it some day.”

  The servant seemed on the verge of fainting. “Any—anything else, sir?”

  “No, Paternoster, you may go.”

  Twigg’s braying laughter escorted Paternoster out.

  Whipping the silver cover off the tray, Twigg disclosed his breakfast.

  It was a single uncapped bottle of sinisterly effervescent

  Zingo, whose label featured the famous lightning-bolt Z.

  Twigg grabbed the bottle and downed its bright Cool Mint Listerine-colored contents.

  Cell-u-licious!

  Setting the empty bottle down, the man picked up a device off the table. It resembled a standard remote-control unit.

  Pivoting, Twigg raised the unit and pointed across the vast room.

  On the far side of the interior acreage stood a full-sized statue of a Siberian tiger, absolutely lifelike save for its unvarying artificial whiteness. The beast’s face was frozen open in a toothy snarl, every ridge of its pallid gullet delineated; one mammoth paw was lifted in midgesture. Separate from the statue, strapped around its neck, was a collar and small box.

  Twigg pressed a button.

  The tiger’s anguished roar filled the room, its striped face a Kabuki mask of rage. Like an orange, white and black express train, it raced at its tormentor. Twigg stood like a statue himself.

  Several yards distant from its infuriating quarry, the tiger leaped, its maw a slick red cavern, claws extended.

  At the last possible moment Twigg pressed another button.

  The stasis-transfigured tiger, now vanilla white, fell with a heavy thud to the deep carpet, nearly at Twigg’s bare feet.

  “Yes!” said Twigg gleefully. “Like to see even that cool bastard Durchfreude do better.”

  Naming the Dark Intercessor aloud seemed to cast a shadow on Twigg’s pleasure.

  The man was a valuable nuisance. Every use of his talents simultaneously decreased his utility and increased the liability he represented.

  One day the balance would tip decisively on the side of liability.

  And then, Twigg grimly suspected, it would take more than the easy press of a button to put Kraft Durchfreude away.

  4.

  Espresso Eggs

  The wide, welcoming, windowed wood door to the Karuna Koffeehouse had its own unique method of announcing customers.

  Mounted inside above the entrance was a Laff Bag: one of those innocuous sacks that contained a device to play tinny mechanical maniacal laughter. Every passage through the door pulled the string that triggered the abridged five-second recording.

  Making a pompous entrance into the gaily-painted Karuna was practically impossible.

  Not that there weren’t folks who still tried.

  Fuquan Fletcher for one.

  Thurman had just arrived that morning, setting off his own personally impersonal gale of guffaws. This early, he had found his favorite table empty, the one by the moisture-misted south window. Taking a seat, he undipped the cylindrical foam bolster from his cane and arranged it against the small of his back.

  The fragrant atmosphere of the Koffeehouse was filled with the gurgles and chortles of various brewing devices, the chatter of the trio of workers on duty, the savoring sipping sounds of sleepy humans gradually coming up to full mental speed with the aid of friendly plant derivatives. The ceiling-mounted speakers suddenly crackled alive with the sounds of Respighi. A wide-mouthed toaster noisily ejected its crisped bagel passengers.

  All was right with the world.

  If not with Thurman himself.

  Lining up his various prescriptions on the tabletop, Thurman tried not to feel too sorry for himself. An attitude that didn’t do any good, he knew from the recent bitter years, though surely easy enough to fall into.

  Looking up from his chesslike array of bottles, Thurman saw one of the baristas approaching.

  Normal service at the Karuna involved placing one’s order while standing at the long, oaken, display-case-dotted counter separating customers from the employees and the exotic tools of their trade, and then maneuvering with the expeditiously filled order through the crush toward an empty or friend-occupied table. The baristas generally ventured out only to clear tables of post-java debris and swab them down. (And even these incursions into the customer area were infrequent, thanks to the unusual self-policing neatness of most Karuna patrons.)

  But for Thurman—and anyone else who obviously needed special attention—exceptions were eas
ily made.

  Just part of the thoughtful charm that found expression in the Karuna’s motto:

  The place to come when even home isn’t kind enough.

  The phrase Thurman always involuntarily associated with the young female barista named Verity Freestone was “pocket-sized.” Pixie-cut black hair topping a seventy-five pound package of cheerful myopia.

  Today Verity wore a striped shirt that exposed her pierced-navel belly, brown corduroy pants that would’ve fit Thurman’s twelve-year-old nephew, Raggle, and a pair of Birkenstocks. Verity filled her pants, however, in a more interesting—to lonely Thurman—fashion.

  Verity pushed her thick glasses up on a mildly sweaty snub nose. “Hi, Thur. The usual?”

  “Um, sure. Except maybe just wave the beans over the cappuccino, okay? The old stomach—”

  “Thurman, you look wicked peaked. Are you okay?”

  “As okay as I’ll ever get.”

  Verity eyed the pill vials ranked before Thurman and frowned. “All those unnatural chemicals can’t be good for you. Haven’t you tried any alternative healing methods? Maybe get the old chi flowing. What about vitamins? You take any vitamins?”

  Thurman waved the advice away. “Verity, really—I appreciate your concern. But I can’t change any part of my medical care right now. Strict doctor’s orders. I’m barely holding on as it is.”

  Verity’s expression changed from faintly hectoring to triumphantly assured. “I know just what you need, Thur.”

  This was more than Thurman himself knew. “And what might that be?”

  “Some espresso eggs! They’re not on the menu. We—the help, that is —we make them just for ourselves. But I’m gonna fix you up some special!”

  The treat sounded nauseating to Thurman. “Verity, I don’t know if I can take any espresso in my eggs—”

  “Oh, they don’t have any coffee in them. We just call them that because we make them using the espresso machine steamjet.”

  “Well, if they’re mild—”

  “Mild don’t even come close!”

  Before Thurman could object any further, Verity clomped determinedly off.

  Thurman plucked the rumpled morning newspaper from the adjacent window ledge and unfolded it. A headline caught his attention: