by Simon Ings
Ajay drove a while along the bridge. Distant lights edged into view through clearing fog, then blanked out, obscured by a round, dark shape.
‘Treasure Island,’ Ajay said, and attaining the near bank, he stopped the car and got out.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing. A little tourism, you’re interested.’ Rosa joined him by the crash barrier. He pointed the way they’d come. ‘You asked me once about Bay Area. Well, there it is.’
‘A Massive?’
‘A wannabe merely.’
Moonwolf had flattened Oakland many years before. At its edges it was as barren as any war-razed town. Here swamp-like, full of grey-green growth. There barren: a chaos of pebbled concrete and uprooted tarmac slabs. The spaces further from the shore, and nearer the gap-toothed city, showed evidence of reclamation. Chimneys from the construction yards sent a heat haze of transparent poisons into the air. Around them lay dirt enclosures, some stacked with pipes and bails of wire and broken machinery. Banks of bulldozed earth – some fresh, some weeded over – weaved meaninglessly between light industrial sites: dykes to drain the swamp and reed-infested shore.
‘Bay Area’s nexus and would-be homuncule,’ said Ajay. ‘Telecomms gone wild.’ The network’s foundations and retaining walls poked up a few feet out the ground looking, in the absence of men and machines, not a built thing so much as a gigantic and tentative growth. ‘Enough sightseeing.’ He slipped his hand around her waist. ‘It’s time we found somewhere to sleep.’
The road ran through a short tunnel. Then the island fell behind and they were crossing the final section of the bridge, heading straight and unstoppably towards San Francisco. The city stretched before them, golden, bright and strange, the fog that hid it now dispersed.
Rosa gazed at it, amazed. The old city, long since destroyed by Moonwolf, had been recrafted self-consciously from its scrap. Whimsical and sparsely tenanted, SF’s tower blocks resembled nothing so much as giant jukeboxes. Only the TransAmerican Tower had been faithfully restored to match the old city skyline, and even that was tinted day-glo pink. Where once the Golden Gate Bridge had stood, now there was a new structure, its every strut a gaudy colour, bright with luminescent film.
‘You’ve seen the Bay’s guts,’ Ajay said, ‘now see its skin.’
‘It’s beautiful!’ she said.
He said, ‘It’s rich.’
They joined a line of traffic, held up at the city gates.
‘Trouble?’
‘Maybe,’ said Ajay, breaking to a stop. He got the gun out his jacket again and let it drop to the floor, by his feet. He opened up the dash compartment and began rifling through the papers and the cards he’d stowed there. He took one out: an ID she’d not seen before. It had his face on it, a hologram.
She glanced at him, inquisitive.
‘I doctored it,’ he said to her. The line shifted forward a car’s length. He put them in gear and crawled forward to fill the space. ‘I think it’s what we need. If not we’ll have to act confused, or maybe bribe whoever’s at the gate.’
A car rolled into line behind them.
‘Not much traffic,’ Rosa said.
‘Look at the time.’
It was half past one.
‘Maybe we should have waited,’ Ajay said, more to himself than her. ‘Less chance of hassle in the morning crush.’
‘Should we turn back?’ she asked, made nervous by his uncertainty.
‘Too late.’
The queue moved on, quicker this time. He reached between his feet, picked up the gun, gave it her. ‘Hide it between your legs. If there’s need, I’ll take it. Don’t you fire. Leave it all to me.’
She hid the gun. The barrel was cold against her thighs.
The queue before them did not stop. The toll-booth came in sight. There was a single guard, standing beside the road, waving the cars through, idly. His uniform was black, with a mass of gold braid at the shoulders. There was a handgun at his belt, but it was buttoned down.
Rosa held her breath.
Two cars’ lengths.
One—
The guard stepped out and raised his hand.
Ajay braked.
She saw there was a patch over the guard’s left eye, and a wire trailing from it. She tried minding it, but it was too simple: just a little screen, repeating his view of their front grille. Not knowing what he was looking for, she could not make the screen show it to him. The view zoomed in on their registration plate. Rosa shook her mind free and looked at the guard.
He was looking at their number plate still. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then, prompted by some hidden signal, he stood aside and waved them through.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Ajay said. She saw his hands were shaking on the wheel.
‘We’re through.’
‘We’re through,’ he echoed, unconvinced.
The guard waved them on again, impatiently.
‘Ajay!’
Ajay came to, revved the car and sped it past the guard and off the main lane, taking a sliproad to the bayside streets.
‘What was it with his eye?’ said Rosa.
‘Eyeball display. Some monad somewhere checks each number plate he sees, projects its history on his eyeball. We checked out.’
‘Should we have done?’
‘Probably not.’
‘A lucky break.’
‘The luckiest,’ He still looked scared.
‘What’s up?’
‘It’s too damn easy,’ Ajay said. ‘Too easy, all of it.’
‘Call it Providence,’ she said, dimly remembering something Xu had said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She yawned, weary of his constant guardedness. ‘I need to sleep.’
‘We’ll find somewhere.’
The city stank. Busier than Oakland, more compact, with roads that ran a mere sidewalk’s width from buildings crammed with people, SF reeked of shit and piss, rank waste and burnt-sweet garbage fires. People were rushing in every direction, faces hidden behind masks or dipped nose-first in pale nosegays. There were cripples everywhere, slumped in doorways, stumps stripped down to dirty bandages, badge of their craft. Some held dishes above their heads, begging off the passers-by. Cyclists careered about the street, missing the car by inches as they threaded over street to sidewalk and back again, fighting for advantage in the crush.
Ajay turned right, up into the city proper. Here there was no room for bikes, let alone cars. Whenever Ajay slowed the car or stopped a dismal carnival descended on them. Men with missing feet. Bald children. Women, blouses slashed to show their weary breasts. Even, once, an old blind man in pinstriped suit and wielding a cane. They leaned on the car shaking beads, pens, tickets, cloths, phones, fruit, dolls, pamphlets, lighters, puzzles, packs of batteries, even knives and bottles. Ajay cursed and shoved the car against their unresponsive weight, carving a brutal path through the crush.
‘You’ll hurt them!’
‘They see the plates. They know we’re new. They’ll crack us like an egg, we tarry here.’
So, leaving behind a few fresh cripples, they reached Embarcadero, and more gentle streets. ‘That’s where we’re bound.’ He pointed to the glassy tower before them, across Union Square.
‘A parliament?’ breathed Rosa, rubbernecking. She’d never seen so grand a façade.
‘Francis Drake Hotel.’ He drew the car round the empty circuit to the entrance.
Men with guns sat round the entrance doors, flanked by sandbags. Black-suited, without braid, they stared impassively at the car as it drew up. Ajay unclipped and got out. They levelled their weapons at him.
Ajay didn’t miss a beat, just strode on up to them, his arms extended, yet another doctored card held tight between the fingers of his right hand. A black man – far darker than Ajay and thickset – stood up. His chest was screened by china armour, making him seem even bigger. Ajay handed him his card. The black man ran it through the EFTPOS scanner at his belt.
&n
bsp; It blinked green.
Marble walls, floor, columns. Mirrors everywhere. The interior of the hotel reminded him, for one heart-jerking moment, of Dayus Ram. He peered around for service, screwing up his eyes against the yellow-grey gloom. He saw no one. There was no air conditioning. The air smelled of rot. Ceiling fans swished stale warmth about the lobby, stirring dust. There were blankets here and there, tossed into gloomy corners, and cardboard shelters, mostly fallen in. There were signs pinned up along the walls. Pocho, Chinese, a few in English.
‘Tonite. Rhetinitis & Pigmentosis Benefit’. Ajay stared, amazed. Who’d give a shit for them, with cholera abroad? He read another. ‘Happy Hour Lasts All Nite Long at Sumpter Palfrey’s Piano Bar (1st floor)’.
Failure lay like a smell over everything here.
Many of the signs had dropped from the walls and lay across the long green leather sofas lining the room. Islands of wicker chairs and low glass tables, grey with dust, broke the monotony of the desolate hall. Dead ornamental trees leaned drunkenly from china urns. Somewhere hidden, water dripped. Another sound, like rattan tapping wood, beat counterpoint. Came closer. Shadows moved.
Ajay turned. A young Chinese in a business suit approached them down a hallway lined with busts and engraved boards. ‘Please, the bags!’ he called, still some way off. He made shooing motions with his hands. ‘We do all that, please put them down!’
Ajay looked round.
‘We’re here, we’re here,’ the man insisted fussily. Ajay saw that his trousers were several inches too short. He wore no socks, and slippers instead of shoes, with raffia soles. ‘Be patient,’ he begged, ‘it’s very late. Now then—’ He snatched the bags off Rosa. She snatched them back.
‘But we have porters!’
‘Well let them sleep,’ said Ajay.
‘They’re all in white, with little gloves and everything.’
‘No. Thank you.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he sniffed. ‘And where’s sir’s card?’
Ajay handed it him.
The young man crossed to a pile of cardboard boxes stacked against a wall and threw himself upon them, furiously, casting them aside like he was hacking through liannas. A night desk came in view, screened off by chicken wire. He unlocked the door, stepped through, and thumbed the register on. ‘So where’d sir like to sleep?’
‘Somewhere dry, you can manage that,’ said Ajay, weary of the porter’s histrionics.
‘Sir wants room service, perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘A nightcap?’
‘No.’
‘We’ve a wide selection—’
‘No. A room is all.’
‘Dinner, perhaps? Supper? The night chef’s blasted; if you like I could send out.’
‘Just a room.’
‘A room, okay—’ He tapped the screen. ‘3513. En suite bathroom. Peach velour—’ He led them to a gilded door and pressed a button. The door slid open for them.
Rosa and Ajay entered.
Ajay pressed button thirty-five. The doors slid shut. Rosa staggered as the lift took off. Something shifted behind the walls: she saw that they were glass. Then the shaft fell away below them and SF proper came in view. The lift was a glass bubble, rising up the hotel’s outside wall.
‘Oh—’ Rosa gasped: fighting for breath, she leaned against the glass and gazed rapt at the city receding fast below them. ‘Ajay,’ she breathed, ‘it’s beautiful!’
From here, the human swarm and chaos made no mark. The streets might be untenanted, for all that she could see. Glass rooftops shimmered cream and spring-sky blue. Lasers sculpted shapes into the damp, particulated air: words, and shapes of goods for sale, and flowing forms.
Rivers of drink.
Waterfalls of precious scent.
Sea spray, dashed from disembodied hair.
Beneath transparent domes, bioluminescent gardens – full of expensive curios from European splicing houses – glowed modestly, making up for any lack of brightness with their variety of hue. Emblems of rich families, these; corporate playgrounds and executive toys and nests for vain and insane connoisseurs.
Up the sides of the buildings, nanotechniqued moulds and lichens grew in fern-like patterns. Released some time before into the teeming city, competing strains of living colour cast glowing feelers up the walls. Sandblasted black marble, monoxided stone, and weather-softened brick: each texture hosted different denizens, each a different hue. Reed-like cyan and ferny verdigris; rose madder like the outline of a lime tree, wound about with creepers of cadmium yellow . . .
Rosa hardly noticed when the pressure left her guts. The lift slowed to a stop.
‘We’re here.’
Glutted by the light she turned and put her arms round him. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
He pulled her gently from him and led her to their room. He carded the door. It swung open.
The room was barnlike, colossal, inimical.
The entire back wall was a window, smeared with biofluorescents. They bled and etched unearthly colours over the night-time cityscape. In the centre of the room lay a bed. It was set into the floor, a mass of green silk sheets and black linen scatter cushions. Around the bed squatted copper tables, etched green by weak acids and tortured into crazy half-animal forms. On them stood violent abstract sculptures of serpentine marble.
In an alcove behind shreds of lemon silk, a green marble jacuzzi bubbled incessantly. Steam rose from the roiling mass, swept up in thick contrails towards vents set high in the walls. Perching there, pewter gargoyles drank the steam in hungrily like gods receiving sacrifice.
There was no ceiling, just struts and pipes and bundles of wiring, weaving like gold and chromium roots so that, in spite of the view outside, one might imagine oneself far underground in some fairy land of precious metals.
Light in the room was strangely sourced. Shadows cut knifelike over the seagrass matted floor, gathering in pools between inch-thick designer rugs. And yet the room’s surfaces seemed quite bright enough, as though lit by different means entirely.
‘Oh sweet, it’s wonderful!’
‘It is?’
‘I feel so spoiled.’
He wondered how they were expected to sleep in this monstrosity.
‘Can we afford it?’
‘He seemed to think so downstairs.’ It occurred to him that she had learned just enough about the world to recognise the value of money and nothing else. The room revolted him. Its show of affluence was infantile, worse by far than anything he’d seen in Rio, brash as Rio was. Even Herazo, with his Rolex watches and stretch Hyundais, might balk at such a place as this.
Rosa rushed over to examine the jacuzzi. The shredded lemon curtain wafted shut behind her. It grew opaque in a second, and the sound of the jacuzzi died. Rosa burst out the curtain. Her laughter cut in abruptly upon the room. Now the bathroom was vacated, the curtain went gauzy again, and the jacuzzi came back in plain view.
‘How do they do that?’ Rosa wondered aloud.
‘Anti-sound. Nanotechniq.’ He spoke absently. He had seen rooms like this before, in Lucia’s palazzo; the same cod-minimal chic, all spacious, wasteful, cold—
The memory was a strange, unwelcome one. Was this then all Lucia’s vision had amounted to: life in expensive, anonymous hotel rooms? But there had never been much ‘her’ in her, Appetite, that cuckoo, having ousted her long years before.
Rosa, of course, was bound to like it. It surely reminded her of Dayus Ram, its polished surfaces and bundled wiring. She was new-born and had seen little of the world’s beauty.
‘Rosa.’
She turned and came to him.
‘Sit down by me.’
They sat together on the bed, not touching, staring into each other’s eyes. He said, ‘You should have run.’
She said, ‘I only ever wanted you.’
‘You’ll lose me in Rio. They’ll make us part.’
‘You will resist them.’
&nbs
p; ‘Will I?’
‘Won’t you?’
He looked away.
‘Ajay?’
‘You trust me too much.’
‘My hammer and my chisel.’
‘What?’
She smiled, sadly. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She put her arms around his neck. ‘This place brings back such memories.’
‘Of Ma.’
‘Of you,’ she said. ‘Of my rescue of you.’
There was nothing he could say.
‘You tasted sweet.’
He laughed, embarrassed. ‘The milk was disgusting.’
‘I kissed it into your mouth.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you did.’
She kissed him, gently, on the lips.
He tried to not respond.
She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
He smelt her musk, her neck’s own scent. Disturbed, he pulled away.
‘Why not?’ she sighed. ‘Tomorrow, Rio-bound, we’ll have no time.’
‘It’s wrong,’ he said.
‘It’s not wrong. It’s not wrong.’ Her hands moved lower, down his back, around his waist. He let himself fall back onto the bed. She raised herself on top of him and kissed his face. ‘It’s what I want,’ she whispered. ‘Always was. You surely knew.’
He nodded dumbly, as her tongue explored his chin, his lips, his mouth. He edged away. ‘I had to care for you,’ he said. ‘This seemed wrong somehow.’
‘I’m quite well now,’ she promised him, and smiled. ‘Don’t care for me so much.’
He ran his fingers down her back, over her bra-strap, to the warm soft skin, the skin-tight skirt, the swell of her hips.
She kissed him deep, tongue probing him. Desire shot through him, painful, little-used, rusty like a nail. He turned her, moved on top of her, hands exploring her for the first time, her large breasts, swollen stomach—
He pulled back. ‘Rosa?’
She nodded Yes.
Ajay stared. ‘It can’t be.’
‘Can’t it?’
He licked his lips. ‘Show me.’
Slowly, Rosa stretched her arms above her head, body abandoned to his gaze.
He gazed at her belly, her breasts, her hips imprisoned in the figure-hugging skirt, her thighs, flexing wide for him. He felt himself harden. He drew his legs up, hiding his arousal from her.
