Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  She says in a nearly inaudible voice made husky by her tears:

  I guess you thought

  I’d play the daughter of Lot,

  But I will not.

  The extreme close-up makes it hard to distinguish what happens next. The restraints bite more deeply into the skin of her neck and chin, like she’s pressing forward against them.

  Then there’s the short scraping sound of a cigarette lighter.

  The right side of Gina’s face receives a warm, flickering light. This seems to wake something inside her. Her eyes become less glassy and start darting around. Maybe she’s making a last-minute inspection of her setup. She rotates her head slowly to the right, perhaps testing the tautness of the line. Then back to the left. She repeats the process more quickly, and then I realize:

  She’s shaking her head.

  Her eyes are bright now with panic.

  The drill bursts through her mouth, spraying the camera lens with drops of blood. Her body goes limp from the huge hole torn into her spine. I have to close my eyes.

  When I open them, Gina’s face is still there, mutilated by the razor-toothed hole saw, which spins on with mechanical abandon. The video rolls for another twenty minutes, and by the end of it, I know I’ll see that image for the rest of my days.

  50

  Acquiring Gina’s suicide video finally gave me a good card for my hand. But I still need an opportunity to play it. I check in to see where the rest of Billy’s gamers are.

  Savant’s forum has come alive with controversy over a post by someone named Clay_Media proposing that Big Ben Mondano was a member of the Pyrexians. An idea that would unify, as good conspiracy theories do, the two primary strands of speculation concerning the party backing Savant. Initially, I assume this is Billy again seeding the story behind his game, but I become unsure, since the post mostly inspired an effort to comb Exotica’s back catalog for Pyrexian imagery: black candles, red rings, antique medical equipment, coded messages inscribed on their victims. I suspect this line of inquiry will actually lead them away from any kind of connection to Robert Randall.

  That said, I’m worried that the Savant players’ growing numbers and organization will eventually allow them to find their way inside Billy’s gingerbread house. And that will complicate my work. I contemplate a subtle disinformation campaign, but before I can solidify any ideas, my duties to the Dancers call.

  Olya’s discovered a new vibration in Fred’s corpus spongiosum, and she and Xan are at loggerheads about whether this is a bug or a feature. I’ve been called to help Garriott investigate, but perhaps more importantly to procure late-night fuel for the team.

  On my way over, McClaren pulls up and invites me into his Town Car. His news is that Charles Delaney, Gina’s father, had called the NYPD out of the blue to demand a copy of his daughter’s suicide video. Nash put him off with some claptrap about “evidentiary sequestration” and phoned McClaren. They ran Delaney’s bank accounts, which showed two recent deposits of just over nine thousand dollars apiece. The conclusion: Billy is trying to use him to get the video, the “final piece” he mentioned to Blythe. McClaren orders me to Boston to see if he can be bribed into leading us to Billy.

  Garriott and I finish our urological procedure on Fred more quickly than I’d anticipated, allowing me to leave GAME at three AM. Needing to sleep on the way, I opt for a train that gets into South Station five hours later.

  Somerville is a suburb north of Harvard’s Cambridge that’s been transformed into a postcollegiate Eden, filled with organic cafés and bars thronged with recent grads. But if you wind up on the wrong side of McGrath Highway, you’ll find a neighborhood whose residents didn’t all get the “inexorable gentrification” memo: East Somerville. It’s only about two miles from the neoclassical halls of MIT, but as with most old Eastern cities, you can span whole galaxies just by crossing a street. I’m amazed Gina made the transition.

  The Delaneys’ house stands on a blighted block of slumping three-story railcar tenements framed by giant denuded elm trees that look like they were last pruned by WPA employees. Despite the hopeless aspect of the block, there’s a yellow Mustang with dealer’s plates parked askew at the curb.

  Eleven Cross Street is a small rectangle of leprous brown shingles. Its only gesture at decoration is rusting steel bars on the windows, which seem to have been bored into the building’s surface at random.

  I ring the bell and wait a long time before someone starts wrestling with the warped wooden door. At first there’s just a thin gap into the dark of the vestibule, but then the door swings open on a woman who begins the painfully slow process of climbing down a short cement staircase to open the metal security door in front of me. I think she might be in her midsixties, but she has the sick thinness and carriage of a woman well into her eighties. She’s draped herself with a worn housedress, and her dull gray hair listlessly crowds her face. Her eyes speak of sleepless nights, and her breath speaks of a seven AM encounter with a gin bottle.

  “Mrs. Delaney? Hi—”

  “You’re here about Geenie?” she asks in a reedy whisper.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Before she can continue, a deep voice booms out from behind her. “Ruthie, get your ass back in here. I’ll take care of this guy. Go finish your breakfast.”

  Ugh. I can tell I’d prefer sharing her kind of breakfast to dealing with the owner of that voice. Mrs. Delaney scuttles off without another word.

  Charles Delaney is scrawny and unkempt, with a large flat head framed by patchy stubble that in some places aspires to be a beard. He’s wearing greasy jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, underneath which a moth-eaten T-shirt proclaims, OBAMANATION: WIPING OUT AMERICA, ONE BABY AT A TIME. He looks me over with a jittery scowl but eventually says in a cigarette-scarred bray, “Well, get yourself in here. It’s colder than ass out there.”

  Against my better judgment, I put out my hand. “James Pryce, it’s nice—” But he’s already walking away from me down a narrow hallway.

  I almost take off. Charles Delaney is disturbing. You see him and think base-head. You smell him and think opossum. His wife’s clearly hanging on by her fingernails too. If his daughter suffered from mental instability, the genetic component has certainly been confirmed. The grim abode tells me that her environment wasn’t helping anything either.

  I follow him down the hall. What I first took for a limp proves to be a stagger. Like his wife, the guy is drunk as a lord at nine AM. He heads straight back to a flimsy door with a Yosemite Sam “Back Off” mud flap stapled to it.

  It opens onto a den obviously meant as an off-limits refuge for the man of the house. The room has a sixties basement quality, with artificial wood paneling adorned with outdated Boston sports posters, a beat-up Naugahyde couch, and a giant duct-taped recliner. The low coffee table is covered with Natural Light tallboys dragooned into service as sloppy ashtrays. I’d expect to see an old TV set with a jury-rigged antenna, but instead there’s a brand-new sixty-inch Sony LCD inexpertly bolted to the wall. A badass surround-sound system sits in boxes on the floor.

  Delaney collapses onto the couch and takes a swig out of a bottle of Midleton Irish Whiskey, which stands in glaring contrast to the dead cans of discount beer. He doesn’t offer me any. There’s evidence here of an epic Home Shopping Network binge: a lacquer stand of samurai swords, a wall full of valuable Red Sox cards mounted in mahogany frames, and two leather gun cases, which I’m hoping do not contain actual weapons.

  I sit on the recliner and start with, “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

  He snorts as though I’ve said something idiotic.

  “So your wife might have mentioned that I’m working on a documentary that in part deals with the work your daughter—”

  “Yeah, I know all about you and your ‘documentary.’ You want to dig shit up about Geenie. So go ahead and ask your questions. I’m a fucking open book.”

  “Well, first of all, my condolences on your
daughter’s death. You must have been shocked—”

  “No, I always knew my girl was heading for hell.”

  “Hell?”

  “Suicide is a mortal sin, ain’t it? You can’t just go picking out the parts of His Holy Word that you happen to like, right? Not like those Episcopal faggots.”

  “I guess it depends—”

  Suddenly heated, he leans toward me. “It don’t depend on shit. The Word is the Truth. You better fucking believe that. Yeah, I can tell you don’t like me saying that shit about my own daughter. But I don’t need you judging me. That’s for the Lord, not someone like you.” Then he takes a long pull off his bottle and relaxes back into the couch. “But you know . . . I’ll probably end up joining her there. Way things have gone for me.”

  “Faith can certainly be a great comfort. Ah, did your daughter share your commitment to the church?”

  “If she did, she wouldn’t be burning in the fiery pit right now.”

  “Did she seem depressed at all before? Did you notice any signs—”

  “What I noticed was that she moved to Jew York to be with all those communistic dickheads.”

  I know there’s never been any love lost between New York and Boston, but this is an odd perspective for someone living north of the Mason-Dixon line and in this century. I try, “I understand she went to study at NYU.”

  “Yeah, all that techy shit. You know computers are the tools of the devil? Once they get their hooks into you, Satan himself can mainline poison directly into your brain.”

  Here I think he has a point most people would agree with.

  He continues. “And those people who went to her school. You wouldn’t believe the kind of faggots showed up at her funeral.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere. “Yeah, I was told that one of her classmates created a commotion there.”

  His enthusiasm at holding forth on the communists and faggots vanishes. “Well, I don’t remember much about that. I was dealing with a lot of shit at the time.”

  “That’s understandable. Let me see if I can jog your memory.” I pull out an eight-by-ten of Billy. “I heard you might have had words with this gentleman. A friend of your daughter’s. That maybe he was taking pictures. That he tried to put something into your daughter’s casket. You wouldn’t by any chance know what—”

  “I don’t know that boy from Adam,” Delaney says quietly, without looking at the photo.

  “Are you sure?” I wait for a while and then push Billy’s picture toward him. “Because I was given to believe—”

  His earlier rage rushes back. He shoots up and leans over me, poking my chest with his finger. “‘Given to believe’? What kind of shit-talk is that? Why don’t you just call me a liar to my face?”

  I put up my hands to placate him, mentally measuring the distance to all the weapons in the room. “Mr. Delaney, I didn’t mean to in any way—”

  “Fuck you!” He’s still yelling. I feel a fine spray of spittle on my forehead. “Whoever the fuck you are. Yeah, I know you’re no fucking filmmaker. He said you’d come sniffing around. Well I’m not telling you shit, so you can get your ass off my chair and get—”

  “Mr. Delaney, maybe we could come to some arrangement, if you’d just listen to—”

  “No, you listen to me, you shit-sucking—”

  Clearly the interview has gone off the rails, so I snatch his finger and roll it back toward his chest until he’s forced to subside onto the couch. I don’t let go but say softly in his ear, “When you see our friend Billy again, tell him that I have the only copy of that video, and he needs to come to me if he wants it.”

  I let go and take a step back. Delaney’s gaze settles on his new swords. I shake my head. He rubs his sore finger and stares hate at me.

  “I’ll see myself out.”

  As I walk back up the hall, I glance into the kitchen. Mrs. Delaney hunches at a battered wooden table with a coffee cup in both hands, letting the steam bathe her face like a child. Her eyes rise to meet mine, and I read in them a nervous question. Her lips open, but she doesn’t say anything, and eventually looks back into her mug. I want to walk over to her, but then I hear something crash in her husband’s den. I run through the likely consequences of dragging her into this, and my conscience won’t sanction the risk. Instead I just take a card out of my pocket and place it on a stack of newspapers sitting against the wall. She makes no acknowledgment.

  I slip out into the lacerating Boston wind.

  51

  Being a dropout, I can’t explain why I’m still so attached to my alma mater. But I let the existence of an Acela departure to New York three hours from now convince me that I might as well head toward the river and look in on Fair Harvard. It’s after eleven by the time I find parking for my rental car, and I decide that a nice long lunch at the Bat would be a fine antidote to the infectious misery of the Delaney household.

  But just as I’m pouring the bourbon over ice, a 617 area code rings my cell.

  I answer and hear a small, hoarse voice say, “Can you come back to the house?”

  By the time I get there, the yellow Mustang has departed from its place at the Delaneys’ curb. I wait through another long pause after knocking, but then Ruth opens the door wearing a worried expression. Without preliminaries, she holds out two items in the palm of her hand. The first is a four-inch figurine of a woman. The second is a Sony memory stick.

  She says, “I . . . I saved these. Please take them.”

  I gently put them inside my jacket pocket. “Thank you, Mrs. Delaney. This is really—”

  She puts up a hand. “I thought . . . I thought maybe your film . . . Maybe you could tell me something. She never said anything, and . . .” She stops, at a loss. “I—I just don’t know.”

  With that, she shuts the door firmly in my face.

  On the train home, I turn the figure over in my hands. I’ve seen plenty like it around GAME. One of the touchstones of geek culture is collectible figurines. The ability of 3D printers to crank out custom miniatures of one’s online alter egos has only intensified our passion for them. This figure is clearly a NOD avatar. Though representing as a blond, blue-eyed anime vixen, she has Gina’s playful elfin features. She’s wearing a set of billowing purple robes reminiscent of a kimono, and her hands are joined in front of her at waist level holding a large red gemstone. The only label left on the figure is a name inscribed on the base. It reads: Ines_Idoru.

  Could this be another one of Gina’s NODNames?

  I slip the memory stick into my laptop and see that it contains photos of her funeral. The thumbnails follow a trajectory that confirms Garriott’s story. Some introductory shots of the graveyard, then images of a group of maybe forty people gathering around the open grave. Finally a couple of Gina’s father stomping over and reaching for the camera.

  Running through them again, I see a sequence where Billy focuses on two attendees at the periphery of the group as they’re walking in from the parking lot. The first picture shows Blythe Randall extending her hand to Xan. And the next shows Xan taking it.

  52

  That night I get my chance to ask Xan about the photo.

  I slip back into my office under the pretense that I’ve been “working from home” all day. The team is properly derisive of this excuse, but they don’t care to spend the effort scolding me since they want me to put the final touches on the Dancers’ voice-recognition abilities. I’m not sure why we’re adding this obvious next-rev feature, but Olya demands that the Solo Control mode function without having to balance a keyboard on our chests.

  Given the complexity of voice input, all we’ve been able to implement are simple commands such as “Fuck me” to initiate sexual contact, “Keep going” to prolong it, and of course the ever popular “Faster” and “Harder.”

  Xan and I are lying in the MetaChairs facing away from each other, both breathing deep from a robust test of the evening’s progress.

  “I can’t believe we get p
aid to do this,” I say with a contented sigh.

  She looks over her shoulder. “What, someone’s been writing you checks? All this work on my back, and I’ve yet to see the first shilling.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. But our Dancers have yet to prove themselves in front of the public.”

  “Are you worried? Olya probably told you by now the money’s coming from Blake Randall, so—”

  “I know. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “What about Blythe?”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you know her at all?”

  “I met her at the same party where Gina met Blake. But no, not really.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “You’re ‘just curious’ about Blythe Randall, are you?” She sighs and stretches her back. “Yeah. I saw her at Gina’s funeral. We exchanged condolences. I was surprised she was there, but I guess she’d met her through Blake.”

  “So you were just being polite?”

  “James, what are you asking me?”

  “Nothing. I remember her from school, and I wanted to see if—”

  “Let me suggest that you keep your mind and other body parts on your robot overlords here. You can think about her all you want once we’re sailing around Sardinia.”

  At ten fifty PM, my GAME email gets a message from the spoofed address louis_markey@savant.net. My pulse thumps as I realize that my Boston gambit worked, and Billy wants to meet.

  On short notice, it turns out. His message reads:

  Have a Rabbit Hole at Apothecary by 11pm tonight.

  Apothecary, a posh downtown bar, publishes a cocktail list so esoteric that it has attracted the attention of both the New Yorker and the New York Health Department. A Rabbit Hole must be one of their signature drinks.