by John Shirley
He thought he recognized the dwarf coming out of the mist, trotting towards him, and then the big guy behind, looming over the little one, almost trampling him ... and since they obviously weren’t cops, they were probably guys he had put away at some point. Just talking to them might be violating probation.
“Fuck off,” he said, and stepped onto the bus.
He saw passengers, mostly old folks, but no driver. Steering wheel, space for emergency manual, but it had a self-directive console in place of the driver’s seat. Driverless bus. New thing. The tech had been around for a long time but there had been a few unions left when they’d put him under and the bus driver’s union had been one. When they’d taken him into UnMinding there’d been talk of privatizing mass transit. Talk of how much better that’d be. Must’ve privatized bus lines. No more unions, no more bus driver.
Just four years ...
He swiped the card. “Fare extracted,” the bus said, gently, sounding somehow uncannily maternal; as if it truly cared. “Destination?”
“Um ...” Last known, last known, was—what? “Terwilliger and Sunset.”
“I can take you to within five blocks of that location,” said the bus. “As that is an area known to be High Risk, please use caution.”
Candle half expected the dwarf to follow him onto the bus, but it didn’t happen. When he found his seat, he looked through the window for the little guy and the big guy in the van. No sign of them.
The steering wheel began its ghostly movement as the bus creaked softly into motion. What’d they need the steering wheel at all? Maybe in an emergency it could still be driven manually. Maybe for psychological comfort.
Nodder and Shortstack stared after the bus.
“Oh dear,” Nodder said, “this is so inconvenient.”
“So, we going to follow him or what?”
“No, actually,” Halido said, striding up behind them. “You two rat’s assholes are not going to follow him. Now me, I’ll be taking the man to his friends, all in good time, when they’re ready to see him. You two, on the other hand, drive out of here, in the other direction. Now. Right now.”
“His ‘friends’?” Shortstack said, looking Halido up and down. Mostly up. “He used to arrest some bottom feeders like you, but he never actually hung out with them, not so far as I know. Here’s a suggestion for you—and if I were you, I’d take this under serious advisement: Go ... fuck ... yourself.”
Shortstack was waiting for it when Halido reached into his coat for the gun—and the dwarf stepped up to him, grabbed Halido around the knees, and heaved him up ... and over ... bodily.
And threw him forty feet through the air.
Halido flying end over end–” Holy shit!” he blurted, as he tumbled. You didn’t see a lot of dwarves enhanced for extra strength. Surprised him.
Then he slammed into the roof of his sedan, face down, nose bloody, all the breath knocked out of him. Leaving a dent.
Shortstack and Nodder—who rarely “nodded” in moments of physical concentration when he had adrenaline working for him—got into their van and started after the bus.
“Uh,” Halido said, “Uh yuh ... uh ... fuh ... ckers ...”
The bus broke down before they’d quite got to Candle’s stop.
It ground to a halt and he got out of his seat to bend over, look through the windows. Was this really the right neighborhood? He wasn’t sure he remembered, for certain, where Danny’s girlfriend had lived. He remembered her, though. You couldn’t forget her, not easily.
It had stopped raining, he saw, and the streets outside the bus were silver-slick as snail tracks. It rained more now in Los Angles, since global warming really got going good; some places that had been rainy got nakedly dry; some places that had been like tanning lamps suddenly got all wet and spongy. It was more like Mississippi, now, in Southern California, than the Los Angeles he remembered from his childhood.
“Happens at least once a damn week,” said an elderly black woman in a white nurse’s uniform, getting off ahead of him. “Bus breaking down every damn ...” She seemed wobbly, so he tried to help her down the steps. She jerked her arm away from him. “Don’t be touching me or I’ll yell for a damn cop!” she snarled, her cube of white hair bobbing with each emphatic syllable.
(Were those cubistic hair styles on women around four years ago?)
Candle almost said, I am a cop, lady. And then he remembered. “Sorry. Just trying to help.”
“Damn buses don’t run anymore,” she muttered, stalking away. “Cost them money to fix them, they say. Got to make a profit, can’t be fixin’ the buses. White people got the plan, alright! Dumb cracker sons of bitches.”
She went to the left, he went right, looking at the street corners, trying to remember. Right should go to the warehouses, the lofts, the art district. Maybe to Danny.
Yes, this was the neighborhood. All the posters for impromptu art shows, guerilla galleries, slapped up helter-skelter on the walls, one atop the next. Most of the posters were static; the animated ones were too expensive for actual artists to afford. He saw just two micro-animated posters, with moving images: a woman with spiky green and blue hair running from a cop, then turning and chasing the cop, who ran away; then the sequence started over.
A few more blocks, and he saw the building to his left. They’d painted it purple, around the last time he was there. It was still, more or less, purple.
Candle approached the front door of the warehouse building—once a warehouse, now a decaying loft conversion. There were three doors, dividing the place into thirds. He started to ring the buzzer at the first one—a twentieth-century century relic, that buzzer—and his hand froze over the button at the sound of a woman’s voice from a window overhead.
“Double-you-tee-eff. If that’s who I think it is, you better have my money, troll!”
She was looking down from an old wood-frame, paint-smeared window, half open. A pale woman, maybe 35, with a spade-shaped face; straight, medium-length hair that was red toward the roots, segueing to blue and then to green and then to transparent near the ends; red and black striped lipstick. He could see part of her flickering screenshirt, quotes in French bouncing around on her chest. He caught the phrase “fleurs du mal.” Flowers of evil: she was wearing a Baudelaire screenshirt. Moving posters he’d seen but moving pictures on shirts were new to him—he’d just seen his first one on the bus.
“Just four years,” Candle muttered again, staring at her chest, “and that’s new, too.”
“These are the tits I was born with, asshole. You got my money?”
“I meant ... I didn’t mean that. About your ... forget it.” He squinted up at her. “You remember me, don’t you? It hasn’t been all that long.”
“What? Yeah I know who you are. What do you think, Richard? But you didn’t answer my question! You’re his brother so you’re responsible–”
“Could you come down here? I don’t want to shout and I’m getting a crick.”
She glared at him and said something he couldn’t quite make out, maybe something about getting “a fucking Watson to go with it”, then left the window.
In a minute she was unlocking the door and glaring at him from just inside. “You don’t remember me?” she said looking at him coldly, her voice flat. She had changed her look a good deal.
“Um–yeah. You’re–”
“In your empty head I should be filed under ‘Danny’s Girlfriends’. A thick file, sure, but look under Z for Zilia.”
“That much I remember.” And he remembered a sexual tension, between her and him. Neither one doing anything about it.
“Well Richard, Danny owes me money and I can’t find him and you’re his brother so now you owe me, far as I’m concerned, hode.” She seemed like she was trying to come across harder than she was.
Candle just nodded. In a very noncommittal way. “How about I come in and we talk about it?”
“Why should I let you in? You might bring Danny back here. I
don’t want him here, just his money. You can go get the money he owes me and bring it back to me. And give it to me through the old mailbox slot. That’s what we use it for, packages and payment cards and shit like that.”
“You should let me in because I want to find Danny and if I can sit down and talk it out with you, I figure that’ll, you know, help me find him. And maybe that’ll help you too. And I need to sit down somewhere. They just–”
“Oh shut up and come in.”
A buzzer sounded and the door popped open. And he went in, and climbed the old, bowed, wooden steps, through a smell of moldy dust, to the second floor apartment, thinking:
Anyway, it sounds like Danny’s still alive.
That was a start. He hadn’t really expected his kid brother to still be alive ...
THIS REFINED EXPRESSION OF ME, IN LIT’RATURE TALK ... IS
CHAPTER THREE
Digital paintings on her walls cycled through montages. The big, barely furnished room had lots of open space; there were workstations, a sofa, and, in a farther corner, a folding Japanese landscape-art screen partly concealing a futon. The space was gloomy, the light yellowed by shades the color of hepatitis; window shades on actual rollers that must have been fifty years old. Candle was drawn to one of the digital paintings: an image of his brother Danny, Skinny, his grin looking too wide for his face, his hair a jet-black explosion. As Candle watched, the grin in the animated painting widened and became a monstrous mouth that tore free and flew around Danny’s head like a bat; mouthless, Danny chased the runaway grin, with his hair growing into seaweed that twined his legs and tripped him until he melted into a floor that became a sea ... and then it started over.
“Do I detect a shade of hostility toward my little brother in your presentation?” Candle asked, smiling, as he watched the images cycle through again. He saw a signature, Zilia, appear, disappear, reappear in a corner of the image.
“Could be.” Zilia’s tone was softer, with Candle looking at her artwork. She stood beside him, looking at the montage. “I did that one about three, almost four years ago ... after they took you off to never-never land ... Hey—do you feel anything when they do that, when they, what, UnMind you? I mean—do you have dreams or, you know–”
“Nothing. You’re just not there. Or so barely there it doesn’t count. Your body follows orders but your mind doesn’t know it.” Getting the questions out of the way so they could drop the subject. “Not much side effect, after. Some of my memories of before are a little foggy but they come back. But I’d, uh, actually–”
“You’d rather not talk about it. No doubt. Here, surf it out.” She hit the series cycle tab on the frame of the painting. “There’s a bunch more cycles under this one.”
He watched the video-painting looping scene after scene. Now it was Danny playing a Stratocaster for Jerome-X, live on stage, wearing black rubber and strips of wild-dog fur. He was leaping, laughing, jamming the pegboard of the guitar at the camera between licks ... The image shifted to another performance, Danny dancing, wearing only briefs and big black work-boots, kicking holes in a plaster wall behind the amplifiers. Then Danny in his bedroom, reading intently but obviously stoned, lips moving silently, probably reading the same lines over and over again. Then Danny lost in childlike intensity, playing with that orange tabby he used to have. The one that drooled as it nursed on your sweater, until all of a sudden it drove its claws into you.
“That cat always reminded me of Danny,” Zilia said, softly. “Danny’s moods were always larger than life.”
“How much did he take you for?” Candle asked, never wondering if the debt was genuine. It was Danny, after all.
“He owes me seven months back rent plus about a thousand WD in loans.”
“He went easy on you.”
Candle walked around the mostly empty loft, talking to her as he went, looking for traces of his brother. Computers and pieces of computers, scanners, cams, an empty, paint-splashed easel from a period of working with real oils. Noticing more details: an old refridgerator, looking out of place near the screen and futon and an antique armoire; two antique floor lamps modified for modern powersave bulbs; and Chinese-food cartons. Looked like she never bothered to dust the place. Artist’s lofts didn’t change much.
“Welllll, Zilia—here’s my story. I haven’t got any money to speak of and I don’t think that’s what you want, anyway. But ...” He turned to look at her. “I don’t know where he is either. I thought he’d be here.”
She turned away from him, went to a fridge, and took out a bottle of white wine. She uncorked it, drank a little straight from the bottle and passed it to him. “I heard he’s getting a gig again, somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s going to be. Hey, you know what—I got some holo stuff of you and Danny. You want to see it?”
He drank some wine. It tasted good, though it was cheap. “Cost me money to see it?”
“I guess not.”
She crossed to her work table. He watched her, discreetly as he could, his memories of her coming back online in his head. The nearest tumble of gear was some kind of holo projector. She blew dust off the lens with an air-can, tapped a code into the selector, hit play. “There, surf that.” An image of Candle appeared in mid-air, alone, sitting on the couch, signal corruption making him move herky-jerky strobelike as he leaned back and waved his hand, yelled “No!”, laughing at someone out of the snow-edged frame, the sound warped and staticky.
Danny, the long-ago Danny, stepped into the shot, but his image was corrupted, almost lost. Candle shivered at the omen.
Zilia muttered, “Fuck the shitter-shatter, hode ...” And reset the projector, and this time the signal came through intact and she went to work at the other end of the table, screwing cryptic chrome and rubber parts together, saying only: “You can watch the holo, Rick, but just don’t hang around all day.”
Girl knows how to make a guy feel wanted.
He perched uncomfortably on the edge of a sofa and watched as he and his brother appeared in mid-rez 3D. It was a translucent image shafted by present day light and dirty air: the Candle brothers sitting together on this same beat-up olive-colored sofa, Danny whanging away on acoustic guitar, both of them already drunk ... The dust in Zilia’s loft spinning through their heads like the drunkenness ...
Oh. That day. Candle remembered they’d all been drinking, Zilia had come in with the holocam, wanting to experiment with her new-tech toy, and he and Danny had said “Whatever!” at precisely the same moment, both of them cracking up over that.
On the holo, Danny paused to take a drink from a pint of Jack, then strummed sloppily on the pick-scored Martin, slapping out a bluesy kind of boogie.
“Okay now Rick–”
“No, no fucking haps, you gotta no-buy here,” Candle laughed, shaking his head. “Uh uh, hode.”
“Yeah, way, haps, do-buy, we’re gonna do it, come on Rick–” He started singing, quite well.
“I used to see ya
flouncing the lower mall
I used to wait n wait n wait
to see if you’d call
It was always ‘Later boy, later
The windows are like invaders’–”
(“Okay, Rick, here it comes, be ready, here’s a chorus–” )
“I hooked in and found ya—
Waitin’ on level five:
That’s where I go to meet
Any other man’s wife ...
Just any other man’s wife!”
Both of them singing now; Rick Candle painfully off key. “I hooked in and found ya on level five, that’s where I go to meet any other man’s wife! Ohhhhh yeah—and all that shit!”
They both fell of the couch, laughing hysterically.
“FUUUUUUUUUCK!” Candle hooted, in the holo.
“Ugh ...” Danny dropped the guitar on an invisible cof-feetable—the holo cam hadn’t picked the table up. The guitar twanged hollowly in protest when it was dropped. Danny saying, softer: “Rick—how
come?”
“How come I can’t sing? You got the chromosome and I didn’t. Injustice, man ...”
“No. How come. Why. Why’d you come to get me out of the j-pen? You hadn’t seen me for, like, two years. I was 17, I woulda been released on my own in a few months ...”
“I dunno, that was a long time ago ...” He picked up the pint bottle. “Shit, empty. Um ... I dunno ... You’re my brother, Danny, Christ. And, you know, those j-pen camps suck. I’d have come sooner but, uh, I thought mom had taken you off somewhere. Then I heard she was dead. So I traced you to the j-pen.”
“I’m a fucking pain in the ass to live with ...”
“It’s okay to grow up slow ...”
“Yeah, but, you know, it’s only because I’m your brother, you got a sense of obligation. I mean—Rick—you don’t have to feel no fuckin’ sense of obligation, you know?”
Watching now, Candle realized that Danny was asking, over and over, for the same message. Waiting to hear that his brother accepted him. Wanted him around, cared about him. Cared no matter what he was, no matter what he had done. Willing to make sacrifices for him. He’d never got that message from his old man. Especially the sacrifices part. There’d always been a sense that he was his dad’s burden. And that there was only so far Dad was willing to carry it.
“It’s not obligation,” Candle said, in the holo. “You’re important to me.” It was hard to say, between two men. They weren’t emos. But Candle said it, as overtly as he could, though he couldn’t say it and look at Danny too: “You’re my brother and my friend, you know?”
Danny looked away—and now, seeing the thing on holo from another visual angle, Candle could see the tears he hadn’t been able to see back then.
Then Danny laughed it off, getting his machismo back online. “What a load of Happycrap! Okay–” He picked up the guitar, whanging. “—one mo’ time! ‘I hooked in and found you on level five—’ Come on, Rick—Sing it out!”
