“We dream. We make reality with our dreams.”
Outside, smoke is blackening the sky from what I swear is the cone of a small volcano. Ash falls from the sky like dirty snow.
She raps her knuckles on the table. She pats the couch.
“See this? And this? We did this. There wouldn’t be anything here without us.”
“You’re telling me you’re God.”
“Don’t be stupid. Okay. We don’t actually make reality. We just dream the forms and give them substance so they don’t blow away.”
A jet turns from the volcanic plume, heading out to sea, trailing thick smoke from one engine.
“You’re telling me that the world is run by a bunch of catnapping party girls and club boys?”
She sets down the glass and lets her head loll back.
“Not all reality. And some of the dreamers are old. There’s houses all over the world. But ours is the biggest. Duh. Hollywood. The big dream machine. This is where the world’s imagination lives. The power spot for collective unconscious. All that crap. Anyway we’re here and it works, so why fuck with it, you know?”
“I’ve never heard of you. Does everybody know?”
“Of course not. Just the right ones.”
“How long have you been around?”
“How many birds on a wire? That long.”
I hate these grade school history lessons. They’re embarrassing and they’re my fault. I didn’t want to know how the world worked when I was young. Didn’t want to know about the Sub Rosa or anything they cared about. Then, when I wanted to know, it was too late and I was busy just trying to stay alive Downtown. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Probably always will be.
“Okay. You’re a dreamer and there’s other dreamers and the whole nondreamer world will lose its Rice Krispies if you stop dreaming. Why were you arguing with Cairo about the job?”
“ ’Cause we’re dying. That crazy little ghost bitch has something against us.”
“The Sub Rosas being killed are all dreamers?”
“Mostly.”
“You’re why the sky is like a broken kaleidoscope and Catalina went AWOL.”
She rolls her eyes, trying to be sarcastic, but she just looks drunk and scared.
“Now you get it. Murder is a downer and people get scared. Sometimes there aren’t enough of us in any one place to hold reality together right.”
“Does Cairo blame you for reality breaking down? Is that what the fight was about?”
“No.”
She gets up and goes for more Aqua Regia. I cut her off and pour regular wine into her glass.
“Ooh. A gentleman.”
“I don’t want you to melt your brain too soon.”
“Whatever, dude.”
She drops onto the couch.
“King wants me to quit or leave town. I tried telling him what I do isn’t a job. It’s like a vocation. It’s what I am. I dream. That’s it. But he says he’s working for people who want to get rid of us regulars. Take over and put in their own dreamers. I thought he was just talking big. He does that sometimes.”
What do you know? Cairo isn’t a complete monster after all. Just a coward.
“Maybe he was trying to protect you by telling you to get out of town. If someone is using a ghost to kill dreamers, when the little girl appeared, he probably knew he couldn’t fight her.”
“He knew she was going to kill me and he left me to that little bitch? That fucker.”
“Who runs the dreamers?”
“Big wheels in the Sub Rosa. Who else?”
“What happens if you stopped dreaming? If all of you in L.A. stopped completely.”
“If we go down, the dominoes start falling. Ping. Ping. Ping.”
She flicks her fingers, knocking over imaginary dominoes in the air.
“I don’t know that the other houses can keep the whole world together without us. Next thing you know, nothing is what it used to be and then I don’t know. Maybe we all just disappear. No one knows because it’s never happened.”
“Who in the Sub Rosa is in charge? Blackburn?”
“Do I look like Google? Go buy a fucking laptop.”
My arm is starting to hurt. I get my own glass of Aqua Regia and walk around until I find some Maledictions. I take the pack back to the table, tap one out, and try to light it one-handed. Patty snickers at me. Takes the cigarette, puts it in my mouth, lights it, and hands it back to me.
“Thanks.”
“No worries. I’d’ve done it for a dog.”
My head is spinning a little. Not with pain or liquor but with all that’s going on. Not to mention worrying about Candy. I check the time. Too soon to call the clinic, goddammit.
“So someone is trying to replace the current dreamers or kill them off. Cairo is working with them but he can’t use his muscle because that would bring down the heat and whoever is running him knows he’d squeal like a piglet. That means whoever is behind all this also controls the girl. You can’t arrest or kill a crazy ghost. She’s a good cover. And maybe you kill a few nondreamers to make the killings look random. It’s all for the greater good, right?”
“If you say so.”
“I say so because I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind this. The question is why does an angel care about our reality? Tell me this. If you’re walking around with your boyfriend, then dreamers must work in shifts, right?”
“Yeah. Two days on and three days off so we get our heads back together.”
“Where do you do your dreaming?”
She sits up, almost spilling her wine. She points to what she thinks is north. It’s not.
“There’s a place in Universal City. Near the movie studio. It looks like a regular office building. Really boring on the outside. Like camouflage, you know? The tour buses go right by it. We’re in there.”
“Has anyone been attacked around there?”
“No.”
Good. That means the building has good protection against spirits.
“You should go there and stay and get the others to do the same. As long as you’re inside, the girl can’t get you or she would have done it already.”
“Anything you say, Sir Galahad.”
“Goddamn arm.”
I need both hands to tie the towel tighter, but if I hold the cigarette between my lips, the smoke goes straight up my nose and I can’t set it down now because the towel will come off completely.
Patty comes around the table.
“Let me help you. Goddamn men. They can tie you to a bed but you can’t do up your own shoes.”
“Thanks. I’m usually a fast healer. It should have stopped bleeding by now.”
“Shoulda woulda coulda,” she says. “Since like you said we’re all BFFs now and I can ask things I always wanted to know, what the hell kind of name is Sandman Slim?”
“Well, I’m not fat.”
“I grasped that.”
She gets the knot good and tight. Then sits back to admire her handiwork.
“They used to watch a lot of old movies in Hell before the cable went out. A Sandman is an old B-movie word for ‘hit man.’ ”
“Oh. Okay. Wait. They have cable in Hell?”
“Now they do. It was out but we got it working again.”
Patty doesn’t hear or has lost interest in what we’ve been talking about.
She says, “This looks like a nice hotel. Don’t they have a doctor or something?”
That’s what happens to you when you spend eleven years in the arena tending your own wounds. When you’re hurt, you look around for rags and string to hold whatever part of you is fa
lling out on that particular day. A doctor is way down on the list of things you think about when you’re a gladiator slave. Lucifer, on the other hand, wants a whole team of neurosurgeons flown in from Switzerland and he wants them now.
I dial the hotel phone.
“Yes, Mr. Macheath.”
“I need the hotel doctor. Do you have one?”
“Not one to tend your, um, special needs.”
“I’ll take a seamstress and a nurse right now. Send up whatever you’ve got. Tell them to keep their eyes closed. I’ll bring them in the clock.”
“Very good, sir.”
I’m bleeding all over the nice furniture and Candy is hurt and L.A. is being buried in volcanic ash. I wonder what’s going on in the rest of the world. I’m formulating a new mantra. WWWBD. What Would Wild Bill Do? I can’t burn down Cairo like I did when I set Josef and the skinheads on fire. I’ll have to kill him later. And I don’t know where Aelita is. The little girl is the only clear line to anything I’ve got, and if she isn’t out slicing and dicing, I know where she’ll be. That’s what Bill would do. If he couldn’t find the head of the bad guys, he’d find the arms and break them. It’s time to say hola to the Imp of Madrid.
“When the doctor leaves, we’ll get you to the dreamer safe house.”
“Okay. Is it all right if I take a nap while we’re waiting?”
“I’ll get you some aspirin. You’re going to need them.”
After the hotel doc stitches me up, I take Patty downstairs and we catch a cab just like regular schmucks. No limos today. I don’t want anyone at the hotel knowing where we’re going. All the cabbie will see is me taking my half-tanked squeeze to Universal to throw up on the big plastic shark.
The hotel is practically empty. Even in L.A., the Apocalypse is bad for business.
The freeway north is a joke. Angelinos and tourists are fleeing the city, locking traffic in a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic like a university experiment demonstrating just how impossible it is to flee L.A. And it’s not like the sky is any closer to normal up here. Clouds shoot overhead at double speed, like the whole sky is on fast-forward. The volcano and ash have disappeared as cleanly and thoroughly as Catalina but it seems to have made an impression on the unwashed. If that wasn’t enough, the cabbie’s radio explains how as part of its clever plan to panic even the nonpanicked population, the powers that be have shut down both LAX and the Burbank Airport.
I have the cabbie drop us off by the office buildings at the edge of Universal City. Instead of heading back in to town, the cab gets on the freeway north with the other abandon-the-ship types.
Patty leads us into the heart of Universal City, past huge glass buildings and to a squat four-floor building hidden behind a row of trees, just off the regular tourist route. There’s a guard station but it’s empty. I get the feeling the big office towers are deserted too.
Patty takes a pass card from her purse and lets us in. She seems perfectly sober now. The girl can hold her liquor. I’ve never seen anyone mix Hellion and civilian booze before. I hope she doesn’t explode and destroy the rest of the world.
The first floor of the dreamers’ building looks like any unfinished office space. A big open area with cable for DSL and phones. A couple of offices roughed in at the back. Walls a neutral shade of suicide beige. How could you work in one of these places and not seriously consider going apeshit postal at least once? An optional murder-suicide pact ought to be part of the hiring agreement right next to the 401(k) plan.
The stairway to the second floor is locked. Patty waves her card again and the door clicks open.
It’s dark inside and smells faintly of asphodel and belladonna. Forgetting and stimulation. Sounds like a party to me.
A cobweb brushes my face. I start to push it away but Patty says, “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of them.”
Through the dark I see more of the webs. They grow thicker the higher we climb. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see that they’re not webs. They’re long, almost invisible filaments, like fishing line. Only they seem to hum and whisper.
“It sounds like they’re talking to each other.”
Patty glances back over her shoulder.
“Good ears. They’re alive. When we’re asleep, our nervous systems merge with the Big Collective and these nerves broadcast our dreams.”
The second floor is a neural obstacle course. Most of the nerves are bundled along the walls like computer cords but the densest bunch run out from a twelve-sided wood-and-brass enclosure in the middle of the room.
A room off this one is a small but comfortable-looking rest area with a fridge, a massage table, and big overstuffed chairs.
The floor around the wooden enclosure is inlaid with the images of silver arches. The twelve vaults of Heaven. Patty touches each door as she walks around the big toy box. And stops by one. She pulls it open.
“Someone isn’t here today. Johnny Zed is supposed to be in here. I hope he’s all right.”
Inside the chamber is a fleshy pitcher-shaped pod of clear fluid. Nerve filaments drift inside like pale seaweed.
“This is it,” says Patty. “Dreamer central.”
“You get in there?”
“Strip down for a two-day skinny-dip. It’s not bad. It’s warm and you don’t feel a thing. You just float there. A womb with a view.”
“What do you dream about?”
“It’s hard to describe. It’s not things so much as the places between them. I wouldn’t dream of a table or you. I dream about big empty spaces. The hollow parts inside things. The atoms and molecules. I don’t dream about how fucked up things are out here but how perfect things are when you go deep down inside them.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Want to strip down and try it? You’re a little tightly wound, you know. It would probably do you some good.”
“What’s the dreamer safeword?”
She does a mock sigh.
“You’ve been to Hell but won’t even give Heaven a try. Silly boy.”
She closes the door and crosses her arms, looking serious for the first time since I got her away from the ghost.
“What happens now?”
“What happens is you stay here. Go inside the Silly Putty and try to calm down the sky a little or just hang around the lounge. I’ll see what I can do about the little girl. Don’t leave until you hear from me.”
I start back down the stairs, stepping carefully around the dreamers’ nerves.
“Hey, Sandman,” says Patty from the top of the stairs. “Thanks for today. You didn’t have to do all that.”
“No problem. I’d have done it for a dog.”
She smiles and goes into the lounge.
I take a cab to Max Overdrive. Thank God for cabbies. People joke that when the world ends, all that’ll be left are the roaches. They forget about the cabbies. As long as the roaches have money to pay or something to trade, the cabbies will be there to drive them from their roach motels to their roach offices and out to the roach suburbs, slamming on the brakes, cursing out the window, and overcharging them all the way.
The freeway into the city is almost empty, so we make good time. I go into the store through the front door, careful to step around the hexes.
Kasabian must have heard me come in because he isn’t surprised to see me.
“Come to check if the Glory Stompers came back and finished me off?”
“Remember when you said I should have been unreasonable and ignored you the other night?”
“Yeah?” he says, looking more nervous than I’ve seen him since I cut off his h
ead.
“You got your wish. Get your gear together. You’re coming with me.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere safe. Those guys who broke in here are trying to change the entire fabric of reality and they’re using hit squads and a crazy little ghost with a great big fucking knife. You want out of harm’s way, you come with me right now.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“Of course I care. You know where my money is.”
“It’s my money. Does this hovel have cable, because if I have to stay with you I’ll need a lot of distraction.”
“It’s nice as hovels go. There’s indoor toilets and everything.”
Kasabian doesn’t want to go with me but he doesn’t want to stay in the store on his own anymore. He slowly closes his laptop. He’s trying to figure out a way to get me to stay so he doesn’t have to leave, especially on a gimp leg. He drums his fingers on the desk and gives up.
“There’s a tracksuit on the floor next to the bed.”
He has to struggle into the suit because of his leg. I don’t offer to help because I’m not in the mood to get barked at. It takes him a few minutes and he’s sweating but he finally gets the clothes on.
“You look like you’re in the Russian Mob.”
“Yeah? Then carry my crap, Comrade. I’m a cripple.”
We take the same cab back to the Chateau. When I take Kasabian through the clock, he just stands there looking the place over. The celebrity-magazine furniture. The trays of food and booze. The thick robe Candy tossed over the arm of a chair. The epic bedroom with a closet full of clothes.
He limps back into the main room. Holds out his arms and drops them in exasperation.
Finally he says, “Fuck you.”
“Mi casa es su casa blah blah blah.”
“Fuck you.”
“There’s food over there.”
He goes to the spread, balancing himself on furniture on the way over. He looks at it and turns.
I say, “I know. Fuck me. Quit whining. It’s your lucky night. You’re going to help me commit suicide.”
“Goody.”
My new chest scar itches at the thought of me hurting myself again but I don’t have a lot of choices.
Devil Said Bang ss-4 Page 28
