Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  “I know what you mean,” she said, in desperation buying a waxpaper cup of beer. “You must be thirsty after that monologue. Here.” She shoved the foaming cup under his nose.

  “Talking too much. Sorry.” He drank off half the beer in three gulps, took a breath, finished it, and it was paradise for a moment. A wave of quietude soothed him—and then evaporated mesc burned through again. Yeah, he was wired.

  “I don’t mind listening to you talk,” she said, “except you might say too much, and I’m not sure if we’re being scanned.”

  Rickenharp nodded sheepishly, and they walked on. He crushed the cup in his hand, began methodically to shred it as they went.

  Rickenharp luxuriated in the colors of the place, colors that mixed and washed over the crowd, making the stream of hats and heads into a living swatch of iridescent gingham; shining the cars into multicolored lumps of mobile ice.

  You take the word lurid, Rickenharp thought, and you put it raw in a vat filled with the juice of the word appeal. You leave it and let the acids of appeal leach the colors out of lurid, so that you get a kind of gasoline rainbow on the surface of the vat. You extract the petro-rainbow on the surface of the vat with cheesecloth and strain it into a glass tube, dilute heavily with oil of cartoon innocence and extract of pure subjectivity. Now run a current through the glass tube and all the other tubes of the neon signs interlacing Freezone’s Walk.

  The Walk, stretching ahead of them, was itself almost a tube of colored lights, converging in a kaleidoscope; the concave fronts of the buildings to either side were flashing with a dozen varieties of signs. The sensual flow of neon data in primary colors was broken at cunningly irregular intervals by stark trademark signs: Synthlife Systems and Microsoft-Apple and Nike and Coca-Cola and Warner Amex and NASA Chemco and Brazilian Exports Intl and Exxon Electrics and Nessio. In all of that only one hint of the war: two unlit signs, Fabrizzio and Allinne—an Italian and a French company, killed by the Russian blockades. The signs were unlit, dead.

  They passed a TV-shirt shop; tourists walked out with their shirts flashing video imagery, fiberoptics woven into the shirtfront playing the moving sequence of your choice.

  Sidewalk hawkers of every race sold beta candy spiked with endorphins; sold shellfish from Freezone’s own beds, tempura’d and skewered; sold holocube pornography key rings; sold instapix of you and your wife, oh that’s your boyfriend . . . Despite the nearness of Africa, black Africans were few here: Freezone Admin considered them a security risk and few on the contiguous coast could afford the trip. The tourists were mostly Japanese, Canadian, Brazilians—riding the crest of the Brazilian boom—South Koreans, Chinese, Arabs, Israelis, and a smattering of Americans; damned few Americans anymore, with the depression. Screens scanned them, one of them caught Rickenharp with a facial recognition program and on it a sexy animated Asian woman cooed, “Rick Rickenharp—try Wilcox Subsensors and walk in a glow of excitement . . . ”

  As they got deeper into the Walk the atmosphere became even more hot-house. It was a multicolored steam bath. The air was sultry, the various smokes of the place warping the neon glow, filtering and smearing the colors of signs and TV shirts and DayGlo jewelry. High up, between the not-quite-fitted jigsaw parts of signs and lights, were blue-black slices of night sky. At street level the jumble was given shape and borders by the doors opening on either side: by people using the doors to check out malls and stimsmoke parlors and memento shops and cubey theaters and, especially, tingler galleries. Dealers drifted up like reef fish, nibbling and moving on, pausing to offer, “DH, gotcher good Dee Ech”: Direct Hookup, illegal cerebral pleasure center stimulation. And drugs: synth-cocaine and smokeable herbs; stims, and downs. About half of the dealers were burn artists, selling baking soda or pseudostims. The dealers tended to hang on to Rickenharp and Carmen because they looked like users, and Carmen was wearing a sniffer. Blue mesc and sniffers were illegal, but so were lots of things the Freezone cops ignored. You could wear a sniffer, carry the stuff, but the understanding was, you don’t use it openly, you step into someplace discreet.

  And whores of both sexes cruised the street, flagrantly soliciting. Freezone Admin was supposed to regulate all prostitution, but black-market pros were tolerated as long as somebody paid off the beat security and as long as they didn’t get too numerous.

  The crowd streaming past was a perpetually unfolding revelation of human variety. It unfolded again and a specialty pimp appeared, pushing a man and woman ahead of him; they had to hobble because they were straitjacket-packaged in black-rubber bondage gear. Their faces were ciphers in blank black-rubber masks; aluminum racks held their mouths wide-open, intended to be inviting, but to Rickenharp whispered to Carmen, “Victims of a mad orthodontist!” and she laughed.

  Studded down the streets were Freezone security guards in bullet-proofed uniforms that made Rickenharp think of baseball umpires, faces caged in helmets. Their guns were locked by combination into their holsters; they were trained to open the four-digit combination in one second.

  Mostly they stood around, gossiped on their helmet radios. Now two of them hassled a sidewalk three-card-monte artist—a withered little black guy who couldn’t afford the baksheesh—pushing him back and forth between them, bantering one another through helmet amplifiers, their voices booming over the discothud from the speakers on the download shops:

  “WHAT THE FUCK YOU DOING ON MY BEAT SCUMBAG. HEY BILL YOU KNOW WHAT THIS GUY’S DOING ON MY BEAT.”

  “FUCK NO I DUNNO WHAT’S HE DOING ON YOUR BEAT.”

  “HE’S MAKlNG ME SICK WITH THIS RIP-OFF MONTE BULLSHIT IS WHAT HE’S DOING.”

  One of them hit the guy too hard with the waldo-enhanced arm of his riot suit and the monte dealer spun to the ground like a top running out of momentum, out cold.

  “LOITERING ON THE ZONE’S WALKS, YOU SEE THAT BILL.”

  “I SEE AND IT MAKES ME SICK JIM.”

  The bulls dragged the little guy by the ankle to a lozenge-shaped kiosk in the street and pushed him into a man-capsule. They sealed the capsule, scribbled out a report, pasted it onto the capsule’s hard plastic hull. Then they shoved the man-capsule into the kiosk’s chute. The capsule was sucked by mail-tube principle to Freezone Lockup.

  “Looks like they’re using some kind of garbage disposal to get rid of people here,” Carmen said when they were past the cops.

  Rickenharp looked at her. “You weren’t nervous walking by the cops. So it’s not them we’re avoiding, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “You wanna tell me who it is we’re supposed to be avoiding?”

  “Uh-uh, I do not.”

  “How do you know these out-of-town cops you’re worried about haven’t gone to the locals and recruited some help?”

  “Yukio says they won’t, they don’t want anybody to scan what they’re doing here because the Freezone admin don’t like ’em.”

  Rickenharp guessed: the who they were avoiding was the Second Alliance. Freezone’s chairman was Jewish. The Second Alliance could meet in Freezone—the idea was, the place was open to anyone for meetings, or recreation; anyone, even people the Freezone boss would like to see gassed—but the SA couldn’t operate here, except covertly.

  The fucking SA bulls! Shit! . . . The blue mesc worked with his paranoia. Adrenaline spurted, making his heart bang. He began to feel claustrophobic in the crowd; began to see patterns in the movement around him, patterns charged with meaning superimposed by his own fear-galvanized mind. Patterns that taunted him with, The SA’s close behind. He felt a stomach-churning combination of horror and elation.

  All night he’d worked hard at suppressing thoughts of the band. And of his failure to make the band work. He’d lost the band. And it was almost impossible to make anyone understand why that was, to him, like a man losing his wife and children. And there was the career. All those years of pushing for that band, struggling to program a place for it in the Grid. Shot to hell now, his identity along with it. He knew, somehow, t
hat it would be futile to try to put together another band. The Grid just didn’t want him; and he didn’t want the fucking Grid. And the elation was this: that ugly pit of displacement inside him closed up, was just gone, when he thought about the SA bulls. The bulls threatened his life, and the threat caught him up in something that made it possible to forget about the band. He’d found a way out.

  But the horror was there, too. If he got caught up in this . . . if the SA bulls got hold of him . . .

  Fuck it. What else did he have?

  He grinned at Carmen, and she looked blankly back at him, wondering what the grin meant.

  So now what? he asked himself. Get to the OmeGaity. Find Frankie. Frankie was the doorway.

  But it was taking so long to get there. Thinking. The drug’s fucking with your sense of duration. Heightened perception makes it seem to take longer.

  The crowd seemed to get thicker, the air hotter, the music louder, the lights brighter. It was getting to Rickenharp. He began to lose the ability to make the distinction between things in his mind and things around him. He began to see himself as an enzyme molecule floating in some macrocosmic bloodstream—the sort of things that always OD’d him when he did an energizing drug in a sensory-overflow environment.

  What am I?

  Sizzling orange-neon arrows on the marquee overhead seemed to crawl off the marquee, slither down the wall, down into the sidewalk, snaking to twine around his ankles, to try to tug him into a tingler emporium. He stopped and stared. The emporium’s display holos writhed with fleshy intertwinings; breasts and buttocks jutted out at him, and he responded against his will, like all the clichés, getting hard in his pants: visual stimuli; monkey see, monkey respond. He thought: Bell rings and dog salivates.

  He looked over his shoulder. Who was that guy with the sunglasses back there? Why was he wearing sunglasses at night? Maybe he’s SA—

  Noooo, man. I’m wearing sunglasses at night. Means nothing.

  He tried to shrug off the paranoia, but somehow it was twined into the undercurrent of sexual excitement. Every time he saw a whore or a pornographic video sign, the paranoia hooked into him as a kind of scorpion stinger on the tail of his adolescent surge of arousal. And he could feel his nerve ends begin to extrude from his skin. After having been clean so long, his-blue mesc tolerance was low.

  Who am I? Am I the crowd?

  He saw Carmen look at something in the street, then whisper urgently to Yukio.

  “What’s the matter?” Rickenharp asked.

  She whispered, “You see that silver thing? Kind of a silvery fluttering? There—over the cab . . . Just look, I don’t wanna point.”

  He looked into the street. A cab was pulling up at the curb. Its electric motor whined as it nosed through a heap of refuse. Its windows were dialed to mercuric opacity. Above and a little behind it a chrome bird hovered, its wings a hummingbird blur. It was about thrush-sized, and it had a camera-lens instead of a head. “I see it. Hard to say whose it is.”

  “I think it’s run from inside that cab. That’s like them. They’ll send it after us from there. Come on.” She ducked into a tingler gallery; Willow and Yukio and Rickenharp followed her. They had to buy a swipe card to get in. A bald, jowly old dude it the counter took the cards, swiped them without looking, his eyes locked on a wrist-TV screen. On his wrist a miniature newscaster was saying in a small tinny voice, “ . . . attempted assassination of SA director Crandall today . . . ” Something mumbled, distorted. “ . . . Crandall is in serious condition and heavily guarded at Freezone Medicenter . . . ”

  The turnstile spun for them and they went into the gallery. Rickenharp heard Willow mutter to Yukio, “The bastard’s still alive.”

  Rickenharp put two and two together.

  The tingler gallery was predominantly fleshtone, every available vertical surface taken up by emulsified nude humanity. As you passed from one photo or holo to the next, you saw the people in them were inverted or splayed or toyed with, turned in a thousand variations on coupling, as if a child had been playing with unclothed dolls and left them scattered. A sodden red light hummed in each booth: the light snagged you, a wavelength calculated to produce sexual curiosity. In each “privacy booth” was a screen and a tingler. An oxygen mask that dropped from a ceiling trap pumped out a combination of amyl nitrite and pheromones. The tingler looked like a twentieth-century vacuum cleaner hose with an oversized salt-shaker top on one end: You watched the pictures, listened to the sounds, and ran the tingler over your erogenous zones; the tingler stimulated the appropriate nerve ends with a subcutaneously penetrative electric field, very precisely attenuated. You could pick out the guys in the health-club showers who’d used a tingler too long: use it more than the “recommended thirty-five-minute limit” and it made your skin look sunburned. One time Rickenharp’s drummer had asked him if he had any lotion: “I got ‘tingler dick,’ man.”

  “To phrase it in the classic manner,” Yukio said abruptly, “is there another way out of here?”

  Rickenharp nodded. “Yeah . . . Uh—somewhere.”

  Willow was staring at a teaser blurb under a still-image of two men, a woman and a goat. He took a step closer, squinting at the goat.

  “You looking for a family resemblance, Willow?” Rickenharp said.

  “Shut your ’ole, ya retro greaser.”

  The booth sensed his nearness: the images on the sample placard began to move, bending, licking, penetrating, reshaping themselves with a weirdly formalized awkwardness; the booth’s light increased its red glow, puffed out a tease of pheromone and amyl nitrite, trying to seduce him.

  “Well, where is the other door?” Carmen hissed.

  “Huh?” Rickenharp looked at her. “Oh! I’m sorry, I’m so—uh I’m not sure.” He glanced over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “The bird didn’t follow us in.”

  Yukio murmured, “The electric fields on the tinglers confuse the bird’s guidance system. But we must keep a step ahead.”

  Rickenharp looked around—but he was still stoned: the maze of black booths and fleshtones seemed to twist back on itself, to turn ponderously, as if going down some cubistic drain . . .

  “I will find the other door,” Yukio said. Rickenharp followed him gratefully. He wanted out.

  They hurried through the narrow hall between tingler booths. The customers moved pensively—or strolled with excessive nonchalance—from one booth to another, reading the blurbs, scanning the imagery, sorting through fetishistic indexings for their personal libido codes, not looking at one another except peripherally, carefully avoiding the margins of personal-space.

  Chuffing, sighing music played from somewhere; the red lights were like the glow of blood in a hand held over a bright light. But the place was rigorously Calvinistic in its obstacle course of tacit regulations. And here and there, at the turns in the hot, narrow passageways between rows of booths, bored security guards rocked on their heels and told the browsers, No loitering, please, you can purchase more time at the front desk.

  Rickenharp flashed that the place wanted to drain his sexuality, as if the vacuum-cleaner hoses in the booths were going to vacuum his orgone energy, leave him chilled as a gelding.

  Get the fuck out of here.

  Then he saw EXIT, and they rushed for it, through it.

  They were in an alley. They looked up, around, half expecting to see the metal bird. No bird. Only the gray intersection of styroconcrete planes, stunningly monochrome after the hungry chromatics of the tingler gallery.

  They walked out to the end of the alley, stood for a moment watching the crowd. It was like standing on the bank of a torrent. Then they stepped into it, Rickenharp, blue mesc’d, fantasizing that he was getting wet with the liquefied flesh of the rush of humanity as he steered by sheer instinct to his original objective: the OmeGaity.

  They pushed through the peeling black chessboard doors into the dark mustiness of the OmeGaity’s entrance hall, and Rickenharp gave Carmen his coat to hide her bare brea
sts. “Men only, in here,” he said, “but if you don’t shove your femaleness into their line of sight, they might let us slide.”

  Carmen pulled the jacket on, zipped it up—very carefully—and Rickenharp gave her his dark glasses.

  Rickenharp banged on the window of the screening kiosk beside the locked door that led into the cruising rooms. Beyond the glass, someone looked up from a fat-screen TV. “Hey, Carter,” Rickenharp said.

  “Hey.” Carter grinned at him. Carter was, by his own admission, “a trendy faggot.” He was flexicoated battleship gray with white trim, a minimono style. But the real M’n’Ms would have spurned him for wearing a luminous earring—it blinked through a series of words in tiny green letters—Fuck . . . you . . . if . . . you . . . don’t . . . like . . . it . . . Fuck . . . you . . . if—and they’d have considered that unforgivably “Griddy.” And anyway Carter’s wide, froggish face didn’t fit the svelte minimono look. He looked at Carmen. “No girls, Harpie.”