by Emma Bull
“Not a thing. If you like, I’ll try to trip on my way upstairs.” I wasn’t in the habit of airing the details of my life here, either.
Spangler shook his head, even more disgusted. “Help me with this fucking ladder first.”
I did; then I pulled myself a beer and took the stairs behind the bar two at a time to the sound balcony.
“Robby?” Theo’s voice came around the door as I opened it.
“Nope. Me.”
“Sparrow!” he said, surprised and pleased. “What’re you doing here?”
He’d been cleaning one of the cassette decks; a stick with cotton wadded around it was in his right hand, straight up like a little torch. There was a hand-rolled cigarette balanced and glowing in one corner of his mouth, and I could smell Theo’s mixture of tobacco and marijuana. The air itself seemed to tremble, full of the light of the dozen mismatched candles that he always lit on the balcony.
“I’m watching you undo your work,” I replied.
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, and grimaced. “Well, that’s why I’m cleaning the thing.”
“If I answered that, this conversation would get damned recursive.”
“Instead of just redundant. Glad you’re here, man. We should be able to do some groovy stuff tonight, if we get the crowd.”
Theo’s favorite movies were Wild in the Streets, The Dagger and the Rose, Easy Rider, and Leary. They’d affected his vocabulary. He seemed to glow a little in the semi-gloom; he was wearing a white cotton jacket whose previous owner had been either a waiter or an orderly at an asylum, and a collared knit shirt under it. The VU meters from two tape decks and the mixing board reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses, and Spangler’s floor lights turned his brown bob to auburn. I found myself wondering what less appropriate things shone on him when he wasn’t working. I’d known Theo for about four years, and I had no idea where he lived, or what he did before the moon was up. I hadn’t seen anything strange in that before, but suddenly I was aware of it, and it bothered me. Paranoia, maybe — downtime erasures, walking dead men, vampire hunters, and why shouldn’t I wonder who my acquaintances were when I wasn’t there?
“I may not stay the whole night,” I warned him.
“That’s okay. Maybe Liz’ll come ’round later to fill in.” One of his heels tapped furiously at the leg of the chair he sat in; he seemed unaware of it, as if it were run by a second brain.
After a moment I said, “Also — sometime — some people may come looking for me.” Well, spit it out. “I’m in a little trouble.”
He closed the door on the tape transport and stared at me. It was unnerving to find myself the single focus of all that energy. “Somebody noticed you? Sorry,” he said, in response to my expression, no doubt. “Bad trouble?”
“No, no. Annoying. I just don’t want to be found.”
“Nothin’ easier.” Theo stood up, ambled past me to the door at the top of the stairs, and kicked it shut with a crash. The candle flames leaned wildly. “You’re working, man. Can’t be disturbed.”
“That’s the idea, anyway. But these people may have connections beyond those of mortal men.”
“City connections?” He was rolling the cotton swab hard between his fingers.
“I was thinking of the kind that are supposed to result from sacrificing small animals. But yeah,” I said, remembering Dana’s apartment, “there may be one or two of those, as well.”
Theo nibbled his lower lip. “That’s not good. If it was just the brujo, you hire another brujo. But we bugger the City over here and we’re done, you know that.”
I sat down at the console and powered up the two video decks and the A/B switcher. “They need us. We’re part of the circuses side of the equation.”
He sat down next to me and stared into my face. “What we have here,” he said in the voice of the warden in Cool Hand Luke, “is a failure to think straight. We generate electricity by the grace of God and A. A. Albrecht. I don’t know about God, but Albrecht can shut us down anytime he wants.”
“Theo, what can they do to us? Reroute the river?”
Theo shook his head, sadly. “The City controllers license the hardware, sell the fuel, own twenty-five percent of the metered output and tax the rest, no matter how you make it. What do we do if the inspectors confiscate the generators?” He waved a hand at the quaking flames around the balcony. “Light candles and sing?”
I knew all that. It was why the wind turbine on my roof was disguised as a vent, after all. But the Underbridge had seemed — still seemed — too big, too important, too visible to be at the mercy of the City. “There’d be a stink if we closed.”
“There’s people lined up to run places like this. If the City closes us, they just hand our permit to the next guy, who’ll keep his nose cleaner than we did. And the nightbabies all just move on down the block. Be damned hard on Robby, man.”
I knew all that, too, I suppose. “It’s okay,” I said. Outside the windows, the moon had drowned in the cloud bank. I felt — it took me a moment to figure it out. Lonely. “If anything happens, I’ll keep it away from here.”
“Sorry, Sparrito,” said Theo.
I shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Let’s do some good.”
I had color bars on monitors one and two, and zip-all on number three, which meant that either the third monitor was evil-eyed or the camera in the rigging was. I hoped it was the monitor. The camera was one of maybe five I’d seen in my life, and that only because I’d been looking. It had full remote capabilities and a twenty-X zoom, and I suspected it of having been made to military specs and used to spy on SouthAm dictators. But who am I to judge?
I jiggled connectors, and finally crawled out on the edge of the balcony, lay on my stomach on one of the crossbeams, and, by reaching as far as I could, managed to poke at the camera jacks themselves. The camera swung on its mount, and I grabbed at the beam.
“Watch the fuckin’ lights,” Spangler shouted from somewhere below me. Serve him right if I fell on his head. I wiggled my way backward off the rigging, and checked the monitor. Live, tah dah.
“I hate it when you do that,” Theo observed.
“D’you ever wonder what it was like when this stuff was new?” I asked him, waving at the mixer, the tape decks, the video gear.
Light turned the lenses of his glasses opaque pink. “Crowded,” he said, but his voice made it mean more than that.
The house lights were down, the room was dark, and thunder muttered from miles away. I slapped a tape in one of the decks and faded the image up on the projectors, on both screens at the other end of the room. At the edge of my vision I could see Theo’s hand on the mixing board, bringing up sound as I brought up my video.
“So, don’t let ’em catch you, okay?” Theo said mildly in that last moment as it got too busy to answer him. I don’t know what I would have said anyway.
Strange scratchy sounds moved through the room, hung on moaning bass notes like the lowing of cows lost underwater. The image I’d grabbed to start with was the old black-and-white test pattern and countdown spinner: nine, eight, seven, six… At one it froze and began to melt, iridescent color oozing slowly out of the monochrome rings and crosshairs. Theo would have called the effect “trippy.”
Suddenly Theo segued to his other deck, pulled in something that went thump-thump-thump against a harmonica that went chigga-chigga-chigga. So I switched sources, too; because I knew how Theo’s mind worked, I had a bit ready from a fifty-year-old war movie that put the viewer nose to nose with an assault rifle on full auto. Pull back on bronzed beefcake sneering under his visor, spewing hot lead at whoever it had been that week, budda-budda-budda-thwakow! I grinned at Theo: That for your chigga-chigga. He grinned back and poked the pan controls as a flute riff seared the room and sent me back to my decks for the next image. We were just warming up.
On most nights our partnership would snag on some piece of equipment; something would fail. Everything we
had was old, and hardly any of it was built for the kind of industrial-weight use we gave it. The regular after-closing ritual turned the sound balcony into a repair shop where we fixed anything that had broken during the show. But that night, we had the hoodoo working.
Christopher Lee sank his fangs into someone just as Theo cranked to a horrible reverbed wail from Morticia just as lightning shattered the air between two clouds outside the window. Uma Thurman, with a look that would melt glass, stretched out a glimmering hand to the Beast in the Forman remake of Beauty and, while Theo raised a Zimbabwean singer’s plaintive high note into the rafters, while blown rain broke the view outside into a moiré pattern. Lightning lashed at the City like artillery; Ego’s top was lost in cloud, but the hits on the obelisk shape of the Foshay looked like pointing fingers. Theo put both decks to work at once, overlapping and cutting between something that was entirely percussion and something else that was all singing. I took a feed off the camera, panning the dance floor in dizzy swoops, then zooming in on anyone who took my fancy.
I had a lot of people to choose from. The place seemed to have filled up suddenly; but that only meant I’d been absorbed in what I was doing. Then, on one of my video strafing runs, I noticed a hand waving, an oval of face looking straight at the camera. I zoomed in, startled. “My God,” I said aloud, “it’s Sher.” Sherrea’s pointed chin and big, shadowy eyes, under a mass of black-and-purple headwrap, filled my monitor. Just then she turned to glance at the screens and saw her own profile ten feet high. She turned back to the camera and gave me the finger. “What?” Theo asked.
“It’s someone I know,” I said, loud enough to be heard this time. “I didn’t know she ever came here.”
Theo looked over at the monitor, where Sher was now making some shrugging, inquiring motion. “Oh, Sherrea,” he said, nodding. “Groovy. Take the mix, and I’ll send her up. I need a break.”
And he left, while I was still trying to ask how he knew her, and trying to figure out why I was surprised that he did.
One person can handle all the hardware on the balcony; you just can’t do as much, and it’s not as much fun. I cued up the next song: “They Want My Four-Wheel Drive,” by Los Blues Guys, copy of tape courtesy of my archives. I’d gotten the original from someone who’d brought it from northern Texas, who knew the recording engineer and half the band members. A fine example of the new record distribution system.
Much of the material at the Underbridge was of my providing. It was another thing I weighed on the scales of the Deal: Robert provided the opportunity and a cut of the door, and I repaid him with fresh antique marvels for the customers. Besides, like most collectors, I couldn’t quite keep it all to myself. I needed some appreciative audience to ooh and ahh over the gems.
I was showing the car chase from The French Connection when Sherrea came up. It had taken her too long, and I wondered if Theo had waylaid her and mentioned my personal problems. Joke on Theo — she had the advantage of him on a few points.
“ ’Lo,” she said. “You want me to take audio or video?”
“You know how to run these?” I asked. I had assumed she was a technophobe; most adivinos were. Or at least, I thought they were.
“Santos,” she sighed. I’d never heard anyone sigh that loud before. “You hardware heads all think you need lessons from God to do this. Next time your significator’s gonna be the High Priestess. Audio or video?”
“Video,” I said weakly. “Theo’s had the tunes all night.”
She slid into the chair in front of the A/B switcher, pulled her headwrap off in a heap, and began rummaging for tapes. I began to think of the 27 Various, Reptile Zoo, and pre-detox Lilly Guilder. Or — what kind of music did Sherrea like, anyway? The candlelight caught the embroidery on her rusty-black denim jacket: silks, beads, and metallic thread in Celtic knots, runes, warding symbols. They didn’t seem to have worked against the weather; her shoulders were damp. “How’s the storm?” I asked.
“Just rain, but a helluva lot of it. Theo says somebody’s after you for something.”
Good guess, me. “Did he say that? Not exactly. It’s nothing serious.”
She popped a tape into the B deck and turned to me. “Sure. Robby says you showed up white as a bar of soap and looking like you slept in your clothes. Nothing serious.”
Well, I had slept in my clothes. I noticed, too, that she called him Robby. I felt as if I were looking in the window of some place I used to live in. “Spangler dropped a wrench,” I said.
“Oh, excuse me for asking. I just figured if there was something I could do, maybe you’d like to mention it.” This sounded like Sher being acerbic, which she did often. It also sounded like Sher being hurt. I looked up and met her eyes. Sher wasn’t the sort to avoid eye contact at a moment like that. But I was.
“It’s no big thing,” I said, changing the tape bias on one machine, then changing it back. “It’s taken care of.”
She brought up B deck: a series of shots of the head of a daisy, a chambered nautilus that came apart into animation. There were fractals right after that, I knew. I ought to cue up something trippy. “Sparrow,” she said, “if you really don’t want anybody to give a shit about you, say so, and we’ll just let you go to hell.”
I almost cracked wise. If it had been any conscious impulse that stopped me, I would have overridden it. “It’s important to me,” I said instead.
“Why? What’s so private that you have to make an enemy of the whole world to keep it that way?”
Just for that instant, I was tempted to tell her.
But Theo came in, a beer in each hand, and kicked the door shut behind him. “Who needs a fresh one?”
“You take it,” I said. “It’s my turn for a break.” Then I caught a look at the third monitor. The camera, which wasn’t feeding to either screen, was on the front door. I saw Robert leaning on the frame, a pack of nightbabies newly arrived and staring just in front of him, and behind them a head of pale curly hair, a big white smile, shades — no, not shades.
I grabbed the camera remote and zoomed in. Dana’s friends hadn’t found me. The other ones had. It was the man in the silvertones.
At the corner of my eye I saw the shift in room light that meant the picture had changed on the screens. “Sher, no!” I cried, but it was too late. The camera feed was up on the left screen. I panned the camera away so fast it must have made the drunks sick, and Sher hit the switcher, but it was too late. I’d seen him look at the screens. He knew somebody on the balcony was watching him.
Sher was chalky, and her eyes were big. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. Theo stood as still as I’d ever seen him.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll use the back stairs.”
“And we’re gonna handle it?” Theo asked politely.
Sher looked at him. “Yeah,” she said. “We are.” She stood up and stretched, flexed her hands, glanced over the edge of the balcony at the dance floor.
“Then I guess we are.” Theo shrugged, picked up a heavy flat-bladed screwdriver from a box by the sound board, jammed the blade between the stairway door and the door frame, and pounded it in as far as it would go. “Door’s sticking again. Bummer.”
“I’m sorry.” And I was, but I didn’t know what to do.
“Get out of here,” Theo said to me, his face blank as tape leader. I plunged through the door in the rear wall of the balcony and shot the bolt home.
I said before that I had a place at the Underbridge. This was it. I passed through without really registering it, beyond deciding that nothing in the closet-sized space could help them find me: a mattress, a couple changes of clothes, a toothbrush. Maybe the barrenness of my life-style would move them to pity, and they’d leave me alone. I began to feel more than guilty. The guy with pink hair seemed like a dangerous sort, and I was leaving Theo and Sher to make my apologies. Well, what could I do? I yanked open the outer door and stepped onto the fire escape.
It was raining steadily, steamil
y, and everything shone. Somewhere many blocks away, a fire alarm was wailing. I heard the Underbridge’s sound system from the open front door. Water gushed over the dam in the river in front of me. The storm, stalking away to the east, gave a long, low rumble like an empty stomach. I hoped the accumulated noise was enough to cover the sound of me running down all those metal steps.
I ran down most of them, actually. Five of them I fell down, loudly, because I forgot that things are slippery when wet. And the last three I skipped entirely and just jumped to the pavement. I was feeling hopeful when something small and hard settled against my skull over my right ear, and a cheerful female voice said, “Darlin’, you must think we’re awfully thick. Were you hoping we’d forget to look for another exit?”
I stood very still, because I had a suspicion about the hard thing over my ear, and wondered if I should tell her that no, the forgetting was all on my side, thank you. Because, of course, I’d known that the man in the silvertones had a partner.
“Put your hands behind you,” she said. When I did, something closed around my wrists. Handcuffs? No, these people were not City security, I knew that. What was happening here? What had I done?
“What do you want with me?” I asked, and there was more than a hint of a wail in my voice.
She came around in front of me. Yes, that was a gun she had. Under the mannish hat she wore I saw her hair, the dark cherry color I remembered from a distance in the Night Fair. Her skin was translucently pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock. Her eyes were cold, flat gray, and familiar — oh.
