Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  The dead woman looked up at her. “When it happens,” she said, “when it all comes down… don’t be too hard on him.”

  November laid her own hand against the thin, cheap door behind herself. “Why?” She was only mildly curious. “Do you still love him?”

  “Of course not.” The dead woman managed a smile. “I never did. But he has his virtues. In his way.”

  For a long time after that, after she had left the little room and the place where the dead lived, she wondered what the dead woman had meant by that. Then she decided it wasn’t important.

  When she was on one of the trains again, heading north, back to where living people lived, or at least approximately so-she let a little more memory flash unwind inside her head. To the end of the story, or one of the stories, part of the whole that made up the lapidary, carefully assembled history of her name. She couldn’t even remember which one it was, whether it’d been that anonymous tenevik, some currency cowboy out of the Nakhodka FEZ, who’d shown up in the first reel of the flash, that one or some other member of the shadow people working the Dow Jones/nomenklatura overlap in Vladivostok and points west, or a little-dragons personnel enforcer shuttling antique punched-hole loom cards from Djakarta to the Lima child-labor free-enterprise zones… or another one entirely. It didn’t matter which one; they never had faces for her but just cruel, hard, pleasuring hands… which was enough for her purposes.

  They only had faces if they made the mistake of following her off the train, in whatever city on the circle she’d decided to make her destination. As if they hadn’t gotten enough of her in that little cramped space rolling across the ocean and the ice floes; as if there were anything more that she was willing to give them. Dream on, loser-she would silently transmit the warning behind herself as she pushed through the crowds in the station, aware of the figure tailing after, erectile tissue transformed into slow heat-seeking missile. She’d been in every station along the Gloss’s edge-the Gloss being the shorthand for Glossolalia, which was either the Greater Los Angeles Inter-Alia or the babel of languages that faded into one another in the almost-complete urban circle around the Pacific, which was to say the world. And every station had its tight private spaces as well, maintenance closets and walk-in fuse boxes and the women’s rest rooms so far off the main drag that they had been annexed into I.V-hype and subcute territory, the needle discards and depleted osmotic skin-pouches all over the floor, the festooned toilet paper freckled with blood specks. She made it easy, or at least faster, on her would-be predators by sliding into one of those obscured nooks, without even a glance over her shoulder, then waiting. It only took a few seconds, the number of steps he’d let stretch out between himself and his prey, the prey that he’d already caught and savored once. That was the brief moment in which she might see one of their faces, if there was light enough.

  It didn’t matter whether she did, though. Because she would already be standing with her back against the wall or the divider panel or the tangled ranks of fuses and wiring, she would already be reaching up with one hand as the man pushed the door of the closet or the rest room stall shut behind himself. He would already be smiling, his eyes narrowed to little hungry slits as her hand touched the side of his head, her fingertips sliding through his hair and onto the back of his skull, as though she were going to draw him toward her for a kiss. But the smile would freeze on his face, it would still be there but it would mean something else, it would mean both pleasure and terror at the center of his eyes, one and the same thing, as she and the mark got into serious transcranial magnetic stimulation time. The fields pulsed from the rare-earth devices imbedded in her fingertips, at an exact ten-thousandth-of-a-second cycle, ramping up to 3+ tesla, more than enough to penetrate human scalp and skull, and into the top cortical layers. Tight magnet currents sparked and modulated and found their way to the exact cerebral tissue necessary to produce lock-loop orgasm and a general paralysis, his muscles locking hard onto each other, his body its own ejaculating prison. She had only enough battery power in the system to freeze the poor horny bastard for ten to fifteen seconds. But that was more than enough; she worked fast. And all she really had to do was reach into his jacket and pull out the weight of metal she knew he’d be carrying there, a hammer with fire inside. They all carried heat when they traveled. She’d put it against the mark’s head where her hands had been, his eyes the only part that could still move, flicking to watch her, to bring the big black piece she held into focus. Then she merely had to pull the trigger, the weight cold inside her fist; the implosion muzzle formed a perfect repulsion-edged vacuum in the little zone beyond her wrist, just big enough for the bullet to rush into soundlessly, the anti-acoustic effect lasting just long enough to soak up the telltale bang. The only sound that escaped, that might have been heard outside the maintenance closet or rest room stall, was the crumpling impact of bullet through rounded bone of skull, gentle as an egg being crushed with the poke of a finger. That was how the better grade of silencers worked on guns: you didn’t get absolute silence, the absence of all sound. Instead, you got the revelation of other sounds, the ones beneath the gun’s otherwise masking roar. You got-she got-the crack of skull and the wet swallow of the imploding cerebral tissue beneath, the man’s gasp at this new, virginal penetration. He might’ve been paralyzed but he could still feel. At least for a little while. Until the blood rushed to fill the hole and wash what was left of him out the exit wound on the other side of his head, where the bone splinters, hinged by torn flesh, fanned out like a surgical peony. Resulting in a death bigger than the little one he’d enjoyed before, a death big enough to be the last one needed. She’d let this one, whatever his face had been, fall away from her; the same as the others had fallen, so that she had to step over him to push open the door of the tiny space and stride quickly away. November always left the guns behind; who needed them? The spattered muzzle of the gun would already be soaking a wet spot into the wadded toilet paper on the rest room’s floor as she’d insert herself anonymously into the crowd, the station, and then whatever part of the Gloss lay beyond.

  The memory ran out, reached its terminus inside November’s head. She could call it up anytime she wanted, which wasn’t often, and with any face attached, any blurred focus tag as to which particular man it might have been, on which train and in which small space littered with the remnants of other passions. She rarely let it get that specific, though; better to keep that section of her brain’s contents vague and generic, sharp only on those moments when she had pulled the trigger and read the bright tea-leaf pattern on each space’s low ceiling. If the spots of blood and brain tissue spelled out her name, in some red wet braille… she wouldn’t have been surprised. Only mildly annoyed, at having to reach up on tiptoe with a scrap of tissue, to wipe away the betraying signature.

  November gazed out the train window. Not at the Antarctic; she was too far north on the circle for that. The train moved slowly through the city’s jumbled outskirts. Strictly a local, for the short ride down to where the dead lived-sort of-and then back up to the True Los Angeles sector of the Gloss. Even now, she wasn’t quite sure why she’d gone down there. To talk to the dead woman, the one who’d been married once upon a time, when she’d been alive, to the poor bastard named McNihil. She hadn’t found out anything; she supposed now that that hadn’t been the point of the journey.

  He doesn’t have a prayer…

  That was probably true. November looked out at the city and figured she’d find out soon enough.

  FOUR

  LIKE A YOUNG IDA LUPINO

  The girl was waiting for him inside his apartment. The cube bunny that he’d spotted lurking around in the corpse’s hallway.

  “How’d you get in here?” McNihil would have felt no particular surprise or anger, even if there hadn’t been a slowly dissipating haze of alcohol over his brain. He closed the door, which she’d bypassed somehow, with all its locks and dead bolts in place.

  “Oh… you know.” She
gave him a shrug and a timid smile, from where she sat over on the crookbacked, threadbare couch. “There’s always ways.”

  “I suppose so.” McNihil slipped his rattling keyring into his pocket, his fingertips brushing against an even smaller piece of metal, which hadn’t been there when he’d left this morning. “You want some coffee or something?” With the jacket unbuttoned, hanging shroud-loose from his shoulders, he threaded his way through the apartment’s cramped spaces. “Frankly, I need some.”

  “Sure.” The cube bunny sat leaning forward, hands clasped at the corner that her knees made in her worn woolen skirt. The fabric had probably been midnight-blue at one time, but had faded to somewhere closer to nine P.M.; that was the tone of gray it looked like in McNihil’s eyes. “That’d be great.” The girl didn’t draw back as McNihil passed by her, close enough that her skirt was brushed by his trousers leg. She glanced up hopefully. “Would it be real coffee?”

  “You’re kidding.” With his forearm, McNihil pushed aside the stacks of dishes and Chinese-restaurant take-out cartons by the sink, giving himself enough room to assemble the battered chrome sections of the percolator. On the kitchen wall, by the oven’s flue outlet, a calendar with days but no year hung, its unlikely mountain scene faded to a curling-edged transparency.

  “Mr. Travelt always had real coffee.” A slight tone of resentment sounded in the girl’s voice.

  “Yeah, well, there isn’t enough caffeine in the world to get a rise out of him now.” McNihil threaded the plug past the unwashed glasses and into the socket in the linoleum behind them.

  “No,” the cube bunny said mournfully. “No, there isn’t.”

  He figured he knew what came next. That she would start crying, not in a big emotional show, but just a few effective tears, half from real grief over somebody who’d been nice to her-or as nice as could be expected-and half for the effect it should have on her audience. And would have; he didn’t see things the way he did, this sad and mournfully beautiful world instead of the other one with all the colors, if he weren’t also inclined toward its emotional weather.

  McNihil turned his gaze from the doorway and back toward the things on the kitchen counter, as the girl rooted through the little black handbag she’d tucked beside her on the couch. He knew that if he’d gone on watching, he would’ve seen her come up with some little cotton handkerchief with the initials in the corner, which the nonexistent nuns back in the convent school had taught her to hand-embroider. Instead of the plastic-wrapped pack of disposables soaked in heat-activated anti-virals that she’d really have on the other side of the reality line.

  He dipped his hand in the water in the sink, then rar his fingertips across the surface of the just-warming coffeepot. The wetness made a slightly shinier mirror out of the curved metal. Shiny things worked better for this than real mirrors; anything big and intentionally reflective got absorbed too quickly into this world’s firmness. But in little bits of chrome and silver, sometimes the back of a spoon or a polished doorknob, he saw a scrap from the other side, a bit of optical leak-through, colors bleeding into the monochrome.

  This time, he saw the girl sitting on the couch. McNihil turned the metal pot slightly, angling the wet reflective patch’s shot through the kitchen doorway and toward the apartment’s living room. Seeing her this way, the girl didn’t look like a young Ida Lupino anymore. The curls against her pale cheeks had vanished, along with the general air of brave vulnerability and period early-forties outfit from Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra that’d been laid over her in McNihil’s world. The worn-and-mended woolen skirt, the thin unbuttoned sweater with a zigzag decorative pattern around the bottom and at the cuffs showing her tiny wrists, the plain high-collared blouse… all that McNihil had already seen her in had been replaced, at least in the percolator’s distorted mirror. Replaced by what was sadly real.

  More skin; that was what was mainly noticeable. Still in a skirt, of some kind of black plasticky stuff with the slick sheen of fetish enthusiasms. But hiked nearly pudenda-high, with correspondingly bare arms and cleavage. The neoprene highlights shimmered with the slow fever gleam of neon on a rain-wet nocturnal street. Over on the other side, where the colors were, a girl could freeze to death in an outfit like that, not so much from air temperature as the coldly assessing gazes of men.

  Just like a cube bunny, thought McNihil. He hadn’t expected anything else. It was no wonder she’d been able to get into his apartment. That was about the only kind of survival skill her species possessed. Beyond, at least, the value of skin and flesh and face.

  The little vision, the peek into the girl’s hard-side existence, faded as the coffeepot heated up, evaporating the wetness on its curved chrome flank. Which was all right by McNihil. He preferred things-especially human things-in black and white. Hands against the edge of the counter, he closed his eyes and leaned his weight forward, easing out the kinks in his stiff spine as he waited for the pot to sigh in steam.

  Overhead, bare lightbulbs dimmed for a second as the coffeepot gurgled wetly. A cranking mechanical noise came from the rear of the apartment, where all the black cables ran. McNihil’s generator was the envy of the surrounding apartments. A sleek, grease-fed hummer that he kept swaddled in rags to cut down the residual noise, its intestinelike exhaust sphincter duct-taped to a hole he’d punched in the building’s exterior. There were other people in the building who weren’t so fortunate; they got by on batteries or candles, or gave up the desire, the need, for light entirely. Like connecting cave fish, brooded McNihil; it sometimes gave him the creeps to even think about it. Creep being the operative word-he could see them in his brain’s interior optic, moving around in the pitch-black with their big lemur eyes or the holes where their vestigial eyes had been, their fingers radiating out in front of them like cockroach antennae. Like roaches in more ways than that: whenever he came back to the building, if he pushed the ground-level door open fast enough, he could hear them fleeing back into the even-darker recesses where they were blindly comfortable. Some of those people-if that word still applied-were so devolved, the charity agencies didn’t even make personal deliveries anymore, but just sort of pushed food packets at the end of a long stick into the gloom, and let whatever was in there grab them and be gone.

  Waiting for the coffee, McNihil reached down and massaged his aching leg. Climbing five flights to get here, through stairwells and landings palely lit by sputtering fluorescent halos, or with nothing but shadows and ammoniacal piss odors seeping into the ankle-deep fast-food trash and discarded subcutaneous-membrane packs-he’d gotten used to it. If he held himself very still, breath stopped and heartbeat slowed, he could hear inside the thin layers of walls and through the buckling floors. Little creatures and the slightly bigger ones that fed on them were scurrying about on their own errands, guided in darkness by the ripe smells of rain-saturated decay. The human inhabitants of the building, and all the similar buildings clustered around it, scuttled through their various agendas the same way, either in the dark or a wavering, battery-fed glow, flashlights duct-taped to the water-stained ceilings.

  “Here you go.” McNihil handed a cup, no saucer, to the cube bunny. It was the only cup in the place without a cracked rim.

  “Thanks.” She held it cradled in both hands. She managed to conceal her distaste for the ersatz as she took a sip. And even lifted a slightly apologetic smile toward him. “That’s not too bad.”

  “Nothing ever is.” McNihil lowered himself into the frayed upholstery of the chair across from her. “Too bad, I mean.” He could see himself in the black mirror of his own heavy restaurant-china cup. “It’s amazing what people can get used to.” He looked the same, he supposed, in this world and the other one. “Take me, for instance. Little while ago, I was inhaling a dead man’s breath. As if the poor bastard could breathe at all. And you know what?” McNihil leaned back, watching for her reaction. “It didn’t bother me at all.”

  What he’d said didn’t faze her. The cube bunny’s eyes w
ere tearless, the lashes’ cheap drugstore mascara unsmudged, as she regarded McNihil over the rim of the cup. Which meant, he supposed, that the late Travelt had been more than a meal ticket for her. She’d done her crying in some private place, out on the street. Private meaning that out there, no one would take any notice. Tears now would’ve meant self-pity and the play for her one-on-one audience’s sympathy.

  She lowered the cup, setting it down on the low table between them. Leaning forward, she peered into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, as if her lost tears could be found there. “You don’t see me,” she said finally. “I mean… you don’t see me.”

  Not stupid, McNihil grudgingly admitted to himself. That was a mistake people made, to think that someone who lived the way she did would be an idiot. A surface phenomenon: a cube bunny’s looks, the way this one looked under the firm overlay he saw, was strictly a survival adaptation. They could be as smart as anyone else. Though that wouldn’t save them, either.

  “I see you fine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded stiff and uncomfortable, even to himself. That was his way of handling personal things. “I see you the way I want to. Or at least the way I’m used to.”

  “How’s that?” She had leaned so close to him, over the table, that she could’ve kissed him. Inside her eyes, McNihil could see himself, small and duplicated. “I don’t understand.”

  She couldn’t tell by looking at him; no one could. Some things were truly invisible. The micron-film inlays inside his eyes-inside the eyes of anyone who’d had the same kind of work done on them-had a refractive index clearer than any air that could be breathed in the Gloss. A scalpel and a set of dentist’s picks would’ve been necessary to dig out the interpreter relays running parallel to his optic nerves. And the stuff farther back, past the optic chiasma and into the soft processors of the occipital gyri and sulci… those dark little rooms were a mystery even before any of the other work had been done.