The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  He awoke, glued by his sweat to the plastic foam. His curtain hung closed; the air encased him wetly. It was still dark outside. He sat up, blinking back tears. His head brushed the ceiling. He wiped at his cheek, wondering vaguely why he could react to events only in his sleep.

  His arm, still warm, had lost some of its ache; the swelling seemed to have gone down, he couldn’t be sure. He was so hot and grimy in that oven of a box, he couldn’t tell if he had a fever or not.

  Drawing back the Odie curtain, he skooched up till he could peer down the lane.

  From the left, an unsavory breeze flowed along; it enveloped him, cooled him where he sat. He could see others seated in their boxes. They might have been duplicates of him. He thought, This is what we all are underneath.

  What that meant, where the singular observation came from, he didn’t know.

  After awhile, he shook out his shirt and put it on. He got to his feet stiffly, but had to hold his jacket in his teeth while he clumsily tucked the shirt into his pants. Lifting the coat, he could only stare at it, unable to identify it as his own. It wasn’t, of course, it was Gansevoort’s.

  In the dream, he had been wearing something blue…

  Already the specifics of the nightmare blurred. Angel had no long- term memory in which to house dreams. They fell like coins through a torn pocket.

  He folded the humid jacket over his bad arm and then, turning slowly in a circle, surveyed the encampment.

  The rain had stopped, but few heads showed above the boxes. Bright lights still glared on top of the Vine Street wall. Machinery still shook the ground: the unloading of supplies for the city continued around the clock.

  He drew a deep breath, then began to cough. Sparkles danced before his eyes for a second; he tested his lungs more carefully.

  Over the quadrangle, streamers of smoke rose languidly into the sky. What did they use for fuel? Old clothes? Worn out boxes? The umbrella-woman had warned about lighting fires; but weren’t packing crates like these supposed to be fireproof? He thought he might once have known the answer to that question.

  He was feeling hungry again. It would be good to eat something.

  He dug around in the jacket for items to trade for food, and found the two cubes and a gold cigarette case. The case had been Chikako’s. He remembered. He turned it over, opened it. It was empty. Holding it close, he sniffed its herbal odor, and triggered an explosive memory of her. Her face, eyes, lips lit up the sky. He had to lean against the top of the box—his legs couldn’t hold him. He squeezed his eyes shut to blot out the vision, and closed the case, fumblingly tucking it away before it could do more harm. Before it could batter him with his own emotions again.

  “Lookit that,” cried a raw, jocose voice from below. “Finally. Finally, it’s Machine Man!” Angel opened his eyes to find a greasy, unwashed, round and unshaven face sticking out of the box across the lane from his. “I knew,” said the man, waggling a finger, “yes, I did.” He crawled out, chugging. He was barefoot, with his pant legs rolled up almost to his knees. He smelled like a used condom.

  Shorter than Angel, covered with wiry hair and thick as a tree trunk, he flailed with his arms while he spoke. Each time he did, the smell of him grew worse. “I told them. They’s got plans to turn us all into machines, is what I said. Machines what never wear out. It’s the only way to get us to Mars, see. The only way. People die, see, if they get too far from the Earth. Ya take those folks on the Moon, they’re all dead and buried, but you’ll never get wind of it, they been converted.”

  “Dead and buried … on the Moon,” said Angel. That sounded strangely familiar.

  “Sure! Nobody up there no more. I said they have to make us into machines.” He grinned like a proud father, arms extended. “And here you are—the next generation. Come to see me, your predicator.” His eyebrows went up and his lids fell halfway. “No concept can exist till it’s put into words, that is the natural law. Didn’t Moses have to have God’s commandments writ upon a stone? I don’t expect an answer. But tell me when you’re leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  “For Mars. That’s next in line. Venus would crush you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man nodded as if he had anticipated such a response. “Sure, keep it quiet, the best policy. And I could be anybody, so you can’t be too careful trusting me, although even folks from the towers do. I’m Bucca.” He stuck out his grubby hand. “Mad Bucca. It’s a title of distinction hereabouts. Only five of us in the whole camp called ‘Mad.’ Be one less after this, won’t there? One look at you and they’ll know. You’re the proof I’ve promised ’em. Yup. Come on now and I’ll take you ’round. Ya ever seen the Bell? Ya ought to once, before you leave. Can’t do it afterward. I’ll show ya.” He put on a brown tweed coat and a pair of boots that had no laces, then went stomping down the narrow lane. Heads withdrew at his careless approach.

  Angel followed at a respectful distance. Onlookers watched Bucca and then turned their attention to him, their expressions clouding, becoming troubled and shifty. He passed them by, ducking his head as if in humility. “See?” his guide was shouting to them in general.

  Mad Bucca took him back the way he had come, through the rows, up the steps to the top of the quadrangle, where fires still burned inside the archways to either side. Bucca pointed. “Ya see that funny looking thing on the far side of the fountain, looks like a food kiosk what wandered off? That’s it, that’s the Bell.”

  They climbed down the marble steps to a pebbled flagstone flooring, then down past the dry fountain. It looked like a giant’s cast-off crown. They waded into the street. The ground turned to flat black slate, then to brick around the building.

  The front of the enclosure consisted of rows of mismatched drapery, birds and flowers and stripes all thrown together.

  At their approach, a man pulled aside one of the curtains and peered out.

  “Coming in, you think, huh? With that computer on your skull? I don’t know but that you’re a spy for some fascistic Communist power. Got any admission price?”

  Angel unhesitatingly handed over one of the program cubes.

  The man played a small flashlight over it. The cube shone nacreous colors. He sucked air through a missing front tooth. “This’ll get you a couple three visits. Bring the whole family.”

  “There’s only me.”

  “Well, then” —he nodded toward Mad Bucca— “I’ll let you take the monkey with you.” Stepping aside, he offered the flashlight. “You gonna want it at this hour.”

  The interior smelled strongly of urine. The walls on both sides had the remains of artwork on them, enlarged images of handwritten documents, forged in a giant’s scrawl. At the opposite end of the small enclosure hung the bell itself, from two curved silver supports. He touched it, and it was cold. He rapped his knuckles against it but it made hardly a sound. Ponderous, dark, it connected to nothing, an object of veneration without a history. For Angel, it might as well have been a soup can.

  “Does it ring the hours?”

  “Naw, just hangs there from its timber. Got a big ol’ crack in it.” Bucca scrunched up his face and contemplated it a moment. “Useta make a noise, I think. Hung over across in that tower there.”

  “When?” He pressed up against the Plexiglas rear wall, staring through the camp at the white steeple.

  “Way back. Before ScumberCorp and everything. Even before the city had walls—leastways, visible walls like we got now.” A few small fires burned along raised strips on each side of the horde of boxes.

  Behind him, Bucca recited, “‘Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land unto all the inhabitants Thereof.’ It’s written here. You had the right idea—I mean, tapping. Someone ought to ring this bell, don’t ya think, Machine Man?” He peered beneath the rim. “I’ll be. Bastards’ve stole the clapper.” His words echoed dully up inside it.

  Angel glanced back at Bucca and the bell that appeared to be devouring him. He asked, “Can w
e get food out there someplace?”

  “Ya still eat, you mean,” said Bucca, straightening up. “Got any more of them memory cubes to barter with, we’ll be able to nab credit for a week or more, get plenty of food. Them things are golden.” He patted Angel, taking hold of him and turning him around; as he did, he let his hand slide lightly across the gray jacket and dip into the right pocket. “There,” he said, “let’s go now.”

  They went back the way they had come, Bucca’s boots clomping on the bricks. People stuck their heads out like turtles and stared after Angel until the dimness swallowed him up.

  ***

  Not long after, a tall figure dressed in layers of cloth swept through the same lane, to the rear of the Liberty Bell enclosure, stopping next to a box there. Drawing back the curtain and peering inside, the figure let fly with a hot, blistering, foreign babble, then jerked back, swung around to the box opposite, and started hammering angrily on the top of it, while shouting, “Celine! Get out here!”

  The blankets draped over the front parted. A redheaded woman stuck her head out and glared. Her initial fury drained quickly away.

  “Lobly!” she said, mixing worry and feigned joy in the name. Her eyes flicked toward the box opposite. She went on, “Oh, I like the blue turban—it is blue, ain’t it? It suits, it really does. Why don’t you come on in with me and I’ll warm your skinny bones?”

  “Thank you, no, Celine. I want to know what is that smelly little tick doing in my home?” An accusing finger jabbed from under the ragged bedouin djellaba, back at the opposite box; silver bracelets rattled. A skinny form lay prostrate on the floor there, the soles of two bare feet like clumps of dirt in the doorway.

  “He, ah—that is—”

  “You rented out my space, Celine.”

  She jutted her chin. “You wasn’t using it, been gone forever.”

  “Two days.”

  “Woman’s got to make a living,” she tried.

  “He’ll have fleas. You will now offer me half of what you’ve skinned him for or I’ll have you both tried and tossed into the Snake Pit.”

  Celine stopped arguing. Both she and her accuser knew that she would lose everything if a quick tribunal were assembled. Violating another’s space was the lowest of all crimes, with the possible exception of arson.

  “Half of it.”

  Celine let the yellow blankets drop. Sounds emerged of things bumping about. Her feet, then her naked white rear, pushed out, parting the blankets, offering Lobly an unsavory gynecological perspective. She turned around, half-hidden behind the blanket again, and held up a stack of old postcards, but hesitated to hand them over. “Or maybe you and I can work out an arrangement?” she suggested.

  Lobly wearily insisted, “Half.”

  Celine slapped the cards into the outstretched hand and retreated behind the blanket. “You just do it with little boys and everybody knows it,” she called out. “Why don’t you go get us something to eat, then, while I toss him out. It’ll take a few minutes because he’s stupid drunk.”

  Without looking at them, Lobly tucked the cards away under the djellaba and turned for the cooking fires on the quadrangle. That was the place to begin, anyway. If Angel Rueda were hereabouts, news of it would circulate by way of the campfire.

  ***

  Mingo sat on a couch behind the two security officers. Low, blue overhead lights made every surface gleam like gunmetal. Gus had turned them down, hoping that Mingo would take the hint and stretch out, go to sleep, quit watching. In the night-dark, rain-spattered window, his reflection stared fixedly like a scowling corpse. The rip down his cheek was black as seaweed.

  His reflection had impaled the two men for hours, relentlessly; if he slept at all, it had to be in nanosecond bursts. His eyes seemed never to close, his body never to move. He sat behind them like some ominous kind of toad.

  Eddie and Gus had both gotten up a couple of times to answer the call of nature, and both gave the couch a wide berth, doing their best not to make eye contact with its inhabitant. Each would have liked to catch a few winks, to turn things over to his partner for half an hour the way they did most nights, but such respite was out of the question with the stiff sitting there. Apparently Mingo didn’t pee, either.

  He was like a hot chunk of satellite that had dropped in through the ceiling—you couldn’t move anyhow but you didn’t really want to get too damn close in the first place for fear he would cook you.

  Seated before the console, Gus clicked the throat mike and breathily answered a request for lens surveillance at the Vine Street docks. He hunched his shoulders a couple of times and swiveled his head. His neck popped, but the knot of tense pain between his shoulder blades would not go away. The source of that knot stared flatly at him in the window.

  Most nights he and Eddie had a pretty good time. Tonight they were executing their duties, responding to security requests, like two twitchy, voice-activated mechanisms.

  It was getting near dawn. At least, once the sun came up, that bilious blue- faced reflection would fade out.

  Then Eddie broke the silence, guffawing about something—a sound so out of place, Gus had to look. All at once he stopped chuckling, holding up his hand. “Wait it,” he said. His face squeezed as if in pain, then relaxed. “Great one.” He punched a button and swiveled around. “You got somefin—colleague you mentioned, name a Gansevoort. Got his card heisted.”

  “Yes. The idiot,” Mingo replied dully. The continuing misadventures of Ton Gansevoort did not concern him. “What does he want?”

  “Unh-uh. Turned up the biocard right now at a Happy Burger, Chestnut and Tenth exit, street side. Paid for a Big Box meal.”

  A tiny smile quivered upon Mingo’s blue lips. His tired eyes transformed, narrowing into chrome and cunning. “Tell them … someone’s coming,” he said.

  “Sneg ’im,” said Eddie, grinning.

  “I will. Make no mistake.” He rose up, stretching, then strode out.

  The door closed. Gus and his partner exchanged exhausted looks. “I love ya, Eddie, I wanna have your children,” Gus announced.

  “Ah, fuck,” Big Ed replied, and flushed brightly.

  ***

  The escalator dumped him at the exit. A small crowd milled around just outside the doors, a mix of those who lived outside the walls being assailed by those less fortunate ones who lived at ground level inside. Mingo ignored the lot of them.

  He flashed his security pass as he circumvented the checkpoint, got a nod from one of the security people, and skirted the crowd. He ran into two people conducting a drug sale. They glanced up nervously at his disdainful glare, but he passed them by, marching rapidly into the Happy Burger stand across the narrow plaza.

  The shift manager had been watching for someone from security. When Mingo pushed through the revolving door, the manager gestured with his shaved head. “Her,” he said.

  A high shelf at the far end allowed for eating while standing up. A grimy gnome of a woman stood there, munching on a biscuit, idly scrutinizing her surroundings, and forming silent words as if talking to an invisible companion.

  “Her?” Mingo asked.

  “That’s the one. Straight outen the boxes. Lucy McElveen, and she says the card’s her brother’s. I wouldn’t have noticed even, except …” The manager stopped talking when Mingo walked away.

  He strolled up beside the gnome. Casually, he leaned on the shelf beside her. “When did you have your last Orbit, Lucy?” he asked.

  Lucy hunched protectively over her food. Between her red rubber fingers she held the stringy remains of a crisp spring roll. She watched Mingo with rabbit eyes. She’d stopped chewing when he spoke, but now, as if cued, started up furiously again. Surreptitiously, with her free hand, she dragged a biscuit into one pocket. “Been a while.”

  “Week, maybe? The scars are pretty fresh.” His teeth gleamed.

  “’bout that, I guess” she answered. “I don’t check off the days.”

  “It’s a nice
world ‘there,’ isn’t it?”

  She brightened, and reconsidered her initial opinion of him. “You seed it?” she asked.

  “You must miss being there terribly.”

  “Yeah.” She popped the rest of the spring roll into her mouth and spoke around it. “Right now, supplies is dry. I hear they got this big hunt on fer some bogeymen down below, and till they’s found, it’s like the taps got turned off.”

  Mingo, having personally turned off the tap, could not help but laugh that this grotesque, stuffed full of chemical-laced food items, could make the connection between any two events much less these two disparate ones. His machinations were too subtle for the CEOs, but she understood them. Well, well. “How’s the hunt going, do you think?”

  Wiping at her mouth, she shrugged. “Made everybody fuckin’ damn crazy. No supply, lotsa demand. Pretty soon they’ll be turning in whoever’s around just to git the pipeline up and running again. Don’t wanna be stranded here.”

  Mingo made a single fist of both his hands and bowed his head as if in prayer. “I have the means to tap a supply for you anytime I like,” he told her quietly.

  She glanced quizzically his way, then turned her head, looking around at dozens of other eaters. “This is kind of a public place for a blow job,” she observed.