“Hey, my boy,” Bobby calls after him. “Gimme a minute here, gimme what the problem is.”
He doesn’t answer. What can you tell someone made of pure information anyway?
* * *
There’s a new guy on the front door, bigger and meaner than His Mohawkness but he’s only there to keep people out, not to keep anyone in. You want to jump ship, go to, you poor un-hip asshole. Even if you are a Pretty Boy. He reads it in the guy’s face as he passes from noise into the 3 a.m. quiet of the street.
They let him go. He doesn’t fool himself about that part. They let him out of the room because they know all about him. They know he lives like Bobby lived, they know he loves what Bobby loved – the clubs, the admiration, the lust of strangers for his personal magic. He can’t say he doesn’t love that, because he does. He isn’t even sure if he loves it more than he ever loved Bobby, or if he loves it more than being alive. Than being live.
And here it is 3 a.m., clubbing prime time, and he is moving toward home. Maybe he is a poor up-hip asshole after all, no matter what he loves. Too stupid even to stay in the club, let alone grab a ride to heaven. Still he keeps moving, unbothered by the chill but feeling it. Bobby doesn’t have to go home in the cold any more, he thinks. Bobby doesn’t even have to get through the hours between the club-times if he doesn’t want to. All times are now prime time for Bobby. Even if he gets unplugged, he’ll never know the difference. Poof, it’s a day later, poof, it’s a year later, poof, you’re out for good. Painlessly.
Maybe Bobby has the right idea, he thinks, moving along the empty sidewalk. If he goes over tomorrow, who will notice? Like when he left the dance floor – people will come and fill up the space. Ultimately, it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone.
He smiles suddenly. Except them. As long as they don’t have him, he makes a difference. As long as he has flesh to shake and flaunt and feel with, he makes a pretty goddamn big difference to them. Even after they don’t want him any more, he will still be the one they didn’t get. He rubs his hands together against the chill, feeling the skin rubbing skin, really feeling it for the first time in a long time, and he thinks about sixteen million things all at once, maybe one thing for every brain cell he’s using, or maybe one thing for every brain cell yet to come.
He keeps moving, holding to the big thought, making a difference, and all the little things they won’t be making a program out of. He’s lightheaded with joy – he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
Neither do they.
JOHN KESSEL
The Pure Product
Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as to many other magazines and anthologies.
Kessel’s novel Good News from Outer Space was released in 1989 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories … the best of which, to date, is the taut, hard-edged, casually and cold-bloodedly horrifying story that follows, one of the most adroit and chilling examinations of its theme ever to appear anywhere.
Kessel won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has just been released as a Tor Double. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and, coming up, a collection of his short fiction, Meeting in Infinity.
I arrived in Kansas City at one o’clock on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August. A Tuesday. I was driving the beige 1983 Chevrolet Citation that I had stolen two days earlier in Pocatello, Idaho. The Kansas plates on the car I’d taken from a different car in a parking lot in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by the Mormons, whose God tells them that in the future Jesus Christ will come again.
I drove through Kansas City with the windows open and the sun beating down through the windshield. The car had no air-conditioning and my shirt was stuck to my back from seven hours behind the wheel. Finally I found a hardware store, “Hector’s” on Wornall. I pulled into the lot. The Citation’s engine dieseled after I turned off the ignition; I pumped the accelerator once and it coughed and died. The heat was like syrup. The sun drove shadows deep into corners, left them flattened at the feet of the people on the sidewalk. It made the plate glass of the store window into a dark negative of the positive print that was Wornall Avenue. August.
The man behind the counter in the hardware store I took to be Hector himself. He looked like Hector, slain in vengeance beneath the walls of paintbrushes – the kind of semi-friendly, publicly optimistic man who would tell you about his good wife and his ten-penny nails. I bought a gallon of kerosene and a plastic paint funnel, put them into the trunk of the Citation, then walked down the block to the Mark Twain Bank. Mark Twain died at the age of seventy-five with a heart full of bitter accusations against the Calvinist God and no hope for the future of humanity. Inside the bank I went to one of the desks, at which sat a Nice Young Lady. I asked about starting a business checking account. She gave me a form to fill out, then sent me to the office of Mr Graves.
Mr Graves wielded a formidable handshake. “What can I do for you, Mr…?”
“Tillotsen. Gerald Tillotsen,” I said. Gerald Tillotsen, of Tacoma, Washington, died of diphtheria at the age of four weeks – on September 24, 1938. I have a copy of his birth certificate.
“I’m new to Kansas City. I’d like to open a business account here, and perhaps take out a loan. I trust this is a reputable bank? What’s your exposure in Brazil?” I looked around the office as if Graves were hiding a woman behind the hatstand, then flashed him my most ingratiating smile.
Mr Graves did his best. He tried smiling back, then looked as if he had decided to ignore my little joke. “We’re very sound, Mr Tillotsen.”
I continued smiling.
“What kind of business do you own?”
“I’m in insurance. Mutual Assurance of Hartford. Our regional office is in Oklahoma City, and I’m setting up an agency here, at 103rd and State Line.” Just off the interstate.
He examined the form I had given him. His absorption was too tempting.
“Maybe I can fix you up with a life policy? You look like dead meat.”
Graves’ head snapped up, his mouth half open. He closed it and watched me guardedly. The dullness of it all! How I tire. He was like some cow, like most of the rest of you in this silly age, unwilling to break the rules in order to take offense. Did he really say that? he was thinking. If he did say that, was that his idea of a joke? What is he after? He looks normal enough. I did look normal, exactly like an insurance agent. I was the right kind of person, and I could do anything. If at times I grate, if at times I fall a little short of or go a little beyond convention, there is not one of you who can call me to account.
Mr Graves was coming around. All business.
“Ah – yes, Mr Tillotsen. If you’ll wait a moment, I’m sure we can take care of this checking account. As for the loan…”
“Forget it.”
That should have stopped him. He should have asked after my credentials, he should have done a dozen things. He looked at me, and I stared calmly back at him. And I knew that, looking into my honest blue eyes, he could not think of a thing.
“I’ll just start the checking account now with this money order,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “That will be acceptable, won’t it?”
“It will be fine,” he said. He took the completed form and the order over to one of the secretaries while I sat at the desk. I lit a cigar and blew some smoke rings. The money order had been purchased the day before in a post office in Denver. It was for thirty dollars. I didn’t intend to use the account very long. Graves returned with
my sample checks, shook hands earnestly, and wished me a good day. Have a good day, he said. I will, I said.
Outside, the heat was still stifling. I took off my sportcoat. I was sweating so much I had to check my hair in the sideview mirror of my car. I walked down the street to a liquor store and bought a bottle of chardonnay and a bottle of Chivas Regal. I got some paper cups from a nearby grocery. One final errand, then I could relax for a few hours.
In the shopping center I had told Graves would be the location for my non-existent insurance office, there was a sporting goods store. It was about three o’clock when I parked in the lot and ambled into the shop. I looked at various golf clubs: irons, woods, even one set with fiberglass shafts. Finally I selected a set of eight Spaulding irons with matching woods, a large bag, and several boxes of Topflites. The salesman, who had been occupied with another customer at the rear of the store, hustled up his eyes full of commission money. I gave him little time to think. The total cost was six hundred and twelve dollars and thirty-two cents. I paid with a check drawn on my new account, cordially thanked the man, and had him carry all the equipment out to the trunk of the car.
I drove to a park near the bank; Loose Park, they called it. I felt loose. Cut loose, drifting free, like one of the kites people were flying in the park that had broken its string and was ascending into the sun. Beneath the trees it was still hot, though the sunlight was reduced to a shuffling of light and shadow on the brown grass. Kids ran, jumped, swung on playground equipment. I uncorked my bottle of wine, filled one of the paper cups, and lay down beneath a tree, enjoying the children, watching young men and women walking along the paths of the park.
A girl approached along the path. She did not look any older than seventeen. She was short and slender, with clean blonde hair cut to her shoulders. Her shorts were very tight. I watched her unabashedly; she saw me watching her and left the path to come over to me. She stopped a few feet away, her hands on her hips. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Your legs,” I said. “Would you like some wine?”
“No thanks. My mother told me never to accept wine from strangers.” She looked right through me.
“I take whatever I can get from strangers,” I said. “Because I’m a stranger, too.”
I guess she liked that. She was different. She sat down and we chatted for a while. There was something wrong about her imitation of a seventeen-year-old; I began to wonder whether hookers worked the park. She crossed her legs and her shorts got tighter. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“San Francisco. But I’ve just moved here to stay. I have a part interest in the sporting goods store at the Eastridge Plaza.”
“You live near here?”
“On West 89th.” I had driven down 89th on my way to the bank.
“I live on 89th! We’re neighbors.”
An edge of fear sliced through me. A slip? It was exactly what one of my own might have said to test me. I took a drink of wine and changed the subject. “Would you like to visit San Francisco some day?”
She brushed her hair back behind one ear. She pursed her lips, showing off her fine cheekbones. “Have you got something going?” she asked, in queerly accented English.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent – the accent of my own time.
I took another sip. “A bottle of wine,” I replied in good Midwestern 1980s.
She wasn’t having any of it. “No artwork, please. I don’t like artwork.”
I had to laugh: my life was devoted to artwork. I had not met anyone real in a long time. At the beginning I hadn’t wanted to and in the ensuing years I had given up expecting it. If there’s anything more boring than you people it’s us people. But that was an old attitude. When she came to me in KC I was lonely and she was something new.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not much, but you can come for the ride. Do you want to?”
She smiled and said yes.
As we walked to my car, she brushed her hip against my leg. I switched the bottle to my left hand and put my arm around her shoulders in a fatherly way. We got into the front seat, beneath the trees on a street at the edge of the park. It was quiet. I reached over, grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck and jerked her face toward me, covering her little mouth with mine. Surprise: she threw her arms round my neck, sliding across the seat and awkwardly onto my lap. We did not talk. I yanked at the shorts; she thrust her hand into my pants. Saint Augustine asked the Lord for chastity, but not right away.
At the end she slipped off me, calmly buttoned her blouse, brushed her hair back from her forehead. “How about a push?” she asked. She had a nailfile out and was filing her index fingernail to a point.
I shook my head, and looked at her. She resembled my grandmother. I had never run into my grandmother but she had a hellish reputation. “No thanks. What’s your name?”
“Call me Ruth.” She scratched the inside of her left elbow with her nail. She leaned back in her seat, sighed deeply. Her eyes became a very bright, very hard blue.
While she was aloft I got out, opened the trunk, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into the gutter and used the funnel to fill the bottle with kerosene. I plugged it with part of the cork and a kerosene-soaked rag. Afternoon was sliding into evening as I started the car and cruised down one of the residential streets. The houses were like those of any city or town of that era of the midwest USA: white frame, forty or fifty years old, with large porches and small front yards. Dying elm trees hung over the street. Shadows stretched across the sidewalks. Ruth’s nose wrinkled; she turned her face lazily toward me, saw the kerosene bottle, and smiled.
Ahead on the left-hand sidewalk I saw a man walking leisurely. He was an average sort of man, middle-aged, probably just returning from work, enjoying the quiet pause dusk was bringing to the hot day. It might have been Hector; it might have been Graves. It might have been any one of you. I punched the cigarette lighter, readied the bottle in my right hand, steering with my leg as the car moved slowly forward. “Let me help,” Ruth said. She reached out and steadied the wheel with her slender fingertips. The lighter popped out. I touched it to the rag; it smouldered and caught. Greasy smoke stung my eyes. By now the man had noticed us. I hung my arm, holding the bottle, out the window. As we passed him, I tossed the bottle at the sidewalk like a newsboy tossing a rolled-up newspaper. The rag flamed brighter as it whipped through the air; the bottle landed at his feet and exploded, dousing him with burning kerosene. I floored the accelerator; the motor coughed, then roared, the tires and Ruth both squealing in delight. I could see the flaming man in the rear-view mirror as we sped away.
* * *
On the Great American Plains, the summer nights, are not silent. The fields sing the summer songs of insects – not individual sounds, but a high-pitched drone of locusts, cicadas, small chirping things for which I have no names. You drive along the superhighway and that sound blends with the sound of wind rushing through your opened windows, hiding the thrum of the automobile, conveying the impression of incredible velocity. Wheels vibrate, tires beat against the pavement, the steering wheel shudders, alive in your hands, droning insects alive in your cars. Reflecting posts at the roadside leap from the darkness with metronomic regularity, glowing amber in the headlights, only to vanish abruptly into the ready night when you pass. You lose track of time, how long you have been on the road, where you are going. The fields scream in your ears like a thousand lost, mechanical souls, and you press your foot to the accelerator, hurrying away.
When we left Kansas City that evening we were indeed hurrying. Our direction was in one sense precise: Interstate 70, more or less due east, through Missouri in a dream. They might remember me in Kansas City, at the same time wondering who and why. Mr Graves checks the morning paper over his grapefruit: “Man Burned by Gasoline Bomb.” The clerk wonders why he ever accepted an unverified check, a check without even a name or address print
ed on it, for six-hundred dollars. The check bounces. They discover it was a bottle of chardonnay. The story is pieced together. They would eventually figure out how – I wouldn’t lie to myself about that – I never lie to myself – but the why would always escape them. Organized crime, they would say. A plot that misfired.
Of course, they still might have caught me. The car became more of a liability the longer I held onto it. But Ruth, humming to herself, did not seem to care, and neither did I. You have to improvise those things; that’s what gives them whatever interest they have.
Just shy of Columbia, Missouri, Ruth stopped humming and asked me, “Do you know why Helen Keller can’t have any children?”
“No.”
“Because she’s dead.”
I rolled up the window so I could hear her better. “That’s pretty funny,” I said.
“Yes. I overheard it in a restaurant.” After a minute she asked, “Who’s Helen Keller?”
“A dead woman.” An insect splattered itself against the windshield. The lights of the oncoming cars glinted against the smear it left.
“She must be famous,” said Ruth. “I like famous people. Have you met any? Was that man you burned famous?”
“Probably not. I don’t care about famous people anymore.” The last time I had anything to do, even peripherally, with anyone famous was when I changed the direction of the tape over the lock in the Watergate so Frank Wills would see it. Ruth did not look like the kind who would know about that. “I was there for the Kennedy assassination,” I said, “but I had nothing to do with it.”
“Who was Kennedy?”
That made me smile. “How long have you been here?” I pointed at her tiny purse. “That’s all you’ve got with you?”
She slid across the seat and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I don’t need anything else.”
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