by James Newman
“Yes,” the client said.
“How did that make you feel?” I asked. I knew his type. They were all self-satisfied and confident, these Punchers, they knew that as long as they didn’t drink, drug, or dick around they were as pure and as serine as a new born baby.
“The Punch kept me together.”
“I see.” And I did see it, remembered it, tasted it, visualized it sharp, vicious, clear, like a panic attack in an elevator, a heartbeat of humorless doom in a closed room: homicide detectives shitting themselves on the couch, disbarred lawyers confessing to bankruptcy, doctors losing their medical licenses, morbidly obese television freaks pissing themselves quite openly while quoting Yeats or some such drivel, the sexually depraved, financially deprived, clowns, liars, cheaters, mime street artists and children’s entertainers who just weren’t that funny anymore; Jesus sycophants, game show hosts, talent show losers and the occasional guitarist who knew the three basic chords required to sleep in union with father troubled college visionaries who painted vulgar abstractions in twilight hours and withdrew from public exhibition. I once saw the rooms with all their rainbows of color and I did honestly chew on words spun by world weary consolers of the mind, the soul, the condition; that wholesome soup, that tepid stew, I kid you not, while being tasty that stew was full of indigestible gristly lumps that have remained stuck in the throat and the gullet forever; since that initial serving of salvation, and yeah, sure, I saw it, ate it, threw it back up and ate it again like the dog returns to the vomit of his folly; it is what men like me do; lap it up. Not wanting to get biblical and being as I am basically a man of the night and mostly inspired by the rooms that held a sanctuary to that night; said. “She slipped?”
“Yes. She talks about seeing insects. Someone needs to save her before....”
“Sir, when a man or woman decides to walk on the dark side there’s nothing you or I can do to stop them.”
“There must be a way?”
“Perhaps I can help find out what’s happening. I can gather evidence but I doubt I can make her turn her life around. She’s aware of The Punch situation?”
“She says the treatment has made her more introspective, more aware of The City. She’s paranoid, the drink, the drugs, it’s a vicious circle. She stared painting.”
I nodded at Sloane. “I just need a photograph and a lowdown of her general behavior patterns. Her name I have, some general information,” I handed him a ballpoint pen and a standard questionnaire to fill out.
He did that.
“Why did she fall from the program?” Sloane asked.
Because she is a human animal with free will.
I said: “It happens. And when it happens here it can be, erm, complicated,” I told him I knew the club operated the other side of the tunnel. The S&M crowd relieved their sins in the Neptune in Leather. A good place to slip, I figured. A 24-hour jazz jam held at the club above the Neptune. Musicians arrived and played until the crowd decided their time was up and sent them, the musicians, downstairs to the whips and the chains and the talent show hosts and the sanctuary and the promises of their wrongdoings. Many of the patrons were known to be past participants of The Punch.
“I knew something was wrong when she started taking an interest in the arts,” the client shuffled in his chair, brushed a hand through his thinning hair, massaged his temples. “The Punch discouraged any artistic activities.”
“Yes,” I sardonically replied. “A sudden interest in the arts, particularly in middle age, is often indicative of an impending nervous breakdown,”
“Huh?”
“I mean I once had a client go catatonic following a weakness for conceptual abstract installations.”
“So what do you think, about her decent into the world of music and art?” He asked me, eyes burning into mine searching for perhaps an educated answer.
I gave it to him: “Really, Mr. Sloane; I have no idea. My idea of art is a street lamp up close. This woman, Penny, wife of an old client got into the art scene here and ended up holed up in the Darkside after the Fun Police came and wheeled her away to the psych ward where as far as I know she still rests staring at the cracks in the ceiling and blowing raspberries at the nurses, rocking up and down, as they are want to do. Penny that is, not the nurses.”
“You think this could happen to Trixie?”
“Who knows? The facts please, Mr...”
“Sloane.”
“Mr. Sloane. The facts, please... How do we get to where we are?”
“It started with Sunday afternoons, soon after it progressed to Friday nights. Before long I was sat at home watching the clock. I began playing games.”
“Video games?”
“Yes.”
“Video games in Fun City? Gamers?” I had to ask.
“The Gamers?”
“Well you are aware that there’s this whole community who fake relationships online and use their messages to claim morality points and to discredit others? There has been a huge scandal, if you read the news. She does have a Life-enhancer account?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Write down the ID number on the questionnaire.” Few travelled the city without a hand held device and a long list of network connections zapping away messages. Surveillance was rife in The City. Conversations were recorded, bought and sold. Our currency, Fun Credits, was based on not only the work that we did but also on how we conducted ourselves under the Fun Eyes that monitored The City and our Life-enhancer accounts. This is how the Gamers came to profit. By setting up and selling the messages and pictures of committed men and women. The Government owned and controlled the Fun Eye surveillance systems, which meant freelancers like me caught a piece of the action recording whatever happened when The Eye blinked.
“So. Let me get this clear. You want independent audio or visual evidence of her behavior and then what do we do?”
“We host an intervention...”
“Really?”
“Yes. This is the only way. I fear that she may be mad? Or possessed?”
“Quite possibly,” I said. “I have yet to meet a man or woman who isn’t at least mad or possessed some of the time in Fun City. Would you have a recent picture?”
“It is not recent. About ten years back. Surprised I managed to get this one,” he waved an envelope across the desk. “She watches my every move. Then she leaves. The crazy thing is she makes me feel like it’s my fault.”
“Women are good at that. The ones that are really good at often become world leaders. The flip side is they’re psychopaths.”
“Psychopaths?”
“Yes, incapable of empathy, a need to control people. Any of this sound familiar? Figuring out those little self-doubts you have and blowing them to the size of a Goodyear blimp? Normally those who exhibit these controlling, manipulating behavior patterns have suffered some kind of abuse or tragic event themselves,” I stopped myself realizing I was thinking about my own choices in recent bedfellows.
“It’s like I don’t know her anymore. She disappears every night.”
“Where?”
“Not sure,” he shrugged, “Just into the night.”
“You didn’t consider joining her?”
“I hate this city.”
“Oh,” I looked at the client directly. “Any idea where she is now?”
“Trixie’s at the bar with a trombone player named Blue.”
“How do you know this?”
“I checked her Life-enhancer account.”
“Sure you need a detective?”
“I told you already Mr. Dylan. The Punch won’t take her back. Some new policy...”
“You have the picture?”
“Sure,” the client handed over the envelope and low and behold there inside a photo of Sloane and Trixie. She was beautiful in an obvious way. She would have gained a few pounds and lost a couple of yards of pace since but basically people never changed. Back in ’07 I solved a missing person case using a twenty-year-old
photograph that had been spun through the washing machine. I figured Trixie Sloane would now have the kind of hair that had been dyed so many times the original color was as undeterminable and as distant as a forgotten dream. Perhaps she knew not the color herself. Facial features unremarkable, like an incomplete sketch by a minor artist on a bad afternoon. I tagged her as having spent her life in the bowels of some administrative hellhole, a reinsurance technician perhaps, or a legal secretary specializing in maritime law somewhere in the Central Business District. Her eyelids were perhaps painted the dull depressing purple of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, lashes synthetic, the rest of her somehow incomplete, distant, lonely, wanting, needing something more than the obvious hand that had played her the husband at home and the trombonist in the jazz bar.
“Are you both the same age?”
“She’s ten years younger.”
“Oh. So what you want me to do, Mr. Sloane?”
“Just get the evidence so we can intervene or at least threaten to.” I figured that with the right fee I could spring myself from The City. Anywhere but Fun City sounded great.
“Yup.”
“And Mr. Dylan is it true that you have been known to use, um, narcotic substances?”
“Well...”
“This is difficult for me.”
“What is?”
“Well, with my Punch program.”
“Sure, but look at it, Fun City is a hot place for dark people. It seems to me I might be able to install her confidence, if I play around with the giggle juice just a little. You credit me up front and I can afford the moral deficit. Who knows, I may even turn her around...”
“Perhaps, get close to her, see what she is taking, using, whatever they call it I think ti may be Scopolamine.”
“Sure. I’ll see which way the rabbit runs. I’ll record some audio and film some still shots. Cost will depend on the time it takes me to get them. I’ll need a payment down now. Anything over that amount I will bill to your account. I’ll need some details. Fill out this form.” I passed over the form, which was a simple declaration to pay the set fees and a ballpoint.
“How long will this take?”
“If as you say Trixie is out nightly it shouldn’t take long. You have any children?”
“No, we tried but...”
“I see.” And I did. Sloane didn’t have kids in him, but then again, thus far, never did I. A child gave you a credit score of 1000. The poor were breeding but the poor always did. Took the completed questionnaire and payment forms from Sloane and slid them under the scanner. Checked my Fun City Credit score and confirmed that I was at 107 points. Enough for a good time and enough for the case.
“Well, let’s get started shall we?”
I stood. Checked my two clips.
One a 2i2 Red-eye recorded film and the other a Whisper 2000 recorded sound. Both clipped to the underneath of the belt.
The client also stood and tried not to notice the rat scurry beneath the drinks globe. I opened the door and ushered him back out into the tunnel where he disappeared walking sheepishly into the darkness. It wasn’t pity I felt for him. It was more a kind of awkward trepidation. He was going to get screwed whichever way the fortune cookie crumbled and I would be at best a spectator in the whole sorry mess.
I moved on into the night towards the bar, a pair of women in high heels and leopard skin sauntered by.
I caught the younger of the pair say to the other.
Look at his shirt. The kind of shirt only a drunk would wear.
TWO
SEEK AND you shall find.
Found the Neptune in Leather like a tequila hangover; crimson wallpaper bled into a lounge with stairs to the left, and straight ahead a jazz band played. The trombone player blew beneath a shock of tightly curled hair. Signet paperback edition of On The Road poked unobtrusively out of his denim jacket pocket. Gibbon hung from a ceiling rafter languidly masturbating above a terminally bored scarlet macaw. The bird was hopping from one foot to the other as if the perch was aflame. A Holy Man sat at the bar wearing a white hemp safari suit drinking mojitos with a docile puffin perched on his shoulder. Outside the sound of tires screeching as a drum solo collided with a sudden blast of brass. A cheetah-skinned barmaid approached, “Soda water, no ice.”
A suit sat in the far corner looking at a copy of the government pamphlet they called the Fun City Express. Somewhere a cockroach died. Slowly, painfully the man with the newspaper sat staring at the print, not reading it, just staring at it. The bar was a nest of pariahs, most of them incurably damaged by the life that brought them here. They existed for the night, the first rays of sunlight signaling the end of the boulevard. Day was simply an interruption of night for those who like vampires returned to their twenty square foot urban coffins and shook through the day until the evening came around arousing them to set foot on the concrete once more. These solitary night crawlers were running low on credits and knew that The Eye just might not catch them wallowing in the rubble. They were motivated by wants disguised as needs, the drink, the woman, the cash, the stash, all simply props in that bizarre performance sadly no dress rehearsal, and probably their final act. Few of them could survive The Punch. A vague military uniform dragged his body away from the bar and towards the exit. Swaying drunkenly from left foot to right before deciding which course the night should take him and then, like an ice pick, plunging right into it.
FUN CITY PUNCH
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