When Gravity Fails

by George Alec Effinger

  “Feel protected now? They give you a sense of invulnerability?”

  “You feel invulnerable, Okking?”

  His sneer tilted over and crashed. “The hell,” he said. He waved me out of there; I went, as grateful as ever.

  By the time I got out of the building, the sky was getting dusky in the east. I heard the recorded cries of muezzins from minarets all over the city. It had been a busy day. I wanted a drink, but I still had some things to do before I could let myself ease off a little. I walked into the hotel and went up to my room, stripped off my robe and headgear, and took a shower. I let the hot water pound against my body for a quarter of an hour; I just rotated under it like lamb on a spit. I washed my hair and soaped my face two or three times. It was regrettable but necessary: the beard had to come off. I had gotten clever, but Khan’s reminder in my mailbox made it plain that I still wasn’t clever enough. First, I cut my long reddish-brown hair short.

  I hadn’t seen my upper lip since I was a teenager, so the short, harsh swipes with the razor gave me some twinges of regret. They passed quickly; after a while I was actually curious about what I looked like under it all. In another fifteen minutes I had eliminated the beard completely, going back over every place on my neck and face until the skin stung and blood stood out along bright red slashes.

  When I realized what I reminded myself of, I couldn’t look at my reflection any longer. I threw cold water on my face and toweled off. I imagined thumbing my nose at Friedlander Bey and the rest of the sophisticated undesirables of the city. Then I could find my way back to Algeria and spend the rest of my life there, watching goats die.

  I brushed my hair and went into the bedroom, where I opened the packages from the men’s store. I dressed slowly, turning some thoughts over in my mind. One notion eclipsed everything else: whatever happened, I wasn’t going to chip in a personality module again.

  I would use every daddy that offered help, but they just extended my own personality. No human thinking machine of fact or fiction was any good to me—none of them had ever faced this situation, none of them had ever been in the Budayeen. I needed to keep my own wits about me, not those of some irrelevant construct.

  It felt good to get that settled. It was the compromise I’d been searching for ever since Papa first told me I’d volunteered to get wired. I smiled. Some weight—negligible, a quarter-pound, maybe—lifted from my shoulders.

  I won’t say how long it took me to get my necktie on. There were clip-on ties, but the shop where I’d bought everything frowned on their existence.

  I tucked my shirt into my trousers, fastened everything, put on my shoes, and threw on the suit jacket. Then I stepped back to look at my new self in the mirror. I cleaned some dried blood from my neck and chin. I looked good, faster than light with a little money in my pocket. You know what I mean. I was the same as always: the clothes looked first-rate. That was fine, because most people only look at the clothes, anyway. It was more important that for the first time, I believed the whole nightmare was close to resolution. I had gone most of the way through a dark tunnel, and only one or two obscure shapes hid the welcome light at the end of it.

  I put the phone on my belt, invisible beneath the suit coat. As an afterthought, I slipped the little needle gun into a pocket; it barely made a bulge, and I was thinking “better safe than sorry.” My malicious mind was telling me “safe and sorry”; but it was too late at night to listen to my mind, I’d been doing that all day. I was just going down to the hotel’s bar for a little while, that’s all.

  Nevertheless, Xarghis Khan knew what I looked like, and I knew nothing about him except that he probably didn’t look anything like James Bond. I remembered what Hassan had said only a few hours ago: “I trust nobody.”

  That was the plan, but was it practical? Was it even possible to go through a single day being totally suspicious? How many people did I trust without even thinking about it—people who, if they felt like getting rid of me, could have murdered me quickly and simply? Yasmin, for one. The Half-Hajj, I’d even invited him up to my apartment; all he needed to be the assassin was the wrong moddy. Even Bill, my favorite cabbie; even Chiri, who owned the hugest collection of moddies in the Budayeen. I’d go crazy if I kept thinking like that.

  What if Okking himself was the very murderer he was pretending to track down? Or Hajjar?

  Or Friedlander Bey?

  Now I was thinking like the Maghrebi bean-eater they all thought I was. I shook it off, left the hotel room, and rode the elevator down to the mezzanine and the dimly lighted bar. There weren’t many people there: the city had few enough tourists to begin with, and this was an expensive and quiet hotel. I looked along the bar and saw three men on the stools, all leaning together and talking quietly. To my right there were four more groups, mostly men, sitting at tables. Recorded European or American music played softly. The theme of the bar seemed to be expressed in potted ferns and stucco walls painted pastel pink and orange. When the bartender raised his eyebrows at me, I ordered a gin and bingara. He made it just the way I liked, down to the splash of Rose’s. That was a point for the cosmopolitans.

  The drink came and I paid for it. I sipped at it, asking myself why I’d thought sitting here would help me forget my problems. Then she drifted up to me, moving in an unhuman slow-motion as if she were half-asleep or drugged. It didn’t show in her smile or her speech, though. “Do you mind if I sit with you?” Trudi asked.

  “Of course not.” I smiled graciously at her, but my mind was roiling with questions.

  She told the barman she wanted peppermint schnapps. I would have put fifty kiam on that. I waited until she got her drink; I paid for it, and she thanked me with another languorous smile.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean?”

  “After answering questions all day for the lieutenant’s men.”

  “Oh, they were all as nice as they could be.”

  I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “How did you find me?”

  “Well,” she gestured vaguely, “I knew you were staying here. You brought me here this afternoon. And your name—”

  “I never told you my name.”

  “—I heard it from the policemen.”

  “And you recognized me? Though I don’t look anything like the way I did when you met me? Even though I’ve never worn clothes like these before or been without my beard?”

  She gave me one of those smiles that tell you that men are such fools. “Aren’t you glad to see me?” she asked, with that glaze of hurt feelings that the Trudies do so well.

  I went back to my gin. “One of the reasons I came down to the bar. Just on the chance you’d come in.”

  “And here I am.”

  “I’ll always remember that,” I said. “Would you excuse me? I’m a couple drinks ahead of you.”

  “Sure, I’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks.” I went off to the men’s room, got myself in a stall, and unclipped my phone. I called Okking’s number. A voice I didn’t recognize told me he was in his office, asleep for the night, and he wasn’t going to be awakened except for an emergency. Was this an emergency? I said I didn’t think so, but that if it was I’d get back to him. I asked for Hajjar, but he was out on an investigation. I got Hajjar’s number and punched it.

  He let his phone ring a while. I wondered if he were really investigating anything or just soaking up ambience. “What is it?” he snarled.

  “Hajjar? You sound out of breath. Lifting weights or something?”

  “Who is this? How’d you get—”

  “Audran. Okking’s out for the night. Listen, what did you learn from Seipolt’s blonde?”

  The phone went mute for a moment, then Hajjar’s voice came back on, a little more friendly. “Trudi? We knocked her out, dug around as deep as we could, and brought her back up. She didn’t know anything. That worried us, so we put her out a second time. Nobody should know as much nothing as
she does and still be alive. But she’s clean, Audran. I’ve known tent stakes that had more going for them than she does, but all she knows about Seipolt is his first name.”

  “Then why is she still alive and Seipolt and the others aren’t?”

  “The killer didn’t know she was there. Xarghis Khan would have jammed the living daylights out of her, then maybe killed her. As it happened, our Trudi was in her room taking a nap after lunch. She doesn’t remember if she locked her door. She’s alive because she’d only been there a few days and she wasn’t part of the regular household.”

  “How’d she react to the news?”

  “We fed her the facts while she was under, and took out all the horribleness for her. It’s like she read about it in the papers.”

  “Praise Allah, you cops are nice. Did you put anybody on her when she left?”

  “You see anybody?”

  That stung me. “What makes you so sure I’m with her?”

  “Why else would you be calling me about her this time of night? She’s clean, sucker, as far as we could tell. As for anything else, well, we didn’t give her a blood test, so you’re on your own.” The line went dead.

  I grimaced, clipped the phone back on my belt, and went out to the bar. I spent the rest of that gin and tonic looking for Trudi’s shadow, but I didn’t see a likely candidate. We went out to have something to eat, to give me the chance to ease my mind. By the end of the supper, I was sure no one was following either Trudi or me. We went back to the bar and had a few more drinks and got to know each other. She decided we knew each other well enough just before midnight.

  “It’s kind of noisy in here, isn’t it?” she said.

  I nodded solemnly. There were only three other people in the bar now, and that included the block of wood who was making our drinks. It was just that time when either Trudi or I had to say something stupid, and she beat me to it. It was right then that I simultaneously misplaced my caution and decided to teach Yasmin a lesson. Listen, I was mildly drunk, I was depressed and lonely, Trudi was really a sweet girl and absolutely gorgeous—how many do you need?

  When we went upstairs, Trudi smiled at me and kissed me a few times, slowly and deeply, as though morning wasn’t coming until after lunch some time. Then she told me it was her turn to use the bathroom. I waited for her to close the door, then I called down to the desk and asked them to be sure I was awake by seven the next morning. I took out the small plastic needle gun, threw back the bedspread, and hid the weapon quickly. Trudi came out of the bathroom with her dress hanging loosely, its fastenings left undone. She smiled at me, a lazy, knowing smile. As she came toward me, my only thought was that this would be the first time I’d ever gone to sleep with a gun under my pillow.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Oh, just that you don’t look bad, for a real girl.”

  “You don’t like real girls?” she whispered in my ear.

  “I just haven’t been with one for a while. It’s just worked out that way.”

  “You like toys better?” she murmured, but there was no more room for discussion.

  17

  When the phone rang, I was dreaming that my mother was shouting at me. She was screaming so loud that I couldn’t recognize her, I just knew it was her. We started arguing about Yasmin, but that changed; we fought about living in the city, and we fought about how I could never be expected to understand anything because the only thing I ever thought about was myself. My part was limited to crying “I am not!” while my heart thudded in my sleep.

  I thrashed awake, bleary and still tired. I squinted at the phone, then picked it up. A voice said, “Good morning. Seven o’clock.” Then there was a click. I put the phone back and sat up in bed. I took a deep breath that hesitated and hitched two or three times on the way in. I wanted to go back to sleep, even if it meant nightmares. I didn’t want to get up and face another day like yesterday.

  Trudi wasn’t in bed. I swung my feet to the floor and walked naked around the small hotel room. She wasn’t in the bathroom, either, but she had written a note for me and left it on the bureau. It said:

  Dear Marîd—

  Thanks for everything. You’re a dear, sweet man. I hope we meet again sometime.

  I have to go now, so I’m sure you won’t mind if I borrow the fare from your wallet.

  Love ya,

  Trudi

  (My real name is Gunter Erich von S.

  You mean you really didn’t know, or were you just being nice?)

  There is very little I’ve missed in my life, as far as sex goes. My secret fantasies don’t concern what, they concern who. I’d seen and heard everything, I thought. The only thing I’d never heard faked—until, evidently, last night—was that involuntary animal catch in a woman’s breathing, the very first one, before the lovemaking has even had time to become rhythmical. I glanced down at Trudi’s note again, remembering all the times Jacques, Mahmoud, Saied, and I had sat at a table at the Solace, watching people walk by. “Oh, her? She’s a female-to-male sex-change in drag.” I could read everybody. I was famous for it.

  I swore I’d never tell anyone anything ever again. I wondered if the world ever got tired of its jokes; no, that was too much to hope for. The jokes would go on and on, getting worse and worse. Right now I was certain that if age and experience couldn’t stop the jokes, there was nothing about death that would make them stop, either.

  I folded my new clothing carefully and packed it in the zipper bag. I wore my white robe and keffiya again today, making yet another new look—Arab costume but clean-shaven. The man of a thousand faces. Today I wanted to take Hajjar up on his promise to let me use the police computer files. I wanted to fill in a little background, on the police themselves. I wanted to find out as much as I could about Okking’s link to Bond/Khan.

  Instead of walking, I took a cab to the police station. It wasn’t that I was getting spoiled by the luxury Papa was paying for; I just felt the urgent pressing of events. I was killing time as fast as it was killing me. The daddies were buzzing in my head, and I didn’t feel muscle-weary, hungry, or thirsty. I wasn’t angry or afraid, either; some people might have warned me that not being afraid was dangerous. Maybe I should have been afraid, a little.

  I watched Okking eat a late breakfast in his flimsy fortress while I waited for Hajjar to get back to his desk. When the sergeant came in, he gave me a distracted look. “You’re not the only bakebrain I have to worry about, Audran,” he said in a surly voice. “We’ve got thirty other jerks giving us fantasy information and inside words they dig out of dreams and teacups.”

  “You’ll be glad I don’t have a goddamn piece of information for you, then. I came to get some from you. You said I could use your files.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure; but not here. If Okking saw you, he’d split my skull. I’ll call downstairs. You can use one of the terminals on the second floor.”

  “I don’t care where it is,” I said. Hajjar made the phone call, typed out a pass for me, and signed it. I thanked him and found my way down to the data bank. A young woman with Southeast Asian features led me to an unused screen, showed me how to get from one menu to the next, and told me that if I had any questions, the machine itself would answer them. She wasn’t a computer expert or a librarian; she just managed traffic flow in the big room.

  First I checked the general files, which were much like a news agency’s morgue. When I typed in a name, the computer gave me every fact available to it concerning the person. The first name I entered was Okking’s. The cursor paused for a second or two, then lettered steadily across the display in Arabic, right to left. I learned Okking’s first name, his middle name, his age, where he’d been born, what he’d done before coming to the city, all the stuff that gets put on a form above the important double line. Below that line comes the really vital information; depending on whose form it is, that can be the subject’s medical record, arrest record, credit history, political involvement, sexual
preference(s), or anything else that may one day be pertinent.

  As for Okking, below that double line there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Al-Sifr, zero.

  At first I assumed there was some kind of computer problem. I started over again, returning to the first menu, choosing the sort of information I was looking for, and typing in Okking’s name. And waited.

  Mâ shî. Nothing.

  Okking had done this, I was sure. He had covered his tracks, just as his boy Khan was now covering his own. If I wanted to travel to Europe, to Okking’s birthplace, I might learn more about him, but only to the point when he left there to come to the city. Since then, he did not exist at all, not officially speaking.

  I typed in Universal Export, the code name of James Bond’s espionage group. I had seen it on an envelope on Okking’s desk once. Again, there were no entries.

  I tried James Bond without hope, and turned up nothing. Similarly with Xarghis Khan. The real Khan and the “real” Bond had never visited the city, so there was no file on either of them.

  I thought about other people I might spy on—Yasmin, Friedlander Bey, even myself—but I decided to leave my curiosity unsatisfied until a less urgent occasion. I entered Hajjar’s name and was not astonished by what I read. He was about two years younger than I was, Jordanian, with a moderately long arrest record before coming to the city. A psychological profile agreed point for point with my own estimation of him; you didn’t dare trust him as far as he could run with a camel on his back. He was suspected of smuggling drugs and money to prisoners. He was once investigated in connection with the disappearance of a good deal of confiscated property, but nothing definite came of it. The official file put forth the possibility that Hajjar might be profiting from his position on the police force, that he might be selling his influence to private citizens or criminal organizations. The report suggested that he might not be above such abuses of authority as extortion, racketeering, and conspiracy, among other law-enforcement frailties.