I sipped on my second gin and tonic. This time the ginfizz not as delectable as before. The pitter-patter of brush sticks on a snare sounded out gently from across the room. A muted trumpet followed, the trumpeter blowing something ragtime, a sibling tune to “Rhapsody in Blue” with flutter and growl. Finally, the sound of a stand-up bass entered like a tugboat, the low thump vibrating on the floor. I dropped a sigh into the air. The drummer’s rocky voice called for a round of applause for the singer, simply named Promise. The trumpeter pulled out the stem of a copper Harmon and softened the place down.
She waltzed into the dimly lit room like a bursting high note. Smile and flash, wearing a short black evening dress diamond-latticed in the back. Eyes in the place tripped up on her sleek lanky body. The spotlight caught her in a circle, head beaming, lips aglow in a candy-cane red. Her dark hair was oiled and slick, pinned back. A blood-red rose pinned in her hair seemed as if it had bloomed there, the corsage like a lighthouse beacon under the spotlight. Her face seemed to be a watercolor, a kind of Monet blur as my eyes failed to fully capture her. Then she lit up a smile and came into focus. The doghouse bass thumped around the tables heavy as bricks as she floated a wave across the room. Suddenly, I was pushing myself farther back in the chair.
The salvo of applause tapered off to a murmuring whisper. Then her cotton voice drifted over the room, light as a feather, taking ears from wide-open plain to snow-capped mountain. The next half-hour she sang a range of silky scat to dolorous orotund long notes, each song tangling in the audience’s ears.
Finally, the band called for a break, and she sauntered up to the bar and ordered a lemon water. Facing the bar, I craned my neck toward her, held a stare too long. She caught my eyes and said, “Are you just going to stare at me cock-eyed like a bird without a beak, or are you going to say something.”
I laughed. “I think I’ll just keep pecking at my drink and admire you from afar.” I turned away from her, glancing into one of the large mirrors mounted behind the bar. She peeked into the mirror several times, stealing glances. We danced like this a minute until the trumpet player came up to her and planted a kiss on her cheek.
As she turned to go, she said, “You know what they say, don’t you?”
“What’s that?” I asked, eyes still in the mirror.
“The early bird gets the worm.” She draped an arm around the trumpeter. Pinning a wink on me, she flashed her mouth full of pearls and faded through the crowd.
I called out in a comedian’s voice. “That bird has to sing through a piece of metal to play a pretty song. Me, I’m just naturally pretty.”
She laughed at this, did a half-turn for a quick glance back. The trumpeter was eyeing me, taking her away as if she were a meadow flower he had just picked and was unwilling to share.
Six hours later I was in her room. After her set was through, we had bantered more at the bar. She had given me the nod and we moved up to the eighth floor. She was in town for the DL conference, then it would be back to Vegas.
Inside her room, the bathroom door cracked halfway open. Her silhouette spilled on the carpet from the light splintering out of the door. Her shadow gyrated in a ropy dance as she brushed her hair. A bit of hum still hung in her voice. Soft moans lingered in her throat, a sad melody hooking the heart like chords from a Stradivarius. She swung the door open, and a slit in her robe opened cutting her through the middle. My eyes jumped helplessly toward a breast bouncing within. The curtains were closed, yet the city lights slipped through their pores. Fractals of light danced over her as she moved toward me, her soft skin a medium absorbing them. Her robe swished from one shoulder to the next. She plopped down on the bed next to me and ran a fingernail over my cheek. “So,” she said, “what instrument do you really sing through?”
“One that enjoys wit more than song,” I said.
She nodded, then looked toward the door. “Didn’t I ask you to leave?”
“You did, but I had trouble finding my feet.”
“They’re right here,” she said, grabbing one, “and I’m quite positive you know how to use them.”
“I’ll leave, if that’s what you really want.”
She eased toward me. I felt her hip on my stomach, a glorious curve to it that swallowed me. She stroked my ear, running a finger behind it, trailing it over my lips, over my collarbone. She looked over to the door again, then moved her eyes back into mine. “After another minute, it would be a wise idea.”
“A minute then to feel human again.”
Her expression flipped. A frown appeared. “You don’t feel human? That sounds rather complicated.”
It was a stupid thing to say, and I became apprehensive, as if I had startled the water in a fishpond. “Do you know I’ve been to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Beijing within the last four days? I’ve slept maybe ten hours between all of it.”
“So you want to sleep then?”
I laughed. “Hardly.”
I ran a thumb over her eyebrow, a slow arch tracing over it. Her eyelashes flickered, soft little beats, butterfly wings. I turned my elbow under the pillow my head was resting on to get a better view of her. My fingers glided to the knot of her robe. “Don’t you ever have a need to just bask in the moment a bit?”
“Let the moment be?” she said, taking my hand into hers. “Without posing any more questions?”
“Yes.”
“Considering the intimate position we’re putting ourselves in, isn’t it more appropriate to get know one another.”
“It is,” I said, “but we don’t need to take this that far?”
She laughed, dotted me on the nose. “Now you’re talking like every other man who wants to get in my pants after I tell them they’re not getting the sugar.”
I leaned forward and kissed her. Her hands pushed at my shoulders, but then eased, slipping toward my back. She took my tongue into her mouth, and moved on top of me. Her robe opened, and her breasts poured out onto my chest as she laid flat on top of me. As she kissed my ear, rocking herself over my hips, my mind deep in bliss, I wrapped my hands behind her back. As my fingers touched her skin, I felt the crosshatched tracks of flesh, welts running in straight lines, intersecting with one another, and my hands jumped off. She must have sensed the revulsion in the sudden jerk. My mind too slow to catch the significance—this part of the diversion. A sting picked me on the left side of my neck. I bucked, trying to fling her off, but she had my legs tied up with her own.
“What have you done?” I yelled, twisting one of my arms out of her grasp, grabbing her by the throat as she made a renewed effort to push her weight on top of me. My limbs going numb, The Abattoir flashed fresh in my mind. She pushed my arm away from her throat, her nose almost touching mine, her breath a hot pant. Her glassy eyes turned sinister, but the soft, playful singer’s smile still bloomed on her face, erotic lips almost wet with a tune. “Really?” she said, kissing me on the nose. “We don’t have to take this that far? What a shit line. And you started off so well.”
I struggled for leverage, but my arms had turned to rubber and she had my wrists pinned with her hands.
She laughed, her head tilting to the ceiling. “Is this slow enough for you?”
“Who are you?” I mumbled. To this question, she simply smiled. She must have felt the drugs had enough time to do their work as she let go of my wrists, sat up on my stomach, and pulled her robe tight.
“You already know the answer to that,” she said. “Your brain is just slow getting there. The blood has been drained from one head to another.”
She now had me feeling a fool, a tone of Seee in her voice, chastising me.
“You’ve been through The Abattoir,” I said.
“Yes.”
“He beat you?”
“Seee, you mean. You can say the name. It’s safe.”
“Yes, Seee.”
“No, Des did it.”
I paused, trying to imagine it. Finally, I said, “He sent you to fuck with
me.”
“He sent me over here to check up on you. He doesn’t think your head is in the game.”
I was silent for another moment, my lips now the only part of me that could move. “Beat me if you will.”
“Beat you? I’m your partner. Betty Smith at your service.” She laughed again while reaching under the mattress. A hypodermic needle appeared in her hand.
“You?” I asked incredulously.
She had the needle pointed to the ceiling, tapping it with a finger. A bit of liquid spurted out of the needle as she squeezed. “Ready to go to Walmart, Miss Theresa Ross?”
“Wait! Wait! Wait—”
“You’re a man easily manipulated, Isse Corvus.”
“I know,” I admitted.
She looked down at me for a long time, tapping the needle again—the finger buying a second’s worth of time so she could think things through. Perhaps something sexy stood out for her in my vulnerability. Perhaps she saw herself stuck numb under someone from somewhere in her past, lying helpless on her back, waiting for the inevitable. Her black eyes were absent of pity, but certainly underneath the tough glare shined a hint of understanding. She produced a shoestring and tied it around my upper arm, jerking it tight. No sensation, even as she knotted it twice.
I garbled the words but said, “What else can I say? I’m human. Now go ahead and do it!”
She gazed heavily into my eyes as she stuck the needle deep into a vein, pushing the liquid slowly into me. She sighed as she let her robe fall once more. She inched forward on my chest, moving over me so her breasts fell lightly over my face. “Sweet dreams, Shane Carrier,” she said, circling a nipple around one of my eyes. Moving it to my lips, she let the softness of it take me peacefully away as a hum slipped back into her voice.
Chapter 22
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
-Abraham Lincoln
Time vanished on the morning of February 3rd. Strange how one can disappear completely from oneself only to reappear, the spell of REM not really part of our daily thought process. Even as we live, we are all part ghost, chiming into the spatial fabric of another—perhaps darker—universe. Only a moment ago Promise sat on top of me singing a lullaby cloaked in her beautiful nakedness. Now, I grasped empty sheets thinking she had rolled over next to me. Traces of her scent hung in the air suffocating my sense of reason about what she had done. I propped myself onto my elbows. Arms alive again, I squeezed them one at a time, up and down, testing them as if my biceps were ripe fruit. Leaning forward, I grasped my head in my hands and felt the thin bristle on top of my scalp. I rubbed my eyes and contemplated what had happened. Perhaps she was right. I was a man without discipline who couldn’t keep his mind on the game. At that moment, I felt like quitting, disappearing with the wad of cash I had been given by The Minutemen. Find another life, I told myself. Live for yourself—Fuck the nation—Fuck The Cause.
I rose to my feet and gathered my clothes with the full intent of executing Plan B. On the door was a note. It read:
Today is a rest day, Shane. We think you need one. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and pull yourself together. Kisses, Promise.
Who was this woman? She had an uncanny way of knowing what I thought. A certain intrigue about her itched more than it annoyed.
I lumbered back to my room and stretched out in yoga positions before I hopped in the shower, then down to the restaurant for breakfast wearing simple jeans, a plain black T-shirt, an A’s hat, and a dark pair of sunglasses. Afterward, I roamed down Turk Street again. A sunny day lit up the blue sky, but the smoke once again clouded up the air. It dawned on me the torched-up neighborhood was spillover from the Oakland demonstrations.
I crossed the street. The same bootlegger shouted at his stand hawking liquor. This time he was taking EBT Product cards, refusing the cash ones. I walked back to Market Street. The DL throngs stampeded in a pilgrimage to the Moscone Center. Clusters of them, with badges roped around their necks, rushed in eager flight to catch the opening keynote, to listen to Blake Thompson’s annual diatribe on the future of computing. I continued up Market until I hit Embarcadero, and headed up the coast. Seagulls squawked from far in the distance. I strolled the promenade, surprised to see the once-pristine sidewalks gum-splatted and shit-stained, cracked and dilapidated. Long rows of tents clustered between shipping docks and piers. The sea air smelled of brine and urine.
Men in dusty suits hawked watches and jewelry, old family heirlooms, silverware, and trinkets passed down through the generations. Cutmen they called them, byproducts of another wave of corporate redundancies, the nexus between the dying middleclass and the sucking Morlocks dependent on the state. But here were thinking men—obeyed their own rule of law, set up their own court, laws plastered on streetlights. The lampposts advertised one had to show prior proof of employment, fill out a questionnaire to be accepted. Open protest here. A mini-society living in mucky tents leaking into the bloodstream of the city. It was a Christiania inside Copenhagen, a society within a society, a superposition of humanity beating to a different drum. Like Turk Street, it was another arrhythmia in the heartbeat of the city by the bay, a presence unable to be ignored.
Men preached on milk crates, yelling about government injustices. Small crowds gathered, but the orators were preaching to the choir, the tent people having nothing better to do. The majority of tourists had long since fled to Pier 39, the last bastion of San Francisco tourism. At Pier 33, even Alcatraz was closed.
Out on the promenade, an older man had unbuttoned his shirt and was showing a crowd his chest port. I approached and listened to him preach.
“How do you change people’s minds? You obfuscate the issue. You redirect emotion. You delude them. What does a parent do when a child cries and becomes sick of the screaming?”
The crowd murmured waiting for a reply. “You give them a piece of candy. You appeal to their sense of instant gratification. That’s what Brainfinger is. It’s robbing us of our free minds and our intelligent thought. It’s creating cattle out of us, and it’s growing. Two more Uplift camps have started up. One in Napa, the other just outside Palm Springs. But they’re building clinics now in this city.”
He went on to speak about community members arrested at cybercafés for “terrorist propaganda.” He warned the Cutmen were listed as a community of interest, targets of the State, and some of them had been shipped off to Uplift camps and never seen again.
As he was midsentence, he pointed to a flock of MAV drones high up in the air incognito under the guise of crows’ bodies. They swooped down squawking from the sky in a strafing attack. The crowd dispersed, jogging away in different directions. I hid behind a streetlamp. The orator seemed ready for this eventuality, pulling out the metal top of a trashcan as a hail of rubber bullets rained down on him.
When the drones flew on, I slipped out of my hiding place and went over to him.
“These ones are less offensive than the ones they use for crowd control,” he said, picking a rubber nub up and rubbing it between his fingers. “This caliber will leave only bruises. They’re called crowd-breakers.”
“I guess with their size, they can’t shoot anything lethal.”
“They will in time,” he said. “That I’ll wager on.”
He had a head of hair as irongray as a San Francisco fog, bushy and disheveled. A limp bothered him from his left leg which he tried to conceal. When he smiled, the skin on his craggy face straightened, showing a once-distinguished man who now fought to regain his dignity. I offered to help him carry some of his stuff—his aluminum garbage can shield, his orator’s pedestal (a plastic milk-carton), a big mountaineering backpack, and an army-surplus duffle bag full of clothes. He thanked me for my assistance, but said he didn’t need it. The Cutman asked for my name, and I told him it was Shane Carrier, L.A. tourist visiting a friend. I remarked the place had changed a lot over the years. He nodded. I asked him why they closed Alcatraz.
“Reop
ening it as a prison,” he said, “but most likely it will be an Uplift facility.”
“You know anyone who’s come out of one?”
“Are you kidding?” he said, guffawing. “Dead or alive, or both?” He followed up the question with another laugh. The laugh stuck with me—the “which world do you live in” laugh, hearty and full, a jawbone chuckle that said I lived in the land of the clueless.
“I’ve been through one,” he said. “Didn’t you see my chest?”
“I was late to your speech. What’s this Brainfinger you’re talking about?”
“That’s its street name. You’ve heard of Elevation haven’t you?”
“Yes, it’s the drug their using, but how is it you’re sober?”
“I still have to go in for shots or they’ll jail me. It’s part of my probation. That’s how they do it. They fabricate a charge—usually disturbing the peace or resisting arrest—then they give you jail time and offer an Uplift site as an alternative. If they really want to nail you to the cross, they’ll give you a felony and you’ll be forced to go.”
He heaped the backpack on and slung the duffle bag over his shoulder. Even a Cutman had more things to hold onto. “How long have you been off it?”
“A few days,” he said.
“I heard it was supposed to last much longer than that.”
“It is, but I know a neurologist, and I’ve been able to secure the closest thing to an antidote. It takes a couple of days to work before your brain comes back from the scrambled-egg state though.”
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