She tried turning the television on. There was no battery inside it. She began searching, and quickly discovered that all the electronic devices in the room had been deprived of their batteries. Except, of course, for the newly stolen devices that were still in her bag. She eviscerated the netlink and transplanted its battery into the laptop television. She turned the television on.
A Deutschlander talk show appeared onscreen. The host was a St. Bernard dog. He had an actress with him. Maya methodically cleaned the room as she watched the show and listened through one ear.
“[My problem is with reading,]” the dog confessed in fluent Deutsch. The dog had shaggy St. Bernard genetics, but he was very well dressed. “[Mastering speech is one matter. Any dog can do that, with the proper wiring. But reading is an entirely different level of semantic cognition. The sponsors have done their best for me—you know that as well as I do, Nadja. But I have to admit it, right here, publicly—reading is a very serious challenge for any postcanine].”
“[Poor baby,]” the actress said with genuine sympathy. “[Why fight it? They say it’s a postliterate epoch anyway.]”
“[Anyone who could say that is deeply out of touch,]” the dog said gravely and with dignity. “[Goethe. Rilke. Günter Grass. Heinrich Böll. That says it all.]”
Maya was fascinated by the actress’s clothing. The actress was wearing diaphanous military gear, greenish see-through combat pajamas, and a paratrooper’s sweater in satin. Her face was like something chiseled in cameo, and her hair was truly awe-inspiring. Her hair deserved a doctorate in fiber engineering.
“[We’re all on our own in this epoch,]” the actress mourned. “[When you think what they can do to us on set nowadays—the weird mental spaces they’re willing to put people into, in pursuit of a decent performance … And then there are the gutter net-freaks, those stinking paparazzi … But you know, Aquinas, and I mean this: You’re a dog. I know you’re a dog. It’s not any secret. But truly—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I feel happier on your show than I would on anyone else’s.]”
The audience applauded politely.
“[That’s very sweet of you,]” the dog said, wagging his tail. “[I appreciate that more than I can say. Nadja, tell us a little about this business on-set with Christian Mancuso. What was that all about?]”
“[Well, Aquinas, just for you,]” the actress said. “[It’s certainly not something I would tell to just anyone.… But it happened like this. Christian and I are both in our sixties, we’re not young people. Of course. We’d been working together on this project for the company, Hermes Kino. We’d been within the set together for six weeks. We got along wonderfully—I was used to his company, you know, we’d emerge from the set, decompress, have dinner together, talk about the script.… Then one night, Christian took me in his arms and kissed me! I suppose we were both rather surprised by that. It seemed very sweet, though.]”
“Natürlich,” the dog agreed.
“[So we both agreed to go on the hormone course, I suppose it was his idea really.]”
The audience applauded politely.
“[So that was what we did. We took a thorough hormone course together. Sex made a lot of difference. Really, it was quite astonishing how intense the experience was. In the long run I have to say it was good for me. It did seem to open me up creatively. I enjoyed it. Quite a bit. I know Christian did, too.]”
“[How do you know that?]” the dog prompted. “[A woman knows, that’s all.… I suppose it was the most profound erotic experience of my whole life! I did things that I never would have done as a younger woman. When you are young, sex means so much to you. You get so serious and formal about it.… ]”
“[Do tell us,]” the dog suggested. “[You might as well tell us now, while you’re still in the mood.]”
“[Well, certain things like—well, we liked to play dress-up. Bed dress-up.]” She smiled radiantly. “[He enjoyed it, too, it was very delightful for both of us. A kind of drunkenness really. A hormonal bender. You can look at my medical records if you don’t believe what I’m telling you.]”
“[Dress-up?]” said the dog skeptically. “[That’s all? That seems very innocent.]”
“[Aquinas, listen. Christian and I are both professionals. You have no idea what professionals can do when we put our minds to dress-up.]”
The audience laughed, apparently on cue. “[Then what happened?]” asked the dog. “[Well,]” said the actress, “[after about eighteen months—I wouldn’t say that we’d tired of it exactly, but we’d certainly settled down. Christian came back from a routine checkup, and he had these bladder cysts. The hormones were responsible. Christian decided that he had to back off. So of course, I did the same. And the moment that happened, all the energy went out of our relationship. We became … well … slightly embarrassed with one another. We no longer tried to live and sleep together.]”
“[That’s a shame,]” the dog said, conventionally.
“[If you’re thirty, maybe it is.]” The actress shrugged. “[Once you’re sixty, you become accustomed to the facts of life.]” There was scattered applause.
The actress sat up briskly, excited. “[I’m still on very good terms with him! Truly! I would work together with Christian Mancuso at any time. Any project. He’s a fine actor! A real professional! I feel no shame or embarrassment about our sordid little carnal tryst. It was helpful to both of us. Artistically.]”
“[Would you do it again?]”
“[Well … Yes! Maybe … Probably not. No, Aquinas. Let me be very frank with you here. No, I’ll never do that again.]”
The door shrieked open. Ulrich appeared, and called out something in Deutsch. The translation earpiece was caught between the jabber of television and Ulrich’s remark. The little machine could not decide where to direct the user’s attention, so it fell into silence.
Maya turned the television off. The translator perked up again with a telltale little squeak.
“I hope you like Chinese food,” Ulrich said.
“I love Chinese.”
“[I thought you would. Little lumps of chopped-up dreck that don’t look like anything. Perfect for a Californian.]” He gave her a carton and chopsticks.
They sat together on the chilly floor, and ate. He gazed about the room. “[You’ve been moving things around.]”
“I’ve been cleaning up the place.”
“What a little treasure you are,” Ulrich said, munching solemnly.
“Why do you keep all this junk anyway? You should have sold all this stuff a long time ago.”
“[That’s not so easy. You can sell the batteries. There’s always a ready black market for batteries. The rest of this loot is all too dangerous. Better to wait for a good long while, to throw off the scent.]”
“You’ve been waiting a long time already. This junk’s all covered with dust and there’s mice living in it.”
Ulrich shrugged. “[We meant to keep a cat, but we don’t get up here often enough.]”
“Why do you rob people at all, if you’re not going to sell what you steal?”
“Oh, we sell it, we sell it!” he insisted. “We do! A little extra cash is always nice.” He poked at the air with his chopsticks. “[But that’s not our premier motivation, you see. We simply do our part to outrage the gerontocratic haute bourgeoisie.]”
“Sure,” she said skeptically.
“[Cash isn’t everything in life. We just had sex,]” Ulrich informed her, triumphantly. “[Why didn’t you ask me for money?]”
“I don’t know, I just didn’t feel like I had to.”
“[Maybe you should have asked for cash. You’re an illegal. But me, I’m a European citizen! They’ll feed me, they’ll shelter me, they’ll educate me, they’ll even entertain me, and it’s all free! If I volunteer myself, they’ll even find lovely useful things for me to do, like pulling up weeds and cleaning up forests and other healthy boring nonsense. I don’t have to steal to survive. I’m a thief because I think diff
erently.]”
“Why don’t you resist them a bit more directly, if you’re so wonderfully radical?”
“[I want to rebel in a way that causes them the maximum shame and embarrassment, for my minimum effort and risk! Robbing tourists is optimal.]”
Maya ate her shredded Chinese protein, and looked him over. “I don’t think you really mean any of that, Ulrich. I think that you steal people’s luggage because you’re obsessive. And I think that you hoard all this junk because you can’t bear to part with any of your lovely forbidden trophies.”
Ulrich stabbed his chopsticks into the mix in his carton. A slow flush rose up the fine white milky column of his young male neck. “[That’s very perceptive, darling. That’s just the sort of thing that a motivational counselor in school would tell me. So, you’ve said it to me. So what?]”
“So, there may be some very nice things here, but they’re not the sort of things that I need. That’s what.”
Ulrich crossed his arms. “What is it you think that you need, little mouse?”
“ ‘Better shoes,’ ” she quoted. “ ‘Contact lenses. Cash-cards. Wigs. Skin tint. Some pidgin Deutsch, to get by. Maps. Food. Plumbing. A nice warm bed.’ ” Ulrich winced. “You have a fine memory.”
“In the short term,” she said. “Also, some forged ID would be very nice.”
“[You can forget forging ID,]” he grumbled. “[The bulls beat the forgery problem a long time ago. You’d have better luck forging the moon.]”
“But we could sell off this useless junk, and we could get all the rest of it.”
“Maybe. Probably,” he said in English. “But you are cheating me. You should have told me of your great ambitions. Before we became lovers.”
She said nothing. She was touched that he’d described the two of them as “lovers.” It showed such a sweetly adolescent will to immolation that she could scarcely bear to maneuver him, even though it was pathetically easy to do.
She ate methodically. Her judgmental silence etched its way into him like a slow-acting acid.
“[Well, I’ve been meaning to sell it all anyway,]” Ulrich told her at last, boasting, and lying. “[There are certain ways to do that. There are good ways. Interesting ways. But they’re not easy. They’re risky.]”
“Let me run all the risks,” she told him at once, crushing him with a single blow. “Why should you run any risks? That’s beneath your dignity. I see you in the starring role of the silent criminal mastermind. A European paranoiac criminal genius. Did you ever watch that old silent film, Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler?”
“[What on earth are you babbling about?]”
“It’s very simple, Ulrich. I like risks. I love risks. I live for risks.”
“That’s marvelous,” Ulrich said. He had become very sad.
She spent two days in Munchen, running around on her stolen tubeticket, mostly favoring a place downtown called the Viktualienmarkt. This ancient shopping locale had been a food market in some preindustrial time, hence the Deutsch business about “viktuals,” but it had long since turned into a dive for kids and tourists, where there was a lot of business transacted in cash. There was still a little food around, like those ubiquitous Munchener “white sausage” concoctions, but it was mostly tourist-trap kitsch and street couture.
The street couture enthralled her. She was dying for decent cosmetics. She’d been making do with the aging caked-up crud she’d found in Ulrich’s stolen bags—there was even a bad wig in one of them—but she needed her own decisions, her own true colors, brighter, faster, looser, stranger. In the Viktualienmarkt there were whole open-air stalls of mysterious Deutschlander cosmetics. Cosmetics for cash. Lipstick—mit lichtreflektierend Farbpigmente. Very modeanzeigen. O so frivol! Radikales Liftings und Intensivpeelings. Der Kampf mit dem Spiegel. O so feminin! Schönheits-cocktail, die beruhigende Feuchtigkeitscreme. Revitalisierende! Die Wissenschaft der Zukunft! Die Eleganze die neue Diva!
Für den Körper, for the body: eau essentielle, le parfum. The perfume was voodoo. She happened to sample a traditional Parisian scent that Mia had once used on a special night sixty years ago. The evocative reek struck her such a blow of rapturous déjà vu that she dropped her bag and almost fell down in the street. Elixier des lebens! Some of it she photographed. Some of it she stole.
On the third day Ulrich piled her and a fat duffel bag of carefully chosen loot into a stolen car. They wove their way out of the city and headed for the outskirts of Stuttgart. She was wearing her jacket and a pair of slightly-too-tight sporty thermal ski pants and chic little stolen hiking boots. She had a new wig, a big curly blond mess. With a nice vivid scarf. Sunglasses. Foundation, blusher, mascara, lashes, lipstick. Nail polish, toenail polish, footwax, nutrient lotion, and a scent that made her feel more like Mia. When she felt sufficiently like Mia she knew that she could work her way out of anything.
The day was chill and drizzly. “[A friend stole this car,]” Ulrich told her. “[He took certain steps with its brain. I could rent us a car legally, of course, but then I considered our destination and cargo. I’m a bit concerned about geographical backtracking should they happen to remotely search the machine’s memory. A stolen and stupid car is safer for us.]”
“Natürlich.” He was so funny. She’d gotten used to him in very short order. Having sex with Ulrich was just like losing her virginity. She’d felt just the same mild disdain for the man involved and the same triumphant secret sense of having finally annihilated her childhood. Sex was like sleeping, only better exercise and more fun. It was something you did when you felt like jumbled-up blocks inside. It obliterated loneliness and when you came to on the far side of the experience there was a new sense of ease. Every time they had sex together, she came out of it feeling that much more settled inside her own skin. They’d been together three days so far and it had happened about ten times. Like ten pitons driven into a cliff, climbing high above everything that was old and Mia.
“[I wish I could strip this car completely and drive it with my own hands,]” mused Ulrich, watching Munchen’s old suburban sprawl roll by. “[That must have been a thrilling experience.]”
“Manual driving killed more people than wars.”
“[Oh, they’re always fussing about mortality rates, as if mortality rates were the only thing that mattered in life.… You should find this event rather interesting. There will be real enemies of the polity there.]”
The car found an autobahn and tore down it almost silently, at an inhumanly high rate of speed. The other European cars were streamlined and blisteringly fast, with lines and colors like half-sucked candy lozenges. Quite often you could see their owners snoozing or reading inside. “Does the polity have real enemies?”
“[Of course! Many! Countless hordes! A vast spectrum of refuseniks and dissidents! Amish. Anarchists. Andaman Islanders. Australian aborigines. A certain number of tribal Afghanis. Certain American Indians. And that’s just in the A’s!]”
“Prima,” Maya offered, tentatively.
“[You mustn’t think that every human being in the world has been bribed into submission and complacency, just because the polity can offer you a few rotten years of extra life.]”
“Fifty or sixty extra years. And counting.”
“[It’s a magnificent bribe,]” Ulrich admitted, “[but there are many people all over the world who refuse to be co-opted. They live outside the medical law. Outside of the polity.]”
“I know about the Amish. Amish aren’t outlaws. People admire the Amish. They envy their sincerity and simplicity. Plus the Amish still practice real agriculture. People find that very touching.”
Ulrich was wearing his sheepskin, as usual. He picked fretfully at a bare patch on the elbow. “[Yes, there’s a cheap popular vogue for the Amish. The polity turned the Amish into pop stars. That’s the polity’s primary means of subversive integration. They’ll make you a prized exhibit in their culture zoo. So they can boast of their so-called tolerance, while subverting the genuine cu
ltural threat posed to their hegemony.]”
Maya tapped her ear. “I think my translator got all of that, but it didn’t seem to mean much.”
“[It’s all about freedom! Ways to seize and keep your freedom, and your individual autonomy. The way to live outside the law is to be an outlaw.]”
She thought it over. “Maybe you can steal some autonomy for a few years. But the cautious people will outlive you in the long run.”
“[That remains to be seen. The polity was created for old people, but the regime itself is not that old. At heart, they’re a bunch of panic-stricken dodderers wrapping everything in knitting yarn. They think they’ve created a thousand-year regime. The Amish have been the Amish for four hundred years. Let’s see these miserable grannies outlive the Amish.]”
The towers of Stuttgart rose over the horizon. They were four hundred stories tall and made of scaled gelatin and they looked like giant fish. Sweet little white pennants of the purest water vapor were being exhaled from the tops of the stacks. If you looked carefully you could see the walls of the towers gently breathing. Puckering and glistening, repeatedly.
“I had no idea Stuttgart looked so much like Indianapolis,” Maya said.
“You have visited Indianapolis?”
“Telepresence.”
“Oh, yes.”
She looked at the distant towers and sighed. “They say Stuttgart is the greatest city for the arts in the whole world.”
“Yes,” Ulrich said meditatively, “Stuttgart is very artificial.”
Large green hills surrounded the city. The hills were compacted rubble, from the former urban structure of Stuttgart. Stuttgart had suffered very harshly during the plagues of the forties. Most of the city had burned down after the panic-stricken population had abandoned town. The scorched infectious wreckage had been demolished by the returning survivors, and Stuttgart had been entirely rebuilt during the gaudy and visionary fifties and sixties. The architects of the new Stuttgart had had nothing left of their past to restrain them, so they’d rolled up their sleeves in a fine biomodernist frenzy and attempted to create compelling icons for their own cultural period. People often got a bit hysterical when they were trying to prove to themselves that they had some right to be survivors.
Holy Fire Page 11
