“Calm down, girl, stop babbling. Tell me something. How old are you?”
“I think I’m about two weeks old.”
Therese sighed. “When was the last time you ate a decent meal?”
“I don’t remember.”
Therese stooped and dug around under the table. She came up with a bag of government granola and a mineral water. “Here. Eat this. Drink that. And remember, you steal one pin from me and I kick you into the street.” She looked downhill. “Joy of joys. Here comes your boyfriend.”
Maya tasted the granola. The granola was fabulous. She jammed an entire handful into her mouth and munched like a hamster.
Ulrich, red-faced and puffing, dropped the duffel bag onto the tabletop. “Let’s talk business.”
“Prima,” Therese said. “[By the way, I just hired your girlfriend for my shop.]”
“[What?]” Ulrich laughed. “[You’re kidding, right? She can’t even speak to the customers.]”
“[I don’t need another salesgirl, I need a mannequin.]”
“[Therese, this is really shortsighted and counterproductive of you. I have to say I’m disappointed. You’re doing this just to spite me,]” Ulrich said. “[I thought you’d gotten over that little contretemps we had before.]”
“[Me? Spiteful? Never! This girl is pretty, she can’t talk much, and she’s got a real bird in her head. She’s a perfect mannequin.]”
“You shouldn’t trust this woman,” Ulrich told Maya in English. “She says you’re crazy.”
“So did you,” Maya said, munching. She glugged some mineral water. “It’s a job and I’m an illegal. It’s a really good break for me. Of course I’m gonna take it. What did you expect?”
Ulrich flushed, slowly. “I did everything you asked from me. I never broke even one of your rules. You’re not being very grateful.”
Maya shrugged. “Jimmy, there’s a million girls in the Marienplatz. Go pick up some other girl. I’ll be fine now.”
Ulrich yanked the bag from the table and slung it over his shoulder. “[If you think you’re moving up in society by going to work in this cow’s stupid little shop, you’ll soon learn differently. If you want to go, go! But don’t think you can come crawling back to the life of freedom!]”
“Her shop’s got heating,” Maya pointed out.
Ulrich turned in fury and lurched away.
There was a long silence. “Girl, you are really cold,” Therese said at last. Half-admiring.
3
Maya went to work for Therese in her shop in the Viktualienmarkt. The shop was glass-fronted brick, untidily crammed with clothes and shoes, with a tiny office in the back where Therese scraped out a narrow financial niche. Therese dealt mostly in cash, often in barter, sometimes in precious metals. Maya lived in the shop, wore her pick of the merchandise, and slept under Therese’s desk. Therese slept in her parents’ high-rise with a variety of scruffy, dangerous-looking, semiarticulate boyfriends.
It was a great comfort to be compelled to work and not have to spend so much time being perfectly free and happy and confident. All that freedom and happiness and confidence was terribly wearing.
One night at the shop in late February, Maya awoke to find herself sleepwalking, yet still compulsively putting the stock in order. That was Mia’s doing. Mia was all right now. Mia liked this situation. Mia felt very safe and at ease now that she had duties.
Maya worked quite hard and without complaint and without much in the way of reward, and Therese appreciated this. Like most young people who had created careers for themselves in the contemporary economy, Therese was a great connoisseur of the gratuitous gesture. Still, Maya was dissatisfied. She couldn’t read the tags in the clothing, and she couldn’t discuss things properly with the customers. This would not do.
Maya begged some cash off Therese, went to a cut-rate language school in the Schwabing section of Munchen, and bought 500 cc’s of education tinctures. These particular philters were said to convey a new plasticity for language, “giving the adult brain the eager syntactical receptiveness of a child of three.” All the smart drugs in the world couldn’t make the Deutsch language a cheap or easy accomplishment—but the “child of three” part certainly met its billing. The neural dope found her inbuilt mastery of English and put its pharmaceutical foot right through it, like a boot through a stained-glass window.
“You’d better ease off that cheap dope and try learning Deutsch the old-fashioned way,” Therese said.
“Ist mein Deutsch so schlecht, Fräulein Obermufti?”
Therese sighed. “Maya, you try too hard. People enjoy having foreign girls in a couture shop. It’s cute to be a young foreign girl. At least you can make correct change with silver money, and that’s more than Klaudia has ever managed.”
“Ich verstehe nur Wurstsalat. Am Montag muss ich wieder malochen.”
“Would you stop that? It’s eerie.”
“I really need to do this so that, uhm, können Sie mir das Dingsda da im Schaufenster zeigen?”
“Listen, darling, you can’t give anyone fashion advice. You don’t have any proper sense of chic. You dress just like a little California magpie.” Therese stood up. “I never dreamed you’d treat the shop like an adult’s job. You need to relax. You’re an illegal, remember? If you start fussing about making money, some cop is going to notice you.”
Maya frowned. “ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’ ”
Therese thought this over. The tone and the sentiment didn’t agree with her at all. “That’s like something my grandmother would say. I think I know some people who can help you, darling. Let’s stop this nonsense, it’s a slow day anyway.”
Therese made some net calls, and then shut up shop. They took the tube into Landsbergerstrasse and crossed the Hacker-Brucke. Maya saw the distant towers of the cathedral rising behind the train station. The ancient permanence of Munchen—combined with the seductive possibility of instant escape. The contrast gave her a deep moment of intense inexpressible pleasure.
All the young people in Munchen seemed to know Therese. Therese had a thousand vivid friends. Therese even personally knew some old people, and it was touching to see that they treated her almost as an equal. It often seemed that Therese’s little clothing store scarcely existed as a shop per se. The shop was just the physical instantiation of her vast and tenuous gray-market web of tips, barters, bribes, pawns, trade-offs, swaps, hand-me-downs, subtle obligations, and frank kickbacks.
Today’s particular friends of Therese had a production studio in the basement of a low-rise in Neuhausen. There were strict laws in central München about obscuring the skyline with high-rises, so the local real-estate entrepreneurs had tried burrowing into the earth. The faddish subterranean buildings had a big overhead from ventilation and heat pollution, and they’d gone broke so repeatedly that they were forced to rent out to kids.
Therese’s friends were sculptors. Their studio was down in the bowels of the place, oddly shaped and full of coughing lunglike racket from the ventilator next door. “Ciao Franz.”
“Ciao Therese.” Franz was a stout Deutschlander with a brown beard and a rumpled lab coat. He wore spex on a neck chain. “[So this is the new mannequin?]”
“Ja.”
Franz fiddled with his spex, scanning Maya as she strolled into the studio. He smiled. “[Interesting bone structure.]”
“[What do you think?]” Therese said. “[Can you cast her for me? Maybe a nice porous plastic?]” They started bargaining, in a vivid Deutsch so thick with argot that Maya’s translator choked.
Another guy showed up from the back of the lab. “Hey, hello, beautiful.”
“Ich heisse Maya. And yes, I speak English.” She shook the new guy’s plastic-gloved hand.
“Ciao Maya. I’m Eugene.” Eugene removed his spex, let them dangle on the neck chain, and looked her up and down bare eyed. “I like your color sense. You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“Are you American?”
&nb
sp; “Toronto.” Eugene looked pretty good without his spex on. A bit gawky and hawk faced, but with a lot of energy. Eugene hadn’t bathed in a long time, but he was giving off an intriguing scent, like warm bananas. “You’ve never been in our studio before, right? Let me give you the tour of the works.”
Eugene showed her a camera-crowded scanning pit and a pair of big, translucent assembler tanks. “We map out our various models here,” said Eugene, “and this is how we do physical instantiation. This old classic,” he patted the transparent wall of the tank, “is a laser-cured thermoplastic instantiator. Modern industrial standards passed her by some time ago. But we’re not industrial people here in the lab. We do artifice. Franz has worked some intriguing culturotechnical variations.”
“Really? Wunderbar.”
“You know how thermocuring works?”
“Nein.”
Eugene was very patient. He was obviously taken with her. “You fill this tank with a special liquid plastic. Then you fire lasers through the plastic, and the lasers cause the liquid plastic to cure into a durable solid object. The object’s proportions are defined by the movements of the beam—sculpted from liquid into solid, at the focus of coherent light. Naturally the beam is an output from our design virtuality—so we can design physical objects from scratch inside a computational space. Or else we can photocopy Three-D actualities. Like, for instance, your body. Which is what we’ll be doing today.”
The technical English verbiage seemed to be driving the language tincture out of her head. “I think I understand. What you do is like photography.”
“Right! Very much like photography! Solid photography. The plastic’s expensive, but we can carbonate it. We can get cheap Three-D foam objects that are mostly gas. The real fun is in whipping it all the way up to aerogel. That way, we can make a structure the size of an elephant that weighs about three kilos.”
Maya gazed respectfully at the machine. “That’s a big tank, but it’s not big enough for an elephant.”
“You make the elephant in pieces and then you laminate the sections together,” Eugene explained, rolling his eyes slightly.
She spoke carefully. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally this stupid, but I’m on drugs.”
Eugene burst into laughter. “You’re a lot of fun.”
“So you’re a sculptor? An artist?”
“Artifice isn’t art.”
“Are you an engineer, then?”
“Artifice isn’t engineering. Let me show you something else. You’re a couture model, right? You ought to find this intriguing.”
Eugene led her over to a life-sized plastic nude sprawling on the floor. The nude woman was lying on her back with her hands laced behind her head and a vague expression of animal bliss.
“Who’s your model?”
“She’s nobody. And everybody. See, Muncheners are very big on nude sunbathing. We just went down to the Flauchersteg one Sunday last summer, and we scanned a bunch of people with our spex. Then we did a physical composite of all the models, a collation in our virtuality. Then we output the collation in plastic, and we got her: The Average Nude Munchener Sunbathing Woman.” Eugene looked at the statue with pride, then jerked his thumb over his lab-coated shoulder. “We got her husband, Mr. Nude Munchener, stashed over there in the corner; he’s a little hard to see right now because his finish wore off and his substance is semi translucent.”
“Right.”
“You can see that as a model she’s not particularly compelling; I mean, entirely average people are unremarkable by definition, wouldn’t you say? But creating this image was just the first step. My next concept was to get about a hundred men to look at her—while wearing spex, of course, so we could track the movement of their attention.”
“How’d you get a hundred people to stare at a nude plastic statue?”
“Well, we just bicycled her down to the Marienplatz and made it a performance event. The tourists were real cooperative.”
“Oh.”
“Then we collated our attention statistics in an algorithm and plotted it in virtuality and fused it out. Come have a look.”
He strolled over to a corner and whipped away a thin black sheet.
“Wait a minute,” Maya said, “I … I know this thing. It’s the …”
“The Venus of Willendorf.”
“That’s it. That’s her.”
“My original conjecture was that we were going to output the most beautiful woman in the world,” Eugene said, “a feminine form that would absolutely compel male attention! But what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.”
“What’s the man look like?”
“The man as seen by men, or the man as seen by women?”
“The man as seen by women.”
Eugene shrugged. “Somehow I knew you’d ask that.… Well, have a look.” He crossed the floor of the studio and removed another sheet.
“What went wrong?” Maya said.
“Well, we’re not quite sure. We think maybe it was our sampling procedure. I mean, you get these two rather odd artificer guys, me and Franz, asking total female strangers in the Marienplatz to put on spex and stare at a naked plastic guy.… We got a few volunteers, but it was kind of a small self-selected crowd of women, and this is what we ended up with.”
The statue was a big angry-looking horned mask connected to a swollen bunch of bulging bubbles.
“It looks like they tried to boil him to death.”
“You see those three, um, leglike appendages here? They’re supposed to float detached in midair, but we couldn’t cast it that way. We still don’t get what happened to his nose; it looks like they just sort of stared right through him.”
Maya gazed meditatively at the statue. The initial impression of ugliness seemed to fade after a while. It was getting harder and harder to stop watching the thing. She felt a growing sense of excitement. It was as if they’d dragged the statue whole and true from some sticky crevice deep in her own brain. “Eugene, this artwork is doing something to me. This feels very … unreal.”
“Thanks a lot.” Eugene shrugged. “We lost interest in this one, we figured we had a flaw in our procedurals. I’m thinking now that maybe self-portraits are the next conceptual step. We scan you, we show you yourself, then we plot out your attention algorithm as you’re looking at your own replicated body. That way we can cast your internal self-image in permanent plastic.”
“I think this boiling-bubble guy would be a lot less scary if he were really small,” Maya offered thoughtfully. “Like something I could wear on a charm bracelet, maybe.”
“You’d have to take that up with Franz. Franz does our merchandising.
Therese came up. “Franz says he’ll cut me a discount if we do six of you,” she told Maya.
“I thought we were just going to do just one nice replica dummy of me for the store window.”
“Sure, but if we do six dummies then I can retail you. Assuming the product would move, that is.”
“Certainly this girl will sell,” said Franz with confidence.
“The problem with couture mannequins is they’re not very tactile,” Eugene opined. “We’ve been doing some great work in surfaces. We got some new finishing techniques that feel just like wet sealskin.”
Therese made a quick moue of distaste. “We don’t want people feeling up the mannequins, Eugene. It wrinkles the clothes.”
Eugene was crestfallen. He considered a further argument, then looked at his watch. “Well, I can’t stay chatting, I gotta see a dog about a man.… ” He looked at Maya. “Y’know, I enjoyed meeting you. You’re a really fascinating conversationalist. If you’re not too busy, why don’t you drop by the Tête du Noyé in Praha next Tuesday? You know where that is?”
“No.”
“It’s in the Praha Old Town, the Staromestska. The
Tête is a tincture joint for the artifice crowd. We got a crowd of very vivid people from the net, they meet there in Praha once a month. Someone like you—I think maybe you’d fit right in.”
Franz and Eugene delivered six Mayas next Monday. Eugene had jointed their shoulders, knees, elbows, and hips on plastic swivels. He had trimmed their skulls inside the design virtuality, so the finished mannequins had no hair.
The shop was now in possession of six tall plastic nudes with slightly startled expressions. The mannequins weighed about five kilos each, so lightweight and breezy that it was a good idea to weight their feet lest they topple over.
Maya and Klaudia spent the day dressing the plastic mannequins, doing their wigs and makeup, and assembling them in action tableaus outside the shop.
Klaudia was surprisingly good at this. Klaudia was no genius at making change but she was great at deploying mannequins—mannequins clambering over café tables, mannequins brandishing tennis rackets, mannequins chewing enthusiastically on each other’s feet. The outdoor orgy of well-dressed plastic Mayas was a powerful crowd draw. Maya would take her own place among the plastic stiffs and then suddenly move, on Klaudia’s cue. The effect was profound.
Maya found it lovely to be publicly admired. So publicly, and with such intense repetition. The romantic ingenue Maya; the big floral pink powderpuff Maya; the Maya in gallopades with gleaming wads of costume jewelry and big kicky wings of eyeliner; the Maya in the white neon battery suit; the high-kicking hey-sailor Maya in red and white culottes; the sporty mountain-hiking Maya; the cool and classic draperied Maya with a fluted frappé glass. The Maya multiplicity was grand fun, a pocket spectacle. Still, when the day was over, Maya felt peculiarly thin and stretched. Strangely and terribly weary.
It was Therese’s biggest commercial day in months. They sold so much stock (including every last one of the Maya dolls) that Therese decided to leave town for an acquisition tour.
“You can run along and have some fun in Praha while I’m out of town,” Therese said to Maya. “You’d better take Klaudia with you. I never knew Eugene to ask any girl for a date before. Taking Klaudia will widen your options.”
Holy Fire Page 13
