by Pat Cadigan
But he needed the experience, so he'd know he'd gotten the hotsuit settings right. Faking it was out of the question.
Manny hated faked material; he could tell immediately when the sensation wasn't authentic.
He put his arms over his stomach. The feel of Gina's arms was long gone, and he wanted them back. Absurdly tall pink feathers growing up from what seemed to be a flamingo face sailed through his field of vision, leaving a hot pink trail behind. He became aware of the music, then, lots of guitar sounds, sounds like lots of guitars.
He felt himself walking, but it was distant, as if he were wearing a good hotsuit with the tactile damped down. The colors parted around him, and he found himself looking at hundreds of strange humps. They grew up out of the ground (or whatever this surface was-he smelled grass and dirt, so he was calling it ground) in sharply regular rows. Information, he thought. Regimentation. On the whole he preferred the idea of the Byzantine orchard. That was long gone, too, but if he could have Gina put her arms around him again, who knew but that it would come back? And if he had to get her to punch him in the stomach to do that, then he would do that.
"Gina?" he asked timidly.
Scattered voices came through the darkness over the humps.
"… fucking furious with you, asshole."
"Fury is what made rock'n'roll great."
"When was I ever not there for you?"
"Well," Gabe murmured, maneuvering between two of the humps, "where was 'there,' and what was I doing at the time?"
"… twenty years on your case, what does it fucking take?" That was Gina's voice, he'd know it forever. The first time he'd ever heard it, he'd known he would remember it forever, and not just because she'd punched his lights out. It was a voice with texture, a voice that you could touch as much as hear. It had been in his ears all night, and he hadn't realized how much he wanted to keep it there until it had gone away and come back just now.
"Gina," he said, moving forward. Something banged into his hip. He reached out to touch it and was startled by the feel of cold stone. One of those humps.
"It's complicated," said the other voice. Not as textured, a voice from someone who seemed to be receding in the distance, not faint but fading out all the same. "I wanted to tell you. It's a rope out of a hole."
Gabe stumbled into another hump and worked his way around it.
"Picturesque, but not accurate. Now you work in a rucking hole."
"I'm fading fucking out, I'm going so fast sometimes you can see right through me."
"I can see right through you, all right."
The darkness was no longer as deep as it had been. Gabe could make out trees now, plain old trees, and somewhere far off, light flung over the grass in great white circles. He moved sideways now, using the cold stone humps as a guide, stepping from one to another in a straight line. If he could put the voices between himself and the distant white light, he would see where Gina was and who she was talking to.
"… guess we should have taken better care of each other."
"I took great care of you, fucker."
"But when it came down to some things, we did something else. Usually video."
"Twenty years I've heard you bullshit and shoot shit, this is the first time this shit has ever come up. I don't want a postmortem of the last twenty years trying to decide if we did right by each other. What we got right now is what we got. Maybe it's damned fucking little, but it made a difference to me. I didn't keep my life from you."
Now Gabe could see people moving around in the distant pools of light, and something in their motions made him think they were hunting each other. Hunting to music.
"Look, you got a video head, I got a video head, what the fuck were we gonna do, keep the day-care in business? I'll be there tomorrow, for chrissakes, I'll be there. When was I ever not there for you?"
Two dark shapes blocked his view of the people in the light. He recognized Gina's silhouette immediately. There was something familiar about the other one, but he couldn't place it.
"Gina," he said, just as she moved toward the other person. "What?" she snapped.
"Gina," he said again happily, going forward. "Punch me in the-" Something caught him right at his belt line, hard enough to flip his feet up as his head went down. Cold stone bashed into the right side of his face, and there was a technicolor explosion in his head. He was barely aware of his own flailing before something slammed against his back, knocking the wind out of him. Colors poured down in an avalanche.
White light seared his eyes and drilled into his brain. He squeezed his eyes shut again quickly. The buzzing roar now waxing and waning in his ears resolved itself into voices over music. Something was pressing firmly against the side of his face. The patches, he thought; if he could move his arm, he would reach into his pocket and stick on two, or three, or four-
Someone was holding his arm. Laboriously he made his head turn, feeling the pressure against his face yield slightly, and opened his eyes again.
Sam's face swam into focus, started to melt away, and came back again. The hollows below her cheekbones had deepened a bit, and her wide, serious eyes made her look both frighteningly old and frightened and young. The unruly black hair was a little longer, a little softer. She was hanging onto his arm as if she meant to pull him up out of deep water. We're all corks on this ocean.
"So," he said, taking a cautious breath. Pain flared in his back, then receded to a constant dull ache. "And when did you get back into town?"
Sam glanced away for a moment. "I guess you'll be all right if you recognize me."
A young woman appeared behind Sam and put her hand on Sam's shoulder. "Ain't sure we can say the same, doll."
"I know, Rosa. Another minute and we'll go. Where's Jones? Don't lose him again." She looked up, and Gabe followed her gaze to a young guy with nervous-breakdown hair framing a bony, sullen face. "Just make sure you stay there, you," Sam said to the guy, and turned back to him. "Gabe, I can't stick around, and I don't know what you're doing here or what you did to yourself-"
"Told you, he tripped over a fucking tombstone," came Gina's voice from nearby. She was pressing something to the side of his face, he realized, and his head was pillowed on her knees. He reached up, found her hand and the wad of cloth in it. She wiggled out of his grasp and closed his hand around the wad. He had a glimpse of something red.
"… going away," Sam was saying. "For a real long time. Please, don't try to find me."
"You're always going away," he said resignedly. "It would be news if you were staying."
Sam shrugged. "I was going to try to get a message to you later, when things calmed down-" The woman behind Sam gave her a poke, and Sam glanced back at her. "Christ, Rosa, he works there. I gotta tell you, Gabe, I never expected to see you at a hit-and-run in Forest Lawn." She reached over and tucked something into his pants pocket. "If something-oh, I don't know, if something comes up, and you want to tell me something, if there's some kind of trouble, you can try getting a message to me through the name on the paper."
He gave a weak, disbelieving laugh. "Aren't we doing this backwards?"
"I know where you are." She let go of his arm and stood up, her gaze going briefly to Gina. "Some life, Dad." She moved off with the other woman and the guy. He tried to sit up, thinking to call after her, but the pain in his face and the pain in his back blossomed anew, pinning him where he was.
Gina slipped his head onto the uneven pillow of her jacket and then knelt beside him, crossing her arms expectantly.
"That was my daughter," he said, still marveling. Sam had called him Dad.
"That's what she told me."
"But I didn't get a chance to let her know," he added sadly.
"Let her know what? That you've been 'found out'?"
"Her mother's leaving me. She'd have wanted to know that." He took the wad of cloth from his face and looked at it, not understanding right away that the red was his own blood. Gina pushed it back against his cheek.
"You never mentioned that to me, either," she said quietly. "Talked about plenty else. That why you wanted a punch in the stomach, because her mother's leaving you?"
His free hand found hers. "No. When your wife leaves you first thing in the morning, how much worse can the day get? I wanted it because-" Because he thought he was about to lose his job, and he wanted to leave Manny something to remember him by? Oh, that sounded real fierce. Leaving Manny a simulated punch in the stomach for the loss of his simulated girlfriends and his simulated secret life, for the loss of his simulated job. If he was losing it all, he might as well leave Manny with a real punch in the stomach.
The idea gave him a rush of pleasure that temporarily overrode the pain. Take it out of porn, make it something real. Do one real thing. Hell, he might never do another.
Gina's gaze turned to her right. The crazy guy, Visual Mark, was bending over him with the same space-case expression he'd been wearing the day Gabe had first met him.
"Go home and pack," Gina said to him. "I'll be there. Just like fucking always."
Visual Mark straightened up and walked off with his hands in his pockets. Gabe had the sudden wild thought that he'd never see the man again. And Gina?
"Are you going somewhere, too?" he asked her. "You and him?"
"That's a long fucker of a story." She yawned. "You feel sober?"
"I feel pain."
"Yah, that's sober as I remember it."
He took a firmer hold on her hand. "Where are you going?"
"Christ, you don't know anything, do you? Your daughter knows. Old Sam, she's got a line on a lot of stuff."
"What?" He felt a flutter of a strange new fear and tried to tell himself that it was the combination of the drugs and the shock of the injury.
"It's a long fucker of a story," she said again. "Your daughter's gonna be okay, but you need some work. Maybe a staple on that gash. You opened yourself up there pretty good."
"Yes," he said. "I did."
She paused, looking at him speculatively. "Shit, maybe I oughta tell you. While you're still too toxed to get frantic."
She had gotten to the part about Mexico when the police arrived.
20
The brain feels no pain.
Who had said that-Frank Sinatra or the Beater? Jim Morrison or Visual Mark? Mozart, or Canadaytime? The Living Sickle Orchestra… or that strange red-headed doctor?
Her mind turned fitfully like some sleeping giant in the grip of a dream about to become real. Real dreams.
Come along with me.
When was I ever not there for you?
There was a pause long enough to live and die in. Her point of view panned very slowly to the left and came to rest on her own face. Somehow it wasn't a shock to find she was looking at herself, because it wasn't her point of view. The taste of Mark was in her mind, and it was a taste, not a feeling, not a sense of presence, not a physical pressure but a taste.
She heard the scream of a jumper lifting off vertically, but the sound was muffled. Her point of view was still fixed on herself; she looked a little sour, she thought.
I didn't think you'd come. Mark's voice, addressing her. She saw her face shift its attention to him, or rather, to her new point of view.
I did, she saw herself say. I got them Bad Old Cosmic C-Word Blues Again.
His confusion was a light metallic something on her palate. What does 'c-word' mean?
It means continuing to believe even when you don't feel it. Not letting go even when you can't find squat to hold onto. Going all the way from the beginning to the end.
The scene melted away, leaving her in darkness. She became aware belatedly of an ache in her head-several aches in various spots-gone as soon as she thought of it, and then someone's voice, coming out of nowhere:
ATTENTION, GINA.
"Right, she mumbled. "You don't have to shout."
SORRY. YOU'LL GET USED TO IT. PLEASE CONCENTRATE.
We've been through this one before.
PLEASE MAKE A BOX.
"What kind of box?" she asked.
A SMALL CUBE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE. There was a pause, and she had a sense of someone speaking in another room, just beyond her hearing. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE.
She obeyed, and the cube was there in front of her in the blackness. Somewhere people were applauding. She could not hear it, but she knew.
MAKE ANOTHER, requested the voice. There was a taste of plastic and metal. She obeyed again, and the requests went on, becoming more complicated, until the blackness had filled, overflowed, and filled again; still, she went on.
--
"We're going to play some music now, Gina. We'd like you to just let your mind go with it the same way you would if you were creating a video for it. All right?"
Video?
First you see video…
"All right?"
Video-
Then you wear video…
"All right?"
Video…
Then you eat video…
"Just run with it. Let the pictures come. All right?"
Video.
Then you … be…
It came easy, nothing too active but strong, a good, fine beat. This was an old one, one she'd heard not too long ago, or a hundred years ago, in a graveyard. Live music, remember it? Nothing like live music, nothing like it.
The Beater went past, whirling like a dervish, a younger version of a businessman with a good cosmetic surgeon. A flying multitude came after, dancing in the darkness, becoming sign and wonders in the night sky.
They were colors now, making patterns in the black, spurting, retreating, spreading down the bowl of the sky. Colored light streamed down into her hand; she flung it back up again, making new patterns. The colors came down to her again, and she hurled them back into the air each time, until the darkness had been completely covered over.
New colors came up from the east then, mixing with the night shades, tunnels of gold cutting through to push the night away. She moved back, trying to see it all at once, and suddenly she was falling softly backwards, and she kept falling and falling until she couldn't hear the music anymore.
A hand came out of nowhere to hold hers. Mark. She gripped his hand firmly, intending not to let him go.
The lake rippled under the cloudy light, putting more damp into the grey day. She looked down and saw the water lapping gently at the rocks strewn around the shoreline.
She turned her head through the gray air, feeling the cold move past her face. Mark looked better, younger; he was smiling just a little slyly, as if he had a secret he had not quit decided to tell her. He turned her around and walked her along the edge of the lake.
"What are we doing?" she asked, stumbling a little. She wasn't a country person by any stretch of the imagination. Th heels of her boots kept skidding on the rocks and pebbles.
"Taking a rest." His voice sounded smoother, almost musical. "Taking a rest in a secret place." He went on speaking, but she did not hear his voice as much as she felt it. It was a good feeling at first, a sense of being with him greater than anything she had experienced before.
The feeling of closeness intensified; sometime later she realized she was straining away from him even as she kept a grip on his hand. Abruptly his hand twisted out of hers, and she was moving away unhurriedly but quickly.
There was a long hiatus-or possibly a short one, she couldn't tell; her sense of time was gone-and then she seemed to be coming up out of a sleep almost deep enough to be coma.
HELLO, MARK.
The voice was back. He wanted to wiggle with pleasure. It had been stone-home lonely in here without the voice. Wherever here was.
WE'D LIKE YOU TO MAKE SOME MORE PICTURES FOR US. IF YOU WOULDN'T MIND.
Hell, no, he wouldn't mind. Making pictures was what he did, didn't they realize that by now?
THIS TIME, HOWEVER, WE'D LIKE YOU TO TELL US WHERE THEY COME FROM.
He smiled to himself. Nosy, nosy,
nosy. Where did they think they came off? Who did they thing they were? It was enough that he made pictures. Christ; he didn't understand where half of them came from himself.
NOW, MARK, SURELY YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THEM.
Drifting along in the something/nothing/whatever, he could not imagine why they thought it was important. It wasn't important. Who could know for certain, anyway? The pictures just came, that was all. Life just came. When you came across something in life, did you get to stop and ask where it was from? Excuse me, is this for real, or is someone making this up on me? Forget it. Damned Schrodinger world, for chris-sakes.
ALL RIGHT, LET'S TRY THIS: ARE THEY MEMORIES?
Once you've thought of it, it's all memory. Don't you know that, homeboy?
He could feel them giving up and retreating. He made pictures anyway, whether they were there or not, all the time listening to the music playing on and on in his mind. Even in the something/nothing/whatever, the program director never took a break. Thank God.
She woke with the feeling that she had been asleep for days.
The semidark, windowless room was little more than a closet, but nicely appointed-everything she needed was built in, and small as things were, she almost didn't have to get out of bed for most of it, or so it seemed. But she did get up and take a few steps around the center of the room, holding her back. The mattress of the tiny single bed was entirely too soft.
Then abruptly she stopped and touched her head. Except for a few bald spots where the shaved hair was already growing back in, she felt no difference. Didn't even ruin the dreadlocks. Same old Gina. Same old-
ATTENTION, GINA.
She looked up, unsure whether she had actually heard anything or not.
PLEASE CONCENTRATE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A BOX.
She held her head with both hands until she was sure it was just a memory. Just a memory, just an awfully stone-fucking home intense fucker of a fucking memory. Feeling a little shaky, she sat down on the bed again, and a new memory intruded.
