Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Miller’s eyes interpreted the shrain-colored suit as the color of absinthe. Not the artificial emerald green of absinthe wannabes, but the real stuff, with clumps of the poisonous herb wormwood floating in it like fragments of flesh in a bottle of formaldehyde from which some deformed infant had been removed. He had a bottle of authentic absinthe, killingly bitter, in his fridge, and its color was a more subtle and watery sort of green, with almost a touch of yellow, even of gray, about it. An unhealthy almost non-color. That was the best way he could describe his new suit: absinthe-colored. That’s how he would describe shrain, this fashion season’s most popular hue.

  While he was completing his purchase, which included a dark green fez with a gold tassel to go with the suit (he couldn’t find a shrain fez, and hoped a Tikkihotto wouldn’t think his choice clashed), Miller heard a commotion toward the front of the store. As he began to leave for the mall proper, two security guards jogged past him...and by the time he reached the entrance, he saw them freeing a shoplifter from the grip of the Tikkihotto mannequin, who had seized him and held him until the guards could arrive.

  * * *

  Miller had bought his bottle of absinthe from a bartender friend at his favorite elbow-propper, Camelot Books and Pub, on Goitre Lane, an artsy little tributary of Forma Street. The painters, poets and holomakers who dwelt there, often in little cadres to afford the rents, benefitted from the frisson between the creative ether of their romantic capillary and the largely illegal commerce of the hot pulsing artery of Forma Street.

  Camelot Books and Pub was built out of blocks of greenish lucite, so that from the inside one could see the watery lights of the wheeled and hovering traffic passing along Goitre Lane, the occasional swoop of a helicar. Conversely, from the outside, the building’s interior glowed like an aquarium. In each and every brick-like block, which also comprised the bar and even the ceilings and floors, there was a large insect entombed as if in amber. Huge moths, prehistoric-seeming dragonflies, nonterrestrial and mutated invertebrates the likes of which Miller had never seen even in books. It was almost educational, but sometimes a bit eerie after too much absinthe, however thinned with water and clouded with sugar. Once Miller could swear he saw the legs of a large millipede wriggling in waves like cilia.

  He sat in a booth tonight instead of at the bar, and having finished perusing a men’s fashion magazine he had picked up while killing time in the bookstore on the second level, he stared at the wall beside him—into one block in particular, which fossilized an immense beetle with its carapace opened, from which spread several pairs of iridescent wings. It had multiple pincered jaws. Each block had its own very faint luminosity, maybe a subtle glow dye, so that their color was reflected on his face. The blocks were, to Miller’s mind, the color of shrain.

  A finger flipped the tassel of his fez from back to forward. Swiveling around, Miller almost involuntarily materialized his automatic—a Scimitar .55 with a ruby red and sparkle-dusted enamel sheen—into his hand. He was too nervous about carrying a gun in a holster, kept it instead securely stashed, but readily accessible, in his Chest.

  “Hey—look at you all glossed up like a real gangster.” It was Bird, and Lisa Wallen was with him as usual. Vaguely reluctant, Miller moved his mind away from the checkered grip of his pistol, which was neatly folded up like origami in the Chest. Bird was a mutant, about seven feet tall and seventy pounds in weight, what passed for his head looking like a rib-cage split open in an unfinished dissection. His voice was a mere creaky whisper and he looked like a good punch or kick might shatter his stick-like limbs, and yet Miller knew enough to be as wary of him as he was of Lisa, whom he had seen break off the two front teeth of an unsolicited admirer in this very establishment by driving his head into the bar. She wore her hair in tight braids and the area around her eyes was tattooed to resemble the Egyptian Eye of Horus. It made her eyes look like those of a painted statue.

  The two slipped into the booth opposite him. Bird already had a glass of Knickerson beer from the bar, Lisa with a blood orange martini. Bird said, “Mr. Diablo seems to think you’ll be a real gangster one fine day, Miller. He was fairly impressed with the way you performed your last trick. So he has higher expectations for the next one.”

  Miller shifted in his seat, glanced at a nearby table, and said in a hush, “I’m not sure I’d ever consider myself a gangster...”

  “Hey—didn’t mean to use offensive semantics.” From a pouch strapped around a waist thin as Miller’s thigh, Bird slipped out his credit card. The mutation tapped out a figure on its key pads, then Miller produced his own card and held it in his palm while Bird passed his above it, covering an activation pad with his thumbprint so as to transfer money from the one’s account to the other’s. With a blip of sound, Miller’s card announced that the transaction had taken.

  “Looks like you’ve been spending some of your money in advance, Miller,” Lisa Wallen said with a smile that didn’t match up with the eerie detachment of her eyes. She pinched the cuff of his new jacket. “Expensive suit. You’re so handsome you make me swoon.”

  “Yeah, Miller, nice.” Bird put away his card. “But the color’s a little drab.”

  “It’s shrain,” he said, self-consciously.

  Lisa laughed with an almost pitying tone. “Shrain. Friend, you bought the emperor’s new clothes. That’s gray, Miller. Gray.”

  -Two-

  When he was fifteen, Miller and his mother occupied an apartment directly below a woman named Karen Templin and her husband, Michael. Miller knew the husband was an invalid of some sort, though until today he had only heard Mr. Templin’s muffled coughs through his bedroom ceiling, had never seen or met the man.

  On this afternoon, Miller’s mother received a call from her upstairs neighbor, asking for help. She had come home from work to find her husband on the floor, having fallen out of bed. That explained to Miller a heavy thump against his bedroom ceiling shortly after he’d finished his school programs, and now he felt guilty that he hadn’t told his mother about it...had waited for her to ask him if he’d heard anything, but she didn’t. Instead, she told him that Karen had asked if he could come upstairs and assist her in getting her husband back into bed.

  Karen met him at the door, and led him through the alien apartment into Mr. Templin’s small, murky bedroom. In size and shape it corresponded to his own, directly below, but the most noticeable difference besides the figure on the floor was the sickly air, a sour milkiness born of cloistered exhalation. And the source of it was the milk-fat veal calf of a man, or almost man, at his feet.

  He had pajama bottoms on, but his upper body was bare and bloated to a plastic sheen. His head hairless, eyebrows and even lashes gone, the man’s weirdly thin arms were bent close to the body, hands pressed to the sides of his face in despair, blue eyes wide between some of the splayed fingers. Then Miller realized that the man’s hands weren’t pressed to his face, but fused there. As if his fingers had slipped beneath the skin. His left hand, in fact, was almost entirely absorbed to the wrist.

  “I caught it on Ram,” the man rasped up at him, those blue eyes very aware despite the motionless turgescence of his body. “I was in the Colonial Security Force there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Karen added with a sigh, squatting to slide her hands under her husband’s shoulders, “it isn’t contagious. Could you get his legs?”

  Half lifting, half pushing him up the side of the bed and finally into it, they only almost dropped him once. The helpless dead weight of him, and the baby-soft fat of his body, were embarrassingly intimate. Karen pulled a sheet over him in a brusque gesture of weary impatience, then stuck an adhesive disk to his shoulder and tapped keys on a monitor that stood by the bed. “Stop disconnecting this, Michael. If you hadn’t, I’d have been alerted at work. And stop trying to stand up; you know you can’t.”

  “I wasn’t. I rolled over. I was having a dream,” said Mr. Templin. “I could use a bigger bed.”

  “And I cou
ld use more money.” Mrs. Templin turned to Miller. “Can you keep an eye on him for an hour to make sure he’s all right? I’ll run and do some errands, pick up his medicine. I’ll give you five munits.”

  “You don’t have to pay me,” Miller told her meekly.

  The husband snorted oddly at this. His tired-eyed wife didn’t protest Miller’s offer, and left. Uncomfortable, afraid to look at the man for fear of making either of them self conscious, he sat in a chair by the wall. Mr. Templin grumbled in a phlegmy voice, “You don’t have to babysit me, boy; I’m not trying to escape like she thinks I am. Go back downstairs. Or go watch VT in the other room, at least.”

  “I’m all right here,” Miller said softly, pretending to look about him at framed photographs of some exotic, tropical place. Temples of red and gold nestled among blue-green fronds. In one holophoto, the fronds stirred and clouds scudded and several green dragonflies of prehistoric dimensions floated from one edge of the frame to the other. Eventually, his gaze dropped to a bureau against the wall beside him.

  “Like it?” Templin asked. “I took that home from Ram with me. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  It was. The chest, or bureau, was small and delicate, made of a wood thickly lacquered an indigo blue. Gold trim, and gold-painted designs: insects flying across its drawers, and gold knobs shaped like cocoons of some kind.

  “Both my daughters want it. Karen, too. When I die they’ll crawl over this rotting mushroom body of mine to get at that beauty. And you know what, boy?”

  “What?” Tearing his eyes off the exquisite piece of craftsmanship, Miller looked over at him.

  “I don’t want any of them to get their hands on it. Not that. I had that in my room on Ram for eight years.” Did the man’s blue eyes, through his blurring fingers, gaze over at the holophoto where the dragonflies flew into and out of sight in an endless cycle? “Eight years.”

  Miller returned his own gaze to the lovely chest, where he could see a dim reflection of his face in its gloss.

  “When I’m gone, I don’t want those hyenas to have it,” Mr. Templin husked.

  -Four-

  With the adrenalin that skittered centipede-like through his body, and the lopsided yawing of his stomach, the last thing Miller seemed to need before he went to the museum was a coffee. Nevertheless, he pulled his hovercar into the lot of a trendy little café, Java the Hut. If nothing more, it was a means of stalling just a little bit longer. But then again, while he might be in the employ of Mr. Diablo, he was not strictly on a time-clock. Miller had had those kind of jobs. After a while, he had felt that he should have a time-clock by his bed. One by his toilet. He never wanted to scan himself into a time-clock again.

  Warming a stool at the very end of the long curved bar, Miller spied on a woman seated a little bit distant from himself. She was a Kalian, lovely, her skin gray as smooth stone and eyes black like obsidian, with the religious scarring of her gender. But she was also a modern woman, scandalously lacking the blue turban meant to hide her thick black hair. Her beauty and her culture made her all the more unobtainable, all the more desirable to him. She glanced at Miller only once, met his eyes before he could divert them, before he could even think to smile, then looked away, dismissing him...even dressed as he was in his handsome new suit and fez.

  She left a tip on the bar; a few coins. Then she left. Miller’s eyes followed her to the door, and when she was through it, returned to the spot where she had been. The heavy white mug. The spoon on its napkin. The coins.

  Miller thought to steal the coins (not because it was money, but because it had been hers), but he didn’t want the waitress to be cheated. And didn’t want the waitress to resent the Kalian woman, especially if she were a regular.

  Instead, Miller returned his gaze to the mug, and fixed it there.

  In his mind, he saw the mug not even as a holograph, but as a two dimensional photograph. A photograph he then picked up in his hands. These astral hands then folded the photograph in half, creasing it neatly. Folded it again the other way. Then again. And again. Making sure the package remained tight, the smaller and smaller it became.

  Then, when the folded up image was no larger than the size of a pill, he pressed it against his navel. The navel of his mind, like an orifice situated in the front of his brain. He pressed it there until it slipped inside him, into a dark interior, inserted the pill until it was gone, into his safe. His security deposit box. The place he had come to call, in his teens years, his Chest.

  And indeed, it was as though the coffee mug was now inside his chest. Inside his physical body. But he did not feel its weight, its hardness. He did not, in fact, know where it truly was at this moment. Only that, wherever it was, it was a place that he owned. His very own little closet between planes. A crawlspace between space and time...

  The waitress’ back was turned when the mug vanished, in a silent blink, from the counter top. When she turned, she scooped up the coins, collected the spoon and napkin, and rushed down the counter to refill another customer’s cup.

  Miller slid his eyes back along the counter to the spot directly in front of himself, and stared at a ring-stained space just to the right of his own half-drained mug.

  In his mind’s eye, his fingers reached into the small black depression. Like tweezers, they took hold of an object, a seed, and plucked it out. Then, both hands set to work quickly unfolding it, making it wider and larger, until he had entirely opened the photo and smoothed it out on the bar before him and saw the image of the coffee mug on it and then the Kalian woman’s coffee mug rested beside his own like the cozy breakfast mugs of a husband and wife.

  The ceramic cup was still a third of the way full of black coffee. Miller lifted it to his lips, and tasted it. Still warm. He savored the waxy flavor of the woman’s black lipstick smudge on the rim of the mug, before setting it down and digging out his own change...from his conventional pants pocket. Only in the Chest did he store large amounts of money...alongside his new and unfired Scimitar .55.

  -Five-

  The special exhibition at the Hill Way Galleries was entitled “Through the Eyes of Raloom”, and today was its first public showing.

  Miller had taken a brochure so as to appear more the avid art enthusiast as he strolled the various large, interconnected chambers given over to the show. He even consulted the pamphlet when standing before certain pieces. The first of these — at the entrance to the exhibition—was an authentic, outsized, and dramatically lit iron bust of Raloom, the deity of an ancient Choom sect which had all but died out over the past several centuries. Like his worshipers the Choom—the indigenous race of this planet—Raloom sported a mouth sliced all the way back to his ears, held shut in a stern line. The eyes of the huge iron head were hollow, where fragrant oil lamps were intended to be burned.

  The rest of the artwork in these rooms, more contemporary, was far less reverential. Even a layman like Miller found the iconoclastic approach of the artists predictable, and in its shock effects somewhat sophomoric, however accomplished the occasional piece was.

  A piece entitled “Consecration”, by an artist named Martin Roberts, was a (fortunately) sealed tank in the bottom of which rested a small plasticlay bust of Raloom not unlike the great iron bust at the entrance. Human excrement of a loose consistency would plop down onto the bust from above, slither down the solemn visage, eventually vanish into holes in the bottom of the tank, and then be recycled to drop down again through the hole above. Miller stepped back to feign appreciative absorption of the object—or perhaps out of fear of a sudden breach.

  In much the same spirit were paintings like the one by Brad Vautrinot, which portrayed Raloom as a pimp with a prosty on either arm, and the moving holosculpture by Les Kohashi which showed Raloom sodomizing an Earth woman in a nun’s habit. There was Troy J. Knutson’s Raloom in a boxing ring bloodying the nose of Jesus, and Mark Skoog’s Raloom, in a red bandana and bandoliers, machine-gunning a row of children lashed to stakes.

 
Tediously, there was a haloed infant Raloom gnawing bloodily at a contented Mary’s bosom, by a painter named simply Roman...in a glass case an actual Choom corpse’s head mounted and tattooed so as to look like Raloom, rendered by well known cadaver artist Philip Fritz...and (here Miller tried not to linger too long, lest he seem unduly interested even for a fan of the arts) the very last painting by the much-renowned Minh Nguyen, who had passed away at the age of one hundred twenty-three only two months ago, before this exhibit could open.

  In the limited time Miller allowed himself to view the object, the only object he had actually come to see, he spent more of it judging the traffic of museum visitors—and fretting over the open display of this particular item, even though there was a thick rectangular column not too far from it—than taking in the painting’s subject matter.