Just an old-fashioned guy, he thought. More so all the time. He saluted to Midge and Belly as he walked away. Midge blew him a kiss, puckering the front of her long Choom lips, lipsticked a soft pink. Monty had changed her mind from her previous electric red.
He entered his booth, sighed. No people to watch. Another great contributor to his acceptance of this job; he loved to watch them. A library of books rapidly flipping their pages at him so he could catch glimpse of a few words—some bland, some tantalizing—before the covers closed and new ones opened. They said you couldn’t judge a book by its cover. Nonsense, utterly. Of course you could, for the most part. People dressed like book covers, complete with title, a brief description of the contents and a series of blurbs. The golden-haired woman in white hadn’t been a waitress in a truck stop. The Hispanic girl in the yellow dress, a concert pianist.
Well, but out of his newsstand, what were others to make of him? Then again, occupation and station in life were not the only factors to be divined. A perceptive observer might detect the mix of brittle sensitivity and angry toughness in his face. He had floated in his clothes for awhile, but had gained back all his lost weight and then some. He had the start of a paunch, disquieting, and a weary pale puffiness to his face. The artistic, almost delicate bone structure fighting through this lazy swollen puffiness echoed his inner state. He was still narcissistic, taking care to dress as he liked best, brush back his proud dark blond hair, shave and shower daily. But he had also become increasingly ashamed of his added weight, self-conscious around females, as if his face were still yellow and bony, lips crusted in sores. He found himself sucking in his belly around people, holding it in for hours at times, used to it, until he ached with gas. One minute he looked in the mirror and was desperate for someone to appreciate how good he looked just then, comment on it, enjoy it while he was still young, still here. Another minute, while naked perhaps, he dreaded that anyone should see him this way. Such is life in the flesh.
He paged through a teen celebrity mag, in which he could ogle pretty young girls less self-consciously than when he watched them at his counter, but still their eyes on him made him squirm a little, and he didn’t dare open to the fold-out holographic posters. Mm, a picture of pristine Dora Deering, cute and dimpled, ever-smiling, a bogus blond. Her image and selling point as a singer was her clean-cut image, whereas her current rival Topaz (just Topaz), also sixteen, was her polar opposite, dark and sexy. It was therefore Dora that Monty now fantasized making sweaty love to.
The older he felt, the more he was attracted, uneasily, to teenage girls—as if, vampire-like, he could draw youth and vitality from them. For he did, though not even forty, feel quite ancient. Dried-out, bloated with decomposition. Close to death. As if he had never even been cured.
He had taken home one teen magazine, scanned a picture of Dora into his computer and had it strip down her clothing to her underwear (shielded from cameras and this kind of technology), then print out a color hard copy for him to tack on his apartment wall. Life-size. Dimpled Dora Deering, the unknowing virgin sacrifice to one man’s silent volcano.
*
Around nine-thirty the traffic was heavy; those just leaving the movies, those coming in for the next show. Things were orderly and peaceful, despite the traffic. On a Sunday afternoon after a sports game let out, particularly in the height of summer, the station would fill wall to wall with people, pressed right up to the edge of the platform, waiting to flood the cars to the bursting point, and the tension would seethe like the smell and the heat, and sometimes fights would spread—once to a near riot. Midge and Belly had closed themselves safe inside their stall. Monty had watched from his circular booth, ignored in the battle like a fish in a bowl watching a murder.
Two people had been pushed accidentally into the path of a train, that time, squeezed out like tubes of paint by its powerful repulsor field as it passed above them. Another time, at the close of his shift, he had seen a train go by from which came wails, cries, screams, shouts. Blood could be seen splashed inside, obscuring the windows. Frenzied bodies inside, thrashing, flailing, flashes of light, cracks of shots. Then gone. He’d read the next day in his papers that it had been a gang war—common enough, but its hellish mysteriousness at the time had shaken him a little and he hadn’t forgotten it.
Nice and quiet tonight. People coming and going as docile as cattle. A little laughter, a little noise from the young, as always…no big deal. No one stole any papers from him. No seething tension. It was cool—autumn up there. But he knew the suddenness of danger. That train of the damned that had flashed by and gone. As when he held his stomach in, Monty held himself tight…never fully relaxing himself until he got home.
Some women bought magazines from him, politely smiling to acknowledge his existence, dressed in the geisha style right down to lacquered wigs, white face, high painted brows and black-painted teeth—though not Asian. One even appeared to be black. Hiding the true covers of their books? Oh no, just the opposite. This was them. A mask can be the self, even when the expression is different from what it hides. Their fakery told much of them. Not repulsive to Monty, altogether. But still, fake.
Already the traffic began to peter out as the cinemas prepared to open their curtains, screen their movies, and the trains whisked away those already sated. Late dinner-goers trickled about; it would be that way for a time yet. Another night, its rhythms as familiar to him as the tides. From his lighthouse tower he could see many of the storms before they hit. Who needed VT?
Two fresh-faced young men waited on the platform, one’s thumb hooked in the rear pocket of the other. It was a tender scene, like seeing a boy and girl together. The more overtly affectionate of the two nuzzled his boyfriend’s neck. They didn’t sense Monty. He remembered Bum Junket, though he didn’t take these boys for hookers. The memory made him restless.
He’d killed men before in the line of duty. One of those mobsters who disposed of hazardous waste illegally for ostensibly legitimate businesses had opened up on him and Opal; Monty had killed him, Opal one of his partners, and the others had been taken alive. He had exterminated men before. A bunch of mutants, crackling with radiation, had refused to surrender themselves into HAP custody once and the agents had had to storm their crumbling tenement fort, Monty himself in one of those black rubbery suits. He’d killed two mutants who came at them with crude swords, the rest rounded up alive but for a few pitiful creatures no longer vaguely human, close to death in their dark corners, whom he and his fellows had exterminated. But that hadn’t felt so much like execution, then.
He asked himself again: would they really have resorted to rounding up those infected with M-670 for mass extermination, if the plague had gone on—as they had confided to him they might, before he’d even gotten it? Himself included, had he surrendered to them?
Oh no, not you, Nedland had assured him after his surrender. Never him.
Well, even if that were true—so what, not him? So what?
Several months after his cure, after he’d started working here, an amazing story had come to his newspapers. A former associate of the popular VT evangelist Matt Cotton had come forward to reveal what he claimed he’d been threatened with death to hide…that Matt Cotton’s ministry had hired a group of brilliant bioengineers still in college to create the deadly STD mutstar-six seventy, and begin its spread to the homosexual community and amongst drug users, in some popular singles bars and brothels both legal and illegal. Matt Cotton had taken his battle on sin very seriously. He was now an historic mass murderer of thousands of evildoers. He was currently free on bail, hiding from the public in his fortress of a home, pending trial.
Monty had allowed himself to derive one guilty pleasure from this amazing and horrid revelation. That Toll Loveland, so pleased with his grand artistic statement, his impressive body count and the technical expertise that had rendered it, had been so grossly dwarfed by Matt Cotton and his achievement. What a laugh on poor Toll. If only he were aliv
e to know it.
Monty lit a cigarette, kept his eye on a pretty Asian girl waiting for her train. No geisha makeup for her. They hadn’t found one of the three students Cotton had hired, Monty mused. Escaped. Probably starting his own company under a new identity on some far colony. Or Earth. Easy to lose yourself in that teeming ruined hell.
He thought these same things many nights. His life had become all dull, predictable rhythms. Maybe, in fact, he had died.
A helmeted Fekah slapped up to the platform on its frog feet. A Blue Line train docked and the Fekah hopped in with the Asian girl and the gay men. And there went the cute girl from the food stand; she left this early every night—maybe went to school or college in the day. She didn’t look at him. Was whisked away. The trained whooshed in the distance, a lonely sound.
Monty glanced off toward Midge. Sitting down, eyes glazed, disc to temple. Oh well…maybe he didn’t feel like talking anyway, just thought he did. He sold a few papers and read from a comic book for awhile.
A new knot congregated for the next train. Idly Monty looked up. This group proved quite surprising and held his attention. There were two Stems at the rear of the group, most saliently. He’d only seen their kind on VT, but they were easy to identify. Seven feet tall, no part of their body larger around than a drinking straw, they consisted of a long central section jointed once at the middle, three jointed legs and three jointed upper limbs. Their bark-rough skin was a brilliant red, and though he couldn’t see their tiny faces he knew the sunken black triangular eye sockets, triangular single nostrils and black toothless grins looked like the features of miniature jack-o’-lanterns. Their plump women (as thick around as broom handles) were a foot to two feet shorter, glossy smooth and pure white—and no other race but the Stems were allowed to view them (though pictures and film footage had been sneaked of their sacred beauty). The women who were soiled by the eyes of others had to be purified by death. Those who stole a look must be punished by death. The Stems were a hard, violent people, their warrior class renowned, sometimes hired as bodyguards or assassins here and on other colonies. Monty didn’t feel comfortable near them, despite his curiosity.
Once his attention shifted from the two silent Stems, he saw the scarred woman for the first time.
She was beautiful. Only the Stems could have made him notice her second She looked taller than she must have truly been in her high heels and trim, blue satin business suit with padded shoulders, her body slender. Her long straight hair was a silken auburn, the hue probably artificial, parted on the side in a chic scattered wave. Lipstick vivid red in her slim, pale face…her skin flawless but for the monstrous scars.
He thought there was just the one on her right cheek at first. It might not have been apparent to him at this distance except that the way the light fell on her, the scar’s deep outline stood out sharply. It curved, with just a few irregular waves, from the middle point of her ear down to the very corner of her mouth, which seemed to have drawn up a little there. But then a train passed on the other, farther side of Blue Station and she offered Monty her other profile as she watched it. An identical scar, but it didn’t draw up the corner of her full lips on the left side.
A Choom, recovering from an operation to look human? He doubted it—there should be no scars, if it had been done right. Had she been attacked, maimed? There was only one possibility, he decided. She was a willfully disfigured hooker. There was quite a market for these things. Mutants, amputees, scarred women, deformed women—some having been born that way, others making themselves that way. There was a lot of money to be made, especially around this part of town.
She never once noticed him while she waited. Two men approached and conversed with her; she smiled and tossed her hair out of her face constantly, a nervous mannerism. She wrote something in a little pad one of the business-suited men produced. A phone number? The men left her to cross the station.
Her train came, she boarded, the Stems boarding after her. By the time she was gone, Monty had fallen in pseudo-love again.
TWELVE
The second time, three days later, she had considerably healed; in fact, the scars were completely gone, unless it was just the light. Maybe he’d been wrong about her. A surgery she’d recovered from? Was she a Choom? He wondered what Midge would look like after such surgery, but only briefly…he was too taken with the scarred woman. The more so now that he’d seen her again.
She wore a black leather jacket, a black sweater and a black miniskirt revealing long, slim, black-nyloned legs ending in black high heels. She had a coffee and a cigarette in her hands and a woman was with her, older and not beautiful so he barely took her in. There were too many customers to attend for him to stare at her; he took quick bites. When a train docked and he turned from a customer to see her climbing up into it he felt irritated, resentful of his impotence inside his circular cell. He hadn’t noticed them before but now he saw two Stems board the train. Did they work around here now? It was about the same time of night that he’d seen her the last time, but funny he should see both her and the Stems again at the same time on the same night after three days.
Well, he wouldn’t totally despair. He’d seen her twice in four days; he was fairly certain he would see her again. And as the night closed, and in the next few days, other enticing creatures materialized to distract him, tantalize him, so that by the time six days had passed from the first time he had seen her he had largely forgotten the woman. Largely.
Business was good, as usual on a Sunday night around this time, hard to keep up with. He juggled customers in the circle around him, saw a businessman type strolling away casually reading a paper he’d lifted. “Hey,” Monty said over the heads of other customers but he went unheard or else ignored. He wondered how smug that man would feel if they were the only two people down here and Monty vaulted over the counter as he wanted to now, just to show that he wasn’t impotent…to prove it as much to himself as to the man. But he didn’t; he let it go.
At last the flood began to recede and he was coming up for air.
“Who do you like better, Dora Deering or Topaz?”
“Huh?” Monty turned around behind him.
Here she was before him, her eyes on him and she was smiling, tapping with a finger the magazine he’d left open on the counter. A flash of embarrassment, as if he’d been caught jerking off to his Dora Deering poster. But a greater flash through him of shock. The scars curving from the corners of her mouth to her ears were distinct pinkish creases in her soft pale flesh. He wouldn’t have reacted this strongly to them, stared so blatantly, except that—light or no—he could have sworn that three days ago the scars had been gone. Had she simply been too far away? Wearing thick makeup?
“Ahh…who do I like better?” A customer bought a paper from him as he groped blindly for an answer. “Well, the standard cliché answer…Dora Deering writes her own songs but Topaz has a better voice. Dora’s sweet and Topaz is sexy.”
“Sweet isn’t sexy?” Now the scarred woman presented a paper for him to key in on his register.
“Well, ideally one would be both…but one quality doesn’t, ah, depend on the other.”
“I can’t stand either of them. All the real artists in the world who never get a shot.”
“The public likes them.”
“The public would like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches more than filet mignon if that was all they were exposed to.”
“Or if the public were vegetarians,” he smiled, recovering himself now, doing good. “I don’t mean to defend them too strenuously…it’s not like I’m their manager or something.”
“It’s a trend, all these teen music and film stars…it’ll die down again soon. For a while. Thanks.” She gave him money.
“Dora’s my favorite. She’s stuck on herself—that’s natural, she’s a kid. But she is sweet and sexy, I think.”
“I like Topaz better, if I had to choose. She isn’t so publicity-conscious and plastic that she won’t let
herself look nasty and jealous of Dora.”
“I say we give them swords and tridents and let them fight it out in an arena. Imagine the box office!”
The scarred woman laughed, brushed aside her ragged wave of hair. “Thanks. Bye, now.”
“Um—yeah, bye.” Monty grinned.
An old woman, her face creased with the maiming scars of time, took her place at the counter. The scarred woman drifted toward the platform. A knot of people surrounded her suddenly, greeted her warmly, enthusiastically. Friends? She didn’t look as though she’d expected them. Someone handed her a piece of paper and a pen for her to write something down.
Her train came in. He had hoped she’d look back at him, wave (as he was prepared to do), but not so much as a glance.
Two brilliant red Stems boarded the train shortly after her.
Monty was starting to become concerned. Never before had he seen a Stem. Now, three times.
Each time after he’d seen the beautiful scarred woman.
Were they following her? If so, hadn’t she noticed? She hadn’t seemed nervous, suspicious. He didn’t like the way they’d just mysteriously appeared these two most recent times, as if they’d been keeping out of sight until she mounted the step into the train. Maybe she didn’t suspect a thing, maybe she figured they came and rode the train every night. He should tell her they didn’t.
The train sailed away into the endless dark maze below Punktown.
Traffic gradually tapered away to the point where Monty could remember the paper she’d bought, and he pulled one of the same toward him. Just a standard all-purpose Punktown newspaper. He didn’t open it. He still worried about her.
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