Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  “What’re you having?” Bridget asked. “You can at least describe it to me.”

  He shrugged. “Bologna sandwich, I guess, if the bread isn’t mouldy.”

  “Gross,” Bridget said. “Bologna? My mom made me eat that stuff when I was a kid, I can’t stand it. How can you eat that crap?”

  Well, she’d asked. He took a plastic bag of sliced meat from the shelf and turned toward the counter. “It’s cheap, and I can’t taste it anyway.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “I don’t have a sense of taste. Or smell.”

  “You can’t smell? I’m dead, Orville, and I can still smell things. What happened to you?”

  “Congenital thing. I was born this way.” He didn’t want to go into the ancient history of violence that was his childhood, the head injury that damaged the parts of his brain that controlled his senses of smell and taste—he was just lucky he hadn’t been mentally impaired. “It’s not so bad,” he went on. “I used to win bets in high school by drinking bong water.” He slapped the bologna between a couple of stale slices of bread.

  “Jesus, Orville, no wonder you killed yourself. Never had sex, can’t taste food, what pleasures of the body did you have?”

  “I used to jerk off a lot.” Orville took a bite of his sandwich.

  He sputtered, bits of bread and meat falling out of his mouth. He hadn’t tasted food in living memory, and now his mouth was filled with the richness of the meat and the wheatiness of the bread—it was like going from being deaf to hearing a world-class orchestra; like blind eyes suddenly seeing a glorious sunrise. “I can taste this!” he said, and gobbled another bite, wolfing the sandwich down. He didn’t have any condiments in the house—why bother with mustard and mayonnaise when he couldn’t taste either—and now he desperately wished for some, or for ketchup, or for those spices he’d only ever experienced as burning pain in his mouth. He sniffed, hard, and almost smelled something—his sense of smell must be back, too, but with the cold, he hadn’t noticed.

  Bridget stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing—not a laugh of contempt this time, but what sounded like genuine delight. “Of course! It was the hospital, Orville! When you swapped bodies, you got one with a head cold, yeah, but you also got one with a sense of taste!”

  Orville finished the sandwich and started looking around for something else. He’d never seen the appeal of junk food, since both salty and sweet were lost on him, but now he wished desperately for cookies, chips, even the ice cream Bridget had talked about. This was easily the second most amazing thing that had ever happened to him. “I want to eat everything.”

  “You’re scrawny enough that a binge won’t hurt you,” Bridget said. “Let’s hit a nice restaurant, what do you say? I’m a cheap date, and vengeance can wait.”

  Orville slumped a little at the counter. “I could afford one good meal at a restaurant, maybe, but then I couldn’t eat tomorrow. I never had much money, and I thought I’d be dead today, so I didn’t plan well. My wallet was in my pocket when I jumped, so I don’t even—”

  “Orville. You’ve got me, now. Money isn’t something you have to worry about anymore.”

  Orville tore off another slice of bologna and gnawed on it. “What, you can rob banks now? Foretell the winning horse at Golden Gate Fields?”

  “Hell, there’s no reason to go all the way into the city, Orville,” Bridget said. “We’ll just catch a bus over to Emeryville. Maybe there are advantages to this ghost thing after all.”

  “What do you have planned?”

  “Well, first, we’ll get you an ice cream cone, and then I’ll show you, what do you say? I don’t have that many pleasures left—at least leave me the anticipation of pleasantly surprising you.”

  Orville wanted to ask why she was being so nice to him, after her earlier pragmatic disinterest. But then she’d been busy coming to terms with her new and tragic circumstances, so a lack of kindness was certainly understandable. Besides, he was afraid that if he asked why she was being nice to him, she might get angry again. Better to just enjoy her kindness while it lasted. “Okay,” Orville said. “A bus, and ice cream, and then whatever your surprise is. But I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  “Perish the thought. You’ll need whatever cash you have available. Don’t worry about wiping yourself out financially—you’ve got to spend money to make money.”

  2

  “But I’ve never gambled,” Orville protested. “My stepfather used to gamble, and it didn’t work out so well for him.”

  “It’s only really gambling when there’s a chance you’ll lose.” Bridget eyed his half-eaten strawberry ice cream cone with undisguised avarice. “I already told you, it’s a sure thing.”

  They stood outside the Oaks Card Club in Emeryville, one of the few legal gambling establishments in the area. “What did you want me to play? Texas what-now?”

  “Hold’em, Orville, Texas Hold’em. Don’t you even watch TV? Poker was a full-blown fad there for a while, but I learned it from my grandmother when I was just a kid, and I was good enough to count on it as a fallback plan when I was running short on rent money. You’ll be fine. But you need to stop talking to me—standing here on the sidewalk, licking an ice cream cone, and talking to empty air is going to get you a reputation as a crazy guy, and they don’t like crazy guys coming in here. No, damn it, don’t even nod, that’s only marginally less crazy-looking. Nobody else can see me, as far as we can tell. Well, probably Ismael could, he sees all kinds of shit, but for the most part, I seem to be a total ghost-of-Christmas-present kind of girl. Just blink twice if you get me.”

  Orville blinked. This was complicated, and he had a fluttering in his stomach that was familiar from college—he’d even gotten stage fright during rehearsals, even during blocking rehearsals, and this was the same sort of near-nausea. The ice cream was wonderful, creamy and sweet and delicious—all words that, until an hour ago, had been nothing but abstractions—but he was going to have to throw the rest of it away uneaten, because his stomach was too unsettled. He tossed the ice cream, eliciting a low moan of dismay from Bridget, and went through the door into the building, which wasn’t much like the casinos he’d seen in movies—no slot machines, no roulette wheels, just a big room with a sunken section in the middle, bordered by raised walkways and rails. There were twenty or thirty tables in the sunken area, sparsely populated with people playing hands of cards.

  Bridget whispered in his ear. “You have to pay rent to the house—that’s how they make money, they don’t get a cut of the winnings, and you never play against the house, they just charge you for the privilege of playing. We’ll find a game and get you settled. Just do what I tell you, when I tell you, and you’ll do fine. Normally poker involves a lot of reading your opponents and thinking about percentages, but you’ve got an edge—I can walk around and see what everybody else is holding.”

  Orville squirmed a little at that—he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of cheating—and Bridget sighed in his ears. “Yeah, it’s dishonest, it’s despicable, whatever, I’m not going to let you clean anybody out, we’re just going to make a decent little pile, okay? Morals are all fine and good up to a point, and that’s the point where you get hungry and don’t have a place to live.”

  He didn’t argue, but only because he wasn’t supposed to talk to her. He’d always tried to be honest. It hadn’t gotten him very far in life, admittedly, but at least he hadn’t hated himself for being a liar.

  “This’ll do,” Bridget said, and Orville sat down, trying not to show he was trembling, trying to remember if he’d ever played a game other than solitaire since he was a kid.

  3

  “That was amazing,” Orville said when he emerged, four hours later, his pockets considerably heavier than they’d been when he entered.

  “I thought it was
going to go belly-up when they realized you didn’t know how to shuffle,” Bridget said, dryly, “But you covered okay with that story about how you shut your hand in a car door and couldn’t handle the cards properly.”

  Orville was proud of that. Improv had never been his strongest skill, but he got by.

  “So what now, my wealthy friend?” Bridget said. “The night’s all yours.”

  Orville took a deep breath, and even the exhaust-laden air of San Pablo Avenue seemed sweet to him, because he could smell it—his cold was even getting better. He had nearly a thousand dollars in his pockets, a sound body, and a beautiful (if immaterial) woman by his side. The world, which had only this morning seemed so utterly bereft of possibility, such a closed system of privation and desperation, now seemed alive with opportunity. If his life still lacked any underlying meaning or purpose, at least he could manage to have fun.

  He wondered if Bridget was trying to make sure he had fun, so he wouldn’t try to kill himself again, and ruin her chances of pursuing her own goals. It would explain her kindness to him. He wanted to believe she felt something more for him, but he was willing to enjoy the effects regardless of their causes. “I don’t know what I want to do,” he said. Having wads of disposable income, and the means to make more, was a new experience for him.

  “Well, I’m not ready to call it a night. For one thing, I don’t think I can sleep, and for another, no offense, but your place sort of depresses me.” She tapped her thumbnail against her teeth, a mannerism Orville had already come to recognize as thinking-behaviour. She snapped her fingers. “Orville. My boy. Let’s find you a woman.”

  And just like that, his gutful of infinite possibilities turned into a bellyful of ice. “Ah, I’m not so good with bars or clubs, I’ve tried, but I can’t hear over the music and I get too drunk and I’m not much of a dancer and I never remember to look for a wedding ring so even if I get up the courage to talk to a woman I—”

  “Shh,” Bridget said, a long soothing sound, and Orville subsided, hunching his shoulders and walking silently along the sidewalk until he reached a bus stop bench, the kind with an armrest right in the middle to keep people from sleeping on it.

  “I’m not sending you into some high-stress meat market situation, Orville. There are other ways. I used to be a dancer.” She raised one eyebrow. “You understand what I’m saying? That kind of dancer.”

  Orville understood. And wondered, not for the first time, what she would look like underneath that puffy red coat. If she were still alive to look like anything. Was lusting after a ghost necrophilia?

  “When I first moved out here,” Bridget said, “I needed to make some money fast, and I danced in a lot of places around the city. I still have friends in that world, and I know a few women of—what’s the joke?—negotiable virtue. I wouldn’t send you to some woman who gets beat on by a pimp or strung along with drugs, because I’m not that much of a moral relativist, but I know some independent contractors, let’s say, who’ll be nice to you and won’t cheat you. Especially when you tell them you’re my cousin from out of town.”

  “A prostitute?” Orville said, halfway between aghast and fascinated. He’d thought of hiring a hooker, of course—he suspected all urban male virgins of advancing age considered the idea—but the streetwalkers in his neighbourhood terrified him, and he was afraid that if he ever approached one, she wouldn’t be a prostitute, and would mace him or hit him or stab him. He’d sometimes looked at the ads in the back of the free weekly papers, with their sultry newsprint women promising incall, outcall, and sensual massage, but he was the sort of person who got nervous just calling a restaurant to get some takeout delivered, and so he was sure he wouldn’t be able to cope with that kind of transaction.

  “Well, my friend Geneva is a dancer, mostly,” Bridget said. “She sees a few regular guys, to supplement her income, but she’s not out walking the streets every night. She operates on a pretty strict referral basis when it comes to new clients. I’m not saying she’s a wounded princess with a hidden heard of gold—she’s a pretty hard-headed businesswoman, actually—but she’s a pro, and she’ll treat you right, if she’s available. It’s early yet. Let’s find a pay phone, if there are any left in the land of cell phones here.”

  “Ah, I’m not sure . . .”

  Bridget regarded him patiently. “It’s up to you, Orville. This morning your life sucked so bad you wanted to end it. Tomorrow, I’m asking you to help me find the immortal asshole who steered me toward throwing my own life away. But tonight, I want you to take a bite out of life, to have a great time . . . because there’s no telling what tomorrow will bring. I’m here to help you any way I can. It’s the least I can do. I know you didn’t ask to be haunted. So I know a woman, and I might be able to help you have something you’ve dreamed about. Orville, I’d take you to bed myself, but, well . . .” She spread her hands. “I’m not equipped anymore. But if you’re nervous about this, or if it feels wrong—”

  “No,” Orville said. In a sense, he had nothing to lose. This morning he’d been willing to die, and if things went disastrously wrong, if humiliation befell him, he could always take that ultimate escape again. “I’d like to call your friend.”

  “All right.” Bridget clapped her hands. “Ismael always said sex—good sex, without head games—was almost as good as standing in the light of a better world, and for a while he tried all kinds of tantric things as a path toward transcendence, but it didn’t get him any closer to the light than drugs or music had.”

  “Tantric? What’s that?”

  “Don’t worry,” Bridget said. “We’ll start off slow.”

  4

  This time, Orville felt flush enough to take a cab, and gave the driver an address in Berkeley.

  “She’s a grad student,” Bridget said. “In her last year. You’re lucky she was free to see you tonight.”

  Orville just nodded, almost imperceptibly, because he didn’t want the driver to think he was crazy. The call had been relatively painless—he’d introduced himself as Bridget’s cousin, said she’d recommended he seek out Geneva’s company, and did she have an opening tonight . . . ? Geneva, very businesslike, said they could meet at a café in Berkeley, introduce themselves, and see what happened.

  The cab pulled up to a curb, and Orville paid and got out, Bridget following. He wondered if Bridget really needed him to open the door, or if she could just pass through it; wondered how much her ongoing pretensions to physicality were born out of habit, and how much out of fear.

  They went into the café, a big place with a tile floor, brick walls, high ceilings, and lots of square tables. “That’s her in the corner,” Bridget said, pointing. She’d gotten the hang of being confidently invisible. The woman in the corner by the window was dark-haired and dark-eyed, not at all what Orville had expected—he’d imagined a Barbie-doll blonde, for some reason, probably the influence of too much porn. Geneva was pretty, but not altogether conventionally, with a strong nose and a high forehead, her wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a grey sweatshirt, and though he couldn’t see her lower body because of the table, he was willing to bet she wasn’t wearing a mini-skirt or latex pants. He didn’t look at her and think “hooker,” which was probably the point.

  “Oh, it’s good to see her,” Bridget said, sad-happily, and Orville felt bad for so frankly thinking about Geneva’s body—this woman was a friend of Bridget’s, who didn’t even know she was dead. “Go over, say hi, and offer to buy her a drink.” Bridget made a shoo-go-on motion.

  Orville approached, trying to smile—this body seemed to have better teeth than his original had, but he was still habituated to a lifetime of shyness—and said “Hello, Geneva?”

  “You must be Orville.” She gestured to the chair across from her.

  “You, ah, want something to drink?”

  “Another coffee if you’re
going up there.” She flashed a smile, and Orville hurried over to the counter, blushing furiously.

  “You know, Orville,” Bridget said, trailing along, “I wondered, when you told me you were a virgin. You aren’t really bad looking—scrawny, and you’ve got those hangdog eyes, but I think your face has character. But now I see. You’re shy.”

  Orville scowled as he waited in line at the counter. Of course he was shy. Social situations paralyzed him.

  “So let me set you at ease a little. Geneva knows what she’s doing. Don’t leer, don’t drool on yourself, look at her face instead of just at her tits—she made that easy with the sweatshirt, considerate of her—and you’ll be fine.”

  Orville bought a coffee for Geneva and one for himself—god, coffee smelled so good, no wonder people liked to drink it so much—and returned to the table.

  “So you’re Bridget’s cousin?”

  “Yeah. Grew up just down the road from her in Indiana. We’ve been through a lot together.” Just what Bridget had told him to say.

  “Oh, yeah? You guys ever go mountain biking?”

  Bridget, who was standing near Orville’s right side, laughed. “She knows I hate biking. I got in an accident when I was a teenager and never wanted to ride after that. She’s trying to see if you’re telling the truth.”

  “I thought Bridget hated biking?” Orville said, and, at Bridget’s prompting: “She tried to teach me to surf once, but all I did was fall off the board a lot and get a sunburn.” This is like Cyrano de Bergerac, Orville thought. But it was easier, talking to this woman, with Bridget’s help.

  “Yeah, we used to surf together sometimes, we’d go down to Santa Cruz,” Geneva said, seeming more relaxed now. “So how is Bridget? I haven’t seen her in months.”

  “Ask her if she heard about me and Darrin,” Bridget said, and Orville did.

  Geneva sighed. “I did, she called me a few months ago and told me they’d split up, that she had to work some stuff out. I only met Darrin a couple of times. He seemed nice—maybe like he lived inside his head a little too much, but nice.”