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Volume 2, Number 6 November-December 1992
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INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
FirstText / JASON SNELL
Seven / RIDLEY MCINTYRE
Circles: A Romance / KYLE CASSIDY
Reality Check / MARK SMITH
The Tired Man and the Hoop / JASON SNELL
------------------------------The InterText Staff--------------------------
EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITOR PROOFREADERS
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan Katherine Bryant
jsnell@ocf.Berkeley.edu gaduncan@halcyon.com Loretta Griffin
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FirstText / JASON SNELL
Hi. I'm Jason Snell, and I've been known to sleep all day.
If that statement sounds familiar, it's because that's how Dan
Appelquist began the first issue of Quanta. And while Dan seems to sleep
all day on occasion because he finds it fun and relaxing, I sleep all day
long because I've got mononucleosis.
This is a lengthy way of explaining why this issue of InterText is a
little late, but it's also a fun way of being able to complain to a large,
worldwide audience about my personal problems. And, you know, I just can't
pass up an opportunity like that.
As I continued my work as a graduate student here at UC Berkeley, I
discovered two things: one, I was starting to feel ill, and two, I only had
a handful of stories for the next InterText. When the sickness got worse
and worse and I was forced to retreat to my home in scenic Sonora,
California for 10 days, InterText suddenly became both scanty on material
and late.
I brought all of this upon myself, of course. At noon on election day,
November 3, I sat down in front of a Macintosh at the School of Journalism
and started laying out our special election newspaper, despite a high fever
and a sore throat. We got finished at 4 a.m. The next day, I was sicker --
there's a shock. The day after, I paid a quick visit to the doctor and then
made the two-hour drive home.
But here we are, a bit the worse for wear but up and running
nonetheless. I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things, and we've
got a decent issue for your reading pleasure.
The centerpiece of this abbreviated issue is Ridley McIntyre's
"Seven," which I think is one of the best stories we've ever run. I'm a
sucker for cyberpunk, I'll grant you, but this one's well-written and well-
crafted, and I know you'll enjoy it.
Also inside we have another story by Mark Smith, who brought us "Back
from the West" last time, and two other stories, "Circles: A Romance," and
"The Tired Man and the Hoop."
"Tired Man," I should warn you, is a bit of indulgence on my part. If
you're read any Ernest Hemingway, especially _The Old Man and the Sea_, you
might enjoy it. If you've read Hemingway and played a game of one-on-one
basketball, you're especially qualified.
But, heck, if you haven't done anything of those things, why not try
it anyway? Perhaps it will encourage you to do so. Both reading Hemingway
and shooting hoops are fun pursuits.
The next issue of InterText is scheduled to be released sometime in
January, which means that we're going to need to find some stories before
the holidays really crash in and take people away from their computers. So
once again, I encourage you all to submit stories to InterText. We can't
pay you, and if you've written a story so good that you think you can sell
it to a professional magazine, I encourage you to do so.
But if you'd rather support the idea of electronic publishing and just
want to get your story read by our audience (an international audience of
over 1,000 at last check, though who knows how many people read InterText
on CompuServe and other systems), submit your stories to us in e-mail. If
you're interested, mail me and ask for a copy of our writers' guidelines.
Well, that's all for now. When next we meet, it will be a new year. I
hope your holiday season is a healthy and happy one, and wish you all the
best. See you next year.
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Seven / RIDLEY MCINTYRE
1. Thomas Morrison.
"So that's it, Tommy. That's the end."
Her face disappears from the screen, angular features flickering to
black. But the trace of her is still there; a two-second imprint on the
tube. I feel myself trailing my fingers over the lines of her nose and chin
as they fade in front of me; see my blue reflection in those Sony eyes.
She's gone now.
The rage erupts in my stomach like a bursting ulcer, burning pain
forcing me back from the vidfone screen, and I'm looking for something
plastic and unbreakable to throw. The coffee cup she gave me looks the most
likely missile, and I scream out "Stupid Bitch!" as I hurl it straight
through the open rectangle of the living room window.
Looking down from the window, I can just manage to see the white cup
turn to a speck as it melts into the dark shadows eighty floors below me, a
falling angel in a London Dustzone owned and run by the local company,
Lambs Conduit, after which the whole neighborhood is named. The red midday
sun burns my wet face and I have to go back inside again.
Through the walls I can hear Jayne's headboard smacking a dull,
arrhythmic beat accompanied by the grunts and moans of sexual pleasure.
Jesus, I wish she'd stop sometimes. It reminds me how hard it is to find
love in this 'plex.
The sun has lifted my brain out of my head and I find I'm just doing
things without realizing I'm doing them, with no reason why. I'm going back
to the gray vidfone and pressing the PLAY button on the answering machine.
Hers is the only message I've saved. Her face flickers onto the screen,
that rough shag of chestnut hair cut into a bob around her ears.
"Uh, hi, Tommy. I really don't know where to begin."
Tracing the lines of her face again with rough fingers, I can hear the
whisper of my own voice talking to that high-definition image.
"Just start at the beginning."
A week earlier I'm in this place called Chevignon in Lambs Conduit.
The large worker's bar reeks of bad business. Couriers from the Outzone
wearing stolen Lambs Conduit gray-blue worksuits do their best to see as
many people as they can, desperately trying to move pills, microsofts,
cheap digital watches and whatever else they can fit in their jackets.
I'm drinking Tiger beer with my spar, Falco, when one of the couriers
takes the third seat at our wrought iron table. The glow from the fuzzy
orange strip lights above us makes his skinny face look almost healthy.
"Namaste. How are you doing?" he says, grinning broadly like he's
known us for years. "Amber Roy." A powerful introduction.
"Not so bad," Falco replies. "How do you feel?" Falco's sarcasm is so
thick I could almost reach out and touch it.
"No worries," the salesman says. "Listen. I've got this great deal for
you. You seen these?"
Like a TV evangelist on one of Disney Guild's religion channels, the
Salesman pulls a sleight-of-hand trick, making a clear plastic ziploc bag
of brown and yellow lozenge pills appear out of thin air into his moving
hand. He throws it instantly to Falco, who catches the bag in his left hand
with lightning-fast Italian reflexes. It's as if the salesman was just
guiding the bag to the right buyer in one simple, fluid motion.
"What's it called?" Falco says. I sip from my beer bottle.
"Chloramphenildorphin-5. The Outzoners call it Primer. Great for
getting you up in the morning and keeping you there. The best thing about
it is that that bag is running at less than half price. I've just cut a big
deal with the Sodha roughriders and I've got some left over that I have to
get rid of. So I put them in bags of ten and I'm letting you have them at
the price I got 'em for. See Phil over there?" He takes a breath to point
to some guy at the other end of the bar, past the empty slampit, who may be
another courier, but the salesman is trying to make out that he's another
buyer. "He just bought five packs off me. Five, man. I mean, this is going
great, by the time I get out of here, they'll all be gone."
Falco hands the bag back. He keeps away from chemicals, preferring
microsofts if he can afford them.
"Hey, but I can tell you just want to see what else I've got before
you make your final decision. I see you both have NST plugs? Excellent.
Well, you'll love this."
Falco's face shines when he sees the jet black microsoft in the
salesman's hand. He looks like his mind's already hooked on the thing, and
the two tiny Neuro-Sensory Transfer sockets placed in his skull just behind
his right ear are calling to him: "Feed me, feed me." The salesman's grin
grows wider as his confidence jumps up another notch. And I watch the two
go through the ritual of haggling a good price for the cleanest drug in the
world.
Her face is pained. Like something off-camera has pierced her flesh
and is slowly twisting a danse macabre through her nervous system.
"I felt like I knew you the first time I met you, Tommy. You have this
way of opening your eyes so your whole soul pours out of them and touches
me. That's what you did outside the bakery. I didn't know what was going on
then. I wish I didn't know now."
"Yeah," comes my voice again. It's sort of disconnected, like it isn't
my voice, but a damn good impressionist's. "I wish I never knew, too."
Outside the bakery. In a back alley not far from the monorail station
at the cross where the Paddington to Islington New Road meets the Gray's
Inn Road. On my route to the huge fortress building at Euston where I work,
I stop to ghoul at what looks like a traffic accident. There is a company
ambulance, rentacops and a small crowd of local bakery workers all milling
around the scene. I get in closer and it's Falco.
His arms have been sliced laterally, across the middle of each
forearm, and then down deep in diagonals towards each wrist. With cuts like
that he can't have lasted long. A Lambs Conduit medic flashes some
snapshots for the local rentacops while another one dodges the blood as it
streams out into the road. Flies buzz around his head, competing for the
sweetness of his eyes.
"Name's Lyle," she says to me. Her skin is too clean and soft for a
Dustzoner; the clothes she wears -- black baggy bermuda shorts and a short-
sleeved Hawaiian shirt with popper buttons down the front -- and the
attitude she carries are 100 percent pure Outzone. She's been standing next
to me all the time, but my mind has been on that corpse.
There's a Federal I.D. tag pinned to the pocket of her shirt with her
videostat hardcopied onto it and the name now has meaning. Mandy Lyle,
Federal Department of Investigations. Her I.D. tag shows her serious face,
knowing that the people she has to spy on must never see it. Lyle is a
fake, an applejack in the Dustzone. Trouble. And this fact is kicking me in
the face, telling me to stay away. But I'm ignoring it. Fighting it.
I look for some sign of recognition, but all I can see is my own twin
reflection in the permanent stare of her Sony Guild cybernetic eyes; blue
cusps which fit neatly into the cheek and brow bones over her eye sockets.
Lyle has a cold face. Poised, angular and clean.
Those eyes are digging into me. Thermographic vision watching my heart
thump, and my stomach churning at the mixed stench of fresh bread and fresh
death. I emulate her face, hoping that those eyes can't see what I feel.
That I want her like love at first sight and I've only known her for a
minute and a half.
"Did you know him?" she asks me.
I turn back to face him and I nod, letting my facade drop, my face
scrunches up with memories of Falco. I try to remember him as I knew him,
rather than this blood-spattered stiff that's crumpled in the doorway of
some Lambs Conduit bakery.
"He was a good friend of mine. Falco Batacini."
High above us all, a monorail Sprinter speeds past, bound for
Tottenham Court Points. Four green-jumpsuited medics lift Falco out of the
doorway and into the back of an ambulance.
"You don't exactly seem cut up about it."
"I worked with him at the processing plant. Running loaders and stuff.
You need NST jacks to manipulate the exoskeletons. You have to be careful
how much you lift. People die of sensory feedback all the time. Fact of
life. But you're an applejack. You wouldn't know."
I can sense her voice tighten after I call her an applejack. Those
born in the Secure Zones take that as a pretty major insult these days.
Maybe I meant it that way.
"Looks like suicide, doesn't it?" she says, as if I did it. "What
would you say if I told you that's the twelfth body we've found like that
in the last three days? All with that L-shaped cut in their wrists. I might
need to talk to you again. Have you got a vidfone where I can reach you?"
I look back to her, standing with her back against the wall, my
haggard loader's reflection in the blue shine of her enhanced eyes. "Sure,"
I reply. And she taps it into a Sony hand computer the size of her Federal
I.D. tag.
2. Falco Batacini.
"Well, this is the last time I'll use this number. The last time. Life
doesn't get any better than last night, Tommy. It just doesn't."
She takes a breath, and as she does so, I reach for the pause button.
There's a bottle of tequila hidden inside my brown sofa. It has a hole in
the corner where the stitching has come apart and I can keep things like
that where no one can find them if my apartment ever gets searched. The
rentacops like to do that sometimes. Dawn raids. If they get a tip off that
someone's hiding something in one apartment they hit the whole block. Keeps
the rest of us on our toes.
As a loader, I'd get canned for possession of alcohol. It dulls the
nerves and interferes with the NST jacks. Doesn't stop me from keeping
some, though. I only drink when I'm depressed, and I know that alcohol only
makes it worse, but that's usually exactly what I want. Right now, I want
to be as depressed as I can get. And then some. I want to feel like Lyle.
And Falco.
The London Outzone has the kind of close, rotting atmosphere that
scares the shit out of us Dustzoners. I'm in there on some kind of mission,
I guess. I need to find out what happened to Falco two days previous. It's
like a deranged curiosity I keep inside me that takes over from time to
time. Right now, it's in complete control.
Soho. The Year of the Rat. I ask one of the streetkids where the Blue
Cross is and they laugh in my face. One of them looks as though he wants to
bleed me with the hunting knife he's twiddling between his fingers. He has
wild eyes, with those glaring wide pupils that the speed junkies at Lambs
Conduit have. I can imagine the slicing edge of that blade, all nine inches
of it, running along the skin of my gut, letting my insides spill out for
the rest to gawk and laugh at. I must be oozing with fear. But the others
must think I'm too stupid to even bother with, and the threat ends when I
finally round the corner of the next block.
And there in among the frozen death throes of a decaying building sits
the Blue Cross.
Nothing like I imagined it. In the Outzones of New Atlantic City, the
local teams police the streets and keep the areas safe from harm. They
charge a hefty price for their services, but it's worth it all. With that,
you get good bars, nightclubs, shops that sell stuff made in the Outzones
-- what they call shadow industry -- and a semi-decent cycle-rickshaw taxi
service. Here in Thames Midland, it's only just starting to pick up. The
London Outzone is anarchic, a playground for the roughrider teams, with
maybe a dozen or so neutral places scattered around. The Blue Cross, a
steamer's bar built in the ground-floor ruins of an unfinished tower of the
Outzone, doesn't even have a roof. This is one of the few places left where
body armor isn't essential. Anything heavier than a fistfight gets blasted
outside by the bar security's riot weaponry. It's one of those places where
you feel safe, but scared, like being in a Metropol rehab cell.
I'm here because Falco mentioned it once. Out of the two of us, I'm
the one who never leaves the Dustzone. He was always the adventurous one. I
stayed home and watched TV or drank at Chevignon or sometimes wasted some
ration credit on the "Raid Port Said" game at the FLC games arcade. Never
leave the Dustzone. Yet I'm here. Having snuck out of the Dustzone past
heavy security after curfew hours and dodged some roughriders, I'm at the
Blue Cross.
Striding over to the tiny bar area, past the slampit crowded with
long-haired raja steamers and a parade of twenty rupee kittens, I pay for a
lukewarm bottle of a local variant of Elephant beer, called Rhino. They
make the stuff in the cellar here, the barboy tells me, and bottle it in
Paddington, which affiliates the place with the Sodha roughrider team.
"I'm looking for a courier who knows something about microsofts," I
say to the barboy.
"What?" The sound system by the slampit is deafening at this end of
the bar.
I pass over twenty marks. With that, he can probably buy himself a
week's worth of kittens.
"Microsofts," I remind him.
The barboy points at one of the many clustered circular wrought iron
tables on the other side of the slampit, populated by rajas in leather
roughrider's outfits and Hawaiian shirts with fading prints. "Over there.
Ask for Amber Roy Chowdhury."
I thank him and push through the jumping rajas in the slampit.
Chowdhury's companions see me coming and vacate the table, moving just far
enough to give us some privacy, while keeping close enough to protect their
man. My mind is scrambling for the lines I rehearsed to myself on the way
out here. I know I can't afford to fluff this one up. Not on their
territory.
"Namaste. Remember me from the Lambs Conduit Dustzone? Two nights ago.
Dealt a microsoft to my spar."
He nods. I can see sweat breaking out between the lines on his
forehead. Could be the heat, I tell myself. Or it could be him.
"I want one, too. Same price."
The look in his eyes as we cut the deal leaves a hard ball in the pit
of my stomach. Walking back to Lambs Conduit I wonder which of us looked
more scared.
I press PAUSE again. Lyle continues in her broken voice.
"Of course, you don't really understand, do you? I went back to see
Nukie again. Routine procedure. He told me everything. Now I'd better tell
you..."
PAUSE. I take a swig from the bottle. I've had too much already, but I
can't stop now.
"Yeah, yeah. Spit it out, Lyle, you stupid bitch. Run through the
whole routine again. You came here and I showed you the microsoft. You said
that Falco never had his, but some of the others were well-known microsoft
users. So you took me to see Nukie, thinking he could solve everything, but
all he did was make you curious. How could you, you stupid bitch?"
We are standing in the burned-out shell of the lift when she notices
the sprayderm patch over my hand. It covers a stapled gash that runs along
the life line of my left palm.
"Where'd you get the cut?" The concern in her voice is overlaid with
suspicion.
"I got stressed out and smashed a cup against the wall of my
apartment. It was stupid. The guy a few doors down from me's a doctor
friend of mine. He patched it up for me. Only charged me half price."
She takes hold of the hand and runs her clean, soft index finger over
the sprayderm. "Not bad."
"Yeah, but it means I can't afford to eat for two weeks."
The lift stops on 57 and we wrench open the concertina doors. The
corridor reeks of rotting vomit and the floor, sticky with old piss, tugs
at the soles of my trainers. Lyle tries to reassure me by telling me this
typical of a block in the Outzone. It makes me feel lucky to be born a
Dustzoner.
"At least it still has some electricity," she reminds me.
"Probably tapping it from the monorail lines," I reply to myself.
She agrees with an audible sigh.
"Bet your place ain't like this."
She shakes her head and laughs softly. "No. Tottenham Court Points
ain't the greatest Secure Zone in the world, but it's better than this. I
couldn't live here. Not on my own, like Nukie. I can't even handle the SZ
alone, sometimes. I still live with Sean. My brother."
"Tell me more about this Nukie, then. Where's he from?" My curious
side takes over the conversation again.
"He's one of you," she replies. "His father worked for South Shields.
And his father's father, and ever was. He'd be there now if Sony Guild
hadn't closed the Dustzone down. He freelances for deckers, building cyber
decks for them and stuff like that. He's bound to have something that can
read your microsoft. Then we can find out if there's a connection, see what
it was that made someone want to kill your friend and make it look like
suicide."
We get to the old-fashioned door, and it's already open, with a crack
of orange sunlight seeping through the gap. The Geordie's voice beckons us
in.
Nukie's a tower all by himself, with long scraggly hair and broken
teeth set in a thick-lipped maw. Sitting himself down in a big red velour
armchair that's been heavily slashed across the back by what could have
been a scalpel blade, surrounded by his Aladdin's Cave of electronic
circuitry and plasterboard that forms a bizarre silicon/plastic/wire
collage around his living room, he assumes his designated role of Rat King.
In a way, he kind of reminds me of Falco, and I feel I can get along with
him easier that way.
Lyle gets straight to the point, handing over the microsoft. "Can you
tell us what this does? I need a full schematic rundown. Any hidden data it
may contain, subliminals, anything that'd make anyone want to kill for it."
"Ooh. This is something to do those suicides, isn't it?" He plugs the
smooth black cylinder into the side of a small box black box fitted with
some sort of pedal switch and jacks a thin blue lead he finds lying on the
floor between the box and a Fednet PC so brutally customized that it's
barely recognizable. The image on its blue screen is a Guild Profile with
my Videostat on it.
Nukie instantly senses my apprehension. "Relax, matey. I ran a go-to
on you as soon as my camera could get a good shot of you in the lift. No
voodoo here. So, do I call you Tom, Tommy, or Thomas?"
"Tommy," I reply.
The Geordie offers us seats of upturned cardboard boxes set amongst
the detrius. He directs most of the conversation at Lyle, but occasionally
he gives me a wink to see if I'm still awake.
"I hear you found number thirteen this afternoon. Unlucky number where
I come from. Ruth White on Disneynews reckons there's a psychopath on the
loose. She's nicknamed him the L-Razor."
Dustzoners labor under the misapprehension that Outzoners use TV's as
fireplaces, and I'm about to say something to that effect when Lyle cuts in
on me.
"Ruth White's just a computer-generated digitized image, what the fuck
would she know about it?"
Before then I was one of the gullible millions who believe that Ruth
White and the other Disneynews anchors are actually real people. Now I know
better. Television is just living proof that half-truths are more dangerous
than lies.
Nukie clears the blue screen and keys in a few more commands before
pressing the pedal switch on the black box. The screen lights up with
strings of what looks like endless random alphanumerics in a chaotically
aesthetic pattern.
"What the hell is that thing?" Lyle asks him.
Nukie strokes the metalwork of the black box proudly. "It's a military
squid. A Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector. Used for reading
fire-control programs in combat machines. It's good for other stuff, too. I
usually use it to check people's viruses for bugs before they run them
against anything. The housing's my own, and I've made a few small
improvements. I'd sell it back to the MGAF, but I like life. Fella two
floors down's gonna finally wake up one of these mornings and find that his
octaver effects pedal's missing. Serves him right for letting me look after
his guitar in the first place."
He turns and reads the random data on the screen. After scrolling
through over twenty screens of symbols his pensive face turns to us.
"I think I'll have to get back to you on this one, Lyle, it's pretty
much got me stumped."
"What's wrong with it?" Lyle asks him.
"Nothing wrong with it, per se. It's just different. It's written in
MAX, like any normal microsoft, but this seems to be some sort of dialect
of the programming language. Like American English for computers. I don't
know. It's slick, I can tell you that. It's called Seven. Puts pretty
filters through your senses, but beyond that, you'll have to wait. It's
imported, no one here could manufacture something this slick."
Lyle and I sit forward on the edges of our boxes. "So what do you want
to do?" she asks him.
"Well, I'll put some feelers out, see if anyone knows the dialect.
Until then, I can run it through a codebreaker program and try and compile
some kind of lexicon for it. I've never done it before, but it's an idea
I've been working on for a while. If it works I might be able to translate
it myself."
We leave Nukie's flat in silence. Both of us know that we've gone to
see him and we've scraped the iceberg. But, try as I might, I just can't
make myself believe that Falco was killed over the number seven.
3. Mandy Lyle.
"I saw what happened to all those people, Tommy. It was like a
hallucination, completely taking over the senses. Some of them survived,
you know that? Some actually carried on beyond that. The ones with the
strongest wills. But that's a high, Tommy. You can't get higher than that.
Never."
My heart's being swallowed by a pit of guilt in my stomach, I can feel
it tearing at the flesh of the fast-beating muscle, strangling it into
submission. I stumble down into my sofa, throat gasping for air, guilt like
a fat demon sitting on my chest. I'm going to die. I know I'm going to die.
Just like Falco, and Sean, and Amber Roy Chowdhury.
"Just what the hell happened at that arcade, Tommy? I just can't
believe you could do something like that."
The message just keeps playing. In my drunken stupor, I roll from the
sofa and try to switch the vidfone answering machine back onto PAUSE, like
it will save my life or something. It won't. It can't.
I know now, that even if I live through this heart-pounding episode, I
won't be able to live long with the events of the last five days sitting
there like some mutant fetus of ours on my conscience, waiting for the time
to enact its own Oedipal desires. It's all my fault. Everything.
The door buzzes angrily for the seventh time as I get there and punch
the LOCK stud. Wrenching the thing open, the first thing I see is the blue-
chrome image of a sleepy Thomas Morrison in Lyle's Sony Guild eyes. Her
cheeks are all puffed up and she makes one last spit into the corridor
before I invite her in.
She's crying. I remember watching an old movie on the TV once about
someone who had cybernetic eyes and couldn't cry through them. Instead, the
tear-ducts are re-routed into saliva glands, and you have to spit.
"Can I use your bathroom?" she asks me.
I point her in the right direction and she follows my finger. Pulling
the glue from my eyelids, I head into my cluttered room to pull some gray
canvas jeans on. I walk back into the living room and she's there, looking
utterly lost.
"Lyle, it's three in the morning."
"I brought you a present." She offers me a plastic coffee cup.
I just look at her straight. I'm trying to use some kind of empathy,
to feel her own problem, so she won't have to tell me. But I'm a man, and
men aren't so good at that kind of thing.
Her voice is broken, croaking like a misused engine. "Sean's dead,
Tommy."
"Your brother?" I can feel a tiny part of her emptiness in her stomach
as she nods. There's a few seconds of pure silence, and I'm screwing my
eyes up, too, holding the tears back.
"I got back from work and found him in his room. He had his modeling
scalpel in his hands. There was blood everywhere. I puked for a while, I
couldn't stop puking, then I was able to check the wound. There was no
forced entry, and no one had been at the door, I checked with security. But
that L was there, Tommy. It was there, on both arms, just like the others.
So I checked the jacks on his neck. I found this."
She hands me the smooth black cylinder, hot from the palm of her hand.
It's the same microsoft I gave to Nukie two days before. I look up at the
suddenly frail figure of Mandy Lyle as she gestures at the thing in deep
frustration.
"It killed him, Tommy. Seven killed my little brother."
I can't think of anything to say to her as she spits into the carpet.
But somehow, I know that after the police, medics, and probably another FDI
agent ransacking her apartment, she could do with a friend. So I move close
to her and she grabs me around the waist and my muscles ache in resistance
as she squeezes me, forcing me to feel her pain.
I just stand there and take all the pain she wants to give.
Her face flushes red with embarrassment. Eyes are the windows to the
soul, and Lyle's eyes are nothing but mirrors. So I have to try and read
the other signs that unconsciously emanate from her face. The way she
spits, the color of her face (or as close as my vidfone screen can
emulate), the shape of her cheeks and lips.
"You held me in your arms and somehow things were right again. We
could've made love, there on the sofa, but instead we just talked until we
couldn't stay awake, and you left me in the morning with a note to tell me
you had to go to work. I hated you that morning. I felt like a twenty rupee
kitten in the Outzone. But I was just emotionally wasted after that night.
I had died with Sean and you gave me new life. Well, there's more to life
than sex and death, Tommy. Much more."
Between each rasping breath I'm trying to form her name with my numb
lips. It's grotesque. I can almost look at my self from outside my body and
laugh at how stupid and feeble I look. I feel like someone with an elephant
sitting on his chest trying to talk after just being anesthetized at the
dentist's. Like a flashback of the evening after Sean died.
After work I'm in the Blue Cross again, but Chowdhury isn't.
Trying to get the attention of the barboy, a very tall thirteen-year-
old raja with a few whiskers of black hair along his upper lip, I instead
manage to attract who I can only assume was one of the rajas around
Chowdhury's table the other night. The kind of person who makes you think
of where you've kept your cash, and if it's safe. This trip, I've got it
rolled into a neat bundle and hidden in the pocket on the tongue of my
trainers with the velcro strapped across it. I'm determined not take any
chances.
"Looking for Amber Roy, again, chuck?" His voice is like sharp ice in
my ear. I turn to face him and he's a massive fat guy, something unusual in
the Outzone, where food is nearly legal tender.
My heart pounding in my ears, I emulate a casual nod as much as I can.
"Yeah. Seen him around?"
"What do you want him for, chuck?"
I try my best to soothe his violent tone. Chuck isn't really an
insult. It's just what the rajas call non-Asians. Same as us chucks call
the Asians in Thames Midland rajas. Just a name. But he makes a simple word
like chuck sound like shithead.
"Just seeing if he's got any more deals for me. I liked the last one
he did."
He shuffles in his cheap black plimsoles for a few seconds. His fat
face seems to light slowly, like someone twisting a dimmer switch behind
his eyes.
"No worries, chuck. I'll take you to see him. He's in Paddington. Come
on."
"Yeah, what do you want?" the barboy asks, his hand scraping a filthy
rag that could once have been a green t-shirt around the inside of a steel
tankard.
I look at the barboy, and I look at the big raja, and instead of
trusting my instincts and asking the barboy anyway, I follow the raja out
into the street.
We must be about two blocks down the street when he hits me. It's
something flat and hard, like the business-end of a cricket bat right
across the back of my skull.
The last thing I remember is the sensation of being turned over and
over. I can tell he's looking for my money, checking the pockets of my blue
plastic rain jacket and my gray canvas jeans. Then he feels around in my
socks and I can feel him sliding his hand in my trainers, checking under
the arch of my feet for the stash.
Then I can't seem to fight it anymore. The feeling that my brain's
going to expand out of my head and that my eyes are going to pop out onto
the cracked concrete wash over, and I'm out.
4. Amber Roy Chowdhury.
Swimming in my own long death, I try to think of a way out. Lyle's
broken voice is still stabbing at my mind.
"There's no way out for people like us," she's saying. "We're all on
some downward spiral. I know. I was born blind. I've never seen through
real eyes. Then I saw myself for the first time as if I was out of my body
and looking down on myself and I could see what kind of shit I was in. How
stupid everything looked. How stupid and pointless my whole existence had
been. It was the greatest feeling in the world, Tommy. I'd never felt that
good before."
...out of my body and looking down on myself... That's what I'm doing.
I'm having one of those near-death out-of-body experiences. I'm willing
myself to live, to do something to save my own life, but I've got no power
out here. I'm all spirit.
"The light, Tommy. It shines there like the ultimate high."
But there's no fucking light here. Not even a dark spot to signify
where the Devil can get you. And damn it, after I found Amber Roy
Chowdhury, the Devil deserved me.
The rain spitting on my face brings me around, and I'm alone on a
heat-cracked pavement in Soho, the London Outzone. My head is pounding,
there's a pain in my ribs like I've been run over by a robot racehorse, and
it takes ages for the dizziness to wear off. I stumble along pipes of
streets distorted by tunnel-vision. Falling over the rubble of crumbling
buildings. Dodging the threats of local teamsters and streetkids. I don't
even know where I'm going, let alone where I am. It's my mad hour. And it
finishes in an arc of red neon as my weak and tired legs finally give out
under me outside some club, amidst a gaggle of distressed voices.
I wake up in the back of a moving Metropol truck.
"Awake at last," one of the fat officers in the back with me says, his
face peering at mine. I can smell chocolate on his breath. "You did well.
Trying to crawl into a Tottenham Court club is a neat trick. You nearly
made it, too. If someone hadn't accidentally found your Lambs Conduit dog
tags, we'd have probably killed you. We don't take well to Outzone scum
turning up on our doorstep."
My dry mouth parts to speak. "I was attacked. I got lost and was
attacked. Then I woke up and tried to find my way home."
"That's okay," the fat cop says. "We're taking you to the monorail
station. You can get home from there, can't you?"
I nod. It seems like the headache's gone now. I still have that pain
in my ribs.
They let me off at the monorail station, and I thank them. I can't
really thank them enough. It must be a busy night for them. I've heard
rumors of Metropol cops shooting on sight anyone who looks remotely like
they could come from the Outzone. But these are stories told by the
rentacops of Lambs Conduit, and they've built up quite a rivalry with the
official Federal police.
I check to see if my cash is still in the pouch in my trainers while
waiting for the monorail and it is. Counting what's left, I have about
thirty-five marks. It's just enough to feed me for the next week, if I'm at
the stores at the right times to get what I want. Otherwise, I'll have to
make do with the processed crap they feed us in the canteens at lunchtimes.
Seeing the monorail train arriving, I quickly stash it back into the pouch
and tighten up the velcro flap to hide it.
The sleek silver bullet takes me back to Lambs Conduit, but I don't
want to go home just yet. I somehow need to feel the electricity of some
local life. Just one of those whims I occasionally have, like when you want
to go for a walk or get some fresh air. I need to be around people. My kind
of people. I need to smell the sweat of a workforce, and the nearest place
I can think of is the FLC games arcade.
I walk in past a pair of rentacops on their way out and feel a little
safer. Only five or ten minutes into watching a raja jacked into the NST
"Raid Port Said" game, his arms and legs still, while his mind controls the
wild nuances of a fighter simulator flying against some ancient Middle-East
threat, and I need to take a piss. So I head to the gents at the back of
the arcade.
And there's Chowdhury. A sleek black cylindrical microsoft sticking
out from behind his ear, and his hands shaking as he makes the first pain-
filled lateral slice across his left forearm with a kitchen knife.
I race over and grab the blade from his hand. His face,
uncomprehending, looks up in a fearful gaze. Black eyes staring into me as
if I've spoiled his final pleasure.
Rage is swelling through me. I can't believe that he's so stupid to
die from his own product, and I don't want to let him have the
satisfaction. So I grab the collar of his jacket and throw him into one of
the cubicles with all the force I can muster.
I can hear his skull cracking against the pipe leading from the
cistern to the bowl, and it nearly knocks him out, and I do it for him.
After making the slices I can finally see it. I'm covered in blood and
Amber Roy Chowdhury's sat on a toilet bowl dying. And on his arms I've
etched two sevens on his arms. Each one a lateral cut across the forearm
and a diagonal cut from there down the wrist to the hand.
Dropping the knife into his lap, I run home. But Lyle's gone.
Her face, cupped in the lines of that bobbed hair, looks so angelic
now. She gives me the last half of the speech. "Nukie just said it was a
dialect from Rio. That the only subliminal in there was the number seven.
It's like something you know in a dream, but it doesn't actually manifest
itself. It's extraordinary. I jacked it in and I understand the whole thing
now. There was no L-Razor. Just a feeling of utter uselessness. So you have
only one more useful thing you can do with your life after you've jacked
seven. And that's to end it."
But I don't feel like ending it. So Lyle had an out-of-body experience
that revealed the final truth to her. My experience is doing the same. Only
the truth is that I'm a loader for Lambs Conduit that's guilty of murder,
even if the bastard did deserve it, I didn't need to do it. And so I really
deserve to die, too.
But not tonight.
I'm walking calmly back to my gasping body and I know I have to
somehow climb back in to take it over. So I lie down on the sofa where Lyle
and I could have made love, and I enter myself. Once there I force my
fingers into my throat, and my gut spasms, retching onto the carpet.
"So that's it, Tommy," she says for the second time this night.
"That's the end."
And her face disappears as I suffer my third blackout of the night.
I'm waking up to the sound of the door buzzing. The smell of vomit
hits my nostrils, forcing me to dry-retch until I can make it to the door.
It's another suited guy from the FDI. Guilt may have left me to live
last night, but the FDI won't.
The penalty for Chowdhury's murder would be death, even for an
Outzoner -- we were in the Dustzone when it happened. And they know it was
me. Someone must have seen me do it. Someone must have.
I'm looking for something with a sharp edge. I'm in the kitchen,
looking for a knife. Where did I put them? The door still buzzes. There, in
one of the cupboards, and I'm out of my head again, watching myself,
thinking, this'll fuck their theory...
This time I can see that light Lyle talked about. It's there. It's
waiting for me. But it's gray, like a fading light. Like a dimming light
all around me.
I sit on the tiles on the floor of the kitchen; the knife edge slides
across the skin. At first the wound is clean, white, shining in the
reflection of the knife.
Then the blood comes, flowing steady like the emergency water pump out
in the square. And I make the second cut. A single, bloody seven down my
arm. Fading like the pump as the flow slowly runs dry.
And stops.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RIDLEY MCINTYRE (gdg019@cch.coventry.ac.uk) was born in 1971 in London,
England and now studies Communications at Coventry University. He has been
playing in his own worlds since 1985, when inspiration hit him to put on
paper the weird stuff often seen flying around in his head. His ambitions
are to escape to Canada before he gets conscripted and to make some sense
of the Real World.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Circles: A Romance / KYLE CASSIDY
"That's where my kitten got stuck," says Bernie, pointing up the
thick, blank trunk of a limbless tree, which rises straight like a dowel
perhaps eighty feet into the air.
"The fire department doesn't get cats out of trees -- that's a myth.
Our neighbor finally got him down. He worked for the phone company and he
had one of those belts, those climbing belts, and he went up the tree and
dropped the kitten down. I was seven or eight and my friend and I were
standing at the base of the tree, holding a stretched-out blanket.
Prometheus -- the kitten was maybe twelve weeks old -- hit that blanket
screaming and going so fast that it tore the corner of the blanket out of
my hands. He was on fire, running across the ground and up onto the porch
and into this box, this cardboard box that he lived in. He hit the back of
the box so hard he knocked it across the porch. He'd been up in that tree,
meowing, for three days, and for three days I'd been outside watching him
up there and crying.
"My neighbor said it was no problem, but my dad gave him a case of
beer for it -- good beer -- and the guy got drunk and ran into our car in
the driveway. My dad had to take him to court to finally get him to pay for
the damage."
We were walking around his house and into the backyard, where we were
barbecuing tofu dogs and corn on the cob in the surprisingly cool June
evening. In a few hours it would be dark and the only light would come from
the glowing coals and from the illuminated sign at The Hat Trick. To get
there you follow the long dirt driveway (or short dirt road) and cross 202
-- it's about 300 yards away.
Bernie had called and said that he'd seen Daphnie in that bar near his
house and that she had spoken fondly of me. Remembering only the good
things, my thoughts flew instantly back to that time at the beach and the
music that she had played over and over again on her stereo, knowing that
we were too young to die and too old to ever make a mistake. They came back
to me with the catchphrases she always used: "you bet," and "false,"
meaning "no." I thought of the way her smile curved back from her teeth
and the way she trembled when we were together in bed.
He'd begged her to meet us there the following week, then called me. I
was thrilled and frightened. I'd been trying to find Daphnie for a year,
ever since she had vanished from my life one evening and left no forwarding
address, phone number, or reason. And now, to have her suddenly there
again, once more with no reason, left me weak and agitated.
We sat on Bernie's porch and watched the sun go down through the
trees, drinking the cheapest beer we had been able to find (Igor's Yellow
Belly, $4.98 a case) and cooking dinner, waiting for 10:30 -- the time when
Daphnie would show up at The Hat Trick. I fretted, chewing my cuticles, and
Bernie languished over the woes of his own life, which I couldn't remember
as he listed them.
We drank beer.
"Agg. God," says Bernie as it starts to creep into his brain. "I
haven't been laid in three months. I lost 120 pounds and I still can't get
laid." Bernie used to be huge, though he's looking pretty good these days.
I noticed a sign on his fridge that says "nothing tastes as good as thin
feels."
"It'll happen," I reassure him, laying low in my seat and belching.
"Don't sweat it."
"Easy for you to say," he moans. "You always get laid." He flings his
empty bottle into the yard.
From there the evening begins to degenerate into a festival of
masculinity, and by beer number seven we're laughing like maniacs and
pissing gleefully into the yard from the second story bathroom window.
It's quarter after ten. Bernie is drunk and depressed about his two-
week-old leather jacket: it's shiny and new and flawless. He drags it
forlornly behind him in the dirt by one sleeve. As we approach the bar, he
puts it on and a cloud of dust rises from him like some desert rat out of a
Clint Eastwood film.
"You'll have to take the lids off," says the bouncer and I say "Lids?"
"Hats," he says, motioning towards my head. "No hats in here." We take our
hats off and I shove mine in my back pocket, thinking that it will look
better if it's rumpled. Although he doesn't ask, I shove about twelve forms
of I.D. at him, managing to drop them on the pavement. He picks them up and
hands them back to me without really looking at them.
I notice that my hands are shaking.
Bernie has already walked in and is waiting for me. He says something
drunkenly that I don't hear and stumbles a step backwards with a blank look
on his face. I follow him up the stairs.
We enter a quiet and brightly lit game room where somebody calls out
Bernie's name, rushes over, and pumps his hand. Bernie mumbles something
incoherently and slides away.
"High school," he says to me, taking his leather jacket off and
dragging it on the floor behind him.
Florid pink-eyed people stand like robots before the video machines,
engrossed cyborgs. I can still hear the music from downstairs, though it
might just be in my head.
Bernie leads me quickly through a maze of small rooms where people are
playing pool or sitting on wooden stools, drinking. There are well-groomed
men with surfer haircuts and women in huge shorts with banana clips on
their heads. If I was sober I would probably hate this place.
Bernie goes down another flight of stairs, which opens up into a wide
and loud room with a very low ceiling. Immediately I see Daphnie sitting at
the bar. She's smiling (I have never known her not to), wearing gaudy
multicolored shorts/white legs/cowboy boots/sports jacket. And probably
nothing on underneath the sports jacket, I think, though I am wrong. Her
hair is a little shorter than when I last saw her, but it is still in the
same style, admitting and closely framing the oval of her face which,
frankly, looks very egg-like when her hair is wet.
"Hey," she says, taking her feet down from the stool next to her so
that I can sit down.
"I was saving a seat for you," she says to Bernie, "but somebody took
it." He's pretty hammered. His mouth is open and he is looking right
through her head like a bullet. Daphnie is drinking something pink from a
plastic cup. In the cup there is also a coffee stirrer and a lot of crushed
ice.
I straddle the stool and look at her -- aware that I am so nervous
that I'm liable to do something stupid, like knock her drink over, and
aware that after all this time, I can't think of what to say to her.
"You look great," I end up saying, and it's the truth. The words come
out of my mouth with a surprising calmness and clarity and this makes me
feel at least a little confident.
"Oh, your hair," she says, leaning over to me and stroking it. "I love
your hair."
"I just got it cut," I interject. "It was down to my navel, but it
kept getting under my arm when I tried to sleep. I couldn't sleep."
"You took all the blond out," she remarks, still petting it. I swivel
on the stool to give her a better look.
"Yeah, well, I can't stand being the same person for too long at a
stretch. Hey, look, is there someplace we can go to talk? Someplace quiet?
There's a lot..." Things have been weighing on me for a long time.
"Sure," she says. "We can go to the game room." Bernie has vanished to
somewhere, like bigfoot into the trees. Daphnie tosses back the last of her
drink, straining it through the ice, and then sets the cup back down on the
bar. I follow her back up the stairs, but all the stools are taken. My
vision is narrowing.
"We can go outside," she says, and I notice that there is a door
leading out side on the far wall. It's open, and two bouncers are leaning
back up against the outer wall. We walk past them and into the parking lot,
sitting down on the curb. I lay down my jacket so that she can sit on it.
"It's been a long time," I say. "I've... It's good to see you, really
good. I've been looking for you."
"Yeah, that's what Bernie said."
"You just vanished and I didn't know what happened to you. You stopped
returning my calls."
"I did?" she asks.
"Yeah, you don't remember?"
"I don't know. I don't remember why."
"Oh, God, Daphnie... There's things I wanna tell you. I've been trying
to find you. Every second I spent with you was magic -- you're the best.
I've never had more fun with anybody else. That time at the beach was so, I
don't know, so real. Larger than life. Everything we did, the way you'd
melt almost when I held you--"
"That's my weakness."
"I have pictures of you hanging up all over my room."
"From the beach?"
"I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but you're beautiful."
I'm drunk and the words flow quickly and easily now. I'm worried that
I'm coming on too strong, that I'll scare her away, but either I can't
control myself or I no longer care. I just need for her to know how I feel
about her. She looks first down at the ground and then into my eyes.
"No one has."
I lean down and start flicking pebbles with my finger. They skitter
across the parking lot. I want very much to reach over with both my hands
and lay my palms against her cheeks and feel their smooth warmth and say
over and over again. "You're beautiful," until she believes it and believes
that I believe it.
"I think about you all the time. There's nothing that I've been able
to do which has given me one-tenth of the magic that I felt with you, just
that short time that we were together. You're fun to be with, there's so
much to you, and you were my best friend, too.
"I mean, it wasn't always sexual -- really. I thought you were a
lesbian the first time that I met you, but I just wanted to be around you
because... Daphnie, I think I may be in love with you."
There is a derailed silence between us and, stumbling, I continue,
lost now somewhere in the past. "I'm so nervous right now. I had to drink
ten beers before we came here. We split a case, Bernie and I. Do you want
to come over to his house with me and just talk or something? It's right
across the street. I don't want to sleep with you. I mean, I do, but I
don't. I want to have something with you that lasts." I haven't touched her
and I want to reach out and take her hand, but I don't, purposefully
leaning further away from her, making the space between us real.
"Sure, I'll come," she says. "I'd like to have a beer."
Walking back through the bar we see Bernie, beer in hand. He leers at
me, eyes like pencil-points, sweat pasting hair to his forehead.
"If only my students could see me now!"
Bernie teaches history at Millard Fillmore High School. Often he
causes me to reevaluate my own teachers and my conceptions of them.
"We're going back, okay?" I say.
"The two of you? Hot damn!" he replies bawdily, slapping me one the
back. A cloud of dust dislodges itself from his jacket and wafts around us.
Then to Daphnie he says: "He really likes you."
"I really like him," she says and takes hold of my arm, pulling
herself close. It is the first time we have touched in a year.
We walk back to Bernie's house. On the way, I hold her hand and we
talk about incidentals: where she's living, working, people she sees. She's
graduated from the university; her degree is in engineering.
When we get back to the house I put the Pearl Jam tape in the player
and we go out on the porch.
"Dance," she commands, taking my hand. We dance on the soft wet
boards. I am drunken and graceless; she thrashes without abandon like Siva
and things are born out of her and I am so glad to be with her. My hair
tangles and sticks to my face.
Finally we sit down on a long, white, plastic sun chair. The barbecue
grill is still glowing faintly in the yard. Daphnie has an ounce and a half
of marijuana in her purse, which she pulls out and begins meticulously
picking through, rolling a joint. It's the dope she got in Ecuador while
working for the Peace Corps and smuggled back in a tin of tea bags. It is
wrapped in an old sock.
I hold the bag in my hands, amazed -- I've never seen this much at one
time before and I've never known anyone with the audacity to carry so much
of it on her person. Daphnie's father though is a state trooper, and I've
always suspected that she is trying to attract some modicum of lost
attention from him. Daphnie proceeds to get stoned and I comb her hair
softly with a brush I find in her purse. She sighs while I do this. I rub
her neck and slowly lean forward and kiss her shoulder where it meets her
neck. She leans back against me the way she did at the shore, and I know
that everything will be all right. I feel warm and very happy and acutely
aware. I think all my sensory neurons are firing at once.
"How were things after you left?" I ask.
"Left where? Ecuador or here?"
"After you left here, last summer."
"Okay, I guess." I can tell by the tone of her voice that they were
not. "I got fired from my job, the one I had last summer, and I just went
away to Ecuador."
"That was the best way to leave that job." I mean this as a joke; it
wasn't a very good job. Suddenly I realize that there is a good deal more
to her than I had ever thought. There was so much that I didn't know about
her.
"Seeing anybody? I mean, do you have a boyfriend?"
"No." She says this quietly. "Not since January."
"Oh. Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," she says again, than adds, "I always get damaged."
"Even with me?" I ask.
"Even with you," she whispers, and I am ashamed. We are silent for a
long time and I am thinking about how I could have hurt her and wondering
why she stopped calling me. What nameless, unseen thing had taken place
between us at the height of my happiness? In my euphoria, was I blind to
her pain? And what had she suffered in January?
"Are you tired?" I ask, kissing the tips of her fingers.
"You bet," she says, shaking the gloom, reaching down and putting a
hand on my leg. "Wanna lie down?"
"Yeah, I do."
We go upstairs, into the spare bedroom and undress, lying down on top
of the sheets. The window is open and we can still hear the tape playing
quietly downstairs. She lies frail and trusting in my arms and I hold her
tightly. We are silent and I am stroking her hair and later I feel her
tears on my chest.
I roll over and hold her fragile face between my hands and feel that
she is breaking apart and that I have to hold her together, tenaciously,
lest all things abandon her. I kiss the tears on her cheeks and they are
salty on my lips.
"I want to hold you forever," I say, "and kiss your tears away. I
don't want to be apart from you again. It took me a year to find you and I
want to make you stop hurting." She kisses me hard on the mouth and I
tangle my fingers in her smooth hair.
Before I close my eyes, I see the red LED of the clock. It says 1:35.
Bernie has somehow, and somewhere, during the course of the night, met
and brought home the Beast From 40,000 Fathoms, who jiggles lugubriously
around the house the next morning in her gruesome underwear, chanting the
mantra "Bernie-Bernie-Bernie-food." She is as white as a sheet of erasable
bond, alternately scowling and laughing shrilly at everybody in the house
like one of Perseus' blind hags. In a deep pan of sputtering lard she
prepares and consumes -- to the stupefaction of all -- a dozen runny eggs.
Bernie in the corner holds his head, looking miserable and hung-over.
I kiss Daphnie on the mouth and her lips fit mine in a hermetic seal
and there are things that have passed between us in the night which we will
not mention again -- words spoken on the loose fortune of wine -- yet we
are closer for them.
I put my arms around her and kiss her again, this time on the
forehead. I let go of her, knowing that now it will work for us, at least
for a time, and that nothing is important but today. She promises that she
will call me and she goes out the door, taking with her the corpulent glob
of chins she'll drop off at home, or work, or the swamp, or whatever.
Cthulhu blows multitudinous kisses at Bernie before oozing into the front
seat of Daphnie's tiny car.
The windows are tinted black, so I cannot tell if Daphnie looks back
as the car drives down the road, past the mailbox, past the lawn gnome, and
past the tree that Bernie's kitten was stranded in for three long days and
two frigid nights.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KYLE CASSIDY (cass8806@elan.glassboro.edu) is 26 years old and a senior at
Rowan University where he is majoring in English and Political Science. His
mother wishes that he would get a haircut.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reality Check / MARK SMITH
Stetson had careened like a cue ball through the whole raucous evening
of his party. Host extraordinaire, he had obliged all comers. Asked to
dance, he danced. If the music needed changing, he manned the platters.
When someone suggested martinis, Stetson fished the olives from the door of
the refrigerator.
Because he had been partaking liberally of various intoxicants, he
periodically performed what he thought of as "reality checks."
He would slip into the bathroom, lean over the antique, chipped sink
and peer into the mirror. If he didn't find a scarecrow-faced stranger
leering back at him, he considered himself to have passed the reality
check.
Leaving the bathroom after the latest check, Stetson found that the
crowd had begun to thin noticeably. The party had hit its zenith of noise
and confusion and was now obviously downshifting. Soon the only ones left
would be insomniac keg-draining diehards and hangers-on.
No matter -- it had been a great party complete with all the requisite
elements of fun: deafening music, a dazzling smorgasbord of mainly illegal
drugs, general intoxication, and enough athletic dancing to require days of
muscle recuperation. But Stetson was no more ready for the evening to end
than a bulimic is to leave the Thanksgiving table: his eight-ball had yet
to find its pocket.
About this time, Joni Ricketts came to say good-bye. She floated out
of the darkened living room, where several rollerball, spike-haired couples
were bouncing to a Bow Wow Wow record popular that weekend, onto the wide,
generous front porch to where Stetson stood with several keg-hangers,
sipping beer, passing a fifth of Beam and cursing punk rockers.
Joni put a bony hand on Stetson's arm. "Going now, super party, had a
great time," she said as she wafted diaphanously down the steps and half
the distance of sidewalk out to the street.
"How're you getting home?" Stetson asked.
"Walking."
"You can't do that."
"Why not?"
"I'm coming with you."
"You don't have to do that. You still have guests."
"I'm coming with you," he repeated.
"Okay."
"Hold on a sec."
Stetson turned back into the house, shooting a glance at Riddle where
he sat rocking silently on the porch swing. A homicidal grin spread like a
rash across Riddle's face.
Inside he grabbed a half-empty jug of California red, noticing as he
did that his girlfriend Olivia, forgotten early in the evening, lay
sprawled fully-clothed across their bed, snoring.
He dashed back out the front door before anyone could ask him where he
was going or delay him with their good-byes. He met Joni at the curb. They
walked along a broad avenue that led from Stetson's neighborhood downtown
along which stately Victorian houses, once dominant, now stood cheek-to-
jowl with convenience stores, daycare centers, and laundromats.
It was very late, nearly four, and a cool, light breeze had sprung up
and lifted their hair behind them as they walked in silence. Strolling with
Joni through this quiet, slumbering city filled Stetson with a dreamy
weightlessness. He stopped walking, swigged deeply from the bottle, and
passed it to Joni who took an equally hearty pull. He watched
appreciatively as the muscles of her throat moved rhythmically up and down.
She handed the bottle back and they resumed walking.
"Good party," she said.
"You thought so?"
"Lotsa people."
"That's all that counts," said Stetson facetiously. Joni chuckled
politely.
"How's Olivia?"
"She's there."
"Everything okay with you guys?"
"I guess. We fight a lot," said Stetson, telling a marginal truth. In
fact, they fought only occasionally. The rest of the time, they ignored one
another, but Stetson felt the need to cast the relationship in a harsher
light.
"And you? Any prospects?"
"Oh. One or two," said Joni, effecting a coy, eye-batting gesture.
"I'm not surprised," said Stetson. He felt his face flush as Joni
turned to look at him. He caught her eyes briefly, then turned away. They
met in a college class several years before, found they had friends in
common, and had been good friends ever since. During that time, each had
served as collaborator, confessor and commiserator to the other's unsettled
love life. Tonight he saw her differently.
They turned the corner and walked past a grand colonnaded mansion that
sat atop a crest down from which an obsessively manicured lawn declined on
each side toward retaining walls that ran along the sidewalk. Stetson
stopped and looked up toward the house.
Joni said, "Well?"
"Come on," he said, vaulting to the top of the wall and reaching for
her hand. Stetson pulled her up onto the top of the wall and, still holding
her hand, ran up the lawn until they almost reached the porch. He plopped
down onto the grass under a spreading live oak tree.
"I don't know, Stetson," said Joni, biting her lip and looking
reluctantly at the house.
"It's okay. They're lawyers' offices."
"Really?"
"Trust me."
"Never," she laughed, dropping onto the grass beside him, her leg
touching his. He laughed too and helped himself to a great glug from the
bottle.
From the crest of the high lawn where they sat, they could see the
downtown spread before them with its motley assortment of bank towers,
church steeples, and older stone and brick buildings. Light from the street
lamp broke through the trees to dapple the shade with medallions of
counterfeit moonlight that spilled down the lawn, across the sidewalk, and
into the street.
"It seems so perfect," said Joni, reaching across Stetson for the
bottle, her arm draped lazily across his chest. He caught her elbow and
pulled her toward him. She smiled slightly and allowed him to brush his
lips to hers. She laughed nervously and pulled away against the light
pressure of his hold.
"We should behave," said Joni.
"Why?"
"Olivia."
Stetson sighed. "Yes. Olivia." He let go of her completely. She
wrapped a languid arm around him and patted his shoulder as a mother would
a child.
"I'm done with Olivia."
"But you're still together."
"Barely."
"Does she think so, too?"
"Hard to say what she thinks."
He drank but the wine tasted like mud. He offered the bottle to Joni.
She shook her head.
He said, "We've been friends for a long time."
"Yup."
"How come we never...?" He paused. "You know."
"I don't know. Maybe we thought it might ruin something special."
"Did I ruin something just now?"
"I don't know," said Joni. "I'll have to think about it."
At once all the booze and drugs of the evening came crashing down on
Stetson. His head began to swim and he felt nauseous and faint.
"Better go," he croaked, staggering to his feet. He felt ten years old
again and stepping off the merry-go-round, at the motionless, dizzying
vortex of a madly spinning cosmos that stretched away from him out to the
edges of the Milky Way, tilting dangerously with each slight movement of
his head.
He managed to walk down off the lawn, but the face of the night had
changed. He became mortified at the thought of puking in front of his old
friend, worsening a situation he already found intensely embarrassing. He
felt the old reliable emotion of self-disgust returning and all he could
think of was getting drunker, partying more. They walked the short blocks
to Joni's apartment, a tiny carriage house, the manor which it once served
having long since been torn down for parking.
"See you soon," said Joni, planting a tiny kiss on his hot cheek. She
bounded into the house and Stetson started back.
The sidewalk rose up too quickly and he felt as though he were
running. Maybe he did run, because his own house appeared before him almost
at once. The urge to retch had passed and his thoughts returned to revelry.
He regretted the episode with Joni, but he had a drunk's confidence that
come tomorrow he could put things right again.
The house was dark and still but for an orange glow floating on the
front porch. Riddle sat in the swing where he had been sitting when Stetson
left with Joni. Stetson stopped on the sidewalk, weaving visibly.
"Well, asshole," said Riddle, "you manage to get your dick wet?"
"Shut up, you swine. Where is everyone?"
"They went home. I should, too."
"No," said Stetson. "Let's do something."
"Fun's over, partyboy," said Riddle. "What did you have in mind?"
"I don't know,"
"Of course you don't. You've killed more brain cells tonight than most
folks are born with." He rocked for a few moments, then flipped his
cigarette butt so forcefully that it cleared the yard and bounced into the
empty street, where it burst apart in a shower of orange sparks. "How about
breakfast?"
"Now you're talking!" yelped Stetson. He reeled a broad step backward
into the grass. "Lemme hit the head first."
In the bathroom, Stetson leaned on the sink and tried to square his
shoulders for a reality check, but he kept slipping from side to side. He
looked into the mirror where his disembodied face floated like a conjured
visitor at a seance. Every pore seemed a crater and his eyes had narrowed
to bloody slits. His lips stretched over his yellow teeth like the mouth of
a corpse.
The dawn wind blowing through the windows of Riddle's pickup truck
began to cool Stetson's fevered brain. Riddle's truck was a mess. Coke
bottles rolled across the floor over piles of yellowed newspapers. Empty
cigarette packages and fast-food trash littered the seat. Reams of papers
were folded and rubber-banded behind the sun visor. Stetson didn't notice a
thing.
Riddle listened unsympathetically to the whole story of his walk with
Joni Ricketts, occasionally shaking his head and grunting.
"Do you think I really fucked up this time?"
"Would serve you right."
"I guess it would."
They pulled into the parking lot of Hill's Cafe. Even though it was
not yet six, the lot was jammed with cars and trucks most in worse repair
than Riddle's. Riddle and Stetson piled out of the truck and started toward
the front door along the sidewalk that ran the width of the building.
Suddenly, without warning even to himself, Stetson tumbled over a
scraggly box shrub and fell in a heap onto a narrow strip of St. Augustine
grass between the sidewalk and the building. He lay next to an old
buckboard wagon bereft of seat and spring that served as someone's idea of
appropriate decor for an all-night redneck diner specializing in greasy
breakfasts, club sandwiches and tough steaks.
Riddle regarded Stetson without trace of sympathy. He shook a
cigarette out of a crushed pack, lit it and let a cloud of blue smoke waft
away to join the grease and smoke hanging above Hill's.
Stetson looked up at the rust-rimmed wheels of wagon with the
incomprehension of an infant.
"Well?" said Riddle. Stetson looked up.
"Well, what?"
"You coming?"
"Coming where?" said Stetson.
"You asshole."
Stetson looked puzzled. "Why do you say that?"
"Because you are one."
"I am?"
"Get up," said Riddle.
"Do I have to? It feels so good here."
"Suit yourself," said Riddle and started to move off.
"Wait."
Riddle stopped. Stetson said, "You just gonna leave me here?" He
looked up at the wagon. "Here in the goddamn O.K. Corral?" He started
giggling like a twelve-year-old at a slumber party.
"Jesus, Stetson, get your ass up off the ground. For chrissake, take a
look at yourself. What the hell's wrong with you? Someone might think you
had real problems or something."
Stetson looked up at Riddle, wanting to answer, but unable. He loved
Riddle like a brother and his disapproval was crippling. He had always
appreciated Riddle's honesty, and felt all the worse to find it directed at
himself. He wanted more than anything to spring up, to prove himself. To
prove Riddle wrong. But the grass was cool and soft and, with the weight of
forced merriment lifted, he felt more depleted than he could ever remember.
A thin, middle-aged, weathered man in western clothes stalked down the
sidewalk, pausing when he came to where Riddle stood. The cowboy cast a
cold eye down at Stetson, then up at Riddle, his face pinched into a squint
under the brim of his hat.
"Drunk," he said, summing up the scene.
"Adjective as accurate as noun," said Riddle, nodding grimly.
The cowboy looked suspiciously at Riddle and went on his way, shaking
his head.
Stetson knew that standing would not absolve him of the crimes of the
evening, but along with a big breakfast and pots of coffee, it might break
the spell of self-absorption under which he had languished for what seemed
like years.
He rose and stepped over the hedge back onto the sidewalk. Riddle
nodded at him much as he had nodded at the cowboy a moment before.
Standing at last, and with sober voice, Stetson looked at Riddle and
said, "I think I'm finally ready." They stalked into Hill's Cafe, where
Stetson ate like a plague of locusts or a man returned from the dead.
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MARK SMITH (mlsmith@tenet.edu) has been writing fiction and non-fiction
for over ten years. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
_Window_, _Spectrum_, _Malcontent_, _Epiphany_, and the _Lone Star
Literary Quarterly_. "Reality Check" is from Mark's collection of
stories, _Riddle_, winner of the 1992 Austin Book Award. Mark lives
in Austin, Texas.
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The Tired Man and the Hoop / JASON SNELL
(With slight apologies to Ernest Hemingway)
The man drove to the baseline, allowing sweat to drip into his eyes.
"Nice try," he said. "You can try to defend against me, but I will keep
driving until I can take a clear shot." He began to bounce the ball with
his other hand and jerked his head to the left. The defender took his bait.
He dribbled the ball past the defender. The ball dropped through the net.
"You make it, you take it," the defender said.
"I do," the man said.
This time won't be as easy, he thought, because that trick won't work
again. I need a new trick, he thought. But what kind of trick? A kind he
has never seen before. But he has been playing this game for a long time. I
will have to be resourceful.
The man put the ball between his legs, his tired legs wrapped in
flimsy sweat pants. He wiped the sweat off his hands onto the pants, and
then retrieved the ball. I will have a better grip on the ball now, he
thought. Such a grip may serve me well.
He stared into the eyes of the defender and knew how difficult his
task was. He could not pass the ball to teammates because he had none.
Being alone was what made one-on-one the challenge it was. The defender was
also sweating, not only because he was tired, but because he was losing by
two baskets.
The man started dribbling; he worked his feet back and forth in false
drives to the basket and switched the ball between his hands. He moved to
the far right of the court, the cracked high school court he had always
used for these challenges. It had been a long time since he had lost. He
did not like to lose.
"You're bad luck for me," he said to the right side of the court. "I
can't ever make a good shot from this side."
The left side would be better, he thought. I can get past my opponent
there.
He kept his dribble and moved to the left. It was a better side, less
cracked than the right. Just then a wave of fatigue washed into every crack
of his body. It had been a long game, and there was only so much his body
could take.
"I will defeat you," he told his opponent.
If I don't collapse first, he thought.
He turned to look at the basket and saw it hanging in the sky behind
his opponent, beckoning like a comfortably rickety front porch in someone's
hometown.
"I am coming for you," he told the basket. He shook his fist at it.
He became angry when he realized that shaking his fist had caused him
to stop dribbling the ball.
In a moment, the opponent was close. He jostled the man repeatedly,
knowing that the man's only recourse was to shoot the ball. Such a shot
would certainly miss. The opponent had the man covered too closely.
You have me in a bad situation, the man thought. But your situation is
even worse than mine. You are four points behind me. How did I allow myself
to be trapped in this corner, without my dribble? I must be getting very
tired. Or I was looking at the basket and was distracted by my thoughts.
Now I will perform my trick and then I will score the basket. He will be
defeated.
"Look up in the sky," he said nonchalantly. "It's the space shuttle."
The opponent looked up, not because he was stupid, but because their
basketball court was not too far from where the space shuttle lands.
Astronomy was the opponent's pastime, other than one-on-one
basketball. And the man knew it.
The man turned as his opponent was looking, and hurled the ball
through the air. The ball a high arc and bounced off the backboard. They
watched the ball drop through the soft net and onto the hard pavement
below.
"That was a dirty trick," the opponent said.
"I know," the man said.
He picked up the ball, and knew that he was now leading by six points.
I will win, he thought. He will not score eight points in a row.
"You make it, you take it," the opponent said.
"Yes," the man said.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
JASON SNELL (jsnell@ocf.Berkeley.edu) is a first-year graduate student at
UC
Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. This is the last in a series of
seemingly pointless imitations of famous authors he wrote for the final
writing class he took as an undergraduate. (Previous victims were Virginia
Woolf ("A Reality of One's Own") and Hunter S. Thompson ("Gnomes in the
Garden
of the Damned"), both of which appeared in Quanta. Now, shoo. You don't
want
to read any more about this guy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Submit! You will submit to InterText! No, we're not trying to
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
InterText Vol. 2, No. 6. InterText is published electronically on a bi-
monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine is permitted as long as the
magazine is not sold and the content of the magazine is not changed in any
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For subscription requests, e-mail: jsnell@ocf.Berkeley.edu
->Back issues available via FTP at: network.ucsd.edu (128.54.16.3)<-
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
What did you expect, a clever joke here or something?
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