K Jeter - Noir

“I… I don’t know.” The cube bunny’s open gaze locked on to his narrower one. “Maybe… I was lonely.”

“You came to the wrong place, then. We’ve already got plenty of that here.” McNihil laid his hands on her shoulders. The warmth of her skin rose through the layers of thin cotton and wool and into his palms. “But Mr. Travelt is dead, isn’t he?”

She nodded. “Yes…”

“Well, I can’t replace him for you.” He let one hand, with its own will, brush softly against the side of her neck. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“That’s all right.” The cube bunny gave him an understanding, forgiving smile. “It’d still be okay.”

“Just as long,” said McNihil, “as you understand that.”

The cube bunny nodded again, without speaking.

He came around to the front of the couch and took her hand, pulling her up toward him. When he’d led her down the apartment’s dimly lit hallway, he stopped suddenly at the door of the bedroom. “Wait a second.”

Back in the kitchen, McNihil pulled the plug of the coffeepot. The burnt smell of the residue inside had already tinged the air; it could be tasted at the back of the throat, like the awareness of sin. He reached over and pulled the thin chain dangling in the middle of the kitchen, switching off the light.

“You said you were lonely.” In the bedroom’s darkness, the cube bunny’s softness was still wrapped in the firmed Lupino-like illusion. Close to him, she laid her hand against his chest, as though reading his heartbeat. “Who are you lonely for?”

McNihil knew why she asked. So she could try to be that other person, another layer of illusion, for him. It came with the territory: that was part of her job and survival skills as well.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Sitting at the edge of a concave mattress, he brought his face close to the hand he’d combed into her dark hair. His lips grazed the skin of her cheekbone. “Probably just my wife.”

The cube bunny drew away from him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Like I said. Don’t worry about it.” McNihil drew the girl down to the field of the thin blanket. “She’s dead.” The same hand stroked the girl’s brow. “When I tell her about things like this… she doesn’t mind at all.”

The girl said nothing, but reached up for him with her bare arms.

Later, when the only illumination in the bedroom was the glow from the cube bunny’s skin-McNihil’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that a naked woman burned like a faint, ghostly lantern-he sat on the edge of the mattress, watching her sleep. She didn’t wake as he drew the thin blanket back from her. Confirming what he’d seen while she’d been in his arms: there was no mark on her body, other than the random bruise.

No tattoos, either moving about or still. The blue-black capital V , with its knife-pointed serifs, that he’d seen embossed over the corpse’s rib cage… if he saw it now, it was only in his memory. The image of the corpse… and ones farther back. He closed his eyes, not to see them better, but so they wouldn’t be superimposed, branded, on the sleeping girl.

In the bathroom at the end of the apartment’s hallway, McNihil heard her gathering up her clothes. He splashed cold water in his face, letting it run down his neck as he raised his head to look at himself in the mirror. Taking his time, giving her time.

She was already gone when McNihil walked out to the kitchen. He pulled the chain dangling from the center of the ceiling, flooding the space with an eye-stinging brilliance. The whole apartment seemed as bare and empty as the specimen freezer in an abandoned morgue.

McNihil leaned back against the sink, arms folded across his chest, the edge of the counter’s cracked tile pressing against the skin just above the waistline of the trousers he’d picked up from the bedroom floor and pulled on. The cold from the linoleum, with its worn-through patches like black islands on an unlabeled map, seeped into his bare feet. From here, he could see out the kitchen’s tiny window with its tattered roller blind, down to the street in front of the building. The homeless were parading by, in strict formation, just as they were supposed to do. In that other world, the one he didn’t see anymore, he knew they were all shellbacks, humping along the personal-sized portable refuges into which they retreated when off-duty. He’d always hated the sequential billboards mounted on the shells’ hardened exterior casings, the lights usually spelling out an ad slogan about some sleazy low-budget operation, like whatever Snake Medicine™ clinic was nearby, with its resident Adder clome offering everything from minor decorative tattoos to Full Prince Charles jobs. McNihil was glad he didn’t see things like that anymore; now the homeless parade looked like a long line of sandwich-board men, trudging down the sidewalk one right after another, like some Depression-era film that had slipped loose in the universe’s projector, stuttering the same frames over and over again.

This time, the sandwich boards hanging in front and back of the shuffling homeless men were advertising something McNihil didn’t recognize. There was just one big alphabet letter on each board; they spelled out, in sequence, the word TLAZOLTÉOTL .

McNihil wondered what the connect that meant. Maybe a new Central American restaurant opening up somewhere in the Gloss. Or maybe nothing at all; maybe the sandwich-board men had gotten mixed up and out of order, creating some random anagram out of the actual word. A back part of McNihil’s brain idly worked on it. After a few seconds, a memory scrap floated to the top of his thoughts. Tlazoltéotl had been the indecipherable word in the banner scroll tattooed on the corpse’s abdomen, right beneath the big initial V .

Probably not a good thing , decided McNihil. He also decided not to think about it anymore.

He didn’t bother drawing down the blind, to shut out the image of the homeless parade going down the street below. Instead, McNihil closed his eyes and thought about the things he’d told the cube bunny. Which were all true, as far as they went.

I’m used to it , McNihil thought. The world he saw… he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

There was only one thing he missed.

Just once in a while, he would’ve liked to have seen daylight again. Instead of this world’s eternal, clockless night.

RENAISSANCE ANGELS TURNED TO BURROWING MOLES

Some kind of church service was going on underneath the grates. Underground from economic necessity, not from any actual persecution; big spaces, cathedrals vaulted with sewage pipes and bundles of ancient copper wiring, black-sheathed fiber-optic snakes, suitable for large congregations of the faithful. Of whatever denomination:

• subterranean mosques, like minarets laid on their sides, the cries of the muezzin echoing beneath cracked and patched asphalt;

• Holy Rollers, interbred clans, toothless and fervid, calling on Zion and awash in the blood of a pompadoured, lazy-eyed lamb of Memphis grace, wrestling high-voltage cables like Teflon-insulated serpents;

• supply-side Republicans, cutting each other with little razor knives and lapping up red puddles among the discarded condoms;

• post-Reformation Lubavitchers awaiting a messiah with hands of fire.

The man loitering in the alley felt a shiver of disgust roll up his arms, mutating into a sour ball of spit at the back of his tongue. He’d just as soon not have been there at all, listening to multipartite hymnody-was it Latin? Old Tridentine ritual?-wafting up from below his feet, as though Renaissance angels had turned to burrowing moles. Flickering candlelight, from staggered ranks of small yellow flames, streamed up past his legs and across his chest, working his face into a network of spook-pocked shadows. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a black puddle at the alley’s edge, the thin water shimmering with solvent rainbows; his face looked like a campfire parody, a ghost story with a flashlight under the chin. The anachronism bothered him more than the actual visual effect.