K Jeter - Noir

“‘ 20AND INTO THAT LAND-’” McNihil murmured another piece of the story to himself; there was no one to overhear him in the train. “‘TO CONVERSE WITH THE DEAD, THAT HE MIGHT LEARN OF THEM THAT WHICH WOULD BE TO HIS PROFIT, NAY, SURVIVAL; TO THAT REGION OF THE DEAD CAME A STILL-LIVING MAN, WHO HAD COME THERE BEFORE MANY TIMES ON SIMILAR ERRANDS. BUT IN THIS TIME, THE LIVING MAN’S THOUGHTS WERE OF RELUCTANT NATURE. SO THAT HE DID SAY TO HIMSELF, “ CHRIST AL-CONNECTING-MIGHTY, I DON’T WANT TO BE DOING THIS …”’”

But such petition , thought McNihil, availeth not .

Rattling on the poorly maintained tracks, the train made slow progress across the blighted landscape. Slow and southward, leaving the ill-defined outskirts of True Los Angeles behind. There had been a time-McNihil had seen the photos, watched the videos-when L.A. had merged seamlessly with the densely suburbanized zones below it, like a corpse on the slab of God the Mad Doctor, a somewhat living thing stitched together by arteriosclerotic freeways. All flowers die eventually, though, even the ones that are already toxic, and the black blooms wither and curl up on their black stems.

McNihil looked out the window, his breath against the glass, and saw ashes and the charred skeletons of buildings, steel girders twisted by the heat of long-extinguished fires, rows of square, empty eye sockets staring past fields of jewel-like glittering broken glass. A grid of streets remained embossed on the deathscape, with the cracked emblems and nonsense words of what had been backlit plastic signage on tottering or spine-snapped poles, all transformed into an idiot language by having melted into one another. The logo of a defunct international hamburger chain merged with the trademark of what had been the West Coast’s largest retail purveyor of automobile tires, the resultant muddle sliding into the blinded facade of an abandoned full-service Church- &-Shop™, the combination seeming to promise seminutritious grease and small plastic toys served as a holy sacrament inside a steel-belted radial. Overall, the air looked and smelled-it seemed to seep through the solid glass and into McNihil’s nostrils-as if the smoke from the ancient fires had never dissipated, the ocean winds no longer rolling over the petroleum-striped beaches, the clouds heavy and listless above the waves too sullen to crest. The air had yellowed and turned rancid, becoming some sort of breathable cheese, a substance accumulating on one’s alveoli like the stuff found at the bottom of backed-up drains.

This was the one zone where McNihil’s vision matched up perfectly with exterior hard reality. The black-and-white movies inside his eyes might just as well have leaked out and congealed, thick and heavy, on the dark landscape.

He turned away from the window at his side and glanced around the interior of the train. The perceived aspects of the world outside had permeated the train as well. Empty, the seats’ torn vinyl extruded dirty-gray stuffing like infected tongues across the narrow floor’s mounds of rubbish. Spray-can placa , even more stylized than the previous century’s glory-days tags in the prescrub New York subways, flowed across walls, seats, windows, and the more permanent strata of trash, as though some judging angel had crashed a party gone badly wrong. McNihil couldn’t read the scrawled, looping words; he’d always found third-generation Huichol slang in Cyrillic characters somewhat beyond him. Mene mene tekel upharsin -he wouldn’t have been surprised if that was how it translated, given the nature of the territory they had entered. Weighed in the balance , thought McNihil glumly, and tossed out .

The meter-high graffiti included a psychotic drawing that didn’t need to be translated. In rapidly shaded Day-Glo, the artist had sketched a malevolently grinning skull, complete with dangling bony vertebrae for a throat. Some minimal animation had even been done, if that term could be applied to a depiction of corpse pieces. Enough sulfurous daylight slid in through the windows on the opposite side to trigger the paint’s remaining shutter-pixels, cycling the image through its program of one empty bone-orbit closing and reopening in a leering wink. The skull’s white forehead was splintered open, with uprooted male genitalia thrust through the chasm; a drop of bloodied semen sparkled and faded, over and over, like a false and deceptive pearl.

McNihil didn’t know, and didn’t care, whether the skull was the vanished artist’s self-portrait or an iconic homage to the passing landscape’s ruling deity. He was going down to see and to talk to his dead wife. Slumping lower in the seat, he folded his arms across his chest, though there was no chill in the air. On the contrary: the climate just south of L.A. was an unvarying hell, unbroken by either grace or rain.

“Don’t forget the mesolimbic dopamine system,” said a little voice right behind his ear.

He turned and saw no one. Which was all right with McNihil; he preferred the occasional random auditory hallucination to sharing a train car with the low-level businesspersons encountered farther north along the Gloss’s edge. Those could creep him out the most; he hated watching them busy in their seats, as they worked with the muscles and nerve endings from their brows to their chins converted to interfaces for their built-in databases and spreadsheets. A trainful of those types looked like a clinic for terminal Bell’s palsy victims, all of them winking and grimacing and twitching away. Some of them, McNihil had always suspected, were frauds, poor bastards who’d gotten downsized out of their jobs but kept up their fronts regardless, going through endless facial spasms to give the impression of productive labor.

Even that was better than seeing some of the graying oldsters, tapping away on their antiquated laptops. Especially the ones whose companies had made them have the Tiny Biz-y Hands™ manual-abatement operation. The sight of those particular poor bastards, with their squirrel-sized paws sticking out from their shirtcuffs, infant-sized fingers skittering across the hundreds of ideograms on combined English-Mandarin keyboards, always put a sour rock in McNihil’s stomach.

The little voice spoke again: “If you correlate the info from the ventral tegmental area scans… implications are clear…”

This time, McNihil caught the source. Literally: his hand darted up and grabbed a fluttering black image just above his head. The holo’d piece of E-mail stayed trapped in his fist just as though it were made of something more physical than intersecting beams from the geosynchronous satellites over the Gloss.

He could tell it was a data-scrap, something too broken and damaged to live much longer, the minute strength ebbing away as it scrabbled at his palm. Not even addressed to him; he didn’t pay for any accounts that covered a service area extending this far south. On a hunch, McNihil dug into his jacket pocket with his other hand and came up with the little cross on a chain that he’d shown the Bishop of North America. The E-mail scrap struggled harder in his fist, trying to reach the bit of cheap gold-toned metal.

The E-mail was Travelt’s. It orbited the cross dangling from McNihil’s hand, responding to some faint emanation of its dead addressee. The lack of any security encryption made him suspect that Travelt had written it to himself, a little personal-reminder memo. Of what?

Hard to say; the recorded voice had faded down to near-inaudibility. “… axons narrow… engine of addiction…” McNihil couldn’t be sure of the squeaking words. “… the hand on the valve…”

There was no point in trying to figure it out. McNihil pushed open the window beside him, just far enough to fling the chain and the cross outside. The fading, crippled E-mail darted after it and was gone, vanished from sight like a fleck of ash churned up by the iron wheels below. McNihil rolled his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.