K Jeter - Noir

“You know where we are.” Harrisch stood up, holding the thin smile over him again. “We’ll expect you bright and early.”

McNihil closed his eyes and listened to the heavy tread of the pair who’d worked him over, heading toward the door and pulling it open for their boss. The door closed behind them and the flat was silent; another moment, and the stereo started up again. The chorus sang once more of resurrection, but he didn’t believe them.

“What I’m not completely sure about…” McNihil spoke slowly, tasting the trickle of blood down his throat. “Is why you.” He raised one swollen eyelid and brought Turbiner into focus. “Why should you help connect me over.”

In the sweet-spot chair, Turbiner dangled the remote control in one hand. “No special reason.” He gazed toward the invisible orchestra between the speakers, rather than at McNihil. “Or just the usual ones. They made me an offer. I needed the money. I’m not getting a lot of reprints; nobody’s really interested in old books these days.” He shrugged. “You know how it is. You gotta make your copyrights valuable one way or another.”

McNihil lifted himself painfully into a sitting position on the floor. He wiped red onto his palm from his chin. The strange thing was that he couldn’t even manage to hate the guy.

At the door, McNihil stopped as he laid his hand on the metal knob. “You know…” He looked back over his shoulder. “This is why nobody reads your old books…”

Slouching in the chair, Turbiner raised his head. “Why’s that?”

“It’s that noir thing.” McNihil pulled the door open, letting the darkness of the corridor outside stretch out before him. “People don’t have to go into your books for that world anymore. Now they live in it all the time.”

After a moment, Turbiner slowly nodded, then turned back to the music.

McNihil stepped out into the corridor and silence. But only for a moment; then he turned and walked back into Turbiner’s flat.

Silence became total, the music over, when McNihil reached behind the stereo equipment and ripped the new trophy cable loose.

“Now that’s just connecting petty,” said Turbiner, disgusted. “That’s just vindictive.”

“That’s right, pal.” McNihil rolled the cable up into a tight coil and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He didn’t feel any better for having done it, but he didn’t feel any worse.

“You know… that really does belong to me.” The old writer followed him to the door. “It’s from the violation of my copyrights. My books.”

“Yeah?” McNihil halted; he glanced over his shoulder at the other man. “Your books, huh? And what would somebody like me do to you right about now, in one of your books? Tell me that.”

Turbiner didn’t have an answer. Or did, but didn’t want to say it.

“Believe me,” said McNihil. “You’re getting off lucky.” Luckier than me . He pushed the door open and walked out, trying not to limp too much.

Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,

Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!…

Zertrümmert sei’n auf ewig all Bande der Natur…

Hell’s revenge boils in my heart ,

Death and Despair blaze all around me! …

Let all ties of Nature be forever broken …

– The Queen of the Night’s Aria, from Die Zauberflöte

by WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, libretto by

EMANUEL SCHIKANEDER

(1791)

Are you sure this is where you want to be?”

“That’s funny.” McNihil found that funny, because the place looked like a doctor’s office. A real one, the way doctors’ offices looked in the movies stitched inside his eyes. He could’ve used a doctor, even though forty-eight hours or more-hard to tell in the perpetual night McNihil saw-had passed since Harrisch’s thugs had handed his ass to him. He’d spent the time since that occasion lying on top of the narrow bed in his unkempt apartment, in the same clothes he’d been wearing then and was wearing now. Every once in a while, he’d gotten up and headed down the hallway to the bathroom, he’d had to lean his arm and forehead against the wall above the toilet to remain standing. His urine had gradually faded from the color of cabernet to a light rosé. Even now, his bones and a good deal of his bruise-darkened flesh still ached; it’d been a big accomplishment to even try shaving before venturing out and coming to this place.

There was another reason he found the question funny. “Somebody else,” said McNihil, “asked me that exact same question, just a few minutes ago.”

“Really?” The man sitting on the other side of the desk wasn’t a doctor, not a real one; not even an imitation of a fake one. He was just an Adder clome, the commercial cloned replica of the maybe-fictional character that was always found running one of these Snake Medicine™ franchises. For his costume, the Adder clome wore a doctor’s white examining-room coat and had a prop stethoscope tucked in the breast pocket. The brow of his hatchetlike face, the surgical embodiment of the corporate image, was encircled by a headband with that mysterious metal disk on it, which always indicated somebody was a doctor in the old movies. “Who was it?” the Adder clome asked.

“You’re not really interested…”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “But tell me anyway.”

“It was a woman,” said McNihil. “In a bar.” He didn’t need to tell what kind of a bar it’d been. He wasn’t sure, himself. He’d let himself fall so far beneath the opacity of his vision, into the world leaking out of his eyes, that any details from the other world had been completely obscured. There wasn’t any less pain to feel that way, but it seemed more appropriate, at least. He could exist as a beat-up operative on a cracked leatherette barstool, downing a shot and a chaser, in a place with beer spilled on the floor and neon flickering like ionic discharge in the mirror behind the nameless bottles. “Ironic discharge,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said McNihil. “A misfire in the brain. Some of the connections are still loose.” The woman in the bar had offered to tighten them for him. Or a similar service. She’d sat down on the stool next to his, so close that he’d been able to tell the difference between her flesh and his, through the thin layers of his trousers and her skirt. Which was all right; it fit in perfectly with the world he saw, that he preferred to see. McNihil had brought his gaze up from the depths of his glass and looked over at her. What he’d seen had made him both remember and forget the cube bunny that had so briefly visited his shabby apartment. The woman had been the ultimate barfly, a movie vision of glamour and lust, like the dream of what nameless women in a dive bar should look like. Complete with luminous golden hair in a soft curve along one side of her face, à la Veronica Lake. But with a radiation as bemusedly intelligent as Lizabeth Scott, giving a hard time to Humphrey Bogart in the ’47 classic Dead Reckoning . Her gaze, the unhidden part of it that McNihil had been able to see, was colder than his dead wife’s.

“You have to watch out for ones like that,” said the Adder clome. “It’d be better if they wanted money. Then you could deal with them. But all they want is trouble.”

McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d spoken anything else aloud. About the woman or the bar. But then, the man on the other side of the desk, sitting beneath nonsensical framed diplomas-he was supposed to know. It was his business to know things like that. If someone possessed bad longings, kundalinic warps, guiltily sweating desires, this was the place to have them read out. As though the non-doctor could spread one’s heart open on his palms and decipher the quivering lines that spelled out life and destiny.