K Jeter: Noir

“I don’t know.” The dead woman shrugged. Her hollowed cheekbones had edges sharp as dull knives. “I know him better than you. I was married to him for years and years. He’s pretty clever. In his way. He could always find another option.”

“Like what?”

The dead woman turned her lovely face-lovely the way the dead are-toward the living one. “He could always kill himself.”

“Ah.”

The dead woman laid a cold hand on the living one’s cheek. “What’s your name, child?”

She knows that . The living woman’s name was November. Not the name her mother had given her, but the one she’d given herself and that her friends, when she’d still had a pack to run with, had endorsed as fitting. Snow touched her brow, whiter than the yellow-tinged bone beneath the dead woman’s parchment skin. Ice walked through the ventricles of her heart and down her pale arms, not as an indication of cruelty-for she wasn’t cruel, even when her living came at the price of others’ breath-but as the metaphor of sadness. When she had nothing better to do-when she was far enough ahead in her accounts that she didn’t have to worry about her own death, at least for a little while-she could ride down to the bottom of the Gloss, to the Pacific Rim’s southern crossing, where the trains worked their way across ice floes and polar fields, past the great sliding glaciers and over the storm-lashed seas. She could lean her forehead against one of the luxury cars’ triple-sealed windows, feeling through the layers of glass and vacuum the cold of that world outside, seeping through her skin and into her flesh, meeting blood that seemed almost the same temperature. Across the tiny unfolded table in front of her seat would be twists of paper and scraps of metal foil, the snowy contents unwrapped and ingested in any appropriate way, molecules unlocking under a Velcro’d patch of skin, or gums and mucosa stinging under the attack of microscopic drill-bits tugging bad-attitude atoms behind them. Getting to her feet as the first shivering rush hit her, eons of glacial motion compressed into seconds as her spine was measured by endorphins and rage; knocking over the champagne flute of the man sitting next to her, spilling wet prickling stars into his lap; stumbling out blind into the swaying center aisle, the magnified thunder of her pulse knocking her off-balance more than the train’s motion as it tilted through the banked maglev tracks, under cliffs of ice, her heart seizing as though its hinges had snagged on hard crystals, lurching into the next beat by some lower brain-stem force of will-

He could always kill himself .

The dead woman’s words echoed inside November’s skull; she could close her eyes and still hear them, rolling like thunder in the air and the iron wheels of the oldest trains that ran the circle. She supposed the dead woman was right. Though there were different ways of killing yourself, ways that efficiently and tidily left you still alive afterward.

Ways like those in the memory flash that had blossomed inside her head, thinking about her own name. What came after the stumbling out into the train’s aisle: pushing her way past the backs of the plush seats, her vision opened into a blur-rimmed tunnel, tight enough that she didn’t have to see the faces turning up toward her, didn’t have to see anything except the auto-sliding door that led between cars and the door that didn’t open by itself, a smaller one, some kind of maintenance access, which opened into one of those spaces that people with a desperate need for privacy and little need for comfort could always find. The cross-treaded metal was always littered with orange plastic hypodermic caps, like thimbles for depraved faery folk, the needles themselves crackling underfoot like the blood-specked ground of a steel forest. The Antarctic cold crawled in sharper here, her exhaled breath nebulous in front of her face, inhaled ice burning down into her trachea. Pinpoint metal scratched her knees when some teneviki arbitrageur from the Gloss’s Vladivostok zone followed her into the narrow space, put his capitalist hands on her shoulders, and pushed her down. The one whose champagne she’d spilled; his crotch still darkly stained and smelling of wine, the teeth of the zipper and his polished fingernails glistening wet, his other hand already tangled in her hair and drawing her closer, his back against the hidden door, the world tight as a refrigerated coffin.

He doesn’t have a prayer …

None of them ever did. She knew that was why she was named November. Even when she was alone again, kneeling in that little space, the side of her head against the metal separating her from the snow and ice sailing by outside, with the taste of salt and chlorine at the back of her throat. In the world outside, the great big empty one, the ice beheaded the gray waves, the ground split open in white fissures, the bones of ancient wooden ships were picked over by the wind. The train rolled on, or flew a millimeter above the charged tracks, and through some window that opened inside her skull, she could see the empty snowscapes, the oceans that chilled drowning men’s hearts to a standstill within thirty seconds; she could see all that without looking outside, she could see it without opening her eyes. She could spit out the taste of the tenevik , a clouded wet thing glistening on the needles around her; she could stand up, a little steadier on her legs as her muscles recongealed into usability, stand and straighten out her clothes that the hard, manicured hands had dislodged through the neckline of her blouse, a simple white button snapped free and rolling through the hypodermic paraphernalia on the metal floor. Stand and push open the hidden door that led back into the train’s heated spaces, where her breath would no longer be a visible and fading thing, and walk back to her seat in the luxury car, slide past the elegant chalk-stripe knees of the man’s trousers, the spilled champagne already evaporated from his lap. He wouldn’t even look up from the rows of numbers in the folded-open Bangkok edition of The Wall Street Journal . Which was as she preferred it as she sat back in the plush seat and watched Antarctica unfold outside the insulated windows. It wasn’t the chemicals slowly evaporating from her bloodstream that had kept her from feeling anything.

“You know my name,” she said aloud.

The dead woman made no reply. The white-centered eyes with the little crosses in them gazed on some interior landscape, some territory where the man she’d been married to, and who was still alive, was all unknowingly getting into deeper shit.

The poor bastard , thought November. She felt sorry for the man-his name was McNihil-in her usual, nonempathic way. An intellectual process, like watching one ice floe grind implacably against another, the white fields cracking and splintering as though alive but not sentient. It didn’t make her feel sad-nothing did, or at least not any sadder-but it was still something that had to be figured into her own calculations. He might get in her way, impede the run of her business activities. That was what she felt sorry about. She otherwise felt no hostility toward him. To be fatal and noncaring at the same time; it just worked that way. The ice surged and hammered against itself.

November zipped up her jacket, sealing a chrome-dotted leather skin around herself. Not to keep out the cold-this wasn’t the Antarctic; here, in the territory of the dead, the sun beat down like sulphurous cake frosting-but to keep her own coldness bottled around her heart.

Even her being here, the fact of her coming to the dead land and talking to the dead woman-that was part of the troubles circling and closing around McNihil. He didn’t know yet, but he would.