K Jeter - Noir

“You see?” The male prowler spoke, its voice unaltered by pain or shock. “It’s no big deal.” The gathering tattoos, black hearts and black flowers, the names of martyred saints, nibbled at his fingertips. “As long as you’re… ready for it.” Slowly, the prowler slid the wet bullet back and forth in its receptacle of softly lubricated flesh. The black holes of his eyes, apertures in the mask that concealed no other face, narrowed as though savoring the slight penetration, the caress of the nerve endings just beneath the surface of the skin. “Just like you’re ready.” The prowler withdrew the bullet, slick with transparent mucus, and held it up before himself. “Whether you like it or not.”

“You don’t,” murmured the smiling barfly, “have much of a choice.” Her bruised-looking eyelids had drawn down to an expression of postcoital satiety. “Do you?” The barfly peeled her languorous form away from the male prowler; she stepped forward and knelt down directly in front of McNihil. “Because… it’s all memory now. That’s what we deal in here. We don’t have any other merchandise… and we don’t need any.” She reached forward, past the tannhäuser in McNihil’s doubled grip, and placed her fingertips on his brow, as though in blessing. “It’s what you gave us. All of you; it’s what we were created for. You wanted memories, memories other than your own, memories of things that hadn’t happened to you, but that you wanted to have happen to you. All the pleasures of remembering and none of the risks.” The barfly stroked his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good deal, though. Maybe you gave us more than you got back in turn. Maybe you really didn’t get anything at all… and we got part of you.” She wasn’t smiling now; her voice had turned harsh and grating. “The ability to feel, and suffer… and remember. Everything that made you human, that made you different from the things you created… that’s what you gave us.” The barfly’s hand pressed harder against McNihil’s brow, as though her lacquered nails could pierce the wall of bone. “It wasn’t,” she whispered, “a good deal for us, either.”

He tried to push himself away from her, his spine indenting the padded surface behind him. “I’m sorry…” McNihil raised the tannhäuser between himself and the woman. “But I wasn’t the one… who did it…”

“No… you’re not.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “But you’re the one who’s here. So you’ll do.”

The bullet had dropped from the male prowler’s fingertips and rolled against the toe of McNihil’s boot. In the bullet’s wetly polished metal, he could see himself-his real face, the one without the mask that had been stitched on at the clinic; his face in that other world he’d left behind. That was what small, shining things had always done for him: mirror reflections that didn’t synch up with all the rest that his eyes saw. Just as though the bullet had left another hole, which let the other world leak through.

There’s more where that came from , thought McNihil. He placed the tannhäuser’s muzzle against the kneeling barfly’s forehead, the blond curve of her hair trailing across the barrel’s black metal. “You know… I’d do this…” He folded one finger across the weapon’s trigger. “If I weren’t such a nice guy…”

“But you are.” The barfly didn’t draw away from the cold circle resting just above her half-lidded eyes. “You’re too nice. That’s your problem.”

“Maybe.” McNihil lifted the tannhäuser from the woman’s head, angling the muzzle toward the bar’s low ceiling. “But I’m working on it.”

Her gaze followed the weapon’s new trajectory. “That’s not a good idea,” she warned.

“They’re my memories,” said McNihil. “At least they are now. So I can do what I want with them.”

“We can’t let you do that.” The male prowler, non-wound still exposed on his upper chest, stepped forward, reaching for the tannhäuser. “It’s not allowed-”

“But you must have.” McNihil squeezed the weapon tight in his fists. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. Or have happened-doesn’t matter which. I wouldn’t remember it happening.” He managed a smile of his own. “But I can see it plain as day.”

The tannhäuser roared again, as though it had suddenly recalled the second verse of its low-pitched aria. McNihil’s spine jolted as the recoil knocked him back; a blinding spark, the same color as the flash from the tannhäuser’s muzzle, jumped across the contacts inside his head.

“Watch out-”

He couldn’t tell which of them shouted that. The barfly had scrambled away from him as soon as he’d pulled the trigger, as though she was desperate for shelter. Any kind of shelter; McNihil’s eyes focused well enough that he could see where the bullet had struck the bar’s ceiling. Fierce light poured through the hole, the radiance filling his vision and piercing all the way to the back of his skull. The doors of the small dark rooms inside his head shattered and tore from their iron hinges.

Above him, the ceiling grew more luminous, heat pressing against his face like a new kiss. The annihilating light flooded in as the bullet hole ripped open wider, the ceiling giving way like the cheap fabric of the male prowler’s jacket. McNihil could no longer see that figure, or the barfly or any of the others. The tannhäuser grew too hot for him to keep in his hands; it fell and clattered away on the floor, pitching and tilting now with the sudden upheaval of the earth. His empty hands shielded his eyes, but with no effect; the light passed through red flesh and shadow bones, relentless.

He could just make out the bar’s ceiling falling away in tatters, as a sky of flames broke over him.

“Now we’re making progress.”

She heard the medical technician speak, somewhere over by the vital-signs monitor. November opened her eyes; she had already propped herself up against the hospital-bed pillows, so she could watch whatever the techs and doctors and nurses were doing, if she’d wanted to.

The tech glanced over at her. “Dreaming again?”

She nodded yes. The lights from the corridor outside the room seemed unusually bright to her. Because it was night , thought November. In the dream . She’d been someplace where it was always night. Both inside and out…

There was only one of the med technicians in the room this time; each visit the burn-ward crew had made, there had been fewer of them. She supposed that was a good sign. This one didn’t ask about whatever dream she’d been having, but just went about his work, reading off numbers from the various gauges and indices on the equipment screens, then punching them into the little handheld data transmitter he carried. He even hummed a little tune, barely distinguishable from the sighing of one of the machines.

November laid her head back against the pillow. The dream was still somewhat intact inside her head, the images and general sense not as fractured as when she’d been pumped full of the major anesthetics. Woozy drug sleep had given way to fifteen-minute catnaps, which ended abruptly when she felt her newly grafted skin tightening over her flesh. She missed being hammered underneath the big drugs; those pharmaceuticals had seemed to cancel gravity, sequentiality, guilt… everything unpleasant turned to sweet, filtered air. Getting detoxed from them, her bloodstream flushed out, the red contents scrubbed clean in something that looked like a miniature clothes washer and then I.V.’d back into her-that had been like returning to the orbit of some planet she wouldn’t have minded seeing the last of.

The dream … With her eyes closed, November could view its basic setup. She carefully held her breath, fearing that any exhalation would shimmer and dissolve the image.