K Jeter - Noir

The firestorm knocked McNihil from his feet. He felt the heat of the burning carpet through his arched back, spearing his heart on the point of its white-hot tongue and straining it against the melting plastic of his shirt buttons. The flames rolled over him like a red tide, obliterating his sight of the hotel room. For a moment, his vision doubled; he could see, superimposed upon the wavering afterimage of the room’s walls and ceiling, another space, darker and torn open to a night sky without churning columns of smoke. The glimpse of the bar where some other, more physical, part of him lay, evaporated into steam off his eyes.

In this room, at the End Zone Hotel, charred bones toppled to the floor beside McNihil, as the bed collapsed into itself. The moans of the sleeping girl had ended seconds before, as though she had passed into deeper, dreamless sleep. McNihil turned his face away, squeezing his eyelids shut as the tattoos, freed of any skin, rose like heavy ash, edges curling in the heat.

“Say hello to her for me.” The Adder clome’s sneering voice came from somewhere beyond the flames. “It’s been a while-but that’s the way I want to keep it.” The voice faded under the roar of the firestorm. “Better you than me, pal…”

No soy yo quien veis vivir

sombra soy de quien murio.

Senora, ya no soy ya

quien gozaba nuestra gloria;

ya es perdido mi memoria,

que en el otro mundo esta.

El que fue veustro y sera,

sombra soy de quien murio.

I am not the one whom you see living;

The shadow am I of one who died .

Mistress, I am not he

Who enjoyed our glories;

The memory of me is lost

And dwells in another world .

I am not the one who was and will be yours;

The shadow am I of one who died .

– ANONYMOUS RENAISSANCE LYRIC

Careful. You don’t want to step in that.”

November heard the cameraman’s warning. She looked down at the catwalk below her feet, a narrow path without handrails or any other protective barrier. The interlocking planks were made of nubbly-surfaced recycled plastic, suspended a couple of meters above the street. At first, when the DZ limo had dropped her off as close as it could get to this zone, she’d thought that the city blocks had been flooded for some obscure purpose, an urban ocean bound in by a ring of prefab emergency dikework. Now she saw the slow, gelatinous nature of the substance filling all the spaces between the gutted buildings; the sight of it brought back recent memories of dreaming. The blackened nose of a burnt-out 747 carcass poked through the transparent membrane covering the gel.

“What the hell is this shit?” A wave with no crest, rolling heavily under the lake’s surface, had splattered through a break near the edge of the catwalk, enough to leave a few rounded, snotlike drops on the toe of November’s boot before subsiding. “It’s disgusting…”

“Sterile nutrient medium.” The cameraman rode with his equipment on a small boom platform, angled out from a cross-girdered pier planted in the middle of the street, the gel substance rising and falling in slow motion around the base. “Like they use in hospitals. To keep people without skins alive.”

That’s where I saw it before . Not just in dreams, but in the hospital reality, in the burn ward. And from the inside out; she’d been floating in the stuff, her own charred body slowly dissolving toward death. Whatever consciousness occasionally sparked under the weight of the anesthetics, it had looked out at the world through a vertical stratum of this stuff.

“What’s it doing here?” November had no option but to wrap her arms around herself, trying to hold in her own body heat against the chill wind sliding past the buildings. The unseen Pacific was somewhere to the west side of the city; she’d caught a glimpse of it as the DZ limo had driven her out from the rail station. “So much of it…”

“It’s only got one use, lady.” The cameraman looked even younger than she did, as though his cocky network attitude postdated her own baby-new skin. “Just like I said: keeping people alive.” The wet expanse glittered in the dark lenses over his eyes; the enduring clouds had parted for a moment, bringing up enough light to trigger the glasses’ photochrome. He leaned forward in his perch, one elbow against his knee, his earphones’ coiled wire trailing behind him. “Maybe I was wrong; maybe you should go ahead and step in it. Dive right in and join the party.”

She looked down and saw what the cameraman meant. The thick liquid wasn’t empty; there was more floating in it than just the ashes and dirt that’d been lifted from the streets’ surface and out of the ground-level stories of the fire-blackened buildings. The shapes drifting in the gel were vaguely human in form, but with outlines blurred. People without skins -those words moved inside her head with the same wavering grace. Poor bastards , thought November, with no trace of irony. That was what happened when people got careless; she should know.

It took only a few seconds for the visions to hook up, overlap, and synch together; the one she saw below the narrow planks of the catwalk and the one she carried inside her head. The figures in the gelatinous liquid were the same that she had dreamed of back in the hospital’s burn-ward chamber. She’d been too connected-up then, with the pharmaceuticals dripping into her own veins, to have reacted with anything more than mild, hammered, apathetic curiosity. Now, though, the sight drew her gut into a queasy knot and ran an ice probe up the links of her spine. Past her own reflection on the gel surface, she could discern white bones, whole skeletons turned as rubbery as life-sized novelty items, rib cages wavering like sea-anemone fingers, femurs and ulnas bending into shallow U shapes, as though boiled limp. Tied to the bones by loosened sinews and integuments were the glistening doubled fists and ovoids of the lungs and kidneys, spleen and gall; pericardial tissue shimmered and dulled with each heart’s exposed pulse.

Just the same , thought November. She’d seen exactly the same in her dreaming, the softly eviscerated but still-living human clusters under the slow waves. But not a dream; she realized that now. The cameraman was the tip-off, along with all the other networks’ news-crew gear that she’d seen at the gel’s bounded perimeter. I saw it on TV -that made it even more dreamlike, in a way. There’d been a set in the hospital room, she remembered now, even in the chamber where she’d been floating on the other side of the infectionproof barrier, in the same nutrient-enhanced syrup as this. The video monitor had been up on a white-enameled bracket in the corner of the room, way beyond all the other equipment with its much more urgent and interesting displays of her various vital signs, the blipping tickers and green traces that’d gone up and down with her pulse and breath. Plus, McNihil’s advance payment to the hospital apparently hadn’t stretched as far as dialing in the video set to any of the premium sat-a-wire channels, so there had been nothing on it but the usual hammering dinfomercials and the FCC-mandated news-minutes. That was probably when she’d seen the coverage of this thickening human stew, the dissolving bodies wavering in their sustenant medium like spore colonies in watery agar, the streets of this city zone turned into one gigantic petri dish. The images transmitted by this camera-jockey and the others stationed here by the networks had infiltrated November’s brain while she’d been out of it, her lidless eyes focused on the TV up in the burn-ward chamber’s corner; when that nonsubstantial part of her had finally crept back inside her head, she’d assumed she’d dreamed all those liquid pictures.