K Jeter: Noir

© 1998

But, at this birth of the modern world, roamed by predatory men armed with increasingly effective means of killing and traveling at speeds which accelerated each year, most assaults on nature went unheeded, and crimes against humanity remained unpunished. The world was becoming one, the wilderness was being drawn into a single world commercial system, but there was as yet no acknowledged law. Who was to play the world policeman?

– PAUL JOHNSON

The Birth of the Modern:

World Society 1815-1830

(HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1991)

At that moment, as the blue spark of sex burned a wire through his tongue, the heavens rained fire. At that moment, all the other moments rushed inside his head. He turned from the kiss that filled his mouth, the hot copper taste of coded flesh, and fell against the glass; the window shivered with fear and mirrored his own ghost face back at him.

He knew what was happening outside the window. That the fear was his alone, as much as the ghost and the kiss were; that the transit authorities had sent another drone aloft, over whatever city lapped around this building like a hectic gray ocean; that the Noh -flies had found the idiot projectile in their airspace-all air was theirs-and were busily devouring it, SCARF’d shards falling on the streets below and the face of anyone stupid enough to look up. Mere coincidence, apocalyptic phenomena synch’d-up with the battery salt leaking through his teeth.

This must be how women feel , thought Travelt.

Not real women, but the women of ideal and dream. Men’s dreams, their dream of women’s dreams. He had felt himself go all weak at the knees, a kinesthetic cliché as much as the racing heart under his breastbone, when the soul kiss had started to eat him up. He’d put his tongue in the other’s mouth, as though his lips were the aggressor’s, the conqueror’s; he’d made the connection inside another’s flesh, that point where electrode and neuron were one fated synapse-

And had been conquered in turn. Battered and ravaged. That dream of rape, in which the raped are dreaming still, in which the dreaming turn their faces upward and see their own faces above them, spread out on a luminous sky like the disintegrating airplanes above the ring of cities and the uncaring, dreaming ocean. Where every hot bit of metal struck and hissed into steam, sharp as his own intake of breath, drifting into unlit depths and turning into adornment for dolphins’ skeletons.

Calm down , Travelt told himself. You’re burning up . The window sweated against his cheek.

Did the other sweat as well? His vision had blurred, everything that close out of focus, and he couldn’t tell if the other’s face was as wet and shining as his own felt. The kiss hadn’t ended, his tongue was still there, locked in bandwidth rapture; the room around him had defocused, the city beyond the window threatened to go any second. Not that it mattered, not now.

No now; all then . Memory and spasm; what had happened, what had been brought back to him. What he tasted in the mercury pool of the other’s tongue. His own tongue lodged in the hinge of the other’s throat, diving toward the other’s heart, as though the secret that drove the sweat through his pores could be read there among the obscure saline atoms.

His legs had turned to gelatin, trembling with desires satiated and yet-hungry. The other had to hold him up, its hands locked in his armpits, pinning him against the glass, the crumbs of the eaten drone sizzling transmuted gold on the other side, an inch from his liquefying spine. His tongue in its mouth, their kiss, his senses and being penetrated by the inrush that left him limp and sweetly crucified. Invisible stigmata blossomed in his palms and groin, the feedback of flesh distant in time and space. The flesh that the other had touched, grasped and squeezed blood and lubricating mucus from, like overripe fruit trickling to the points of his elbows. He felt that now, the other’s gift to him, rape of him.

Slow down -Travelt murmured the subvocal command and plea. Locked so tight in the other’s embrace, its reflected image in the glass next to his, that he could feel the sympathetic flutter of its larynx. As though his words had strummed the other’s vocal cords like taut guitar strings, a chord of surrender and supplication.

It obeyed him, or seemed to; he knew the other’s response was as synchronous and acausal as the heated shrapnel falling outside. But the inrush slowed, torrent to stream, and separated into layers of incident and event, became an inventory of all that the other had gone out to seek and had brought back to him. He had smelled it on the other’s skinlike skin, that muscled substance that passed for its flesh. When it had returned and let itself in to his cubapt, its key imbedded in its stained fingertips-he had smelled it then, as it had walked through one room after another and into this one with the high-luxury window overlooking the anonymous city below. The mingled overlays of sweat and semen, stale cigarette smoke and endorphins breaking down to burning, dysfunctional molecules, the shards of the other’s flight through a sunless sky. Collagen derivatives, pharmaceuticals that tasted like metal and the perspiring of schizophrenics, virginal lipstick and Chernobyl mothers’ milk, original sin and its photocopies-a wind from that other atmosphere, ten degrees lower than his own body temperature, had swept ahead of the other as it had strode toward him.

He had turned from the window where he had stood waiting, turned upon the sense and smell of its arrival-no sound, it walked so softly, silent as that other world-and had seen the smear of blood on its brow, Cain-marked and Lilith-born, the great wisdom of indulgence in its idiot eyes. Which had scanned and judged him, like the lenses of the watching security cameras at every corner of every building. First from across the room, as he had felt the first tremors of fear move out from his gut, then inches away, then less than that as it had stood right in front of him. The other’s eyes had been round dark mirrors in which he had seen himself, perhaps more clearly than ever before.

That was then, just a few minutes ago-or perhaps only seconds. In any death, even the smallest, there was no east or west or other measurement of time, no gauge of stars or the earth’s rotation. In this now, the inrush had slowed and become subject to inventory; he could sort one thing out from the next. What the other had brought back to him. The Christmas morning of the genitals, each bright ribbon-bow coming loose inside his head.

This is what he received from the other’s kiss. What he saw, felt, inhaled in acidic, mingled pheromones:

• A vision of black-ink tattoos that slowly woke and shifted beneath a woman’s skin, pale as unsunned cave fish, white as Bible pages, dimly phosphorescent;

• The swarming of those tattoos, like decorative koi or human-eyed piranha, attracted by the shadow of a man’s hand over the world in which they swam;