John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“The Sorenson incident. What…?”

“And tell him you’ll release what you know about her, about Sorenson, if he tells anyone about that vid before tomorrow. Tell him this came from me. He’ll stay quiet.”

“But the restraining order…”

“Tear it up. And come with me—you’ve got to explain to Sparks that your paperwork was wrong. That you were mistaken about something…”

Spector walked out onto the stage, just glancing at the cameras and the studio audience beyond the bulletproof glass. He pointed the pistol loaded with blanks at the grinning man in the cowboy hat at the other end of the stage and walked toward him, toward the big gun in the man’s hand.

He walked right up to a gun that was loaded with real bullets. And Spector smiled softly, thinking, This is the only way I’ll ever go free…

You could smell the place, the Hollow Head, from two blocks away. Anyway, you could if you were strung out on it. The other people on the street probably couldn’t make out the smell from the background of monoxides, the broken battery smell of acid rain, the itch of syntharette smoke, the oily rot of the river. But a user could pick out that tease of amyl para-tryptaline, thinking, Like a needle in a haystack. And he’d snort, and then go reverent-serious, thinking about the needle in question… the needle in the nipple…

It was on East 121st Street, a half block from the East River. If you stagger out of the place at night, you’d better find your way to the lighted end of the street fast, because the leeches crawled out of the river after dark, slug-creeping up the walls and onto the cornices of the old buildings; they sensed your body heat, and an eight-inch ugly brute lamprey thing could fall from the roof, hit your neck with a wet slap ; inject you with paralyzing toxins and when you fall over, its leech cronies drain you dry.

When Charlie turned onto the street, it was just sunset; the leeches weren’t out of the river yet, but Charlie scanned the rooftops, anyway. Clustered along the rooftops were the shanties.

New York’s housing shortage was worse then ever. After the Dissolve Depression, most of the Wall Street firms moved to Tokyo or the floating city, Freezone. The turn of the century boom in Manhattan deflated; the city couldn’t afford to maintain itself. It began to rot. But still the immigrants came, swarming to the mecca of disenchantment till New York became another Mexico City, ringed and overgrown with shanties, shacks of clapboard, tin, cardboard protected with flattened cans and plastic wrappers; every tenement rooftop in Manhattan mazed with squalid shanties, sometimes shanties on shanties till the weight collapsed the roofs and the old buildings caved in, the crushed squatters simply left dying in the rubble—firemen and emergency teams rarely set foot outside the sentried, walled-in havens of the midtown class.

Charlie was almost there. It was a mean motherfucker of a neighborhood, which is why he had the knife in his boot sheath. But what scared him was the Place. Doing some Room at the Place. The Hollow Head.

His heart was pumping and he was shaky, but he wasn’t sure if it was from fear or anticipation or if, with the Hollow Head, you could tell those two apart. But to keep his nerve up, he had to look away from the Place as he got near it; tried to focus on the rest of the street. Some dumbfuck pollyanna had planted saplings in the sidewalk, in the squares of exposed dirt where the original trees had stood. But the acid rain had chewed the leaves and twigs away; what was left was as stark as obsolete TV antennas. Torchglow from the roofs; and a melange of noises that seemed to ooze down like something greasy from an overflowing pot. Smells of tarry wood burning; dog-food smells of cheap, canned-food cooking. And then he was standing in front of the Hollow Head. A soot-blackened town house, its Victorian facade of cherubim recarved by acid rain into dainty gargoyles. The windows bricked over, the stone between them streaked gray on black from acid erosion.

The building to the right was hunchbacked with shacks; the roof to the left glowed from oil-barrel fires. But the roof of the Hollow Head was dark and flat, somehow regal in its sinister austerity. No one shacked on the Hollow Head.

He took a deep breath and told himself, “Don’t hurry through it, savor it this time,” and went in. Hoping that Angelo had waited for him.

Up to the door, wait while the camera scanned you. The camera taking in Charlie Chesterton’s triple-Mohawk, each fin a different color; Charlie’s gaunt face, spiked transplas jacket, and customized mirrorshades. He heard the tone telling him the door had unlocked. He opened it, smelled the amyl para-tryptaline, felt his bowels contract with suppressed excitement. Down a red-lit hallway, thick black paint on the walls, the turpentine smell of AT getting stronger. Angelo wasn’t there; he’d gone upstairs already. Charlie hoped Ange could handle it alone.

The girl in the banker’s window at the end of the hall—the girl wearing the ski mask, the girl with the sarcastic receptionist’s lilt in her voice—took his card, gave him the Bone Music receptor, credded him in. Another tone, admission to Door Seven, the first level.

He walked down to seven, turned the knob, stepped through, and felt it immediately; the tingle, the rush of alertness, the chemically induced sense of belonging, four pleasurable sensations rolling through him, coalescing. It was just an empty room with the stairs at the farther end; soft pink lighting, the usual cryptic palimpsest of graffiti on the walls.

He inhaled deeply, felt the drug imbued in the very air go to work almost immediately; the pink glow intensified; the edges of the room softened, he heard his own heartbeat like a distant beat-box. A barbed wisp of anxiety twined his spine (wondering, Where’s Angelo, he’s usually hanging in the first room, scared to go to the second alone, well, shit, good riddance), and then he experienced a paralytic seizure of sheer sensation.

The Bone Music receptor was digging into his palm; he wiped the sweat from it and attached it to the sound wire extruding from the bone back of his left ear—and the music shivered into him. It was music you felt more than heard; his acoustic nerve picked up the thudding beat, the bass, a distorted veneer of the synthesizer. But most of the music was routed through the bone of his skull, conducted down through the spinal column, the other bones.

It was a music of shivery sensations, like a funny-bone sensation, sickness sensations, chills and hot flashes like influenza, but it was a sickness that caressed, viruses licking at your privates, and you wanted to have an orgasm and throw up at the same time. He’d seen deaf people dancing at rock concerts; they could feel the vibrations from the loud music; could feel the music they couldn’t hear. It was like that but with a deep, deep humping brutality. The music shivered him from his paralysis, nudged him forward. He climbed the stairs.

Bone Music reception improved as he climbed, so he could make out the lyrics, Jerome-X’s gristly voice singing from inside Charlie’s skull:

Charlie got to the next landing, stepped into the second room.

Second room used electric field stimulation of nerve ends; the metal grids on the wall transmitting signals that stimulated the neurons, initiating pleasurable nerve impulses; other signals were sent directly to the dorsal area in the hypothalamus, resonating in the brain’s pleasure center.

Charlie cried out and fell to his knees in the infantile purity of his gratitude. The room glowed with benevolence; the barren, dirty room with its semen-stained walls, cracked ceilings, naked red bulb on a fraying wire. As always, he had to fight himself to keep from licking the walls, the floors. He was a fetishist for this room, for its splintering wooden floors, the mathematical absolutism of the grid patterns in the gray-metal transmitters set into the wall. Turn off those transmitters and the room was shabby, even ugly, and pervaded with stench; with the transmitters on, it seemed subtly intricate, starkly sexy, bondage gear in the form of interior decoration, and the smell was a ribald delight.