Ghosts of Punktown (18 page)

     He unlocked a desk drawer, cluttered inside. A little glass cartridge rolled into the light, sparkling. He pocketed that, too.

     There was no security camera in the men’s rest room. Swift locked the metal door and sat on the toilet cover, long legs in a wide stance, body drooping over them, staring at the floor vacantly like a man summoning up the courage to shoot himself in the temple. He sat that way for some minutes. Finally, as if a tiny mechanism clicked in his head, he straightened up, pulled the gleaming chrome injector from his trousers, then the cartridge, and fitted the latter inside the former.

     He positioned the tip of the injector over a forked vein in the crook of his left elbow, exposed by his rolled up sleeve. Another hesitation, a clenched breath packed solid in his chest, and then his thumb depressed the plunger key.

     He watched the twinkling solution inside the cartridge flush into his arm in one smooth, innocuous motion. Then it was gone, and the cartridge was empty, and it was done. No worries about cartridges submerged in coffee, or inserted in some orifice. The contents were dispersed within him, and if the security scanners should detect that, well, it was all just part of his research. Sorry, a bit unorthodox maybe, but not unheard of. Everything stored in its proper place, right? Everything integrated.

     He already had the nano remote he had taken from Talane’s area in another pocket of his trousers. Back at his desk, he had linked the remote to a control program in his computer. With the remote, he had transmitted orders for the nanomites to remain in stasis, a state of inertia. They were on pause, their little legs unmoving, and they would simply drift within his system as the currents dictated, as the beating of his heart drove them, slumbering without dreams of their own, and waiting with the patience of the dead for resurrection.

     His heartbeat quickened as he passed through the security booth on his way home that afternoon. The Dacvibese guard was in animated conversation with one of the other Dacvibese workers, both barking with loud laughter. The guard glanced over at Swift suspiciously, his expression souring as if he were contemplating a spray of his odious mucus, but he turned back to his companion and Swift exited from the booth into the parking lot of Camus Organics, its great purple fingers curved threateningly above him. He stepped between the bars of their shadow.

     He bypassed the subway line that would take him directly home, traipsed further along to the dock from which he’d ride an elevated shunt to the neighborhood of the Scowling Buddha. Aboard this, he watched the streets rush under him as if he were stationary and they were flooding off the edge of the world, sparks cascading below like molten rain. Staring through his reflection, he caught himself softly singing aloud the theme to the children’s show
Wunderdumpling
. He transformed the lyrics the way Talane would sing them.
“My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

     She was inside him, in a union more intimate than any act of intercourse, in an embrace that he felt might be unprecedented between lovers.

     The Scowling Buddha’s bartender lifted a glass to the Knickerson tap, but Swift stopped him and surprised himself even more than he did the man by asking for a glass of Merlot instead. He had never much cared for wine, had teased Talane that her love of it was another manifestation of her religion; communion, transubstantiation. As he sipped, and found it more pleasing than he remembered it, he wondered if he had made this choice on his own, in an effort to commune with her, or if trickles of Talane were leaking from the molecules the nanomites clutched, despite their state of suspended animation. No, that’s foolish, he thought. They could float through him for the rest of his life inactive – if that was how he wanted it. They would be stored in the archive of his body, not destroyed or forgotten at Camus. Even if he never activated it, her spirit was safe in the sarcophagus of his body.

     He drank half a bottle of Merlot before embarking back onto the streets, which listed beneath him as if with the aftershocks of that catastrophic flood off the edge of the world. It was dark now. Even in this state he was wary, because this was Punktown, so it was almost like a sixth sense that caused him to turn around quickly at one point and glimpse a figure trailing him in the shadows. It quickly sidestepped into a recessed doorway, but he had the impression of a whitish body, barely anthropomorphic, like a ghost.

     Swift quickened his pace, looked behind him every few moments. He didn’t catch sight of the figure again, but he still seemed to sense it. Or was it only a ghost that slipped stealthily through the convolutions of his brain?

     In his tenement house, he mounted the stairs leerily, expecting to find that the white figure had reached his landing ahead of him, waited there to block him. But his path was unobstructed, and he hastened inside, hastily secured his door.

     He sat at his little kitchen table with an injector and extractor lying before him, just as he had at work, except that these were instruments he had bought at a medical supply warehouse a few days ago and this time there was no petty little office tyrant to harass or berate him. He was only too thoroughly alone. The injector, well, that had been in case he had smuggled out the cartridge itself. The extractor was in case he injected the nanomites, either at work or at home, and then had second thoughts about it. The extractor was loaded with an empty cartridge to receive the nanomites, should he command them to exit his system, in which case they would obediently dog-paddle out of his veins in their thousands in a neat and orderly manner, not a single stray remaining behind.

     If he chose. Draw them out. Leave them inside. Activate them. If he chose.

     Choices. They had crushed Talane under their weight, too, hadn’t they? But it had been two hungry, demanding men crowded into her one body, her one mind, and not these delicate little fairies/ferries of memory.

     A heavy thump at his door caused Swift to jerk his woozy head up. He rose and stole close to the metal panel. There was a view screen set into the middle of the door, and Swift activated it in such a way that he could see who was out there in the hallway, though the screen on the other side would remain blank.

     The face was almost like something carved into a piece of fruit to approximate human features; a jack-o’-lantern thing. Mouth and nostrils like black knife gashes washed of their blood. Mere recessed holes for eyes. It was expressionless, and yet it stared directly into his own face as if it didn’t need him to turn on the outside screen.

     Swift stabbed the speaker key and snarled, “You fucker! You fucking freak! You like following me around, huh? You think I’m a freak like you? Bugger off!”

     The face registered nothing, did not budge or even shift within the view screen’s frame.

     “You want to play games? I can play games.” Swift pushed himself away from the door and stomped to his fridge. First he plucked up a fur-lined glove resting atop it, and put that on before thrusting his hand into cold vapors and taking hold of the gun he kept in the freezer. It was ostensibly a cutting tool with an adjustable beam, but was popularly used  – and perhaps truly intended by its savvy if unethical makers – as a weapon. Swift’s own device was glitched, however, would heat up to the point where it might break down entirely and perhaps in a dangerous manner if he didn’t keep it cold. Swift strode back to the door, and this time he punched the key that would positively enable the Bliss on the other side of the panel to see him. He held the steaming, frost-glistening gun up close to his face. “This will give you more than a couple of dart holes, wanker! Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”

     He wasted more threats and imprecations, wafted on the reek of wine, without the alien withdrawing. Finally it was Swift who withdrew, to pull up a chair and sit facing the door, facing the screen, with a newly opened bottle of Knickerson in one hand and the cutting gun drooping from the other. He toasted the lifeless face with his beer. “You want to be a voyeur? Enjoy yourself. Finger your holes all you want. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have hands. Well you’ll get no fingering from me, freak.”

     He continued to rave to his visitor, until eventually he dozed off. When he awoke just past dawn, he was surprised to find that he had shifted to the sofa. On his way to the kitchen to return his gun – alarmingly hot to the touch – to the freezer, he saw half a dozen empty Knickerson bottles scattered beside the sofa like bowling pins. He was even more surprised when, moving on to the bathroom,  he caught sight of himself in the mirror. When had he lined his eyes with some kohl that Talane had forgotten here, and which he’d kept like a sacred relic? Streaks of it like newsprint tears had dried on his cheeks. It was like seeing Talane’s face superimposed over his own. Was it she who had painted his eyes while he slept, her spirit taking control of her new vessel?

     When he remembered the Bliss at last, he stumbled back to his apartment’s door. The security screen was still activated, but sometime during the night the being had finally drifted away.

     “Can’t even get
you
to stay beside me, can I?” Swift grumbled, as if he might actually be insulted or hurt that the creature had abandoned him to suffer his pain unattended.

5

     Swift had just climbed to his floor, home from another numbing day at work, carrying more numbing bottles of Merlot in a shopping bag, when the door to the elevator opened – he hadn’t realized it was repaired – and a curious if partly familiar figure emerged. It was the Bliss, but it dragged a bizarre contraption after it. For lack of arms, the alien wore a harness that crossed its body but was mostly buckled around its thighs (obviously with the assistance of a creature better adapted to such a task).

     The machine itself was primarily made of black metal, borne on two large rubber-treaded wheels. A few intensely blue lights gleamed or blinked across its surface like stars on a solidified chunk of space, and steam or some other vapor wafted out of a grille in one side. Also, set into a cavity was a glass container of a glowing blue fluid. A rubber tube ran from the machine to the otherworlder’s mouth, into which it disappeared, though it had no lips to pucker around it.

     “What is it you
want?
” Swift growled, hesitating outside his flat. “You selling those gadgets door-to-door, are you? Got a vacuum already.”

     “I know you,” came a flat, burbling voice from the grille in the machine. More steam coughed from it in time with the translated words, and the luminous blue fluid bubbled. “I would like you to know of me, as well.”

     “What do you mean, you know me?” Swift asked, trying not to seem startled at hearing the entity speak.

     “We Sufferers experience empathy almost telepathically. Not the words in your head, but the flavor of your feelings. I have tasted your pain, your self-destructive self-loathing, and I know the flavor of it as akin to our own. We are kindred.”

     “Yeah, sure, I knew it was something like that. Well, the hell we’re kindred. My pain is
real
, not a fucking fetish. You just want to feed off it, don’t you? Not enough pain of your own, you fucking vampire? No, you aren’t a vampire – you’re just a big blob of tofu, aren’t you? No flavor of your own, and you want to steal mine.”

     “It is not something I can take from you, only experience.”

     “Why should I let you experience my pain?”

     “It may be therapeutic for you, not to live your pain alone.”

     Swift barked a nervous laugh, less angry now and more disoriented, thrown off kilter, instead. “Oh, so you’re a therapist, are you? Is that what you’re selling door-to-door?”

     “We can suffer together,” the thing said simply, its mouth not moving around that tube, but the steam puffing out, the fluid gurgling along with each word.

     Finally Swift registered that the being had referred to its race not as the Bliss, but as the Sufferers.

     “Suit yourself, if you want to play,” he said, a little bitterly, a little tremulously, as he turned his back on the creature and unlocked his door. But he left it open behind him as he entered his flat...and he heard the two rubber wheels rolling after him.