Penny Dreadful (13 page)

California? I said.

Not exactly, said Griffin. Then he shrugged. It’s two hundred dollars a bottle.

What the fuck. I hate champagne anyway.

Griffin’s eyes were flat. You will like this.

I turned away, the glass fizzing in my hand. There were no law books in the office. The walls were gray, with a faint sparkle. The walls were like dirty silver, unadorned by art of any kind. Griffin had an excellent view, however. I stood before his massive window and looked out over downtown Denver. Half of the city seemed to be under construction, deconstruction. This was a sign of prosperity, this effortless ravaging of old, failing stone. A few years ago, Denver had not been looking well. It had been downright ugly, in fact. Emaciated and sickly.

Not anymore, by god. Denver had acquired a baseball team and the city was reborn. If they told you it was beautiful, then it was beautiful.

It’s beautiful, I said.

Griffin sneered. Like a postcard.

I sipped at the Pale and it shivered down my throat like mercury, cold and thickly sweet.

What is this? I said.

Wormwood and licorice, said Griffin. With a drop of cyanide. Don’t ask.

Absinthe? I said. You are full of shit.

Oh, I stink of it.

I took another drink and the glass felt heavy in my hand. I put it down on the coffee table and smiled. I was a little dreamy, like I had just exhaled a lungful of nitrous oxide. The silver walls rippled nicely. Griffin relaxed on the couch, heels drumming noiselessly on the carpet.

So, he said. What’s going on.

Yeah. That’s a good question.

Griffin smiled and smiled. His eyes were dilated and I saw him again, turning to spray my legs with urine. With urine.

You pissed on me, I said.

What?

The last time I saw you. You pissed all over my pants, like a dog.

Griffin shrugged. Maybe. Who remembers these things.

It’s not something you forget. I fumbled with my zipper. If I emptied my bladder all over that ugly fucking suit right now, would you remember?

What’s wrong with this suit?

You look like a big, paranoid grape.

Griffin finished his drink and the smile on his face was elastic.

Okay, I said. I have some coke I want to sell.

Coke, said Griffin. Please tell me you’re joking.

I know. It’s embarrassing.

Griffin sighed. Let’s see the shit.

I pulled out the police evidence bag and Griffin laughed. He clapped his hands.

I have always wanted one of those bags, he said. It would be perfect for my toothbrush and hair gel and shaving gear. I could keep it in my briefcase.

You don’t have any hair.

Skull gel then, he said. I like a shiny helmet.

I found myself nodding stupidly. I shrugged, pulled myself together and scooped out a fat bump of coke with one finger and sucked it up my nose. The eyeballs tightened promptly. I licked my finger and offered the bag to Griffin, who tasted it without blinking.

Not half bad, he said.

Do you want it?

Griffin yawned. Four hundred for the shit and two hundred for the evidence bag.

Four hundred? I could cut it up and sell it for five times that.

Good luck, he said.

Give me eight hundred, I said.

See you later, Phineas.

Okay. Okay, I said.

Yeah, he said. The thing is, I don’t really want any coke. This is charity. This is like serving soup to the homeless.

Oh, well. I love a good bowl of soup, I said. Three hundred for the bag, then.

I hated myself and Griffin was practically asleep, he was so bored. He shrugged and produced a roll of new bills. He peeled off six or seven hundreds, losing count. He smiled and tossed two more bills on the table.

That’s nine, I said.

What’s the difference. Have you had lunch?

I watched as Griffin transferred the coke to a gunmetal snuffbox, carelessly. A fine white shadow of spilled cocaine caught the light and Griffin noticed me watching.

Oh, he said. Would you like a last taste?

I hesitated, sniffing. Of course I wanted some. But I shook my head, mute.

Good, he said. That’s good.

Griffin dropped the little box into a drawer. He folded the evidence bag into a small square and tucked it into his breast pocket, his eyes fond and bright.

Of course, he said. You’re lying.

Yeah, I said. Let’s have lunch.

Griffin sniffed, wiping at his nose. I want to show you something, he said.

Okay.

I was a bit clammy, shivering. I thought the air-conditioning was much too cold and I wasn’t the least bit hungry and so I just nodded dumbly. Griffin walked over to the big window, his arms and legs hanging weirdly loose. The sun was crashing through the glass like a live thing and Griffin appeared to be held together by thread and I squinted at him through a maddening self-contained haze. I felt like I had wandered onto the set of one of those Roger Rabbit videos where some of the characters are real and some are animated. Griffin was definitely animated. I stared at the big window now, hoping to find myself in the open sky beyond but instead the light shifted and I saw a very peculiar scene in the reflection. I saw myself, standing in about the same position but wearing fairly ridiculous clothing, with a funny gray hat and a slash of white bandage across my face. Griffin looked exactly the same, but was standing on the wrong side of the room with his back to the window and there was a third person in the reflection, a long-legged man with limp yellow hair who wore a three-piece suit of soft brown leather and held a gun in one hand. The gun was aimed at me, at my head.

Do you see him, I said. Do you see him, Griffin.

Griffin turned and smiled, or maybe his reflection did because now the physical Griffin placed both hands on the window and pushed, muttering softly the word “poof.” And I felt my mouth drop open as the entire sheet of glass fell from its frame and floated down toward earth with the lazy, carefree silence of a paper airplane. The glass was crystal-bright and somehow invisible and it swooped and glided back and forth, a pale deadly shadow. And it seemed to fall forever. I leaned out to watch the glass dive into a throng of pedestrians and cut three people in half and now I felt my head bump against the window. I touched it gingerly, with the tips of my fingers. It had never fallen at all. Griffin smiled and smiled.

Eve:

She woke from a drifting sleep and she couldn’t breathe. Christian was sitting on her chest, staring at her like she was a bug. He was naked, slim and hairless. She was pretty sure he shaved his chest.

Eve never had a brother. But when she was a kid her best friend was a girl named Minna who had an older brother, a hulking bully named Guy. He had wanted to be a wrestler and his breath always stank of bananas. Guy had been truly manic but never depressed and his fingernails were always chewed to raw, moody shreds. Guy’s favorite game had been to sit on his sister’s chest, pinning her arms down with his knees. Then he would pinch her nipples and drool yellow spit into her face. Eve and Minna took care of him, eventually. Eve had gotten some codeine tablets after she had a root canal and they saved a few just for Guy. Minna made root beer floats one Friday night and dissolved five of the little white pills into Guy’s float. He passed out before ten and they stripped him naked, then soaked his genitals and one eyebrow with Nair, the infamous hair dissolver. Guy woke up with no pubic hair and a painfully sore left eye. The Nair had dripped into his eye, apparently. It ruined his eyelashes and he could have been blinded, probably. But Guy always left them alone after that.

Eve wondered what Christian would use on his chest. Vitamin E and aloe, she decided. And as he was so scornful of technology, he probably used a straight razor. One day, he might lose a nipple.

What are you smiling at? he said.

You, she said. You have a nice chest.

Oh, he said. Now you want to be friendly.

Not really.

Well, said Christian. We don’t have time, anyway.

He rolled sideways and off the bed. He stood there, distracted and chewing at his lower lip. Eve realized with some surprise that he actually looked worried. And there was one thing about Christian that he liked: he rarely looked worried.

What’s the matter?

Your apartment, he said. It’s slipping.

Eve sighed. Fuck you.

She had heard of this, of course. The whispered stories about badly spooked gamers, obsessed tonguelovers who never slept, who stayed in character too long. Their worlds were compromised and their reality began to slip. The idea was that if you lingered in the subterrain for too long, you might never leave. And some claimed to have lost their identities, their jobs. They showed up for work one day and no one remembered them. Their credit cards were suddenly invalid. The explanation for this seemed simple enough to Eve: a lot of gamers and tonguelovers were also computer geeks, hackers. And it would be child’s play to tamper with the virtual reality of one of your enemies, thereby erasing his job and identity, his bank account.

Virtual reality was reality. The game of tongues was something else, a peripheral reality.

But it was not so easy to explain the physical slip. A few of these mad gamers claimed that losing one’s identity was nothing, it was a joke. The physical slip was the real nightmare. They believed that their apartments and cars had literally become unstable, that they were fading. Disintegrating. Their material possessions actually ceased to exist. The walls around them got fuzzy. They suffered molecular decay.

Eve shrugged when she heard these stories. She scratched her nose. Drugs, she thought. It can only be drugs. Though she was well aware that the elite gamers like Mingus and Christian were pretty clean. They sucked down a lot of coffee and cigarettes and popped a little ephedrine. And the Pale, of course, nearly everyone consumed a mysterious liqueur called the Pale. Everyone but Christian. He never touched it, and he sneered at those gamers who seemed to depend on it.

Come on, said Christian. We’ll show you.

Irritated, she slid out of bed. Her feet were bare and cold and she was pretty sure she had been wearing socks when she went to sleep. Christian had a mild foot fetish, or Chrome did. He often slipped her shoes and socks off when she was asleep or otherwise distracted. She didn’t mind it so much. Odd as it may sound, she liked the way it felt when he nibbled on her feet. But she was annoyed this time.

Christian, she said.

He pounced on her, knocking her to the floor. His lips were pulled back to show fine white teeth and his eyes were like the blue edge of flame. Those teeth aren’t real, she thought. Not real. They must be caps. The dig of pain in her chest and he was hurting her now. His teeth were impossibly white. Erik Estrada. He’s got the teeth of Erik Estrada, she thought. What kind of grown man calls himself Ponch?

Thin red shiver of pain as she tried to breathe.

He may have cracked one of her ribs. Punctured a lung. The pain was like a claw, ripping at her from within. Eve took another experimental breath and as she opened her mouth Chrome lowered his mouth to hers. He sucked her tongue out of her mouth and held it between his teeth and his pull was very strong, he could swallow it, he could turn her inside out. He didn’t bite her tongue but he owned it for a moment. He owned her. The tongue is the soul, she thought. The soul. The tongue is ugly, vulnerable and not well-hidden.

Chrome released her. Don’t call us by that name, he said.

Okay, she said.

He helped her up, his face calm and friendly. As if she had slipped on the wet floor and he were merely bending to her aid. Eve jerked her hand away and looked around for her slippers. Her feet were cold and she felt raw, unclean. She wanted to pull a sheet over her head. Christian briskly pulled on his black jeans and said, come on.

She followed him into the living room, sighing when he told her to avoid a small circle of carpet in the hallway that he had marked with baking powder.