Vineland (19 page)

“Found a cab,” Prairie said. “But then again. . . .” She'd finally got to meet Takeshi, who'd showed up in the dead of night talking a mile a minute and demanding to be put on the Puncutron Machine, a device he apparently believed had brought him back to life once. When they were introduced next morning at breakfast, she saw this shorter, older guy wearing a truly gross suit, in synthetic fabric but printed to look like some tweed of bright powder-blue flecks against a liver-colored background. The pants bagged at the knees. DL leaned lightly on his shoulder and looked down at him, a little apologetic. “Just got to keep an eye on his feet, you'll be fine,” as Takeshi took Prairie's hand and leered genially. “Here,” DL reaching over and swiftly brushing bangs down over his eyebrows while he tried, muttering, to push her away, “who's he remind you of?”

“Moe!” Prairie cried.

He winked. “What's she been tellin' ya, Toots?”

“All about it,” said DL.

“Looks like I got here just in time.” From then on he was not shy about putting in with color commentary on DL's version. Until, just before the dark metal door with the plastic key, he paused and wondered aloud, “Maybe we should just skip over the sex part here. . . .”

“She is just a kid,” DL agreed.

“You
guys?
” Prairie protested.

“Heedlessly then—fingering its smooth rigid contours, I—took the plastic card and—thrust it into the slot, shuddering as—something whined and the object was—abruptly sucked from my fingers. . . .” After a brief scan it was stuck back out at him, like a tongue. Inside, he found the place all but vacated, little evidence of any night's business, no fumes of sake, no screened clatter of gaming tiles, or feminine crossings and glimpses. . . . Had there been a police raid? Had Brock already found his troops? From distant margins of the place voices could almost be heard. Suddenly he'd walked right into the middle of a piping of parlormaids, easily a dozen of the charming soubrettes in scandalously short outfits of organdy and taffeta, who gathered around him like shiny birds of doom. He began to sweat with panic and also to get an erection. He was hustled along, daintily coerced with flashing burgundy nails, through room after room, barely able, in the delicate stampede of high heels, to keep from tripping, down deserted hallways, trying to be a sport, going, “Ladies, ladies!” and “What's all this?” But he was only cargo. Surrounded by airy petticoats and fluttering eyelashes, he was billowed at length into an elevator, and they all dropped suddenly, pressing together, till the doors opened onto a corridor lit by musk-scented black candles, with only one other door in it, down at the far end. As they were shoving him out of the elevator, the girls acknowledged him for the first time. “Have an enjoyable evening, Vond-san,” they cried. “Don't be so nervous!” Then all together, rustling, breezy, they bowed and departed by elevator, reaching as the doors closed into necklines and stocking tops for cigarettes and matches and lighting up.

“Vond-san”? Must be—his lookalike, back at the Hilton! They thought he was this American! What should he do? He looked around for a button to summon back the elevator, but there was none, the walls were smooth. The one door at the end of the passage was covered in black velvet, with a silver doorknob. As carefully as he approached, he could still hear his shoes squeaking in this muffled place. Maybe it was all Minoru's idea of a practical joke. He tried to knock on the door, but the velvet surface absorbed the blows. He was supposed to turn the knob himself, open, step in. . . . There was DL, lying in bed, hat, long earrings,
miniskirt?
Incredible! This Vond character must be—a miniskirt man too! She smiled. “Hurry, Brock. Get those fuckin' clothes off.”

Oboy, an assertive woman! Takeshi thought, I love it! “But that's not—” he began.

“Ssh. Don't talk. Undress. You're safe here.”

Trembling in a way whorehouses seldom got him to do, Takeshi stripped, conscious of each article coming off, of the air and the weight of her watching against his skin. Somewhere the hour chimed. By the ancient system, it was the hour of the cock, “In more ways than one,” as Takeshi in later years liked to interpolate in comical accents, predictably to DL's annoyance. A bird usually associated with the dawn, the cock, by the laws of the Death Touch, belonged to early night. By now the chi cycle of the victim would have arrived in the region of his triple warmer, considered wife to the bladder, which was thus endangered. In the Dim Mak method, the Needle Finger DL intended to use could be calibrated to cause a delay of up to a year in the actual moment of death, depending on the force and direction of its application. She could hit Brock Vond now, and months in the future be safely in the middle of a perfect alibi at the moment he dropped dead.

“Now
wait
a minute,” Prairie interrupted, “you're right there in this superintimate situation with a guy taking his
clothes
off, and it's obviously Takeshi here, a stranger, but you're still calling him Brock?”

“It was 'ose contacts they made me wear,” said DL, “to make my eyes as blue as your mom's—yours, for that matter. Cheapskates at the ol' Depaato wouldn't even spring for a pair that was in my prescription.”

“You had on somebody else's contacts? Eeoo!”

“And I couldn't see shit. Brock and Takeshi were both about the same size and body format anyway, and my mind right then was switched onto more of a transpersonal mode.”

“Payin' attention to what you were doing,” Prairie guessed.

So much so that it wasn't till later that DL remembered the contact lenses, which had been repossessed almost as soon as the deed was done. The more she considered, the more thickly came the birds of creepiness to perch on her shoulders. She never found out for sure, but had come to believe that the lenses had been taken from the eyes of a dead person. That furthermore she had been intended to witness her own act of murder through the correction to
just this person's
eyesight. Likely a hooker, DL speculated, who'd been caught holding out, who'd spent her whole short life off the books, whose name, even names she'd used professionally, nobody remembered anymore. As lost now as she could get.

But whose countersight DL was looking through that hour as she straddled the naked man on the bed, found his penis and slipped it in, breathing with precision, conscious only of the human alarm points spread below, defenseless, along those dark meridians. No longer needing anyone's eyes, she went in by other sensors, direct to the point, opposing his chi flow, spiraling her own in with the correct handedness. Takeshi never felt it. It wasn't till he climaxed moments later and started screaming in street Japanese that DL, de-transcending, realized something might be amiss. She hung over the side of the bed, groping at her eyes, Takeshi with a softoff sliding out and away in some confusion. When he saw her face again, he was amazed at the sudden green paleness of her irises, as if something had drained away. She clenched her lids, blinked.

“Oh—God—oh, no—” faster than he could follow, she had rolled off the bed and taken a fighting stance with the door to her right.

“Hey, beautiful,” Takeshi up on one elbow, “if it was something
I
did—”

“Who are you? No—never mind—” She turned and fled out the door, in her high-sixties outfit, observed as she went by any number of cameras, population now returning to the corridors, plausible copies, for DL, of known enemy faces, bearing old wrongs, old scores to settle, converging here around her sloppy, amateur attempt at homicide. . . .

Ralph Wayvone, who'd been patched in as a courtesy from the Imperial, followed DL's progress out to the street on his own monitor, as well as Takeshi's slow bewildered dressing and departure. “Better put somebody on that Japanese guy. Maybe we can help.”

“Want me go get her?” inquired Two-Ton Carmine Torpidini.

Ralph appeared to think about it. “Let her go, we can always find her again . . . she'll know how much she owes us now.”

The phone rang, Carmine took it. “Says that somebody tipped off our boy. So he must have sent in a stuntman.”

Ralph kept watching the screen, watching her go, those long, beautifully-in-shape legs, that slowed-down martial-arts lope, finally with an extravagant “Mmwahh!” blowing her a kiss as she vanished. “So long, babe. I was hopin' you'd be the one. If you couldint nail him, who can?”

“He's
too
lucky,” Carmine philosophized. “But he's livin' on borrowed time, 'cause a lucky streak don't last forever.”

“Fuckin' Vond,” Ralph Wayvone sighed, “he's the Roadrunner.”

DL flew back to California, homing brainlessly in once again on the Kunoichi Retreat, where she'd been coming since her adolescence, then leaving, then coming back again, building a long-term love-hate affair with the Attentive staff, Sister Rochelle in particular. But this time Rochelle could see how awful she looked, and only assigned her to a cell and suggested gently that they talk the next day.

It would have given DL time to try and look quietly, frontally, at what she'd done. No use. She cried, failed to sleep, masturbated, snuck down to the kitchen and ate, snuck into the Regression Room and watched old movies on the Tube, smoking cigarette butts out of the public ashtrays till the birds woke up. By the time she dragged in to see the Senior Attentive, she was a sleepless wreck. The older woman reached, smoothed hair away from DL's sweating forehead. “I've done something so—” DL sat trembling, couldn't find a word.

“Why tell me?”

“What? Who else can I tell that'll understand?”

“Just what I wanted today, just when the cash flow's starting to turn around, just as I'm finding my life's true meaning as a businessperson, I might've known it, in you waltz and suddenly I've got to be Father Flanagan.” She shook her head, pursed her lips like a nun, but sat and heard out DL's confession. Finally, “OK, couple questions. Are you sure you didn't, at the last instant, pull back?”

“I'm—not sure, no—”

“Paying attention,” darkly,” 's the whole point, DL-san.” The body transaction had been complex, referential, calling in not only chi flow and the time of day but also memory, conscience, passion, inhibition—all converging to the one lethal instant. The Senior Attentive gazed evenly at the bent nape, the averted face. “Just from your life pattern already, here's what I think. Living as always let's say at a certain distance from the reality of others, you descended—”

“I was taken!”

“— you were brought—down again into the corrupted world, and instead of paying attention, taking the time, getting prepared, you had to be a reckless bitch and go rushing through the outward forms, so of course you blew it, what'd you expect?”

And that was when DL remembered Inoshiro Sensei's remarks about those who never get to be warriors, who on impulse go in, fuck up, and have to live with it for the rest of their lives. He had
known
—he had seen it in her, some latency for a bungled execution at a critical moment, somewhere in her destiny—but how could he ever have warned her? DL realized she had been nodding solemnly for a while. “What I need to know,” she whispered at last, “is, can it be reversed.”

“Your life? Forget it. The Vibrating Palm, well yes and no. It depends on many variables, not least being how quickly it'll get seen to.”

“But . . .” but what was she saying? “but I was just down there. . . .”

“Since you were here with us last, we've built up a good medical unit—couple of licensed DOM's on the staff now, some new therapy machines—and while we don't see
that
many Ninja Death Touch cases, your victim has a better chance the sooner you can get him up here.”

“But how'll I ever find him again? I didn't think I'd—I wanted—” but DL thought better of it.

But Rochelle said, “Let's have it.”

“I hoped there might be . . . ,” a small failing voice, “some way I could stay?”

Out the window, screened by eucalyptus trees, could be seen once-white walls overgrown with ivy, a distant bight of freeway tucked into the unfolding spill of land toward “down there”—while up here the wind blew among the smooth gold and green hills, it seemed endlessly. Here was the deep quiescent hour, the bottom dead center of the day. The women sat in the Ninjette Coffee Mess and watched the caustics of sunlight flutter on the insides of their cups.

“If there were ninjitsu jury boards,” Rochelle suggested, “you'd get your card pulled for what you say you did. Maybe this is the time, sister, that you'll finally start pulling your weight. We've always believed in your sincerity, but it can't get you much further—when do we ever see you concentrate, where's the attention span? Blithely driving off down the road in some little low-rent touring machine, showing up again in something from an assistant buyers' sale at Zody's beggin' to be taken back, on again off again over the years, no continuity, no persistence, no . . . fucking . . . attention. All we see's somebody running because if she stops running she'll fall, and nothing beyond.”

“I thought you'd take me in no matter what I'd done.”

“And if I wanted you to leave us forever, I'd just say ‘Leave,' wouldn't I?”

“And I'd have to leave.” For the first time in the interview the sun-haired girl raised her eyes to those of the motionless Headmistress—a compound look, flirtatious while at the same time pushing away, clearly desperate at, any thought of having to go find Takeshi again. “But if I bring him back up—”

Sister Rochelle rolled her eyes in mock surrender. “We should reward you by letting you stay forever? Oh, child. Thirty-year-old, hardcase, cold and beautiful child.”