Noir (40 page)

She laughed, holding up a glass with ice cubes rattling like polished bones, their round square curves melting into brown alcohol. “You got that right, pal.”

McNihil sipped at the drink that had been placed in front of him, without his needing to ask. Bad scotch, as though from the well of indifferent souls, trickled near his heart. In the mirror, flecked with dust
and something more deliberate, he could see himself and the bar’s space, both endless and claustrophobic. The black-and-white world in his eyes had set up tight and hard, shutting out anything more recent.
No future
, thought McNihil,
for me
. The obliging deity of the universe he saw had heard that decision, made even before he’d gone into the hospital and formalized it in front of the burnt November, floating at the altar like a charred bridesmaid, tubes and oxygenated hoses trailing like the ribbons of a bouquet crushed to what was left of her small breasts. That particular god had heard and had obliged far beyond what the stingy, nonexistent object of the Bishop of North America’s worship would’ve given: McNihil’s present as well as his future had been extinguished, leaving just this dark past, both threatening and oddly comfortable.
Just what I always wanted
…

The barfly nudged his shoulder with her bare arm. “I wonder,” she said softly, her mouth close to his ear, “just what game you’re talking about.”

He drew his finger through the small puddle that had been jostled from his glass. “There’s all kinds … aren’t there?”

“No.” She took his hand—the darkly shining polish of her fingernails caught sparks from the mirror—and brought it to her mouth. “There’s only one.” Gazing up at him through her eyelashes, she licked the smoky drop of alcohol from his fingertip. “You know that.”

McNihil let his hand stay caught in both of hers, like a small animal too stupid to run away, even as the trap was folding around it. His eyes had adjusted to the bar’s shadows enough that he had been able to catch a glimpse inside the woman’s mouth, past the diminished-spectrum red of her lipstick and white, unsharpened teeth. He’d seen the scars along the surface of her tongue, the minute roughened and healed abrasions, as though from needles that had been held in a match flame. McNihil had seen the same marks before, and often. But the last time had been in the mouth of a corpse, lying on the floor of a lux cubapt, as he’d knelt on the deep-pile carpet to make his quick, disinterested examination. Scars indicating prowler usage, the wet flesh, all muscle and sensors inserted pluglike into the socket of that other mouth, that face like a mask opening and fused to knowledge.

Face like mine
, thought McNihil; if he’d taken his hand away from the woman’s, he could’ve touched his own inert flesh, skin yielding just slightly more than the bone beneath. On the way from the hospital to
this bar, he’d stopped in at the Snake Medicine™ clinic and finished up the antitherapeutic course, the needles and tiny knives, that made his face the unmemorable equivalent of a prowler’s. “There you go,” the Adder clome had said, sorting out his bloodied tools into their chrome trays. “The full job, on DZ’s tab—you don’t owe me a nickel. I’ll send the bill to Harrisch.” The Adder clome had glanced over his white-coated shoulder, and had smiled with satisfaction at his work. “Just as well somebody else is paying,” he’d said. “The way you are now, I could never track you down for my money.”

In the bar’s dark spaces, McNihil drew back, bringing the woman beside him into focus. He wondered just what she saw, if anything, when she looked at him. His gaze shifted to one side, from long automatic habit, looking for some bright, shiny surface that would give him a glimpse of that other world, the one he’d gladly vacated. The bartender had left a knife beside a halved lemon; in the glistening metal, McNihil saw the same image reflected as in the mirror. A face visible as long as you were looking straight at it, but that as soon as you glanced away, dropped out of memory like a stone beneath the surface of unrippled water.
I’ve eliminated myself
, thought McNihil. Without regret; he would’ve paid for himself, if he’d had to.
Should’ve done it a long time ago
.…

“Honey,” said the barfly, reading his thoughts, “you look fine to me. Better than fine. Anyway—I wouldn’t have remembered what you looked like, no matter what happens. In this world, memory’s dead-weight. We can do without it.” One of her hands stroked the back of his. “Real memory, that is. And the other kind … we send out for it.”

That word
we
was another stroke, lighter and more chilling; McNihil felt his skin tighten along his arms. In the bar’s enclosed silence, his hearing sharpened, attuned to his breath and the woman’s. And beyond that, to the previously undetectable signals of other human presences.
Or close enough to human
, he thought. He felt like someone exploring a cave deep inside the earth, the little beam of his attention sweeping across cold stalactites and water-smoothed rock, miles removed from any living thing, his own clouded breath the only sign of warmth and motion—and then suddenly, the explorer is aware of a thousand unseen eyes in the darkness, all watching him.

McNihil turned on the leatherette-padded stool and looked back across the bar. He’d gotten the impression before, somehow, that the
place was empty, as though he’d managed to slide in after some hypothetical closing hour, with just himself and the barfly keeping the faith. Though he knew that nothing ever really closed in this timeless zone; the flickering neon wrote its partial hieroglyphics on the streets’ wet obsidian through all the motion of clocks without hands. The doors were never locked; the dismal happy hour never ended. The ghostlike bartender, impeccable in his nonperceived state, set them up without even being asked, leaving the drinks and the faint smell of a damp bar-towel drawn across the overlapped circles of the previous round. It was like the Platonic ideal of a drinking hole, someplace different from where you lived, but with no one to intrude upon the slow march and collapse of your thoughts.

Now, though, he saw the others. That McNihil hadn’t seen before; he leaned his elbow on the edge of the bar and let the fit of the cave-explorer analogy settle across the floor and walls of the establishment. Birds rather than bats, though; they sat hunched forward, hands folded around their own stingily nursed drinks, silent and watchful as crows under storm-clouding skies.
Watching me
, realized McNihil; the collective gaze emerging from the bar’s shadows pressed against him like a slow tide, hours away from receding.

“They knew, too.” The barfly leaned close to McNihil’s ear and whispered. “That you’d be back. Or maybe they were just hoping you would be.”

He realized that now as well. That expectancy was what put so much tonnage into the dark figures’ watching.
Waiting for me
—another handless clock was shared out amongst them, its numbers slowly pecked away. In a place like this, time was that dead substance consumed but never extinguished.

“All right.” McNihil turned toward the woman sitting beside him. “What do they think I’m going to do?”

“What did you come here to do?”

“I came here …” He had to think about that. Not because he didn’t know. But because it would be easier to say something else.
I came in here for a drink
—that’d be good. And true in its own way. Because that was the other option, that always existed in this world, the one that had leaked out of his eyes and taken tactile as well as optical form. You watched those old movies, those black-and-white visions of the past, truer than history, and it was always noticeable how alcohol ran through
and beneath every scene, like an underground river. Those people always had the option of drinking their problems away, or engineering their own dooms in an even more convincing and final way by fishing with their tongues for the key that lay at the glass’s bottom—
Why shouldn’t I?
He’d always wanted to live in and not just see this world; maybe that was how to do it.
Dive in and drown
.

McNihil set his own half-empty glass back on the bar, without having touched it to his lips. It was an option, all right—just one he didn’t have at the moment. “I’m working,” he said simply. “Believe it or not.” He waited for some scornful reaction from the barfly, but didn’t get one. “I’ve got a job to do. That’s what I came in here for.”

“Everybody here is working.” She held her glass up like a crystalline trophy. “In our own way. We all have our little.
jobs
to do. That’s why we’re here.”

He had come a little closer to understanding, or admitting to himself what he already knew. “Of course,” said McNihil. “You’re all prowlers.”

A silence fell over the bar, as though all the oxygen had been sucked out through some hidden mechanism to the night’s vacuum beyond. He could feel the gaze of the shadowed figures at the tables sharpening, penetrating and judging him even more thoroughly.

“That’s right, sweetheart.” The barfly gave McNihil a smile of alcohol-blurred delight. “You’ve come to the right place. This is where
you
belong—you know that, don’t you?”

“I know.”
That’s why I didn’t see them before
, he told himself.
I didn’t see them because I couldn’t
. He hadn’t been ready to; but now he was. He brought his hand to the side of his face, prodding the skin. Either the anesthetics he’d received at the Snake Medicine™ clinic hadn’t worn off yet, or the dulling of sensation was a permanent effect of the little Adder clome’s work on him. “That’s funny,” he murmured aloud. “I thought my senses were supposed to get sharper …”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the barfly. “That’s only for
real
prowlers. Not a phony like you.”

“I’m not fooling anyone?”

“You don’t have to. You never did.” She reached up and placed a gentle, disturbing fingertip where McNihil had dropped his hand. “You could’ve come here in your own face, the one you gave up, and nothing bad would’ve happened to you.”

He laughed. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Well …” The barfly gave a shrug of her bare shoulders. “Maybe nothing
different
would’ve happened to you. From what was already going to happen.”

“Don’t tell me,” said McNihil. “You’ll spoil the fun.” He looked away from the woman, back toward the space leading to the diamond-padded door. Though his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, he couldn’t make the watching faces become any clearer, any more sharply focused than they already had been.
She’s right
, he thought.
I’m not really one of them. Not yet
. He supposed if the Adder clome had had some way of transforming his entire being, from human to something-like-human, his percept systems would’ve been completely altered as well. But just having his face worked on, the minimum hallucination and anti-gestalting cues surgically implanted—that apparently wasn’t enough. Even though the clome hadn’t touched McNihil’s eyes with all the clinic’s bright scalpels and wetly glistening hypodermics—he’d forbidden that, staying awake through the entire procedure to make sure that the black-and-white world wasn’t nicked and leached out of his eye sockets—something had happened to his vision. A change; the making visible of the previously unseen.
Like ghosts dipped in glue and flour
, he thought. If somebody had invented black wheat—the odd notion struck him that maybe bread the color of ink was what they ate in this world he’d entered through the bar’s tightly sealed doors.

“I wouldn’t want to do that.” The woman’s dark red fingernails clicked like insect shells against her glass. “Fun’s our whole reason for being. That’s why God put us here.” She smiled, lazily and sure. “Isn’t it?”

“Some god did.” McNihil caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the stacked bottles. He could make out his own face, all right, perhaps even clearer than before.
Before I even went to the clinic in the first place
. He nodded slowly. “Now I understand.”

“Understand what, honey?”

“What I’ve become. What I was always trying to become.” McNihil picked up his own glass and used it to point toward the mirror. “An extra. Like in the old movies. That real world I was always trying to crawl into. Because it was real.” He glanced over at the woman beside him. “You see them and you don’t see them—the extras, I mean. They exist in that world, they’re even necessary—but you don’t remember them.
Just like prowlers that way; there’s nothing in their faces to snag onto normal people’s memories.”

“
Our
faces,” said the woman. “And yours.”

“Exactly. And that’s just what I always wanted.” The words were fervent in McNihil’s mouth. “To be there—to be here—and to exist and watch and maybe even have a few lines to speak. You know; to tell a real person which way to Fourth and Main, to maybe even light a cigarette for a real woman, the one the movie’s about …” He closed his eyes, imagining all he’d spoken of. “That’d be all right.”

“I don’t smoke,” the barfly said drily. “Otherwise I’d let you light my cigarette. If that’s what you’d get off on.”

McNihil stayed silent, knowing he shouldn’t have said anything at all.
Not about this, at least
—it was too close to some other dark place, a little unentered room inside himself. He folded both hands around the almost-empty glass, and thought about his dead wife. Thinking without words; just the image of her face. Which was not just snagged, but stitched with iron threads, to his own memory.

“Like I said before …” The barfly stroked the back of McNihil’s neck with her cold fingertips. “It’s nothing you have to worry about. Everything’s going to happen just the way it was meant to.” She used one nail to draw a knifelike incision, just short of opening the skin at the top of his spine. “And that’ll be fun.
Loads
of it. I promise you.”

He lifted his head, raising the glass at the same time and using the watered dregs in it to sluice away the vision of his dead wife’s face. The lock on the door of the little room inside him remained keyless. “Great,” said McNihil. The single drink, combined with some percolating residue of the Adder clome’s injections and his own self-generated toxins, turned a different key in a different lock. A doorway through which he knew he was going to step, though he already knew what was on the other side. The glass splintered into shards in his fist as he slammed it back onto the bar. “Let’s get going.”