Noir (6 page)

Overhead, bare lightbulbs dimmed for a second as the coffeepot gurgled wetly. A cranking mechanical noise came from the rear of the apartment,
where all the black cables ran. McNihil’s generator was the envy of the surrounding apartments. A sleek, grease-fed hummer that he kept swaddled in rags to cut down the residual noise, its intestinelike exhaust sphincter duct-taped to a hole he’d punched in the building’s exterior. There were other people in the building who weren’t so fortunate; they got by on batteries or candles, or gave up the desire, the need, for light entirely.
Like connecting cave fish
, brooded McNihil; it sometimes gave him the creeps to even think about it.
Creep
being the operative word—he could see them in his brain’s interior optic, moving around in the pitch-black with their big lemur eyes or the holes where their vestigial eyes had been, their fingers radiating out in front of them like cockroach antennae. Like roaches in more ways than that: whenever he came back to the building, if he pushed the ground-level door open fast enough, he could hear them fleeing back into the even-darker recesses where they were blindly comfortable. Some of those people—if that word still applied—were so devolved, the charity agencies didn’t even make personal deliveries anymore, but just sort of pushed food packets at the end of a long stick into the gloom, and let whatever was in there grab them and be gone.

Waiting for the coffee, McNihil reached down and massaged his aching leg. Climbing five flights to get here, through stairwells and landings palely lit by sputtering fluorescent halos, or with nothing but shadows and ammoniacal piss odors seeping into the ankle-deep fast-food trash and discarded subcutaneous-membrane packs—he’d gotten used to it. If he held himself very still, breath stopped and heartbeat slowed, he could hear inside the thin layers of walls and through the buckling floors. Little creatures and the slightly bigger ones that fed on them were scurrying about on their own errands, guided in darkness by the ripe smells of rain-saturated decay. The human inhabitants of the building, and all the similar buildings clustered around it, scuttled through their various agendas the same way, either in the dark or a wavering, battery-fed glow, flashlights duct-taped to the water-stained ceilings.

“Here you go.” McNihil handed a cup, no saucer, to the cube bunny. It was the only cup in the place without a cracked rim.

“Thanks.” She held it cradled in both hands. She managed to conceal her distaste for the ersatz as she took a sip. And even lifted a slightly apologetic smile toward him. “That’s not too bad.”

“Nothing ever is.” McNihil lowered himself into the frayed upholstery of the chair across from her. “Too bad, I mean.” He could see
himself in the black mirror of his own heavy restaurant-china cup. “It’s amazing what people can get used to.” He looked the same, he supposed, in this world and the other one. “Take me, for instance. Little while ago, I was inhaling a dead man’s breath. As if the poor bastard could breathe at all. And you know what?” McNihil leaned back, watching for her reaction. “It didn’t bother me at all.”

What he’d said didn’t faze her. The cube bunny’s eyes were tearless, the lashes’ cheap drugstore mascara unsmudged, as she regarded McNihil over the rim of the cup. Which meant, he supposed, that the late Travelt had been more than a meal ticket for her. She’d done her crying in some private place, out on the street.
Private
meaning that out there, no one would take any notice. Tears now would’ve meant self-pity and the play for her one-on-one audience’s sympathy.

She lowered the cup, setting it down on the low table between them. Leaning forward, she peered into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, as if her lost tears could be found there. “You don’t see me,” she said finally. “I mean … you don’t see
me
.”

Not stupid
, McNihil grudgingly admitted to himself. That was a mistake people made, to think that someone who lived the way she did would be an idiot. A surface phenomenon: a cube bunny’s looks, the way this one looked under the firm overlay he saw, was strictly a survival adaptation. They could be as smart as anyone else. Though that wouldn’t save them, either.

“I see you fine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded stiff and uncomfortable, even to himself. That was his way of handling personal things. “I see you the way I want to. Or at least the way I’m used to.”

“How’s that?” She had leaned so close to him, over the table, that she could’ve kissed him. Inside her eyes, McNihil could see himself, small and duplicated. “I don’t understand.”

She couldn’t tell by looking at him; no one could. Some things were truly invisible. The micron-film inlays inside his eyes—inside the eyes of anyone who’d had the same kind of work done on them—had a refractive index clearer than any air that could be breathed in the Gloss. A scalpel and a set of dentist’s picks would’ve been necessary to dig out the interpreter relays running parallel to his optic nerves. And the stuff farther back, past the optic chiasma and into the soft processors of the occipital gyri and sulci … those dark little rooms were a mystery even before any of the other work had been done.

“But I
know
,” the cube bunny said softly. “That you don’t. See right. I can tell.”

McNihil wasn’t surprised by that, either. That was what cube bunnies were good at. It wasn’t their major job skill—their skin and flesh was that—but it was a major adjunct, anyway. The ability to tell things about people, to figure out in some deep nonverbal way what the score was. And how to profit thereby.

Girls like her confounded the corporations. That’s what they’d evolved to do. The whole point of cube life, the logical extension of the system of shuffling employees in and out of workplace cubicles at random, had been revealed back at the millennium turn to be psychological warfare on the corporations’ own. What the human-resource managers and company psychs called
optimized transience disorientation
. It was all straight out of Henry Denkmann’s magnum opus,
Connect ’Em Till They Bleed: Pimp-Style Management™ for a New Century
, which hadn’t so much revolutionized corporate life as confirmed and blessed what had already been going on. This particular theory being an extension of the old New Orleans whore-hustling motto, that they weren’t completely under your control if they still thought they had names of their own: if employees didn’t have a place to call their own all during the day—if they didn’t scent-mark familiar walls and desks with their family photos and funny plastic figures stuck on top of their computer monitors—then it was that much easier to ream out their heads and stick in whatever behavior patterns the human-resource departments wanted. The only problem being that the employees still went home, to the same home over and over, defeating all the psychs’ good work, keeping bad attitudes high, as indicated in the standard measurements of workplace sabotage, absenteeism and pay agitation, and theft of office supplies. The cubapts solved all that, or at least most of it.

Better a freelancer
, McNihil had decided a long time ago. The Collection Agency might’ve wound up connecting him over as well, but it’d at least left most of the contents of his head intact. Shabby as this place was—and he’d had better, back when the agency gigs had been lining his pockets—at least he’d never had to shuffle every evening from one company-assigned anonymous living-space to another, with his clothes and a little box of irreducible personal belongings packed and waiting for him when he got home to the next one. That’d be a stone drag, even at the relatively luxurious levels that an up-and-coming junior exec got
shuffled in and out of. The corpse, which McNihil had looked at a little while ago, had been like that. The poor bastard had died on the company farm.

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” The cube bunny was still looking intently into McNihil’s eyes. “I can tell that, too.”

“Yeah, I suppose you can.” The little ways that cube bunnies and others in their low-rent quadrant of the sexual-services industry had. Which drove the corporations’ psychs up the wall. How could you reduce your company’s employees to perfect productive zeroes, with no hindering attachments to things or places, if cube bunnies and the like kept showing up at their doors, or even worse, inside their cubapts, sailing right past all the locks and security devices? And the same cube bunny, or the gender-preferenced equivalent, for each employee. When that goes on, the erosion of nonproductive personality structures—the human-resources goal that management had taken over from the previous century’s old-line drug-rehab programs—and all the other good things that come from a randomized living environment, all that gets kicked out on the street. Or some of it, at least.

The cube bunny smiled at him. “I’m good at what I do.”

“You must be.” There had been a hint in the girl’s voice, about her other job skills. He decided to let that pass for the time being. “You know,” said McNihil, “I see you just fine. I see you the way I’d rather.”

She tilted her head to one side, studying him. “You had that operation, didn’t you?”

“I’ve had several.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve led a rough life. Or maybe just an unlucky one.”

“No, silly; you know what I mean.
That
operation. That thing …” The cube bunny hesitated, then pointed to her own face. “With the eyes and stuff. Where they cut ’em open and … put things in ’em.”

“‘Things?’”

“Things you see.”

“Well, sweetheart …” McNihil took another draw on the brackish liquid in the cup. “That’s what they do, all right. They stuff whole worlds in there.” He returned a fragment of the smile she’d given him. “They even put
you
in there.”

The rest of the smile had faded away. “I don’t understand.” She drew back apprehensively. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Travelt didn’t have anything like that.”

“That’s because …” McNihil set his cup down on the table. “He was a smarter man than I am. Though it doesn’t seem to have done him much good.”

She didn’t seem to hear the last comment. “Why would you do something like that?” An appalled fascination narrowed her gaze. “Let them do that to you?”

“‘Let them?’” McNihil laughed. “Shit, I
paid
for it. Didn’t come cheap, either. It was a while back, when I was doing rather better than I am now.” He gestured toward the shabby apartment encasing them. “I could afford to be in at the beginning of a product-introduction cycle.”

“What happened?”

“I came down in the world.”
In this one and the other
, he thought but didn’t say aloud.

“No,” said the cube bunny, “I mean with the operation. And your eyes. It must’ve gone wrong, huh? I heard they do that. And then you’re … you know … not right.”

“If I am—” One finger tapped the side of the cup in front of McNihil. “It’s not because of my eyes.” He picked the ersatz coffee up and drank. “Besides,” he said, leaning back, “what do you know about it? I wouldn’t have thought there were things like that back in Kansas.”

“There ain’t shit in Kansas.” A little cloud of unsunned memory passed across the cube bunny’s face.

“That’s where you’re from? I was just guessing.” McNihil felt sorry for her. On the other side of the reality line, in that world he’d glimpsed in the wet reflection of the chrome percolator, she had all that other world’s pretty genetics, a child’s face grafted by survival-oriented evolution onto an adult’s body, one that hadn’t needed to be surgically pumped up to achieve its Blakean lineaments of desire.
Born that way
, thought McNihil. They came out of the rusting wastelands at the center of the continent, boys and girls together, walking the dead roads of Kansas and Ohio all the way to the Pacific Rim cities, True Los Angeles and all around the Gloss to Vladivostok and the Chinese and Southeast Asian zones. Where they had something to sell: themselves and their sheer prettiness, the exact combinations of size of eye, distance between, angle of nose and space to the perfect upper lip. The infantile kink, the baby-sex lure, was seemingly programmed right into the human nervous system. It lodged right down at the base of the spine, where some kundalinic serpent with icy pederast gaze uncoiled and went either wet
or stiff at the sight of its prey. Even in his own, he had to admit. Before the vision had faded on the side of the coffeepot, a needle-eyed weasel had smiled at the center of his brain.

Maybe that’s why
, thought McNihil.
I’d rather see her this way
. Safer emotionally, no matter whatever else might happen. He was still a married man, even though his wife was technically dead.

“Mr. Travelt told me about them.” The cube bunny slid past the question about where she’d come from, the dry zone before she’d hit the Gloss. “He knew all about them. In the company he worked for … Dyna-something …”

“Zauber,” said McNihil. “DynaZauber. Like the song.”

That produced a frown. “What song?”

“You know. Beethoven. The Ninth. About how it’s all going to
bind uns wieder
.”

The cube bunny shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Just as well. The only reason those people want to do any
bind
-ing is so they can get into our pockets easier. Just another word for connecting.”

A little flinch; the girl he saw in his eyes was probably more sensitive to dirty words than the cube bunny underneath. After a moment, she nodded. “Anyway, he used to work in the division that made that stuff. That’s in your eyes. But that was before he got promoted.”

“Too bad he’s dead, then. Maybe he could’ve told me why my debits keep coming back.” Every month, he wrote out an actual hard-copy paper check, payment for the firmness-overlay maintenance, and every month it came bouncing back with a form letter about the service having been discontinued, thanks for your patronage, be sure and try our other fine enhanced experiential products, blah and more blah.

“Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.

“This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”