Noir (7 page)

The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated,
childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.

“When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”

“Another world.”

If not a better one, then at least more to his liking.
I’ve gotten used to it
, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.

For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him—the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him—and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.

The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw—it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.

“You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real—I’m really here—and you can see that. So that’s a help.”

“Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.

Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for—and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it—was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pulling
and distorting the spheres of aqueous humor—not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.

“That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly business.” It was a big reason why he had such an aversion to executive types, like that DZ bunch with Harrisch at their head. “You can be talking to them,” he mused aloud, “and you’ll be looking at them, right in the face, and they’re looking back at you. And then you see the eyes shifting, like they’re looking past you into the distance, or at some place just past their noses. And you know they’re not really looking at you, they’re reading some market-update numbers that’d just crawled in over the wire.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve always just found that kind of offensive.”

“But that’s not what you see.” The cube bunny held her own empty cup enfolded in her hands. “I mean … it’s not some kind of business thing with you.”

“Well … maybe.” McNihil shook his head. “I don’t really know, anymore. I’ve been seeing things this way for a long time now. I don’t make any distinctions between what it was I wanted to see and …” It was hard to say. “And what it’s useful for me to see. I don’t know if those are two different things.”

The cube bunny had another question, very serious and important, the way children’s questions are. “Am I … pretty? The way you see me?”

The way he saw her … the way he saw everything. He supposed there was no way of really telling her. Just what it was that he saw. There wouldn’t be any shared points of reference between himself and a creature of survival-oriented sexuality such as the one sitting in front of him, like some kind of grayed-out butterfly caught in a dingy cardboard box with his name on it. The whole perceptual system of
hard
and
firm
and
soft
reality—he might’ve been able to explain that, with some effort on both their parts. It was really just the difference between the hard components of the world, the things that really existed, that didn’t go away even if you’d wanted them to; and the firm overlay that was programmed in over the hard stuff, that transformed the other world into
the one he felt and saw and smelled and tasted; and the soft, which was all that he could pick up and move around, change and destroy. Just as in that world, the unaltered one, on the other side of the reality line: there were some things you could do something about, and other things you couldn’t.

“You look fine,” said McNihil truthfully. “You’re absolutely lovely.”

“Really?”

“Why should I lie to you?” She did look lovely to him; better than in the smeared, wavering reflection on the side of the coffeepot. He’d paid to see a world that was to his liking. Not beautiful—it was based, after all, on cultural artifacts of more than a century ago, the bleak and brooding crime and thriller movies of the 1930s and forties—but with beautiful things in it. More beautiful, actually, for being surrounded by constant threat and darkness. So that if he could sit in a shabby, too-small room that smelled like dust settling on bare, flickering lightbulbs, if he could sit across from a girl who looked—at least to him—like an actress from those ancient films that nobody watched anymore, a woman with heartbreaking eyes … that was all right by him. And if she looked both sad and desperate, fragile and eternal, a mouth that was softly red even when seen in black and white …

Then the money he’d paid to the surgeons had been well spent.

The cube bunny hadn’t said anything, but had smiled at him. McNihil supposed he’d said the right thing. Even if it was the truth. Sometimes it worked out that way.

He supposed her smile meant something else as well.
You shouldn’t think so much
, McNihil told himself.
About the things you see. The way you see them
.

“But … you don’t really know.” The cube bunny’s smile faded. “If I’m pretty or not. ’Cause you don’t really see me.” A tear trembled against her lashes. “You just see that stuff that’s in there, inside your eyes.”

“That’s not how it works.” McNihil set his empty cup down on the counter and walked back out of the kitchen. “It’s a little more subtle than that. It has to be.” He didn’t imagine he had any way of explaining these things to someone like her. The world she’d come out of was too far different from any he lived in, on either side of the firm line. “Only idiots want to inhabit a world separate from anyone else. I mean literally idiots, would-be idiots; you know, from that
idios kosmos
notion of a
private universe.” He could see that he’d lost her on that one. “There’s just no point in thinking that you’re picking up things that don’t exist, or talking to people that are just part of some dummied-up sensory load. That kind of stuff died out back in the mini-theme-park days. Kids standing around with big ugly goggles on, swatting away at nothing. That kind of stuff’s crap. But seeing the same things that everybody else does, but just seeing them differently … hey, that’s the way it is for
everyone
.”

“It is?”

“Sure,” said McNihil. He was on a roll now. He’d walked over behind the couch, standing just in back of where the cube bunny sat. “There might even be some people who’re so connected up … that they wouldn’t even be able to see how beautiful you are.”
Like that other poor bastard
, thought McNihil.
The dead one
. What’d the late Travelt’s problem been, that he’d gotten into that prowler shit? When he had someone like this available and willing. Just went to prove something that McNihil had believed for a long time. That people engineered, with all the craft and will they could summon, their own annihilations.

The cube bunny said nothing. McNihil wondered if she had a name. He supposed he could give her one, something cute and temporary; it only had to last as long as whatever connection existed between them. Which was probably measurable in hours.
If that
, he thought glumly. She was the loveliest thing that had ever been inside the dark, cramped space of his working and living accommodation. Like some self-destructive flower that had bloomed here, begging to be crushed inside anyone’s fist.

He wondered how much the late Travelt had ever given in to those provoked desires. A little bruise, partly healed and fading, could be seen at the hinge of her jaw, just below her delicate ear. Given the stupid shit that the dead man had gotten into, it was entirely possible that the mark came from him, that the corpse’s thumb and fingers would match up, like an ID handprint to buzz him through the door and into that private space where desires were satisfied.

“Why did you come here?”

She twisted about on the couch and looked back up at him. She shook her head. “I don’t have a reason.”

“People always have a reason,” said McNihil. “At least in the world I live in. The one I see.”

“I … I don’t know.” The cube bunny’s open gaze locked on to his narrower one. “Maybe … I was lonely.”

“You came to the wrong place, then. We’ve already got plenty of that here.” McNihil laid his hands on her shoulders. The warmth of her skin rose through the layers of thin cotton and wool and into his palms. “But Mr. Travelt is dead, isn’t he?”

She nodded. “Yes …”

“Well, I can’t replace him for you.” He let one hand, with its own will, brush softly against the side of her neck. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“That’s all right.” The cube bunny gave him an understanding, forgiving smile. “It’d still be okay.”

“Just as long,” said McNihil, “as you understand that.”

The cube bunny nodded again, without speaking.

He came around to the front of the couch and took her hand, pulling her up toward him. When he’d led her down the apartment’s dimly lit hallway, he stopped suddenly at the door of the bedroom. “Wait a second.”

Back in the kitchen, McNihil pulled the plug of the coffeepot. The burnt smell of the residue inside had already tinged the air; it could be tasted at the back of the throat, like the awareness of sin. He reached over and pulled the thin chain dangling in the middle of the kitchen, switching off the light.

“You said you were lonely.” In the bedroom’s darkness, the cube bunny’s softness was still wrapped in the firmed Lupino-like illusion. Close to him, she laid her hand against his chest, as though reading his heartbeat. “Who are you lonely for?”

McNihil knew why she asked. So she could try to be that other person, another layer of illusion, for him. It came with the territory: that was part of her job and survival skills as well.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Sitting at the edge of a concave mattress, he brought his face close to the hand he’d combed into her dark hair. His lips grazed the skin of her cheekbone. “Probably just my wife.”

The cube bunny drew away from him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Like I said. Don’t worry about it.” McNihil drew the girl down to the field of the thin blanket. “She’s dead.” The same hand stroked the
girl’s brow. “When I tell her about things like this … she doesn’t mind at all.”

The girl said nothing, but reached up for him with her bare arms.

Later, when the only illumination in the bedroom was the glow from the cube bunny’s skin—McNihil’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that a naked woman burned like a faint, ghostly lantern—he sat on the edge of the mattress, watching her sleep. She didn’t wake as he drew the thin blanket back from her. Confirming what he’d seen while she’d been in his arms: there was no mark on her body, other than the random bruise.

No tattoos, either moving about or still. The blue-black capital
V
, with its knife-pointed serifs, that he’d seen embossed over the corpse’s rib cage … if he saw it now, it was only in his memory. The image of the corpse … and ones farther back. He closed his eyes, not to see them better, but so they wouldn’t be superimposed, branded, on the sleeping girl.

In the bathroom at the end of the apartment’s hallway, McNihil heard her gathering up her clothes. He splashed cold water in his face, letting it run down his neck as he raised his head to look at himself in the mirror. Taking his time, giving her time.

She was already gone when McNihil walked out to the kitchen. He pulled the chain dangling from the center of the ceiling, flooding the space with an eye-stinging brilliance. The whole apartment seemed as bare and empty as the specimen freezer in an abandoned morgue.

McNihil leaned back against the sink, arms folded across his chest, the edge of the counter’s cracked tile pressing against the skin just above the waistline of the trousers he’d picked up from the bedroom floor and pulled on. The cold from the linoleum, with its worn-through patches like black islands on an unlabeled map, seeped into his bare feet. From here, he could see out the kitchen’s tiny window with its tattered roller blind, down to the street in front of the building. The homeless were parading by, in strict formation, just as they were supposed to do. In that other world, the one he didn’t see anymore, he knew they were all shellbacks, humping along the personal-sized portable refuges into which they retreated when off-duty. He’d always hated the sequential billboards mounted on the shells’ hardened exterior casings, the lights
usually spelling out an ad slogan about some sleazy low-budget operation, like whatever Snake Medicine™ clinic was nearby, with its resident Adder clome offering everything from minor decorative tattoos to Full Prince Charles jobs. McNihil was glad he didn’t see things like that anymore; now the homeless parade looked like a long line of sandwich-board men, trudging down the sidewalk one right after another, like some Depression-era film that had slipped loose in the universe’s projector, stuttering the same frames over and over again.