Upgunned (32 page)

“Erik killed a shark once,” said Kleck. “A bull shark, the most aggressive, a four hundred pounder. Wrestled it in salt water and killed it.”

“They swim in fresh or salt,” said Erik. “So can I. He bit me. Here.”

He displayed a lightning bolt scar near his kidneys, muted by overlapping scale growth.

“They're manhunters,” said Kleck. “Tell them how.”

Erik demonstrated with his armored talons. “Tore off its jaw. I drank its blood. It was an honorable death.”

Azure light seemed to waft into the room, and I turned and caught my first look at Davanna, the arabesque to Erik's grotesque.

I had described her as a kind of butterfly woman, but that's not completely accurate. She was, in form, more a hybrid of bat and moth, with a symmetry possessed by neither. Faint winkings of flight dust scattered there, like the talc-fine shed scales of moths, the kind old wives used to say were poisonous. Davanna would never, could never fly.

All the bug-bat were-woman nonsense flew away when you saw her face, her body, the absolute reality of her. Moths were hairy; she was hairless. Bats were essentially airborne rodents; Davanna was, as I said, more than human.

“Don't be afraid,” was the first thing she said to me. “Take the time your eyes need to accept what you see.”

She filled even my dark-adapted eye to capacity. These people were all rhodopsin purists, almost certainly. I wondered how their eyes saw us.

Then there was Mejandra, the tentacled woman. Imagine Cthulhu, only hot, with eyes like mulled cider and real, chatoyant, vertical pupils. Multiple appendages that were not grafts but living tissue, fundamentally connected. They moved with the grace of cilia.

“Think you could do something with this material?” asked Mason, elbowing me.

Tabanga, the Skeleton—not some emaciated derelict, but a living ossuary shrink-wrapped in blue-gray skin about half a millimeter thick, a skinny Visible Man road map of vasculature. Shine a bright light on him and he would probably dehydrate to death on the spot.

When Uno unveiled, I nearly gagged on my bubble water. He only had one eye. It was large, slightly protuberant, sienna-brown, and right in the middle of his face, above his flat and flare-nostriled bullish nose, which had a ring through it. More flashbacks of Joey. This ring appeared to weigh several pounds. Uno looked strong enough to bend it double between his thick fingers. The eye beneath its single brow was no fake, no trick, no illusion, and it did not miss anything.

There was no “performance” as the word is usually understood. This was more like a reception; you drifted around as your interest drew you, and spoke to Kleck's people. Except they did the same thing. Not only was there no performance, there was no performance wall. They mingled. We mingled. Until we were all indistinguishable; one group of people, making conversation.

Kleck introduced his sister Klia, his feminine iteration, wizened and wise. That weird sensation in the air, and the hyperreality of the Salon, gave each contact the mild blur of an acid pop, until, in a way, it all seemed very ordinary.

Because it was.

Mason compared notes with me at the bar. “So, Davanna, huh. You want to monopolize her. Tell the truth, Jules, you're thinking about banging her. I was. Everybody does. But she'll know, if you think that. Your aura, or something, gives you away. Ole Erik, the Gator Man, can whiff fear just like a bloodhound, and Mejandra is practically a living lie detector—all those limbs, like antennae, she can read your vibrations. Like I said, it's the shit, ain't it?”

Kleck interposed. “Another new friend,” he said of me. “Tell me of your life, new friend.”

“He's a photographer,” said Mason.

“Is it allowed?” I asked Kleck.

“Normally, no,” said Kleck. “Rarely.”

That was Mason's cue to slam down two inches of Franklin notes on the bar. “
Now
it's allowed,” he said. I had an uncomfortable flashback of Gun Guy doing the same thing to me.
Cash,
wham,
now shut up and do as you're told
.

Kleck's gaze danced between Mason and the money. “There are conditions,” he said. “No flash. No strobes. No bright light.”

Bright light destroyed visual purple. Maybe civilians had lived in bright light for so long, their innate capacity to see the unusual had been curtailed.

“No exposés,” said Kleck. “No tawdry feature articles. We do not seek exploitation.”

Then Lyle entered the main room.

“Ah,” said Kleck. “I feared Lyle might not join us tonight; earlier he complained of a headache, you see. Lyle, please come meet our new friends.”

Lyle emerged from the shadows holding his head, and my eyes got a read on him before my companions did. He was holding his head as if to prevent it from toppling off, which was sensible since his cranium was twice the normal size. His features were bunched together in the center of his face and surrounded by a perimeter of pale flesh. Baby-fine, wispy white hairs floated in an atavistic semicircle at the ear line. His forehead bulged up and out; his occipital was swollen backward, but apparently his skull had accommodated all this expansion. The crowding of his physiognomy gave him a perpetually surprised or perplexed expression amplified by his lack of eyebrows. He was wearing a white surgical smock, the kind that buttons up the left side, and I think his collar was reinforced.

“Please except my apologies,” said Lyle, freeing one hand to shake mine. “As you can see, sometimes I have problems with my neck, and lying down in a dark room with my supports is the only thing that can ease the stress.”

He kept hold of my hand while looking into my eyes.

“No,” Lyle continued, “it doesn't handicap me in the way you are about to ask. It's not an Elephant Man thing, if you follow.”

Funny; I was just thinking of asking him that.

“Lyle is clairvoyant,” Kleck announced matter-of-factly.

Indeed; letting go of his hand was like breaking an electrical circuit.

“Mr. Kleck was not joking when he said I had a headache,” said Lyle. “As you can see, it is obvious if someone wished to be derisive.” He almost cocked his massive head at me. What was odd was that he had to hang on to his head to do so, as though balancing a full tureen of soup.

“You, too, seem to be in hiding,” Lyle said of me. “You worry about it a lot. There are faces in front of your other faces. That is typical with movie people.” He spoke of movie people in a tone that indicated he was dealing with another kind of freak show. “All that worry will just eat you up from inside. Better to just process the problem. I like to think of problems as equations with an eye toward correcting the imbalance. Do let me know if you would enjoy discussing this further.”

With that, he moved off—carefully—to greet the others.

Kleck toasted me in passing with his flute of champagne. “Lyle has an unsettling effect on most people,” he confided with an elfin wink. As though the other members of the Salon were completely prosaic. “He is our only American member. Come, let us get you started with your photography.”

Thank Zeus I had brought my Hasselblad four-by-five and thought to pack high-ASA film for the Nikon. The lighting was tricky and demanded a tripod for long exposures. But when I photographed Erik, luridly shadowed in gothic light, he remained as still as a Grecian sculpture. He allowed me to position him. Touching his scaly armor was never
not
going to feel weird.

Fancy that, I thought, models who were not whiny or erratic.

Davanna smiled at me with even, normal teeth that glowed slightly, as though under UV light. She seemed amused. I wanted to amuse her.

“It's a vaginal cleft, Mr. Julian, surely you've seen them before.”

I had been staring at her crotch too much. She was so boldly nude that it was hard not to concentrate on her breasts, or her pubis, but then it was just as tempting to take in her startling pinpoint white eyes (not to mention everything else about her), to try and plumb what those eyes saw when she looked at me.

“What are you thinking?” Still, the smile, utterly magnetic.

I was thinking that I could help Salon make four or five million bucks, easy. I was thinking that an opportunity to express my vision, as opposed to my subordinate work for Clavius, had just plonked right into my lap. I was thinking here before me was the perfect confluence of the commercial and the artistic. No compromise, no committee, no editing. There was a clothing company called Serpentine, sort of a halfway house between the Gap and higher-end designer glitz, that had conferenced me not so long ago about finding a way to establish a bold new product identity. In that meeting I had mentioned using a tempting form of promotion that did
not
incorporate the product, on the theory of beguilement—an oblique approach to curry fascination for the unseen. Now all my brain could see were titanic billboards in Times Square featuring the members of the Salon in utterly mundane, casual poses, dramatically lit and without the need for Photoshop or airbrushing, completely honest and real, with the Serpentine logo alone in one corner, that was all. No other text. No cute phrases like “Live in Your Skin” or “Just Wear It.” The idea had seeded when I saw Erik's capacious hip-hop jeans, and was now in fast ferment.

Start with Erik in assorted stages of undress, then follow with Davanna, two sets, one with her dense sunglasses and one without … my god, it was all so obvious inside of a split second.

“Your hands are trembling,” observed Davanna.

“I can't look at you enough. My eyes can't absorb you the way I'd like, as you said. I need the film.”

“You are looking at me much differently through that lens,” she said as she turned at my direction and her membranous wings caught the warm air like veils. “When you look through that eyepiece, suddenly you're not thinking of sex so much, I think.”

“This is a different kind of lovemaking,” I said, meaning it.

I thought back to how difficult it had been to ramp up Nasja's exhausted sexuality in the camera. How Joey had wanted to indulge even more groundling expressions of the simplest sexual recombination, artificially spiced with tattoos and rope and leather. It was all mining a depleted vein. You had to do more, and more, to get less and less. That was Clavius's one basic trick—he had legitimatized basic porn for the masses to consume without guilt, then “shocked” them with the surgical reality behind the endlessly augmented images the world was supposed to accept as the baseline for sexual attraction.
I want that, even at the cost of the butcher shop
. And most people
did
want it; just look at what they were willing to endure in the name of hotness. Being hot. As Joey would say, “being a Hott.”
Would you
?
Would you
?

The appeal of the members of Salon was that they were totally unaugmented. You could want it but not have it, although you could buy products to align yourself closer to it, and that was fine because the big 99 percent would never dig having a snout, wings, or tentacles, because that would be going too far. And pushing perceived limits was what the sell was all about.

I had forgotten about Gun Guy for more than an hour. Two. I was distantly aware that the sun would be coming up soon.

“I'll need to see you again,” I tried to say offhandedly.

“I know,” Davanna said with the slightest imperial nod.

“I mean, all of you.” I meant all of
them
, not all of her.

“That is not what you really mean.” Again, the half-smile.

Lyle butted in. His head tended to stop conversation anyway. “I think you are formulating a worthy plan,” he said. “But you need to ponder it more before you talk to Kleck, yes?”

I did not know whether he was referring to my overpowering attraction to Davanna, or my nascent strategy to make them all famous.

I mean, it was laughable. Meet a mutant and eat the thunderbolt of love at first sight. It was teenaged in its vehemence. It was depressing in its predictability. This probably happened all the time to her. It had to be as real as meaningful eye contact with a stripper. Wasn't the whole game to make them come back for more? It was desperate. It was hopeless.

It was undeniable.

*   *   *

“Some dude wanted to meet you,” said Arly Zahoryin, back at his desk.

Nobody was supposed to know I was here.

“What guy? What did he look like?”

“Blond guy, glasses. Some guy.” Anyone outside of the purview of
Vengeance Is
held little interest for Arly. “Funny. I described you to him the same way.”

“You didn't get a name?”

“Hey, I'm not a secretary, okay? Lighten up, jeezus.”

“Some guy with the production?” There was still the morose hope that it had nothing to do with my old self.

“Nah, some guy Spooky was cozening up to. She called in sick today. You don't think she finally jumped Garrett's bones and caught what he had, do you?”

Arly really was remarkably insensitive. I put it down to his immature vintage. My problem had nothing to do with his avocation.

I scanned my desk with a critic's eye, looking for things that might betray me. If Gun Guy had shown up incognito and foxed the drawer lock—simple enough—I was totally made. I looked for scratches around the keyhole and was not satisfied. Every desk in the production office already looked like it had survived demolition. Scratches, gouges, dents, scuffs, skewed handles, crippled track; a
CSI
television series clue crew would go delirious looking for a place to start.

I pulled out a crew list—the one from which Tripp had omitted me—and ran a finger down to Spooky's vital stats. Hotel Beacon, Broadway and Seventy-fifth. She wasn't answering her phone or her mobile.

This was beginning to feel like a disturbingly familiar pattern ping.
He's here. He knows you're here. He knows you know he's here. Scramble defenses
.