“You shouldn’t have any trouble finding a job in Manhattan. I’m guessing you’ve already sent your CV out to the museums?”
“Not so much yet. I landed a gig for a while working for Kylee Asparagus.”
“No kidding?” Sylvie said. “I loved her Asia album. She’s way underrated.” She rose and tickled a docked iPod. The opening of Asia played through bookshelf speakers.
As promised, Rocco wasn’t long, or was as long as it took him to walk around the block four times. When he returned, Sylvie sat in bed with a damp washcloth over her eyes. Abby remained on the couch, the magazine still in her lap.
“I suddenly got a really brutal headache,” Sylvie said.
“Did you download anything for it?”
“Did I what?”
“Take anything. Acetaminophen.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t entertain our guest.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“I could barely get a word in edgewise.”
Rocco poked at his pocket transmitter and entered a mild pain relief code, then an equally mild tranquilizer that had Sylvie snoring in a minute. Returning to the living room he paused in front of the fake Abby.
“Can I get you anything to eat?” he said.
Sylvie arrived home early on a Friday and found Rocco in bed with Abby. Apparently he hadn’t heard her come in. She watched him huffing over the prone form through the doorway. Abby’s legs were up, one of them bent over his right shoulder as he pumped and strained. Watching someone else have an orgasm is like witnessing a machine seize up, a system grind to a halt. Rocco grunted “Fuck” as he rolled onto his back, his cock audibly popping out of the artificial vagina like a cork exiting a bottle. He noticed Sylvie standing in the doorway.
“This is nothing,” Rocco said.
Sylvie frowned and went to the kitchen. A minute later she leaned against the dishwasher and Rocco leaned against the sink.
“I’m telling you, it was nothing. You didn’t see that.”
“I don’t want her staying here anymore,” Sylvie said.
“How do you think she feels about all this?”
“I don’t care how she feels, Rocco.”
“You’re not really mad at me.”
Sylvie palmed a tomato. “I am too.”
“You’re not. And you’re confused as to why you’re not. You feel like you should be more mad.”
Sylvie caught his eyes for a second, nonverbally offered up her confusion, then cast her gaze aside.
“She’s not real, Sylvie.”
“She loved you.”
“Huh?”
“Abby loved you, Rocco. She trusted you. She told me what you did.”
“There’s no Abby anymore. Just Sylvie.”
“I am Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You are Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You were fucking her.”
“I was fucking her for the last time.”
“All she did for a month was watch TV, eat, and sleep. You set her up with the most boring routine possible.”
Rocco scritched stubble. “You assume I was her DJ.”
“Who then?”
“Someone else makes me do this. I only DJed Abby because someone else is DJing me.”
Sylvie’s fingers closed around the tomato, the pulp and seeds and skin running down her wrist. Her fist trembled.
Rocco continued. “I don’t have a choice about who I am. But you do. You can choose to live Sylvie’s life.”
“I am Sylvie Yarrow.”
“You are Sylvie Yarrow. There’s one thing left to do. It’s the right time.” From the butcher’s block next to the Cuisinart Rocco pulled a filleting knife. He pried open Sylvie’s hand and let the fingers curl back around the knife handle. He led her to the bedroom, where the Abby sex doll was still prone, dripping a thin drool of semen onto the comforter, the dummy eyes pointed toward the ceiling.
“A young, successful woman with her life ahead of her. A talented book editor making a name for herself. This is what you want,” Rocco said. “So you must kill her. You’re Sylvie Yarrow,” Rocco said.
“I’m Abby Fogg,” she said, wiping the blade across Rocco’s neck.
Rocco smiled a second, surprised, then seemed to realize this wasn’t fucking around. The sheets: they used to be white. He awkwardly genuflected, a hand over his throat, then crawled to the bathroom. Abby stepped over him and fetched the Bionet transmitter from the medicine cabinet, sat on the toilet, and held it out for him as he crawled around in a red slick. She’d never seen this much blood. Bubbles of it coming out of the fleshy, fishy slit she’d made. He reached for the transmitter, died, and settled into the pool.
Back in the bedroom, Abby dressed the sex doll and propped her against the headboard. She turned on the TV for her, switched to a nature show, and put the remote in the doll’s hand. A moment later somebody knocked on the door. She opened it to find Lamb, the qputer monk, now dressed in toddler-sized overalls.
“Good job, Abby,” Lamb said.
“I’m Abby Fogg,” Abby said, blinking her eyes. “I’m Abby Fogg.”
This was a sidewalk from a memory, a crisp overlayer of graffiti and fluttery newspaper trash. Skinner had been here before, chasing newmans through Old Navy display windows and the gutted burning interiors of hipster apartments. SoHo: a facsimile. The address Rocco had provided under duress led him to a block, a door, a stairwell, a creaky wood hallway, a steel door behind which played some hideous prog. The door was unlocked. Skinner found an apartment committed to Danish design. Shit was minimal. Like the place was intended to be temporary but had been temporary for a very long time. Dirk Bickle sat on a black leather couch, wearing a white bathrobe, his white hair slicked back after a shower. On the coffee table in front of him were spread a variety of brand-name guns.
“Make yourself at home, Al.”
Skinner took a seat opposite, on a box-shaped chair. “You’re an old guy like me.”
“You and I go way back. You wouldn’t remember.”
“What’s with the arsenal?”
“We figured you’d want to rearm yourself.”
“You have my grandson,” Skinner said.
“They have a clone of your grandson. I thought that made all the difference.”
“I’m tired.”
“Take a nap, my friend. The bed is comfy.”
“I’m tired of killing things.”
“I’d be tired, too. But you’re the reptile brain, remember? You’re doing what you were designed to do.”
“You know where they have him.”
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You’ll find him at the Egyptian tomb.”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
Bickle shrugged. “You want an explanation. You want me to lay out the causalities. For what? The world we occupy doesn’t operate that way anymore, if it ever did. You want me to tell you where Waitimu is so you can do your heroic rescue routine?”
“I’ll lay down my weapons for good.”
“Let go of A+B=C, Al.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
Bickle laughed. “I’m just some stupid guy. Look at this place. You know what’s funny? This is my actual apartment. A replication of where I lived pre-FUS. I’m having reruns of dreams I had hundreds of years ago. I never got married, never shared my life with anyone. I’m just some asshole with a sociology degree who answered an ad in a newspaper in 1985 for tech industry recruiters and found himself working for the most visionary of men. I didn’t offer you anything to drink. Cocktail? San Pellegrino? I’ve got some re-created Limonata in the fridge.”
Skinner picked up the nearest chair and hurled it through the window.