Say, uh, Leon, Bobby began again, you seen Two-a-Day in here lately?
The horrible eyes came up again and regarded Bobby for entirely too long. No.
Maybe last night?
No.
Night before?
No.
Oh. Okay. Thanks. There was no point in giving Leon a hard time. Lots of reasons not to, actually. Bobby looked around at the wide dim room, at the simstim units and the unlit kino screens. The club was a series of nearly identical rooms in the basement of a semi-residential rack zoned for singles and a sprinkling of light industry. Good soundproofing: You hardly ever heard the music, not from outside. Plenty of nights hed popped out of Leons with a head full of noise and pills, into what seemed a magic vacuum of silence, his ears ringing all the way home across Big Playground.
Now he had an hour, probably, before the first Gothicks started to arrive. The dealers, mostly black guys from the Projects or whites from the city or some other burb, wouldnt turn up until there was a patch of Gothicks for them to work on. Nothing made a dealer look worse than just sitting there, waiting, because that would mean you werent getting any action, and there was no way a genuinely hot dealer would be hanging out in Leons just for the pleasure of it. It was all hotdog shit, in Leons, weekenders with cheap decks who watched Japanese icebreaker kinos.
But Two-a-Day wasnt like that, he told himself, on his way up the concrete stairs. Two-a-Day was on his way. Out of the Projects, out of Barrytown, out of Leons. On his way to the City. To Paris, maybe, or Chiba The Ono-Sendai bumped against his spine. He remembered that Two-a-Days icebreaker cassette was still in it. He didnt want to have to explain that to anyone. He passed a news kiosk. A yello fax of the New York edition of the Asahi Shimbun was reeling past a plastic window in the mirrored siding, some government going down in Africa, Russian stuff from Mars...
It was that time of day when you could see things very clear, see every little thing so far down the streets, fresh green just starting from the black branches of the trees in their holes in the concrete, and the flash of steel on a girls boot a block away, like looking through a special kind of water that made seeing easier, even though it was nearly dark. He turned and stared up at the Projects. Whole floors there were forever unlit, either derelict or the windows blacked out. What did they do in there? Maybe hed ask Two-a-Day sometime.
He checked the time on the kiosks Coke clock. His mother would be back from Boston by now, had to be, or else shed miss one of her favorite soaps. New hole in her head. She was crazy anyway, nothing wrong with the socket shed had since before he was born, but shed been whining for years about static and resolution and sensory bleedover, so shed finally swung the credit to go to Boston for some cheapass replacement. Kind of place where you dont even get an appointment for an operation. Walk in and they just slap it in your head... He knew her, yeah, how shed come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, shed drool a little. About every twenty minutes shed man-age to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
Shed always been that way, as long as he could remember her, gradually sliding deeper into her half-dozen synthetic jives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear about all his life. He still harbored creepy feelings that some of the characters she talked about were relatives of his, rich and beautiful aunts and uncles who might turn up one day if only he werent such a little shit. Maybe, he thought now, it had been true, in a way; shed jacked that shit straight through the pregnancy, because shed told him she had, so he, fetus Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta. But he didnt like to think about being curled up in Marsha Newmarks belly. It made him feel sweaty and kind of sick
Marsha-momma. Only in the past year or so had Bobby come to understand the world well enough as he now saw it to wonder exactly how she still managed to make her way in it, marginal as that way had become, with her bottle and the socket ghosts to keep her company. Sometimes, when she was in a certain mood and had had the right number of nips, she still tried to tell him stories about his father. Hed known since age four that these were bullshit, because the details changed from time to time, but for years hed allowed himself a certain pleasure in them anyway.
He found a loading bay a few blocks west of Leons, screened from the street by a freshly painted blue dumpster, the new paint gleaming over pocked, dented steel. There was a single halogen tube slung above the bay. He found a comfortable ledge of concrete and sat down there, careful not to jar the Ono-Sendai. Sometimes you just had to wait. That was one of the things Two-a-Day had taught him.
The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufacturers, part of the shadow economy the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz.
Moths strobed crooked orbits around the halogen tube. Bobby watched blankly as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest, scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have been part of a coatrack. When the last one made it over the top, into the mess of plastic scrap, the line was drawn swiftly up. The scrap began to creak and rustle.
Just like me, Bobby thought, I used to do that shit, fill my room up with weird garbage Id find. One time Ling Warrens sister found most of somebodys arm, all wrapped in green plastic and done up with rubber bands.
Marsha-mommad get these two-hour fits of religion some-times, come into Bobbys room and sweep all his best garbage out and gum some God-awful self-adhesive hologram up over his bed. Maybe Jesus, maybe Hubbard, maybe Virgin Mary, it didnt much matter to her when the mood was on her. It used to piss Bobby off real good, until one day he was big enough to walk into the front room with a ballpeen hammer and cock it over the Hitachi; you touch my stuff again and Ill kill your friends, Mom, all of em. She never tried it again. But the stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt hed considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasnt one of them, so he didnt.
Now one of the dumpster kids popped up and conducted a slit-eyed survey of the immediate area, then ducked out of sight again. There was a clunking, scraping sound. Small white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a meter from the soles of Bobbys boots; as it touched down, it happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol that stood for biohazard. Hey, fuck, he said, drawing his feet up reflexively.
One of them slid down the rope and steadied the canister. The other two followed. He saw that they were younger than hed thought.
Hey, Bobby said, you know that could be some real bad shit? Give you cancer and stuff
Go lick a dogs ass till it bleeds, the first kid down the rope advised him, as they flicked their grapple loose, coiled their line, and dragged the canister around the corner of the dumpster and out of sight.
He gave it an hour and a half. Time enough Leons was starting to cook
At least twenty Gothicks postured in the main room, like a herd of baby dinosaurs, their crests of lacquered hair bobbing and twitching. The majority approached the Gothick ideaclass="underline" tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt restlessness, young athletes in the early stages of consumption. The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldnt warp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.