There was a moppet shop, with a mix of real girls and prostibots, depending on how much pre-programmed interaction you wanted, not that you could always tell the difference. There was a group of street acrobats who did torch-lit high-wire acts on ropes strung across the flooded streets, and sometimes fell and broke parts of themselves, such as their necks. The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.
Among the carny acts there was a magician, a sad-eyed guy of maybe fifty, with a baggy-kneed suit he must have purloined from a thrift store: there wasn’t a lot of margin in what he did. He’d set up a makeshift stage on the rapidly mildewing mezzanine floor of a former platinum-grade hotel, where he manipulated cards and coins and handkerchiefs, and sawed women in half and made them disappear from cabinets, and read minds. Those delights had vanished from television and online, since such displays of skill lacked tangibility in the digital realm and were therefore distrusted: how could you tell it wasn’t just special effects? But when the Floating World magician put a handful of needles into his mouth you could see they were real needles, and when they emerged threaded you could touch the thread; and when he threw a pack of cards up into the air and the ace of spades stayed there on the ceiling, you’d seen that happen in real time, right in front of your eyes.
The mezzanine was always crowded on Friday and Saturday nights when the Floating World magician put on his shows. He called himself Slaight of Hand, after Allan Slaight, a twentieth-century historian of the hermetic arts. Though few in the audience would know that.
Zeb learned it, however, because it was with Slaight of Hand that he found work. He played Lothar, the muscular assistant, clad in a cornball outfit made of faux-fur leopard skin. He’d heave the cabinet around, turning it upside down to show there was nothing in it, or he’d place the beautiful girl assistant into the box in which she would be sawn in two. Though sometimes he posed as an audience member, gathering information for the mind-reading act, or expressing amazement and thus distracting attention. In the daytimes he was sent on shopping errands outside the Floating World, to where there were mini-supermarkets and people who were awake during the day.
“I learned a lot from old Slaight of Hand,” Zeb says.
“How to saw a woman in half?”
“That too, though anyone can saw a woman in half. The trick is to have them smile while you’re doing it.”
“I guess that takes mirrors,” Toby says. “And smoke.”
“I’m sworn to secrecy. Best thing old Slaight taught me was misdirection. Make them look at something else, away from what you’re really doing, and you can get away with a lot. Slaight called each one of his beautiful assistants Miss Direction. It was his generic name for them.”
“Maybe he couldn’t tell one from another?”
“Maybe not. They didn’t interest him in that way. But they had to look good in sequins, not very many sequins. The Miss Direction of the moment was Katrina Wu, a lynx-eyed Asian-Fusion hybrid from Palo Alto. I thought of her as Katrina WooWoo, and tried to get friendly with her — Wynette the SecretBurgers meatslinger had opened up a whole world of possibility, and I was feeling reckless — but Miss Direction WooWoo was having none of it. I held her in my arms every weekend while stuffing her into boxes and cabinets to be sawed and disappeared and laying her out on a table so she could be levitated, and I’d give her the odd squeeze and what I must’ve thought was a marrow-melting leer, but she’d hiss at me through her smile: Stop that right now.”
“You do a good hiss. Maybe getting sawed in half was using up all her vital fluids.”
“Nope. One of the high-wire acrobats was taking care of those. During the week, when she wasn’t working for Slaight of Hand, this guy was teaching her trapeze dancing; the two of them were working on a high-wire strip act. She had a couple of outfits for that: a bird one, a snakeskin one. For the snake act she also had a real snake: some sort of lobotomized python. Its name was March because, according to Miss WooWoo, March was a month of hope, and her python was always hopeful.
“She appeared to like the thing; she’d drape it around her neck during some of her acts, let it do some writhing on her. I got friendly with March, I used to catch mice for it. I figured those terrorized mice could be a way to the WooWoo heart, but no dice.”
“What is it about women and snakes?” says Toby. “Or women and birds, for that matter.”
“We like to think you’re wild animals,” says Zeb. “Underneath the decorations.”
“You mean stupid? Or subhuman?”
“Cut me some slack here. I mean, ferociously out of control, in a good way. A scaly, feathery woman is a powerful attraction. She’s got an edge to her, like a goddess. Risky. Extreme.”
“Okay, we’ll split the difference. So then what?”
“Then what was that Katrina WooWoo and the high-wire guy took off one day. And March the python — March went with them. That bothered me at the time, not the snake so much, but Miss WooWoo. Infected as I was by Cupid’s festering dart. I confess I moped.”
“I can’t imagine you moping,” says Toby.
“I did, though. Pain in the butt, I was. Not that anyone noticed, so I was mostly a pain in the butt to myself. Word on the street was that Katrina and the trapeze guy had headed east to make their fortune. Couple of years later I found out that they’d used the snake-and-bird motif and launched an upmarket gents’ joint called Scales and Tails. Started small, became a franchise. That was before the sex trades got taken over by the Corps.”
“Like the Scales in the Sinkhole, near the Edencliff Rooftop Garden? Adult entertainment?”
“You got it. Where the Gardener kids used to glean leftover wine, for making the vinegar. Same franchise. Anyway, saved my ass at a crucial moment, but I’ll tell you about that later.”
“Is this going to be about you and that snake woman? You finally scored? I can hardly wait to hear. Was the python in on it too?”
“Ease up. I’m trying to stick with the chronological order here. And hey, not everything’s about my sex life.”
Toby wants to say that a lot of it has been so far, but she refrains: it’s not fair to demand the whole story and then object to it, she does realize that. “Okay, fire away,” she says.
“After Katrina WooWoo disappeared from the Floating World, old Slaight of Hand wandered away in search of another Miss Direction, and maybe a more aesthetically attractive performance space that wasn’t falling into the water. I was at loose ends, which was most likely good, since — being on the lookout for the next best thing, with eyes open and ears pricked — I noticed a couple of guys hanging around who were making too much of an effort to fit in, riffraff-wise. You can tell when a man is new to his greasy ponytail, his raggedy ’stache, and his garish nose jewellery: too much face fiddling. And their pants were wrong. They hadn’t made the mistake of new ones, like Chuck, but their rips and tears and smears were too artful. Or that was my judgment. So I was on the next Truck-A-Pillar I could hitch a ride with.
“This time I went all the way down to Mexico. I figured that whatever tentacles the Rev could stretch out weren’t likely to reach that far.”