“I’m glad,” said McNihil, looking over again at the woman next to him. “That you’ve been waiting for me.” All irony had been drained from his words. “It’s nice to be wanted.”
“We’re not the only ones.” The other’s presence was so close and unfolding that a perfume of body-temperature latex and soft industrial resins had drifted in the air between them. “There’s somebody else waiting.” The barfly both kissed and whispered into his ear. “She’s waiting, too.”
McNihil didn’t need to ask her. There was only one possibility. “I’m ready,” he said. The glass had been drained and then shattered; what more was left? “Let’s go.”
“You first.” The woman looked straight into his eyes, the way someone about to plunge into a dark, still lake would. “You know how…”
He hesitated only a second. Then brought his hand along the side of her head, the blood from his palm seeping lines through her blond hair. He pulled her even closer and kissed her.
The woman drew back suddenly, her gaze turned to both wonder and almost frightened concern. “Your heart’s stopped.” She had placed her own hand against his chest, as though helping him to keep his balance in the gap between her barstool and his. “I can’t feel it beating…”
“Don’t worry about it.” He couldn’t keep himself away from her. “Not important,” said McNihil, pulling the woman harder toward himself and his mouth.
It took a moment for the inside contact to be completed. McNihil could hear behind himself the silence of the bar’s shadows and the prowlers’ mingled, expectant breathing. Just what they want-there was time only for that thought fragment, before the spark hit.
He’d felt the woman’s tiny scars with the tip of his own tongue, like deciphering a wet braille that chaptered down her throat. If he’d known how to read it, a biography in stitched flesh or a warning:
Abandon all hope
Blue lightning sizzled the insides of his eyelids, like the frayed curtains of his apartment bursting into flame.
Ye who enter here
Image rather than words filled his head, a newspaper photo of an electric-chair execution a long time ago, where flames had burst from underneath the cloth mask as soon as the switch had been thrown. In a sliced-apart microsecond, he wondered if he looked as well as felt like that, his skull wrapped in the incendiary halo of a martyred saint, fire-laced smoke rising to the bar’s low ceiling.
“You gave me… too much…” Talking like one of the spidered-together junkies in the lobby of the End Zone Hotel; he’d felt, been dimly aware through the rush of sensation and memory data, the woman grabbing the front of his shirt to keep him from toppling off the barstool. McNihil’s tongue felt burnt and swollen, as though he’d licked it across the terminals of a live battery. “That was… too big a hit…”
Other hands grasped him under the shoulders, lowering him to the bar’s floor. Far away, in the anteroom of the world he’d just left, he’d heard chairs toppling over as the seizure had snapped his muscles tight, and more than one of the watching prowlers running forward to catch him.
They laid him out corpselike, the back of his hand flopped against the stool’s chrome leg. He gazed up, still able to discern a fragment of real time through all the hurtling images that had risen into his eyes from the woman’s kiss.
“I should’ve known…” McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d managed to mumble the words aloud. “I should’ve known it was you…”
“That’s all right,” said Verrity. Her blood-streaked hair tumbled over her bare shoulder as she looked down at him. “You did know.”
“I had the strangest dream,” said the burnt woman. Or formerly burnt woman; that part hadn’t been in her dream, but had been real. I nearly died, thought November with a calm lack of emotion. A good deal of the peace that passeth understanding-at least for right now, in her case-came from the medication she was still on. She recognized that icy-warm feeling, all sharp edges reduced to fuzzy nubs, that came from a skin-pouch trickling its magic into her veins. “I was floating…”
“Not a dream,” said one of the med technicians, leaning over the arm he and the others were working on. “You were in the tank. Remember?” He looked up from his ’scope and micro-waldo’d needles, and smiled and winked at her. “You didn’t look so good then. Now you’re looking fine, fine, fine.”
November rolled her head back onto the hospital’s paper-covered pillow. She’d caught a glimpse of herself in the chrome flank of one of the machines-different machines than the ones she remembered from before, less scary-and had seen that she’d lost most of her close-cropped black hair. A little soft fuzz was starting to show on her patchwork scalp. As long as they’re doing all this work, she mused, I should’ve asked for a makeover. They could’ve given her a cascade of shimmering Botticelli-red hair down to her butt; anything. She’d heard about the money that was making it all possible…
“Tell us about your dream.” One of the other white-suited technicians spoke without taking his gaze from his fiber-optic eyepiece. “Passes the time. We’re going to be here awhile.”
She raised her other arm, the one they’d already finished. Does look nice-the skin on it was all new, soft and white as a Caucasian baby’s. Since genetically it was her own skin, cooked up in the hospital’s tissue labs for grafting, it would have to be. With a fentanyl-induced smile on her face, November admired the craftsmanship; the stitches only showed if she imagined them. And when she opened her eyes wider, raising her new eyelids, the stitches faded entirely from sight.
“What I dreamed…” She laid the finished arm back down upon the snowy white bedsheet. “While I was floating… I know the difference… I dreamed I was falling…”
“Yeah, like we pulled the drain plug on you or something.” The med technicians exchanged buddy-ish grins with each other. “So you’d run down the pipes, all the way from here on the twentieth floor.”
“That’s not it… I wasn’t even here at all…” She hauled the pieces of the dream out of recent memory; they were already falling apart, as though the touch of her reborn fingertips were enough to reduce them to sugary dust. “First I was back at the hotel… you know, where I got burnt so bad…”
“Do tell.” The technicians continued with their work, stretching the freshly grafted skin and laser-polishing the joins between sections down to nothing. “How utterly fascinating.”
She didn’t mind their gentle teasing. More than the casing of her material form had been renewed by the surgery and all the other expensive therapies. It’s the drugs, she reminded herself. But maybe something else as welclass="underline" there had been a moment when the anesthetics had thinned out in her nervous system’s receptor sites, when the nurses had been switching her from one I.V.-drip regimen to another, and the pain had rolled over her like a train screaming its heated engine apart, pulling her bones and sinews to tatters with it. And I didn’t even get mad-the way she would’ve before. She’d lain there, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, waiting as patiently as possible for the next batch of opiates to hammer her into diminished consciousness. That was the beginning of some kind of wisdom, she’d supposed. Or maybe some other part of her, inside the baby-new skin she’d been given, had gotten older. It amounted to the same thing.
“And I was falling there…” November went on recounting her dream. “Through the flames and all the beams and stuff breaking away… so I guess I was just remembering that part…” She couldn’t be sure; when the burning hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, she’d struck her head on a rusted iron girder that had seemed to come leaping up at her from the churning interior. Things had been mostly blank after that, a well-erased tape, until the med techs had removed her from the sustaining bath in which she’d been floating. That had been just like being born all over again, and present time starting up once more. “And then… and then…”