Trubate cut loose with a cackle.
"I'm working on the cackle," he said.
I milled around the room, inspected the mail-order baubles. There appeared to be some sort of nautical motif in effect, solid gold sextants, diving bells that doubled as ice buckets, stereo speakers mounted in the galleon wood. A lot of it looked culled from those old magazines at the Center, Estelle Burke's yearbooks. Don't forget the postcard from Paris. Remember me when you're a crazed futurist.
A stack of coasters on the coffee table bore the hut logo in safety orange. The Realms Is Real, they proclaimed. I found a leather binder with some hole-punched pages. It was a business plan, a pretty primitive-looking one at that, some smudged graphs, a brief budget breakdown whose figures didn't add up. One section was entitled the Trubate Brand, another the Heinrich Time-Sensitivity Factor. A list of future projects included the Daddy Chair, the Gimp Snatch Miracle Hour, and the Subject Steve. A parenthetical following this last noted that the executive producer credit had been "preguaranteed" to one Leon Goldfarb.
Now one of the monitors in the wall fired off a series of high squawks. Heinrich leaned into frame, his face puckered, papery. He lay supine on his counterpane in bikini briefs, his nipples blacked with cork. The bed was heaped with toys, baby dolls, wind-up robots, Scrabble chips.
"Hey, kids," he said. "Welcome to Heinrich's Story Bed. Looks like I'm going to tell you kids another story. Looks like all I'm good for these days is telling stories, at least according to your buddy Bobby. Bobby can't wait for me to die. Neither can I, tell you the truth. Cancer's eaten clear through me. It'll get you, too, don't worry. Meanwhile, prepare for some allegorical instruction. Do you know what that means? It means shut the fuck up and listen, because here we go. Once upon a time there was a big game hunter. This was in the time when there were big game hunters with big fucking guns and everyone understood it was a natural thing, a man versus beast thing. That's a modality that people conveniently forget these days, but it's still out there, every day, man versus beast, whether you like or not. Now this big game hunter, who happened to be from Cleveland, which is not important, but I want to make it clear he was from a highly esteemed smelting dynasty in Cleveland. ."
There was someone else in the room. I turned and there she stood, hair up, pale arms tucked in rubber crutch locks.
"Renee."
"Look at him," she said.
"You're standing," I said. "You're walking."
"Look at the man," she said. "Saddest thing I've ever seen in my life."
"They said you'd never walk again."
"They never actually said that."
"You're walking," I said.
"Injections," she said. "Incisions. Experimental stuff. Animal cells. I have some antelope in me. Some silverback."
"Gorilla?"
"Very avant-garde. It's not the animals, though. It's the chip."
"The chip?"
"A chip in my gut. Electrodes in my legs. Bobby paid for it. Look at my crutch handles. See the buttons? I'm remote-controlling myself."
Renee twitched towards me, her crutches buzzing. Heinrich's voice careened around the room.
". . and the hunter felt the tusk slide through him, and I'll put it bluntly, kids, the cold, sharp tusk slid through him from behind, through his anus and curving upward, just tore right through his guts and punched out his chest. Skewered, he was. Completely, irrevocably skewered. Yet even then, wriggling with the last of his life on that great bloody ivory shaft, even as the elephant lifted his head and the hunter felt the hot rank breath of the beast blanket him and its horrendous trumpet blast shatter his ears, the hunter could not understand it, and with what was left of his strength he said to the elephant, 'Why? Tell me why? You called me brother.' And the elephant blinked once and nodded, and with his trunk pushed the gored hunter to a mangled heap on the jungle floor. 'I know I called you brother,' said the elephant, shrugging his great white shoulders. 'My mistake. I must have had you mixed up with somebody else.' "
Pink pinwheels spun in Heinrich's eyes.
"Needless to say, children," he said, "Cleveland is not the manufacturing center it once was."
There were more squawks and the screen went white.
"Christ," I said.
"This is content," said Renee.
"I heard on the radio. Your big multimedia deal."
"PR bullshit. This kind of idea has been dead for a long time. We were out in the forest, what did we know? We're fucked. We're the fuckers and we're fucked."
"I've met fans."
"Like I said," said Renee.
"Renee."
"What."
"You're walking."
"This isn't really what I had in mind."
She hit the button on her crutch, just stood there, buzzing. Then she jerked away.
Everyone had gathered around Trubate's hub, a sea of wet haircuts and ghosted skin. The Rad Balm girl sat in back with a boy who'd come off the plane with us. He had lime-colored muttonchops, a denim jacket in his lap. Apparently he was getting some sort of handjob.
"Yo," I said.
"You," said the Rad Balm girl, slid her hand away.
"Get your jollies, geezer?" said the boy.
"Nice sideburns," I said. "They remind me of my father's. He was a fire captain."
"That's the most engrossing story I've ever heard."
"Better watch it," said the Rad Balm girl. "Warren's a writer, you know. That sounds so stupid. Of course you know that."
"I do now," I said.
"He's like the most famous writer in the world. The spokesman of our generation. I mean that in quotes. Spokesman in quotes. Generation, that's just generation. Whatever that means."
"Hey," said Warren. "I just do what I do. If people like it, that's cool."
"How's the fish?" I said to the Rad Balm girl.
"Fish?"
"Musician talk."
"Yeah, okay."
"Don't you remember?"
"What, do you have a photographic brain thing?"
"Excuse me?"
"Never mind."
"Okay."
"Sometimes I can't believe I actually took this job," said the Rad Balm girl. "You know, I almost went to SarinNet. That's the other big desert dot-com. They're in the silos. Package was worthless, though. Not like this is any better. People like us, we fucking made the information economy, now they're flushing us down the toilet. San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Brussels, Tehran, Perth, I've been pimping code all over. I just hope I can squeeze another few months out of this bullshit before everything goes bust. I know people have been saying that for years, but it's coming for real now, mark my words. What I really want to do is study medical ethics. Like what are the moral ramifications of putting a monkey head on a human body? Or a horse dick. Or like a lot of cow tits. Or is it wrong to fuck a clone of your brother if you use a rubber? That kind of crap. This place is weird, huh? The Realms. You should see some of the shit they do down there that doesn't make it past post. Bobby seems pretty creepy. What's with the robe? But I guess he has a viable business model."
"I'm sure," I said.
"Hey, you're the dying guy. You used to ball Renee, right? Somebody said that. Because Bobby's balling her now. Me, too, when I have time. I love to say ball."
"Okay."
"Just a heads-up, to use the old hippy term."
"Right," I said.
There was a man in a tight Lycra hood standing with some others near a water cooler. When the man turned to cough I saw it was the Philosopher, tricked out like some aerodynamic Franciscan. He nodded me an amen. Nearby an obese Japanese kid in a hunting vest just like Naperton used to wear was conducting impromptu Bible study with some Realms techs.