"Take me home," she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. "Take me home." There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I’d never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I’d looked, then looked away, beside Rubin’s all-beer refrigerator.
So if that’s the word I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.
I took her home.
I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor. The elevators usually work, and if you sit on the balcony railing and lean out backward, holding on to the corner of the building next door, you can see a little upright slit of sea and mountain.
She hadn’t said a word, all the way back from Rubin’s, and I was getting sober enough to feel very uneasy as I unlocked the door and let her in.
The first thing she saw was the portable fast-wipe I’d brought home from the Pilot the night before. The exoskeleton carried her across the dusty broadloom with that same walk, like a model down a runway. Away from the crash of the party, I could hear it click softly as it moved her. She stood there, looking down at the fast-wipe. I could see the thing’s ribs when she stood like that, make them out across her back through the scuffed black leather of her jacket. One of those diseases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones—the all too obviously environmental kind that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoclectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high-school lab tape, then hated myself for it.
"This is a fast-wipe module," she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. "What’s it doing here?"
"I edit," I said, closing the door behind me.
"Well, now," and she laughed. "You do. Where?"
"On the Island. Place called the Autonomic Pilot."
She turned; then, hand on thrust hip, she swung—it swung her—and the wizz and the hate and some terrible parody of lust stabbed out at me from those washed-out gray eyes. "You wanna make it, editor?"
And I felt the whip come down again, but I wasn’t going to take it, not again. So I cold-eyed her from somewhere down in the beer-numb core of my walking, talking, live-limbed, and entirely ordinary body and the words came out of me like spit: "Could you feel it, if I did?"
Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. "No," she said, "but sometimes I like to watch."
Rubin stands at the window, two days after her death in Los Angeles, watching snow fall into False Creek. "So you never went to bed with her?"
One of his push-me-pull-you’s, little roller-bearing Escher lizards, scoots across the table in front of me, in curl-up mode.
"No." I say, and it’s true. Then I laugh. "But we jacked straight across. That first night."
"You were crazy," he said, a certain approval in his voice. "It might have killed you. Your heart might have stopped, you might have stopped breathing…" He turns back to the window. "Has she called you yet?"
We jacked, straight across.
I’d never done it before. If you’d asked me why, I would have told you that I was an editor and that it wasn’t professional.
The truth would be something more like this.
In the trade, the legitimate trade—I’ve never done porno—we call the raw product dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back—well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market. Well, the more things change… That’s something my father liked to say.
Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars’ worth of baffles, and I don’t even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it’s easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I’d never done it. And now that I think about it, I’m not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.
I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.
Because she claimed she was an artist, and because I knew that we were engaged, somehow, in total combat, and I was not going to lose. That may not make sense to you, but then you never knew her, or know her through Kings of Sleep, which isn’t the same at all. You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose. People who know exactly what they want have always frightened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time, and wanted nothing else at all. And I was scared, then, of admitting to myself that I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness. And I was still drunk.
I put the trodes on and reached for the stud on the fast-wipe. I’d shut down its studio functions, temporarily converting eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Japanese electronics to the equivalent of one of those little Radio Shack boxes. "Hit it," I said, and touched the switch.
Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did…
There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you… It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever.
What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.
And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside.
It probably took all of four seconds.
And, course, she’d won.
I took the trodes off and stared at the wall, eyes wet, the framed posters swimming.
I couldn’t look at her. I heard her disconnect the optic lead. I heard the exoskeleton creak as it hoisted her up from the futon. Heard it tick demurely as it hauled her into the kitchen for a glass of water.