No Dogs in Philly, page 2
“Are you listening to me?”
“They bought my building today.”
“What?”
“They bought the whole office building. Thirteen Oh Six Walnut. Shut it down. I’m guessing by this point they’ve found where I live and they got that too. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. This is unusual.”
“I want to get a case together. Start putting together some sort of action, something aggressive, to put them on the defensive. Money’s no object; I’m flush from the Favre case. They can’t get away with this.”
Eugene stared at her flatly and then burst out laughing—God he was pretty when he laughed. He went to his liquor cabinet and poured them each a tumbler of bourbon—his on the rocks and hers a straight fistful. He handed her her glass and then sat, swirling the bourbon, serious.
“I’m flattered, really, that you think I’m up for this, but what you’re proposing is ridiculous. Launch a case against the Gaespora? On what grounds?”
“I don’t know,” she said, hotly. “You’re the lawyer, make something up, reckless intimidation, intent to violate American freedom, do something.”
“What do you think I can do here? What judge do you think would even hear the case? Their salaries, their mistresses, their kids’ medicines and their wives’ fake tits all come from the Gaespora. I’d be laughed out of court and if I didn’t shut up you’d find me dying of diphtheria.”
“So you believe that bullshit.”
“I don’t believe—I know. They bought your office building for crissakes.”
“So what am I supposed to do, get on my knees and suck their alien dicks?”
“You could talk to them—maybe not hang up and ignore their phone calls. Jesus, most people would give their right arm to have a sit-down with the Gaespora and you’re ignoring their phone calls. I don’t believe you sometimes.”
“I don’t enjoy being pushed around.”
“This isn’t the playground; you can’t beat up every other kid and call yourself king shit of the turd pile. There are rules.”
They glared at each other. Eugene looked away, out the window. The rain was coming harder now, coming up to be a good ol’ spring thunderstorm. Saru downed her bourbon and held the glass out for a refill. Eugene filled her glass. He squinted his eyes shut and Saru guessed he was shooting out a command to Sissy to cancel his next meeting. Wordlessly he packed a long, curving vape with some hash and a few stimulants. They smoked and stared out at the storm. An elzi had gotten stuck on one of the barbs on the iron fence around the building. They watched him jerk himself free, leaving his hand and most of the forearm behind. He stumbled down the street, causing pedestrians to scuttle to the other side. A cop came over and herded him into a paddy wagon.
“Shit,” Saru said. “There’s no way out of this, is there?”
Almost as soon as she said it, there was a knock on the door, soft, polite, Sissy.
“Come in,” Eugene said. The door opened and she stepped in. She looked ruffled, uncomfortable—uncharacteristic. Even before she spoke Saru knew what she would say:
“Mr. Gercer-han Bernstein? There are two gentlemen here to see you. They say they belong to the Gaespora.”
Chapter 2
What they didn’t understand was the simplicity—it was killing him. He’d been operating on three to seven layers of consciousness since he was sixteen years old and now that was gone. They had hacked away all his distractions, all his facets—his virtual kingdoms, virtual sex, his mischief, news feeds, criminal enterprises, and voyeurism. He’d been flitting from implant to implant, seeing life through other people’s eyes and tongues and cocks and skin for so long that now, trapped in his own fat body, he was disgusted with himself. Is this what he was? A blob of flesh in a ratty armchair with a catheter and a feeding tube—when had he even put that in? Had it been a good idea at the time? Now without the freedom to eat the meals of others he was stuck sucking down the phlegmy white goo that sustained him. He shouldn’t have been fat—he hadn’t even bothered to measure the input. He’d just jammed it in and swum back to the Net. God, would he have swollen up like a balloon, would he have burst eventually? Or would the fat have squeezed against his veins until they clamped shut and his brain went dead?
Now his whole existence was focused on the search, the girl, the streets of Philadelphia, the homeless shelters, the crack dens, the whorehouses and strip clubs, the private sex clubs, and the orphanages. How old was she? They didn’t know. What did she look like? Blue eyes, eyes so blue they hurt. Was that it? Yes. He was starting to despair. He twitched his eyes to the left, the bucket with his toes. What would they take next? A new day was dawning. It occurred to him that traveling up from his feet they would eventually reach his cock, and then he thrust himself back into the search, records, records, records. Blue-eyed girls, and one other clue—the arson. She had killed a man apparently, allegedly, burned him to ash. A friend of theirs? Maybe. How did they know? They just knew.
He found himself cursing the police for their incompetence, cursing the media for their neglect—couldn’t they even note a building burning down? Wasn’t that worth a footnote in the paper? If it even was a building. It could have been a car or an outhouse or a submarine for all he knew, vaporized by a girl with blue, blue eyes. He was going to die, he realized. He was going to be chopped apart piece by piece by piece. The creepiest part was the way they watched him. All four of them—maybe there was a fifth standing guard upstairs—they sat, eyes closed but pointed at him. They were still, perfectly still like statues, and silent. The only sound was the hum of his computer and the squeak of the chair or a fart from his fleshy prison.
They were feasters, they had to be; it was the only explanation. They weren’t thugs or robbers; he’d been in enough of them to understand their way. They weren’t twitchy or angry or greedy or even cruel. In ten toes he hadn’t seen them move or eat. Only the leader spoke. They carried no weapons but knives, and he didn’t know a lot about knives but he knew these were sharp. The leader’s knife had gone through his toe like it was nothing, not even butter, just a quick flick and the toe slid off. There was no pain—they had injected him with drugs, mind-focusers, analgesics, and their own blood. This last fact convinced him of their nature. The feasters were blood worshippers; they believed if you ate a man you gained his strength. And he suspected that would be the fate of this girl. They believed she had some power and they meant to eat her.
The leader’s eyes flickered open. He stood and withdrew a syringe from his jacket. He calmly slid the needlepoint into his neck and sucked out about a juice-box full of blood. The leader walked over and jammed the needle into his neck. He felt nothing with the needle but oddly the blood entering his body burned. He could feel it spreading out through him, warm like piss in a pool but not diluting, just filling his body with heat. He wondered what diseases were coming along for the ride—a fancy new hepatitis perhaps?
He realized then, that there was no randomness involved here. What he had taken for brutal motivation was a ritual. Every twenty-four hours, on the exact second, a toe was removed. Every twelve hours blood was injected. Every six hours a new cocktail of drugs to keep him awake. He was being transformed—like a club with a notch for every skull it had broken. These were creatures of ritual, moved by ritual, obsessed with ritual. They were clocks, machines, vampires, slaves to a higher order. He felt a comfort—was it the blood?—in this ritual. He had thought his search methods to be perfect and orderly, but now he recognized how crazy, how random they were. He began again, from the beginning, from birth records, genetics. He knew, somehow, that the eyes were natural blue and not a bought alteration. He knew much more now, the knowing a great staff he could lean upon. It was wonderful to know.
There it was, all the girls in Philadelphia born with blue eyes in the last forty years. Now their medical records. It was a phenomenal amount of data, more than he could ever know or process, but it seemed to glide by. He felt his consciousness divide like a cell, and then again and again and again until he was a thousand cells, a million, all working in tandem to solve this problem. In the background, time was passing, seconds, days? Millennia? He felt light and free, a mind without a body, a creature of pure data. And girls, surrounded by girls, so many in just one area, beautiful, ugly, horrid, filthy sacks of copulation making more and more girls—did they never stop? Why was he here? This girl, Charlene M. Farrow, grew up in Kensington, black with blue eyes, was this the girl? No, she was dead, beaten by her husband into a coma. And this girl, Ramona Ko, she was the one! No, she was married, three kids, Glish teacher in the suburbs.
And what was this? A cell-mind trembling in the foreground, bursting with excitement, rushing, exploding, destroying all the other tiny minds around him. It was the girl! The one they wanted—they, who were they? It didn’t matter, they knew, they knew already he had found her; he had done it. She had made a call, called her mother and he had heard the voice, all the bits of data going through the line, and he knew the voice belonged to those eyes because all data was one, any form of information expressed as any other; a stream is a star is a tree is a limb is an arm or a drop of blood or a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, my God, no, God, he understood, understood everything!
In the climax of knowing he died—or at least his new self, his transformed self. He found himself, his old self, alone in a chair in a cold basement. He looked down and saw stumps where his legs should have been. He looked to his sides and saw similar stumps where once had been arms. The pain was coming now, the drugs, the blood, the bliss, all fading. He understood now. He had glimpsed the UausuaU—there was no doubt. He had seen into the dark and emerged sane, but he had paid the price in flesh—he knew now, there was always a price to be paid. This task was his task; it had always been his task, his gift from the Uau, his purpose to serve. He spat out the feeding tube. There was a tremor in his throat, a tickle, a vibration, traveling up to tremble on his lips. He burped, then he groaned, and he coughed. And then he laughed, a quick, harsh bark, and then another and another until he could no longer stop and the laughter raced madly out to echo through his tomb.
Chapter 3
It was a mistake, Ria thought, to go into the subway. She had taken the normal route, sliding through the oversized storm grate on Logan Boulevard, climbing down the iron spikes that some nameless hip had hammered into the walls, dropping carefully onto the cinder-block island—now practically submerged from the pounding rain—and then feeling her way along the wall until she came to the hatch that lead to the abandoned Logan Station. She had stepped carefully over the mounds of dozing elzi, careful not to even brush against the coat-hanger or chicken-wire antennae poking from their eyes or ears or throats. The boojie were afraid of the elzi, but to her they were a comfort. They were the canaries of the underground, their snores and growls and whimpers a sign that all was safe.
The dog had followed her, of course. She had thought the trip underground might shake it, but of course the dog wasn’t real and didn’t have to climb ladders or slide through grates or tippy-toe hop from cinder block to cinder block to find his way to Lo City. It was there, in the shadows, in the corner of her eye, prowling, watching her. It grew and shrank with the light. Black as a pit with golden eyes or suddenly gold with black eyes. It wasn’t a breed she had ever seen on vision but it looked maybe like the bastard freak of a wolf nailed down by a lion. Lately it had been growing larger, huge sometimes, like a parade balloon swelling to fill the streets and the terror would overtake her, a suffocating sense of impending and she would run, tear down the street, shoving the sneering boojie out of the way and confirming to all the world that she was indeed a crazy woman unfit to handle herself.
Fuck you, she thought at the dog. It stared at her from the shadows. You ruined my life.
It had appeared five years ago—was it really so long?—on her thirteenth birthday. Or was it fourteenth? Was it her birthday? She couldn’t recall. A birthday was no different than any other day back then unless it fell on a Friday and the free lunch program had cheesecake. She loved cheesecake. It had come in the same little plastic cups that all the other deserts had come in and she had licked it clean every Friday. Mom had called her fat, but that wasn’t true, she was skinny as a stick, which was what Derrick used to say, laughing at her, but it didn’t stop him from kissing her under the bleachers. Was that when the dog had first appeared? Under the bleachers with Derrick Wilson, between his sloppy tongue kisses and him grabbing her boob so hard it hurt? She had slapped him for that and then she’d let him do it again.
She wasn’t crazy though; she knew that. The dog was there, even if no one else could see it. Sometimes it left—but never because of the pills they gave her or the words they said, condescending—but it always came back. At first it was tiny, not a puppy, not cute or juvenile, just smaller, a little wiener-dog version of itself. At first she thought it was because of the acid or the pink powder that Bobby had given her that she later discovered was lolacaine, another sex drug, and he was just trying to get her to put out. Why was it that all the “nice” guys were just trying to wet their cocks? The only one she had even really liked was Cale—he was an asshole but at least he never made his plans a secret. He always brought over a bottle of sweet rum, and not the dollar store kind, and she’d let him touch her a few times, even use his tongue when she was feeling really foggy, but it felt better to shoot him down each time he thought he was going to score. Once he’d pinned her arms to the floor and told her he could just take it if he wanted and she’d said nothing, almost hoping that he would. But he pussied out and zipped up his shitty thrift-store jeans and slunk away.
It wasn’t the drugs though because she didn’t know a drug on the planet that made a tiny golden dog appear and follow you around for half your fucking life. At times she thought maybe she was mad, that maybe she had gone too far and peaked into the Uau and this was all her personal nightmare and she was actually rolling around in a pile of trash somewhere with a computer stapled to her forehead. But that seemed too far-fetched, too anti-climactic that the darkness driving all the poor sobs insane was a virtual pet simulator.
It was warm underground, and dry, but she had been soaked in the rain and she shivered. Up ahead was a flickering and she followed it to a group of four other hips huddling around a trash fire. She approached the group cautiously, holding up her hands and walking slowly so they didn’t mistake her for a hungry elzi. She saw them tense and then relax. Close to the fire she saw their faces, two boys, a girl, and one that was a toss up. They were older than her, except for the girl, who seemed very young to be hip. She must’ve ditched foster or a bad sit at home. Ria felt a surge of sympathy.
She took a seat on an old tire close to the fire but slightly apart from the rest. The others said nothing. They stared at the flames. Wordlessly, one of the older men withdrew a flask, took a long swig, and then passed it to his left. It went around and Ria drank gratefully; it was harsh in a good way, and she felt herself warming. She took off her jacket and lay it on a pile of bricks and subway tiles close to the flames.
“Bad nigh’,” the other man said. He could’ve been thirty or sixty. His face was shriveled and most of his teeth were gone. She guessed he’d been using a bit. His words had a chewy, gummy-like feel as though he couldn’t quite remember how to form them.
“Lossa rain,” he continued. No one could argue with this. Ria stared at the curving wall beyond the fire, enjoying the dancing shadows. It was quiet here; she liked it. She wondered how many other small groups like this were scattered throughout the station. There was a slight tremor, a few stones rolled; some dust fell from the ceiling. A train, probably, from another line, or one of the big dumb waiters bringing food to the distribution points. Could she get to there from here? There must be a way. Her stomach growled. The thought of all that food—still in its neat, pristine packaging—made her mouth water.
The dog was back. He stepped out of the shadows on the wall, stood in mid air and stared down the subway tunnel. Ria thought this might mean something, but she had resolved to ignore the dog. She could have lived with the dog, ignored it completely, if it hadn’t started killing people. That had caused her some problems, all her problems, really. The man at Lourdes, what was his name? Dr. Stermdrick? Stern Dick? Why not? He had said that she had started the fire, that she couldn’t remember it, that she was blaming her imaginary dog, but that wasn’t true! Sure, she had been drinking, but they seemed to think that meant she was drunk. She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.
The john had come at her, stiffed her, was going to kill her, maybe. He had his meaty hands locked on her throat, thrashing her, slamming her head into the car door, stars exploding in her face. She’d struggled and flailed her legs but he sat his fat hairy ass on her body and pinned her to the seat. She was ninety pounds with a meal in her and he was a fat fucking gorilla man that felt like a bus crushing her sternum. In the end he had broken two of her ribs and torn something in her gut that made blood show up every day of the month, and that was what forced her into the hospital in the first place.
Then there was the dog, two eyes in the shadows, growing, filling the van. The john letting go, the look of terror in his mongoloid eyes, the gooey sweat on his fat neck and the hole opening in his chest, like a fist-sized cigarette burn, and his scream. He was too big, she couldn’t get him off, and the hole widened and widened and burned away his mass, his chest, his face, his arms dropping off like sausages, and then her squirming out from under his melted belly and running into the night. It was the dog, she knew it was the dog, not her—how was she going to start a fire like that? How could she even get free? They didn’t care; they didn’t listen.
It was impossible to feel grateful to the dog, even though it had saved her life. It was too much, to burn a man alive that way, even if he did deserve it. It couldn’t have scared him away or pushed him off—if you can burn him, why can’t you do that? She didn’t feel safer after, merely hunted. She had killed a man, apparently; she was insane, dangerous. What would happen the next time she felt threatened? Was the dog going to vaporize anyone that came at her? Could it tell the difference between unease and terror? A good pain and a bad pain? A real threat from some dumb punk trying to snatch her purse? How much did the dog understand her?—because she didn’t understand the dog at all.
