At the corner people had halted for the sign to say WALK instead of DON’T WALK; cars were making wild left turns. But the girl continued on, fast but with dignity, threading her path among the nut-o cars. The drivers glared at her with indignation. She didn’t appear to notice.
“Donna!” When the sign flashed WALK he hurried across after her and caught up with her. She declined to run but merely walked rapidly. “Aren’t you Bob’s old lady?” he said. He managed to get in front of her to examine her face.
“No,” she said. “No.” She came toward him, directly at him; he retreated backward, because she held a short knife pointed at his stomach. “Get lost,” she said, continuing to move forward without slowing or hesitating.
“Sure you are,” he said. “I met you at his place.” He could hardly see the knife, only a tiny section of blade metal, but he knew it was there. She would stab him and walk on. He continued to retreat backward, protesting. The girl held the knife so well concealed that probably no one else, the others walking along, could notice. But he did; it was going right at him as she approached without hesitation. He stepped aside, then, and the girl traveled on, in silence.
“Jeez!” he said to the back of her. I know it’s Donna, he thought. She just doesn’t flash on who I am, that she knows me. Scared, I guess; scared I’m going to hustle her. You got to be careful, he thought, when you come to a strange chick on the street; they’re all prepared now. Too much has happened to them.
Funky little knife, he thought. Chicks shouldn’t carry those; any guy could turn her wrist and the blade back on her any time he wanted. I could have. If I really wanted to get her. He stood there, feeling angry. I know that was Donna, he thought.
As he started to go back toward his parked car, he realized that the girl had halted, out of the movement of passers-by, and now stood silently gazing at him.
He walked cautiously toward her. “One night,” he said, “me and Bob and another chick had some old Simon and Garfunkel tapes, and you were sitting there—” She had been filling capsules with high-grade death, one by one, painstakingly. For over an hour. El Primo. Numero Uno: Death. After she had finished she had laid a cap on each of them and they had dropped them, all of them together. Except her. I just sell them, she had said. If I start dropping them I eat up all my profits.
The girl said, “I thought you were going to knock me down and bang me.”
“No,” he said. “I just wondered if you …”He hesitated. “Like, wanted a ride. On the sidewalk?” he said, startled. “In broad daylight?”
“Maybe in a doorway. Or pull me into a car.”
“I know you,” he protested. “And Arctor would snuff me if I did that.”
“Well, I didn’t recognize you.” She came toward him three steps. “I’m sorta nearsighted.”
“You ought to wear contacts.” She had, he thought, lovely large dark warm eyes. Which meant she wasn’t on junk.
“I did have. But one fell out into a punch bowl. Acid punch, at a party. It sank to the bottom, and I guess someone dipped it up and drank it. I hope it tasted good; it cost me thirty-five dollars, originally.”
“You want a ride where you’re going?”
“You’ll bang me in the car.”
“No,” he said, “I can’t get it on right now, these last couple of weeks. It must be something they’re adulterating all the stuff with. Some chemical.”
“That’s a neat-o line, but I’ve heard it before. Everybody bangs me.” She amended that. “Tries to, anyhow. That’s what it’s like to be a chick. I’m suing one guy in court right now, for molestation and assault. We’re asking punitive damages in excess of forty thousand.”
“How far’d he get?”
Donna said, “Got his hand around my boob.”
“That isn’t worth forty thousand.”
Together, they walked back toward his car.
“You got anything to sell?” he asked. “I’m really hurting. I’m virtually out, in fact, hell, I am out, come to think of it. Even a few, if you could spare a few.”
“I can get you some.”
“Tabs,” he said. “I don’t shoot up.”
“Yes.” She nodded intently, head down. “But, see, they’re real scarce right now—the supply’s temporarily dried up. You probably discovered that already. I can’t get you very many, but—”
“When?” he broke in. They had reached his car; he halted, opened the door, got in. On the far side Donna got in. They sat side by side.
“Day after tomorrow,” Donna said. “If I can git ahold of this guy. I think I can.”
Shit, he thought. Day after tomorrow. “No sooner? Not like, say, tonight?”
“Tomorrow at the earliest.”
“How much?”
“Sixty dollars a hundred.”
“Oh, Jeez,” he said. “That’s a burn.”
“They’re super good. I’ve got them from him before; they’re really not what you usually buy into. Take my word for it—they’re worth it. Actually, I prefer to get them from him rather than from anybody else—when I can. He doesn’t always have them. See, he just took a trip down south, I guess. He just got back. He picked them up himself, so I know they’re good for sure. And you don’t have to pay me in advance. When I get them. Okay? I trust you.”
“I never front,” he said.
“Sometimes you have to.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then can you get me at least a hundred?” He tried to figure, rapidly, how many he could get; in two days he probably could raise one hundred twenty dollars and get two hundred tabs from her. And if he ran across a better deal in the meantime, from other people who were holding, he could forget her deal and buy from them. That was the advantage of never fronting, that plus never being burned.
“It’s lucky for you that you ran into me,” Donna said as he started up his car and backed out into traffic. “I’m supposed to see this one dude in about an hour, and he’d probably take all I could get … you’d have been out of luck. This was your day.” She smiled, and he did too.
“I wish you could get them sooner,” he said.
“If I do …” Opening her purse, she got out a little note pad and a pen that had SPARKS BATTERY TUNE-UP stamped on it. “How do I get hold of you, and I forget your name.”
“Charles B. Freck,” he said. He told her his phone number—not his, really, but the one he made use of at a straight friend’s house, for messages like this—and laboriously she wrote it down. What difficulty she had writing, he thought. Peering and slowly scrawling … They don’t teach the chicks jack shit in school any more, he thought. Flat-out illiterate. But foxy. So she can’t hardly read or write; so what? What matters with a fox is nice tits.
“I think I remember you,” Donna said. “Sort of. It’s all hazy, that night; I was really out of it. All I definitely remember was getting the powder into those little caps—Librium caps—we dumped the original contents. I must have dropped half. I mean, on the floor.” She gazed at him meditatively as he drove. “You seem like a mellow dude,” she said. “And you’ll be in the market later on? After a while you’ll want more?”
“Sure,” he said, wondering to himself if he could beat her price by the time he saw her again; he felt he could, most likely. Either way he won. That is, either way he scored.
Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.
The day outside the car, and all the busy people, the sunlight and activity, streamed past unnoticed; he was happy.
Look what he had found by chance—because, in fact, a black-and-white had accidentally paced him. An unexpected new supply of Substance D. What more could he ask out of life? He could probably now count on two weeks lying ahead of him, nearly half a month, before he croaked or nearly croaked—withdrawing from Substance D made the two the same. Two weeks! His heart soared, and he smelled, for a moment, coming in from the open windows of the car, the brief excitement of spring.
“Want to go with me to see Jerry Fabin
?” he asked the girl. “I’m taking a load of his things over to him at the Number Three Federal Clinic, where they took him last night. I’m just carting over a little at a time, because there’s a chance he might get back out and I don’t want to have to drag it all back.”
“I’d better not see him,” Donna said.
“You know him? Jerry Fabin?”
“Jerry Fabin thinks I contaminated him originally with those bugs.”
“Aphids.”
“Well, then he didn’t know what they were. I better stay away. Last time I saw him he got really hostile. It’s his receptor sites, in his brain, at least I think so. It seems like it, from what the government pamphlets say now.”
“That can’t be restored, can it?” he said.
“No,” Donna said. “That’s irreversible.”
“The clinic people said they’d let me see him, and they said they believed he could work some, you know—” He gestured. “Not be—” Again he gestured; it was hard to find words for that, what he was trying to say about his friend.
Glancing at him, Donna said, “You don’t have speech-center damage, do you? In your—what is it called?—occipital lobe.”
“No,” he said. Vigorously.
“Do you have any kind of damage?” She tapped her head.
“No, it’s just … you know. I have trouble saying it about those fucking clinics; I hate the Neural-Aphasia Clinics. One time I was there visiting a guy, he was trying to wax a floor— they said he couldn’t wax the floor, I mean he couldn’t figure out how to do it … What got me was he kept trying. I mean not just for like an hour; he was still trying a month later when I came back. Just like he had been, over and over again, when I first saw him there, when I first went to visit him. He couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get it right. I remember the look on his face. He was sure he’d get it right if he kept trying to flash on what he was doing wrong. ‘What am I doing wrong?’ he kept asking them. There was no way to tell him. I mean, they told him—hell, I told him—but he still couldn’t figure it out.”
“The receptor sites in his brain are what I’ve read usually goes first,” Donna said placidly. “Someone’s brain where he’s gotten a bad hit or like that, like too heavy.” She was watching the cars ahead. “Look, there’s one of those new Porsches with two engines.” She pointed excitedly. “Wow.”
“I knew a guy who hot-wired one of those new Porsches,” he said, “and got it out on the Riverside Freeway and pushed it up to one seventy-five—wipe-out.” He gestured. “Right into the ass of a semi. Never saw it, I guess.” In his head he ran a fantasy number: himself at the wheel of a Porsche, but noticing the semi, all the semis. And everyone on the freeway—the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour—noticing him. Noticing him for sure, the lanky big-shouldered good-looking dude in the new Porsche going two hundred miles an hour, and all the cops’ faces hanging open helplessly.
“You’re shaking,” Donna said. She reached over and put her hand on his arm. A quiet hand that he at once responded to. “Slow down.”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I was up two nights and two days counting bugs. Counting them and putting them in bottles. And finally when we crashed and got up and got ready the next morning to put the bottles in the car, to take to the doctor to show him, there was nothing in the bottles. Empty.” He could feel the shaking now himself, and see it in his hands, on the wheel, the shaking hands on the steering wheel, at twenty miles an hour. “Every fucking one,” he said. “Nothing. No bugs. And then I realized, I fucking realized. It came to me, about his brain, Jerry’s brain.”
The air no longer smelled of spring and he thought, abruptly, that he urgently needed a hit of Substance D; it was later in the day than he had realized, or else he had taken less than he thought. Fortunately, he had his portable supply with him, in the glove compartment, way back. He began searching for a vacant parking slot, to pull over.
“Your mind plays tricks,” Donna said remotely; she seemed to have withdrawn into herself, gone far away. He wondered if his erratic driving was bumming her. Probably so.
Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent: He saw, first, a big parked Pontiac with a bumper jack on the back of it that was slipping and a kid around thirteen with long thatched hair struggling to hold the car from rolling, meanwhile yelling for assistance. He saw himself and Jerry Fabin running out of the house together, Jerry’s house, down the beer-can-littered driveway to the car. Himself, he grabbed at the car door on the driver’s side to open it, to stomp the brake pedal. But Jerry Fabin, wearing only his pants, without even shoes, his hair all disarranged and streaming—he had been sleeping—Jerry ran past the car to the back and knocked, with his bare pale shoulder that never saw the light of day, the boy entirely away from the car. The jack bent and fell, the rear of the car crashed down, the tire and wheel rolled away, and the boy was okay.
“Too late for the brake,” Jerry panted, trying to get his ugly greasy hair from his eyes and blinking. “No time.”
“ ‘S he okay?” Charles Freck yelled. His heart still pounded.
“Yeah.” Jerry stood by the boy, gasping. “Shit!” he yelled at the boy in fury. “Didn’t I tell you to wait until we were doing it with you? And when a bumper jack slips—shit, man, you can’t hold back five thousand pounds!” His face writhed. The boy, little Ratass, looked miserable and twitched guiltily. “I repeatedly and repeatedly told you!”
“I went for the brake,” Charles Freck explained, knowing his idiocy, his own equal fuckup, great as the boy’s and equally lethal. His failure as a full-grown man to respond right. But he wanted to justify it anyhow, as the boy did, in words. “But now I realize—” he yammered on, and then the fantasy number broke off; it was a documentary rerun, actually, because he remembered the day when this had happened, back when they were all living together. Jerry’s good instinct—otherwise Ratass would have been under the back of the Pontiac, his spine smashed.
The three of them plodded gloomily back toward the house, not even chasing the tire and wheel, which was still rolling off.
“I was asleep,” Jerry muttered as they entered the dark interior of the house. “It’s the first time in a couple weeks the bugs let up enough so I could. I haven’t got any sleep at all for five days—I been runnin’ and runnin’. I thought they were maybe gone; they’ve been gone. I thought they finally gave up and went somewhere else, like next door and out of the house entirely. Now I can feel them again. That tenth No Pest Strip I got, or maybe it’s the eleventh—they cheated me again, like they did with all the others.” But his voice was subdued now, not angry, just low and perplexed. He put his hand on Ratass’s head and gave him a sharp smack. “You dumb kid—when a bumper jack slips get the hell out of there. Forget the car. Don’t ever get behind it and try to push back against all that mass and block it with your body.”
“But, Jerry, I was afraid the axle—”
“Fuck the axle. Fuck the car. It’s your life.” They passed on through the dark living room, the three of them, and the rerun of a now gone moment winked out and died forever.
2
“Gentlemen of the Anaheim Lions Club,” the man at the microphone said, “we have a wonderful opportunity this afternoon, for, you see, the County of Orange has provided us with the chance to hear from—and then put questions to and of—an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.” He beamed, this man wearing his pink waffle-fiber suit and wide plastic yellow tie and blue shirt and fake leather shoes; he was an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there was little or nothing to be happy about.
Watching him, the undercover narcotics agent felt nausea.
“Now, you will notice,” the Lions Club host said, “that you can barely see this individual, who is seated directly to my right, because he is wearing what is called a scramble suit, which is the exact same suit he wears—and in fact must wear—during certain parts, in fact most, of his daily
activities of law enforcement. Later he will explain why.”
The audience, which mirrored the qualities of the host in every possible way, regarded the individual in his scramble suit.
“This man,” the host declared, “whom we will call Fred, because this is the code name under which he reports the information he gathers, once within the scramble suit, cannot be identified by voice, or by even technological voiceprint, or by appearance. He looks, does he not, like a vague blur and nothing more? Am I right?” He let loose a great smile. His audience, appreciating that this was indeed funny, did a little smiling on their own.
The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell Laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers. He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one night, having administered to himself an IV injection considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a disastrous drop in the GABA fluid of his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings.
For about six hours, entranced, S. A. Powers had watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flash-cut speed, and then he had been treated to Paul Klees, more than the painter had painted during his entire lifetime. S. A. Powers, now viewing Modigliani paintings replace themselves at furious velocity, had conjectured (one needs a theory for everything) that the Rosicrucians were telepathically beaming pictures at him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an advanced order; but then, when Kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum at Leningrad specialized in just such nonobjective moderns, and decided that the Soviets were attempting telepathically to contact him.
In the morning he remembered that a drastic drop in the GABA-fluid of the brain normally produced such phosphene activity; nobody was trying telepathically, with or without microwave boosting, to contact him. But it did give him the idea for the scramble suit. Basically, his design consisted of a multifaced quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.