On reflection, I’ve spent too much time reading dealers and their doors. Nobody needs to know this kind of junk unless they’re in the trade, and I keep my addictions on the legal side of the fence. I know I should put a call in, get this prick and his gear off the streets, but it’ll have to wait ’til after I get what I need.
As he reaches the door, I get up from the bench and start to make my way out of the urban “fauxasis.” Slowly. Don’t want him noticing me, but also don’t want the door to slam shut before I can get to it. He struggles with the key fob, refusing to let go of the bag, as if allowing it hang from his shoulder without two hands grasping it is a massive risk. I’m at the edge of the pavement, about to cross the road. Come on arsehole, open the damn door . . .
The fob meets the security panel, beeps. The door clicks as it unlocks. From my read, I know it’s about eight seconds from when someone enters to when it swings shut and the maglocks screw my day up.
A faster strut. He’s not looking over his shoulder now he’s inside. I burst into a jog, get across the road, back on the pavement, through the gate, and up the path, planting a boot just as the door is about to slam. Hold my breath. Stay perfectly still. Will he notice the latch didn’t meet the strike plate? Hopefully his opiate haze and thrill of success will keep him from turning back.
I wait a moment, just to be sure, then push the door open, keeping hold of it with my gloved hands as I enter, gently letting it swing back. I don’t want it slamming, don’t want his ears pricking up, letting him know that someone else has come in, set his paranoia bubbling away.
The hallway is dilapidated. Wallpaper curling down the walls, as if a giant was about to turn a page in a building-shaped book. The carpets are thin, patchy, stained. No one gives a damn about this place. The owner’s probably just in it for the rent cheques. This used to be a grand old house, that’s what I got from the read. Refined people used to live here—and now it’s filled with whatever scum can drop eight hundred a month. Six years ago, when I first moved to the city, the rent here was probably about half that, maybe less. You pretty much have to be a drug dealer to afford that now, or have a real job, I guess. This isn’t exactly a “real” job.
All these doors look alike. Four of them on this floor, stairs ahead lead up to another two floors, probably four or six apartments on each of those. I don’t want to have to read them all. This is where deduction comes in. Sherlock Holmes shit.
First door has a welcome mat. Who the hell has a welcome mat? Old couple, or hipsters being ironic. Second door is new, painted—someone trying to make a good first impression on whoever comes by. Definitely not my guy. Third still has the keys in the door. Bingo. Paranoia does not mean you’re smart.
I pull the black leather glove from my left hand. Take a moment, a breath, knowing that this is about to suck and probably leave me with a residual opiate hangover. He’ll have touched this door as much high as straight, maybe more so, and the former is going to kick my medulla in its balls.
Another breath. Readying myself. Exhale, stretching fingers out, and psyching myself up. Grit my teeth before I lay bare skin on the door.
*
There’s a jolt, a spasm up the spinal column, a punch at the base of the neck. Getting reads off inanimate objects isn’t so bad. It’s worse if the object is older. This door is cheap, a thin veneer posing as wood, ten years old at a push. Its earliest sense memories are of the factory it was made in, from a chimera of original materials, none of which make up enough of the surface area to retain anything from before that time.
I always go back to the first memory. It’s not intentional, it’s just how my sensitivity works. They say the first memory you pull in a read speaks volumes about you. If you go straight to a sexual experience or whatever, then I guess that makes sense. I go to the beginning of the story, get the full picture. Maybe that’s a refraction of myself. Who I became when the light hit the surface of this lake of watery bullshit.
The girl was here before her disappearance, and had been here regularly before that. She honestly didn’t seem the type from the photos or the way her parents talked about her. But what do parents know? All they see is their sweet little girl, pigtails and smiles, great grades at school. They don’t know her. Nobody ever knows anyone. Not like a sensitive can know them.
She didn’t want to show the cracks, let her doting folks see the stress she was under. When she first came here, she was just after something to help her concentrate. He dealt at the door back then, flogged whatever Adderall or Ritalin knockoff was cheap at the time. The more she visited, though, the more he took to her, the more he fantasized about her, the more he pushed on her to manipulate the situation. Pretty soon the deals were going on in the apartment. She was in and out in five minutes at first, then ten to fifteen, then longer, and longer. But that’s all the door can tell me.
*
I pull out of the read, lift my fingertips from the veneer. I’ve got everything I can from the door. There’s only so much of the story it was going to be able to tell. I turn the key in the lock and slowly, silently, lean my shoulder against it. Pushing it wider without making skin contact and getting lost in another read, knowing that the hinges will creak as their arc hits around thirty degrees.
I know that, because the sense memories are still floating around in my head, will be for a little while at least. They start to fade after contact is broken, with a shorter half-life than real memories. But they’re still there, time-mapped to my neural circuits, older ones vague, the newest crystal clear. Not just memories of the girl and her deals, but all the deals and all the girls. All the junkies. All the dealers. Not to mention neighbours banging their fists on it to complain about the noise. If someone touched the door, I’ve got the memory of it. Most of them are ignored, pushed down, like trying to forget an embarrassment or an ex. You know the memory is there, somewhere in the back of your mind, but you concentrate on anything else so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed. That’s an understatement. Most sensitives are completely fucking insane. Not so much the touch ones, like me. But the others—I don’t know how you could discover you’re a sight or sound sensitive and not lose your mind the first day in. Smell and taste sensitives are kinda on the middle ground, could go either way. That probably makes me one of the lucky ones.
Lucky. Jesus, people who say things like that can’t even comprehend this goddamn life.
Carpeting throughout the apartment, now that’s lucky. I can get a read on all the footfall and narratives without having to venture too deep into the flat, risk ending up on the wrong side of the guy’s steak knife. I bend down onto one knee and let my hand make contact with the scratchy, discoloured fibres.
*
The carpet doesn’t have sense memories from before the discount carpet warehouse, where it was priced it at fifty pence a square metre. The guy still felt like he was overcharging for it, given that his dog pissed all over the roll. There’s a nice memory of a close-up of a dachshund’s urethra, which I really don’t need floating around inside my head.
There are too many memories of scumbags who’ve trodden their shit-stained boots through here. Sensitivity is an art, not a science. You have to think of the memories as an extension of your own, but seeing as you don’t have context for the new memories, it becomes a game of finding a face and following that narrative thread as far as it will go until the next memory of the same person.
Found her. But it’s not pretty . . . When she was short on cash she offered herself to him. Handjobs at first, but soon she was part-exchanging pussy for a score. But that’s too far along. I’m missing something.
Door deals became hallways deals became sit-down-and-smoke deals. He filled her “prescription” for kiddie speed, hooked her up with weed for the come-down, gave her freebies of molly every now and then, convinced her to try crystal and crack.
She liked him.
I don’t get how, but she really did.
??
?What the fuck y’think y’doin, la?!” shouts a voice.
For a moment I wonder if it’s a memory. But deep down, I already know it’s not.
*
Pull my hand from the carpet, pull out of the sense memories, and look up. Shitbag junkie is standing over me. He’s wiry, twitchy, shifting on the balls of his feet like a kid that needs to go take a piss. He thinks he’s imposing, scary. He’s not. His words are slurred, slow. I could take him. Got twenty pounds of muscle on him, and I’m at least two and a half thoughts ahead. Could go for a shot to the balls and a head butt as he keels over. A quick glance to his crotch; dry semen crusted around the fly. Hit that with my ungloved fist and I’ll get a first-person view of the inside of his scrotum, until a load is shot clumsily into a sock. And the head butt would take me out for longer than it would him. Rather take the punch I see coming, his skinny shoulder swinging back, elbow cocking like the hammer of a short-range pistol made of bone. He doesn’t have the muscle mass to do serious damage. What’s another broken nose? Maybe it’ll fix the bend left by the last one.
The friends I have left tell me I get punched in the face too much. I like to think I get punched in the face just the right amount, and by the right people. All in the service of doing the job.
Don’t even feel his knuckles crunching into what’s left of the mangled cartilage that once used to be a proud, Semitic nose. As soon as his skin touches mine, I’m already reading him. And my head feels like it’s about to explode.
*
If reading inanimate objects was a knock at the door, reading people is having the door blown in by a rocket-propelled grenade. Electricity surges up the spine. it feels like it engorges, quickly starts ploughing away at the soft, squishy meat of the brain. A skull-fucking of rapid thrusts sending the entire body spasming as pulses of borrowed memories are woven over your own. Singeing fragile neural tissue with echoes of a life you never lived.
Neglect. That was his first memory. Abandonment. Then foster home after foster home, beaten and neglected some more. What a cliché. I should feel sorry for him, and I almost do—until I remember where he’s just been. Where he’s left the girl.
Totally worth a fist to the face.
3
He only hit me the once. Must have backed off as soon as I started seizing and hit the ground. Bet a little part of him is proud of that; he’ll spend the rest of his life telling the tale of how he knocked a guy unconscious and into a seizure with a single punch. Little does he know that he only needed to make the slightest skin contact to knock me to the floor and turn me into a human vibrator with a twenty-three-second battery life.
It’s always twenty-three seconds, across the board for all sensitives. Nobody on the forums or message boards knows why, but they’re rife with speculation. Twenty-three is a number loved and obsessed over by conspiracy theorists. It’s Robert Anton Wilson’s fault. He brought it into public perception after hearing a story about it from William S. Burroughs. As much as I love the idea of some magical and mystical reason for our skin-contact seizures lasting twenty-three seconds, chances are it’s just a coincidence. You look for anything hard enough and you’re going to see it everywhere.
I come to in the hallway, groggy, the ephemera of every drug he’s ever taken coursing through my system. Right boot is half-off my foot; he must have dragged me out of his flat whilst I was doing the horizontal shimmy and shake. I consider knocking on his door, telling him it’s not good practice to move someone when they’re having a seizure, but that isn’t important now. His memories are still mingled with my own, and I’ve got to get the hell out of here.
Pulling my glove back on, I leave his building and call Mary, the girl’s mother. The glove has some dull memories to impart of its time in my pocket since I took it off, as does the phone as I hold it to my ear. With inanimates that stay in close proximity, the first touch is full of memories, but following touches are essentially status updates, short bursts of the moments since contact was last made.
Again, there’s no science to it—no real science at least. “Psientists” have claimed it’s something to do with morphic fields, but most others have pretty much called bullshit.
Mary answers on the first ring. She’s been my contact through this whole show. As far as I can tell, the father’s been near-catatonic since the girl disappeared. Blames himself, I reckon. Although, curiously, he wouldn’t let me shake his hand. His wife had nothing to hide. Nothing of consequence at least, just a little shame that she has a closer relationship to her Hitachi than her husband. I always find it suspicious when a person who’s come to me with a problem doesn’t want to be read. But I get it. Privacy is a big deal these days. And whilst it’s one thing for a faceless corporation to know what posts you like and what porn you watch, it’s another thing to be face-to-face with someone who knows literally all the secrets you’ve held through your entire life. He didn’t have anything to do with his daughter’s disappearance, that’s clear, but I’m pretty sure he’s having an affair. Not that it’s my business. Not unless the wife comes back to make it my business.
“Mister Ballard . . .Have you found her?” There’s a tremble in her voice. Sounds like she’s either been crying or is about to cry.
“I think I know where she is,” I say, trying to think of the nicest way to put the situation. “We’re going to need to . . . barter for her.”
“Barter?” The word croaks over short, shallow breaths.
I didn’t phrase that well. Need to be more careful about the words I use. “I know this is hard to take in, especially over the phone, but Lisa was . . .” Take a breath, don’t want this to sound like a tabloid headline. “She was a drug user, and fell in with the wrong people.” Not much better, sounds like a damn public information film. She’s crying now. There had to be a better way to lay it out. Idiot. “She’s being held as collateral for a deal. But we can get her back.”
I pause whilst she takes it in and gets over the flurry of emotion. No point shovelling more shit on the pile if she’s not in a fit state to absorb the situation, let alone what needs to be done next.
As I wait for the crying to stop, I start walking back down the street, hanging a right at the main road and walking round the block. The dealer’s house is only five minutes away. I can do recon whilst she composes herself.
The street is full of kids. Three universities in the vicinity, all of these teens and twenty-somethings living in a world of obnoxious ignorance. No clue of the scum and bullshit that lie just feet away from their self-involved conversations, stressing over relationships and exams and homework. Like that will actually matter in a year or two when they have a useless piece of paper that declares them an expert in pop-culture references of the 1970s through the 1980s. They’re going to get a big shock when they realise there are fifteen hundred applicants for every job out there, and after three years and twenty-one grand, all they’re qualified for is standing in line for jobseeker’s allowance.
“How much do we need?” she asks. I had almost forgotten I was holding the phone to my ear, waiting for her to fight through the tears.
“Two thousand,” I say. “Can you get that together today?”
She sniffs, breath heavy, through quivering lips. “Of course,” she says. “Whatever it takes.”
“I’ll text you an address,” I tell her. “And act as intermediary. You don’t need to meet these people, don’t need to see how they’ve been treating her.”
“I want to . . .” she starts.
“No,” I say, insistent. “You really don’t.”
4
I sit outside at a café, round the corner from the house where the girl’s being held.
Lisa. I keep thinking of her as “the girl,” trying to take the human out of the equation. Make it about a theoretical entity rather than a person, a daughter, a three-dimensional human being. Building a wall of separation, trying to keep emotion from becoming involved, even if it’s only vicarious emotion I b
orrowed from my read of the mother. If she’s a person, if her parents are anything but clients, if I empathise, then it becomes more than just a job. It becomes personal. Being attached clouds judgement, that’s why I want the mother meeting me here, rather than outside the house. Who knows what idiot thing she’d do if she was shown where her daughter was being held. Not that she seems like a stupid person, but even the smart ones do stupid things. Especially when they’re overcome by emotion.
If there’s one good thing to come out of the loneliness and isolation that stems from my sensitivity, and “good” is relative here, it’s an increasing lack of emotion. Or should that be a decreasing amount of emotion? A utilitarian calm pervades all situations, almost robot-like. When I first noticed it, I thought I must have had a stroke at some point in the night. Then I put it down to adult-onset autism. Neither were true, and both were vaguely humorous distractions. In truth, I knew all along. It was the sensitivity.
We all have it. The forums are awash with other sensitives trying to come up with explanations, as if knowing why we’re emotionally numb makes a damn bit of difference. I make the most of it, though . . . Whilst it’s not great for a normal, it’s the perfect state for a PI who’s suddenly found himself in the role of negotiator. And as soon as I walk into the building, that’s all I’ll be.
As I bring the takeout cup to my lips, I relive its creation, packaging, unpacking, and stacking. The searing shot of coffee boils my insides as it pours out of the machine, joined by boiling water filling me up to the brim, steam licking under my skin. It’s recycled, biodegradable. A short life repeated over and over. The karmic cycle in microcosm. Made of myriad pulps, each with their own personalities, lives lived to various lengths, but only fragments are present in this current iteration. My tongue takes in the recent sense memories of the water and grounds, but they don’t go back further than when the coffee was brewed. I’m fortunate in that regard; experiencing the water cycle from the dawn of time is not what I need right now.