By Jeffrey Thomas
. Prague wasn't required to paint his toenails the same color as his fingernails, but he believed that his attention to such details was what had earned him his rank at the Registry of Faces in the first place. His fingernail color – dark brown – was a visual indication of that rank.
With his recently acquired promotion and increased salary had come his decision to move out of his one room in a boarding house for men, and take this two-room apartment instead. At least his new apartment had its own toilet. That was the second room. The first was a combination livingroom/kitchenette, the two sections being partly partitioned by a counter top. His sofa folded out into a bed. It was on the edge of the bed that he sat with cotton balls between his toes, the smell of the nail polish seeming to shellac the interiors of his nostrils. It was giving him a deep and intensely focused pain just behind his right eyebrow.
To exacerbate this headache, there was a lime green light flashing at him from the corner of his eye in a kind of fluorescent semaphore. He looked up at it directly, in annoyance, to see what was silently clamoring for his attention.
Prague's flat was made more affordable because it featured advertising screens on much of its available wall space. One entire wall was a single great billboard, but most of the other screens were smaller, generally rectangular in shape but with a few squares and ovals. These banners were ranked one above the other, and end to end, from floor to ceiling. There were none on the ceiling or floor, though his landlord had shown him one of those flats (even more affordable, but Prague had felt vertiginous and vaguely guilty walking across the huge smiling face of a pretty girl advertising colored eye dyes).
His landlord had advised him not to block too many of the banners with an overabundance of furniture, but Prague only had his couch/bed, one worn armchair, and a small kitchen table with one chair, in any case. He had positioned the armchair, kitchen set and even the sofa away from the walls. He had been instructed that he could hang no pictures of his own over the advertisements, and was prohibited from hiding them with hangings or screens. His landlord had reassured him that when he went to sleep at night, a sensor would take note and the banners would be extinguished.
Some of the banners remained fixed in content, while others were animated or alternated their subject matter on rotation. The large billboard ran a continuous loop of a pretty naked couple running across black volcanic beach sand and falling down together laughing noiselessly, close to the camera. Then some type appeared, promoting Rantac, a popular mood control medication.
But the lime green that spiked Prague's skull and turned his eye was an oblong banner close to the ceiling, near to the kitchen section. That color was atrocious – too bright, too unnatural. An invented color, not one evolved in nature. Lime was just the best he could think of to describe it.
Against this green flashing field were simply the words, in bold black caps: IT'S OK TO EAT!
A public service announcement, he decided... probably against excessive dieting, or fast-paced workers not taking the time. Or maybe it was an error, an incomplete message, a broken loop for some restaurant. He had seen glitches in the banners before. One banner for dog food that had previously shown a dog running got stuck so that the dog seemed to be twitching in one spot in an electrified spasm, his tongue hanging out. And one morning just as Prague awoke, and the sensor turned on the light and color in a riot around him, an overly-amplified voice had boomed out from one of the screens. The voice had shouted, "Velvetdew – because you both deserve it!"
He had been shown, but declined, an even more affordable apartment where the advertisements took turns speaking and playing music. But he had not complained about this isolated episode to his landlord, as it had not been repeated, and M. Prague wasn't one to readily voice complaint, anyway – another reason why, he felt, he had been given his promotion at the Registry of Faces.
The light of the morning sun, however diffused by the gray winding sheet of the sky, made M. Prague squint when he emerged from his tenement building to walk to his bus stop. He tucked his chin to his chest against the morning chill and started on his way. He wanted to be early. He had never been late. He was terrified of being late. What if the bus came too soon and he missed it, or not soon enough, and he arrived tardy at the Registry of Faces? He quickened his pace.
The city reared around him in a forest of black stalagmites. Chimneys stout or slim jutted, loomed or tottered in profusion. Indeed, the leaning tapered buildings themselves seemed like the immense crumbling chimneys of vaster structures unseen beneath street level. The gray sky rippled with invisible vapors from the many lofty openings, as if a multitude of souls escaped from a ranked army of the dying.
A white form snaked between Prague's legs as he darted along the warped sidewalk. He almost stumbled. The sensuous coiling of a cat, he thought. A white cat. He shot a look over his shoulder, saw it hadn't been a cat. The ghost of a cat, maybe: the luminous white form was lifting into the air, wriggling eel-like, a tatter of ectoplasm. Prague faced front again and walked even faster.
As he approached a street intersection, nearly at his stop now, more of those white swimming forms emerged from around the corner, directly in front of him. His pace faltered, but before he could duck into a doorway or cross the street to avoid them, the glowing fish-like shapes swarmed around him. They were more like fish skeletons than fish – bare, plucked things. He realized, then, that they were words. Holographic ads, sent out like carrier pigeons. Were they meant to flock together like this or should they have dispersed? He blinked, batted at them, though of course he made no contact. An attractive woman with a bloodred kerchief framing her face smirked at him in a way he didn't like, but he averted his eyes from her and continued on his way.
Only a few of the ghostly ads, rippling like flags, persisted in following him, harassing him, now that they had his scent. He did his best not to give them the satisfaction of a look, but at last he glanced at the nearest of them and took in its message:
STAR EST CONTROL
It took him several moments to digest this. He might not have interpreted its meaning, had he not been familiar with an extermination service named Star Pest Control, not far from his office. A closer inspection of the other floating banners behind and around him confirmed that all of them were similarly defective, maimed, missing the "P" in "Pest". Was nothing ever whole, untainted?
Prague had rounded the corner now, and lost all but one tenacious banner, luckily falling behind him. He saw his bus stop ahead. The bus wasn't there – was that good or bad? Nestled up to the curb almost in the bus's space was a truck that carried a trash dumpster on its back – either picking up a full one or dropping off an empty one. Prague was distressed; was there room enough for the bus to pull in? He should see if a constable were about, and complain.
The dumpster was painted a vivid red, and it had an opening at its end, which faced Prague. A tarp was pinned over the opening, hanging down a bit in the middle so that over the top of it he could see the black of the metal box's interior. The sagging tarp was colored the exact same red as the metal body of the dumpster – thus, Prague had at first mistaken the rumpled tarp for a badly damaged metal door, crumpled in some terrible impact. The illusion didn't trouble him much, but the color was a bit offensive to him – too loud, too strong.
But even as he approached the truck, it gave a hiss and a rumble and pulled away from the curb, entering into traffic. Taking his spot of sidewalk, the precise spot he claimed every morning, he watched the red dumpster wind its way amongst the smaller, darker, beetlelike vehicles of other workers on their morning migration. Why must a dumpster announce itself so garishly? That red was appalling.
He waited ten minutes for the bus. It came on time. Prague's bunched shoulders lowered ever so slightly. While waiting, he had alternated between glancing at his pocket watch and stealing peeks at a young couple waiting for the bus beside him. Well, perhaps they weren't a romantic couple, maybe just co-workers. Both wore charcoal-colored baggy suits. Hers looked a bit frayed, like her hair. Bottom rung clerks, he inwardly sneered. And he flicked his eyes to the fore again when the man touched the woman's arm in the midst of their conversation. Very unbecoming, such obvious flirtation.
When the bus pulled up with a great belch of wavering invisible vapor, Prague checked to see if the solitary banner still hounded him. No sign of it. Relieved, he boarded the bus, mounting its steps directly behind the woman in the worn suit. He took a deep inhalation, and caught the scent of her jagged hair.
The black beach sand clung to their pale, youthful flesh with its sheen of healthy sweat, like obsidian pulverized to powder, as if the young naked couple lay embracing in the ash of a vaporized city. This city. They laughed noiselessly as the huge banner screen superimposed text over them which advertised RANTAC – TO KEEP YOU IN BALANCE.
Though he lay in his foldout sofabed, beneath the covers, the banners had not yet extinguished themselves because Prague was not asleep. His hand worked rhythmically under his blanket, so that it looked like the rolling waves at the edge of that obsidian beach. His eyes were more fixed on the girl tonight. Sometimes he focused more on the equally perfect young man.
Before the laughing, embracing couple could actually begin to make love, they were gone...only to appear once again on the horizon, running toward the camera – toward Prague – hand in hand. Her breasts bounced. The man's member flopped. Prague's eyes and mouth were open like a dead man's. Only his hand moved.
But soon enough he turned away in disgust, closed his eyes against the screen and the profusion of smaller banners, curling himself in a fetal position and drawing the edge of the blanket over his head. Until he actually fell asleep, the banners would glow, and their glow kept him from sleep. He wished he had a button to shut them all off. He felt their colored gaze on him. He heard the soundless laughter of that too-perfect, too-happy couple.
His new desk at the Registry of Faces was inclined slightly like a drafting table, with a strip of buttons and dials along either side of a large monitor screen set in a circular frame of glossy cherry wood. His desk was in a cubicle like a tiny apartment flat without a ceiling. Its walls were empty but for a few memos; he frowned upon the unprofessional decor in his neighbors' cubicles. One woman had a calendar of naked men with dogs' heads superimposed onto their necks. This woman had an irritating laugh, and talked too much, and Prague wondered how she had ever achieved her status. She didn't even paint her nails with the color of her office rank, used a lurid blood red instead.
He tuned out her chatter, and the loud coughing of a man in one of the cubicles that were suspended from the ceiling and accessed by a complex catwalk system. (There were three levels of these suspended cubicles; Prague was afraid that one day, the cubicle nearest to the high ceiling would tear free, and crash into the one directly below it, and so on, sending a whole train of cubicles down upon his head.) He blocked out all else, kept his eyes focused on the circular monitor, watching a succession of photographed faces. Each visage lingered before him for ten seconds unless he altered the rate or paused it entirely.
Because he was presently viewing a succession of Oriental women, the Caucasian woman took him by surprise. Not that he thought all Oriental women looked the same. One's face would be narrow, the next one's broad, long hair, short hair, but there was a sameness in that they were all female, all dark-haired, all almond-eyed, so that sometimes it seemed it was one single Oriental woman whose head was pulsing and undulating, ceaselessly molding itself.
But what also surprised him about this Caucasian intruder was that hers was obviously the face of a dead woman.
He touched a button to pause the image.
The source of her injuries – assuming she hadn't died of disease – was not apparent, but there was no mistaking the milky emptiness of the staring eyes, the slack but frozen gape of her mouth. The photograph was a poor one, the color dull, the focus a touch off, unlike the clarity of the ones he had been viewing. All those almond eyes gazing directly at him. These eyes looked off to the side, to an oblivion just over his shoulder.
It was misfiled, that was all. A clerical mistake.
Prague glanced furtively over his shoulder, as if to see what the young, pretty dead woman was staring at. He then faced forward again, darted his hand out and flicked a metal toggle. The photograph of the dead woman was deleted from the file, and replaced with the next solemn Oriental face.
He was dreaming. The banners were dark, but he was still being watched...
In the dream, he was naked, and much thinner than he should be – nearly skeletal. He was trudging across a desert of endless flatness, a desert of fine black glittering powder, with no ocean in sight. He was pulling something heavy behind him. The hissing of this burden across the sand was deafening.
He was pulling an entire city behind him, as if it were built upon a vast sled. And this black, jagged city was connected to his head, as if it were an immense tumor that had emanated from his very body. It was tethered to the back of his head by a thick cord of flesh, pulled taut but not tearing. He leaned his whole body forward with the effort, dragging the city onward...onward...
He couldn't turn his head to see the city behind him. Or perhaps he was simply forbidden to do so. Or afraid. But somehow he knew that there was a figure standing in every doorway, a face pressed to each and every window in every tottering tower. He sensed infinite sets of eyes, all staring directly at him. And he pulled all these eyes along behind him...across the barren landscape...
When the bus pulled up to the curb this morning, the banner that ran the length of it said YOU'LL BE SORRY.
Sorry, if what? Prague wondered. He had missed the start of the message...either that, or a glitch prevented the rest of it from playing. The banner went dark after that. If the message resumed, he was already on the bus by then.
Sorry if he didn't buy this product? Subscribe to that service? Take this pharmaceutical?
As the bus jolted into movement once more, and Prague was rocked in his seat, he noticed that he hadn't seen that couple again, who were either romantically involved or coworkers or both – the young man, and the girl with the frayed suit and hair.
A peripheral movement caught his eye. It looked like snow, or a drift of dandelion seeds. He looked out his smeared, blurred window and saw the insectlike swarm of freefloating ads for Star Pest Control again. They were outdistanced so quickly that he couldn't tell if the "P" had been restored in them. He found himself sinking down in his seat a bit, as if afraid they would see him in the bus, and give chase.
Today it was a succession of children's faces. Some looked ready to laugh, others to cry. Most looked serious and resigned. Then, suddenly in their midst, the face of a man with his eyes gouged out.
His face had been washed afterwards, so there was no blood. Perhaps that made it worse. Yawning eyes contrasting horribly with the calm, closelipped mouth. He was young, had apparently been good-looking.
How could anyone be so careless as to allow these files to become improperly inserted this way? Perhaps it was the rednailed ninny in the neighboring booth.
His heart still trotted from the shock. Prague flicked a look over his shoulder, then up at the vertical stack of cubicles above him, then hunched over the monitor as if to blot it with his body and flipped the toggle to erase the image... but even as it vanished, replaced by the glum features of a little red-haired boy, he regretted not studying the photo a moment or two longer. Maybe it was only because he had been thinking about the man that very morning, but in that last second he had imagined the murdered man and the young man he had seen at the bus stop were one and the same.
And if so, did that make the woman...
He wouldn't allow himself to complete the thought. It was not them. Why would it be?
But for the rest of the afternoon, Prague had to slow the rate of faces down from ten seconds to thirty seconds each, thus getting behind in his work – which he had never done before – because he found it hard to focus on the countenances passing before him. He kept seeing two other faces, superimposed by his memory.
He stood at the counter that partially divided the one large room of his flat into the illusion of two. He was slicing the end off a loaf of bread, but found its crust hard and flaking, the interior crunchy. Stale. He set down the knife beside the bread, and for a moment lost himself in the way a luminous banner was reflected in the bright metal. Backwards words advertised a new lipstick. Gray and blue were the hues in fashion. A woman's blue lips parted on the surface of the blade.
Abruptly, as if he had peripherally sensed a change, he thrust his gaze up at the one large billboard that advertised Rantac. A new advertisement showed there instead. He was so accustomed to the old ad that the new image before him blanked his mind and transfixed his eyes, like an animal caught in headlights.
On the huge banner there was a red wall, and in the center of this red – metal – wall was an opening. A dark doorway. It appeared as if a metal panel had been dented and twisted and wrenched away from that doorway, but in fact it was simply that a red-colored tarp had been hung across the opening, and it sagged down in the middle, showing just the top of the black recess behind it.
There was no text. No movement. Just this. But no...was there a dim white glow, after all, moving in the blackness behind the drooping tarpaulin? Yes...yes, there was. A vague pale figure. And it drew nearer to the opening. It peered out at him from over the top of the curtain, yet he couldn't make out the shadowed face, the dark – too dark – eyes. But a hand emerged, and curled its fingers around the top edge of the tarp. The fingernails of this hand were lacquered a dark brown.
Prague clapped his palms over his eyes, as if to press those gelatinous orbs all the way into his skull. As if to flatten them against the wall of his brain. But it was the soundlessness that made him look again. If there had been an accompanying sound or noise, even just a rustle of plastic tarp, he would know if it were all over or still looming before him. But the silence...that could go on forever.
When he lowered his palms several inches, he saw the young couple high on love and Rantac racing toward him naked, hands linked, arms and legs lithe and long, smooth and lubricated in perspiration.
Prague lowered his arms the rest of the way, and then noticed a smaller banner off to his right, lodged between a diminutive window and the muchlocked door to his flat. The rectangular, horizontal display showed a woman's leg. An ad for pantyhose? Hair removal? He found himself scuffing in his slippers closer to the banner to see it more clearly, his hands now tucked in the pockets of the white robe he wore over his neat white pajamas against his apartment's constant chill.
Yes, it was a woman's leg. Sleek and snowy and perfect as alabaster. The leg of a statue. A leg broken off a statue. Because the leg ended at the upper thigh, in a ragged wound that had been washed so that the blood would not mar the perfection of that smooth, silken white skin. The neatly trimmed nails of the delicate, childlike toes had been meticulously painted a deep shade of brown.
Prague turned his head. Most of the banners were normal. Bland. Almost reassuring where once they had harassed him, tugged and prodded at him. Across the room, however, he thought he saw a man's hand and forearm on a small banner between two kitchen cupboards. This time he didn't want to approach it. But a screen very close to his face when he whirled around showed a glistening formless mass on a shiny kitchen counter top. This image had text where the others hadn't. Red letters scrolled down from the top of the banner and read: THIS IS NOT YOUR KIDNEY.
Stumbling away from the wall, out into the center of the room, Prague whipped his head this way and then that, but when he looked again at each of the terrible banners, they had changed to advertise a shoe store, a jewelry store, a new dieting book.
Was that a tiny scratch or tap at the window behind him? How could it be, up here, above ground level? There were no tree branches near to the building.
Prague confronted the glass, and through his ghostwhite reflection he saw a glowing, writhing eellike shape hovering at the pane. The rippling words read STAR EST CONTROL.
He rushed to the window and drew down its ragged shade like an eyelid.
On his foldout sofabed, M. Prague lay curled in a fetus-like position...naked and pale as a worm, his damp flesh pimpled and doughy – but his finger and toenails were meticulously, freshly painted.
The smell of the polish made his head scream with pain.
He peeked over his arm, and saw the one large screen for Rantac. The inviting beach now looked forbidding. The sun was setting, nearly extinguished. A breeze that he imagined to be cool, chilly, blew the black sand about like the ash of a crematorium.
The young couple were gone.
Prague would not peek at the many smaller banners all around him, but from each and every one of them he sensed a face staring at him. Some staring accusingly without eyes.
He closed his own eyes, wet with tears.
If he could only fall asleep...
If he could just fall asleep, the sensor would know, and those faces might go away.
