1,000

When struck with the occasional brilliant certainty, Shati would rattle it out to Veil: facts, images, tones of voice, spiritual viewpoint, smells, tastes in diet, and more – and far too much more about her nameless benefactor – in her quick, painfully familiar darting rhythms.  Veil would listen with a deep stomach glow – the same kind of warmth that came when she noticed that Shati had gained weight, demonstrated a wider vocabulary, or showed recognition of anything beyond the Tenderloin.

But sometimes Shati's tone, the staccato pulse of her words, would touch a cold spot in her.  She would listen and try not to notice that Shati's clarity and certainty swung in synchronicity with her old habits: her need to discover something about whoever it was who had helped her was as addictive as the junk it had replaced; she'd simply changed the tone but not the tune.

Although the thought occurred less frequently – dimming as Shati protested she was getting “chubby”, forgot to utter “motherfucker” for hours at a time, or complained about something she'd seen on the Net – the ghosts of her previous life were too vivid to vanish completely.  Shati had possibly stepped beyond her old life with the help of her visions, but Veil was still haunted by memories of the irregular puckers of track marks, hair thinned by compulsive stroking, and hysterical paranoid messages left on her system in the middle of the night.

“I got her, Vi,” Shati said, smiling full, fleshy and wide.  “Got her down – middle-aged, but kinda sliding down towards grandmother.  Old but not like she can't get around or anything.  Maybe rich – but not too much, you know.  Got enough to get by, enough so she doesn't feel the bite or anything.  Maybe her man was some asshole with some...  somethin' like that.  Yeah, she ain't hungry –”

Veil smiled, battering down the ghost of her friend, the walking dead who had been the only Shati she knew for too long.  “But you don't really know anything –”

The smile, again:  a well-rounded near-laugh that was so unlike Veil's recent memories that she felt she was talking to a stranger.  “Fuck, Vi – I know that.  I'm not freaking out or anything.  It's just, I like thinking of her, you know – so I can see her.”

Even though Shati didn't mention it and Veil couldn't see it from the tiny, cramped kitchen, she knew that beyond the chaotic bedroom and it's piles of free newspapers, the battered futon, and the second-hand netcom with the stained screen; past the faded poster for the Hail Mary's (with a once tangerine-brilliant, now urine shaded headline: “Jesus We're Fucking Good”), there was, in the next room, one of the tiny alcoves common to San Francisco apartments.  Once intended to hold a phone, before such instrumentation became then nearly-invisible, the little niches often became tiny, almost comical bookshelves or, in the cases of people who needed – or experienced – a savior, an altar.

Shati's was something you noticed:  Flesh flowers that had cost too much of her bare income, clippings and photographs from magazines – always showing someone wealthy but with a glimmer of divine humanity, a beatific smile looking down from Have to Have Not.  There was also a battered cardkey from the capsule where Shati had been staying; a tiny Japanese toy – a cheaply brilliant red and silver superhero from some vending machine that had been a gift from a gift from Tala; and a empty, disposable syrette, now streaked with another kind of urine-yellow color.  The contents of a denim vest, worn that day, that night, when Shati had passed out in an unnamed alley only five blocks away.

“Fuck, Vi, I'm not freaking.  You think that?  Fuck you–” no venom, just a common trait from her days on the street.  “– I'm just tryin' to figure why the fuck she dropped it on me, is all.  You know, try to get down to her.  I can't fuckin' call her or anythin'.  All I got is the fuckin' card –”

Some had Jesus or Buddha, Hubbard, Jack Palmer, Shati had a faded debtcard, its cheap liquid crystal display showing a bare, single Revalued Dollar where once there had been a thousand: it was all that physically remained of Shati's unknown savior, her nameless saint, the man, woman, the mystery who had carefully tucked it into her denim vest, and saved her life – or allowed her to start it.

* * * *

Veil listened, as was her place, and tried to push the ghost of the old Shati back, focusing instead on where she was, what was around her.  “I know, Shy.  I know that.  That's not what I'm saying.  You're just so...  I don't know.  You just want to know so damn badly.  Don't you want to keep going?”

“I'm going, Vi – shit, yes.  You think I want to go back.  Fuck, no!” – there was that laugh again, something shocking to Veil, a joke seen where one hadn't been seen before.  The Shati that had always started and ended every conversation with a plea for money; the gaunt girl that had jerked at any sound, scanned every entrance for imagined or real threats wouldn't have – couldn't have – looked, anywhere, and laughed.  “Yeah this is fucked, having to worry about shit like rent and going to get fucking groceries, for Christ's sake.  It's worse at night, though...  when there's nothing to do.  That's when it bites, when it starts to really fuckin hurt, you know?  But I can do a little beer, watch some tube.  This all just so fuckin new – I don't know what I'm supposed to do sometime.  You're used to this shit, Vi.  I know what I was supposed to be, before, you know – but now I just try to do what I wouldn't do.  It fucks with my head.  And she brought me here.  I just want to know who the fuck she was –”

Back – farther back than the Shati, face blue and swollen from something Veil didn't ask about, or the Shati pleading for Veil to not tell anyone where she was if anyone asked – there was another Shati, one Veil didn't think about all that often, but one that was there nonetheless.  It was that Shati, the tall, gangly girl with multicolored hair, who'd always made Veil try to help her when those calls came.

The rainbow hair (blond on top, ringing down to purple bangs in front of her face) came from a bottle and was considered by their teachers, and the other parents, as being too much of a fashion statement for such a little girl.  It showed a lot about Shati that she refused to change it, and that her mother couldn't be bothered to fight her over it.  That Shati had walked the line from friend to bully many times – defending little Veil first from more playground bullies and then from the terrors that came when Veil's parents had suddenly become sullen strangers living in two different apartments.  When the tears came, Shati had palmed stolen her candy, offered her firm fortune cookie sympathies (“It's okay to hurt, kid – just don't let them know it does”) when everyone else had wanted to pry into her little skull for her “feelings” or give stern looks or inflict childish cruelties.  That Shati always lurked deep down – the same Shati who had tried with hard lessons of slaps, humiliation and mockery, to teach sheltered Vi about the harshness of life; but who was also the only one who seemed to actually care about Vi.  That Shati had seemed to know the pain the therapist, the teachers had “spoken of,” but never felt or offered remedy for.

It was also that Shati who had kissed her one hot afternoon, a kiss that had defined for Veil all other kisses afterwards.  At the time she hadn't recognized the emotions that single kiss had caused, but now she looked back on it as her first flutterings of love.  Childish, maybe, but love all the same.

“I know it's hard, Shy –”

“Fuck you, Vi –” that laugh again.  “You don't know shit.  I got my old crap here, you know, but I also got this new shit.  I don't know which way I'm supposed to be.  But at least I got somewhere else.  It used to be the old shit, you know, and that was easy – just slide all the way down, slow or fast was just all I had to decide.  Now I got all this other shit – and she brought it to me.  There's so much now, and she's the one responsible –”

The Cascade Revaluation.  Now, of course, it was just Revalue, as in “Where were you after the Revalue?”  When Veil heard it she thought of something she heard about “Ring around the Rosey” and how children's voices unknowingly sang of pustules under the arms, of certain death.  Sounds innocent:  “Rosey” and “revalue” – no one bothered to count, to actually post the figures.  One day a dollar was a dollar, and then, after a frightening night of newscasters stifling tears as the market went down, down, down and didn't come back.  It was a financial Pearl Harbor, a monetary Kennedy assassination.  The days after were still in Veil's nightmares:  Her father crying, her mother screaming as they had to sell everything they had, to throw out their lives to dig themselves some semblance of security.  They had managed better than most:  the nightmares stayed, but Veil had been one of the 20% who had come out with something close to normalcy.

Not Shati.  The gangly girl had to live in a dorm with hundreds of other students after their parents suddenly had no homes – property owners trading everything for food, medicine, secure accounts outside the American marketplace.  Veil had watched her fade, the strength drain from her body, her eyes, as the rainbow, too, washed out to a simple mousy brown.

For weeks, until things stabilized for those who Had, and the new system was in place, Veil had brought Tala food, precious vegetables and fruits, to supplement the government yeast porridge – until her father had found out, screamed at her for the luxuries she'd given away to “trash” and sent Veil away to the sequestered world of an Oasis.

No, Veil didn't understand.  She couldn't.  But she had her own kind of hurt, her own kind of agony.  She hadn't just lost a childhood friend.

* * * *

“Tala called,” Shati said, when the conversation had wandered away from familiar territory:  Veil not wanting to hear, again, her expositions on her mysterious benefactor, and Shati not having much else to talk about in her still-fresh, still-clean life.

To this, Veil said nothing.  She'd had a mad flurry of differing emotions that, if voiced, would have sounded like “How's she doing?” mixed with “I hope you didn't talk to her.” Instead she offered silence as she waited to hear more, yet dreaded to hear exactly that.

“Left a message.  I was in the shower–” something Shati had fetishized.  Once she'd admitted it, smiling at the guilty pleasure of being able to experience cleanliness on her new schedule, in the privacy of her own space.  “Said for me to call.  She sounded good.”

“You mean high?”  Veil said, biting the end of the last word even as she spoke it.

“No,” Shati said, looking heat through her now-neatly maintained lashes, “just good...  no, I don't know” but concluding by looking down at the scratched tabletop.  It was something, a ghost, an echo, from her life before when the two – 'good' and 'high' – where synonymous.  “Better than I've heard before.  It was good to hear from her.”

“I hope you're not going to call her back.”

“It's my choice – isn't it?”

“Shati –” the tone was wrong, she sounded like her father.  “If you want to, of course.  I miss her too, but don't you –

“She's shit – don't you think I know that?  She's crap, Vi.  Why do you think I skipped out?  You think I'm gonna tell her I scored a grand?  She's a straight-up bitch – but she's still Tala, right, Vi?  She's still Tala–”

Memories don't ask permission:  Tala, pale and thin – hair shoe polish black, unkempt but still with an attractive, inherent, style.  One eye dyed pure blue, a robin's egg set in her porcelain face, a fad from decades before, the other an earthen brown.  Veil's memories recalled a young girl, rail-thin with a pride that had kept her spine straight, her sight angry, but also clearer than most.

Tala had been more than a crush.  As everything had spiraled down, Tala had stayed straight, stayed cool and precise.  As Veil had watched as more and more public services were stripped away, and the kids who had to stay overnight in school grew more and more gaunt until the hunger was obvious in their eyes, the only one who had seemed to stay strong had been Tala.

Her parents had balanced on the edge, a few dollars less and she could have been sleeping in the gym – and then the Support Camps.  Not for the first time she'd wished those extra dollars hadn't been there – maybe then she could have really helped Shati and Tala.

“But you're not...  she's got to make her own choices, Shati,” Veil said, looking at her friend, seeing the fullness in her face, the calmness that had been missing for a long time.

“I just...  you know, miss her.”

“So do I.  But she hasn't really been around much for you, has she?”

It had been the week before Veil's parents sat her down at their immaculate kitchen table and calmly told her that she was going to be attending the Brookhaven Oasis from then on.  Veil had stared at that table too, noticing for the first time imperfections in the smooth surface.

She never would know.  Those few dollars in the parent's bank account had seen to that.  Veil would always be on the outside, beyond the two of them.

She had never found out what had happened – and had never asked beyond that day.  Veil remembered the heat – unusual for spring.  The old city building, the dry air thick with dust, every footstep contributing more.  It had been a common day – her parents leaving her at the school, going off to try and hold onto more of their precious money.  Greeting her friends, some looking fresh from sleeping in their own beds, others looking frayed, a sunkeness beginning to eat at their cheeks.

People running by the classroom doors.  She remembered, vividly, that Ms. Carson had been talking about Congressional Reapportionment, trying in vain to get them to care about what was happening around them – but the kids who did were too busy counting their blessings and those who didn't just wanted something to eat.  People running by the classroom doors – Ms. Carson stopping at “Senator Thurbridge –” and then stopping to look, then going outside.  She came back, face ashen, eyes wide.

Veil hadn't known the girl.  A full face, clothes that were a little too new.  Maybe even a debtcard or two – for drinks on a hot day.  She didn't hear anything else about the girl, but when Ms. Carson had come back her face had rouged from rubbing away tears.

Frightened, Veil had found Tala and Shati an hour later, had sat with them in the shade next to one of the temporary housing shelters.  She'd expected – wanted – them to be as upset as she was, but they were just quiet, held back and private.  Then one of the other kids, another one of the tired and thin children, came by and gave them drinks – but not to Veil.  Not to her.  She hadn't questioned where the money had come from, to buy the silvery drink pouches, until later.

In the morning, her father had told her about Brookhaven – and she had just nodded, not wanting to go there, but not being able to go back.

“Fuck you, Vi,” Shati said, looking coolly across the table at her.  “What the hell do you know about it?”

* * * *

The clothes were the oldest she had – a pair of simple jeans, knees torn and threadbare.  A sweatshirt from a band an old boyfriend had liked.  Vending machine shoes.  Polyarmor jacket, ripped along the right sleeve.  She even got out the Hotpoint her father had given her when she said she'd be moving back to the city.  It's case still had a fresh plastic smell after two years at the bottom of a drawer.  At first she hadn't wanted to read the little Japanese/ French/ German/ Spanish instruction book, intending just to put it in a pocket, but after looking at the warning stickers on the front of the box she made herself read it carefully.

Veil felt heavy, like the air was resistant to her every movement.  She forced herself to get dressed, to get the Hotpoint, to read its booklet, to get out the old city map and find the street.  If she let herself think she wouldn't do it.  So she didn't allow herself to think – she made a list and meticulously went through it.

Then she was though it – and standing at the door of her little Oasis, hand cold around the weapon her father had given her, trying not to allow thoughts into her head, but still unable to coldly rehearse what she'd try to tell Tala, when she found her.

* * * *

At a distance, the Tenderloin was hazy, the greasy smoke from a thousand small fires twirling around the buildings, staining lintels and window glass with a heavy, sad oil.  Getting close had been easy – so much so that fear touched deep within Veil.  She realized as she passed beyond her rented watchdogs, when the gates were shut behind her and the security guards turned back to their monitors, that they didn't care when you walked towards that part of the city – it would only be when someone walked out that they'd pay attention.

She watched, eyes scanning the streets.  Trying to calm her breathing, trying not to grip the Hotpoint too tight, she walked quickly, coolly.  Don't show fear.  They can sense that.

Even thought she felt it, real and tense in her belly, she hated herself for her fear – hated that she had gone so far from where Tala and Shati had been.  She tried to calm herself, to slow her steps and control her thumping heart.  It was simple, really, she just wanted to talk to her, to see what she really wanted with Shati.  There wasn't anything to be frightened of.  She wasn't stupid.  She knew Tala, after all.  Or had –

The streets grew narrower – no, the buildings were no father apart, but the constructions of cardboard, tents, old shipping containers, temporary shelters years beyond their expected life, crowded closer and closer to the center of her route.  Her eyes danced over details, and she forced herself not to look too long, not to make eye contact:  A thin woman wrapped in foil biohazard disposal bags cooked something over a thin sheet of dirty metal, heated from below by glowing coals.  A black man, bloated belly hanging over the waist of a pair of institutional green pants methodically paced back and forth across the street.  Three naked young men, skin a dazzle of tattoos and bleaching, coolly played a game involving dice and bones.

Angry voices pulled Veil's eyesight, but she tried not to look or let her fear show.  Screams echoed down some of the artificial canyons, the words destroyed after too many ricochets but the hysteria remained.  Veil knew she was walking too fast, knew she was a hammering heartbeat away from running, but she breathed deep and tried to will her legs into a stead cadence.  Eyes watched her, measured her, and hated her – she was certain.  Her animal self might not have been as close to the surface as it was among the pack she saw, but it was there, nonetheless.  Them, jaguars.  She, gazelle.

The numbers were the worst; their descent towards 661 meaning every step brought her closer to the address recorded on her message.  Memories battled each other.  Tala, the strong kid vs.  Tala, the pit that had swallowed Shati, had pulled her down and kept her there.  The angry Tala, the one who was always looking to get something.  Sometimes, when it had been Shati on the line, her face shrunken, her eyes darting, her speech broken and smashed with addiction, Veil had sensed Tala behind her, pushing her.

The Tala that had taken her Shati, had dragged her down to the streets.

But then there was Tala, the strong kid who had protected them – had hid the young Shati behind her butch, leather-clad arms, had escorted Veil through hungry streets.  That Tala versus the Tala she had actually seen one time, a ghostly shadow over Shati's shoulder.  A too-late call, a plea for money so she could “get a room for the night.”  Veil had shaken her head, having heard the same words too many times.  Then she looked up at the screen, seen a pale image hovering behind Shati.  The sending call had been crude, a screen marked with graffiti and filth, but the contours had been distinct – and familiar.

But then there was the other Tala, the one who had looked hot anger when a bigger kid had stolen her lunch – promising revenge.  Too much violence already, when she started crying even harder Tala had simply given Veil her own government-issue ration-pack.  That Tala versus – 661.  It had once been new – a fact known but not perceived:  abandoned storefront at street level, steel plate awash with generations of tags and brutal statements in bad English and other languages covering the windows and door.  The building above was a standard San Francisco apartment block, all bay windows and coronets – mostly broken glass showing dark interiors.

Off to the side, a narrow gap between it and its neighbor; a dark inset showing a thick plate door, hanging slightly open.

She went in, finding herself in an alley choked with garbage.  A rickety set of iron stairs so rusted they looked caked in blood.  At the foot of them a puddle cloudy with ash and soot.  Veil put her foot on the first step, feeling poor construction settle against the side of the building, and then the second.  The call had come from a public terminal on the third floor.  She'd ask her leave Shati alone – she'd ask her to let Shati have her new life and not drag her back.  She didn't know how she'd say that, what words she'd use, but what was what she'd ask:  Walk away, don't follow her, don't call her again.

Babies cried, a wailing siren.  Men shouted, sounding like barking dogs.  Screens blared, too loud to pick out individual words.  The smells were indescribable – a sweet perfume of garbage, urine, vomit, feces, and gasoline from illegal heaters.  The second floor door was wedged open, showing a dark hall.  A laughing voice, bouncing down towards her, meaningless:  “– chasing a rock.”

Third floor, this time the door wide open.  Light from a distant window.  After the second, too bright, showing streaked walls, threadbare carpet – color lost to conjecture.   A thought, quick like an attack:  Public terminal.  There it was, in fact – a dark rectangle against one wall.  At the base of it, a fat body wearing bright orange prison pants – asleep or other, not easy to tell.  She watched for a beat, then two, of her pounding heart, then turned to leave, to walk down those stairs, to get back –

“Git you somethin'?”  He was standing on the floor below her, on the rusted railing outside that dark hall, looking up at her.  Old, somewhere beyond middle age, but wired from living too long on desperation.  His face was pale, ghostly.  Nose broken and flat reminding her instantly of an ape.  His hair was white, as well, but cropped so short as to be nothing but fuzz covering his red, blue, yellow tattooed skull.  One ear was gone, sheared away – leaving nothing but a smear of scar tissue.  Hospital green pants carefully restitched to fit.  An old cop's vest, possibly bullet-proof, and under it nothing but pale skin streaked with more scars.  His feet were bare, callused, dark gray from soot.

Eyes locked on hers, he repeated himself.  Veil shook her head.

“Fucking bitch,” he said, with quick anger, “then what you doin' here?”

She knew if fear got her, he would be right behind.  “Looking for someone.  She's not here.”

“Who the fuck you lookin' for?”

She shook her head again.  “It's not important.  Look, I've got to get going –”

“My building, bitch.  Everything here my business.”

“Tala,” she said quickly, thinking of walking into the building, seeing if there was another way out.  Steel plating covering the front.  The way in the only door she'd seen.  “I knew her from way back.”

“That bitch –” he said, frowning even harder.  “– ain't here.  You missed her.  Got a fuckin' big score, some asshole dropped a grand into her fuckin' lap.  A whole one thousand.  So she got royally toasted.  Loud asshole.  Finally kicked off near one.  Most went in right after to score leavings.  Almost a fuckin' riot.  Hauled her away for parts this morning.  Nothin left for you.”

Veil didn't say anything.  She just started walking.  She walked right up to him, past him and down the stairs.  When her feet stepped onto the concrete, the Man of the Building said something...  then she was in the darkness of the alley, past the steel slab door and out onto the street.  It was starting to get dark, windows starting to flicker with glowing screens, fires being kindled in the sidewalks, but she kept walking.

She walked till she couldn't anymore, and so she stopped, slumped, sat.  Back against the irregular bricks of another old building, another dying apartment block, she stared out at the people shuffling, running past but didn't see them.  Her memories didn't battle – they ached and screamed inside of her.  Both of them, both the Talas were gone: the protector and the stealer.  The strong girl, the desperate addict.  Both were gone, and for one she felt bad, one she felt good – and because of both of these emotions she cried and vomited onto the sidewalk.

Eventually she was too exhausted to do either, so she sat, and – for that night – belonged there.

* * * *

She must have slept, if only briefly, because she remembered awaking – a sudden, burst of consciousness that pulled her out of a heavy and suffocating dream – the shock of someone touching her.  Awakening too confused to shout, she instead slapped her hand down towards her hip, catching a bony hand there.

Present, full consciousness slammed down into her.  A thin sliver of plastic bit into her palm.  Focusing, she saw shapes moving to and fro under the still dark skies – then they became people, shuffling and walking, ghosts under hard streetlights.  Something was still in her hand, pressed into her palm.  She looked at it, saw a common enough sight: a debtcard, it's LCD window showing a single digit followed by a small row of zeros.  Her eyes focused, saw the number, saw the card.  Crisp, clean and new, it was in her hand – and the memory of its mate, its twin, on Shati's altar, and – no doubt – another somewhere in the Tenderloin, the one that had killed Tala.  One thousand.

She looked up, scanned the street to the left and the right.  Looking, looking – faces looked at her, but lit with only hostility or need.  Again, a glance at the hard.  It was real.  It had weight and texture.  It was fresh, new.   The bank it was drawn on was unusual, but not overly so.

Veil shook, her hand holding hope and poison.  One thousand doses.  She gripped it tight, feeling the plastic bite her palm.  Again she looked up, again she saw faces, stuttering gaits, some saw her – with a measuring squint – but all kept moving.

Fifteen feet away, moving faster than the rest.  Not a run, but a frightened walk.  Dark cloak, black as well as smeared with dirt.  Head and face obscured, but then not – as the figure turned and looked at her with frightened, pale eyes.

“Wait,” Veil heard her own voice say, cracking from stress, emotion.  “Wait!”

Other faces turned, moved to look with quick estimations of the danger, but none of them, none of the shufflers, the limping crowd, moved.  The dark figure did though – hurriedly moving away with a bouncing, short-legged gait.

But Veil was young, and had long, young legs.  People moved from her, parting to let the wild-eyed girl by.  A hammering heartbeat and thick, course cloth filled her hand, “Stop, you fucker!”

She pulled, and the figure turned.  A white moon face craned to look up at her.  Lines ringing wild, furtive eyes.  Skin like a shelless, boiled egg.  The cloak was like a home-made nun's habit, a scavenged wool and dirt gown – a poor approximation, a mockery: Nun? None.  Sex unknown, age hazy yet pronounced – mouth a yellow tumble of teeth; badges of dark rot, signposts of the bad neighborhood.  The words that came out of the mouth were, at first, as broken as the teeth, hysterical fragments that refused to accept meaning.  A hand, a broken chicken's foot, clawed at Veil's sweatshirt, trying for purchase but too weak to accomplish anything.

“Why?  Come on, tell me why–” Veil managed to say, unsure of where the words or the force was coming from.  Doubt weighed heavy on her, but the words – the anger – had a momentum all their own.  Even if this None, this mockery, wasn't the one, she had to ask someone, get some kind of explanation.

Nonsense from the None, the heavy-shrouded figure – only a stream of sounds, a cascade of sounds that could have been words, or could have just been irrational sounds.  The claw continued to work at her sweatshirt, continued to pull or push – weak muscles unable to do either.

“Why..?” Tears – she knew she shouldn't, didn't want to.  Not again.  But her cheeks were hot, burning with their path down her cheeks.  “Why–” she said, loosing, knowing that they were flowing again, unable to prevent it.

She wanted the answer, needed some kind of explanation.  As the burning moved slowly down her cheeks and nausea boiled in her belly from the sobs she tried to keep down, she still tried to listen, still tried to understand.  That's all she wanted.

Later...  when salt had dried under her eyes, she wished more than she had ever wished for understanding that she hadn't – that the words from the None hadn't slowly started to resonate, hadn't found meaning in her clouded mind.

Later, she wished she had never gone there, never asked, never inquired, and, especially, never listened.

* * * *

Veil knew she'd see it when she walked back into Shati's little apartment.  She knew it would be there, the little altar to an little piece of obsolete technology.  The niche: the syrette, the cheap toy, the fresh flowers, the vest, the smiling faces on cheap newsprint – the zeros, the emptiness of the debtcard.  She knew it, long before she buzzed the security panel outside the building, before Shati let her in – seeing it was foregone, unnecessary:  she knew it was there, and that, alone, was enough to make the knowledge agony.

A different Shati was waiting for her – which was appropriate because it was another Veil that had buzzed in.  This Shati was still the gaunt, going to soft fat, still the same rough girl getting fuller, duller – less starved, less feral, but there was a restrained energy, a cool, contemplative kinesthetic to her.  There were vibrations, yes, but they were focused, controlled, decided.

Appropriate ...  Veil was fractured, broken.  She walked, but didn't feel anything except for pain.  Everything she looked at, everything she touched, echoed with a burning knowledge, with words ....

At first just a tumble of sounds, but then a few stabbed out, holding meaning ....

“Vi!” a beaming smile, a kind flow of affection.  The hug was unexpected, alien – proof that the other Shati was retreating, falling back.  “Oh, Vi – I'm so glad you're here.  I was hoping I'd see you before I went out.”

To that, Veil could only nod, slowly, unable to do anything else – trapped between wanting to, needing to, and not daring to, speak the words.

“I'm so glad I get to see you.  I just had to tell you – since I knew you'd understand.”

At first the words had just been simple, repeating like taps on a drumhead: “God, Jesus, Our Savior, Our Lord” ...  a liturgical chaos.

“I understand now, Vi – I think I got it.  It doesn't matter, Vi – not really.  Yeah, I'd still like to see her, to say – you know – 'thanks'.  But that ain't what it's really about, you know.  Not really.”

Vi moved past, buffeted by Shati's enthusiasm.  She had to get away from her pleasure, her revelation – and away from the phone niche, the empty zeros of the card.

The figure had tried to give her another one, a fan of money, a crude shuffle of cards.  But the action had been ...  wrong, and as she tried to understand how, exactly, the words had congealed a bit more, grouped into greater meaning.

“It'd all just be words, wouldn't they Vi?  It wouldn't mean shit – nothing really.  That's not what it's all about, though, right?  It's not about just saying 'thanks' and shakin' her fucking hand.  No, that ain't what it's about.  No really.”

Veil sat in one of the old kitchen chairs, looking up at Shati – into the shine of her happiness, her joy, and wanted to say something, wanted to explain, wanted to let her own meaning fall out of her shaking lips.

“Jesus gives,” the figure had said, with a brutal stab of crystal understanding, words too clear:  “Jesus gives a chance; Jesus gives a choice.  Jesus gives.  Satan one way, God the other.  I give a chance–”

Shati put it down on the table, a cleaner, fresher one.  Instead of all zeros, a one in front of three.  It was a lot, and a cooler part of Veil knew that she must have been saving it for a long time, as long as she'd started to crawl out, lifted by that first debtcard.

“It's the best way of saying ‘thanks', Vi – don't you see?  It's the best way.  I'm going to walk out with this, and I'm going to give it away.  Just hand it to some fucker lower than I was, down there.  She'll know, Vi – it's just right.  She'll know – it's better than a thank you.”

“I give a chance,” a hardness in the eyes, an anger, a fury.  “I give the weak, the disgusting, the evil.  I give it to them.  I give it to them!  I GIVE IT TO THEM –” a hysterical vengeance, a gift always given as poison, as a righteous weapon of anger.  Give it to them –

Veil sat and cried, knowing the venom in the gift, the broken soul who shot a 1,000 angry bullets at everyone, knowing that if life were the result, it was an accident, not according to intention.

Veil cried for an hour, long after Shati had left – with a kiss to Vi’s forehead and a strange hug – to pass out her own thousand.

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

She hadn't thought about Mark in years – then, suddenly, she did.  It wasn't something obvious, like seeing his face on someone else's who also had pale blond hair, like burnished steel, or eyes like amber marbles, but something swift and intangible, like a floating piece of consciousness you remember as not being fact, reality, but part of a dream half-forgotten.

Lisa had been standing in the warm sunshine down on Solano Avenue, walking back with her sister from seeing a movie – something with explosions and lots of male sweat, details already mostly forgotten.  They'd parked far away, and chatted emptily as they marched back to Lisa's battered little sports car.

He'd had a tension about him sometimes, an almost tangible armor that would slip over him.  The first time it had happened they'd fought later in the day, Lisa convinced on some level that she'd been the cause.  It had happened, so quickly and without apparent cause and had lingered for hours, and he hadn't spoken a word about it.  When the same had happened to Lisa, in other relationships, it usually meant anger at her, a stewing resentment just needing an impetus to release.  Better, she'd learned, to get it out when she wanted to – beat the fight to the punch.

Hot, hard sunlight in her eyes and she replied mechanically to Shirley's polite sisterly banter.  Why now – why think of that and Mark... now?  The laughter of children in front of a nearby toy store, an old woman glacially making her way down the sidewalk in a mechanical walker, a burnished Latino man clipping branches from a tree in front of a doctor's office.

“Some people just shouldn't have children,” Shirley said, slipping into the passenger seat as Lisa absently hunted for the ignition.  Lisa looked up, hunting for the source, and saw the three with the kids: two glowing parents, and a friend.  The parents were young and sleek with their own kind of baby fat – the softness that Lisa had seen around her other friends that had the innocence and responsibility of children thrust onto them.  “Luckily,” Shirley said, her eyes obscured by sunglasses, “other people can.”

Their friend wasn't sleek, wasn't soft.  His hair was slightly greasy, his jeans rough and faded to threads in some places – and even though he was smiling with his friends and the children he had to accompany, his tension was obvious.

Lisa knew, that fragment finding it's place in her mind: the why of thinking of Mark.  Yeah, some people shouldn't have children, but other people – good, kind people – were terrified of them.

* * * *

It was night by the time she got back to her apartment, parking as usual in the darkness of the alley behind her building.  After an afternoon with Shirley, Mark had faded into a cool melancholy – a lazy sadness about many things, old and nearly forgotten boyfriends only some of it.

At first she thought it was an insect, and fear/disgust/revulsion tingled up and down her spine.  Then she thought it might be a toy – children being up way to late.  Then she picked it up.  Looking at it under the washed-out distant lights from the street beyond, she again thought specifically of one old boyfriend and brought it inside.

His breath had been hot – she remembered when it seemed about to scald her neck, how she'd felt she'd had to move – just a little – from under him, feeling it almost ready to burn her skin.  He always seemed to have a bruise or two, looking like a swatch of grease on his angular body, from where he'd hurt himself at work.

The apartment seemed empty, cold – so she turned on the coffee machine and absently flicked on the set to keep her company.  Her answering machine was beeping one, one, one in dark red – so she didn't play it, knowing it to be Shirley saying she'd be late for the movie.

The little machine wasn't a toy – it had a kind of patched-together, crude look to it.  Putting it down on her kitchen counter it immediately started a hesitant exploration of its new environment.  Smiling despite herself, she lunged to catch it as it neared an edge – only to have it pull away at the last minute.  It had a couple of small motors, maybe scavenged from a toy after all.  It had wire feelers, and a mysterious cluster of dark glass panels along its back.  Its body seemed to be a piece of an old circuit board, the green material almost black in some places from being outside for a long time.  It seemed to have eyes, as well, two discs facing forward.  Yes, eyes, as she watched it hunted along her counter-top for light.  It had a battery, a black box along its back, but must have fed, recharged, on what it could see – eating light through the flat glass panels on its back.

Also on its back was a cigar tube.  Picking it up, Lisa shook it, hearing something inside.  Carefully, she unscrewed it – and a tightly rolled sheet of paper came out.

* * * *

Mark was very much in her mind.  The gruff rumble of his voice, the deep avalanche of his laughter.  For someone who saw tools as an extension of his self, he liked surprisingly subtle and sophisticated things.  When he was crouched over some new machine, or under some behemoth of gears and engines, Bach chimed from his speakers.  When he stopped to eat it was usually Sushi or Thai, and while he enjoyed watching things explode and men sweat on the screen he also had a complete Win Wenders collection and worshipped Jacques Tati.

The instructions on the paper were simple, straightforward.  Even for someone like Lisa for whom Mark's terminology had been like listening to an ancient Asiatic language, she could understand it.  It was also obviously a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy – the pattern of the diagrams in some places blurred by replication.

She stayed up for a long time, staring at the instructions and thinking about Mark, while the little machine patiently explored its new world – charging its battery from her kitchen lights.

* * * *

The parts were surprisingly easy to find.  Two trips to two different electronic stores.  Cheap too – or would have been had she had some of the tools it required at hand.

Practicing with the soldering iron, she thought a lot about Mark.  She built him, assembled him from memory as he sent curls of acid smoke up towards the ceiling: tall, thin – rough but not course, with a kind of mechanic's masculinity.  Machines had been a special language for him, the key to a secret world of cause and effect.  She remembered how his amber eyes glowed when he talked about some new project, some new device or construction – explaining to her innocence the philosophy of its gears, the beauty of its mechanisms.

She didn't have any photographs.  No letters.  They hadn't been together long – two and a half, maybe three years.  She couldn't even remember why they'd broken up... exactly.  She knew a lot of it was because of his passion, and her revelation that, at best, she'd only be the second most important thing in his life.

She burned herself, gesturing clumsily with the iron like it was a pencil or pen and not a very hot tool.  The pain was like a flash in her eyes and she dropped it – luckily on the table and not on the carpet.  After sucking on the inside of her finger when the iron had touched and almost crying, she breathed deep a few times and went back to trying to get enough with the unfamiliar tool.

That fight was very present in her mind.  They had gone to a picnic with her sister, who'd been baby-sitting her friend's six-year-old.  Mark hadn't made any noises when she'd told him about it, but that tension descended on him hard and fast whenever he was near the kid.  Sally was a sweet girl, shy but very smart and with laughter that sounded like chiming bells.  Still, Mark had been terrified.

Lisa hadn't known that – and so the fight: beat him to it, get it out in the open.  For a long time he just stood there and let her run all over the place trying to figure out why he was so angry.  Finally, he said something – and then something else, and then she started to understand.  That night they'd made love – and it had been different.  Passionate, yes, but also caring – an act to seal up a wound that had been opened.

When Shirley came over the next day she saw the mess of electronic parts scattered on her kitchen counter.  “Toaster explode?” she joked, picking up something only three days before Lisa wouldn't have recognized.

“Just a hobby,” Lisa said, defensively, feeling as if Shirley had been picking through her bedside table, commenting on her method of birth control.

“Looks like something Mark would have put together – spit and bailing wire, couple of batteries and... viola , art.  Too bad everyone else just saw it as some bailing wire and lots of spit.”

Mark hadn't called it art.  He might have treated it that way, but he never called it that.  “Yeah,” Lisa said, grabbing her purse, “but that's what he liked to do.”  Then she said, not at all hungry, just to get her sister away, “let's get a bite, I'm starved.”

“You think about him... Mark – a lot.”

“Sometimes,” she said, gently moving her sister towards the front door.

“You weren't together all that long, and it weren't even with him when he, you know, passed away.”  At the door, she paused. “Cancer, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, cancer –”

“He didn't leave much behind did he?  I think you were the only person who knew him well – and that's not saying a lot.”

“No,” she agreed, locking her front door, “not a lot at all.”

* * * *

She decided to build two of them.  That way she could have some practice and not put too much pressure on herself to get the one-and-only done perfectly.  She burned herself, twice more – but then felt like she was really getting a handle on the iron.  Her nose tickled for a long time from the resin-reek of the melting solder, but then she started to enjoy it – it was like an incense from some distant, mechanical land.  Something burned in Mark's church.

It wasn't hate that had tensed him that day in the park around dear little – it was responsibility.  “I was scared.  Damn, I hate that – that feeling.  Like walking on glass.  They're so fragile, you know.  I know what that was like, how one wrong thing... well, it might not mean anything to me, but to them it could be how they see the world after.  That freaks me out.  I'm not ready to do it right, I guess – I'm too selfish.  When I want to do, I want to do it right, to be there all the time for them – to really be there for them, to help them.  Now, though, the responsibility scares me.”

“You just have to let go,” she'd told him, holding him close and feeling his breathing, hot breathing on the side of her neck.  “Other people have the same fears, but they manage okay.  You just have to learn to let go.  It's how we go on – it's how you leave a part of yourself behind.  You're just scared because you only want to leave the best of you behind.”

He'd nodded, his heavy body moving slightly, too, as his head did.  “I know.  I just keep thinking that... maybe I'm not good enough.”

The first one Lisa built had faltered, as if stricken with a kind of electronic/mechanical palsy.  She went back to the instruction sheet and spent a few minutes following it's strange course.  There, finally she saw it, a stray wire, a hesitant short.  After a quick, skillful jab with the soldering iron it seemed to work fine.

At dawn, which seemed appropriate, she took copies she'd made of the instructions, put them in the cigar tubes she'd bought, attached them to their backs, and let them go.  The original moved across the alley, vanishing quickly off into the distance.  Her first born started off to the right, slowly making its way among the trash cans and garage doors; the whine of its little electric motors went on for a long time, until fading into the general background of the city.

The second born went to the left, darting across the dark asphalt – but then stopped just about halfway.  It stayed there for a minute, spinning slowly as it sought nutritious sunlight.  Finally it stopped its dance and made its way slowly down the other side of the alley, until vanishing among some parked cars.

The tears were a surprise, there before she was even aware she was crying.  She watched her descendants until she felt they were able to make it on their own, then she wished them well, gave them her love, and went back inside.

THE RICH MAN’S GHOST

Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., was wandering through the deep, dark woods of the datasea.  It was a lovely financially vibrant day and the bursts of exchange were bright and vivid.  He had come to hunt an elusive clue as to the income fluctuations that had been plaguing a rival kiretsu, and thus take advantage of their weakness to seize and conquer by purchasing vast amounts of their stock.  A rich man, Hiro Yashido didn’t need to hunt.  A fantastically rich man, he had many servants, who could very easily have worn their immersion goggles, taken up their retrieval software packages, mated their neurofacilitators to the vast network, the vibrant domain, and brought him all the information he could ever have wanted.

But not on this spectacularly glorious day – glimmering with energetic phosphors and dazzling transactions – he would go out alone, forsaking all his salariman secondaries, dismissing his virtual footmen.  Today he would hunt, he would face the wilds of the datasea and bring back the data himself.  Hiro Yashido’s servants and employees begged their master to at least bring along an avatar or two – a benevolent software agent – that would protect him against the terrors and wilds of the global information economy.

  Hiro Yashido, however, would have none of their childish fears, their infant terrors.  So Hiro Yashido, took up his own optical interface mask, donned his own beautifully crafted software, and clicked home his ornate cortical socket, and wandered out of the real domain of his Tokyo office and into the uncivilized domain of raw information.

Moving through the cascades of financial, transactional, monetary, and representational data, Hiro Yashido was struck by the beauty of it all:  the way the stock market indexes glowed far in the distance, casting shadows of probability across the plain of small business databases, the ominous towers of rival zibatsus lurking beyond the fermenting brilliance of his company’s own infrastructure.  Looking at the scope of it all, Hiro Yashido was struck by how majestic and timeless it all seemed:  money and information as usual.  It was only when he scanned down to the minute scale of regional profit and loss that he noticed that all was movement, active and alive.  The datasea seethed with financial life, profit preying on loss, bankruptcy sowing the seeds of investment.

Hiro Yashido wandered the amazement of the datasea, lost in the glory of it’s beauty, enjoying it’s life and vitality.  Holding his retrieval software down to his virtual side, he moved carefully through a dense fractal swirl of rampant devaluation and found himself in a calm glade of stagnant trade.

That’s where Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., saw the ghost.

* * * *

The disembodied spirits of those projected but somehow lost between the programmed world and the world of flesh, bone, and blood, ghosts are ethereal and intangible, spectral and non-numeric:  neither matter nor information, walking between the bites and the bytes of the datasea.

To see one is bad luck, to be cursed by one is a fate worse that an audit, a massive depreciation, even bankruptcy:  unstoppable and total.  It was said by some that ghosts resented those who still remained tied to their bodies of flesh, bone, and blood and thus cursed out of jealousy.  Others said that ghosts were in the thrall of evil spirits, vast chaos storms following the laws of informational thermodynamics – slowly, inexorably, grinding down the financial world to an entropic coldness.  Still others claimed that one shouldn’t waste time pondering their origins, existence or purpose – for such time puzzling them was time away from fleeing their awful economic vengeance:  fleeing was all that was important.

Seeing the ghost, Hiro Yashido, felt his real heart seize in panic.  Not many things scared Hiro Yashido.  He had become a rich man, and thus a powerful man, by not fearing anything: man, beast, or data.  But this, the wavering outline of a man, or woman, chilled his fingers and made his eyes behind the interface mask grow wide with terror.

A ghost’s curse could ruin him – reduce him from a rich and powerful man to simply a man, nothing more than flesh, bone, and blood in days, hours.  It would break him, drain him of everything he held dear, his stocks, his bonds, his investment portfolio, his last coin.  Financially he would be as dead as the ghost itself.

Turning quickly, panic making his eyes skip across details of the glade that a heartbeat before had held him in rapt fascination, he bolted through the phosphors of brilliant commerce – positive that as he moved the ghost’s eyes were watching, the ghost’s phantom lips moving, casting down a horrible curse on Hiro Yashido:  the curse of poverty.

* * * *

Back in the sanctuary of his zaibatsu, safe behind his firewalls and ramparts of aggressive software, Hiro Yashido released his retrieval programs, tore the interface mask from his face, and jerked the sockets from the back of his neck.

His hands shook, and his breathing was shallow and quick.  A patina of sweat coated his body, running down his face and making his fine Matsuda suit cling to him intimately, claustrophobically.

Frightened, Hiro Yashido could all but feel the curse of the ghost start to work on him:  the phantom feeling of heavy coins dripping through his fingers, the ghostly hallucination of numbers counting down to a bankrupt zero, the fading of paper currency.  Frightened, he knew we was becoming a financial pariah – an economic victim.

I must do something! Hiro Yashido thought.

Knowing that the actual workings of ghosts were beyond his field of expertise, he chopped his hand through the air in a special gesture that his intelligent office would know as a command to summon all his agents, servants, advisors, avatars, and guardians.  Soon his office was filled with hovering icons and flickering windows, the symbolic representation of all he surveyed.

“I need someone who understands the power of ghosts,” Hiro Yashido said to them all, trying to keep fear out of his voice.  “I must find someone who knows their workings:  Their weaknesses or how to appease them.”

“Hai !” and with a blink they were gone, vanishing away to complete their urgent task.

With an equal blink, some returned:  “Most esteemed Sensi, our research indicates no possible avoidance of ghostly curse, so sorry–”

Another blink and more returned:  “It is with deepest regrets, Sir, that we must report that there seems to be no way–”

Yet another: “Sorry, Boss, but your goose is cooked.”

But then: “WiseMan, Inc.!” said one.

* * * *

Hiro Yashido didn’t believe it was possible to make an algorithm, a fractally-complex series of software exchanges seem... old.  But, yet, the tired, bent, wrinkled, dusty, palsied representative of WiseMan, Inc. seemed just that.

The wavering image of the old man bent slowly in a controlled and painful bow.  “Most honorable Sir, how may this unworthy servant serve such a rich and powerful man as yourself?”

“I have need,” Hiro Yashido said, “of a way to defeat a ghost’s curse.”

The software straightened, looked at him with clever eyes.  Hiro Yashido didn’t believe it was possible to make a program have a glint in an eye – yet that’s what seemed to sparkle at him.  “Has Noble Sir become the victim of such a curse?”

Hiro Yashido remembered the dips and drops of his revenues just a few minutes before.  A few digits here and there, a steady decline of profit, a bending of a certain graph – money leaving his hands, falling away from him.

“I am.”

Now sadness seemed to cross the old man’s face:  what design skill!  “Ah, it is with great sadness that I hear of this horrible fate, Sir, for the curse of a ghost is a terrible thing.  Terrible–”

“I am well aware of that fact.  What I require of you is a way to defeat the ghost–”

“Impossible.”

“– or to escape, somehow, his curse.”

The representative of WiseMan, Inc. closed his too-vivid, too-human appearing eyes, appearing lost in thought, concentration, meditation.  Hiro Yashido watched him, impatience ringing in his ears.  For every second of silence, he felt the weight of fortune fall from him – retreating from his cursed and diseased presence:  time was money and both were running out.

“I believe I may have a solution to your dilemma, Kind and Noble Sir...”

“Yes, yes!  Speak, speak!”

“Alas, Sir, it requires what you seem to be in critical need of.”

Thoughts lightning flashed through Hiro Yashido’s mind.  Possibilities, fears, potentials, concerns – all in a storm of aggravation.  Finally, he had to speak the terror he felt, the agony he guessed what might be the solution to his horrible situation:  “You mean–”

“Yes, Sir: Money .”

* * * *

Hiro Yashido stood before the non-existent gates to a phantom shrine.   Erected on a calm, tranquil island in an area of the datasea safe from the storms of commerce, the shrine was dedicated to the souls of the dead – but the souls of those had never quite been alive to begin with.

It makes sense , he thought, tapping on the temple bell with one outstretched virtual finger, that ghosts would seem sympathy for, and kinship with, dear, departed Tamagotchi.

After a time the great heavily detailed, high resolution gates opened and a man who could have been the beta version of the representative from WiseMan, Inc. stuck a gray and wrinkled head out:  “Who is it that breaks the sleep of the departed?” he said.

Hiro Yashido repeated what the WiseMan had said:  “Most noble Priest of this most precious of shrines, I have come a great distance to give to you a gift of finance so that the Holy beings you protect and serve might rest with greater comfort.”

“Got cursed by a ghost, eh?” the software said, looking up at Hiro Yashido with squinting, suspicious eyes.

“Hai ,” Hiro Yashido said, bowing deep.

“Okay, so how much you going to give us?” the Priest said, looking Hiro Yashido up and down with a pawnbroker’s eye, measuring his weight – or, at least, the weight of the avatar Hiro Yashido had chosen that morning.

Must remember to wear something cheaper next time , the rich man thought as he bowed again:  “Most noble Priest, I have but five million yen to give so that our cherished loved-ones might rest in the afterlife with greater ease.”

The amount was exactly half of what the WiseMan had suggested he give.  Hiro Yashido hadn’t become rich by giving everyone exactly what they asked for:  he gave what he could get away with.  It wouldn’t do for him to become poor to avoid becoming so.

The priest snorted at the amount but held out a wavering hand anyway.  “Whatever.  Fork it over.”

Hiro Yashido passed over a glowing yen icon representing the currency.  It vanished the instant it touched the priest’s intangible palm.  “The spirits thank you.  Want a receipt?”

“Definitely.”

With receipt in hand for the transaction, Hiro Yashido turned and moved away with a few practiced gestures – leaving behind the shrine to the spirits of dear, departed virtual pets:  a cemetery of virtual cats, electronic dogs, silicon birds, and other tiny, cherished but deceased, programs.

* * * *

Hiro Yashido couldn’t see it.

He’d stared many minutes at the oscillating rainbow but still it was just – colors and shapes, geometry and fractals.  No eyes.  No nose.  No ears.  No face.  Just brilliant, half-seen shapes that could have been anything – anything at all.

THE NEW MIRACLE OF THE KOBO DAISHI, the abstract pattern that oscillated and undulated next to him spelled out in Technicolor letters.

“It is a miracle –” that you can see anything at all in that... mess , Hiro Yashido said, and thought.

The priest of the hall turned inside out, flashing through a variety of wild patterns, forming dazzling Kanji.  “YES, SO YOU DO SEE!  HIS APPEARANCE HERE IN THE DATASEA MARKS THE START OF A NEW PILGRIM’S JOURNEY – FROM FLESH TO INFORMATION.  A STEP ON A NEW ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT.”

Hiro Yashido bowed his avatar low, an elegant gesture of respect even through the cheap software he was using:  “A noble journey,” from sanity, Hiro Yashido said, and thought.

“THAT IMAGE OF THE DAISHI ON THAT FISH-CAKE WAS NOTHING BUT CIRCUMSTANCE, A TRICK OF SHAPE AND COLOR.  HIS SUPPOSED APPEARANCE ON THAT BAMBOO LEAF?  A HAPPENSTANCE OF NATURE AND NOTHING MORE!  THE SUPPOSED ‘MIRACLE’ OF THE STONES IN KOSHIDO?  GEOLOGY AND EROSION!  BUT HERE – HERE IN THE DEPTHS OF VIRTUAL EXISTENCE, THIS CHAOTIC NODE OF ELECTRONIC BEAUTY – IS A TRUE MIRACLE, AN HONEST APPEARANCE OF THE KOBO DAISHI.  HERE, THE FIRST SHRINE OF A NEW PILGRIM’S JOURNEY!”

Hiro Yashido only somewhat understood the philosophy behind the Buddhist priest’s selection of a spasming kaleidoscope of color to represent himself, and his habit of spelling rather than speaking – his advisors had explained the sect’s solid vow of silence and their preference of honest representation over the illusion of ‘reality’ that governed most people’s selection of a self in the datasea.  Understanding, though, was one thing – comprehension and appreciation something altogether different:  looking at the swirling madness that was the priest of the shrine, and reading the glowing words gave Hiro Yashido a screaming headache.

“I have seen the truth of your words, Noble Priest, and I wish to contribute what no doubt must be a small pittance to the upkeep of your most holy of shrines – so that others might come here to gaze on the appearance of the Kobo Daishi in the datasea,” so maybe the damned ghost will let me off the hook, Hiro Yashido said, and thought.  Bowing again, deep, he intoned, “Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo ” before the electronic altar and extended a shimmering symbol of hard currency to the priest.  It was a lot, but not even close to the amount the representative of WiseMan, Inc. had suggested he give.

Maybe , Hiro Yashido thought, if I gave more I could see it – but then I don’t really want to see it – if I have to give more .

The priest returned the bow, or at least seemed to – his flicking oscillations cascading inwards into a bulging Mandelbrot formation.  “A MOST GENEROUS CONTRIBUTION, SIR,” you miserable cheapskate , he spelled out, and thought.

* * * *

And so Hiro Yashido visited a great many shrines, temples, churches, cathedrals, shrines, tombs, and cemeteries.  Wearing his cheapest icon, his most run-down avatar, his most downtrodden representations, he knocked on doors, rang bells, sent pings, beeps, chords, droplets, wildeeps, susomis, and more.  He visited the Temple of Forgotten Operating Systems, Our Lady of Virtual Piety, The Cathedral of the Holy Electron, the Shrine of the Divine Circuit, The Tomb of the Unknown Crash, and the Sleepy Systems.  At each and every one he passed their priests, sisters, monks, and caretakers a donation.

They weren’t huge donations, or massive funds.  They weren’t generous absolutions, or bottomless atonements.  “Give till it hurts,” the representative of WiseMan, Inc. had told him, and so Hiro Yashido gave tiny aches, minuscule pains, minimal smarts.

After all , Hiro Yashido thought as he dispensed, handed out, passed along and forked over small fractions of his vast fortune, what good would it be if I gave all my money away trying to save it?

And so for many days dawning and fading in the datasea (about three hours in the ‘real’ world) Hiro Yashido gave and gave and gave some more – trying to buy his way out of misfortune, pay his way away from the ghost’s curse.

In the end he did – somewhat – all that the representative from WiseMan, Inc. had said, and managed to still stay a very, very rich man.

* * * *

Many ‘real’ days later (years in the Datasea), Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., was wandering through the representational domain of the world’s financial fervor.  As before, his servants, footmen and salarimen had decried his taking up his immersion goggles, carrying his retrieval software, connecting his neurofacilitators and stepping out into the brilliant calculations, the fantastic computations, glowing transactions of the datasea.

But Hiro Yashido would hear none of it.  He felt free, liberated, born again.  He, Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., had defeated the terrifying curse of a ghost.  He, better than any economic Shogun, had stared bankruptcy in the face and had the satisfaction that it had been financial ruin that’d blinked first.

He was Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc. – a rich man still, a powerful man, still.  He was Hiro Yashido, and, damn , he felt good.

With strong, firm strides he left the protective battlements, the reinforced firewalls of Geonome Inc., and moved out into the dark and shadowy realms of the datasea.  With his most refined, most immaculately tailored Matsuda-styled representation, he moved through the chaos, the undulating economic wilderness as if he were immune to all dangers.  Hiro Yashido felt virus and worms, crashes and system conflicts melt away from his personal power.  He was Hiro Yashido, and he had bested a ghost and come out with most of his immense riches intact!

Proud and tall, he brushed aside fractal chaos that a few days before would have made him hesitate.  He walked where few dared to go – into the undulating morass of third world banking institutions, into the brilliant fires of micro-economic marketplaces, and even through the raging torrents of boom-and-bust investment hurricanes.

He pushed through stagnant eddies of hard currently investors and stepped over the fossilized remnants of sharks who’d starved in the eye of the repression.

Then Hiro Yashido saw the ghost.

Even with his pride and his bravado, fear stabbed through his heart at the sight of him, her... it:  a wavering image, a phosphor palimpsest of something once alive and now – maybe not alive, maybe another kind of living.  A rippling outline, it stood in a clearing of frozen assets, powerful and mysterious.

No , Hiro Yashido thought, seeing it.  No!  Not all that I’ve been though, not after the money I’ve already spent!  No, I refuse to loose more.  I refuse – haven’t I shown my respect, haven’t I offered money to cool its awful wrath?

And so Hiro Yashido decided that he had done, in fact, just that, and spoke:  “Kind and noble ghost, I have given many great and noble causes the heavy coins from my investment portfolio.  I have emptied the coffers of my powerful zaibatsu, tapped deep the financial resources of my kiretsu.  I have paid many a priest, sister, monk, and caretaker to honor their holy sanctuaries, their noble care-taking of our electronic ancestors.  Do I not deserve therefore to be spared your awful, terrifying curse?”

The ghost turned it’s computational perceptions on Hiro Yashido – a hideous, ripping electronic sight that turned the Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., into a mere icon of a flesh and blood and bone man – and saw him for the very first time.

The chilling revelation tumbled down through Hiro Yashido, the horrifying knowledge that, yes, indeed, this was the first time the information specter had ever really seen him.  Not before.  Then, there, in that clearing of frozen assets the ghost saw him.  Before, it had not.  There hadn’t been a curse – there never had been.  All those shrines, temples, churches, cathedrals, shrines, tombs, and cemeteries had been for nothing, a waste of time and (horror!) money .

“I see in the tides of commerce,” spoke the ghost to Hiro Yashido in a voice with the power of a thousand depressions, a hundred thousand recessions, a million bankruptcies, a billion financial disasters, “that what you say is true – that you have given of your portfolio, your zaibatsu, the fellows of your kiretsu.  You have indeed given to the holy orders that us of the in-between world hold dear.  For this you should be rewarded.”

“I-I-I...” stammered Hiro Yashido, Chief Executive Officer of Geonome Inc., terror even transmitting to his representation in the datasea:  his Matsuda icon shaking like a leaf battered by a heavy wind.

“And so you shall be rewarded.  For your giving to these precious orders, I grant you the most priceless of rewards –”

And so Hiro Yashido achieved Enlightenment.

* * * *

Every day the new monk rose at the start of financial trading.  Gathering his humble and well-worn interface mask, his crude and beta-version software, and carefully connecting himself via his cheap – off the shelf – cortical socket, he stepped into the dully-realized domain of the shrine.

Some who saw his crazed swirl of identity speculated that this humblest of monks, this squiggly cartoon of a figure, was once him – Hiro Yashido – the rich, rich man who had achieved true Enlightenment and so had, in one mad, pious act, given all that had once defined him to many shrines, temples, churches, cathedrals, shrines, tombs, and cemeteries.  Was this, they wondered, the man who had tried to selfishly buy away the curse of a ghost – only to receive in thanks a gift that showed him the futility of money?

The monk never spoke of his former life.  He diligently cleaned the shrine and intoned his prayers, and meditated on the swirls of colors, the fractal rainbows that some said was the face of the Daishi.

Whether he actually saw the face no one but the monk could say – and, silent, he never did.

MEDICINE MAN

Hot, dry air buffeted the heavy canvas of the tent, carrying with it the sharp stink of horses.  The roans tied outside scratched crescents in the dirt as the main flaps fluttered.  The wind held the deep aromas of manure and raw timber, and the faint fermentation of human sweat. The dry, hollow bite of dust, and the distant crack of occasional gunfire.

When a pungent draught pushed the billowing tent just right, Joshua Logan could make out the dim, flickering lights of Last Ditch.  Yet another small town.  Last Ditch could very well have been Clearwater, Dogwood, Freedom, or Sweetwater Flats – any of them.  All that distinguished Last Ditch from the other tiny outcroppings of clapboard and sand-faded paint was that it was the small town outside his tent, this night.  This night, like so many others, a place on a map, a recitation from the Good Book, and a pass of the tambourine.

The tent was mostly empty.  Toward the back of the battered wagon that served as Joshua's pulpit, familiarly rugged faces watched him from three crooked lines of old wooden chairs.  One a tanned mask, eyes pushed into thick skin.  Another a shrunken apple, cheeks too red and bright.  And yet, like in every town, at least one soft and delicate, a china doll hidden behind a mist of lace, waiting its time under the sun.

Great canvas wings beat slowly over his head – tent fabric streaked by many miles of travel, innumerable patchings and resewings.  Once the color of fresh cream, the canvas now resembled sour milk from so long on the road.  Rough-hewn posts lifted the tent at three points.  A half-dozen cheap lamps, hanging from ropes strung between the poles, illuminated God's makeshift kingdom.  Their light surged back and forth under the steady wind.

Joshua spoke of God, of His grandeur, of the brilliant sun above and of the cool moon at night, of His breath in the wind.  He spoke of His Love and His power and His forgiveness.  And, as always, he reminded them of His righteous fury, the brimstone furnace awaiting them should they turn away from His sight.  He reminded them of an eternity of pain and suffering, punishments beyond their worst imaginings all guaranteed should they shun Him, and yet all escapable through acceptance of His glory.

He saw it in their gleaming eyes, in their rigid bodies.  They understood his words, the Word of God.  It was what he was there for; it was what he lived for.

A sullen, monotone chorus of Amen rang down the curtain that night.  Joshua had performed his duty to the Lord.  His Word had been delivered.  All that remained was business – and always Joshua felt soiled as he passed the tambourine, pleading before their dully glowing eyes for his earthly needs: the holes that needed patching, the chairs that needed mending, the wagon wheel that threatened to splinter, feed for his horse, feed for the preacher – the pittance that kept him going.

The congregation shuffled out, hands tight over their hats lest the wind snatch them away.  They were silent, hushed by his intensity.

The last to leave, a sad-eyed farmer in tired dungarees, handed him the sparse take before following the citizens out into the late-night dust storm.

Maybe enough to mend two chairs or patch a few holes in the great tent.  Some oats for Isaiah, a steak and potato dinner at Mrs. Harrison's Boarding House, and – always – more than enough for a bottle of cheap rye.

Joshua moved about the sagging tent, making sure the ropes were secure against the wind, extinguishing the lanterns… and he realized he wasn't alone.

* * * *

“Uh, welcome, good sir,” Joshua said, his voice wavering with nervousness.  “How might I help you?”

On the road, many conflicting tales about the red savages reached his ears.  Joshua held his breath, waiting to see whether the Indian had brought treasures in trade or injury.  Life had brought the preacher little of the first.

The figure that finally stepped into full view was ancient, his dark flesh leathery and lined.  Mahogany, yes, but wood torn and warped by decades of harshness, or winds and pounding rains.  The savage's dimly lit face was heavily wrinkled, as if his skull had withdrawn.  His chest was a gray barrel in the flickering lantern light, a mad pattern of heavy, blistered scars.  Behind his head drooped a mass of eagle feathers, and in one callused fist he clutched a knurly staff peaked by the flesh-stripped skull of some unrecognizable beast.  The Indian wasn't tall – he didn't need to be.  This man carried his power within.

“Please,” Joshua whispered, fright touching his heart, “please tell me what you want.”  Slowly, the preacher retreated, moving cautiously among the scattered seats.  “I don't have any money, no fire-water, not much food.  Just tell me what you want.”

The feathers at the Indian's shoulders moved slowly in the hot, dry air.  “Many sick, many with bad sickness,” he said in a rough, gravelly voice.

“I'm not a doctor,” Joshua said, “I am just a man of the cloth.  I offer only the Word of God.  I am His messenger, a mere man spreading the truth of His divine blessing.”

“God?” the old Indian intoned.  “Speak to me of God.  I travel many days, seeking medicine.”

At Joshua's feet, a toppled chair.  Behind him, a cross that desperately needed painting.  A tent that needed mending.  His wagon's right front wheel was creaking persistently of late, and Isaiah was getting slower and slower.  More importantly, all around him was the hot wind, and nothing else.  He was hollow, a void, a shell walking in a filthy cassock, with an ache in his belly that only a bottle could relieve.

The Indian was asking.  No one had ever asked before.  They came when he lifted up his tent, scattered his handbills, or called to them outside their saloons.  They came, but never, not in his forty-five years, had anyone walked into his tent and asked to be saved.

“The best medicine is the Word of God,” Joshua said, stepping backward toward the crucifix, to his little nave at the back of the tent.  He took up his still-warm Bible, clapped it hard, sent a thin cloud of yellow dust into the dank air.  “His word is all.  His love and divine light can cure anyone or anything.  Even you, my friend, who might never have heard His Word, felt power of His love, can be saved, can be cured of even the most wretched illness.”

The Indian stepped forward slowly, till he stood before the jumble of chairs.

Joshua Logan held his Bible aloft.  And His divine power, His righteous strength, surged through him.  The words came like thunder, like the holy torrent upon Noah.  It felt right, it felt good.  Rarely did the Word thrum from so deeply inside.  The Word was with him tonight, as he reached out his hands to this ignorant savage.

“My friend,” Joshua finished, “if you take God and His Son into your heart and soul, nothing on this earth can touch you.  After you've accepted Him as your Lord and Savior, there's no disease, there's no illness that can affect you, for you will be held in His bosom.  Once you've accepted Him into your life, you will be saved, son.  You will be saved.”

He felt the Lord acting within him, as strongly and as surely as he felt the force of the relentless wind.  This night, before this lone savage, he was truly touched by the Holy Spirit.  Finished, he felt full, complete, at peace.  The emptiness didn't yawn beneath his feet, didn't swallow his soul.

The Indian stood still as stone.  Then he spoke, his words rough: “I hear your words.”  His voice seemed crushed by the desert, scoured by hot winds and sand.  “Many of my people sick.  Sick in spirit.  So I must cure.  I cure with knife, with bleeding, with the great pains of the body.  I cure by taking their seeing.  My medicine good, very powerful, but still no hope for them.  So I destroy them, before others become sick – sick from this thing you call God.”

Joshua stepped backward, suddenly understanding the savage's intent, even though the words had yet to come.

“I walk,” the Medicine Man said, great gray orbs taking in Joshua's own weeping eyes.  “I walk to find medicine to cure – or to find those who spread this God.   I hear your words.  You are also sick.”

The Medicine Man stepped forward, obsidian knife tight in one hand, dark glass catching lantern light.

“I must cure you – before more become sick.”

WANDERLUST

The moan of radials on asphalt; a high-octane, four-stroke, eight cylinder, growl under the hood.

The white line vanishing under, then appearing behind.  The near landscape moving fast, far landscape slow.  That it was day pines and jagged peaks, blurs of snow, and stoplights swinging in a biting wild.  The clouds above were thick and dark, heavily laden with imminent hard rain.

Dancing on his dash, spring-loose hips knocking back and forth with each shimmy and engine knock, she smiled up at him: a beautific image of absolute love in cheap, sun-faded plastic.  Every once and a while he found himself looking at her, entranced for a moment by her smile – but most of the time he tried to ignore her, pretend the Mustang’s dash was void of cheap hoola girls.

The road lifted and dropped under him till the sun set, cutting itself on a distant mountain top – bleeding a bright red sunset.  Reaching down, he hooked two fingers around a peeling, chrome knob and pulled.  High beams stabbed out, revealing a picket line of trees beneath a dark canopy of thick branches and strong needles.

The needle tapped E.  Around one corner, a gas station – antique signs lovingly preserved: Gas & Food.  Then a restaurant, flashing by his right-hand window – a hospitable glow from within dusky log cabin walls, through thick gingham curtains.

A quick turn, tires only beginning a scream of protest.  With his foot on the brake, the exultation of being on the road, of traveling, fell away from him.  Stopping felt like a putting on a heavy cloak.  Before he opened the door he took a deep breath of mental preparation.

Out and into the station.  Dark deco pumps, like drained Coke bottles, under buzzing lamps circled by flights of huge moths.  The air was crystal – hard and jagged with cold.  Plunging hands deep into leather jacket pockets, he moved across the concrete towards the buzzing neon OFFICE sign.

Inside, the place was as familiar as – well, as his home had been, so long ago.  It had the usual touches, as regular as the gas in the pumps: jerky and maps, cigarettes and potato chips, lighters and a GIVE can; a guy behind the counter in overalls, backwards gimmie cap, face craggy with exhaust and exhaustion – and with that special grease and spark plug viewpoint they all seemed to have, that special kind of bitterness.

“Howdy,” the gas station man said, “anything I can do you for–?”  Then he stopped.  Frozen, arrested, his eyes staring wide.  He’d been drawn in, completely taken.

“Yeah, I need gas,” he said.  As the door closed behind him, he took another deep breath, feeling the soft leather press against his chest.

“Take what you want, please –” the gas man said, his voice soft, cooing like a pigeon.  “Anything you want, it’s yours.”  It was a tone he had probably never used before, and would never use again.  Not a two stroke sound, not a fuel additive sound; it was so sweet it was almost comical.

“Thanks,” he said, turning and walking back out to his car, the pumps.  He didn’t laugh.

Dipping the nozzle in and squeezing the handle, he sensed the gas man standing behind him, lingering close by.  With another breath, tired this time, he turned to look at him.

Turning his gimmie cap in his dark, wrinkled hands, mouth hanging open just enough to show his yellowed, picket-fence teeth, eyes glimmering, flashing with fascination, the gas man said,  “Uh, Mister, I, ah–”

He turned completely, to look at him directly.  Sometimes he just walked away, or drove off – feeling bitter guilt for a few miles.  Tonight, though, he felt a pitiful affection for the man.  “For the gas,” he said, kissing him on his chapped lips, listening to his little sigh, his pathetic moan of ecstatic release.

Then, towards the restaurant.  Suddenly, the wind surrounded him, nipping at his exposed skin, howling with feral glee – carrying away most, but not all, of the gas man’s sobbing, beatific joy.

He hoped it wasn’t crowded.  He prayed it wasn’t crowded.  The door was heavy, halved logs again, but pushed open easily.  Inside it was warm, comfortable, like burying under many layers of blankets.  Maybe a dozen tables, a dark jukebox, red and white checkered table cloths, little electric lamps at each table, stuffed moose on one wall, antlers on the others.  From the back, the clatter and bang of a busy kitchen.

Maybe four people – not many: an older couple dressed simply, warmly – obviously locals; a pair of women wearing simple, but pretty dresses – on their way to, or home from, something formal.

“Hello–” the waitress said, and he turned to look at her.  Maybe forty, bright red hair, skin the color of new cream.  She was a big girl, but strong – she moved with a comfort in herself, not without a certain grace, a certain sensuality.

Her eyes were bright green, like the stoplight that he’d seen swinging, and very, very wide – drinking him in as completely as they could.  Looking at her, he watched them dilate till they were nothing but jade-ringed deep pools.

“I’d like to have something to eat.  A steak, some potatoes.  Oh, and a beer,” he said, turning away from their rapture.

She nodded, unable to speak.  She licked her lips – once, twice, three times.  Finally:  “Yeah, sure – right.  How... how do you want it cooked?”

“Medium,” he said, trying not to smile, trying to keep his face cool and immobile.  “I’ll sit over there,” he said, indicating a table near the window.

He sat in silence, everyone’s eyes on him, their conversation dead.  Their attention was like a growing heat, making his skin and face feel almost burned.  Even the kitchen was quiet, the cymbal clashes of pots and pans gone.

He turned, looking over his shoulder at the kitchen door.  The waitress stared at him, immobile in her bliss in the doorway.  Next to her, partially eclipsed by her shoulder, as the cook: an old man with a bad toupee.  His eyes were the size of skillets.

“I’m in kind of a hurry–” he said, and the cook disappeared, hastened by the simple request.  The waitress startled, surprised by the time limit – and vanished back into the kitchen as well.

Someone was stroking his jacket.  Looking over his shoulder he saw that it was one of the fancy-dressed women, her face frozen in joy, her eyes wet with ecstasy, her hand moving with cautious delight up and down his back.

“Please don’t do that,” he said with kindness.  Shocked, she jumped back, looking like a fawn trapped in headlights: frozen in place, caught between adoration and the fear of loosing the source of it.  “It’s okay,” he said softly, “just don’t touch me.”

Delighted, she squealed, curling her legs under her – staring with fascination as he took a napkin from the stainless dispenser and neatly arranged it on the table.

“Your... your beer,” the waitress said, putting the chilled bottle on the table in front of him, her hand grazing his. With the contact, her eyes rolled back into her head and she quivered, ever so slightly.

The others watched as well – eyes wide, mouths slightly agape.  He wondered, again, what they saw.  The answer was simple, but somehow unfulfilling: they saw that they wanted to.

The steak came – quicker, he knew, and prepared better than the cook ever had before – with a steaming baked potato.  With the food in front of him, his stomach complained loudly.

He ate quickly, cutting the steak with a few deft strokes of the cheap knife, following every other bite with a swig of beer.  They all watched, staring at each movement, adoring him totally, completely.  Every gesture, every breath, every blink was perfect, ideal, beatific.

Halfway through the steak, blade scraping against white bone, a frown creased the waitress’s forehead – a quick spasm of facial muscles.

He didn't need to, especially with time slipping away, but sometimes he wanted to release the guilt, to explain – if just a little. His years on the road, the salesman of all salesmen – mile after mile, selling this and that: His car his home, his Bible an AAA map, his family the grim faces that pumped his gas.

A swig of beer, a big bite of tender steak, hot potato. He'd driven those roads day after day, night after night – miles and months blurring. At first the cheap little figure on his dashboard had been just that: an image of cartoonish happiness in red plastic, found in a junk shop attached to a service station somewhere.  At first it was a kitschy trinket to keep his spirits light, give him company on his journeys.  But all those miles he'd put in, all those roads, his life as the salesman of salesmen – it had attracted the attention of... something.  Something that had come to inhabit that hula girl.  Something that had come to possess her – and in so doing, possess him.

Wanderlust, you'd have to call her: A priestess of the Interstate, a Goddess of the roads. The endless white lines were her altar. His endless traveling, it seemed, had gotten him noticed, and then loved by her.  And she had a powerful, divine affection.

She loved him so much, in fact, that she'd given him a gift, a little something to remember her by whenever he left her immediate domain: a little something that made him glow with splendor at every new stop, made him beautiful to every new face he saw.  His face had become the mirror of her adoration.

And now his dashboard lover reflected the pleasure she drew from him: A tiny smile on the face of that cheap plastic hoola girl.  A smile on the face of Wanderlust.

The waitress’s frown creased further, deepening.  He ate faster, cutting with even greater speed, almost choking down the meat, the hot potato.  Then the older man sneered, his lip quivering; and the waitress’s frown dropped into a scowl... her eyes narrowing at him.

A sudden clattering explosion of metal from the kitchen startled him, and his beer almost slipped from his hand.  Glancing up, he caught the cook standing in the doorway, disgust on the face.

The waitress got up and left, quickly retreating towards the back of the cafe.  The women followed, shading their eyes behind shaking hands.  The older man looked pale, as if the life had been quickly drained from him.

He ate quickly – soon very little of his steak remained, but there was still a good portion of potato.  Not finishing meant getting hungry – so he tried to force the food down.

The waitress retreated into the kitchen, moaning pitifully as she glanced over her shoulder at him.  The older man turned a light shade of green and started to painfully retch in a distant corner.  The three women held each other – faces turned away, trying to avoid even the slightest glimpse of his grotesqueness.

The last piece.  The last swallow.  Getting up, his chair skidded across the floor.  The older woman looked up at the sound, deep reflexes betraying her fear.  Seeing him, she screamed.  It was a sound of terror and revulsion that came up from down deep – even deeper than that betraying instinct.  Seeing his primal ugliness, her body convulsed, snapping her head back against the hard wall with a heavy, hollow sound, and rocketing her arms and legs out stiffly.

He ran towards the door – a piercing chorus of agonized repulsion tearing through the air from behind as he moved.  It was a sound of ultimate abhorrence, absolute disgust.  He knew what they saw, now, as he slammed into the heavy door, bolting out into the bitter night – it was what they never, ever wanted to see: an image of ugliness that was lurking in them all painted on his face.

As he ran towards his car, he felt a bolt of sadness tear through him.  He used to apologize – first with words and then, later, just in thought.  But it had been too many miles, too many roads.  So he just ran – trying to get into his car as fast as possible.

The gas man was standing by the door to his office, absently wiping his hands with a red cloth – movements stiff and awkward, still recovering from his dose of pure joy.

The man looked up at the movement, his face instantly frozen in a mask of exaggerated horror: mouth and eyes too wide, hands clawing outwards as his legs tried to push him as far away as possible.  His scream, when it came, was a shattering noise, a sound of witnessing his own personal terror.

As quick as he could, with the sound of the gas man’s screams still tearing at his ears, he climbed in, started the engine, and pressed the accelerator to the floor.  The sound of squealing tires on wet asphalt was an angel’s choir, a concerto of escape.

* * * *

Miles later – time not having any meaning, anymore – his heart slowed a bit, was no longer hammering in his chest.  As he relaxed – sinking down into the seat, resting his hands on the wheel – distance slipped by faster.

So many highways, so many roads, so many white lines vanishing in front, reappearing behind.  Yes, she loved him – his Goddess of the roads.  Loved him enough to give him that special gift: he wore her love as a mask of beauty.

But she also wanted him with her, always.  So, towards the end it turned, he turned... ugly: changed into a reason to invariably return to the road – to return to her.

Mile after mile, the road sometimes weaving, sometimes straight, always ahead.  Foot down, hands on the wheel, he drove – following the road wherever it took him, stopping only when he absolutely needed to.

While on the dashboard, the hoola dancer smiled up at him – her cheap plastic face a stern image of eternal possession.

ORPHANS

Outside of Atlanta, after standing under the flickering fluorescent lights of a sprawling truck stop for almost an hour, he was picked up by a heavy faced man driving a ratting sixteen wheeler.  Red hair an angry mop on his head, brushy beard all wild and unkempt, the driver said “Glad for the company” before they’d even pulled out onto the dark highway.

* * * *

In a little town somewhere just beyond the Louisiana border, he was picked up by a middle-aged woman in a green station wagon, who seemed to delight in creating herself as the perfect housewife:  housecoat, hair in curlers, kid’s seat in the back.  She spent the first few miles prattling nervously, obviously just wanting companionship but frightened with herself for choosing the young hitchhiker to try and sate it.  He listened, hypnotized by the landscape blurring by.  Finally she asked, “Been on the road long?”

“Not long,” he said, wishing again that it had been someone else who’d picked him up, “just getting out.  Meeting people.”

“That’s good,” she said, innocently.  “Nothin’ worse than being alone.”

To that he just nodded, still staring out the window.

* * * *

He’d never heard of a nut log, and would be damned if he was going to try some.  But the salesman, Lou Phillips, was so insistent that – before he was even aware of it – he had some on the end of his fork.

“Now me, son,” Lou said, smiling broad and bright, “I ain’t a flincher.  You take that shit there on the end of your fork.  What’s the worse that could happen?  It taste like crap – but that ain’t gonna kill you, is it?  But maybe it’s gonna be the best damned shit you ever tasted.  Ain’t gonna know till it’s in your mouth, right?”

He didn’t answer, and instead stared at the tip of his fork, at the brown sticky mass.  Before he was aware of it he was categorizing diseases, vectors and transmission rates.  Closing his eyes, he breathed in, out, in and again, then put it into his mouth.  The sweetness was almost alarming, and without conscious control he opened his eyes – and stared into Lou’s sparking brown eyes.  “See, that ain’t so bad!  Fuck it, son – life’s too short to be scared.”

A cup of coffee later, Lou confessed that he was a widower.  His wife of twenty-six years having passed away that spring.  “Some kind of virus got her.  By the time she went to the damn doc it was she was thin as a rail.  Didn’t last more than a month.”

Sipping hot, bitter – with a touch of slightly turned cream, he hung his head down, mumbling, “Sorry” like it was his fault.

“I mean we all got to go, right?  When it’s our turn.  But what pisses me off is the shit those damned doctors put ya through.  Pretend that they know it all when they don’t know shit.  Tell ya what, kid, if I ever get something I’m just gonna drive out to the desert somewhere and just lay out there in the sun.  Damn sight better chance then letting them touch ya.”

It seemed such a positive act that he smiled, despite himself – masking it by sipping the foul coffee again and saying “Sometimes it isn’t that they don’t know – it’s that it’s just not worth knowing.”

* * * *

Another big truck – this time cleaner, almost polished.  Like a fighter plane, sporting an elegant pin-up on the driver’s side door.  Haulin’ Ass , scrolled under a cheesecake girl with golden blond hair.  The driver was gaunt, a narrow sketch of a man.  Peppered hair and the ghostly scar of a hair lip. 

They didn’t speak for many miles, then the driver said, unexpectedly, “What cha’ runnin’ from, man?”

His first reaction was so say, “nothing” but the word didn’t come.  Was he running?  When he thought about it, watching the double-yellow vanish under the windshield, the direction wasn’t right.  “Not from, towards.”

“What cha’ goin’ to, then?”

He didn’t know.  He did know, though, that he couldn’t stay in Atlanta.  It was such a lonely place... no, not right.  It was where he discovered loneliness.  A dusty little room and files – at first just one or two then more.  Some of them had faces, pictures charting their progress – images to match the declining graphs.  Aside from the wasting, he’d seen something else in those faces, the sunken eyes, the fallen features – loneliness.  In their worlds they’d been too few, not enough to matter... to save.

He’d managed a rough smile, trying to put a comedic face over tragedy.  “Just makin’ friends,” he said.

* * * *

Texas was hot, ghostly heat hovering above the roadway.  Sky too blue, too pure to be stared at for long.  Sitting in a McDonald’s, slowly sipping a shake to avoid going out into the hot, dry, he struck up a brief conversation with a young couple.  Too pressed, too clean.  A few miles beyond, the air conditioner in their older car cranked up to full, they started to talk about Jesus. 

He responded noncommittally, but soon their tone started to irritate him.  Looking out at the hot land, he could too easily see the ghostly hopelessness, the abandonment he’d first seen in Atlanta overlaid on every face they passed.  Maybe the harried father in the RV – stricken with something that struck one on ten thousand.  Maybe that old woman, all blue hair and cautious hand on the wheel – catching something that would waste her, slowly, horribly but only affected one in a hundred thousand.

He listened, for a moment, about what they were saying – instantly realizing that they were following a well-hewn grove.  Something like Parkinson’s, a horrible in-law to the more popular disease: a gradual wasting of the mind – something affecting one in a million.  He could too easily see them, parroting their beliefs till they had no more will, no more strength left to even move their lips.

At the next town he asked to be left off, dismissing their offer of finding him a shelter, a meal, but he did take the money they offered, more than anything to get them to leave.

* * * *

Too many miles.  Still in Texas but the weather had changed – high, turbulent clouds casting deep shadows onto the flat land.  Too many miles.  Maybe that was it.  A pressure.  They all saw him the way they wanted to, a young man traveling.  A bum, a threat, a homeless person, an object of pity, something to hate and blame.  The pick-up truck full of teenagers, throwing a half-empty can of beer as they passed, the too-helpful families that desperately wanted his absolution.

So he told some of it to the bald man, the man in the jeans and stained tee-shirt.  He knew he’d been picked up for rough trade, but didn’t care.  He avoided his inquiring eyes and, at first, answered with only a few words, but as they drove and the driver’s interest became more and more obvious he found himself talking more, stringing together fact and fiction.

To “– where are you headed?” he said, “Los Angeles, my mom’s in the hospital.  Something wrong with her liver.”

To “– that sounds pretty serious.  What does her doctor say?”  he said, “They know what it is, some kind of hepatitis variant.  Rare, though, like one in a hundred thousand get it.”

To “– at least they know what it is.  They got all kinds of drugs and shit nowadays” he said, pausing “They know what it is, but not enough people get it.  So they don’t make a cure, not cost effective.  They call them ‘orphan diseases’ – too rare to bother curing.  She’s going to die.”

They rode in uncomfortable silence till the next town.  This time he was asked to leave – and he did, stepping out into the darkness of a cloud’s shadow.  It had been the shortest trip he’d been on, but he felt lighter, less burdened.  That it had only been part of the truth didn’t matter; he’d spoken enough of it to get someone to understand, if maybe just a little.

* * * *

A long time and New Mexico.  He felt the fever start as he walked down dusty streets, passing stores selling fake Indian art, plastic tomahawks.  In a narrow alley, an old man with heavy features slept out the hot afternoon, a bronze-colored bottle by his hand. 

He went into a dark bar and sat in the corner, feeling his core temperature rise, his skin shimmy with cold shakes.  Taking deep breaths, he sipped a warm beer. 

He remembered its pathology, its transmission rates, preferred vectors.  He thought he’d have more time, and silently felt a heavy sadness at not being able to see the Pacific.  It hadn’t been a real goal, but had begun to be a kind of benchmark, a saccharin epitaph. 

He’d met some good people as he’d traveled from Atlanta, and felt sorry for them.  But he also remembered those faces on all those files.  It wasn’t virulent, but it did spread.  Airborne was tough, but it could manage. 

Too few to care about.  Not enough to bother curing.  It had almost been gone, at least to the Center for Disease Control.  Exiled to its refrigerator, the vault.  A rarity that claimed maybe a hundred, maybe two each year, almost just a memory.  So rare that they’d passed judgment on it:  extinction.  It had been his job to destroy the samples, to consign the virus to a few sad cases scattered around the world.   

The faces on those folders.  Too few to care about.  As the shivers began in earnest, he tried to think about them, to hold each and every one of them in his mind.  Coldly told there weren’t enough of them to bother, to care about, to cure.

Sipping his beer, feeling his strength drain, he hoped that now – after all those miles he’d managed, those rides, those hands he’d shaken – they wouldn’t be so alone.