SLEEPWALKERS

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… the environment that Man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it.—Marshall McLuhan

“ANYTHING FOR A BUCK,” Ace said.

“A man’s gotta live, a man’s gotta eat, a man’s gotta have shoes to walk down the street,” Bernie said.

“Another day, another dollar,”’ Jules chimed in.

“Five’ll get you ten and ten’ll get you a fuckin’ twenty,” Ace added. “And all that shit.”

“Fucking beggars can’t be fuckin’ choosers,” Bernie said. “And all that shit too.”

“When the motherfuckin’ wolf’s at the door you gotta pay the goddamn piper, or some fucking thing like that,” Ace muttered, getting bored with it. They’d begun the recitation game when Jules had told them he was going to rent himself to the Sleepwalker Agency.

They were silent then, and listened to Mick Jagger on the oldie station explain that although it was only rocknroll, he liked it. The song ended, another began, a lovesong styled like a dirge, and that started Jules thinking about Zimm and the money he needed before he could see her again. “Neither a dumbshit borrower nor a fucking lender be,” be murmured. Well, I’ve got the lender part sewed up, he thought. I wish I didn’t owe her anything. Money. Or anything.

That’s when Barb came in, and since she had her swagger on they knew she had the shit; the fake-platinum grill on her teeth shining like a needle in the afternoon light slanting through the only unbroken window. It was impure meth, kinda yellowy, so it had to be cooked. Seeing her cook up the meth, Bernie danced around her in a circle, clapping his hands and growling. Bernie had downslanted brown eyes and curly black hair bowed from the weight of six washless weeks. He’d been nineteen and Jewish before he’d started shooting crystal. That’s the way Jules thought of it. That Bernie was no longer Jewish, he was no longer young; he was a speedfreak. Made you a whole new species of person.

Jules watched with a slight smile, tapping his fingers to the music against the plywood nailed over the side window. On a bygone giddy summer night Ace had a kind of meltdown and had broken out all the windows but one and now the small stucco house glared like a one-eyed man at the rest of East Hollywood. Jules felt left out, times like this, because he’d given up on drugs. A little peyote here and there, maybe some ’shrooms now and again; next to being straight, almost, with these guys. He was tempted every damned time it came around, too. He’d had a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor—before the guy blew him off for taking ’shrooms—who’d said the desire to use would go away. But it never did completely. It just backed up a little and yelled at you from across the street, instead of yelling in your ear.

Ace was half Chicano, or had been before he made the agreement with methedrine. The pockmarks in his gaunt cheeks seemed to glow like tiny fumaroles as he watched Barb, his old lady, preparing the syringe with clinical detachment. His eyes were black: sharp, pointed black.

Ace went to his room and returned with a can of lighter fluid. Skipping in a circle around Bernie, Ace sprayed the lighter fluid on the floor. Bernie danced. “Hey, HEY!” Bernie growled as the guitar player on the stereo went into an incendiary solo. It was the band Witch with that guy from Dinosaur Jr. Ace tossed a match at the ring of lighter fluid and gossamer flames darted up, encircling Bernie like footlights, tickling at his ankles. Laughing, he danced them dead. They died quickly and with little smoke, like starved infants dying easy.

“Wuh-ooo!” Jules shouted obligatorily, clapping his hands. Not feeling it much.

Barb, her black skin shining with sweat, leaned over the candle so the light glinting off the spoon was reflected in her inky eyes.

Jules hadn’t been molded into a functional component of the Overmind Amplifier, as Bernie called it, the Speed Machine, as Barb called it, because he had not made the agreement. He combed slender fingers through his long, straight brown hair and pouted. He swiped at his eyes, making a black smudge on his hand. His makeup was smeared. He could give a shit. Yeah, he definitely felt left out, when his roommates fixed. He loved a woman who was only desultorily interested in him; he played bass but had no band; he’d played with drugs … but he had not come to terms with them; and he could no longer bear to peddle his ass—he was a cog without its clockworks.

He drooped back against the wall, slumped to the floor, stretched out his legs and reflected that the machine-and-petroleum scent from the combusted lighter fluid would be appropriate perfume for Zimm. He ran his thumb along the shiny inner thigh of his skintight dungarees, staring at the worn, pointed toe of his black boots.

The record ended. Jules watched as Bernie and Barb fixed, rubber bands tight around their biceps, their foreheads beaded with sweat. They drove the spikes home at precisely the same instant.

Ace was still filling his spike, chewing his lower lips, head tilted downward, eyes fixed on the almost transparent liquid. He was loading up more this time, and the last time he’d used more than the time before. Jules looked harder at the lineaments of Ace’s skull pressing out through his sallow skin, and knew; knew that Ace was sure to overdose. Dust himself. It was like the speed was inside him pushing, pushing, pushing his skull out through the skin. Jules sagged inwardly—nothing he could do.

The hell with it—it’s what he wants.

Jules turned off the radio, put on a CD, smirked, knowing what Bernie’s reaction would be to this particular song, and put it on: The Velvet Underground, “White Light, White Heat.”

“Take that motherfucker OFF!” Bernie snarled, shivering from the first influx of rush. His pupils shrank like coffee going down a drain; they expanded all of a sudden like the coffee had hit an obstruction and was welling back up: his eyes dilating.

Barb laughed as Bernie shrieked, “Take it off before I step on the fucking stereo!”

Snickering, feigning surprise, Jules put something on that Bernie could accept because it was absurd: A scratchy copy of Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” “’At’s better,” Bernie said, sinking into an already sunken velour easychair. He was shaking like a wet dog, breathing quickly, tongue snapping between his teeth. In the storm-eye of the rush, Bernie’s face, muscles tight, was flushed so white it was like the chrome grill of an onrushing Cadillac. Jules liked seeing Bernie this way just as he had once enjoyed watching his father at work—both of them doing something that defined their lives. Bernie had made a career of being a speedfreak. “You put on that speedfreak song on purpose, Jules, you sucker. You know I can’t stand music if it’s appropriate. I hate things that are appropriate and obvious, like people coming out of the Betty Boop film festival all giggling and goin’ Oohboopeedoo and you KNOW you KNOW you know I hate that shit Jules-you-ugly-mother. Oh you KNOW it grinds on me like a giant pitbull in heat, a big giant pitbull with a big, giant—”

And Bernie was well launched into his speedfreak rap which everyone knew better than to listen to and which he had to get out of his system for the next two-and-a-half hours.

“That Judy Garland song’s appropriate,” Jules ventured. “She was a speedfreak too.”

“‘At right,” Ace said, teeth chattering, head bouncing like a violently dribbled basketball; he’d intended a slight nod.

Barb and Ace went into the next room to get passionate. The speed had done its work—Ace had been unable to get it up for months, but he did her with his fingers and that was fine because she only liked sex as an excuse to be held and rocked.

Naturally, this turned Jules’s thoughts to Zimm. How he had to get some money to her. So she’d look at him with respect.

Some liberated woman, he thought. She pretends she’s above it all, but she lives for money. Maybe he would go to the club and watch her shake ’em, and laugh at her, loudly, see how liberated she felt with someone besides a TV-snowed middle-ager watching for the sake of The Big Machine.

I’m onto her, Jules thought. She plays feminist but she gets off dancing nude for those whip-offs, it’s a sick throwback to her fixation on her father … . Maybe I can get in good with her by kidnapping her old man and bringing him to her on a chain and making him crawl for her. Maybe that would be enough.

Nope. No way that would be enough.

Even then, she’d want the money “for the role-playing.”

But he had to see Zimm tomorrow. He needed her. That much was established. He couldn’t wait any longer. He had to get five hundred dollars to pay back the money he owed her. Five hundred dollars and maybe enough extra cake for a down payment on a car so she’d stop calling him a deadbeat. And he could get that kind of money quick only one of two ways. He could steal. Or he could go to the Sleepwalkers Agency.

“It’s nothin’ you ain’t done before,” said Bernie suddenly, as if he’d read Jules’s mind. Which maybe he had. Speed gave him access to normally inaccessible channels. “You ought to know the scene. I’d figure it for a step up. I mean, you don’t remember it, afterwards. Except for twelve lost hours it’s like free money. For sleeping. If they wanna fuck you, they gotta use condoms. I don’t know anybody who was ever hurt by it,” he said like a car salesman, tapping his fingers, licking his lips, tapping his feet and shrugging—all simultaneously. Bernie wanted Jules to take the job because he knew Jules would donate some of his earnings to the house kitty. “Nobody gets hurt, much. A few bruises. A few people went nuts. But there’s a hazard to every profession. Just as bad being a cop as it is being a bum, sometimes, an’ it’s just as lonesome being a burglar as a priest or a mom as a dad or an embryo as a dyin’ old man it all has its compensations and its reversals and the dues to pay you gotta pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues and everything but everything has a slot for you to put in your quarter—”

Jules screened out Bernie’s rap. But he thought: You gotta pay your dues if—

So he got up and went to pay his dues.

He left Bernie talking to the walls of the dingy stucco house with the boards over the windows and the house was soon wrapped up in the city as he walked on, consumed and gift-wrapped behind him in the Hollywood downer district. Houses of plaster, houses of pine, one storey, one story at a time, he thought. Palm trees nodded in agreement in the faint breeze, a violet twilight settled over the dirty skyline and the bite of lemons graced the reek of car exhaust.

He felt the wind ruffling his hair, felt it very distantly, as a junkie feels a kiss.

He thought about Zimm standing for hours outside the theatre, in the cold, from four AM to ten PM just to get a thirty-second audition for a ten minute bit in a minor play. She hadn’t got the part but she had paid her dues.

He pictured her there, standing in the gunmetal early morning light, full lips pursed, snapping blue eyes limned with shards of bitterness, high cheekbones standing out with the determination of her set jaw, her platinum hair tossed by the chill wind … and he wished he could go to her and put his arms around her then and say: you don’t have to be so hard and relentless, there’s a soft place where we can go where you can be a performer and I can play my bass and we’ll be audience enough for one another.

But she’d only laugh bitterly, if he had said that, and call him a jerk.

Long ago she’d settled on the hardcore role and it was too late to change her like it was too late for Ace. “Oooooh, isn’t it nice, when you find your heart is made out of ice … ” Another Lou Reed number Jules sang to himself as the bus rumbled up.

He glanced at the plate on the brow of the bus, verified the destination—yeah, Hollywood and Vine—and climbed aboard.

He tossed seven quarters into the slot, as a snob contributes to a beggar. He ignored the wooden faces of the passengers the way a squirrel never looks right at the trees of its own forest, and found a seat.

IN THE VESTIBULE to the Sleepwalkers Agency he reread the pamphlet, wished he had the nerve to ask for another look at the contract he’d signed and hardly read. He noted that the sweat on his fingers was making the pamphlet’s print smear and that reminded him of his makeup. He went to the restroom, imitation-black-marble stalls, imitation-wood wallpaneling, imitation-mother-of-pearl toilet seat—where he shakily voided himself. Then he washed the makeup off his eyes.

He came into the lounge, sat down, and the tall white girl with the blue Afro-wig and the smile that was like a smile an embalmer might put on a corpse, softly called his name. He was the only one in the waiting room.

He followed her, taking deep breaths to calm himself. Passing through a very clean, very white door, they came into a room with battleship-gray walls, empty except for a padded diagnostic table.

The girl turned to him and repeated words she’d repeated many times before, not hearing herself say them: “Remove your clothes, take a shower in that room there, wash thoroughly, then come back in here and lay down on your back, relax, close your eyes, take deep breaths and dream about how you will spend your money. You won’t feel a thing.” Jules was certain she could repeat the same speech verbatim while watching her favorite reality show and playing solitaire. She left him alone.

Fingers shaking, glancing nervously around the spare, gray room, he removed his clothes, folded them neatly, left them in a pile at the foot of the table in a yellow plastic box stenciled: YOUR CLOTHES.

He took a shower, used the liquid soap dispenser liberally, dried off with a towel that was way too small, then came back into the room with the couch. There was a thin sheet of clean white paper on the couch. He stretched, and lay down, listening to the paper rustle beneath his weight. He could hear the sleep-gas hissing through the ventilator. It smelled like lemons and car exhaust and musk. He shut his eyes, breathed in deep, thinking: Nothing you haven’t done before. Only you won’t be aware of it this time and the pay is better. And with an ordinary trick you wouldn’t know for sure if the dude wasn’t planning to beat you up afterwards. This way you’ve got the agency’s written guarantee you won’t be hurt or infected. And five hundred dollars when you wake up tomorrow. A sure thing …

He said these things to himself, an inward litany, and he thought it was working to make him feel better because soon he was relaxing and humming. But an instant before dropping off, he realized it was only the gas.

• • •

IT WAS OVER like nothing. Just like that. He woke up, saw the young woman with the funereal smile bending over him. He looked down at himself, discovered with surprise that he was dressed. He smiled in momentary embarrassment, but then the detached urbanity he’d labored nineteen years to perfect (his mother claimed he’d begun to act cool and distant at two years old) took the wheel.

He shrugged.

“How do you feel?” she asked disinterestedly.

“Fine,” he said, though the gas had left him with a dull qualm, like seasickness in his gut. He sat up, and the feeling quickly passed.

“When you’re thoroughly awake you can come out to the front desk for payment,” she said, and went through the door.

At the mention of money he stood bolt upright and stretched. Well. That was a snap. He looked himself over. His body didn’t seem the worse for wear. A distant ache between his legs. Maybe a bruise on his left thigh. Better than hustling on the Boulevard. Whoever had played with him had been careful.

With a shiver he tried to remember—and came up with nothing. Yet his eyes had been open, his ears had heard, parts of his brain had followed someone’s spoken directions. But he couldn’t remember a damn thing. He straightened his collar, tightened his scarf, regarded his chipped silver-painted fingernails ruefully and went to get his money. The secretary handed him an envelope. He left immediately, but outside the office he stopped and tore open the envelope. Five hundred cash, as promised.

It was eight AM and the traffic was beginning to work itself into a frenzy. He grinned at the scowling copper sun, the smog-burnished sky, and set off for Zimm’s apartment.

SHE WAS IN the tub when he arrived. He knocked and called, “Zimm!”

“Jules?” There was no welcome in her, “Come on in.”

He pushed through the green paint-peeling bathroom door and managed not to stare at her as he sat on a rickety unpainted wooden chair beside the tub. It was an old-fashioned bathtub; its legs rusty eagle’s claws clutching globes. She toyed languidly with a pulpy bar of soap. The bubblebath made a lace gown beneath her breasts and about her upraised knees. The ends of her hair dangled in the water, the platinum dye showed where the black roots were growing out. She still wore silvery lipstick and false eyelashes and chrome-tinted contact lenses; her head lolled a little to the left as if its weight was too much for her neck.

“Doing Quaaludes again?” he asked, trying to sound indifferent.

“None of your business.”

That answered his question.

“You can buy some more with this …” he withdrew the fold of bills from his shirt pocket and laid it on the soap shelf. “What I owe you.”

After counting the money, she said, “Thank you very much, sir.” Pretending to bat her eyelashes.

His eyes wandered. Her breasts bobbed in the water like the slick backs of jellyfish. Her pubic hair—he frowned. “Christ! You’ve still got your underwear on.”

She giggled and admitted, “I’m stoned.”

She tucked the money into the pocket of the white pants lying rumpled beside the tub. “Wanta get in?” she inquired politely. “Water’s still warm.”

He was undressed in seconds, sliding into the water; the first of a variety of damp penetrations.

Her kisses were more ardent than the last time, when he’d still owed her money.

ACE WAS THE only one home when Jules got there at two in the afternoon.

Ace was lying on his back on the floor amidst a scattering of discs like autumn leaves: he was into vinyl recordings; his head was clamped into earphones, eyes closed, toes making jerky figure-eights to the music. Jules frowned at the bare walls, the sunken, splintered furniture, mostly wicker foraged from trash heaps. They could get some decent furnishings if he made some more money.

… it was then that he was sure he would go back to Sleepwalkers. But it wasn’t because of the furnishings. It was only because of Zimm and the change in her voice that came when she’d seen the money. She hadn’t asked where he got it. Ace opened his eyes, squinted up at him. He took off the earphones which leaked a howl of thrash. “We gotta get some new tunes,” Jules said, hoping to distract Ace from the pitch that must come. “Most recent stuff we have is four years old.”

“Yeah,” Ace agreed, his pinpoint eyes flickering, not seeing much. “Yeah we gotta keep up, we live inna world of the future after all.” He laughed. “You know: Magnetic rocket cars and telepathy booths.” He rubbed his nose. “I been reading my uncle’s 1938 Popular Science magazines with a special feature about “The Marvelous World of The Future”. And we’re in it because guess what, the time they’re talking about is right now! They say we got telepathy booths and people go to work in jet-propelled rollerskates.”

Jules laughed.

But then Ace asked what he must inevitably ask: “Hey, can you let me have some’a the squeeze you got sleepwalkin’? You must have some left and my connection won’t take—”

“Gave it all to Zimm, man. Owed her. I’m going back tonight. Get you some dollars tomorrow, for why, I don’t know, you never give it back. But I’ll give you some—”

Ace was content. “Hey, it’s better than street hustling, huh? Like, you look okay—used to come home all crumpled-up and forlorn lookin’ and complaining you only got sixty bucks and what a total ripoff it was—”

“Shut up, Ace.”

“You feel nothin’ later, with Sleepwalkers, huh?” Ace continued doggedly.

Suddenly feeling odd, tingling all over, Jules said, “No, not a goddamn thing.” He didn’t want to talk about it. He realized he was rubbing the palms of his hands, again and again, on his shirt sleeves. He trapped his hands in his armpits. But now he was suddenly feeling grievously annoyed, seeing the deltas of built-up filth in the corners of the room. “Place needs a good cleaning.” He said.

“They just gas you like Gary said and that’s it? And then they rent your body out to people and it walks around like a zombie and does what it’s told and you don’t feel a thing? You don’t even ache in your asshole?”

Jules shot him a look. Ace made an elaborate shrug and replaced the earphones, lay back.

Jules got up and went to his room and threw himself on the air mattress, the cushions billowing up around him. He turned onto his back and thought of getting stoned. No.

It was there. In there, somewhere. Whatever they’d used him for was stored up in the back of his head somewhere, locked in with their electrical repressors, but intact, in there all the same. In a cell in his brain. In a little room somewhere in his brain re-enacting endlessly what they’d made him do. And maybe Methedrine would unlock the door. No. Don’t get started again, and especially not now. He decided that next time he did the sleepwalk he’d take the money to a bank and deposit half of it into a new account so that Ace and Bernie couldn’t talk him out of that much, anyway. He’d say he’d given it to Zimm. They’d been his best friends for years. He couldn’t say no to them. He’d been there himself. He fixed his eyes on the fierce and empty heart of the naked bulb shining white light overhead. He stared, unblinking, till the pain of staring at the bright bulb made him close his eyes.

Pictures came. It wasn’t dreaming, really. And not daydreaming either. They weren’t hallucinations. It was re-living. He could see it so clearly, there under his eyelids, almost cinematically. Yet none of it was familiar. A dark room, a fire at one end in a huge gray-stone fireplace throwing tongues of light on the hooded congregation. People in black robes, faces in shadow. On a table of polished mahogany he dimly made out a huge oyster shell on its back, open and empty but for an enormous blue pearl which seemed to emanate its own black-light. On the ornate rug, woven in red and black gargoyle visages, a silver casket like an infant’s coffin faced him. “This the young man from the agency?” came a reedy voice from the right. He was unable to move, he couldn’t turn his head to see who had spoken.

“Yes,” replied another voice, business-like. One of the hooded figures stepped forward, tilted back the milky lid of the casket and said, “Come forward.” Distantly, Jules felt himself striding forward. “Stop. Stand where you are, look into the casket.” Jules looked.

It took time for his eyes to adjust. He saw the iridescent gleam of multifaceted eyes. “Bend you over and open wide your mouth,” the hooded figure commanded. Jules bent toward the casket, looked closer, opened his mouth, his head near the edge of the casket, he looked closer …

He sat up, struggling to escape the clinging air mattress, and heard the echoes of his own scream. Slippery with sweat, he floundered off the bed and crawled over the wooden frame, across the floor. He lay face down, breathing heavily, drained. Then he got slowly to his feet, went to the refrigerator, got the vodka and drank what remained, nearly half the bottle.

That seemed to help.

THE NEXT EVENING he plugged in his bass and played simple, aggressive riffs, building up his courage to return to Sleepwalkers.

In the next room Ace and Bernie were loudly arguing:

“Com’on, Ace. Wha’sit to you?”

“I just don’t like to do that stuff when Barb’s around.”

“She ain’t here.”

“Man she’ll be here in half an hour.”

“So it won’t take that long. Twenty minutes. I’m on my knees, Ace. I’m down—”

“Okay—okay, go get it for me then.”

Jules heard Bernie run obediently down the hall to his room to get the handcuffs and flog.

Minutes later Bernie breathlessly pleaded, “Now say the things.”

“You half-assed slimy PUNK!” Ace shrieked and there was the counterpoint wet sound of the flog tasting Bernie’s buttocks, and Bernie’s grateful moan like a liturgical reply.

Annoyed, Jules turned the volume up and played loud and brutally through the fuzz-tone, until it was over and Ace came out, looking exhausted and wired. Ace looked out the single intact window. He let the curtains drop and turned away. “No sign of Barb,” Jules said, without looking up.

“Keep playing that thing, man. Don’t stop. Sounds good.”

Jules dipped his fingers into the guts of the bass and savaged the steel-string nerve-ends and made it groan for Ace. Speeding again, Ace walked back and forth slapping his thighs, a martinet parading too fast for the music, twitching his shoulders and bobbing his head.

When Barb arrived they tied off together, Jules playing for them as they rushed, thinking that Ace didn’t look quite satisfied and that next time he’d probably double the dose and that would be it. Involuntarily grinning, Ace moved to the music like a striking cobra. Jules looked at him and could see the agreement Ace had made with the speed, signed and sealed in the noiseless workings of his mouth. He knew that Ace was connected, in that instant, that he was one with the cars hurtling over the freeways and the buses rumbling through the avenues and the electricity whining in the powerlines; that he was synched with the rhythms and pistons and jackhammers. That was the contract: Take my body and make me one with the world’s machines.

Ace knew what he was doing. To live, you must deal. You must deal with someone of the big machine’s agents. Speed or heroin or lonely old breadwinners on the prowl or guns or editors or music managers. You had to make an agreement somewhere, and modify yourself, mutilate yourself to fit, like the Amazons removing a breast for the quiver-strap.

Trying not to think of the Sleepwalkers in those terms, Jules wondered if he should join a band. If he could.

He turned the volume up full.

THIS TIME, THE girl with the Afro-wig and the fixed smile didn’t bother with the directions. She simply opened the door for him and he went in and lay down.

The gas seeped in. He could hear the faint susurration.

Drifting off, he thought about Zimm and wondered, if ever he took the trouble to scrutinize the fine print in the Sleepwalker contract, if he’d see her name there, as part of the exchange.

Loan us your body, we pay you back in your lover’s respect.

He tried hard not to wonder what they were going to do with him. This time.

The gas was getting to him. Experimentally, he tried to get up. He couldn’t move a muscle. There was a moment of panic when a large blue-black fly lit on his right chuck and walked up toward his eye. He tried to move to shake it off, but couldn’t do more than blink. It came onward, growing to a bristling huge black blur. His only escape was in closing his eyes.

And the gas took him down.

HE DEPOSITED HALF the money in a new account, took seventy-five home to Ace and Bernie and simply handed it to them, to save them the trouble of having to ask.

Now he walked down Sunset Boulevard to the apartment building where Zimm lived. It was six, the sky melting like candle wax, tangerine-lemon at the horizon. The balmy June air slid velvet past his fingers as he hurried.

It was getting rapidly darker. He smiled. Thank God it gets dark this time of evening, thank God for that. That’s fine and it’s getting darker.

Suddenly lonely, Jules continued down the street, toward Zimm’s. He was in a gay hustler district now, and there were others, slowly drifting down the street like blossoms on the wind. He nodded to those he recognized and shook his head at a customer who approached him. He lit another cigarette, though his throat felt raw.

But he was feeling left out again, and sinking. It called back the vision of the casket and the pearl and the cowls.

And that was something he wanted very much to forget.

His clothes clung to him. He was sweating excessively. Nerves. There was electricity sparking between his teeth and the air was so charged with tension that the streetlight poles were straining to keep their upright shape against it and the buildings were squatting with secret muscles flexed. What were they afraid of?

No. He didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want to find out that way what the Sleepwalker Agency did with him while he was under. But he knew then that he would have to find out another way. He needed to know what the full terms of the agreement were, in detail. Otherwise this fucked-up feeling, this tripping on uncertainty would never leave him.

A long dusty navy-blue air-turbine Cadillac pulled up beside him, honking. Unthinking, acting on reflex, Jules accepted the ride. He climbed into the car, grateful for the air-conditioned coolness. Beside him was a squat man with rubbery florid skin, a wide blocked-out nose and a collie’s entreating tiny brown eyes. The man pulled the car back into the light traffic. Jules noticed the guy’s hands on the steering wheel—noticed what small hands they were. “Come and sit closer by me,” he ordered.

Jules came alert. Christ, I should have known. “I’m not into it, man,” he said. “I don’t work that way anymore. Don’t need it.” He assumed the man was one of his old tricks from when he’d hustled. “I just wanted a ride. I’ll get out here.”

The john smiled, thinking that Jules was playing games, and reached a tubby hand for his crotch.

Jules backhanded the guy across his flaccid right cheek.

More startled than hurt, the stranger gave him a long look. “You didn’t mind last night. I guess they don’t let you remember … but kid, last night you performed.” Was that a grin? Or a grimace?

The man grabbed for him again and, spasmodically, Jules kicked the steering wheel. The car nosed far left, began to slide sideways. Jules braced himself. A small import sedan hit the right front fender, which had crossed into oncoming traffic. The Cadillac’s driver was jolted forward and his forehead cracked viciously on the steering wheel; he slumped over.

Jules was only wrenched. When the car stopped sliding he hopped out, dodging traffic, and ran to the curb, down the sidewalk. He looked back only once. The import was almost totaled, crumpled in supplication against the dominant, glistening block of the Cadillac. The fat man was alive, he stumbled out of the car, leaning on the import’s crushed hood, the lines of his face defined in blood streaming from a head wound.

Jules turned away and ran around the corner.

When he arrived at Zimm’s he was glad she wasn’t home. He was going to be sick and he wanted to get it over alone. Vision swimming, he let himself in and ran to the bathroom. He vomited, flushed the toilet, watched the piebald churn swirl down into the city’s gut. Then he washed out his mouth, several times, and undressed. He ran a bath and got in before it had filled. He washed himself thoroughly, seeing everywhere unaccountable gray smudges on his limbs. Scrubbing violently, he rubbed them off, but they reappeared seconds later. It looked like mold.

He emptied the tub, cleaned it completely with ammonia and Ajax, rinsed it and filled it again. Again he cleansed himself. Emptied the tub, refilled it, scrubbed.

Finally, he stopped seeing the spots of mold.

But after he had toweled himself dry he saw in the mirror something dark red on the inner side of his left buttock. A handprint. Not the handprint of the man in the blue Caddy. Much bigger, and with long fingers which must have ended in sharp nails.

It wouldn’t go away.

HE GOT THE nose filters from Ace, who had worked briefly in a paint factory the year before. They were something new, two thimble-like wire meshes, guaranteed for eight hours. Ace had only used them for a few hours. Jules hoped no one could see them. He pressed them deeply into his nostrils.

He lay back on the couch. He could hear the lisp of the gas coming through the grate, but he couldn’t smell it. Good.

He was wide awake when the man in white came into the room ten minutes later. “Stand up,” the man told him.

Jules stood up, moving slowly, gracefully, trying not to think. He had heard a friend of Ace’s who knew an attendant at Sleepwalkers describe how the tranced moved, how they responded to orders. Slowly but not jerkily. Look alert, but don’t focus your eyes on anything, don’t move unless you’re told.

“Follow me.” He followed the man out through the rear door and into a dressing room. The stranger was tall and brawny, with blond hair cut into a shag. He wore a white suit with a black tie, a patch sewn on one shoulder of the suit said only: SWA.

“Get dressed,” said the attendant, and left him. Jules went to one of the racks and selected a black robe. He began to frown, then instantly repressed it. There was no one else in the room, but they might be watching. From somewhere.

The robe, with its soft black cloth and black cowl, was the same sort of robe he’d seen in his vision. The vision of the fly.

Probably the visions weren’t literal, he thought, pulling the gown over his head. Probably the pictures were symbols, dream interpretations, with a few real-life components, like the robe.

There was no getting around it. He was getting scared.

He almost jerked around when he heard the door slam behind, but he caught himself. “Follow me,” the attendant intoned, sounding bored.

Jules turned slowly and trailed after the attendant out the back door, down three concrete steps and into the Los Angeles night. They got into a van, all-white except for the agency’s symbol in red with their motto: YOUR PLEASURE IS OUR BUSINESS.

The attendant opened the back door for him. Jules waited for the order.

“Climb in, sit down.”

Jules obeyed.

Like a trained dog, Jules thought. He talks to me like I’m a trained dog.

The attendant started the van and drove down the alley.

Jules sat on a metal bench staring at a metal wall and listening to the creak and grind of metal machinery around him. He sat upright with hands folded in his lap, staring straight ahead, braced against the inertia of the van’s turning.

The van turned into a driveway and pulled up in another alley.

Jules was ordered out of the van and through the back door of an old tin-roofed warehouse.

He was led to stand on the lowest of five wooden steps rising to a stage, behind two other people. The curtains were drawn, backstage was twilight. Jules could hear the unseen audience murmuring. Two other hooded figures stood before him, one after the other, waiting: immobile, backs straight.

He heard, slightly muffled through the curtain, a voice addressing the audience through a microphone. “Please remember to keep your requests within the limitations prescribed by the contract. Only those with red cards will be permitted the private use of these bodies, after the performance is over. Red cardholders interested in particular bodies should see the attendant for schedules and user-fee rates.”

Then the curtains rolled back, but from the wings the audience was still invisible. An attendant came up from behind and whispered to the first shrouded figure. “Go up on the stage, get undressed, turn to face the audience.”

The figure obeyed and, leaning very slightly to the right, Jules could see that the sleepwalker was a young woman. With platinum hair. He looked closer. No, it wasn’t Zimm. For ten seconds he had been sure it was her. He realized that he was not particularly relieved. He would not have been surprised or dismayed if it had been Zimm.

The woman was shorter, plumper than Zimm, with full breasts and rings glittering on her fingers. Her profile was all curves and puckers.

“First call,” the attendant told the hidden audience.

Jules heard someone shout, “Dance like a monkey.” The woman leapt clumsily up and down, knees bent, until the voice added, “Monkey in heat.” Face bestially contorted, the woman postured obscenely.

An attendant sent the second tranced onto the stage. He tossed off his robe and even from behind Jules knew it was Bernie.

Bernie needed a fix and couldn’t wait on Jules.

“Monkeys mating,” came the command. Bernie did a mock-apish dance around the woman, then grasped her by the buttocks. She bent over. They simulated copulation, making bestial faces, and the crowd roared in satisfaction.

Jules heard the attendant behind him. “That long-haired kid up there, got track marks on his arms. Plenty.”

“Goddamnit!” the other man said. “They’re supposed to inspect ’em before signing. Shit, this could be bad.”

“How ’zat?” the first attendant said.

“These fuckhead dopers—any stuff in their bloodstream, it reacts with the sleep-gas, see—they can come out of it. Doesn’t matter what shit they’re shootin’.”

Bernie was facing toward Jules, ten feet away. Looking into Bernie’s eyes, Jules realized it had already happened. Bernie had thrown off the effects of the gas. His eyes wandered, he looked scared. His lips twitched. But he did as he was told and Jules could see the inward litany in his eyes: Make me one with the world’s machines. It worked. It fit. No one noticed that he was out of the trance. And maybe he wasn’t, some kind of way.

Jules almost nodded to himself. This was home.

“Where’s this guy go to?”

“Lemme see, what time is it? Oh—just take him up to Mr. Carmody now. He should have gone on stage first, I guess.”

“Follow me,” the blond attendant whispered to Jules. Jules turned and followed, leaving Bernie behind as he’d left him twitching on the floor at home many times before.

Jules was escorted to a door, down a passage into another building. He was taken up an elevator, along a carpeted hallway. The dun carpet was spongy beneath his bare feet. The attendant took him into a bathroom, made him shower yet again, dry off, then left him sitting nude on the edge of a wide round white bed in the bedroom of a luxurious apartment decorated Victorian; lace curtains, ancient yellowed oil paintings, quaint, elaborately carved furniture. Dust. Jules sat still, staring ahead, feeling a hot wire stretching tighter, tighter within him. It took him nearly two minutes to recognize this sensation: rage.

It had been a long time since he’d been angry at anyone but himself. And he could always hurt himself without outside retribution. But now—it was a rush to feel the anger, made all the hotter by his immobility. Coiling up inside.

And if he was taken to a place where there was a huge black pearl and a white casket containing something hideously outsized with shiny wings and faceted eyes—then he would do his best to kill someone.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a door open. A withered little man, almost completely bald, entered and shuffled toward him.

Age spots dappled the old man’s lumpy scalp and trembling hands, and he walked with the aid of a fiberglass cane. He wore a red terry cloth robe and red satin slippers. His eyes were sunken, watery gray-blue. He was toothless. He was a very old man. He faced Jules, looked him impishly up and down and smiled wistfully, showing withered gums. He was bent, hardly came up to Jules’s biceps. I could strangle him with one hand, Jules thought. The fury mounted. Just let him touch me. I’ll choke him for Bernie and Ace and me and Connie and Barb and for the child Zimm must have been.

The old man, Carmody, giggled and rasped, “Com’on—com’on, ol’ buddybuddy!” He turned and Jules followed him into the next room.

It was a wealthy child’s nursery and playroom. A prodigious room painted in gaudy colors with a sprawling electric train set at the far end, a miniature two-rider carousel nearer, a sand box, and a huge wooden crate of toys, five feet to a side.

Humming, the old man went to the chest of toys. A hysterical orange orangutan was painted on the facing side of the chest.

Carmody fumbled through the toys till he found a small wooden broom and a battered red wig. “I’ll be the mommy and you’ll be the daddy and you can mow the lawn.” He nodded again and again. His hands shook with excitement, the gray skin on them so loose and vitreously wrinkled they looked like rubber gloves.

Once more digging into the box he found a small plastic lawnmower and handed it to Jules.

Gazing in wonder at the toy, Jules accepted it. All semblance of the trance was now discarded. Carmody either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He had put the red wig crookedly on his head and was busily sweeping the floor of an imaginary kitchen. Humming in an unnaturally high-pitched voice.

Jules felt duped. The fury drained from him, the beautiful transparent rush of long-suppressed hostility like the rush of meth, fading away. The acceptance returning.

No, he told himself. Uh-uh. Don’t fall for it. This is the same as if you’d performed sexually. You’re still following orders, he’s still using you, you’re just a toy.

Jules dropped the plastic lawnmower and turned away. He went to the light switch. He would turn out the light and strangle the old man. He put his fingers on the switch.

He turned at a tap on his shoulder. The old man was smiling, holding out the scarlet wig. “You don’t wanna be the daddy? You can be the mommy if you want.”

Once more, for an instant, Jules felt cheated.

Then, for Bernie and Ace and Barb and Connie but not for Zimm, he went back to the lawnmower, picked it up, began pushing it cheerfully back and forth, saying to the old man: “No, you can be the mommy.”