(Atlanta/Manhattan, 8/9/2035) [Part 2]
I think, here and there in 707, I’ll do this one double pay, cadge the network and the blippers. Oh, sure, the net will scream, but I do this best of all, they know that, best of anyone, and the swells won’t dare kick me.
Now, ful brighter was the shynyng of hir hewe, imo, the Woman in White, Queen Bee, Queen of Diamond-Hard Dicks, Bells, and Whistles. I cannot look away, she’s gone so supernova. She stubs out her cigarette in one of those faux rhino-horn ashtrays you find at the duty-free cabooses. This ashtray is a hideous shade of yellow. Details, boys, it’s all the devil right in there. Check your style manuals. Check your sixes and check your weapons at the door, natch. I take a long drag on my own smoke and tap ash onto the polished ceramic at my feet.
“We dislike journalists,” she says. “If you’d done your homework, you’d know that. We dislike dreamers even more.”
When the nuke went off in St. Petersburg, they say that she was there. Sara White Queen, White Queen Black, that is what they say. Though, the two times I formal interviewed her not dozing she neither confirmed nor did she deny. She collects sleepsy sea shells by the seashore. Did I mention that already? No, yes? Scrollback. But she does. Corks them up, they say, and I dare say she took no few of my own in the twenty-fours we spent one in the other’s company. This dream, it’s not the day we met. Not at all. I say I spent time in Atlanta, but not with her.
When the tsunami stomped the shivers on Seymour Island, they say she was there, too, swimming with the melting bergs, penguins, and what you’ll have.
She’s a bad penny, this one.
No one has ever believed I spent waking time in her company. The blippers won’t even buy that for fact, and they snap up the bat boys and Buddhas in bagels. But. Already in progress, the reverie of a night come and gone, ill met by moonlight. Times down at hoof I could sure have used a cheque, but no one will touch, and that makes me wonder how long her arm actually is, right? If we are all only the saddish puppets she spoke of, for true, and she the puppeteer. I wouldn’t put it past, the way no one will finger on my reminiscences of the truth. But here I’ve done a damn double digression, and neither the suicide nor the dream of Her are on the stage of these words. It’s the headache. It usually is, the buggity hurtin’ slinging John Henry in my own personal calaveras de azúcar. Too many hours logged on the scorch, says the docs the network pays for me to see. Should retire, the docs agree, but not like they’re gonna pay the rent, and not as if I have any other marketables. Not about to lay down and take that bodhisattva vow, go Romeo clean. But docs are covering their own wars, sure, and so I don’t begrudge.
On the bed, the suicide kisses her blade, puts narrow painted lips to steel. The suits back in the tower are getting annoyed her intestines are still on the proper-born side of her skin. But no one in 707 speaks up to hurry her along, as we all in the know sick to the anticipation. Once it’s only the what’s done is done, show’s over, curtain falls, die Geschichte ist aus und hier lauft eine Maus, so drink up, fuckos, until the next kamikaze puputan rolls round and you’re lucky to be on the guest list.
“Focus,” says my bosses.
“Focus,” says my memory of WiW.
“I miss you,” I say to her, and she laughs.
“You knew from the start,” she replies, pull no punch. “There was never any deceit, unless it was you lying to yourself.”
She cannot stay in one place that long, for her and thee to last out. Then again, the rumors say she don’t gotta, the rumors what say she has a twin white shadow. Ivoire and Bête, but I never asked her for the up and up on that word of mouth. Didn’t dare, except in the dreams. Only halfsome fool, me. Ask around, you’ll hear.
“I know,” I say, and she sighs. “Sorry,” adds I.
She might two have sighed when the Cat 5 typhoon smucked the fuck down Manila way. She might have sighed, I have thought, all the way before to Hiroshima and Katrina, Peshtigo and Tunguska.
“Why don’t you shut up and come to bed,” she says (not a qyest).
Isn’t that why I’ve asked her here, and a fraction of my lonely in her absence?
I never recall her getting naked or blow-by-blow from chair to bed, but sure it hardly matters. She’s there, bedded, flesh as to marble dusted.
“Yes,” I reply. “I’m coming.”
But I turn back to face the glass and the city all spread banquet below the whichever skyward floor we’re briefly inhabiting. There are two bird-shaped smears printed on the glass, blood and shit and feathers. Crash, delete. She says I shouldn’t look at those, and I know how right she is. But I worry them, regardless, knowing of a certain they are critical integers of the riddle of She.
Nonetheless, don’t know, paper toe.
She is a surprisingly gentle lover. In dream, I mean, but, then she was, too, for reals.
Blister white here, though in 707 a bead of the αἷμα swells holly-berry gleam on our suicide-to-be’s mouth after a first unexpected slice, not qyest inadvertent. She licks it away, but has earned from the pit a grateful ah - now - all - sit - up - take - notice sigh. Set aside your idle conversation. Her second, she’ll have to take up sword should prime de dibujo etc., turn McNuggets on the talismonger assembled, so obviously a second has interest vested in keeping the show must go on. She leans to an ear and whispers. Can’t hear, but I can imagine, can’t I? Could be, Make it quick. Contrawise, could be, With mercy for the greedy, dear, for rats live on no evil star. I likes, tho, Don’t you fucking make me do it for you.
“Carlisle, can you please get a close up?” asks impatient’d, long-suffering producer. I feel the techs scrambling behind my retina. I tab their close-up, sticking to roughshod p’s and q’s and dot my eyes.
“You got it, you jackal shits,” says I. I blink and pull in. It’s a good smart shot, if I do concede, and it’ll be turning up in the verts and broadsides for months. So close are the second and her Duke of Welly, they might be exchanging sweet nothings. That’ll get the viewers at home and in the izakaya and sports bars and bear gardens with wet panties, all right.
All right.
I think the woman with the jellybean hair might be crying, for no added charge.
“You getting all this, Carlisle?”
I am.
In my Deep South Peachtree dream, the Queen Bee holds me. She smells of tobacco, vanilla, sweat, and semen. We are spent, the both. She does not love me, as there is just one love in her, and she dare not speak its name, so all I have is second-guess work. But the fucks were all good, alike to the dream.
Now trewly, how sore that me smarte ashen dede and colde.
I would live down the vieux rêve forever. I’m that pathetic.
And finally like 707 She Here To See does as promised the johnny comes, and before she loses her nerve straight in dives the tantō! Huzzah and hallelujah!
The sponsors will be not complaining, no, and the net will be happy-happy, and here’s your pound of flesh, you at home (or wheresomever). And, important most the all, I get paid my commish. Huzzah! Homerun! Into the belly, then cutting traditional left to right, ah, you see? I always am put to mind by the entrails of pink-blue deep-sea worms, fat on rotten abyssal carrion. Ever see a clip of hagfish at a down-below whale fall? Still-living intestines in my view, they seem to writhe like that. The room gasps a collective gasp, as traditional as the dictates of this perverted seppuku. I’m right there, covering the war, and in the hollow dogging the shoes of that gasp is when I spot her, Her, Woman in White and Of White and Queen-Be Ivory Beast. Sara Never Was Her Name, but one amongst a hundred. Here’s rumor made manifest, my Johnny comes.
“Woolgathering?” in ATL asks me.
At the Chinatown present-day, I have dared divert my attention from the bed, in danger of scotching the grande eloquent hacer un exit, which could or shall cost me of a certain a percentage. But I feel as of old her eyes on me, in that aftergasp, which is how not could I fucking look? Right? Yes, no? Yes, kanga and yes, more roo. This will pass so fastly, as did that sword through the woman’s innards, as always passes climax, orgasm, all fine pinnacle gained. This will pass like a bolt from the blue. We’ll not speak. I would not hazard to go half that distance. Chillsome bumples on my arms and legs and hairs up on the back of my neck, since—rumors and my true intent aside—what the motherfucking Christ is she doing here? Has she come for me or only for the gladiatorial entertainments? Has she come back to stay? It’s a domino toppling towards the next in line, no doubt, and this is why, sure, there’s more fear in me than deelite at the sight of her.
“Just thinking,” I reply.
“Only just thinking?”
“The crows,” I say, then roll off her and nod towards the window and the bird-shaped stains. “Are they here for you? Or only because of you?”
For, even asleep, I do not believe in coincidentals.
“You should rest,” she shushes.
The woman on the bed in 707 slumps forward, though not yet dead, still short of bag and tag, and the crowd goes wild. Her second kisses her cheek. See thee off to an honorable end, for they speak of honor in the fulfillment of one’s Art, and if this is not art I don’t know what would be. Crimson pigment splashed upon the canvas of the real.
I am able not to hear the angry from the tower, good at my bithead’s lookaway when I gotta be, when I’ve blown code but good and the coyote’s get forlorn, for live paid extra for an under the counter, backroom, and costing didn’t approve it cut-out chip.
From my dream, says the WiW, Sara White Queen, “Oh, why so green and lonely? Little lamb, smile.” Which she does for me, not answering on the issue of corvid sacrificials.
But waking, this night, 707, she does not even approach me. And I respect that, however might it make my soul crumple. We’ve an agreement. “Carlisle, you stupid son of a bitch. The bed. Look at the goddamn bed.”
Yeah, this night’s gonna have twice-over paydata fat cat credulous scores, and also is it now occurring to me what the alleys will pony for a glimpse who might be her. Oh, it’ll rake some nuyen I can stash for drizzle days. But I cover the war, my cover story, and so I do return my focus to death unfolding on the bed.
In the dream, crows hover, and . . .
“What’ll I do, when you are far away, and I am blue, what’ll I do?”
She shushes me. “Here is the day,” says she.
Good nite.