Ghosts of Punktown Read online

  3

  Ultimately, at the close of the work day Swift locked the cartridge of nanomites in a drawer of his own desk rather than smuggle it out of the building. At least he had taken that much incentive today. At least he had salvaged that much from her work area – and wasn’t it everything? Everything of her, in a 1.8 ml receptacle, less even than the ashes they had also given to her sister.

  “Is cremation Christian?” he might once have argued with her. He could argue about anything. “Or are you a Buddhist now?” Always poking and prodding at her inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, her flaws of logic, like an impatient scientist with a needle-tipped probe. The inconsistency that she would not divorce her husband though she claimed he was psychologically abusive, her hypocrisy that she would not break up with Swift even though she would not go through with divorce, the contradiction in saying that she’d been drawn to Swift because he was so unlike her husband, and then later turning around and saying he was just like her husband, doubting her, questioning her, pressuring her, so where was the logic in keeping two men like that, and if I’m so bad then why do you supposedly love me, what are you doing in my bed right now, oh run away, sure, that’s all you ever do, don’t try to work out the problems in your own life, blame it on me, on him, you like to wallow in your misery, you like it this way, the world’s eternal misunderstood victim, you like to suffer...

  As he walked home from the subway, this internal tirade – remembered from no particular occasion; it could have been from any number of occasions – overwhelmed him and he had to pause as if to catch his breath. Swift squinted up into what he could see of the sky through gaps and chinks between the slab-faced towers. His tenement building squatted near the base of a massive apartment block, like a forgotten chunk that had dropped off the titan. He picked out his bedroom window, as if he expected to see the dingy lace curtain draw aside to reveal a ghostly white face peering back at him. The window gaped empty. He drifted forward again.

  He had agonized at her vulnerability. And so why had he also been so quick to abuse it? Now, with her gone – with her having again contradicted her religion, by cutting herself, carving her poor beautiful body, her white translucent flesh, like some seaman whittling a skate into a leering Jenny Haniver, a preserved mockery of a living thing – Swift found he understood himself even less than he had understood her. He reflected that he had always been better with the concept of people than he was with people, better at the concept of human interaction, of love, than in its execution. Uneasy abstracts that didn’t fit him the way they had looked in the catalog. Sometimes he had suffocated her, desperately lonely every moment he was without her. Other times, bitter at her confusion and indecision, he had felt she was needy and clinging. Then when he would pull away from her, or she from him, he would feel miserably alone again. There was no happy state for them. And yet after all their fighting and tears, they were drawn together again and again like kindred creatures.

  Until she had gone so far away as to never return.

  Except...except for the file she had left in her computer. Except for the glitter in the cartridge in his desk, the metallic angel dust that seemed to slither and move, and not just with its medium of water, if you stared at it long enough.

  He hauled open the tenement building’s metal front door, and it clanged hollowly behind him. Sparks were spitting from the elevator’s keyboard, so he bypassed it and trudged up the first metal staircase. Each footfall seemed to punch a key, release a jack-in-the-box memory.

  “You’re just selfish!” she’d screeched at him once, her heavy kohl running down her face in newsprint tears. “You think it’s all so easy for me, don’t you? You don’t understand how it is for me at all!”

  Was there something wrong with him, then, something fundamentally lacking? Had he been bereft of true empathy for her? Did he have the capacity for empathy with another human being at all? Or was that simply human nature, anyway, and the concept of empathy merely an unsubstantiated theory? Maybe that was what they should have been researching at Camus Organics. How to train their clever fleas to carry empathy to the human soul, and there weave it into the fabric with their nimble little claws.

  At the head of the stairs to the fourth floor, Swift turned toward his door and found the narrow landing blocked by a broad, kite-shaped figure. It was a Bliss, its punched-in eye holes fixed on him. It was the exact stare of the alien in the Scowling Buddha, but then these things all looked alike anyway, so that you couldn’t even tell if there was more than one sex among them. Still, the immediate impression Swift had was that this was in fact the very same being.

  “Excuse me,” he grumbled, edging forward and dropping his eyes from the thing’s face.

  It didn’t budge. It hovered there, as if uncomprehending.

  Swift looked up at it again, his glare playing over its body for signs of dart wounds. How could he even be sure? In the clinical greenish glow of the landing’s fluorescent lights, he saw that its snowy flesh was marred with countless scars, from apparent punctures to long lacerations or incisions. He thought some of them looked like cigarette burns. In addition, along its lower abdomen and cupped in its groin were a number of orifices of different shapes and sizes, most if not all surgically rendered, some of these ports lined with rubber and one of them trickling a clear jelly. Repulsed, Swift felt his impatience soar. “Get the fuck out of my way, will you?”

  Still it lingered, either not understanding or not heeding him.

  Swift surged forward, pushing at the armless creature with both hands, slamming its back into the wall. It made no sound, did not resist him or try to turn away. Stupid, Swift cursed himself. It wanted you to do that. It wants you to hurt it. It saw that in your eyes in the bar – that you had enough hatred in you to do someone harm.

  Maybe it had even sniffed the harm he could do to a lover.

  He wouldn’t give it the satisfaction again. Ignoring it, Swift punched in the code to his door. He muddled it, had to start again. Peripherally, he saw the otherworlder slide away from the wall at last and float past him for the stairs. It began descending, and he cast another look at it now that it was in retreat. Ha. The only thing he found vaguely human about it was that it had buttocks, small and hard like those of an Asian woman. Very white and smooth and not at all bad looking, if you could get past the rest of it. But that was a lot to get past.

  Swift didn’t wait to see it disappear down the stairwell entirely, instead turned into his flat and locked his door again after him.

  4

  “Do you just leave injectors and extractors lying around on your desk like paperweights?” asked Ramona Conte. Swift started; he hadn’t seen her in the threshold of his cubicle. Aroma Cunte, Talane spoke in his mind. A Dacvibese let out a loud snore in the next cubicle over but the team leader’s lumpen, badly made-up face didn’t seem to register it.

  Swift glanced furtively at the instruments lying in front of him. “I’m still doing my 5S organizing. I’m not sure where to put them. It’s not easy to standardize each work area, Ramona, since not everybody here is exactly working on the same project with the same equipment.”

  “It just has to be neat; do you think you can manage that?”

  A strange, poisonous thought unfurled in Swift. That it wasn’t just him who had killed Talane, but – cumulatively – her husband, too, and every last malicious little soul-sucker like this person blighting his threshold. Ahh, but that thought was dangerous, lest he shift blame to more convenient shoulders. Yeah, that was just too easy, wasn’t it? Just too wrong.

  When he’d muttered something to satisfy her, and his team leader had retreated to haunt some other rabbit cage, Swift looked down again at the two devices lying before him. He picked one of them up, pocketed it, and slipped the other into a spot that might be considered in keeping with the spirit of 5S. If only everything could be neatly slotted into a labeled, designated space. Everything part of a puzzle, neatly integrated. Everything in harmony.


  He unlocked a desk drawer, cluttered inside. A little glass cartridge rolled into the light, sparkling. He pocketed that, too.

  There was no security camera in the men’s rest room. Swift locked the metal door and sat on the toilet cover, long legs in a wide stance, body drooping over them, staring at the floor vacantly like a man summoning up the courage to shoot himself in the temple. He sat that way for some minutes. Finally, as if a tiny mechanism clicked in his head, he straightened up, pulled the gleaming chrome injector from his trousers, then the cartridge, and fitted the latter inside the former.

  He positioned the tip of the injector over a forked vein in the crook of his left elbow, exposed by his rolled up sleeve. Another hesitation, a clenched breath packed solid in his chest, and then his thumb depressed the plunger key.

  He watched the twinkling solution inside the cartridge flush into his arm in one smooth, innocuous motion. Then it was gone, and the cartridge was empty, and it was done. No worries about cartridges submerged in coffee, or inserted in some orifice. The contents were dispersed within him, and if the security scanners should detect that, well, it was all just part of his research. Sorry, a bit unorthodox maybe, but not unheard of. Everything stored in its proper place, right? Everything integrated.

  He already had the nano remote he had taken from Talane’s area in another pocket of his trousers. Back at his desk, he had linked the remote to a control program in his computer. With the remote, he had transmitted orders for the nanomites to remain in stasis, a state of inertia. They were on pause, their little legs unmoving, and they would simply drift within his system as the currents dictated, as the beating of his heart drove them, slumbering without dreams of their own, and waiting with the patience of the dead for resurrection.

  His heartbeat quickened as he passed through the security booth on his way home that afternoon. The Dacvibese guard was in animated conversation with one of the other Dacvibese workers, both barking with loud laughter. The guard glanced over at Swift suspiciously, his expression souring as if he were contemplating a spray of his odious mucus, but he turned back to his companion and Swift exited from the booth into the parking lot of Camus Organics, its great purple fingers curved threateningly above him. He stepped between the bars of their shadow.

  He bypassed the subway line that would take him directly home, traipsed further along to the dock from which he’d ride an elevated shunt to the neighborhood of the Scowling Buddha. Aboard this, he watched the streets rush under him as if he were stationary and they were flooding off the edge of the world, sparks cascading below like molten rain. Staring through his reflection, he caught himself softly singing aloud the theme to the children’s show Wunderdumpling. He transformed the lyrics the way Talane would sing them.“My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”

  She was inside him, in a union more intimate than any act of intercourse, in an embrace that he felt might be unprecedented between lovers.

  The Scowling Buddha’s bartender lifted a glass to the Knickerson tap, but Swift stopped him and surprised himself even more than he did the man by asking for a glass of Merlot instead. He had never much cared for wine, had teased Talane that her love of it was another manifestation of her religion; communion, transubstantiation. As he sipped, and found it more pleasing than he remembered it, he wondered if he had made this choice on his own, in an effort to commune with her, or if trickles of Talane were leaking from the molecules the nanomites clutched, despite their state of suspended animation. No, that’s foolish, he thought. They could float through him for the rest of his life inactive – if that was how he wanted it. They would be stored in the archive of his body, not destroyed or forgotten at Camus. Even if he never activated it, her spirit was safe in the sarcophagus of his body.

  He drank half a bottle of Merlot before embarking back onto the streets, which listed beneath him as if with the aftershocks of that catastrophic flood off the edge of the world. It was dark now. Even in this state he was wary, because this was Punktown, so it was almost like a sixth sense that caused him to turn around quickly at one point and glimpse a figure trailing him in the shadows. It quickly sidestepped into a recessed doorway, but he had the impression of a whitish body, barely anthropomorphic, like a ghost.

  Swift quickened his pace, looked behind him every few moments. He didn’t catch sight of the figure again, but he still seemed to sense it. Or was it only a ghost that slipped stealthily through the convolutions of his brain?

  In his tenement house, he mounted the stairs leerily, expecting to find that the white figure had reached his landing ahead of him, waited there to block him. But his path was unobstructed, and he hastened inside, hastily secured his door.

  He sat at his little kitchen table with an injector and extractor lying before him, just as he had at work, except that these were instruments he had bought at a medical supply warehouse a few days ago and this time there was no petty little office tyrant to harass or berate him. He was only too thoroughly alone. The injector, well, that had been in case he had smuggled out the cartridge itself. The extractor was in case he injected the nanomites, either at work or at home, and then had second thoughts about it. The extractor was loaded with an empty cartridge to receive the nanomites, should he command them to exit his system, in which case they would obediently dog-paddle out of his veins in their thousands in a neat and orderly manner, not a single stray remaining behind.

  If he chose. Draw them out. Leave them inside. Activate them. If he chose.

  Choices. They had crushed Talane under their weight, too, hadn’t they? But it had been two hungry, demanding men crowded into her one body, her one mind, and not these delicate little fairies/ferries of memory.

  A heavy thump at his door caused Swift to jerk his woozy head up. He rose and stole close to the metal panel. There was a view screen set into the middle of the door, and Swift activated it in such a way that he could see who was out there in the hallway, though the screen on the other side would remain blank.

  The face was almost like something carved into a piece of fruit to approximate human features; a jack-o’-lantern thing. Mouth and nostrils like black knife gashes washed of their blood. Mere recessed holes for eyes. It was expressionless, and yet it stared directly into his own face as if it didn’t need him to turn on the outside screen.

  Swift stabbed the speaker key and snarled, “You fucker! You fucking freak! You like following me around, huh? You think I’m a freak like you? Bugger off!”

  The face registered nothing, did not budge or even shift within the view screen’s frame.

  “You want to play games? I can play games.” Swift pushed himself away from the door and stomped to his fridge. First he plucked up a fur-lined glove resting atop it, and put that on before thrusting his hand into cold vapors and taking hold of the gun he kept in the freezer. It was ostensibly a cutting tool with an adjustable beam, but was popularly used – and perhaps truly intended by its savvy if unethical makers – as a weapon. Swift’s own device was glitched, however, would heat up to the point where it might break down entirely and perhaps in a dangerous manner if he didn’t keep it cold. Swift strode back to the door, and this time he punched the key that would positively enable the Bliss on the other side of the panel to see him. He held the steaming, frost-glistening gun up close to his face. “This will give you more than a couple of dart holes, wanker! Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”

  He wasted more threats and imprecations, wafted on the reek of wine, without the alien withdrawing. Finally it was Swift who withdrew, to pull up a chair and sit facing the door, facing the screen, with a newly opened bottle of Knickerson in one hand and the cutting gun drooping from the other. He toasted the lifeless face with his beer. “You want to be a voyeur? Enjoy yourself. Finger your holes all you want. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have hands. Well you’ll get no fingering from me, freak.”

  He continued to rave to his visitor, until eventually he dozed off. When he awoke just past dawn,
he was surprised to find that he had shifted to the sofa. On his way to the kitchen to return his gun – alarmingly hot to the touch – to the freezer, he saw half a dozen empty Knickerson bottles scattered beside the sofa like bowling pins. He was even more surprised when, moving on to the bathroom, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. When had he lined his eyes with some kohl that Talane had forgotten here, and which he’d kept like a sacred relic? Streaks of it like newsprint tears had dried on his cheeks. It was like seeing Talane’s face superimposed over his own. Was it she who had painted his eyes while he slept, her spirit taking control of her new vessel?

  When he remembered the Bliss at last, he stumbled back to his apartment’s door. The security screen was still activated, but sometime during the night the being had finally drifted away.

  “Can’t even get you to stay beside me, can I?” Swift grumbled, as if he might actually be insulted or hurt that the creature had abandoned him to suffer his pain unattended.

  5

  Swift had just climbed to his floor, home from another numbing day at work, carrying more numbing bottles of Merlot in a shopping bag, when the door to the elevator opened – he hadn’t realized it was repaired – and a curious if partly familiar figure emerged. It was the Bliss, but it dragged a bizarre contraption after it. For lack of arms, the alien wore a harness that crossed its body but was mostly buckled around its thighs (obviously with the assistance of a creature better adapted to such a task).