Punktown: Shades of Grey (25 page)

“Nice day,” Coffin noted blandly, waiting for his floor, “but a bit chill.”

“Fine day, though rather cool.”

The
apartment was small and neat…a kitchenette, a bath, and a bedroom where Coffin squeezed his desk and comp
and vid-screen in with his bureau and bed. The living room, largest chamber in the flat, contained a small city.

Rising from the bedrock of clustered card tables, it was a sprawling miniature of spires and domes, a maze of bridges and streets, of mock temples and whorehouses and sad, haunted tenements, like the one he lived in. Mother hadn’t been able to afford the schooling to facilitate Coffin’s architectural impulses, thus the imaginary city within the city. Punktown Junior, he called it, although it was not so much a replica of his habitat, as an evocation of its jumbled diversity, its textures and contrasts, its beautiful incongruity.

After dinner he went straight to it. He hunched—surgeon with a glue gun—as the hours dreamed past. He was putting tiny frames around the broken windows in a four-decker, a reptilian thing with meticulous grey tiles he’d fashioned from flakes of cardboard.

His eyes wandered down the length of the tenement and lingered on the
alley which
separated it from the glassy structure next door. Inspired by the Fern Museum, this building was made from a salvaged aquarium. A tiny black bird sat on the roof.

««—»»

Two lovers were rushing through the rain on Fortune Street. The man was laughing behind a damp cigarette, and the woman, lovely and chocolate, had a dress like a windy curtain. Coffin smiled and looked down as the pair whisked past, perfume and nicotine.

Rain drummed the white lid of his Styrofoam cup. Rain made the tenements look like great sticks of slippery butter. Rain brought puddles for the feet, and a muting grey that turned red neon to
rose
.

Coffin walked on the other side of the street, so that he would not have to pass that robot again, presuming it was still in the alley. He imagined it hadn’t moved, seeing as it was missing one of its major wheels. He was right; there it was, slumped and stained, like a
trash can
with big black eyes, propped against the mounded garbage bags.
Like a sick old man with too many pillows.

Hoping he would not be noticed, Coffin picked up his pace. He glanced over once more as he was moving out of range, and noticed that the robot had two of its spindly arms extended and was cracking open peanuts to feed to a twitchy audience of damp grey pigeons. It was even singing to them, its voice
froggy
, a gargle of static.

««—»»

Coffin dreamed that he was inside his tiny city. He was following a woman. Her heart was a small black bird, and she herself had great fern wings. She was dodging through the echoing buildings, glancing over her shoulder, smiling sadly. The bird was a mascot for broken hearts, all of them gathered into one dark heap.

He lost her trail after a while, and found himself alone in one of the lifts. In his dream, the city, like the staggered creation in his parlor, was comprised of cardboard, and other collected bits…tubing and scraps, details harvested from dead radios. He followed the echo of the woman’s steps and ended up in a vacant apartment, a room of grey cardboard with dusky stains, soft from rain. He was alone.

Coffin touched the center of a soggy wall. He thought he heard weeping on the other side. The wall gave, organically soft, its musty layers peeling to give him a
port hole
. He pressed his face up to have a look.

There was not much to see, for all the shadows. There might have been a window somewhere, or a small, solitary bulb overgrown with webs, winking faulty voltage. A vague naked woman, with shadows for hair, was slumped deflated in a corner, slackly staring with twin scoops of darkness that might not have contained eyes. Her wings were only stains on the wall, like a dank watercolor of petrified ferns. Like fish skeletons infused.

An oversized tadpole, slick and black in its pre-limb state, was clutched in the woman’s mouth as if a matador’s rose, weakly waving its tail. It was a great black teardrop, wheezing its last from fluttery gills.

Coffin woke to the shrill of his alarm clock, his face pressed into a damp pillow.

««—»»

A cup of coffee in each hand, Coffin walked faster than usual. He had stopped at the small market across the street from Brewland and purchased a package of cigars. On he went, down Fortune, with its mustard tenements lined up along the puddles, and the pigeons staggering like boozers.

Pigeons went up, with a gargling sort of noise, when Coffin came to the alley between two of the yellow behemoths. Empty peanut shells were strewn like bullet casings from a machine gun.

“Hey,” the robot croaked, tilting its head up with black doorknob eyes, “I know you.”

Coffin held out one of his cups. “Mandheling, right?”

A slim metal hand snatched the coffee. “Shit! You’re okay, kiddo. I’m going to have to put you in my will.”

Coffin took the cigars out and offered them.

“Whoa. Now cut that out,” the robot rasped, “you’re getting me all choked up.”

Two skinny little arms worked to rip the smokes open while a third tilted the coffee so that the relic could sip. A bit of dark liquid sputtered from the mouth vent and ran down over the robot’s dented chest, blurring spray-painted expletives.

Coffin raised his Styrofoam in a parting gesture and spoke over his shoulder as he walked away, “Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring you a cup of Kalian marsh-bean roast.”

The robot coughed a little and called, “Thanks, pal!”

««—»»

Mort’s was a secondhand place with two big windows like fish eyes. Twin garishly colored plastic cigar store Indians minded the door. Hologram word balloons sporadically puffed like smoke from their molded faces, offering such irresistible enticements as:
COME IN AND SEE OUR RARE COLLECTION OF DISCONTINUED SCREWS
, and:
Z-12 TUNING KNOBS ON SALE
. The inside was a clutter of odd items which the proper antique shops deemed unsuitable…a jumbled maze of rusty components and plastic tendrils. Coffin, who secretly admired the disheveled texture of the place, often came here to gather building materials for his private city.

The owner, a sagging little man with too many fingers on one hand and not enough on the other, helped Coffin find what he was looking for.

At the counter, Mort tapped one of his too-few digits on the wheel. “Yes, indeed, a fine wheel, this. Model seventy-two task-bot…they don’t build ’em like that anymore. You got one of those babies at home?”

“It’s for a friend.” Coffin said.

««—»»

With a cup of Kalian coffee in one hand, and a wheel under his arm, Coffin made his way onto Fortune Street. The tenements stood there, chipped and waiting for rain, and the afternoon traffic was growing thick, punctuated with horns and sirens.

Coffin was not as eager to get home to his miniature city as he usually was. He felt like talking. Talking about anything.
About the rain hiding in the clouds, or women, or even birds.
Maybe he would tell the robot about Punktown Junior. Maybe, someday, he might even bring him up to see it. No one else had ever visited his city.

The pigeons were not in position; they were floundering about the stone steps of one of the yellow buildings, and they were making disgruntled sounds. There was a white Health Agent van parked by the alley and a man in a dark suit was giving orders, gesturing. The alley, apparently, had been deemed a health hazard.

Coffin picked up his pace when he noticed the squat aqua-colored hover-scow. It was hunched there at the curb, by the van by the alley, and a mighty jointed limb was lifting a large scoop up, to dump the contents into the rusty jaws that snarled at the sky. A frail metal arm was sticking up out of the scoop, quavering. Rusty fingers dropped a peanut.

“No!” Coffin called, dashing into the street to a tune of horns.

The contents of the scoop thundered down into the hulking turtle-backed scow and an engine shrilled like a swarm of dentist drills. Panting, having survived the traffic, Coffin reached the gutter, clinging to the coffee, his glasses half down his nose. There wasn’t even time to protest. All he could do was stand there and listen to the terrible sound of grinding.

««—»»

Late into the rainy night he stooped above the little city. The sirens outside were soft in the distance, as if they too were in miniature. The buildings were huddled together, some with glass domes glowing a shade of peach, some dark and Deco, some thorned and gothic. Some had rotating antennae, and vents that shook the tiny garments strung on clotheslines between tenements.

The sun was starting up when Coffin finished his latest addition. It was a squat miniature robot sitting at the mouth of an alley, a very small cup of coffee—made from paper to approximate Styrofoam—in its hand. Gathered around the robot were minute pigeons, delicately shaped from cotton, and a sad shade of grey.

— | — | —

I HAVE KILLED MILLIONS

No one could explain The Dusk that had hung upon the city for close to a week. The atmospheric control systems appeared to be functioning properly, the pollution containing complexes were intact and still there was no difference between day and night—only the odd luminous grey.

There were only rumors—a plague, the end of the world, a dimensional anomaly. Over in the ghetto of Phosnoor Village, Paxton, there had been reports of black sticky footprints in the street and frost on morning windows, even though the temperatures were above freezing. There was a rash of bird suicides—pigeons repeatedly slamming themselves into walls or flying in front of cars.

Jax found himself in the wastes of Phosnoor clanging up five metal flights in a tenement. There were many doors in a hall of unfurling wallpaper, feeble light from a window at one end. He stepped over an incongruous merry-go-round horse, dull in its cobwebs like a spider’s abandoned prey.

There was no door to kick in this time. Pistol first, Jax floated into the room. The room was a sepia box—no furnishings, no windows. An emaciated naked man was slumped in the corner with a large beetle on his chest like a lacquered chest plate. Two thin tendrils ran from the creature’s armor into the man’s blood-crusted nostrils. He stared dully, grinning, and muttered, “I have killed millions.”

Jax backed out of the room and tucked the stocky pistol back under his coat. He was headed for the stairs when he heard a crash and turned to see a pigeon stuck in the cracked window like a bug in a web.

««—»»

There was an open barrel of rotting sausages outside the motel office. Jax dropped his cigarette into them and it hissed. The sausages shifted as if something were buried in the thick of them; angry flies flew up. It smelled like mothballs in the office and an old woman with blood-caked nostrils and bandaged wrists sat behind the counter.

“One night,” Jax said. He stood behind the woman in a mirror—lean, tinted, unshaven, somewhat older looking than his thirty-five years.

“Forty-five,” the woman said, as if she could read the caliber of his pistol through his coat.