Strange Flesh (30 page)

I glance back at Xan. She nods.

“Guys, I guess I made a mistake. I’m sorry. Hey, ah, next round’s on—”

They’re not to be soothed. Plaid Suit shifts his bulk toward me and says, “Fuck you. Who the fuck do you think—”

Olya presses against him. “Eh, eh, eh. Maybe you let
me
buy you the drink. We don’t mean—”

I don’t hear the rest of her glamouring them because I’m thrown off by a movement in my peripheral vision. Back at our table, the guy that was sitting in the adjacent booth now stands in front of Garriott, shaking his hand. He puts his other hand on Garriott’s shoulder and gestures at
his date, who reaches over the back of the booth to greet him as well. The guy doesn’t let go of his shoulder and bends down to say something else. I take a step toward them, not knowing exactly why.

Pinky grabs my elbow, evidently not done with our confrontation.

The woman next to Garriott raises her right hand. I’m horrified to see that her fist holds a steak knife. I try to yank my arm free, but Pinky’s grip is tight. I call Garriott’s name.

He can’t hear me over the loud music. The woman cocks her hand, and anticipating the blow to follow, I set myself and twist my arm forward, breaking Pinky’s grasp.

Too late,
I think.

But then something strange happens. Instead of plunging the knife into Garriott, the woman pulls it back toward her own face.

And sticks the blunt handle all the way down her throat.

The resulting reflex delivers in one gushing eruption all four pints of beer she had consumed earlier, along with a full plate of macerated nachos and what might be a Greek salad. Garriott reels back in disgust as her partner lets go.

Another guy videos the incident from across the room. Rather than thoughts of vengeance, what enters my head is this simple observation:

Day 6, scene 3
.

Olya gets there before me, and retribution
is
foremost in her mind. She stiff-arms the girl’s head into the wall and then bashes the meat of her palm onto her nose.

In a low growl she says, “You stupid—”

I reach out to restrain her, thinking that nobody’s really gotten hurt—yet. We can’t have Olya getting arrested in a bar brawl. Unfortunately, the boyfriend also decides to wade in. I elbow him in the gut and jack him back away from the booth. Garriott composes himself by wiping his face with the corner of our tablecloth. He bears an oddly philosophical expression, like he’s more disappointed than aghast.

I try to drag Olya off the girl, though she’s literally spitting with rage. Just as I finally get them separated, I feel a hard jerk across my windpipe and am neatly ripped off my feet by someone with the physique of a bulldozer.

He says, “Not cool, James.”

That would be Ray the bouncer, a former heavyweight wrestler. He
hauls me fast through the door and hurls me, without undue rancor, into the gutter. As I lie there catching my breath, I see another bouncer politely but firmly escorting Olya out by her elbow. Garriott and Xan follow, upbraiding the bar manager on the way.

When I finally sit up, the Foo Bar staff has gone back in to deal with the other parties, though I imagine they’ve slunk out the back.

Xan kneels at my side and asks, “Are you quite all right, James?”

“Yeah, nothing a few more drinks won’t cure.”

Olya fumes, muttering to herself in Russian, no doubt detailing the hideous fate she has in mind for Billy. I could direct her to a few choice passages in Sade.

I edge upwind of Garriott. “You, ah, okay? That was pretty . . .”

Garriott musters the proper devil-may-care affect. “That? A little Roman shower? That’s nothing, mate. I was a Wyvern at Cambridge, for God’s sake. Not to say that’ll stop me from pounding Billy’s face into marmalade, if he ever has the stones to show it.”

I’m glad Garriott can laugh it off, but Olya may well have broken that girl’s nose.

And the Innoculytes are just warming up.

T
he next day I walk back from the corner deli through the icy morning sipping a cup of burnt, acidic coffee. It’s not helping my tender head, which was already throbbing when I awoke. From my hard landing in the gutter last night? Or the unreasonable amount of Garriott’s favorite Bordeaux we drank after escorting him home to change? I guess the group wasn’t keen on traveling back to our respective apartments alone, because we tacitly decided to make a slumber party of it.

So this morning I’m exhausted and yet still anxious to get back to GAME and power through the bugs we left for today.

This intense impulse to resume work is alien to me. Am I feeling the first twinges of severe Stockholm syndrome? Maybe I need to take measures to get my personal shit together. Tamp down the Byronic passions I’m starting to feel for this tarted-up vacuum cleaner. Not to mention my paternal pride at seeing Fred make Xan or Olya go breathless.

On the other hand, the life I led before was tending toward the untenable. I was engaged in my work without being inspired. And my personal life after Erica resembled a speeding car in heavy fog.

At GAME, I’ve stumbled onto a project uniquely suited to my abilities and desires. Regardless of my qualms about the enterprise, in the past week or so, I’ve gone to work every day with a hard-on. Why? It’s the difference between doing something and
building
something. While they’re hard-won and all too rare, those flashes of triumphant creation satisfy like nothing else.

In combining them with the primordial lust I feel toward Olya—despite her obvious entanglement with the very target of my investigation—I’ve found myself creating a false identity I like better than the original.

Billy would be proud. Though when my job is done, I’m sure he’ll want to see me bleeding in the more literal sense.

I
f Blake’s SoHo spread seeks to frame its occupant with a discerning luxury, then Blythe’s is much more of the “tremble now, all ye who come before me” variety. The very existence of a suite consisting of the top four stories of a seventies–and–Central Park West monolith testifies to an owner who controls things the rest of us don’t even know about. I assume that’s the message intended by this gym-sized foyer with carved-marble wing staircases sweeping upward toward an actual ballroom. The décor betrays an interior designer who recently visited Versailles and takes too much Xanax with her kir royales.

Not at all what I’d pictured for Blythe, something she acknowledges as she leads me into a cozy library for our meeting.

“Sorry about the place. I know it’s gauche, but my stepmother forced it on my poor father when he was in no position to resist. She made him move to get away from his ‘old life’ in L.A., and all his stuff is still here. I know he was supposedly a corporate Antichrist, but a girl can still love her father, right?”

“No shame in loving a prewar penthouse either.”

“I promise myself that one day I’ll fill it with African war orphans to even the karma.”

“I’m sure the co-op board will be thrilled.”

Blythe had called me to ask if I could “swing by her place for a quick chat.” It was eleven
PM
then, now almost midnight, and something in her voice made me believe she might be a little drunk. An exciting prospect.

The last time I’d seen Blythe get truly hammered was the night after I took her out of the Zeta house. The night she came by my apartment for a drink. The night, it is sad to say, that still stands as the clear apex of my life.

We’d powered through most of a bottle sitting close on my couch. Though at first she wasn’t inclined to discuss it, after her third double, I brought the conversation around to the events of the previous night. I detailed my thoughts about exacting revenge on Novak, but she barely seemed interested, as though she’d already dismissed him from her mind.

“You’re not angry?” I asked.

“Of course. But mostly at myself.”

“Blythe, you can’t blame—”

She puts up her hands. “James, I knew.”

“What?”

“I knew all about Pete Novak. I knew his interest in me was . . .
profane
. It sounds so crazy, but I guess I wanted to see . . . Well anyway I never suspected he’d resort to such a cowardly cliché. I mean, a roofie? It makes no sense. The way he looked at me . . .”

She trailed off and stared contemplatively into space. I tried to survey the void with her while she collected her thoughts. But when I glanced back, I found myself transfixed by those unearthly green eyes.

“Was nothing like the way
you
look at me, James.”

I racked my brain for something to say, but it had thrown a rod and juddered to a halt.

Blythe rose. I feared she was leaving, but she merely bent to pick up Novak’s camera from my coffee table. She sat back down and regarded it thoughtfully.

I cleared my throat, but before I could speak, she said, “I want you to take my picture, James. I want to see what you see.”

She offered me the camera. Her hand lingered on it before she let it go, the gesture saying to me, “I know I can trust you. That you’d never try to hurt me.”

The images I made that night became for a long time the holy icons of my private cult, the same ones that years later drove away my fiancée:

A close-up of her glimmering eyes seeking mine through the lens.

A slightly tilted shot, from my shiver of excitement when she touched the first button of her blouse.

A profile of her lithe frame as she undid the front clasp of her bra.

A dark silhouette of her matchless figure as she leaned over me and undid my fly.

An extreme close-up of the appreciative quirk of her lips as she drew me out.

An unfocused picture of the ceiling that corresponds to my burst hydrant of a climax.

The curves at the small of her back as she rubbed her naked chest wetly against me.

A lascivious grin over her shoulder as she led me by the hand into my bedroom. Her body bare, but for those red pearls.

That was when I dropped the camera. It would never take another picture. But the memory survived.

Once inside her, my eyes snapped shut as I tried to parse the symphony of sensation played by her gently rocking hips. She smelled like the final dish of a twelve-course tasting menu. Some concentrated essence of citrus and vanilla cream that the chef had to consult a battery of chemists to concoct.

She grabbed my chin and said, “No. Keep looking at me, James.”

I’d fantasized about sleeping with Blythe for more man-hours than they were wasting on the Big Dig. But I’d never imagined that the actual act could be better than all my fervid scenarios. Blythe was so in tune with herself, she was even able to make something of my amateur fumbling. She moved like she was a secret weapon the palace eunuchs trot out when the sexually ambivalent young sultan must produce an heir. Being a realist, I’m suspicious of over-the-top carrying on, but when Blythe subsided onto my chest with a self-conscious giggle and then bit my shoulder, I was so besotted I had to fight back tears.