Synners (32 page)

"Go home and pack," Gina said to him. "I'll
be
there. Just like fucking
always."

Visual Mark straightened up and walked off with his hands in his pockets. Gabe had the sudden wild thought that he'd never see the man again. And Gina?

"Are you going somewhere, too?" he asked her. "You and him?"

"That's a long fucker of a story." She yawned. "You feel sober?"

"I feel pain."

"Yah, that's sober as I remember it."

He took a firmer hold on her hand. "Where are you going?"

"Christ, you don't know anything, do you? Your daughter knows. Old Sam, she's got a line on a lot of stuff."

"What?" He felt a flutter of a strange new fear and tried to tell himself that it was the combination of the drugs and the shock of the injury.

"It's a long fucker of a story," she said again. "Your daughter's gonna be okay, but you need some work. Maybe a staple on that gash. You opened yourself up there pretty good."

"Yes," he said. "I did."

She paused, looking at him speculatively. "Shit, maybe I oughta tell you. While you're still too toxed to get frantic."

She had gotten to the part about Mexico when the police arrived.

The brain feels no pain.

Who had said that—Frank Sinatra or the Beater? Jim Morrison or Visual Mark? Mozart, or Canadaytime? The Living Sickle Orchestra . . . or that strange red-headed doctor?

Her mind turned fitfully like some sleeping giant in the grip of a dream about to become real. Real dreams.

Come along with me.

When was I ever not there for you?

There was a pause long enough to live and die in. Her point of view panned very slowly to the left and came to rest on her own face. Somehow it wasn't a shock to find she was looking at herself, because it wasn't her point of view. The taste of Mark was in her mind, and it was a taste, not a feeling, not a sense of presence, not a physical pressure but a taste.

She heard the scream of a jumper lifting off vertically, but the sound was muffled. Her point of view was still fixed on herself; she looked a little sour, she thought.

I didn't think you'd come.
Mark's voice, addressing her. She saw her face shift its attention to him, or rather, to her new point of view.

I did,
she saw herself say.
I got them Bad Old Cosmic C-Word Blues
Again.

His confusion was a light metallic something on her palate.
What does
'c-word' mean?

It means continuing to believe even when you don't feel it. Not letting
go even when you can't find squat to hold onto. Going all the way from the
beginning to the end.

The scene melted away, leaving her in darkness. She became aware belatedly of an ache in her head—several aches in various spots—gone as soon as she thought of it, and then someone's voice, coming out of nowhere:

ATTENTION, GINA.

"Right, she mumbled. "You don't have to shout."

SORRY. YOU'LL GET USED TO IT. PLEASE CONCENTRATE.

We've been through this one before.

PLEASE MAKE A BOX.

"What kind of box?" she asked.

A SMALL CUBE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE. There was a pause, and she had a sense of someone speaking in another room, just beyond her hearing. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE.

She obeyed, and the cube was there in front of her in the blackness. Somewhere people were applauding. She could not hear it, but she knew.

MAKE ANOTHER, requested the voice. There was a taste of plastic and metal. She obeyed again, and the requests went on, becoming more complicated, until the blackness had filled, overflowed, and filled again; still, she went on.

———

"We're going to play some music now, Gina. We'd like you to just let your mind go with it the same way you would if you were creating a video for it. All right?"

Video?

First you see video. . . .

"All right?"

Video—

Then you wear video. . . .

"All right?"

Video. . . .

Then you eat video. . . .

"Just run with it. Let the pictures come. All right?"

Video.

Then you
. . . be . . .

It came easy, nothing too active but strong, a good, fine beat. This was an old one, one she'd heard not too long ago, or a hundred years ago, in a graveyard. Live music, remember it? Nothing like live music, nothing like it.

The Beater went past, whirling like a dervish, a younger version of a businessman with a good cosmetic surgeon. A flying multitude came after, dancing in the darkness, becoming sign and wonders in the night sky.

They were colors now, making patterns in the black, spurting, retreating, spreading down the bowl of the sky. Colored light streamed down into her hand; she flung it back up again, making new patterns. The colors came down to her again, and she hurled them back into the air each time, until the darkness had been completely covered over.

New colors came up from the east then, mixing with the night shades, tunnels of gold cutting through to push the night away. She moved back, trying to see it all at once, and suddenly she was falling softly backwards, and she kept falling and falling until she couldn't hear the music anymore.

A hand came out of nowhere to hold hers. Mark. She gripped his hand firmly, intending not to let him go.

The lake rippled under the cloudy light, putting more damp into the grey day. She looked down and saw the water lapping gently at the rocks strewn around the shoreline.

She turned her head through the gray air, feeling the cold move past her face. Mark looked better, younger; he was smiling just a little slyly, as if he had a secret he had not quit decided to tell her. He turned her around and walked her along the edge of the lake.

"What are we doing?" she asked, stumbling a little. She wasn't a country person by any stretch of the imagination. Th heels of her boots kept skidding on the rocks and pebbles.

"Taking a rest." His voice sounded smoother, almost musical. "Taking a rest in a secret place." He went on speaking, but she did not hear his voice as much as she felt it. It was a good feeling at first, a sense of being
with
him greater than anything she had experienced before.

The feeling of closeness intensified; sometime later she realized she was straining away from him even as she kept a grip on his hand. Abruptly his hand twisted out of hers, and she was moving away unhurriedly but quickly.

There was a long hiatus—or possibly a short one, she couldn't tell; her sense of time was gone—and then she seemed to be coming up out of a sleep almost deep enough to be coma.

HELLO, MARK.

The voice was back. He wanted to wiggle with pleasure. It had been stone-home lonely in here without the voice. Wherever
here
was.

WE'D LIKE YOU TO MAKE SOME MORE PICTURES FOR US. IF YOU WOULDN'T MIND.

Hell, no, he wouldn't mind. Making pictures was what he did, didn't they realize that by now?

THIS TIME, HOWEVER, WE'D LIKE YOU TO TELL US WHERE THEY COME FROM.

He smiled to himself. Nosy, nosy, nosy. Where did they think they came off? Who did they thing they were? It was enough that he made pictures. Christ; he didn't understand where half of them came from himself.

NOW, MARK, SURELY YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THEM.

Drifting along in the something/nothing/whatever, he could not imagine why they thought it was important. It wasn't important. Who could know for certain, anyway? The pictures just came, that was all.
Life
just came. When you came across something in life, did you get to stop and ask where it was from? Excuse me, is this for real, or is someone making this up on me? Forget it. Damned Schrodinger world, for chris-sakes.

ALL RIGHT, LET'S TRY THIS: ARE THEY MEMORIES?

Once you've thought of it, it's
all
memory. Don't you know that, homeboy?

He could feel them giving up and retreating. He made pictures anyway, whether they were there or not, all the time listening to the music playing on and on in his mind. Even in the something/nothing/whatever, the program director never took a break. Thank God.

She woke with the feeling that she had been asleep for days.

The semidark, windowless room was little more than a closet, but nicely appointed—everything she needed was built in, and small as things were, she almost didn't have to get out of bed for most of it, or so it seemed. But she did get up and take a few steps around the center of the room, holding her back. The mattress of the tiny single bed was entirely too soft.

Then abruptly she stopped and touched her head. Except for a few bald spots where the shaved hair was already growing back in, she felt no difference. Didn't even ruin the dreadlocks. Same old Gina. Same old—

ATTENTION, GINA.

She looked up, unsure whether she had actually heard anything or not.

PLEASE CONCENTRATE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A BOX.

She held her head with both hands until she was sure it was just a memory. Just a memory, just an awfully stone-fucking home intense fucker of a fucking memory. Feeling a little shaky, she sat down on the bed again, and a new memory intruded.

Lying on a padded slab; going with it now as the slab begins to move
and the ceiling begins to move; head goes into a box; a short wait and the
fast insect sting of needles, very deep, sinking far, far in and suddenly fad
ing to a sensation of distant cold; murmur of voices, saying they are map
ping this and mapping that, and the brain feels no pain, the brain feels no
pain, the brain feels nothing at all—

But
this
brain feels
something.

Something
is there;
something
has come in
and something
is still com
ing in
and

The pictures flashed quickly, one after another. She touched her head again, but it still didn't feel any different. Except for each small bump that marked the locations of the sockets.
Bet I look pretty fucking drop-dead
with wires in my skull. Medusa's ugly sister.

Mark.

She got up and tried the door, thinking she would find it locked and then she'd have to trash the place till alarms went off. But the door swung open, and she found herself in a long hallway. Down at the very end, a light was on in some kind of alcove.

Gina hesitated. No guards—excuse me, nurses—keeping watch? She scanned the light-track running the length of the ceiling. The light was damped down, either for night or for her and Mark's benefit, after their long sleep, but she saw nothing other than the unbroken strip of illumination. Fuck it, they wouldn't have been that obvious, to stick eyes where anyone could just look up and see them. And on the other hand, who did they think they were fooling? Did they really think she'd believe she was moving around unobserved after fucking brain surgery?

Fuck 'em.
Take a good look at the walking, talking rock'n'roll animal.
She went down the hall.

Mark was sitting at a table off to one side in the dormitory-style kitchenette set up in the alcove, eating something unidentifiable out of a plastic dish. She jerked her chin at it.

He held up his dripping spoon. "Fuck if I know, but it's supposed to boost your neurotransmitter production. Brain glop. Tastes a little fishy."

She pulled up the sleeves of the stretchy white jumpsuit or pajama or whatever it was. Mark was wearing the same thing; it made them look like a couple of overgrown kids sneaking a midnight snack while the adults were asleep.

"Is it what you wanted?" she asked.

His head jerked slightly. "Well, it's not what I
didn't
want, put it that way."

She moved behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. They felt bony and frail. Like always. Abruptly she thought of Gabe Ludovic. The image of him lying on the ground with his face bloody and confused came to her out of nowhere, as intense as one of those inserted images.

Mark put a hand on one of hers, twining their fingers. "I know what I'd like to do right now."

She held very still. He twisted around and looked up at her. He really didn't look too bad. Better than he had in ages, as if a great deal of trouble had dropped away from him. Maybe it was not having to worry anymore. He could just stick a socket in his head and out it would come, essence de V. Mark. Video on tap.

He stood up then and wrapped his arms around her. This was never the easy part. They weren't smooch-faces, it didn't work that way, for her or for him. In twenty-some-odd years she hadn't stopped too often to wonder how it could have gone.

One time, though . . .one time, three-four-five years into the madness, there'd been a space where they'd come together one night, and it had been different. Hadn't been the first time or the last, but it had definitely been different. Might've just been time for it, time to find out, or try to find out. He'd been reaching, and she'd been reaching, and for a little while there, they'd gotten through. Maybe that had been the night when the little overlapping space called
their life
had come into existence.

And as if to make the point, as if to make absolutely sure they both understood, he'd put on this music, straight audio, very old stuff, guy named Dylan.
I Want You.
Very old, very big; maybe too big for either one of them. She remembered being unable to move or talk, or do anything but listen, and at the same time some part of her wanting to laugh her old laugh to break it up and break it down—hey, jellyroll, let's us just sit down and read our profiles in the entrails of popular culture, whaddaya say, but another part of her, the bigger part, got it right away, and that was the part that kept her from laughing. Because if you didn't speak your truth, there was always something that would speak it for you that much louder.

Maybe there'd been a little too much truth in the room with them. Something had almost turned there, but the night ended, and after that they just couldn't ever get it right.

Now she let herself relax into him for the first time in a long time, resting her head on his hard, bony chest and slipping her arms around his waist. Her mind began to drift, unreeling a series of wordless memories and pictures in no particular order, scenes from the old days, from all the days before this one: Mark bending over a screen, his prematurely old face lit by the glow of the rough cut he was previewing for final editing; the Beater sitting at the permanently closed synthesizer, unmoving and unmoved, and Mark standing on the other side, trying to get his mind around it and having a bad time; Mark on the courthouse steps; the Beater facing her with it; the lake with the stony shore—