He opened one of his desk drawers, dropped Singin’ in the Rain into it, closed and locked it. As sometimes happens when a great deal of money changes owners in an atmosphere of bare tolerance, he suddenly turned hearty. He gestured toward a lower corner of the room and said, “Down there, some people call two hundred in gold a fortune, son. What do you plan to do with it all?”
I smiled; if he couldn’t see it, he would still hear it in my voice. “Oh,” I said, “I thought I’d treat myself to breakfast.”
And that should have been the end of it; but it may be that I don’t think clearly with a fortune in my inside pocket. “Have you seen it?” I asked him.
He was startled enough to get in the way of the light. It made him squint, his eyes lost in pasty white flesh. “Pardon?”
“Singin’ in the Rain. Have you seen it?” Dancing over sofas, hanging from lampposts, piling furniture on the speech tutor. Did he have a secret passion for foolery?
“No.”
“Then how do you know you want it?”
His answer was all in his face, scornful and baffled at once. Money makes me ask stupid questions. He wanted it, of course, because someone else didn’t have it.
“Debbie Reynolds dies in the end,” I told him.
Five minutes later I was in an elevator rumbling down from the top of the tallest building in the City, with more money than I’d ever carried in my life, literally surrounded by wealth and power. And I was mostly sick and frightened with it. When I got outside, onto the street, to anyplace that had ever been touched by sunlight, I would be all right.
I went past the guard desk, nodded at the man who sat behind it, and tried, as I went out the door, not to look as if I was rushing. I turned right, into the cheerful morning pandemonium of the mall market, and the tight prickling between my shoulders went away.
I’d done a good job, I decided on reflection. That building, that office, that customer, always made me feel claustrophobic and small, but I’d kept my mind on the Deal, and it had gone as I’d meant it to. I might have sounded a little like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, but there were worse roles.
I bought eggs and peppers and a few ounces of crumbly cheese at three different stalls, and took them all to a grill cart and had the proprietor turn them into an omelette.
After breakfast I would hail a bicycle cab and pay for the long, long ride to the western outskirts of the City, where a culture-vulture knew of a sealed-up basement holding the remains of a video production business. It would be, by my standards, a perfect day.
But it had chaos hidden in it. Cancers start that way: a cell or two, mutated, dividing, a secret for weeks, or months, though I knew nothing about it for weeks.
Card 1: Covering
Death, Reversed
Waite: Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism, hope destroyed.
Gray: Stagnation. Failure of revolution or other forms of violent change.
Crowley: Transformation and the logical development of existing conditions thwarted. His magical weapon is the pain of the obligation. His magical power is necromancy.
1.0: Gonna go downtown
I came up on my back in the dirt. The sun was hot on the front of me, but the ground under my body was cool. I’d been there a while, then. A white-blue glaring summer sky made my eyes water. My mouth felt like a tomb from some culture where they bury your servants with you.
I turned my head reluctantly, and found the river flats around me, deserted, smelling like dead fish and damp wood. Far away, across the baked mud and spilled cured concrete, a bridge crew worked. I could hear the cadence shout, faintly, and the crash as the weight came down to drive the piles.
I rolled half over and tried to decide how I was. This time, all I felt was a sore and swelling bruise on the side of my face. I remembered where I must have got it: in the street in back of Tet Offensive, where I’d gone for spicy mock duck and gotten two Charlies petites instead. The last thing I recalled clearly was one of the boss girls doing a snap kick, watching her heel come at me out of the dark. Probably about then that I went down.
Since the only lasting damage I’d taken was something I could remember, I must not have been into any nasty things during downtime. How long had it been? And what had I missed?
When I stood up, I had to revise the damage report. My skull was the Holy Sepulcher of hangovers. Oh, I must have been into some nasty things, indeed. I hoped I’d had fun. By the time I got to the street along the Bank, it was enough to make me sick.
I’d had thirty bucks in paper, but my pockets were empty now. If the boss girls hadn’t gotten it, then it had paid for whatever had left its residue in my head. I wished I knew what it was. Not that I could resolve never to consume any more. Sooner or later I’d go down again, shut out of my own mind, and all the resolving I’d ever done would be as useful as a dome light in a casket.
The next plunge down would be number five. The first time, I’d thought it was something I’d eaten, or drunk, or otherwise consumed. The second time, I’d wondered if it was someone else’s malice, the coup n’âme. By the third, it had occurred to me that it might be all mine. The effect of my colorful origin, arrived at last to rectify a long-neglected error. But if that was so, why wasn’t it coming closer to killing me?
I sat on the wall by the road, shivering in the sun. Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn’t there to stop it, and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn’t left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and knew I couldn’t bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.
The obvious method came to mind, despair’s favorite offspring. It came so sharp to the front of my brain, so clear and desirable, that I made a quick little noise about it. I was down off the wall and headed for the Deeps before I could think about what I was running (figuratively) from. The human animal, when hurting, prefers to go to ground in its own burrow.
In parts of town, I could have sat on the curb and held out my hand, and after a while, if I looked pitiful enough, I would have the money to pay for a bicycle cab. There were still people in the world who were superstitious about beggars, after all, and if bruised, dirty, and disoriented couldn’t elicit pity, then what was superstition for? But the Bank was lousy panhandling territory. People there lived by the Deal, like everyone else. They lived well by it, however, and that affected their judgment. Even if they once knew the First Law of Conservation of Deals — that there are never enough to go around — they’d let it slip their minds. So they drove past in their co-op’s car, or trotted by under the twisted trees, led by dogs that ate as much as I did, and assumed when they saw me that I didn’t do as much to earn my food as the dog.
Once, even in a place like the Bank, you could hold your hand out in a certain way, and people would understand that you needed transportation. They’d stop their private cars and let you ride in them, without asking anything in return. Unnatural, but true. I’d seen it in movies. But that was a long time ago. I staggered on, the dogs barked, and their owners made what they thought were imperceptible movements toward one pocket or another. I wasn’t worried; I didn’t think even a shot of ammonia in my eyes could make me feel worse.
By the time I got to Seven Corners market, the whole world seemed to flash colors in rhythm with my heartbeat. The flapping shutter of my headache kept time, too. Seven Corners has never been a good place for my preferred sort of marketing: it’s food, clothing, housewares, and the kind of services that go with those, mostly. So I didn’t much mind having to make my way through it with my eyes squinted three-quarters shut. It occurred to me, dimly, that I might have more than a hangover.