Climbing to the loft, Harry could look down between the steps, which had treads but no risers, and see couples frozen in makeout postures in the shadows under the staircase.
All the sex education in the world, all the graphic pamphlets on condom use, could be swept aside by one tab of Ecstasy if the user experienced an erotic response, as so many did. How could you remain concerned about disease when the stranger you’d just met was such a soulmate, the yin to your yang, radiant and pure to your third eye, so in tune to your every need and desire?
When he and Connie reached the loft, the light was dimmer than on the main level, but Harry could see couples lying on the floor or sitting together with their backs against the rear wall. They were making out more aggressively than those beneath the stairs, Paused in tongue duels, blouses unbuttoned, jeans unzipped, hands seeking within.
Two or three of the couples, in an Ecstasy rush, might even have lost such complete touch with where they were and with common propriety that they were actually doing it in one fashion or another, when the Pause hit.
Harry had no desire to confirm that suspicion. Like the sad circus on the main floor, the scene in the loft was only depressing. It was not in the least erotic to any voyeur with minimum standards, but provoked as many somber thoughts as any Hieronymus Bosch painting of hellacious realms and creatures.
As Harry and Connie moved between the couples toward the loft railing where they could look down on the main floor, he said, “Be careful what you step in.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Only trying to be a gentleman.”
“Well, that’s unique in this place.”
From the railing, they had a good view of the frozen throng below, partying eternally.
Connie said, “God, I’m cold.”
“Me, too.”
Standing side by side, they put their arms around each other at the waist, ostensibly sharing body heat.
Harry had rarely in his life felt as close to anyone as he felt to her at that moment. Not close in an amorous sense. The stoned and groping couples on the floor behind them were sufficiently anti-romantic to assure against any romantic feelings rising in him just then. The atmosphere wasn’t right for it. What he felt, instead, was the platonic closeness of friend to friend, of partners who had been pushed to their limits and then beyond, who were very probably going to die together before dawn — and this was the important part — without either of them ever having decided what he really wanted out of life or what it all meant.
She said, “Tell me not all kids these days go to places like this, saturate their brains with chemicals.”
“They don’t. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Most kids are reasonably together.”
“Because I wouldn’t want to think this crowd is typical of ‘our next generation of leaders,’ as they say.”
“It isn’t.”
“If it is,” she said, “then the post-millennium cotillion is going to be even nastier than what we’ve been living through these last few years.”
“Ecstasy causes pin-size holes in the brain,” he said. “I know. Just imagine how much more inept the government would be if the Congress was full of boys and girls who like to ride the X-press.”
“What makes you think it isn’t already?” She laughed sourly. “That would explain a lot.” The air was neither cold nor warm, but they were shivering worse than ever. The warehouse remained deathly still. “I’m sorry about your condo,” she said. “What?”
“It burned down, remember?”
“Well.” He shrugged. “I know how much you loved it.”
“There’s insurance.”
“Still, it was so nice, cozy, everything in its place.”
“Oh? The one time you were there, you said it was ‘the perfect self-constructed prison’ and that I was ‘a shining example to every anal-retentive nutcase fussbudget from Boston to San Diego.’”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Really?”
“Well, you were angry with me.”
“I must have been. About what?”
He said, “That was the day we arrested Norton Lewis, he gave us a little run for our money, and I wouldn’t let you shoot him.”
“That’s right. I really wanted to shoot him.”
“Wasn’t necessary.”
She sighed. “I was really up for it.”
“We nailed him anyway.”
“Could’ve gone bad, though. You were lucky. Anyway, the son of a bitch deserved shooting.”
“No argument there,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t mean it — about your condo.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Okay, I did, but I have a different take on it now. It’s a screwed-up world, and we all need to have a way of coping. Yours is better than most. Better than mine, in fact.”
“You know what I think’s happening here? I think maybe this is what the psychologists call ‘bonding.’”
“God, I hope not.”
“I think it is.”
She smiled. “I suspect that already happened weeks or months ago, but we’re just getting around to admitting it.”
They stood in companionable silence for a while.
He wondered how much time had passed since they’d fled from the counting golem on Pacific Coast Highway. He felt as if he had surely been on the run for an hour, but it was difficult to tell real time when you were not living in it.
The longer they were stuck in the Pause, the more inclined Harry was to believe their enemy’s promise that the ordeal would only last one hour. He had a feeling, perhaps at least partly cop instinct rather than entirely wishful thinking, that Ticktock was not as all-powerful as he seemed, that there were limits to even his phenomenal abilities, and that engineering the Pause was so draining, he could not long sustain it.
The growing inner cold that troubled both him and Connie might be a sign that Ticktock was finding it increasingly difficult to exempt them from the enchantment that had stilled the rest of the world. In spite of their tormentor’s attempt to control the altered reality that he had created, perhaps Harry and Connie were gradually being transformed from movable game pieces to permanent fixtures on the game board itself.
He remembered the shock of hearing the gravelly voice speak to him out of his car radio last evening, when he had been speeding between his burning condo in Irvine and Connie’s apartment in Costa Mesa. But until now he had not realized the importance of the words the golem-vagrant had spoken: Gotta rest now, hero… gotta rest… tired… a little nap…. More had been said, mostly threats, the raspy voice gradually fading into static, silence. However, Harry suddenly understood that the most important thing about the incident was not the fact that Ticktock could somehow control the ether and speak to him out of a radio, but the revelation that even this being of godlike abilities had limits and needed periodic rest like any ordinary mortal.