“Yeah, I know.” November had walked all the way across this contained sea, like Christ keeping his feet dry at Galilee. Around the catwalks’ and derricks’ pilings, little ripples and gurgles sounded, the sighs of bubbles that flowered, broke open, and disappeared with the heavy glacial quality of magma as she’d made her progress along the planks. “I was here when it happened.”
“So was I.” The cameraman tilted his head to listen to something in his ’phones, made a sotto voce reply into the mike, then redirected his attention to the woman standing in front of him. He’d angled the camera boom to impede, if not totally block, her way. “I was one of the first on the scene when the word went out. The combine had me up here so fast, I still had my toothbrush in my mouth and I was rolling tape. Been a while since the last big poly-org outbreak-that was the Goose-Pimpler up by the Bering Strait. I was on that one, too. We had to wire the whole place up with space heaters to keep the thing from freezing over and turning any exposed flesh blue. Got so hot up above that me and the rest of the crew were riding our gear in shorts and T-shirts. Like a summer day with melting glaciers all around.”
“How nice for you.” She hadn’t come all this way-not just across the catwalks, but the hitch up from the hospital down south-to wind up listening to this idiot brag. At the same time, she didn’t want to blow him off too fast, maybe arouse his suspicions about what she was doing here. There was probably some kind of security detail around here, sleeping on the job at the moment, but capable of being roused. “You don’t seem to have that kind of a problem.”
“Nah-this is the perfect setup.” The cameraman turned a small chromed wheel, and the boom edged a few inches closer to November, as though the brachiosaur head had come awake to sniff her human scent. “Nice, big one; getting some good shots off it.” He patted the complicated flank of his videocamera equipment. “I’ve seen some of the ratings. Worldwide, this is beating the pack. Those enhanced Lucy reruns, with the Tarantino dialogue filters and the Peckinpah slo-mo death scenes-those were a good idea, but they just really can’t compete. People are just too hip to those reconstruct jobs; you can’t just add four minutes of ceegee’d special effects and have people plotz like in the old days.” He gave an appreciative nod. “You want the numbers, you gotta have something happening in real time. You get that event factor, people think they’re watching the news.” The cameraman shrugged. “Plus sex, of course. That always helps.”
“I’m sure it does.” November put her hands on the forward edge of the boom, balancing herself as she tried to slide around it on the catwalk. If she looked down, she could see the soft bones, loose collections of vital organs, and skeins of nervous tissue floating in the gel. “Give the people what they want.”
“Yeah, right.” The cameraman angled his head so he could look at November over the top of his glasses. His eyes had the red corners and pinpoint pupils of someone who had no way of remembering what sleep felt like. “Couldn’t have come at a better time, either. Sweeps week, you know.” He radiated a sweating intensity, excitement translating into a vein ticking at the corner of his forehead, as though November had laid her hands on a portion of his carnal anatomy, instead of just the machinery he controlled. “Sometimes it makes you wonder… like whether they plan it that way…”
She didn’t make a reply. She’d gotten to the point where she was half off the catwalk, holding on to the camera boom rather than just using it for balance.
“So like I said. No point in going in there.” The cameraman smiled and made another, tinier adjustment to the little chrome wheel. “All the action’s out here.”
The camera boom nudged her in the chest, pushing her all the way off the catwalk. November held on to the device’s platform, both hands digging into the various bolts and flanges. Her boots dangled a few inches above the gel’s surface membrane. Underneath, the outlines of the perpetually copulating forms grew more tangled and numerous, as though her shadow on the slow waves were a newly tattooed image, one that they hadn’t seen before.
“Cute-” November looked up into the face of the cameraman above her. “But not very.” It was made even more clear to her that she hadn’t fully recovered from her hospital stay. The delicate new skin of her fingertips and palms felt as if it were about to shred apart from her desperate clutching of the boom platform. Plus, she was too weak to climb up and kick this smirking sonuvabitch’s ass. “I’d appreciate it… if you’d put me down…”
“What’s your rush?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the chrome wheel, as though it were the dial to a bank-vault safe. “There’s more than one party possible at a time. Why should we let these folks-or whatever they are-have all the fun?” He nodded to indicate the gel and its interspersed contents. “World enough and time, sweetheart. Why miss the opportunity?”
“Thanks for the offer.” November could feel her hands beginning to either sweat or bleed. “But I’ve got business to take care of.”
“Bullshit.” The cameraman’s expression darkened, as though he were coming down from some minor chemical rush. Scowling, he picked up a handheld videocam from the platform by his feet; he held it to his eye, pointing the glassy lens toward November. The image of her face, in real time, showed up on the monitor mounted on top of the boom’s bigger camera. “You see?” He lowered the camera from his face, still keeping her in focus with it. He pointed his thumb toward the monitor screen. “You look like somebody who could use a little relaxation. You’re all tense.”
“That’s how I like it.” November had managed to grab hold of some kind of cable socket on the side of the boom platform, giving one hand, at least, a secure purchase. “Now stop connecting around and put me down.”
“All right, bitch.” With one hand, he spun the chrome wheel hard, jerking the boom into a quick horizontal arc. “Your loss.”
November clung to the edge of the boom until it slammed to a stop, harder than necessary. For a dizzying fraction of a second, she had an unnerving perception of the slow ocean below, blurred in her gaze, but with the things-or thing-inside it undoubtedly gazing up at her with inarticulate lust. The boom deposited her on the other end of the catwalk, closer to the ruins of the End Zone Hotel; the narrow pathway bowed toward the gel when she let go of the platform and dropped the few inches down. “Thanks.”
“Whatever.” The cameraman appeared seriously disgruntled; pushing a small black-knobbed lever in front of himself, he angled the boom away, without looking back at her. As though picking up on his disappointment, or expressing its own, the slow ocean roiled beneath the catwalk, its internal temperature taken up a notch from its previous simmer.
The lobby of the burnt hotel was flooded now, the gel extending past the former check-in counter with its steel grille-the open register book floated under the surface membrane like a preserved butterfly-and all the way to the wet stairs at the back. Standing on tiptoe on the swaying catwalk, November managed to reach the sill of one of the second story’s windows. She jumped and scrambled her way in, the front of her jacket scraping across the cindery wood, and landed sprawling in ashes.
“Here you go, pal. You asked for it; you got it.”
The ultimate barfly stepped back, pushing the hotel room door farther open behind herself. She smiled and made a sweeping gesture, half inviting bow and half magician’s display, toward the room’s contents.