Her look is enough to shut me up. Even against the light it’s unmistakable.
“Don’t talk to me about language!” She’s the first woman I’ve met growls when she’s angry. “What do I care that this word and this color and this dress mark the boundaries of chauvinism? What comfort is that to the mother with a drunk for a husband? Or the rape victim or the dyke or the pensioner? Go tell your good news to every lacerated clit in Africa then look me in the eye and say this is worth the money!”
She slams her hand down on the table, lifts it, and there’s a tiny gold wafer winking up at me like the promise of El Dorado, from the marble tabletop.
I pick it up and weigh it gingerly in my hand. It’s a ROM wafer—a packet of hardwired information. It slips into the port between my shoulders—the same kind of port they fitted to Helene Ritenour.
It’s strange how Angèle can read me so well, even in anger. She leans over and strokes my hand with dark fingers. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I don’t, but it’s the only way I can thank her for tacitly forgiving me.
“It was bad,” I say. “I slid off the track sideways—the near side of the monocoque took the impact. The whole thing failed in tension at the rear bulkhead. The engine and avionics went one way, the rear wheels the other. The heat exchanger was torn off. The steering column broke. The monocoque got crushed on the front offside. All the underbelly ceramics sheared—”
“I didn’t mean the car.”
“So—” Something misfires inside me and the old anger is back. “Tabloids have back numbers.”
She starts back like I’d slapped her. “That wasn’t fair. I’m not a ghoul. I didn’t mean the accident, anyway. I meant the treatment. How you got better. What it did to you.” She rubs her face with her hands. “I want to know you. What am I to you? A friend or a whore?”
Maybe this playboy bullshit is rubbing off on me because I really don’t know. Sorry is the best answer I can come up with.
We sleep in the same bed but we don’t touch.
I want to tell her what she wants to know. I want to tell her about São Paulo, and what they did to me. And why.
I want to tell her it hurt like hell.
She’s asleep.
The Monaco Grand Prix is two days away.
Maureen Havers honestly believed she was doing me a favor. No one spends eight figures sterling on one man without some feeling behind it. She could have left me in a wheelchair. It wasn’t her fault I was in that state, after all—I was the one who crashed.
Instead she saved me, after a fashion.
But she had other ideas too. I remember how flushed she became when Dr. Antonioni showed her the jack in my spine. I swear she made eyes at it. As far as she was concerned then, I was just the meat it plugged into.
Did I resent that? Not at the time. I was still in shock from the accident. I still couldn’t quite get my head round the fact I could walk again—walk with a spine shot in five places.
Imagine you’re lying there with a hospital bed your only future. Then they plug ROM cartridges into your back. On them are programs which teach your brain how to access and control a whole new nervous system. You can walk again, even shit when you want to. It’s a miracle—and it takes a while to adjust.
Then, but too late for it to make a difference, it occurs to you—All that expensive tech, just to get you toilet trained again?
Of course not.
At least when the Programme paid for Helene they let her be her own boss—or so the popular science programs tell us. She uses an expert system, writing her prize-winning solo choreography direct to a ROM cartridge.
Me? I get fresh ROMs sent me every month from Achebi CyberPARC, where they analyze my race data. It helps me drive better. Only they went one stage further.
They built me a second jack, behind my arse. When I strap myself in, I hot-wire myself to the car. I don’t drive it; I become it.
This has its consequences.
My body is a corporate concern. It has no solid boundaries. In short, it is a whore.
One of Formula Zero’s damn few rules states: one car, one driver. Havers has got round that—they saved my spine and in return have turned me into a databus, a way of loading the aggregate wisdom of Achebi’s Research Institute into a racing car; a smart messenger with a spine full of—what? Software? Wetware?
I have a name for it: Slime.
The Casino is fashioned in flamboyant style with towers at the corners and, sitting on the roof, great bronze angels, picked out by floodlighting which extends into the Boulengrins.
Angèle and I walk among the cacti. She is scared. Maybe it’s the race. More likely it’s being undercover, working for terrorists. I wonder how much they’re paying her? She has no respect or liking for them. Her politics are much more homely. Maybe they agreed to fund some rape crisis centers.
“Do you think that wafer will kill you?”
“Maybe,” I reply. Is this part of her job—to frighten me? Test my nerve? She may be right. To cause the world’s best speed driver to die twirling in flames through the bijou houses of Monte Carlo-No. Accidents themselves have their own phallic semiology. No sport on Earth so quickly forgets its widows. Grand Prix’s finest take Death as their bride. Whisper their names in awe: Depailler, Villeneuve, Willy Mairesse.
I do not think the Programme will kill me. Perhaps I lack the cruelty to credit such deception. Perhaps, if I were a woman, I could be that cruel. Perhaps (I look at Angèle, the stoop of her shoulders, her tired eyes, the way she twitches her fingers through her hair)—perhaps I would have to be, to survive.
We return to the Hotel de Paris. We have a suite overlooking the Casino. Tomorrow Angèle will sit on our balcony; she will see the cars as they stream into the square and snake down the hill.
Perhaps she will think of me.
We watch Danseuses Nouvelles. There are only five dancers in the company, including Helene. If I didn’t know better, I would say there were at least twenty. This is the heart of Danseuses’ enduring novelty. The way they dance alters their appearance. They toy with the semiology of movement, with their audience’s stereotypic racial and social expectations. They move in a way we expect certain kinds of people to move, and they become those people. The eye is tricked by the conditioned expectations of the brain. The government is outraged by the Programme’s violent acts. But I suspect they fear this quiet revolution far more. They can handle terrorism: but seduction?
The credits spool and I undress. I sit cross-legged on the bed. Angèle pushes the wafer into my back.
In a while the headache clears. Two green circles appear, one above the other, center-vision. In an eyeblink they are gone. They are the first and last I will see of the Programme’s system. It will perform its acts regardless. I will have no opportunity to intervene.
“It’s all right now,” I say.
Angèle turns on the light. She looks at me and she is afraid.
Inside me, something flexes.
Formula Zero is a race for cars, not drivers. It is a vicious testing bed for crackpot ideas, the way Formula One used to be till the 1970s and the iron rule of Jean Marie Balestre.
Formula One’s rule book ceased to reflect technical progress around that time. Formula Zero was conceived in the nineties as a way round the rule book and into the twenty-first century.
Anyway, crashes are good for business.