I’ve often thought about the old man, about how chance words can touch people’s lives in ways that are impossible to predict. Bend the world, he said, don’t accept having less than you want and blow a hole in anything that blocks your way. Armed with that notion, many people could have gone on to carve themselves a life that culminated in something approaching peace. It was good advice, and well meant.
I was just the wrong person to give it to.
At two a.m. I was back on 8, stumbling toward Howie’s place. Sitting in a bar on 30 I’d suddenly remembered Mal’s body, remembered it in the form of a line of small maggotlike creatures marching along the bar toward me and holding up little signs, “MAL’S DEAD,” said one; “PROBABLY PRETTY GROSS BY NOW” read another. When I looked more closely I saw that the maggots were in fact spares, limping and crawling with whatever limbs they had left. David was there, and Nanune. Whoever originally synthesized Rapt must have had some sense of humor. I’d only taken a moderate dose, not sure after five years how much I could stand. The news was I could have stood a lot more. I’d lost a couple of hours, but that was all. I was melted and seeing things, but I knew where I was; a particularly ill-favored bar on a dangerous floor, my shirt wet with whiskey that hadn’t made it as far as my mouth, my head burning, and a naked and dying fifteen-year-old shaking her wasted body at me from the top of the next table. I was the only person near her, and I hadn’t even noticed she was there. Everyone else in the bar appeared to be fucked up on Oprah, babbling about their lives to anyone who would listen, too wound up in themselves to tell whether it was day or night.
I didn’t want to be here anymore. I was falling too fast, and I wasn’t Rapt enough not to care.
I settled my tab with the barman, who was uglier than three types of shit in a one-shit bag. Another sixty dollars gone. Tilting my way out into the avenue, I burnt my finger lighting a cigarette from a nearly empty packet which I assumed was mine, and stared baffled at the moving shapes in front of me. Most of them resolved enough to reveal themselves as unimportant, and I made my way as best I could toward a men’s room. Inside, I dabbed at the stains on my clothes, rinsed my mouth out, and stared at myself in the mirror. The Rapt was beginning to fade, and the fog of sound had thinned to a haze. I decided I could cope and laughed hollowly at myself. Calmly appraising how fucked up I was took me back far more than walking into a police station would ever have done.
I took a local elevator down to 8 and walked unsteadily down the main street, buffeted by straight people. My mind was poised too precisely between caring and not caring to make any headway toward deciding what to do about anything at all. One of the things Rapt does is take you to a place between all options, where everything and nothing matters and you can just hide away. Once you’ve been there, snug and dead, you never want to leave. I passed a young couple standing on a corner, arms entwined and lips smacking against each other. The sound made little yellow sparks amidst the general background hum of mustard brown. Either I could hear a conversation which was taking place about a mile away, or my mind was making it up and muttering darkly to itself. It wasn’t a very interesting conversation, which figured. I was also slightly frightened of something unspecific, but that was okay. I don’t mind a little fear; it’s an old friend.
I was a couple of turns from Howie’s when I suddenly found myself crouching down by the side of a building with no memory of having done so. I looked up and saw passersby staring down at me, mildly amused. I let out a heavy, shaky breath, and realized that my hand was inside my jacket and gripping my gun. Maybe this should have reassured me, told me something about reflexes which were still miraculously intact. St didn’t. It-made me feel very bad indeed. For a while the street ceased to exist around me and I slid unthinkingly down the wall, heart beating hard and sweat appearing from nowhere on my forehead and neck. The foliage on the ceiling appeared to shift as one and a sky blackened above it, hot at the edges with liquid orange flames. I heard sounds, distant cries and a siren, and it took me a long moment to realize the sounds were coming from inside my head. Then I realized I was repeating a sentence to myself; something about wall-diving, and a mountain.
I stood up shakily, deciding that the Rapt maybe hadn’t been so weak after all, and lurched round the corner in search of some beer to calm it down. I noticed that I was hungry, and realized I hadn’t eaten in two days. I beguiled the rest of the walk by imagining seventeen different ways of having a cheeseburger, given three sets of variables: the condiments, the relative amounts of lettuce and pickle and tomato and onions, and the number of patties, up to a maximum of three. By the time I got to Howie’s, I had every intention of ordering them all at once.
Howie was standing at the bar, benignly watching the crowds and listening to the band in the corner. For once I’d arrived when the bar was full. It seemed to take me a long time to get to the bar through the hot mass of people being noisy, and I watched Howie all the way. He had a large piece of cheese and a jar of peperoncino rings in front of him, and he was slicing slivers off the former to create something to ladle spoonfuls of the latter onto. Each time he completed this maneuver he popped the result into his mouth and then immediately started again. He was doing this quickly and efficiently, as if under match conditions, and it was doing my head in.
He looked me up and down when I reached the bar. “Bought that truck yet?”
“No,” I said patiently, and waved at the barman for a beer.
“Thought not,” Howie said, through a mouthful of cheese. “And you can stop avoiding my eyes—I clocked your pupils as soon as you walked in. Welcome back, jack. You need some more?”
“No,” I said. I was beginning to like the word. No seemed to fulfill all my current needs. I was about to take a sip of beer when suddenly my mouth dropped open. “What are you doing here?”
I was talking to a woman whom I now saw was sitting a little farther along the bar, behind Howie. Apart from her dress being red rather than blue, she was dressed exactly as I’d last seen her. It was the woman I’d run into in the women’s restroom the first time I entered New Richmond. Helping me to recognize her was the fact she was engaged in exactly the same activity now as then. She was busy cutting a line on a mirror, so Howie answered for her.
“This is Nearly,” he said. “An employee of mine.”
I didn’t ask in what capacity. I remembered my conclusion from last time. The woman looked up and winked at me, and the faint glimmer in the back of her right eye proved me right. It also reminded me how attractive I’d thought her, and that I’d been right about that, too.
“Hi,” I said, and Howie laughed.
“Jack’s not one of the most sparkling conversationalists of our time,” he said, shaking his head, and then took something out of his pocket and slapped it on the bar. “Or one of my most reliable suppliers.”