“No,” I said to Howie. “But thank you.”
Howie shrugged, drained the rest of his beer.
“Good haircut, by the way,” I said.
Howie ran his hand ruefully through his hair, which was spiking considerably more than usual. He looked like he had a blond hedgehog sitting on his head. “The fuck it is,” he said. “But I’ve got a detailed and well-thought-out plan.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to firebomb the fuckers. That’ll teach them that when I say ‘just a trim’ I mean it.” He explained his theory that hairdressers sprayed some chemical on your head that made your hair look longer than it really was. When they asked you if they’d taken enough off, you always looked in the mirror and said no, take a little more. Then the moment you left the shop, all your hair shrunk back to its normal length again, making you look as if you’d been designed for cleaning round the U-bend of a toilet. You couldn’t blame the hairdressers, because you’d told them to take more off, and they’d achieved their real aim of making every man look a complete fucking idiot. It was a good theory, and I applauded him for it.
Howie stuck around for a little longer but in the end headed back to the bar in search of peperoncinos. I sat in the glow from the lamp and cleaned my gun for a long time. It didn’t really need it, but it seemed like the thing to do. Then I got a couple more cheeseburgers sent through and munched on them instead.
Later, I heard a knock on the door behind me and turned to see Nearly standing there with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
“I’m not going to try to talk you out of it,” she said. “I just thought I’d make sure you went off to certain death with a hangover.”
“You look nice,” I said. She did. She was wearing a long dress, and when I ran my eyes over the pattern I realized it had to have come from the same store where Suej’s first and only piece of clothing had been bought. I started to say something, but she interrupted me, the words coming out in a rush.
“Actually, I lied. I am going to try to talk you out of it, and this is how I’m going to start. Jack, don’t do it.”
“Sit down, Nearly,” I said. She came and perched on Howie’s chair, placing the wineglasses in front of her on the table. She left the bottle there for a moment, and when she saw that I wasn’t going to open it, reached forward to do it herself. She tossed the cork away and poured two glasses, filling them right to the top. Then she lit a cigarette, sat back in her chair, and looked at me.
“So?” she said, after a silence. “What are you going to tell me? That Maxen deserves to die, and that you’re the man with the God-given task of making sure he does?”
“There’s no point in us having this conversation, Nearly.”
“There isn’t if you’re just going to sit there and patronize me. I can get that from clients.”
“So why aren’t you working tonight?”
“Because I don’t fucking feel like it, okay? You’re not big on explaining your motivations. I don’t have to tell you jack shit.”
I sighed. “It’s late, Nearly.”
“Drink some wine, dickweed,” she said, and her eyes flashed dangerously. I was actually a little frightened of her. Having her in the room, in this mood, was like being corralled with an interesting but imperfectly trained wild creature.
“I don’t want any,” I said.
“Drink it,” she said sweetly and with utter seriousness, “or you’re not even going to make it through to tomorrow morning.”
I’d finished my beer. It was simpler than walking to the fridge to get another one. I picked up the glass and drank a mouthful of wine.
Nearly winked at me humorlessly. “Great,” she said. “The training session’s going well. It’s almost like you understand every word I say. How long before I convince you that trying to kill Maxen is a stupid thing to do?”
“You don’t understand.”
“So explain it to me,” she said, and now her face was different again. Open, vulnerable: the face of someone who was genuinely trying to see into my mind.
“I should have done it a long time ago,” I told her. “It’s either that or keep running forever.”
“Bullshit!” she screamed, catching me unaware again. The hubbub from the bar in the background seemed to dip for a moment, as if her voice had carried all the way out there.
I shrugged. “That’s the way it is.”
“So explain it to me properly,” she said. I looked away irritably. “So explain it to me,” she repeated, implacably, and then a final time at wall-shaking volume. “SO JUST FUCKING EXPLAIN IT TO ME.”
I found I was talking then, without meaning to.
“The brain’s a mistake,” I said, and she snorted derisively. “It’s an evolutionary disaster. The mutations bit off more than they could chew. Yeah, we can oppose our thumbs and make marks on paper, but along with that came gaps and interstices, horror pits and buried emotions, concentration camps, Hitlers, and men like the Maxens. They’re created by the fact that the real world and The Gap just never got along.”
“Jack, I think too many slices of processed cheese have addled what’s left of your brain. You’re going to have to unpack that for me or I could go away thinking it’s just meaningless bullshit.”
I wasn’t even talking to her by then, I don’t think. I was talking to myself, or perhaps to Henna.
“The genes with their random quirks created the human brain like a child building a MegaMall from a kit. It looks like a plane, it sounds like a plane, but don’t for fuck’s sake try and fly in it. In the wings and the engine, in the hold and the seats, there are parts which don’t quite fit together. Screws which weren’t tightened enough. Things fall through the gaps and don’t quite go where they should. Doors swing shut in the wind and suddenly you find yourself not recognizing anything you feel, running on collapsing code, and not remembering what it meant.
“We live in huge hotels, full of hundreds of shifting rooms. Our emotions are the tenants—some fleeting, short-term, others long-term residents. Some treat the house well, some don’t; some lock the doors and windows after them, others leave them open. A good tenant will leave the key under the mat when he leaves, so that new people can come in every now and then. But sometimes something will happen that seals the doors shut, leaving you with whatever happens to be inside.
“I’ve had a long run of bad tenants, the kind who spill stuff over the walls and put cigarette burns in the carpet and leave the windows open for the wolves to come in. Sometimes they go, without paying their rent or cleaning the kitchen; leaving the mess for the next bunch of barbarians to build upon. Sometimes they stay, glowering in corners, refusing to forward people’s mail and fighting spring-cleaning to the death.
“I’d like to believe there’s some good tenants in there too, but they’ve been forced up into the attic, hiding in crawl spaces and never coming out. I never get to see them because there’s too many thugs at the front door who won’t let me in.
“I’ve never been a very strong landlord, and I felt it was finally time to collect some rent. I needed to evict some of these guys, to have my life returned to me. Finally closing the book on Arlond Maxen seemed like the only way of getting the house keys back.”
I stopped talking then. There didn’t seem to be any more I wanted to say. Nearly stared at me, her eyes wide open.
“Uh-huh,” she said, eventually, slowly nodding her head. “I suppose that was kind of interesting. Verging on the content-free, but interesting. I guess you had some slow evenings back there on the Farm.”