I can't remember what it feels like to have a body.
Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks-
… with visual marks…
Manny was leaning forward to take it when Gina's face burst on him like a thunderstorm.
"Can't remember? Well, lover, it's a lot like this."
His face exploded with pain. The secondary hit of his body on the carpet was negligible, but he felt it clearly this time, his lower back hitting first, then shoulders and head, his heels bouncing a few times. From behind closed eyes he felt his mouth stretching in a smile.
"Jesus," said Keely. He knelt down to touch the left side of Gabe's face.
"What happened?" Sam clutched the unit on her thigh, her other hand resting on the wire leading to the needles in her stomach. "What's doing that, why is that happening? Keely, I can't read the fucking screen the way you can, goddammit!" One little yank; if that was what it would take to save her father's life, she would do it and hope it wasn't already too late, if that weird swelling in his face didn't mean he'd stroked out-
Keely was at the monitor again, scrolling the output backwards, forwards, and backwards again. Then he looked over the top of the monitor at Jasm, who was squatting next to Gina. "Jazz, look at her hands. Are her knuckles bruised?"
Jasm checked and then held up Gina's limp right arm. "You got it. Bruised and skinned a little." She glanced at Gabe and then did a double take. "Keely, something else." She leaned over Gina and pulled Gabe's shirt up. "You want to guess at what that is?"
Keely stared in silence at the sinuous lines and shapes pressed into Gabe's flesh. Then he blew out a long breath and shook his head.
"Keely, I'm gonna tear your fucking head off," Sam said tearfully. Fez put his arms around her, and she twisted away, keeping one hand on the wire leading to the needles.
"It's all right," Keely told her, laughing a little. "It's just the best case of stigmata I've ever seen. Actually, it's the only one I've ever seen with my own eyes, so let's say it's the best one I know about."
"Shit," said Gator, "they must be seriously hysterical in there."
"Wouldn't you be?" Keely said. He smiled at Sam. "Gina just belted your father a good one."
"Whack to that," said Percy, standing over Gabe and rubbing his own face. "Whack on sight when you been to the same party."
"What about those marks on him, what are those?" she demanded.
"From his hotsuit, of course," Keely said matter-of-factly. "You've worn hotsuits a time or two, you ought to recognize the marks they leave. Your father just discovered his whole body's a hotsuit, at least as far as his mind's concerned."
Sam stared at her father, not quite believing. The marks on his skin were fresh and deep, his swelling cheek looked painful, and the expression on his face said the best dream of his life had just gotten even better.
I feel pain.
That's sober as I remember it.
"Anybody can take shelter," Marly said. "Can you take on someone else's pain?"
"You're gonna have to try, at least," Caritha said, before Gabe could answer.
He was in somebody's living room, somebody's enormous, endless living room, currently filled with a glittery array of people eating, drinking, wandering in and out, watching the multiple screens on the walls, giving the thing in the center of the room a wide, courteous berth.
Gabe blinked at it. He remembered a creature eight feet tall, part ersatz samurai and part machine-fantasy, but this thing was so much more overdone that he was having trouble keeping it in focus. He thought he could catch glimpses of Marly at certain angles, Caritha at others; sometimes when it turned a particular way, he was sure it was Gina he saw within it, other times Mark, or Markt, and occasionally even himself.
Then it was a pillar of fire, and he remembered how he had ducked, expecting it to become a laser beam in the next moment. He got up and went over to the wall of screens.
Instead of the tech-fantasy porn clip, he was watching Gina. She was lying on a cot with wires in her head; behind her closed lids her eyes moved back and forth.
Gina-porn?
"That's a good way to put it," said a familiar voice. "If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it, be it, or throw it away. Lucky her. Not only can she dance, but she can be it, too. And so can you."
Abruptly the scene switched to Mark's bedroom, and he saw himself and Gina together. He looked away quickly only to find he was turning to the wall of screens again, all of them showing the scene in Mark's bedroom now. He put his back to them and there they were in front of him, above him, below him, on all sides, at every angle.
"It's no more of a prison than you were ever in," Mark's easy voice said soothingly. "After all, that's entertainment. Isn't it? One person's pain being another's entertainment. One person's grand love affair being another person's porn. That's all it ever meant to anyone. 'Don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters'-other than that, nobody cares. It doesn't make a difference to anyone. A drop in the consumer bucket, to be drunk up, digested, excreted, and fed back into the food-fuck-and-dance chain. Food-fuck-dance-and-be chain, excuse me, whether it's you and Gina, or you and your virtual playmates, you and your wife, you and Sam, or just you and your carefully cultivated, fully formed pain."
The screens were splitting, multiplying, now displaying a myriad of pictures from both himself and Gina, each one different. His vision rebelled, unable to see them all at once, and they melted into a blur that ran and faded to a bleak grey color.
– -
Ow.
She turned in a rush, looking for Markt. For all she could sense of him, or them, or whatever the fuck, Markt might have vacated as soon as she and Ludovic had gone through the window. "Enjoying the show?" she called angrily. "You get off on fucking with me like this?"
Laughter in the dark, flowing like music. Then Mark was pulling her onto the narrow bed in the room in Mexico. She hadn't been sure at first what he'd been doing, or even if he'd been sure, she remembered that, just as she remembered clutching his jumpsuit in both hands and tearing it away from him, driven by an urgency she hadn't wanted to identify at the time. Reveling in that intense familiarity and letting it cover over thought of anything and everything else, especially the feeling that this would be the last she could have from him in this way, that he was going down the rabbit hole in his brain finally and for good.
Feeling? Shit, he'd told her, right out… you're gonna see this funny-looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console…
So what was she doing here, with the feel of cloth and flesh so vivid?
"Because you can have anything you want, just by thinking of it. Make it over into what you wanted it to be, instead of the disappointment it turned out to be," Mark whispered. She felt his breath on her neck and strained toward him in reaction, pulling an arm out of her own jumpsuit. "Because the brain feels no pain."
The sensation running down her side with his hand definitely wasn't pain, she thought, letting herself open to it as it intensified; not pain, nothing like it.
"Pain is curable," Mark whispered to her. "It's the most curable thing of all, really, and it's the thing we all walk around feeling all the time when we don't have to. There doesn't have to be pain. Just us. No pain. Just us… us…"
Is there really such a thing as a second chance? "It's not a second chance, Gina. It's a new one. And in spite of all that's happened-maybe even because of it-you want that. Do it any way you want to. Pain, your pain, my pain, it was all noise, and I've cleared it away for us."