Noir

after another and into this one with the high-luxury window overlooking the anonymous city below. The mingled overlays of sweat and semen, stale cigarette smoke and endorphins breaking down to burning, dysfunctional molecules, the shards of the other’s flight through a sunless sky. Collagen derivatives, pharmaceuticals that tasted like metal and the perspiring of schizophrenics, virginal lipstick and Chernobyl mothers’ milk, original sin and its photocopies-a wind from that other atmosphere, ten degrees lower than his own body temperature, had swept ahead of the other as it had strode toward him.

He had turned from the window where he had stood waiting, turned upon the sense and smell of its arrival-no sound, it walked so softly, silent as that other world-and had seen the smear of blood on its brow, Cain-marked and Lilith-born, the great wisdom of indulgence in its idiot eyes. Which had scanned and judged him, like the lenses of the watching security cameras at every corner of every building. First from across the room, as he had felt the first tremors of fear move out from his gut, then inches away, then less than that as it had stood right in front of him. The other’s eyes had been round dark mirrors in which he had seen himself, perhaps more clearly than ever before.

That was then, just a few minutes ago-or perhaps only seconds. In any death, even the smallest, there was no east or west or other measurement of time, no gauge of stars or the earth’s rotation. In this now, the inrush had slowed and become subject to inventory; he could sort one thing out from the next. What the other had brought back to him. The Christmas morning of the genitals, each bright ribbon-bow coming loose inside his head.

This is what he received from the other’s kiss. What he saw, felt, inhaled in acidic, mingled pheromones:

• A vision of black-ink tattoos that slowly woke and shifted beneath a woman’s skin, pale as unsunned cave fish, white as Bible pages, dimly phosphorescent;

• The swarming of those tattoos, like decorative koi or human-eyed piranha, attracted by the shadow of a man’s hand over the world in which they swam;

• Their nuzzling beneath the palm laid on the woman’s skin, their kisses’ delineated teeth, the tingle of each electric micro-surge, the release of musky encapsuled opiates, the blood warmth of a close-enough approximation of real human flesh;

• All of these and more. The pumped-up techly stuff and the straight old-fashioned, the redheaded idiot in the cave of wonders, the soft wet hand of normal coitus. Normal as it gets.

Thought Travelt: I’ll have to work on this. Now he knew why people started doing this sort of thing. What the attraction was.

Metal fingertips, disconnected from anything but rising tendrils of SCARF smoke, clicked against the window. And fell, pieces of the Noh-eaten drone. The larger pieces, of engine manifold and wing panels, would plummet next, fiery meteors sweeping the streets clean of any watchers.

He was falling as well, the connection between his tongue and the other’s mouth broken, that blue spark snuffed by his pink-tinged saliva. His jaws felt hot and vacant as the other, working off some consumer-protection coding, lowered him gently to the fleece carpet.

Shame, or something like it, turned his face away from the other’s gaze above. He couldn’t bear to be seen, even by something empty and soulless as the autonomic truck that came every morning to change the building’s air hoses. Especially by something as empty as that, as empty as the other standing over him. Judged by machines, by their hard flat scrutiny, the iris of an onrushing train. Iris and inrush; the two words remained inside his head, like prophylactic debris washed up, pearlescent and luminous, on a moonlit beach. Maybe that was how women felt as well; he didn’t know. No way he would. He put his arm up across his face, as though shielding himself from the sun.

The name of the flower had left its image, an intricately petaled construction, in his memory. Maybe one of the tattoos that the other had brought back to show him; he could almost see it opening in the white field of the woman’s skin. Opening the way flesh opened, the dew at the petal’s edge a perfect magnifying lens.

I’m making that part up. That part didn’t happen, thought Travelt. Or maybe it had; he didn’t know.

The other watched him, waited for him, for whatever he might choose to do next. The other was in that part of its operative cycle; it had gone and fetched, it had brought back, and now it waited. With the flat empty gaze of coins, of metal that had been on fire and then extinguished, smoldering to cold lead. He might stand back up on his trembling, bone-loosened legs, stand up and kiss the other again, insert part of himself into the other again, let the blue spark snap and sing piercingly high, into his throat and down along his spine, penetrated by the other and what it had brought him. The iris, the eye and the flower, each opening, flesh opening, the mouths of the tattooed koi nibbling at the other’s palm, the warmth of the dead-white flesh and skin, the ocean in which they swam…

It was all there. Waiting for him. Watching him.

I’ll get better at this. The first time, for anything, was the hardest. He turned on his side, drawing his knees up against his chest. Closing his eyes, so he wouldn’t have to see. Anything but what the other had brought home and bestowed upon him.

On his tear-wet cheek, he felt fire, heat through the window’s glass. The last of the drone plane fell from the sky and rolled its black smoke and insect swarm of sparks along the building’s flank.

TWO

BITS OF DEAD AIRPLANES

You people shouldn’t have called me.” McNihil stepped over pieces of blackened metal. The shapes littering the sidewalk were the size of dental fillings, with the same odd combinations of rounded curves and ridges. They might have fallen from junkies’ rotting teeth, but he knew they hadn’t. “I don’t do this kind of work anymore.”

The DZ flunky trotted alongside him. The man took the exact same steps as McNihil, at the exact same speed, but looked as if he were running to keep up. If he’d had the end of his own leash clamped in his jaws, it would’ve been perfect. “What kind of work do you do?”

McNihil was aware the question came from no need, no desire other than to make talk, to fulfill the rep’s junior-exec schmooze training. He’d run into the type before.

“I don’t,” he said, “clean up other people’s messes.”

The metal bits of dead airplanes crunched under the soles of his shoes. Mess was, categorically, one of the basic components of this universe he lived in, like hydrogen atoms. Gray newspapers with significant headlines- Dewey Defeats Truman; Pearl Harbor Bombed-moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil’s jacket.

“Careful,” warned the flunky, but it was already too late. A piece of hard reality poked through the merely optical; McNihil hit his knee on some larger contortion of metal, which hadn’t yet been filtered into his black-and- white vision.

“Thanks.” McNihil gritted his teeth, as the pain ebbed and condensed into a drop of blood trickling down his shin. Now he could see what had done it, a sharp-edged fragment of a wing panel, its glistening alloy crumpled like a soft mirror. It stuck out into his path all the way from where the downed jet had dug a trench through the strata of trash, plowing back the asphalt and concrete below. The singed metal carcass, the biggest piece at least, lay in the street like a barbecued whale. The engine, some fairly recent Boeing-CATIC thrust device, showed the circled fins of its air-intake snout, the merge of Chinese design and American tech resulting in something delicate as that whale’s sifting baleen.

In less than a second, McNihil’s vision rolled an overlay across the broken aircraft, transforming it from the hard world into what he usually saw. A flash of color had reflected off the shiny metal; now that had drained away, down to monochrome. Not even a jet anymore, but a Curtiss P-40, camo-mottled in dark green and desert sand. The propeller blades had snapped where they’d scythed into the street’s asphalt. His eyes worked up the most appropriate images they could; the China suggestion must’ve evoked this Flying Tigers historical.

As McNihil continued walking, limping a bit, long-fingered dwarves, swaddled up in their homemade chernoberalls-lead-lined against the residual radiation-and their eyes goggled with aplanatic/achromatic dark-field jeweler’s loupes, crawled out of the littered wreckage’s tight spaces and skittered off to some nearby recycling souk. Leaving the jet’s bones behind for the janitors to sweep up, the janitors that