Budayeen Nights: Stories

gate but we were not allowed in, although my news service had confirmed our appointment for that morning. Honey had changed her mind.

“Fifteen years later I was working for Visions/Rumelia, and once again I stood by the high, gilded gate. ‘What secrets does this young beauty know,’ I said on that occasion, ‘that maintain her position as the world’s premier moddy star?’ My story didn’t go on to reveal any actual secrets, of course. Honey Pilar never tells her secrets. But she did make a rare personal appearance and answered some mild questions about her favorite foods and her thoughts on the world situation. She was tanned and smiling and, well, perfect. A week before that interview, a poll had announced that sixty-eight percent of the seven billion people on earth could identify her face. Eighteen percent could identify her naked, unaugmented breasts.

“Today, Rio Home Data has asked me to begin this series it calls Honey Pilar: A Quarter Century of Fascination. Never in the history of the personality module industry has one performer so dominated the charts. Since her now-classic first moddy, A Life in Lace, she has turned out thirty- eight full-length recordings and nine of the ‘quickies’ that ABT experimented with and then abandoned. Her total sales top one hundred and twenty million units, and every one of her recordings remains in print. As of last week, she has eight titles on the Brainwaves Hot 100 Chart, with two in the Top Ten.

“The question always arises, what has this remarkable success cost the young woman who became Honey Pilar? A Life in Lace was recorded when she was only fourteen years old. Has her career been at the expense of her happiness? She’s been married four times, and she lives a private, almost reclusive existence. She rarely grants interviews, and in keeping with that, she refused to appear with us on Rio Home Data. Her legions of fans want to know: Just what kind of woman invites the whole world to listen in on her private sexual experiences? Is Honey Pilar providing surrogate passion to millions of people dissatisfied with their own love lives, or is she merely pandering to an emerging taste for high-tech titillation? We can only speculate, of course, but next time, in a highly personal way, I’ll tell you how this reporter sees it.”

Kit and Honey are having dinner in a small, dimly lighted cafe near the ocean. There is a tall white taper burning on their table and, shining through their wineglasses, it is casting soft burgundy shimmers on the linen tablecloth. Across the narrow room there is a stage made of scuffed green tiles. Lively North African music, distorted and shrill, is playing too loudly through invisible speakers; hovering just an inch or two above the stage is the holographic figure of a demure-eyed, big-hipped belly dancer. There are streaks and scratches on the woman’s face and body, as if this recording has been played many times over many years.

Honey Pilar sips some of the wine and makes a little grimace. “How are you thinking?” she asks in a soft voice.

“It was all right,” says Kit. He looks down at his broiled fish. “What do you want me to say? It’s always all right. It’ll sell a million; you outdid yourself. Your climaxes made the dials go crazy. Okay?”

“I never know you telling me truth.” She frowns at him, then picks up a delicate forkful of couscous and eats it thoughtfully.

Kit tears a chunk of the flat bread and puts it in his mouth, then takes a gulp of wine. Communion, he thinks, I’m absolved. Time for new sins. “You don’t believe me when I tell you it was all right? You don’t take my word for it? If you didn’t believe me a minute ago, what can I say or do that will make you believe me now?”

Honey looks hurt. She puts her fork down carefully beside her plate. Kit wishes the shrieking Arab music would die away forever. The cafe smells of cinnamon, as if teams of bakers have been making sweet rolls all day long and then hidden them away, because nothing on their plates or on the menu contains the least hint of cinnamon. Kit knows that Honey wants desperately to go back to the house in Provence. She’s not comfortable in strange places.

Kit finishes his glass of wine. He reaches for the bottle, tops up Honey’s glass, then fills his own. He takes out a beige pill case from his shirt pocket, finds four yellow Paxium, and drinks them down with a Chateau L’Angelus that deserves better. “What next?” he says.

“What next now?” asks Honey. “What next tonight, what next tomorrow, or what next we make another moddy?”

Kit squeezes his eyes shut and lets his head fall back. He opens his eyes and sees black beams made of structural plastic crossing the space overhead. He wishes that something, anything, with Honey Pilar could be simple, even dinner, even conversation. So she’s the most desirable woman in the world, he thinks. So she makes more money in one year than the CEOs of any ten major corporations you’d care to name. So what. His private opinion is that she has the intelligence of three sticks and a stone. He lowers his gaze and forces himself to smile back at her. “What do you want to do, sweetheart? Stay here, go back home, take a trip? You’ve earned a vacation, baby. We’ve got your next blockbuster in the can. The world is at your feet. You name it, chiquita. Someplace exotic. Someplace you’ve always wanted to go.”

He knows, as well as he knows anything in the world, exactly what she will say next.

She says it. “I rather only go home.”

“Home,” he repeats quietly. He finishes the wine in one long swallow, and signals the waiter.

“Kit,” she says, “I was in happy mood. You always do that. You always make me feel I choose wrong.”

I was in a happy mood, thinks Kit. Then I woke up, and we were married. But don’t let me kid you, sweetie. It’s been great.

“It is very early in the morning, and the haggard winter sun is rising over the red-tiled roofs of Santa Coloma. Wrapped in scarves, packaged in parkas, slapping their mittened hands together to fend off frostbite, Fawn and Dawn huddle against the fogged plate-glass window of the Instant Memories Modshop on Bridger Parkway. Fawn and Dawn are standing in a long line of people waiting for the manager to open the store. They’ve been waiting all night in the cold and wind and sleet, because today’s the day Honey Pilar’s new moddy, Slow, Slow Burn, goes on sale. Fawn and Dawn want to be the first in their neighborhood to own the new Honey Pilar. They want to get it as soon as the shop opens, and take it to school with them. Fawn and Dawn are in the ninth grade; these days in Santa Coloma, ninth graders all have their skulls amped, except for the trolls and feebs.

My God,’ mutters Fawn, shivering, ‘I haven’t felt my toes since midnight’

“‘I haven’t felt my lips,’ says Dawn. ‘Or my nose, or my ears, or my fingers.’

But if we leave now, I’m going to feel like a total fool.’

“‘We can’t leave now. These jerk-offs behind us will get our place.’

“Fawn makes a face. ‘If only the wind would stop blowing.’

“‘Oh, sure, the wind. If only the wind stopped blowing, it would still be, like, ten degrees below zero or something.’

“Fawn rubs her cheeks. ‘Hey!’ she cries. She points through the display window. ‘Here he comes!’

“‘Let us in now,’ Dawn prays to the store manager, ‘and you can have me right on top of the cash register.’

“The manager is, in fact, opening the front door. He’s smiling in anticipation; the store is going to make a fortune today. Slow, Slow Burn is stacked up four feet high in the front window, piled up beside every register, and loaded into cardboard dumps scattered all around the selling floor. You can’t turn around inside the store without staring into the liquid green eyes of Honey herself. Her holographic likeness is more than just inviting; if the mythical sirens had looked like Honey Pilar, they wouldn’t have needed to sing.

“When the door opens, of course, what disappears is any respect for the length of time Fawn and Dawn have been waiting in the freezing night air. They are pushed aside by the jerk-offs behind them, and by the jerk-offs behind them. Fawn and Dawn are cast aside by the charging throng of people. They announce that this is truly unfair and rude, that they’d stood in line longer, that they are going to complain, but no one listens. The flood of bakebrains shoves the two girls this way and that, until they are afraid of being trampled. At last, however, first Fawn and then Dawn are pitched up like driftwood at the front cash register, each with credit card in one hand, moddy in the other.

Wow,’ says Fawn, as she clutches her package and fights her way out of the shop.

“On the street again, with the air so cold it shocks nose and throat, the two girls wait for the bus to take them to school. ‘Are you and Adam going to use it tonight?’ asks Dawn.

“Fawn’s eyes open wider and she smiles. She taps the crown of her head, the corymbic plug invisible now beneath her hair. I’ve got it all down on this moddy,’ she says, her smile becoming sly. ‘Who needs him anymore?’