illusion, it must be somebody else's, 'cause I wouldn't make up this shit.' There was a scraping on the concrete, a rustling of paper. Jonny thought Groucho might be moving boxes.
'That's just avoiding the issue,' said Groucho. 'It also sounds like am elaborate excuse for suicide. Do you want to die?'
'I don't know.' Jonny shrugged. 'Sometimes. Yeah.'
'It's hard,' said Groucho. 'We've become so numbed by the presence of death that we toy with it, use it like a drug, building it up in our minds as the great escape. The fallacy there, of course, is that death is an illusion, too.'
'You're a three ring circus, man,' said Jonny. 'But it's all just words. The Catholics got half the city under their thumbs with cheap lighting effects and stained glass, the Muslims tell the hashishin that dying for Allah is a ticket to heaven and Buddha says life is suffering, which means I shouldn't bring anybody down by pointing out that being blind, that this whole situation is completely fucked.'
'Don't you see, that's what illusion means? You're blind, you say? I say, there's no one seeing and nothing to be seen,' Groucho replied. 'How can you miss what never existed?'
'That is such bullshit.'
'Ice told me you had a roshi once, that you used to sit. What happened?' Groucho's voice was close again. He pressed something into Jonny's hands. 'Your boots. Sorry, somebody polished them. They're black, again.'
Jonny leaned over the edge of the bed and started to pull on his right boot. He said, 'Yeah, I used to sit. I was young and it was fashionable. Teeny-bopper Zen. Like lizard skin jackets or green eyes.'
'You don't seem the type for that game.'
'Sure I am.'
'No, you like to think you are, because it's easy and it fits in with an image you have of yourself, but, I think, you're not nearly the cynic or fool you like to play at.'
As Jonny pulled on his other boot, he said, 'That was you guys tipped the cops to Nimble Virtue's warehouse, right?'
Groucho sighed. 'Taking you from the cops was going to be a breeze. We never dreamed the idiots would call in the Committee,' Groucho said. 'Ice made the call, actually. She's safe, you know.'
Jonny smiled. Thanks.'
'Sumi, too.'
'Jesus,' he said, 'is she here?'
'Yes. She practically rigged all the lighting out here single-handed. She's running the juice through the transit authority's power grid.'
'That sounds like her,' said Jonny. 'Where is she? Take me to her.' He stood, but Groucho pushed him back on the bed.
'You stay here. She and Ice are on a scavenging party to some of the old oil platforms nearby. When they get back, I'll let them know you've come around.'
'Thanks, man,' Jonny said. He touched the neat rows of tiny plastic staples they had used to close the incisions in his face. Tight meridians of pain. He felt very tired.
'The confidences of mad men. I would spend my life in provoking them,' replied Groucho. 'Take this.' Jonny found a small cylinder of soft plastic pressed into his hand. 'Auto-injector,' said Groucho. 'It's an endorphin analog. If the pain gets too bad, just remove the top to expose the syringe, and hit a vein.'
When the anarchist left the room, Jonny popped the top of the injector with his thumb and pressed the needle into the crook of his left arm. A spring-loaded mechanism pumped home the drug.
Immediately, the pain was gone, replaced with a gentle disembodied warmth, as if his blood had been replaced with heated syrup. He lay down on the bed, feeling his muscles uncoil, and let the drug and the deeper darkness of sleep wash over him. He listened to the ocean and the dolphins, licked the salt from his lips, and hoped he would not dream.
Sleep did not stay long. The drug did its work well, holding the pain an arm's length away, but the analog left too much of his brain in working order. He was just aware enough to notice the ghosts as they floated high above his bed. Hot red and electric blue, moving fast, like falling rain or static on a video monitor. He swung at them open-handed, but missed. They were not there. They were inside.
Inside his head.
A trick of the surgery, he told himself. Random signals twitched from fried nerves, entering the visual center of his brain. Fireworks, he thought. Great timing. Thank you very-fucking-much.
When he fell asleep again, he dreamed of machinery, an underground refinery, like a buried city. Cooling towers and steam and choking clouds of synth-fuel fumes. He had run away from the state school again. Jonny, ten years old, fat and out of breath, ran on trembling legs and hid among the dull hills of cooling slag. A man came after him. He wore a cheap plastic poncho and carried a gun.
Silent as death, half his face was hidden behind a pair of mirror shades. When the man found him, all Jonny could do was raise his blistered hands to cover his ears. At the last moment, he saw his burned face reflected in the man's glasses. The refinery roared and spat smoke. He cried, hoping he would not be able to hear the shot.
'Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Hey Jonny, come on, move your ass. Somebody made little railroad tracks all over your sweet face.'
Startled, he awoke. He could still see the ghosts, but there were fewer of them now. His skull was full of cotton. 'Ice?' he said.
'Who else, doll?'
He sat up in bed, reached out and touched wet leather, cool and smelling of the ocean. 'Hiya, babe,' she said, and kissed him with salted lips. 'I got a present for you.' She guided his hand to the right, until it touched something. Graceful planes of skin and bone defining cheeks, below that, a strong jaw and mouth. Something happened in his chest, a jolt, like pain, that instead was pure pleasure. Later, he thought if he had eyes, he probably would have made a fool of himself by blubbering. 'Sumi,' he said.
'Can't put anything over on you,' she replied.
He held her, held on to her to keep from falling. If he let go, he knew the floor would open up and swallow him. But he felt Ice's arm join Sumi's across his back. They stayed that way for some time, huddled there together, Jonny's head on Sumi's shoulder. His drugged brain could hardly handle the input. It kept misfiring, triggering emotions and memories at random. Fear. Love. A melted circuit board. Desire. Mirror shades. A gun.
'Where the fuck have you been?' he asked, finally. They relaxed and moved apart on the bed, but remained touching.
'You know Vyctor Vector?'
'Sure,' he said. 'She's only el patron of the Naginata Sisters.'
'Well, I was setting up power out at her place; she's got this squat in an old police station in Echo Park. The Sisters are using it as their new club house. Built in security system, a gym, working phones, you know? Anyway, when I finished up there, I went back to home, but when I got there, the place was crawling with Committee boys. I thought one of them might have spotted me, so I high-tailed it through some movie crew downstairs, and back to Vyctor's. The Sisters were cool. They put me up for awhile, then got in touch with some smugglers they muscle for, who put me on to the Croakers. And here I am.'
'Here you are,' said Jonny. 'Christ, we probably missed you by maybe a couple of hours.' He shook his head. 'I thought you were dead.'
'And we thought you were dead,' said Ice. ''Course, before that Sumi thought I was dead, and I thought, oh shit-' She laughed. 'Let's face it, everybody wrote off everybody these last few weeks. But we made it. We foxed 'em.'
'We got lucky,' Jonny said.
'Maybe it's the same thing,' said Sumi.
'Maybe it doesn't fucking matter,' Ice said.
'I'm so out of touch,' said Jonny. 'What's it like on the street? The Committee's push still on?'
'Yeah. We thought with so many people sick, they'd forget about it and back off,' said Ice. 'No such luck. They're just pumping the boys full of amantadine and sending 'em out on search and destroys, using the virus as an excuse to come down on anyone's ever looked cross-eyed at the Committee.'
'That's why the Naginatas were moving,' said Sumi. 'Vyctor said the Committee closed the Iron Orchid, where
