Grey

Trashing, I tried to kick her and get her away from me and then I don’t know if my air ran out, or if I just didn’t have the strength to inhale. I got one hand to my face and yanked the air mask off so I could scream, but the thick goo filled my mouth and tasted sour and acidic like an uncoated aspirin. I began to gag and then instinctively inhaled and sucked in more of the cold lava.

I was dying. My chest was beginning to spasm. An adrenaline terror started in my heart and shot toward my hands. Flailing my arms and feet, I felt like I had milliseconds left.

Meanwhile, Joelene put one hand on my right shoulder, the other atop my head, and pushed me down. She was killing me! My body began to cry for air. I was frantic. My throat and lungs burned.

Below, my feet touched a distorted glowing yellow circle. She shoved me again. I squeezed through an opening and all around was blinding light. For a second, I was inside a blob, like a solid balloon. With a rubbery snap, the gunk tore itself from my throat and chest and all around, and dropped me onto a hard surface. I retched, and then sucked in air.

The warm, perfumed air smelled like fresh apples. I inhaled deeply, coughed, but could breathe. Then I sobbed a few times, because for a moment I had been sure I was I going to die.

Above, I heard wind and gently bubbling water and decided it was on a sound system. A couple of feet away, sat a glowing pink commode, and on a shelf was a vase of violet dahlias. This was a woman’s bathroom.

Above was a hole torn in the white ceiling

tiles.

Inside the open end of a three-foot-wide pipe was the shine of the gunk and a few distorted blue lights. A dark shape appeared in the liquid and then a foot encased in clear goo emerged. I rolled away as Joelene was first lowered in an elongated orb of gel. When it snapped away, she fell to the floor.

Pulling off her mask, she laughed as if relieved. “We made it.”

“I hate you!” I told her. “That was terrible! I couldn’t breathe.”

Scanning me up and down, as if afraid, she asked, “Are you all right?”

“No! You almost killed me.”

“Can you move?”

“Yes,” I said, sorry that I hadn’t broken my skull.

“Come,” she said, giving me a hand up. “We must hurry. Put your goggles on.”

“I’m not going back in!”

“No,” she said, “now it’s your disguise.”

I hesitated for a second, then pulled the mask over my face, but didn’t

breath

through the tube. We stepped from the bathroom into a long dark hallway. At the end of it was a twelve-foot-tall wooden door. Joelene pushed it open.

Then we were on the street in boiling hot air filled with meat smoke from street vendors, hundreds of intense perfumes, and a note of rotting trash. Hundreds of people passed in all directions—salarymen in cheap cherry, peach, and lavender suits, shoppers with bags and boxes, tourists in night swimwear and headpieces, partiers in sheer garb, and dating couples holding hands, kissing, or leaning against the walls feeling each other. I saw two Box 4 readers all in white with artificial tears dripping from metal tubes next to their eyes. I saw an Om Om girl in a brown suit with her lips cut open. Two Ball Description girls were dressed as cats in big pastel gowns.

A group of Ultra boys, in all manner of fur, kelp, high-heeled boots, and scraggly black wigs, skipped by.

And all up and down the street hung glaring speakers singing about rewoven fabrics, buttons, beads, lace, ric-rac, and other notions. Others promised recreational surgery, vegetable alcohols, and iambic psychodramas.

“’Is way,” said Joelene, enunciating her words like someone might while holding a cigar between their teeth. As we wove our way through the masses, we must have looked like two service men on their way to a biohazard and no one recognized me. A block down, we crossed the street, ducked into an alley, and soon came to the unmarked side entrance to the SunEcho.

Joelene said, “We only have a minute.”

I paid no attention as I started to unsnap the jumpsuit.

“No!” she said. “We’re back on the system. Don’t take if off.”

“I can’t see her in this!”

“You have to.”

I hated to have come this far only to look this bad. Grasping the metal bar, I yanked the door open and marched inside.

The SunEcho had been in existence as long as I had been alive. The story goes that not one customer came in for a decade. Then, one day, a tall, lean man entered. He wore a long, dark grey jacket and had his face covered with charcoal net. After he drank a cream coffee, he sat and scribbled in a notebook for several hours. He then paid and never returned. Exactly a year later, a new magazine, called Pure H, appeared on the newsstands. The magazine soon sold out as fashion devotees discovered the brilliant writing and imagery. And in that issue was a story about a disfigured but disguised man, who visited the SunEcho, worked in his notebooks and went on

to

publish a copy magazine. Since then, the waiting list for the SunEcho was more than six thousand days.

Although Nora and I didn’t need reservations, we were not going into the main sitting room.

As was the custom, when one suggested to meet at the SunEcho that meant the auxiliary room.

It was a square room thirty by thirty feet at the back of the shop. Why it was there, or what purpose it served wasn’t clear, except to the owner, one assumed. The walls were covered with

a warm

, double-warp wool broadcloth. Underfoot was a mosaic made of scrap metal from 100 Loop

accidents.

Besides the two doors, one leading out into an alley, and the other into the concierge’s area, the only other feature was a single small, straight-backed wooden chair that sat in the middle.

The room was packed and warm. As my eyes adjusted to the dim, I saw Nora two feet from me. She wore a long grey coat buttoned to the neck. Her hair looked darker, her nose flatter, and something was odd about her eyes. For an instant, I worried that her father had hurt her—beaten her or given her some terrible and disfiguring drug. A second later, I realized it wasn’t Nora.

The two women on either side of her resembled Nora, too. The one on the left had her eyes, but her lips were too thin. The other had her chin and neck, but her eyes were the wrong shade of mahogany. The three of them looked me up and down and sneered.

As my eyes continued to adjust to the dim, I saw that the room was filled with young women all Nora’s height, with dark hair, and olive complexions. Each was similar to her, but wrong.

My heart sank. Nora wasn’t here! She hadn’t come because she had hated the date. And she hated me. She didn’t want to see me after I had even pretended to flirt with that cat-bunny-beaver girl. And now instead of her, I was in a room filled with Pure H imposters and Pure H pretenders. I felt heartbroken and angry, and was about to tear off my goggles and throw them to the floor, when I noticed someone on the chair.

She too wore a long grey coat, but its material was smoother and more refined than all the others. And her loosely hanging hair had been brushed not combed and was at once perfectly ordered and yet free and unfussy. Most of all though, she was the only one not glaring at us, not trying to guess who we were, or trying to decide if we belonged. She alone waited patiently and calmly.

Eight

When I stepped before her and saw her face, I chided myself for thinking that any of the others even slightly resembled her. And it wasn’t just that her skin was softer and smoother, her features perfectly symmetrical, her eyes a deeper achromatic black, but that she seemed at once stronger and more vulnerable than all of them put together.

She had been gazing forward, with her smoky-colored eyelids half closed, as if meditating. When I stepped beside her, first she looked up with fright, but then as she peered into my eyes through the mask, warmth filled her.