Grey

began frantically unbuttoning the jacket and tugging off the sleeves.

“You can go, lady, but give us Michael!”

“What are you doing,” Joelene asked me.

“I have to take this off.”

“And now,” said the house voice, as a distorted drum began pounding, “it is my super-amazing and spectacular honor to welcome you to the thirty-third annual RiverGroup product show and Ultra extravaganza. As you —” The voice and drum turned into screeching feedback and stopped.

“Take it off!” barked someone. Others laughed and applauded.

I lay the jacket on the stage and as I began undoing my pants, looked toward the channel cameras. “Don’t drink the poison!” I told her. “I’ll see you soon!”

The prompter said: Michael—I am happy to let Xavid take my place as… The screen was smashed with what looked like a pair of aluminum pants thrown through the air. Shards of glass showered down on the audience.

“Strip it off, golden boy!”

“Make me beg your balls!” wailed someone close.

“You can go free!” said Father again. “Just release Michael! We won’t hurt you if you do.”

Joelene stooped for the orange jacket.

“Leave it,” I told her. “Let’s go!”

She picked it up and sniffed it.

“Put it down!” I said. “Come on!”

Her eyes met mine. Next she was balling up the jacket into a wad the size of a cantaloupe. “You were going to kill him,” she said, with a grin as though she thought we were the same evil, commercial assassins.

“No!” I told her. “Let’s just go. Let’s go to MKG!”

Father fired another shot.

The bullet hit Joelene’s abdomen right in the middle of a smooth green bruise. Her body wobbled. For an instant there was a small, dark hole three-inches northwest of her bellybutton. Blood, as thick and dark as cola syrup, welled out and ran down her front. It spread into her green underwear and down her thigh. From there, it turned around her kneecap, and continued toward her bare foot.

“Get away from my boy!” said Father, taking a step toward us.

She tightened the balled jacket and muttered, “Fucker.” Her eyes were ecstatic and furious like someone who wanted to kill. She was insane.

I had slipped off my pants and held them before me. “You did it,” I told her, afraid of what she was going to do. “You ruined RiverGroup. You got me Nora. Let’s go!”

She reared back like an old-fashioned baseball player. The clear gun in Father’s right hand fell two inches as his eyebrows tightened over his nose.

“No!” I screamed. “Joelene, don’t do it!”

Her weight shifted forward. She launched the wadded-up jacket. It spun backward, and one sleeve came unfurled as it flew. With a backhanded swing, I whipped the pants at her. An instant before the jacket hit Father, the Adjoining Tissue pants struck Joelene’s back. The white explosions flung me twenty feet.

Epilog

Sitting up, I adjusted my company tie, glanced around the table, tried to refocus on the names, numbers, timelines, and locations that were being discussed, but my concentration was as settled as a droplet of quicksilver. Soon, I picked up the moon-wool tweed samples and began to flip through them. When I came to the 2x2 twill that I had picked out for the product show tomorrow, my eyes defocused on the smooth, dark charcoal. In the last year, I had learned a lot about grey. Maybe more than I cared to.

Originally, of course, I had been attracted to grey because I assumed it was the opposite of Father’s garish colors, the reverse of his style and manner, but it was much more complicated than that. In fact, because its parents were black and white, no color in the spectrum was the offspring of such complete opposites, and as such no other tone could ever represent and compass the vast distances between those extremes, that of light and dark, life and death, and good and evil.

More important, grey was not the escape from the world I had wanted, nor was it the negation I had desired. All I had to do was close my left eye and see the grey spine of the world. Everything was grey. Color was nothing but a thin veil of deceit on top.

Setting down the cloth samples, I focused on my half brother again.

“I have been in contact with one of the members of the Ultra band, Stinkin’ Dead Unicorns, who feels strongly, as many of us do, that Hiro’s death should be avenged.” Rex, my armless half brother from Tanoshi No Wah, wore a sleeveless maroon frock, vest, and a black tie. The screen beside him now showed the diagram of a theater with a red circle around a front seat. “This man, whose name I am not going to reveal, is one of the drummers who plays the new Nalor 450mm munitions tom. As you may know, that specific drum has caused dozen of fatalities at recent concerts.” Returning to his chart, he drew a line from the stage to the circled seat. “Despite the dangers of this new drum, in an interview yesterday, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu insisted he will sit in the front. So, what we are proposing…”

As Rex continued, my eyes gravitated toward the distant gleam of Ros Begas, the geometric high-rise towers silhouetted against aquamarine, the gaudy flickering signs, blinking spires, all connected with flowing arteries of red and white light. Then the dots began to coalesce, the shapes turned hazy, and the city became one amorphous glow.

I thought of her.

Like I had many times, I recalled the moment when the door of her Loop car slid back and she stood inside in her gown. Since we were off the system and the cameras in her car were disabled, no footage existed. But that made it more special, more rare, if unfortunately more vulnerable to the corrosion of memory.

I could still conjure the color of her skin in contrast to the iridescent grey of the bodice and the hazy white edge of her skirt that deepened to a glistening black in the center, the calm of her muted irises, and the smooth, moist watermelon of her lips. Sometimes though, without the help of video or images, it was difficult to exactly recall the shape of her hairline, how her eyebrows curved, or the precise timbre of her voice.

And although it had been a year, almost every morning, while I lay in that semi-dream state at dawn, I would often feel her chenille-covered fingertips on my back or gently squeezing my throat. Sitting up, hoping to see her beside me, I would only find the wrinkled landscape of the empty sheets.

After the product show, I sent a hundred messages to Nora, but they were all returned unanswered. The channels were filled with wild speculation and the foursome on Intellectuals and Soup debated whether she was even still alive. Every few weeks someone thought they spotted Nora at Slate Gardens, SpecificMotor 505, or the SunEcho, but after careful study, they were all fakes—no doubt some of the same young women from the auxiliary room that day. In Pure H, a new advertisement for plutonium buttons appeared. Instead of the beautiful dead couple, now a man lies alone. And although his palm is bloody, as though he had held her hand, she is no longer near.

Even as I worked twelve- and fifteen-hour days to try to rebuild RiverGroup, my heart was dismal and motionless. And I began to worry that if she were alive—which I desperately believed—she had rejected me. It was bad enough I had once worn gold and danced to killer beats, now the world also knew that I was the stitched- together collage of a Pharmaceutical War freak.

Then, the day before, Nora made an appearance on Celebrity Research Yacht. She wore a simple bias-cut charcoal one-piece, with wide flat-fell princess seams, a v-neck, and a slender gold scarf. Her hair was shorter and the ends were tinged with black. And while she answered Milo’s silly questions with her usual succinctness—giving out no information other than that she was alive, I could tell that she had changed in a million ways, that her eyes were a darker shade, her face a little rounder, and her cheeks a deeper blush. And yet, despite all the differences, she was Nora—my Nora. At the end of the show, her dark eyes met the camera’s stare,