Noir

“That’s why I don’t live in this world.” The faces in the framed photos regarded McNihil with a blank absence of envy. “Or at least I try not to.”

“I thought that was the case.” Leaning across the desk, the Adder clome studied McNihil’s eyes as though they were soft, inanimate objects. “When you’re in the business like I am-the surgical business-there’s little signs, indicators that professionals can pick up on.” He sat back in his chair. “You must’ve had it done a while back.”

“How can you tell?”

“The work’s too good. You can hardly see the stitches around the corneas.” The Adder clome sighted through his tangent fingertips. “The only problem is the one you already know about. This world is what you can’t escape from. It always comes seeping back into your little private existence.”

McNihil had said as much to the cube bunny not too long ago. So it must be true, he thought now. Or true enough-he’d had that proved to him at the last place he’d been before walking into the SM clinic with Harrisch’s card tucked in his jacket pocket.

“That woman,” said McNihil. “At the watering hole down the block. Sitting on the barstool next to me.” The whole dimly lit space had been empty except for the two of them, as she’d leaned her cigarette breath and decaying-rose scent toward him-she’d been proof enough. Even in that black-and-white gloom, with the shadows leaking out of McNihil’s eyes and stacking up in the bar’s corners like strata of negative ghosts, the ultimate barfly’s unsunned flesh had glowed with pale mycologic fire. But not all her flesh; some of it had been cut away and replaced, probably right here at this SM franchise, perhaps with the scalpel with which the Adder clome idly played. An oval window, in that space bounded by her throat and her naked shoulders, the bottom edge touching the first swell of her breasts; a soft window, made of some bio-mimetic polymer that was so expensive it got weighed out by the microgram like all the better or at least more effective drugs. McNihil had seen the price sheets on that kind of thing; the woman’s elective surgery hadn’t come cheap. She was either seriously in hock or rich enough to enjoy trolling around the Wedge’s blurred circumference.

“Yeah, that’s one of mine.” The Adder clome nodded when McNihil reached that part of the description. “I’ve done a lot of work on her.” He smiled. “She loves it.”

“I could’ve guessed that much.” McNihil had known, as he’d looked at the woman in the bar, his gaze moving away from her dead empty eyes, down to the window above her breasts, that if he’d touched that transparent substance, it would’ve felt as warm and soft as real flesh. That if he’d closed his eyes, his hand at least might’ve been fooled. But he didn’t close his eyes. McNihil had left them open, and had seen, like smooth white coral under the slow rising and falling of a blood-temperature ocean, the woman’s bones. Faintly luminous, laced with fine red threads: manubrium, clavicle, trachea, and farther behind, deeper in that soft ocean, the herpetoid segments of her spine.

Or would you rather be somewhere else? The next thing the woman in the bar said to him, with a turn of her head and a lowering of her dark lashes over the cold emptiness of her gaze, so that the message being radiated in a tight beam at him was made even clearer.

McNihil hadn’t replied, but had gone on looking into the depths of her exposed body. To where the elegant, blackened engraving had turned her bones into fragile scrimshaw. The black, swirling lines were only slightly wavered by the flesh substitute’s gelatinous layers. Rococo motifs, thorned rose stems and sickly fin-de-siecle lilies twined to frame a motto written in an antique Teutonic font.

I RUNNE TO DEATH, AND DEATH MEETS ME AS FAST

He’d let himself be drawn closer to her, so that he could bring his lips close to her ear.

“‘And all my pleasures,’” he’d whispered, “‘are like yesterday.’”

The remembered darkness of the bar ebbed a little, as the Adder clome’s voice cracked the thin eggshell of McNihil’s thoughts. “Quoting John Donne to barflies-” The voice was brittle with sarcasm. “There’s a wasted effort.”

“Is it?” McNihil looked up. “It’s always worked really well for me.”

“Gotten you this far.” With one finger, the Adder clome balanced the scalpel against the desktop. “I suppose that’s a good thing.” The scalpel dug into the already marked-up wood. “You should’ve picked up on that number at the bar. She’s not the kind that needs a lot of sweet talk. Some of my other clients have told me that she’s a real experience. The kind that leaves marks. Inside your skull.”

“Sounds great. But I’m working right now.” McNihil felt like knocking the scalpel skittering across the desk. “Maybe some other time.”

“And that’s why you came here. Not to reminisce about the chances you’ve let fall out of your hands. So get on with it.” The Adder clome used the scalpel as a pointer again. “Ask me a question, why don’t you?”

“All right,” said McNihil quietly. “Why did Harrisch tell me to come here?”

“I told you already. I don’t know.” The Adder clome scratched the side of his face with the blade’s point, leaving a white mark on the skin. “Obviously, it wasn’t to get information from me. You know too much already.”

“What’s ‘too much’?”

“More than I know,” said the Adder clome. “That’s too much. You haven’t even told me the name of this person. The one who lost Harrisch’s precious whatever-it-is. Or what happened to him.”

“He’s dead. And his name was Travelt.”

“Ah.” The doctor admired his reflection in the scalpel. “Now it becomes a little clearer. I do believe I remember something about a certain Travelt; one of Harrisch’s associates, a junior exec over at DynaZauber. Right?”

McNihil nodded. “You’ve got that one.”

“I did a little job for this Travelt-”

“He came in here?”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “I don’t think I ever set eyes on the man. No, I did something for him. A commission on his behalf, a business gift ordered up by another party. By Harrisch, in fact.”

“You put together the prowler.” That made sense to McNihil. “That Harrisch and the other DZ execs gave to Travelt.”

“That’s right. Though I don’t know how much anyone else at DynaZauber had to do with it.” The Adder clome gave a shrug. “It all seemed like Harrisch’s little project. A personal thing. Harrisch is, as you might’ve already noticed, a hands-on kind of executive.”

“That’s him, all right.” McNihil regarded the other man with a flat, level gaze. “But you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Well. There you go.” Another false smile floated up on the narrowly angled face. “You see? It’s just like I told you. You know too much already. Or if not enough-that’s not my problem. You’re the one who’s supposed to be finding out things. That’s your job, isn’t it? What Harrisch is paying you for. Why should I make it any easier for you? Even if I could.” The smile curdled into a sneer. “I don’t think that’s what Harrisch is paying me for, why he’s underwriting our time together-”

“He’s paying you? For this?”

“Of course. He’s a businessman who understands a fellow businessman’s problems, the need for a little cash flow. There was a transfer of funds-nothing too big; nothing I can retire on-before you came over here. For unnamed services to be performed for a certain individual named McNihil.” The Adder clome rolled the blunt scalpel between his palms. “That’s you, right? You told me as much. So what is it you’d like me to do for you?”

McNihil looked at the man with welling distaste. “There’s nothing you can do for me.”

“Oh, I think otherwise.” The Adder clome’s voice took on a steel edge, as though by some transference of essence from the surgical tool. “You’re underestimating the range of services we provide in this establishment.” Even his eyes glittered as brightly. “Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve paid one of our franchises a visit. There’s all the old classics… and some new ones.”

The Adder clome’s spiel washed up against McNihil, like the waves of a polluted ocean.

“Frankly,” said the Adder clome, “you look rather unmarked to me. For somebody who’s had all your, shall we say, life experiences. You’re a blank slate. But that was always the word in old-fashioned tattoo parlors, sailor. We can do so much more for you now. Just in terms of your skin. We can put your biography on your flesh, in as many animated chapters as you’d like-so you could read yourself in the mirror, if you wanted to. Everybody’s favorite book. Wouldn’t that be nice?”