Noir

came after the stumbling out into the train’s aisle: pushing her way past the backs of the plush seats, her vision opened into a blur-rimmed tunnel, tight enough that she didn’t have to see the faces turning up toward her, didn’t have to see anything except the auto-sliding door that led between cars and the door that didn’t open by itself, a smaller one, some kind of maintenance access, which opened into one of those spaces that people with a desperate need for privacy and little need for comfort could always find. The cross-treaded metal was always littered with orange plastic hypodermic caps, like thimbles for depraved faery folk, the needles themselves crackling underfoot like the blood-specked ground of a steel forest. The Antarctic cold crawled in sharper here, her exhaled breath nebulous in front of her face, inhaled ice burning down into her trachea. Pinpoint metal scratched her knees when some teneviki arbitrageur from the Gloss’s Vladivostok zone followed her into the narrow space, put his capitalist hands on her shoulders, and pushed her down. The one whose champagne she’d spilled; his crotch still darkly stained and smelling of wine, the teeth of the zipper and his polished fingernails glistening wet, his other hand already tangled in her hair and drawing her closer, his back against the hidden door, the world tight as a refrigerated coffin.

He doesn’t have a prayer…

None of them ever did. She knew that was why she was named November. Even when she was alone again, kneeling in that little space, the side of her head against the metal separating her from the snow and ice sailing by outside, with the taste of salt and chlorine at the back of her throat. In the world outside, the great big empty one, the ice beheaded the gray waves, the ground split open in white fissures, the bones of ancient wooden ships were picked over by the wind. The train rolled on, or flew a millimeter above the charged tracks, and through some window that opened inside her skull, she could see the empty snowscapes, the oceans that chilled drowning men’s hearts to a standstill within thirty seconds; she could see all that without looking outside, she could see it without opening her eyes. She could spit out the taste of the tenevik, a clouded wet thing glistening on the needles around her; she could stand up, a little steadier on her legs as her muscles recongealed into usability, stand and straighten out her clothes that the hard, manicured hands had dislodged through the neckline of her blouse, a simple white button snapped free and rolling through the hypodermic paraphernalia on the metal floor. Stand and push open the hidden door that led back into the train’s heated spaces, where her breath would no longer be a visible and fading thing, and walk back to her seat in the luxury car, slide past the elegant chalk-stripe knees of the man’s trousers, the spilled champagne already evaporated from his lap. He wouldn’t even look up from the rows of numbers in the folded-open Bangkok edition of The Wall Street Journal. Which was as she preferred it as she sat back in the plush seat and watched Antarctica unfold outside the insulated windows. It wasn’t the chemicals slowly evaporating from her bloodstream that had kept her from feeling anything.

“You know my name,” she said aloud.

The dead woman made no reply. The white-centered eyes with the little crosses in them gazed on some interior landscape, some territory where the man she’d been married to, and who was still alive, was all unknowingly getting into deeper shit.

The poor bastard, thought November. She felt sorry for the man-his name was McNihil-in her usual, nonempathic way. An intellectual process, like watching one ice floe grind implacably against another, the white fields cracking and splintering as though alive but not sentient. It didn’t make her feel sad- nothing did, or at least not any sadder-but it was still something that had to be figured into her own calculations. He might get in her way, impede the run of her business activities. That was what she felt sorry about. She otherwise felt no hostility toward him. To be fatal and noncaring at the same time; it just worked that way. The ice surged and hammered against itself.

November zipped up her jacket, sealing a chrome-dotted leather skin around herself. Not to keep out the cold- this wasn’t the Antarctic; here, in the territory of the dead, the sun beat down like sulphurous cake frosting-but to keep her own coldness bottled around her heart.

Even her being here, the fact of her coming to the dead land and talking to the dead woman-that was part of the troubles circling and closing around McNihil. He didn’t know yet, but he would.

“I’m leaving now.” She bent down, bringing her face close to the dead woman’s, looking right into the black- and-white eyes. The room, a tiny space filled with untidily stacked, yellowing papers, windows filmed with dust, ate up her words without echoes. Exactly the sort of room the dead would be expected to live in, or at least exist. She had been in ones just like it, before this; the dead were always a good source of information. It was their business. November straightened up; she could still feel the dead woman’s hand where the pale fingers had touched her cheek. “Thanks for everything.”

The dead woman looked up at her. “When it happens,” she said, “when it all comes down… don’t be too hard on him.”

November laid her own hand against the thin, cheap door behind herself. “Why?” She was only mildly curious. “Do you still love him?”

“Of course not.” The dead woman managed a smile. “I never did. But he has his virtues. In his way.”

For a long time after that, after she had left the little room and the place where the dead lived, she wondered what the dead woman had meant by that. Then she decided it wasn’t important.

When she was on one of the trains again, heading north, back to where living people lived, or at least approximately so-she let a little more memory flash unwind inside her head. To the end of the story, or one of the stories, part of the whole that made up the lapidary, carefully assembled history of her name. She couldn’t even remember which one it was, whether it’d been that anonymous tenevik, some currency cowboy out of the Nakhodka FEZ, who’d shown up in the first reel of the flash, that one or some other member of the shadow people working the Dow Jones/nomenklatura overlap in Vladivostok and points west, or a little-dragons personnel enforcer shuttling antique punched-hole loom cards from Djakarta to the Lima child-labor free-enterprise zones… or another one entirely. It didn’t matter which one; they never had faces for her but just cruel, hard, pleasuring hands… which was enough for her purposes.

They only had faces if they made the mistake of following her off the train, in whatever city on the circle she’d decided to make her destination. As if they hadn’t gotten enough of her in that little cramped space rolling across the ocean and the ice floes; as if there were anything more that she was willing to give them. Dream on, loser-she would silently transmit the warning behind herself as she pushed through the crowds in the station, aware of the figure tailing after, erectile tissue transformed into slow heat-seeking missile. She’d been in every station along the Gloss’s edge-the Gloss being the shorthand for Glossolalia, which was either the Greater Los Angeles Inter-Alia or the babel of languages that faded into one another in the almost-complete urban circle around the Pacific, which was to say the world. And every station had its tight private spaces as well, maintenance closets and walk-in fuse boxes and the women’s rest rooms so far off the main drag that they had been annexed into I.V-hype and subcute territory, the needle discards and depleted osmotic skin-pouches all over the floor, the festooned toilet paper freckled with blood specks. She made it easy, or at least faster, on her would-be predators by sliding into one of those obscured nooks, without even a glance over her shoulder, then waiting. It only took a few seconds, the number of steps he’d let stretch out between himself and his prey, the prey that he’d already caught and savored once. That was the brief moment in which she might see one of their faces, if there was light enough.

It didn’t matter whether she did, though. Because she would already be standing with her back against the wall or the divider panel or the tangled ranks of fuses and wiring, she would already be reaching up with one hand as the man pushed the door of the closet or the rest room stall shut behind himself. He would already be smiling, his eyes narrowed to little hungry slits as her hand touched the side of his head, her fingertips sliding through his hair and onto the back of his skull, as though she were going to draw him toward her for a kiss. But the smile would freeze on his face, it would still be there but it would mean something else, it would mean both pleasure and terror at the center of his eyes, one and the same thing, as she and the mark got into serious transcranial magnetic stimulation time. The fields pulsed from the rare-earth devices imbedded in her fingertips, at an exact ten-thousandth-of-a- second cycle, ramping up to 3+ tesla, more than enough to penetrate human scalp and skull, and into the top cortical layers. Tight magnet currents sparked and modulated and found their way to the exact cerebral tissue necessary to produce lock-loop orgasm and a general paralysis, his muscles locking hard onto each other, his body its own ejaculating prison. She had only enough battery power in the system to freeze the poor horny bastard for ten to fifteen seconds. But that was more than enough; she worked fast. And all she really had to do was reach into his jacket and pull out the weight of metal she knew he’d be carrying there, a hammer with fire inside. They all