Noir

The tech glanced over at her. “Dreaming again?”

She nodded yes. The lights from the corridor outside the room seemed unusually bright to her. Because it was night, thought November. In the dream. She’d been someplace where it was always night. Both inside and out…

There was only one of the med technicians in the room this time; each visit the burn-ward crew had made, there had been fewer of them. She supposed that was a good sign. This one didn’t ask about whatever dream she’d been having, but just went about his work, reading off numbers from the various gauges and indices on the equipment screens, then punching them into the little handheld data transmitter he carried. He even hummed a little tune, barely distinguishable from the sighing of one of the machines.

November laid her head back against the pillow. The dream was still somewhat intact inside her head, the images and general sense not as fractured as when she’d been pumped full of the major anesthetics. Woozy drug sleep had given way to fifteen-minute catnaps, which ended abruptly when she felt her newly grafted skin tightening over her flesh. She missed being hammered underneath the big drugs; those pharmaceuticals had seemed to cancel gravity, sequentiality, guilt… everything unpleasant turned to sweet, filtered air. Getting detoxed from them, her bloodstream flushed out, the red contents scrubbed clean in something that looked like a miniature clothes washer and then I.V.’d back into her-that had been like returning to the orbit of some planet she wouldn’t have minded seeing the last of.

The dream… With her eyes closed, November could view its basic setup. She carefully held her breath, fearing that any exhalation would shimmer and dissolve the image.

Not an ocean this time, or anything to do with falling: she’d dreamed of a building, a big one, an old one with rows of windows from top to bottom. It took a little while for her to recognize it, as she let her vision zoom in, movielike. The hotel, thought November. What was it called? Something terminal… the End Zone Hotel; that was it. Her spine contracted in a full-body flinch reaction, as the dream hooked up with her own memories. She remembered just enough-it was encoded in the deep layers of her nervous system-to sense again the heat of the flames, scorching down into her lungs. Even before the hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, and sent her falling down inside, the place had been an exact hell. Even before the fire, she thought; just a different, bleaker kind.

Strangely, in the dream-she could see it now, in retrospect-the End Zone Hotel burned but was not consumed, as though some Old Testament deity had checked in. From her floating point of view, November could see the flames rising behind the grime-thickened windows, the glass either intact or shattered by the heat into shards diving like transparent knives to the street below. The tattered curtains went up in lacework of smoke and sparks; she could look past them just a little bit, enough to see a few of the sagging beds combusting, the smoldering mattresses coughing up the heavier, darker clouds of hourly rate passion. She couldn’t see anyone there, though, whether sleeping in flames or beating a wiser retreat from the ongoing, apparently endless inferno. That made her wonder where they had all gone. The dark ocean she had seen before, maybe, with its gelled waves slowly lapping against the hotel’s lobby doors…

“Won’t be long now.”

November’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

“For you getting out of here.” The med tech held up the black rectangle of the data unit. “See?” Green numbers tagged with a little happy-face symbol marched across the one-line screen. “You’re rated in the top ten percent of all serious burn recoveries in the Gloss, or at least at the hospitals linked on this system.”

“How nice. Does that mean you guys get a bonus or something?”

“Maybe.” The med tech gave a noncommittal shrug. “Depends upon the year-end review for the whole division, and if the performance ratio comes in under the insurance companies’ cost-efficiency targets. We’re not doing too bad so far.” He regarded the data unit with obvious satisfaction. “They’re crunching your numbers down in Accounting right now; that’ll probably perk up the averages quite a bit.”

“So soon?”

“So soon what, sweetheart?”

She nodded toward the device in the tech’s hand, as though the numbers had already spelled out good-bye. “I’m leaving here?”

“Of course. Did you think you were going to be here forever?” The med tech shook his head. “You’re all put back together, believe it or not-”

“I don’t.” November instinctively wrapped her arms around herself, as though there were pieces that might fall off otherwise. “I feel like I’ve got needles all over my skin, the kind that aren’t any fun-”

“That’s a good sign. Means all the neuro work went off okay. It’ll settle down after a while.”

“And I’m still on that thing.” She pointed to the I.V. drip; a clear tube ran from it to the bandaged patch on her arm. “How would I feel if that wasn’t pumping away?”

“Honey, aspirin’s stronger than what you’re getting off on right now.” The tech glanced at the label dangling from the dispenser’s hook. “Baby stuff. You know the drill: you’re at the point where if you want anything good, you’re going to have to get it on the street.”

The thought of it made her hands sweat, with both fear and anticipation. As good as the stuff in the hospital was, there was better walking around beneath the metal-raining skies. “I’m still not sure… that I’m ready…”

“Ready or not, you gotta trot.” The med tech started punching off the displays on the gauges and monitors. “Your boyfriend, or whoever it was, didn’t pay for you to become a permanent resident here. Even if he’d wanted to-” The latex-gloved hands tossed the data unit into the air spinning, and caught it again. “That’s just not available. This is a hospital, not a hotel.”

Hotel. She kept thinking about the one in the dream, her own internalized End Zone, after the med tech had left. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see it burning; the real one, she supposed, would’ve been ashes by now.

She heard someone’s footsteps come into the room-probably another tech or the same one as before-and didn’t bother to look. Maybe it was someone from the accounting department; she’d sensed the machines around her switching off one by one, the clicking and sighing noises falling silent, the electrical presence diminishing as the final data was processed down in the hospital’s insurance computers.

The footsteps stopped by the side of the bed. “They told me-” The man’s voice startled her when it spoke aloud. “That you’re just about to roll. Right on out of here.”

“Christ… it’s you.” She found herself staring up into the encompassing gaze and unpleasant smile of Harrisch. The burning hotel’s afterimage evaporated like steam; November hadn’t even been aware of the transition from closed eyes to open. For a confused half-second, she had wondered how the DynaZauber exec had come to be looking out from one of the End Zone Hotel’s flame-shrouded windows, before she’d realized he was there with her, outside any dreaming. “What the…” November reacted by reaching up for the call buzzer that the nurses had pinned to the side of her pillows.

“Looking for this?” Harrisch held up the little box with the big red button, the wire dangling down to the floor. “There’s really no need for it.” He laid the buzzer down on top of one of the machines, well beyond November’s reach. “I’m just here for a bit of conversation. I imagine you’re feeling well enough for that. Aren’t you?”

November pushed herself up higher on the pillows, drawing as far back from the exec as possible. “What do you want?”

“Why so nervous?” Spreading his empty hands apart, Harrisch let his smile fade. “Is there something I’m doing that’s making you afraid? What is it?”

“You gotta be kidding-” November looked around herself for something she could throw at the exec, something hard rather than soft, that would do real damage. Musing about dreams and their meanings was over for the time being. “Get the connect out of here.” She wondered if she could scream or shout loud enough to get the attention of anybody passing by in the corridor beyond. That’s the problem with hospitals, November thought grimly. They were so damn loud, nobody ever knew what was going on. No wonder people die here. “Just get out,” she said again. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“That’s a rotten attitude to take.” Harrisch appeared genuinely wounded. “What did I do to deserve that from you? Employed you, paid you… made your whole life possible, the way you wanted to live it. If it weren’t for people like me, farming out the work outside the corporation, freelancers like you wouldn’t exist. You oughta thank me.”

“Your ass, connect-head.” November’s initial panic had been replaced with a simmering anger, the way it