Chapter 4
By Sunday, I’d moved into the Z Hotel, where the doormen dress like ninjas and stab passing poor people in the neckbits with wooden swords.
I spent the day reading the handheld, in between horrible abuse of room service and watching all the Filth-O- Vision pay-TV porno I could handle. It turned out that regular vanilla sex hadn’t been changed while I’d been away in the prison of chastity forced upon me by the world, but apparently all men and women everywhere now like anal sex, and no one uses a rubber to prevent pregnancy when there is the opportunity to ejaculate up a woman’s nostril.
There was actually a porno documentary pasted between the hump flicks as “bonus programming.” A scrawny girl with pretty eyes and teeth like a ninety-year-old chainsmoker cackled to the camera that, while tampering with her female coperformer, her “entire fuckin’ arm went right up there! It was awesome!” Sitting there naked but for a light crusting of popcorn crumbs, I scratched my belly and considered for a few moments the erotic voltage of someone’s forearm suddenly appearing in your abdomen. I just couldn’t see it.
A thin man in a jacket someone had plainly advised him to buy as a sick joke sat in front of the camera next, attending carefully to his 1983 flicked hair with a sensitive palm. He was one of those disturbing people who only appear to have a chin from certain angles. When he inclined his head, his chin became a tiny couch-like thing sitting an inch above his collarbone. He was introduced as America’s premier male adult performer. It was explained that he was a triple threat as producer, writer, and trained cock with body attached. Despite plainly being convinced that he was also America’s greatest comedy genius (“I have
“Anal sex was edgy. It wasn’t a mainstream thing. But time was, cum shots were edgy. And there was a response to cum shots, and then every porno had cum shots, and now there’s bukkake. Same with anal sex. Big shock when it was first shown, and now anal sex is in every movie. The audience takes that on and then says, What’s next? What’s new? So all this stuff, that was hidden away for years, is mainstream now. You know what else? There was a movie in England last year, an arty movie, based on a literary kind of novel. And it has blowjobs. The actress—and this was straight actors and actresses, not adult performers—had to suck the actor off on camera. Porno’s already crossed over, man. We’re mainstream American shit now. If people out there want to worry about something, tell them to worry about what comes next. Worry about what comes after us.”
I had no idea what bukkake was, and absolutely no interest in finding out. But the rest of it resonated with what the chief of staff had said to me the day before. Things people tried to not even conceive of in the 1950s were matter-of-fact daily life in the 00s.
Is it the Oh-Ohs, I wondered? Or the Zero-Zeros? More beer was required to puzzle this one out.
The room service people pleaded with me not to answer the door dressed entirely in popcorn again.
I put the phone down, picked up the handheld again, and sank into the luxurious sofa with it.
If the documents filling the handheld were to be believed, they’d spent the last two years using every paranoia-inducing spook operation you’ve ever heard of in tracking the book down. FBI, CIA, NSA, even ISA, which I knew were the president’s own spooks, formed by Carter in the seventies. Lots of rumors, third-party reports, hearsay and bullshit, and a litany of hotspots missed by months or years.
The book didn’t seem to stay in anyone’s hands for long. It appeared to be considered an asset to be traded. The mysterious Chinese woman from San Francisco started the game by trading it to a rogue private hospital in Texas in return for a multiple trepanation operation. She had a circle of small holes drilled in her head, just below the hairline, that supposedly allowed her to transmit hypnotic mental radio. She died in Guatemala in 1985, attended by eighty-eight Fortune 500 figures, all of whom had enjoyed extended sexual knowledge of her.
The book stayed in Texas for six months, before being traded to an unknown figure in NASA in return for one of their experimental neural implant transceivers. A notation insisted that the patent actually exists, and was lodged by NASA—a two-way radio smaller than a dime and designed to be placed directly into the brain. Space-flight is all about reducing the weight of whatever you’re trying to fire into orbit, and two ounces in the brain has to be better than ten pounds of radio in the cockpit.
Unless you’re the guy having a jagged circle of steel built with lowest-bidder components wedged into your living brain, I guess.
Additional notation explained that a secret NASA memo released on the Internet in 1996 revealed that the TV show
The documentation went on in this style for some considerable volume. I started skipping, decided to just see where in the stack of files I’d land.
I landed on New York City, two years ago.
A private group called NULL (notation: “colossal perverts”) held the book for a month. Traded as a hush payment by a financially embarrassed mayoral candidate in return for silence over unnamed sexual proclivities, given to a major city landlord in return for lifetime free rent on a small building in SoHo.
It was Sunday night. I thought I’d go and take a look at the building, case it for a proper visit Monday or Tuesday, after I’d bought some new clothes.
I blasted the crumbs off my skin in the shower, and got hot water in my beer.
The sun was down by the time I got down to the lobby, full of people who worked for rich people. The rich people stay somewhere else. Their people stay at the Z on the expense account. People, talking about being people with people. People shoptalk. The people community. Magazine-beautiful, but almost pathologically uncharismatic. A swarm of pretty drones. Several of them looked me up and down. I was just unshaven, disheveled, stinking, and confused-looking enough to be Somebody. They weighed my wallet with X-ray vision. Perhaps I needed people.
I navigated past the swarm as best I could. Some of them floated in my direction while appearing to be continuing their conversations. I rearranged my jacket, allowing them to see my gun. Six backed off, but three got erections.
The ninja doorcrew on the sidewalk were scratching their nuts and talking about going to Mulberry Street for some clams. “Ywannacab?” One of them launched himself out into the middle of Lexington Avenue, howled like Bruce Lee being enthusiastically taken from behind, and waved his special ninja sword a lot. A yellow cab swerved
