laughter. He wasn't sure what was funny about this but found himself laughing as well. He felt defined, etched sharply. He felt a burst of self-realization that heightened and clarified.
'It's interesting, isn't it?' she said. He waited.
'About men and immortality.'
They covered the burnt body and wheeled it away, semi-upright, with rats in the streets and the first drops of rain coming down and the light changing radically in the preternatural way that's completely natural, of course, all the electric premonition that rides the sky being a drama of human devising.
'You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.'
She found this amusing.
'And you bought an airplane. I'd nearly forgotten this. Soviet or ex-Soviet. A strategic bomber. Capable of knocking out a small city. Is this right?'
'It's an old Tu-160. NATO calls it Blackjack A. It was deployed around 1988. Carries nuclear bombs and cruise missiles,' he said. 'These were not included in the deal.' She clapped her hands, happy and charmed. 'But they wouldn't let you fly it. Could you fly it?'
'Could and did. They wouldn't let me fly it armed.'
'Who wouldn't?'
'The State Department. The Pentagon. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.'
'The Russians?'
'What Russians? I bought it black-market and dirt cheap from a Belgian arms dealer in Kazakhstan. That's where I took the controls, for half an hour, over the desert. U.S. dollars, thirty-one million.'
'Where is it now?'
'Parked in a storage facility in Arizona. Waiting for replacement parts that nobody can find. Sitting in the wind. I go out there now and then.'
'To do what?'
'To look at it. It's mine,' he said.
She closed her eyes and thought. The screens showed charts and graphs, market updates. She clutched one hand in the other, tightly, veins going flat and blood draining from her knuckles.
'People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life. This is true or not?'
'Even the word computer.'
'Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb.'
She opened her eyes and seemed to look right through him, speaking quietly, and he began to imagine her asquat his chest in the middle of the night, in candlelight, not sexually or demonically driven but there to speak into his fitful sleep, to trouble his dreams with her theories.
She talked. This was her job. She was born to it and got paid for it. But what did she believe? Her eyes were unrevealing. At least to him they were, faint, gray, remote to him, unalive to him, bright at times but only in the flush of an insight or conjecture. Where was her life? What did she do when she went home? Who was there besides the cat? He thought there had to be a cat. How could they talk about such things, these two? They were not qualified.
It would be a breach of trust, he thought, to ask if she had a cat, much less a husband, a lover, life insurance. What are your plans for the weekend? The question would be a form of assault. She would turn away, angry and humiliated. She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.
'I understand none of this,' she said. 'Microchips so small and powerful. Humans and computers merge. This is well beyond my range. And never-ending life begins.' She took a moment to look at him. 'Shouldn't the glory of a great man's death argue against his dream of immortality?'
Kinski naked on his chest.
'Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here,' she said. 'Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down.'
Kinski vivid in his nightmares, commenting on events therein.
'There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that.'
It was twilight, only dimmer, with a silvery twinge in the air, and he stood outside his car watching taxis extract themselves from the ruck. He didn't know how long it was since he'd felt so good.
How long? He didn't know.
With the currency ticker restored to normal function, the yen showed renewed strength, advancing against the dollar in microdecimal increments every sextillionth of a second. This was good. This was fine and right. It thrilled him to think in zeptoseconds and to watch the numbers in their unrelenting run. The stock ticker was also good. He watched the major issues breeze by and felt purified in nameless ways to see prices spiral into lubricious plunge. Yes, the effect on him was sexual, cunnilingual in particular, and he let his head fall back and opened his mouth to the sky and rain.
The rain came washing down on the emptying breadth of Times Square with the billboards ghost-lighted now and the tire barricades nearly cleared dead ahead, leaving 47th Street open to the west. The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right. But the threat was even better. He saw a few tourists creep along Broadway under bunched umbrellas to stare at the charred spot on the pavement where an unknown man had set fire to himself. This was grave and haunting. It was right for the moment and the day. But the credible threat was the thing that moved and quickened him. The rain on his face was good and the sour reek was fine and right, the fug of urine maturing on the body of his car, and there was trembling pleasure to be found, and joy at all misfortune, in the swift pitch of markets down. But it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time.
Now he could begin the business of living.
PART TWO
3
She had coral brown skin and well-defined cheekbones. There was a beeswax sheen to her lips. She liked to be looked at and made the act of undressing seem proudly public, an unveiling across national borders with an element of slightly showy defiance.
She wore her ZyloFlex body armor while they had sex. This was his idea. She told him the ballistic fiber was the lightest and softest available, and the strongest as well, and also stab-resistant.
Her name was Kendra Hays and she was easy in his presence. They mock-boxed for about a second and a half. He licked her body here and there, leaving fizzes of spittle behind.
'You work out,' she said.
'Six percent body fat.'
'Used to be my number. Then I got lazy.'
'What are you doing about it?'
'Hit the machines in the morning. Run in the park at night.'
She had cinnamon skin, or russet, or a blend of copper and bronze. He wondered if she felt ordinary to herself,
