Time Travelers Strictly Cash (12 page)

That was the last time she was lucid for nearly forty-eight hours. I plied her with successively stronger soups every time she woke up, and once I got some tea-soggy toast into her. Sometimes she called me others’ names, and sometimes she didn’t know I was there, and everything she said was disjointed. I listened to her tapes, watched some of her video, charged some books and games to her computer. I took a lot of her aspirin. And drank surprisingly little of her booze.

It was a time of frustration for me. I still a couldn’t make it all fit together, still could not quite understand. There was a large piece missing. The animal who sired and raised her had planted the charge, of course, and I perceived that it was big enough to blow her apart. But why had it taken eight years to go off? If his death four years ago had not triggered it, what had? I could not leave until I knew. I did not know why not. I prowled her apartment like a caged bear, looking everywhere for something else to think about.

Midway through the second day her plumbing started working again; I had to change the sheets. The next morning a noise woke me and I found her on the bathroom floor on her knees in a pool of urine. I got her clean and back to bed and just as I thought she was going to drift off again she started yelling at me. “Lousy son of a bitch, it could have been over! I’ll never have the guts again now! How could you do that, you bastard, it was so nice!” She turned violently away from me and curled up. I had to make a hard choice then, and I gambled on what I knew of loneliness and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair as gently and impersonally as I knew how. It was a good guess. She began to cry, in great racking heaves first, then the steady wail of total heartbreak. I had been praying for this and did not begrudge the strength it cost her.

She cried for so long that every muscle in my body ached from sitting still by the time she fell off the edge into sleep. She never felt me get up, stiff and clumsy as I was. There was something different about her sleeping face now. It was not slack but relaxed. I limped out in the closest thing to peace I had felt since I arrived, and as I was passing the living room on the way to the liquor I heard the phone.

Silently, I looked over the caller. The picture was under contrasted and snowy; it was a pay phone. He looked like an immigrant construction worker, massive and florid and necklace, almost brutish. And, at the moment, under great stress. He was crushing a hat in his hands; mortally embarrassed.

“Sharon, don’t hang up,” he was saying. “I gotta find out what this is all about.”

Nothing could have made me hang up.

“Sharon? Sharon, I know you’re there. Terry says you ain’t there, she says she called you every day for a week and banged on your door a few times. But I know you’re there, now anyway. I walked past your place an hour ago and I seen your bathroom light go on and off. Sharon, will you please tell me what the hell’s going on? Are you listening to me? I know you’re listening to me. Look, you gotta understand, I thought it was all set, see? I mean I thought it was set. Arranged. I put it to Terry, cause she’s my regular, and she says not me, lover, but I know a gal. Look, was she lying to me or what? She told me for another bill you play them kind of games.”

Regular $200 bank deposits plus a cardboard box full of scales, vials, bags, and milk powder makes her a coke dealer, right, Travis McGee? Don’t be misled by the fact that the box was

shoved in a corner, sealed with tape, and covered with dust. After all, the only other illicit profession that pays regular sums at regular intervals is hooker, and $200 is too much for square-jawed, hook-nosed, wide-eyed little Karen, breasts or no breasts.

For a garden-variety hooker …

“Dammit, she told me she called you and set it up, she gave me your apartment number.” He shook his head violently. “I can’t make sense of this. Dammit, she couldn’t be lying to me. It don’t figure. You let me in, didn’t even turn the camera on first, it was all arranged. Then you screamed and … and I done like we arranged, and I thought you was maybe overdoin’ it a bit but Terry said you was a terrific actress. I was real careful not to really hurt you, I know I was. Then I put on my pants and I’m putting the envelope on the dresser and you bust that chair on me and come at me with that knife and I hadda bust you one. It just don’t make no sense, will you goddammit say something to me? I’m twisted up inside going on two weeks now. I can’t even eat.”

I went to shut off the phone, and my hand was shaking so bad I missed, spinning the volume knob to minimum. “Sharon, you gotta believe me,” he hollered from far far away. “I’m into rape fantasy. I’m not into rape!” And then I had found the right switch and he was gone.

I got up very slowly and toddled off to the liquor cabinet, and I stood in front of it taking pulls from different bottles at random until I could no longer see his face, his earnest, baffled, half-ashamed face hanging before me.

Because his hair was thin sandy blond, and his jaw was a bit too square, and his nose was a trifle hooked, and his blue eyes were just the least little bit too far apart. They say everyone has a double somewhere. And Fate is such a witty little motherfucker, isn’t he?

I don’t remember how I got to bed.

I woke later that night with the feeling that I would have to bang my head on the floor a couple of times to get my heart started again. I was on my makeshift doss of pillows and blankets beside her bed, and when I finally peeled my eyes open she was sitting up in bed staring at me. She had fixed her hair somehow, and her nails were trimmed. We looked at each other for a long moment. Her color was returning somewhat, and the edge was off her bones.

“What did Jo Ann say when you told her?”

I said nothing.

“Come on, Jo Ann’s got the only other key to this place, and she wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t a friend. So what did she say?”

I got painfully up out of the tangle and walked to the window. A phallic church steeple rose above the low rises, a couple of blocks away.

“God is an iron,” I said. “Did you know that?”

I turned to look at her, and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. “And I’m a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?”

“If a person who indulges in gluttony is a

glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He’s the dumbest designer that ever lived.”

Of a thousand possible snap reactions she picked the most flattering and hence most irritating. She kept silent, kept looking at me, and thought about what I had said. At last she said, “I agree. What particular design fuckup did you have in mind?”

“The one that nearly left you dead in a pile of your own shit,” I said harshly. “Everybody talks about the new menace, wireheading, fifth most common cause of death in only a decade. Wireheading’s not new-it’s just a technical refinement.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Are you familiar with the old cliche `Everything I like in the world is either illegal, immoral, or fattening’?”

“Sure.”

“Didn’t that ever strike you as damned odd? What’s the most nutritionally useless and physiologically dangerous `food’ substance in the world? Sugar. And it seems to be beyond the power of the human nervous system to resist it. They put it in virtually all the processed food there is, which is next to all the food there is, because nobody can resist it. And so we poison ourselves and whipsaw our depositions and rot our teeth. Isn’t that odd? There is a primitive programming in our skulls that rewards us, literally overwhelmingly, every time we do something damned silly. Like smoke a poison, or eat or drink or snort or shoot a poison. Or overeat good foods. Or engage in complicated sexual behavior without procreative intent, which if it were not for the pleasure would be m pointless and insane. And which, when pursued for the pleasure alone, quickly becomes pointless and insane anyway. A suicidal brain-reward system is built into us.”

“But the reward system is for survival.”

“So how the hell did ours get wired up so that survival-threatening behavior gets rewarded best of all? Even the pro-survival pleasure stimuli are wired so that a dangerous overload produces the maximum pleasure. On a purely biological level Man is programmed to strive hugely for more ; than he needs, more than he can profitably use.

“The error doesn’t show up as glaringly in other animals. Even surrounded by plenty, a stupid animal has to work hard simply to meet his needs. But add in intelligence and everything goes to hell. Man is capable of outgrowing any ecological niche you put him in-he survives at , all because he is the animal that moves. Given half a chance he kills himself of surfeit.”

My knees were trembling so badly I had to sit down. I felt feverish and somehow larger than myself, and I knew I was talking much too fast. She had nothing whatever to say, with voice, face, or body.

“Given Man’s gregarious nature,” I went on, fingering my aching nose, “it’s obvious that . kindness is more pro-survival than cruelty. But which feels better? Which provides more pleasure? Poll any hundred people at random and you’ll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration-and maybe two that know how to give a terrific back rub. That business of your father leaving all his money to the Church and leaving you a hundred dollars, the going rate-that was artistry. I can’t imagine a way to make you feel as good as that made you feel rotten. That’s why sadism and masochism are the last refuge of the jaded, the most enduring of the perversions; their piquancy is-“

“Maybe the Puritans were right,” she said. “Maybe pleasure is the root of all evil. But God! life is bleak without it.”

“One of my most precious possessions,” I said, “is a button that my friend Slinky John used to hand-paint and sell below cost. He was the only practicing anarchist I ever met. The button reads: ‘GO, LEMMINGS, GO!’ A lemming surely feels intense pleasure as he gallops to the sea. His self-destruction is programmed by nature, a part of the very small life force that insisted on being conceived and born in the first place. If it feels good, do it.” I laughed, and she flinched. “So it seems to me that God is either an iron, or a colossal jackass. I don’t quite know whether to be admiring or contemptuous.”

All at once I was out of words, and out of strength. I yanked my gaze away from hers and stared at my knees for a long time. I felt vaguely ashamed, as befits one who has thrown a tantrum in a sickroom.

After a time she said. “You talk good on your feet.”

I kept looking at my knees. “I was an economics teacher for a year once.”

“Will you tell me something?”

“If I can.”

“What was the pleasure in putting me back together again?”

I jumped.

“Look at me. There. I’ve got a half-ass idea of what shape I was in when you met me, and I can guess what it’s been like since. I don’t know if I’d have done as much for Jo Ann, and she’s my best friend. You don’t look like a guy whose favorite kick is sick fems, and you sure as hell don’t look like you’re so rich you got time on your hands. So what’s been your pleasure, these last few days?”

“Trying to understand,” I snapped. “I’m nosy.”

“And do you understand?”

“Yeah. I put it together.”

“So you’ll be going now?”

“Not yet.” I said automatically. “You’re not-“

And caught myself.

“There’s something else besides pleasure,” she said. “Another system of reward, only I don’t think it has much to do with the one I got wired up to my scalp here. Not brain-reward. Call it mind-reward. Call it joy-the thing like pleasure that you feel when you’ve done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding of the Universe just seems especially apt. It’s nowhere near as flashy and intense as pleasure can be. Believe me. But it’s got something going for it. Something that can make you do without pleasure or even accept a lot of pain to get it.

“That thing you’re thinking about, that’s there, that’s true. What’s messing us up is the animal nervous system and instincts we inherited. But you said yourself, Man is the animal that outgrows and moves. Ever since the first brain grew a mind we’ve been trying to outgrow our instincts, grow new ones. By Jesus, we will yet. Evolution works pretty slow, is all. Couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape, and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thou? That lemming drive is there-but there’s another kind of drive, another kind of force, that’s working against it. Or else there wouldn’t still be any people and there wouldn’t be the words to have this conversation and-” She looked down at herself. “And I wouldn’t be here to say them.”

“That was just random chance.”

She snorted. “What isn’t?”

“Well, that’s fine, ” I shouted. “That’s fine. Since the world is saved and you’ve got it under control I’ll just be going along.”

I’ve got a lot of voice when I yell. She ignored it utterly, continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends-none and all there is-and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate myself to the middle of the road and see how that works out. Starting with the very weak tea and toast I’m going to ask you to bring me in another ten minutes or so. But as for this other stuff, this joy thing, that I would like to begin exploring, in as much intensity as possible. I don’t really know a goddamn thing about it, but I understand it has something to do with sharing and caring, and what did you say your name was?”

“It doesn’t matter!” I yelled.

“All right. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing!”

“What did you come here for?”

I was angry enough to be honest. “To burgle your fucking apartment!”

Her eyes opened wide, and then she slumped back against the pillows and laughed until the tears came, and I tried and could not help myself and laughed too, and we shared laughter for a long time, as long as we had shared her tears the night before.

And then straight faced she said. “You’ll have to wait a week or two; you’re gonna need help with those stereo speakers. Butter on the toast.”