Strange Flesh (41 page)

“Faith can certainly be a great comfort. Ah, did your daughter share your commitment to the church?”

“If she did, she wouldn’t be burning in the fiery pit right now.”

“Did she seem depressed at all before? Did you notice any signs—”

“What I noticed was that she moved to Jew York to be with all those communistic dickheads.”

I know there’s never been any love lost between New York and Boston, but this is an odd perspective for someone living north of the Mason-Dixon line and in this century. I try, “I understand she went to study at NYU.”

“Yeah, all that techy shit. You know computers are the tools of the devil? Once they get their hooks into you, Satan himself can mainline poison directly into your brain.”

Here I think he has a point most people would agree with.

He continues. “And those people who went to her school. You wouldn’t believe the kind of faggots showed up at her funeral.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “Yeah, I was told that one of her classmates created a commotion there.”

His enthusiasm at holding forth on the communists and faggots vanishes. “Well, I don’t remember much about that. I was dealing with a lot of shit at the time.”

“That’s understandable. Let me see if I can jog your memory.” I pull out an eight-by-ten of Billy. “I heard you might have had words with this gentleman. A friend of your daughter’s. That maybe he was taking pictures. That he tried to put something into your daughter’s casket. You wouldn’t by any chance know what—”

“I don’t know that boy from Adam,” Delaney says quietly, without looking at the photo.

“Are you sure?” I wait for a while and then push Billy’s picture toward him. “Because I was given to believe—”

His earlier rage rushes back. He shoots up and leans over me, poking my chest with his finger. “‘Given to believe’? What kind of shit-talk is that? Why don’t you just call me a liar to my face?”

I put up my hands to placate him, mentally measuring the distance to all the weapons in the room. “Mr. Delaney, I didn’t mean to in any way—”

“Fuck you!” He’s still yelling. I feel a fine spray of spittle on my forehead. “Whoever the fuck you are. Yeah, I know you’re no fucking filmmaker. He said you’d come sniffing around. Well I’m not telling you shit, so you can get your ass off my chair and get—”

“Mr. Delaney, maybe we could come to some arrangement, if you’d just listen to—”

“No, you listen to me, you shit-sucking—”

Clearly the interview has gone off the rails, so I snatch his finger and roll it back toward his chest until he’s forced to subside onto the couch. I don’t let go but say softly in his ear, “When you see our friend Billy again, tell him that I have the only copy of that video, and he needs to come to me if he wants it.”

I let go and take a step back. Delaney’s gaze settles on his new swords. I shake my head. He rubs his sore finger and stares hate at me.

“I’ll see myself out.”

As I walk back up the hall, I glance into the kitchen. Mrs. Delaney hunches at a battered wooden table with a coffee cup in both hands, letting the steam bathe her face like a child. Her eyes rise to meet mine, and I read in them a nervous question. Her lips open, but she doesn’t say anything, and eventually looks back into her mug. I want to walk over to her, but then I hear something crash in her husband’s den. I run through the likely consequences of dragging her into this, and my conscience won’t sanction the risk. Instead I just take a card out of my pocket and place it on a stack of newspapers sitting against the wall. She makes no acknowledgment.

I slip out into the lacerating Boston wind.

B
eing a dropout, I can’t explain why I’m still so attached to my alma mater. But I let the existence of an Acela departure to New York three hours from now convince me that I might as well head toward the river and look in on Fair Harvard. It’s after eleven by the time I find parking for my rental car, and I decide that a nice long lunch at the Bat would be a fine antidote to the infectious misery of the Delaney household.

But just as I’m pouring the bourbon over ice, a 617 area code rings my cell.

I answer and hear a small, hoarse voice say, “Can you come back to the house?”

By the time I get there, the yellow Mustang has departed from its place at the Delaneys’ curb. I wait through another long pause after knocking, but then Ruth opens the door wearing a worried expression. Without preliminaries, she holds out two items in the palm of her hand. The first is a four-inch figurine of a woman. The second is a Sony memory stick.

She says, “I . . . I saved these. Please take them.”

I gently put them inside my jacket pocket. “Thank you, Mrs. Delaney. This is really—”

She puts up a hand. “I thought . . . I thought maybe your film . . . Maybe
you could tell me something. She never said anything, and . . .” She stops, at a loss. “I—I just don’t know.”

With that, she shuts the door firmly in my face.

On the train home, I turn the figure over in my hands. I’ve seen plenty like it around GAME. One of the touchstones of geek culture is collectible figurines. The ability of 3D printers to crank out custom miniatures of one’s online alter egos has only intensified our passion for them. This figure is clearly a NOD avatar. Though representing as a blond, blue-eyed anime vixen, she has Gina’s playful elfin features. She’s wearing a set of billowing purple robes reminiscent of a kimono, and her hands are joined in front of her at waist level holding a large red gemstone. The only label left on the figure is a name inscribed on the base. It reads: Ines_Idoru.

Could this be another one of Gina’s NODNames?

I slip the memory stick into my laptop and see that it contains photos of her funeral. The thumbnails follow a trajectory that confirms Garriott’s story. Some introductory shots of the graveyard, then images of a group of maybe forty people gathering around the open grave. Finally a couple of Gina’s father stomping over and reaching for the camera.

Running through them again, I see a sequence where Billy focuses on two attendees at the periphery of the group as they’re walking in from the parking lot. The first picture shows Blythe Randall extending her hand to Xan. And the next shows Xan taking it.

T
hat night I get my chance to ask Xan about the photo.

I slip back into my office under the pretense that I’ve been “working from home” all day. The team is properly derisive of this excuse, but they don’t care to spend the effort scolding me since they want me to put the final touches on the Dancers’ voice-recognition abilities. I’m not sure why we’re adding this obvious next-rev feature, but Olya demands that the Solo Control mode function without having to balance a keyboard on our chests.

Given the complexity of voice input, all we’ve been able to implement are simple commands such as “Fuck me” to initiate sexual contact, “Keep going” to prolong it, and of course the ever popular “Faster” and “Harder.”

Xan and I are lying in the MetaChairs facing away from each other, both breathing deep from a robust test of the evening’s progress.

“I can’t believe we get paid to do this,” I say with a contented sigh.

She looks over her shoulder. “What, someone’s been writing you checks? All this work on my back, and I’ve yet to see the first shilling.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. But our Dancers have yet to prove themselves in front of the public.”

“Are you worried? Olya probably told you by now the money’s coming from Blake Randall, so—”

“I know. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“What about Blythe?”

“What about her?”

“Do you know her at all?”

“I met her at the same party where Gina met Blake. But no, not really.”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

“You’re ‘just curious’ about Blythe Randall, are you?” She sighs and stretches her back. “Yeah. I saw her at Gina’s funeral. We exchanged condolences. I was surprised she was there, but I guess she’d met her through Blake.”

“So you were just being polite?”

“James, what are you asking me?”

“Nothing. I remember her from school, and I wanted to see if—”

“Let me suggest that you keep your mind and other body parts on your robot overlords here. You can think about her all you want once we’re sailing around Sardinia.”

At ten fifty
PM
, my GAME email gets a message from the spoofed address [email protected]. My pulse thumps as I realize that my Boston gambit worked, and Billy wants to meet.

On short notice, it turns out. His message reads:

Have a Rabbit Hole at Apothecary by 11pm tonight.

Apothecary, a posh downtown bar, publishes a cocktail list so esoteric that it has attracted the attention of both the
New Yorker
and the New York Health Department. A Rabbit Hole must be one of their signature drinks.

As cocktails go, this one sounds treacherous, but if Billy wants to meet for a drink, then he can sure as hell call the round.

T
he bar lies on the border of the Lower East Side and Chinatown. It’s unmarked save for the customary mortar-and-pestle glyph molded in wrought iron on the building’s side gate. Behind the railing, a steep staircase leads to the basement. Apothecary’s interior maxes out the medical history theme with specimen jars of preserved animals, organs, and ambiguous polyps mixed in among the liquor bottles.

A little out of breath from having jogged over, I take a second to text McClaren about this, though I doubt he’ll have time to arrange a shadow for me.

Inside I find a man with a stringy beard and beady eyes who has the mien of a Renaissance Faire staffer. Someone who lives by stringing together a patchwork of marginal gigs well on the outskirts of conventional theater. He’s polishing the marble bar top with a studied diligence that I’ve never observed in a real bartender.