New Canadian Noir Page 6

  “Lady, I told you to go check upstairs.”

  “Have you seen my friend, an old Chinese woman like me, about my height, grey hair, she collects bottles in the neighbourhood?”

  “No offence, but all you Chinese look alike to me. Ask upstairs. They’re Chinese or something.” With that, he slammed the door, then I heard loud music. He would not come back to the door again.

  I went to the front door and rang the bell but there was no answer, even after I waited for a while. Looking in the partially curtained windows, it looked like a regular home with a couch and TV, empty, with the owners still at their work.

  Taking my cart, I went to find Bobby, who was just down the street grabbing some beer cans from a recycling bin, and told him what happened.

  “Was he acting strange?” he asked.

  “I think he was on drugs but I don’t know.”

  “How about I get in there when he’s not home and look around?”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “It’s a basement apartment, they’re easy to get into and small. It won’t take me long.”

  “I don’t know, maybe we find her.”

  “I hope so,” Bobby said.

  With that, we walked our separate ways home. That night, I called Shu Chen’s phone number so many times I lost count. By the end, her old answering machine was full with my pleas for her to call me when she got the message.

  I had trouble sleeping that night. I dreamed of Shu Chen and me swimming like I did as a girl back in China. Shu Chen was ahead of me, just swimming out of my reach, and I could not really see her other than the kicking of her feet, but knew it was her and kept trying to catch up. There was no shore to be seen, like we were in the middle of the ocean. I woke up before dawn, drenched in sweat.

  After having a steamed bun I microwaved in my little kitchen alcove, I walked to Shu Chen’s room above a storefront that sold used furniture. She had given me her keys that one time when she was recuperating and had never asked for them back. Her small room was dark when I let myself in. Checking her stand-up dresser, all her clothes were there and her one piece of luggage was still sitting nestled in the back, the handle tattered from age, but she had wrapped twine and elastic bands around it to hold it together. I knew her so well, I knew the outfit she was wearing when she disappeared, a white brimmed hat stained to pale yellow, dark green pants and her pink quilted top with little blue flowers like daisies, the pattern so small they looked like houndstooth if you didn’t look close enough. The place, like mine, smelled of mothballs. On a wall she had a photo of her and me at a mahjong game, smiling like we both won. I started to cry.

  I knew that when I passed maybe my son and his family would mourn but no one else. Shu Chen’s daughter probably wouldn’t even come, but I knew I should contact her if too much time passed before we found out what happened to Shu Chen. From what Shu Chen told me about her daughter, I doubt she would even care, which made me cry harder, with deep moans for my lost friend. The world was so cruel to good people like Shu Chen, who never hurt anybody. Our lives were so hard and to end like this made everything seem worse than I could endure any longer.

  While walking home, just wanting to lie down, sleep, and make it all go away, I saw Bobby running my way. He was holding something in his hand and talking so quickly I could not understand him, and then I saw the yellowed hat of Shu Chen. She wore that hat so much it was probably her late husband’s.

  “I found it in his place,” Bobby said. “Jimmy, his name’s Jimmy, I found some letter from the government. He’s an ex-con or something.”

  I took the hat from his hands and stared at it. “How did you get in?”

  “After I left you, I turned around and started watching his place from across the street on the porch of an abandoned house. After it got dark, I saw him stumbling down the street, mumbling like he was wasted. I knew I had some time to get in so I pried open a window and slipped through. His place was crazy messy. I doubt he’d notice anything missing except his drugs. He had all kinds of pills in there. None of the bottles had Jimmy’s name on them.”

  Still holding the hat and staring at it, I felt the material, rubbing it with my fingertips and said, “This is hers.”

  “Yeah, I know. There was nothing else though.”

  “This is proof.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking he had something to do with it.”

  “It’s proof. Enough for me.”

  Bobby just smiled. “Maybe I can follow him and see where he goes next time.”

  “Yes, next time,” I said. “Bye, Bobby.” I walked away, still clutching Shu Chen’s hat.

  A week went by in which I only slept a few hours and I still had heard nothing from Shu Chen, so I tried calling her daughter, but never spoke to her, only leaving her a message. She never got back to me.

  I had stopped working and spent my days walking by Jimmy’s, dropping in on Shu Chen’s and just tracing her regular route. I guess I was looking for clues or a sign or something, I was not really sure, feeling confused from lack of sleep and not eating properly.

  After some time doing this, I decided I had to get into Jimmy’s place and look around myself. Slow Bobby could have missed something my eyes would catch, so I formulated a plan.

  I went to the local liquor store and bought a large bottle of Polish vodka that was 76 percent alcohol, which cost me about three days of work, then put it into a gift bag I got at the dollar store, writing “To Jimmy” on its little tag. I walked over to Jimmy’s and left it outside his door around dusk, then wasted time for a few hours walking Shu Chen’s route once more. At the time, I don’t know exactly why, but it felt right, and maybe in the back of my mind I was honouring her.

  When I was sure Jimmy had had enough time with the bottle, I went back and knocked on the door. It took a while but I was patient enough. He opened the door very drunk, weaving on his feet, unable to focus his eyes. While he said some incoherent words in his drunken stupor, I brushed past him and he almost fell to the ground. His apartment was as messy as Bobby had said, with overflowing ashtrays all over the floor, the counters, and the table in the middle of the room. It smelled like stale sweat and urine. I felt him grab my shoulders, but he was so drunk that the momentum of swinging around knocked his feet out from underneath him. He lay there on his back, beside the empty bottle of vodka, huffing and wheezing with his eyes closed, this man who did something to Shu Chen.

  My gloved hands found one of the garbage bags I kept in my pockets, and I shrouded it over his head, tying it in a knot around his neck while all the time he still hadn’t moved. The bag started to suck and blow right where the hole of his mouth was, then he started to get sick, filling the bag with vomit, and his arms and legs started to flail about like he was having a bad nightmare, and all along I just stood there and watched, trying not to miss anything. After some time, I nudged his unmoving body with the toe of my running shoe.

  Remembering why I came, I looked around in a haze, surprised to find no pills anywhere, thinking maybe Bobby had taken them. I left then, shutting the door behind me, and started walking. I was just walking, wanting to go somewhere else, to find some place where I could trade Jimmy’s life for Shu Chen’s and we could go play mahjong, then get some dumplings and tea, talking and laughing like we used to.

  I found myself near Bobby’s, so I thought I would tell him what had happened, since I felt like I had to tell someone and Bobby might know what to do next.

  I came up to Bobby’s apartment through the alley and saw Shu Chen’s cart by the trash bins in the back. It was partially covered by some large greasy rag, but I would recognize it anywhere. Maybe Bobby had brought it back from the beer store after he saw Jimmy getting cash for its contents. Or maybe Bobby was lying the entire time and I had just killed an innocent man. Either way, I would need another bottle of liquor. Bobby and I would either celebrate, or I had more work to do.

  THIS IS THE PARTY

  Rich Larson

  This
is the Party:

  Had Khuat is constellated by fire dancers all up and down its black beach, by lithe Thai bone-and-sinew slumsurfers, with their rock-star manes and anglicized nicknames, wearing fire-proof skinsuits or nothing at all as they cartwheel, cavort, carve up the dark.

  More bodies twist and turn up on skyscraping platforms that rise like Ozymandias from the sand, dancers perfected by a subtle knife, sculpted by silicon and surgery and genetics. Floating cams transpose them onto frayed clouds, weaving their writhing silhouettes into the laser show’s neon.

  Below, on machine-sifted sand soft as flour, the Party guests drink and stumble and dance around the base of an artificial volcano belching steam. Freon-chilled champagne foams and splashes in wobbling arcs. Dopamine plugs slide into ear canals, up reddened nostrils. The guests mostly wear Gucci and Rag and lunar imports, and all of them wear masks, either mirrored or holo-retro.

  In this bacchanalia, Prosper is reborn. His blood runs slick with alcohol and his head is shredded by a mild hallucinogen, but he knows he is Prosper Rexroat, he knows he is twenty-three, he knows he is from San Francisco, and he knows, dimly, that he came here on the suborbital with Holly, but if he can barely stand then Holly is prone somewhere on the sand and so he can do whatever, whoever he wants.

  Parties have always been Prosper’s element. Why would the Party be any different?

  Prosper wakes when adrenaline clouds into his IV bag, swims up his veins and strokes his brainstem. He reassembles himself from a hipbone, a sore calf, a cheek on rough fabric. His skin is numb. He opens his eyes.

  The clock above the gurney tells him a lie. It says 5:27 a.m., August 18, 2127, but Prosper knows he is twenty-three years old, not forty-seven years old. There’s a woman standing over him, turned away. He knows it’s Holly, though her posture is subtly changed, her smell is different.

  She turns. Her sea-green eyes are webbed with cracks.

  “Why are you so fucking old?” he asks, voice catching on a dozen hooks.

  She says nothing.

  “Rip Van Winkle,” Prosper says. “I pass out on a beach and wake up in the future. Because those fucking lucies were diced. I’m in a hospital sweating out the trip. Still seeing shit.” He pauses. “Or is it a coma? Have I been in a coma? Am I old, too?”

  He remembers falling twice: once down onto soft white sand, glass in hand, then once falling down into a column of steam, but he can’t remember which fall was dream. Maybe both.

  “You’re a clone,” Holly says at last, and her voice is pewter. “The eighth.”

  Up on the monitor, Prosper’s heart line writhes like a snake.

  Holly Rexroat-Carrow, née Holly Carrow, killed her husband for the first time on a sun-drenched August afternoon, one liquor-drenched week after he left her and other earthly possessions to take the deep sleep to Ganymede with a digitattooed Ukrainian actress.

  Divorce proceedings stalled by cryogenesis and a lawyer AI in need of diagnostic, Holly spent seven days in a gin-and-tonic haze. She cut lines on the smartglass kitchen counters and cut lines on her wrist in the shower, just shallowly.

  In the mornings she slept as long as she could without overdosing on Dozr, so when the San Francisco FleshFac called at 11:35, Holly heard nothing. When they called at 12:35, she ignored it. When they called at 1:35, she clawed through cumulative hangover and answered, thinking, half-dreaming, that it was Prosper.

  “This is a call regarding the organ policy of Prosper Rexroat-Carrow.” The clinic’s phoneghost had a slight Italian accent, calm and cultured.

  “This is Mrs. Rexroat-Carrow.” The title stung on its way out of her mouth.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Rexroat-Carrow. This call is to inform your husband that his clones have reached transplant maturity. The San Francisco FleshFac would like to extend an invitation for IRL or remote inspection of said clones at your and your husband’s leisure.”

  Holly picked a looped hair follicle off her pillow, twirling the dark strand between two fingers. Prosper never told her he’d taken out an organ policy, but she knew of it, vaguely, as she knew of other things he’d never told her, like the string of bleached blondes she’d convinced herself were only a physical release, a bodily function. She thought of Olga Kurylenko’s tanned thighs and felt gutsick.

  Prosper would want the clones put on ice and shuttled after him. Holly opened her mouth to tell the clinic as much. She stopped.

  “I’m afraid my husband is offworld on business, but I’ll take a look at them,” she said instead, her tongue thick and clumsy with three days’ silence. “If that’s alright.”

  While directions uploaded to her Audi, Holly slouched toward the kitchen. She filled a glass with the same Luna vodka stickying her bathroom tiles. The smell made her gag and the taste made her hollow stomach heave. As she drank she shuffled through drawers of pristine utensils, knives, and electric peelers. She went to the car with her glass in one hand and a tenderizer dangling from the other.

  The San Francisco FleshFac was well outside the city, out in the dust and vineyards and faux-villas still stubbornly aping Tuscany. Holly lay back on the drive, closing her eyes in the cool dark and opening them only when her car dropped its indicator and turned onto a long stretch lined by twists of AI-generated sculpture. The clinic itself was a behemoth of smoked glass and concrete and biostructure, swooping architecture more in line with a gallery than a hospital. Prosper had always had a taste for the exorbitant.

  An automated greeter ushered her inside, an automated usher directed her down a sun-sliced hall, an automated door scanned her iris, and then she was alone in the red womb of the clone room. There were three of them, three perfect Prospers prone under frosted glass. Holly walked circuits around them, trailing her fingers along the humming cool bioshells, hating the curve of his lips, full as the day she met him, the symmetry of his bones, the girth of his cock. Perfect as he’d been the summer they fell together.

  She thumbed the release to a deep click and a serpentine hiss. Prosper’s face was a lake with no ripples, tranquil the way his face a thousand light years away was tranquil, frozen veins flushed with saline, the woman he loved one cryopod over. Holly opened her bag with trembling hands, retrieved the tenderizer, and set to work demolishing his face. She swung with grim rhythm until she finally cracked skull; neurons in the blank brain made the clone spasm, squirting clotted grey and red over her hands, slicking her grip on the mallet and making her flinch backward.

  When the clone was finally inert meat, an automated usher directed her toward the lavatories. As she washed her trembling hands, it explained soothingly about liability and replacement costs and legal actions. It asked if she had found the clones dissatisfactory in some way.

  “I’ll pay for any additional cleaning and disposal costs incurred,” Holly said, voice smooth and tight for the first time in seven days. “The clone was beautifully grown. In fact, my husband and I would like another. To replace it.”

  The usher’s head bobbed on its pneumatic neck. It didn’t try to understand. Holly wished, fervent in the moment, that she was the same.

  Parties have always been Prosper’s element; the Party is no different. He slides from copse to cultured copse of revellers, speaking silver-tongued in English, German, body language. He draws them and sloughs them, touching this arm, this stomach, this ass, as if he owns every body on the black beach. Wherever he takes his unbreakable smile, he hears about two things: the Host and the Lotto.

  They pull up their cuffs from their blue-veined wrists to show him the digitattooed numbers; a girl rolls up the sleeve of his shirt to remind him of his own. He doesn’t remember when the impermanent ink was punched into his forearm, but he doesn’t remember who slapped glow-paint across his crotch or where his Versace loafers have gone, either.

  The Lotto is unbelievable the first time he hears of it, macabre the second, magnetic the third. Each and every guest has a randomized sequence stitched into their skin. One of those sequences is the winner. Wh
en the Host arrives, the winner dies. Some years by drowning, some years by fire, some years by gutting, electrocution, helium-hefted gallows. But this is all second-hand, because attending the Party is only ever permitted once, and all external electronics are confiscated, all implants damper-clamped. And attending in itself costs as much as an organ policy. More.

  Prosper knows Holly cannot possibly know this, could not have known this when they trawled down Thailand’s coast and ferried to Koh Phangan to find the sort of partying that hadn’t existed since the military coup. She would have never agreed to come. Maybe he knew and didn’t tell her, but with the sand slithering like quicksilver and the night swelling and contracting around his skull it’s hard to remember what he knows and what he’s told.

  Prosper wrestles up from the IVs and body monitors and tells Holly-who-is-not-Holly that he is not a clone. “Clones don’t have memories,” he says. “They’re vegetables.” But he is groping down his leg, down under the thermal blanket, searching for his scar.

  “What’s the last thing you remember, then?” she asks simply.

  “We’re in Thailand,” Prosper says. “Koh Phangan.”

  “Yes. We’re here every year.”

  Prosper stops, racks his memory, reaching back past the party on Gaussian-blurred beach with the strange tattoos and some sort of game, some sort of lottery. “We rented gills to go diving,” he says. “We tried to fuck in the water but it was too cold. Went back to the bungalow for Singhas. The mosquito net has a hole and you were drunk so you tried sewing it shut. But I told you, I told you the only mosquitos here are vaccinators.” The scenes are unfurling in his head now and spilling out of his mouth. “We went out. They were casting ads for a muay thai fight, but we just wanted to get drowsed so we hit a club for shisha. Your hair was in your mouth.”

  Holly-who-is-Holly, even though she’s somehow old, closes her eyes for a moment. Her lids are scrubbed of makeup and look paper-thin. Prosper feels he’s getting close to something.