Synners

14

She was supposed to settle into a routine now.

She was supposed to accept everything the Beater had told her, leave Mark alone, do the videos, hope for the best. Hope for the best. What the fuck kind of talk was that? She couldn't ask him; he was suddenly unavailable, closeted with Rivera, busy, busy, busy, and she couldn't ask Mark, because Mark had been spirited away again.

Her own goddamn fault, most likely, for opening her big mouth to the Beater. He'd gone to Rivera, and Rivera had probably waved his magic corp-wand and removed the only person who could have given her an answer.

She looked for him anyway, on the off-chance that he was simply dodging her to avoid being smacked around. Looking for Mark had become a fucking way of life in the past few years. She didn't really know how to do anything else, except make the videos, and somehow, making the videos was too hard when she didn't know where he was.

Fuck it all, she thought, walking the boulevards, scoping the clubs, making at least one nightly run to the Mimosa, scouting the hit-and-runs. Fuck it all, let Mark come to her if he ever decided there was something she should know. Twenty-umpt years could make you tired; she had a right to be tired. And then she looked some more.

"Ain't seen him," said Loophead's little percussionist, rapping her sticks on the table. It was some empty night between one empty day and another in a nameless little Hollywood joint trying to hold its own with a combination of videowall and live music. The postage-stamp-sized dance floor was packed with boulevardettes, and attitude-mongers pretending they were Somebody, and vidiots who had finally had to go somewhere, and a couple of hungry kids with handcams hoping to capture something they could manipulate into some semblance of a video, probably on hardware built from paper clips and masking tape and held together with spit. Then they'd watch it on one of the public-access channels while the rest of the world watched just about anything else.

The little percussionist's name was Flavia Something. She dressed like a cavewoman on food stamps, and she took her sticks everywhere. They beat out a sequence of shifting rhythms on the tabletop as if of their own will, unperturbed by the conflicting beat coming from the band up front. All of Loophead's music grew out of percussion.

"When you comin' over, do the new one?" Flavia asked her. "You come do the video with us on our turf. Finish wherever you want, but you do with us, okay?"

"I thought Mark had your next," Gina said, taking a healthy swig from the bottle of LotusLand in front of her. Flavia tapped the bottle as she put it down, hesitated, and then tapped it again, liking it. As if she could hear it over the thrash.

"Told you, ain't seen him. Can't do video with the invisible man." Flavia's shrug was exaggerated, but the sticks never stopped. On another night, some time ago, Flavia had taken Mark to bed with her, sticks and all. Gina remembered it; Flavia remembered it; Mark didn't.

Up front, a kid in rags and plastic wrap made an old-fashioned stage-dive into the dance-floor crowd, helped along by a kick from the group's hoarse vocalist. The kid sank by uneven degrees into the hobbling mass of jerking bodies and resurfaced several feet away, hopping up and down like a maddened kangaroo. There was a distinct heelprint on his forehead.

"A synner in the making," Gina murmured.

Flavia tapped a stick directly in front of her. "You gonna syn, syn bravely. I forget who said that. Vince Somebody, I think, died in a terrorist raid in Malaysia."

Gina shook her head. "Somebody else. Died like a dog, probably."

The group came to a screaming halt and cleared the stage in a minor brawl as the video screen went on. One of Mark's. Gina finished the rest of the LotusLand, putting on a solid tox while she watched the big curved screen. The texture of the stony shore came through vividly even in this format.

"Rocks," Flavia said, and made a face. "I get it already, wish he'd stop doing it, do something else."

"Pass a law."

The perspective traveling along the shore came to a slow stop and focused on a smooth red gold stone, stutter-zooming in close enough to show the graininess of the surface, changing, melting into unreadable symbols that merged with the patterns she was getting from the hallucinogen in the LotusLand. The symbols resolved themselves into regular shapes, an aerial view of a foreign land that began to roll, earth and sky switching places like the flapping of a huge wing.

Canadaytime dragged her out of a hit-and-run in the ruins of South Bev Hills just before the cops would have. Valjean claimed not to know where Mark was, but had she ever known him to miss one of his parties?

Plenty of fucking times, she told him.

Well, then, one of the better ones, how about that?

Plenty of fucking times. But she let them take her because it was a different empty night, and Valjean had been known to turn up with Mark stashed in one of his many bedrooms.

She wasn't sure it qualified as one of Valjean's better parties, but he had a cam crew saving all of it anyway. Do a finish on it later-not her, some drone; she did his videos, but she wouldn't do his fucking parties-make it better than it could have been, the insty-party channels were hungry for all they could get. Plenty of people out there, strung out on the dataline, they'd never get to a party like this, they'd never have lives like this. Here's the real secret, folks, she thought, as a kid with a cam to her face stalked her like a machine of prey: none of us will ever get to a party like this, none of us will ever have lives like this; this isn't what happened; nothing happened except the dataline.

Valjean had a screen for every porn channel, jammed together in the wall so that food porn overlapped med porn overlapped war porn overlapped sex porn overlapped news porn overlapped disaster porn overlapped tech-fantasy porn overlapped porn she had no idea how to identify. Maybe nobody did, maybe it had just bypassed the stage where it would have been anything other than porn. Meta-porn, porn porn?

I don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters.

"Fucking right there's nothing fucking wrong with porn," said Quilmar. Quilmar was one of the stone marathoners. He'd taken so many years off his age, he'd have been nine when he'd cut his first single (okay, maybe eight and a half), and he'd had it polished and tightened so much, his lovers said the dimple in his chin was actually his navel. Maybe, Gina thought, the Beater hadn't been so rucked after all to do what he'd done. "Porn is the fucking secret of life, sister-mine. If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. That's the fucking order of the universe, and I'm at the fucking top of the food-fuck-and-dance chain."

Then he tried to corner her in Valjean's long, narrow kitchen but he got a little bit confused, and she left him dry-humping the refrigerator door. Wait till he tried to throw that away.

"Talent squeezes out brains." Jolene, looking older, but good-older, wiser, full of dignity. "Shit, you told me that the first time I helped you drag Mark home. How's he surviving the corporate life?"

When she couldn't answer, Jolene took her up to the top floor, to Valjean's secret oxygen supply, and gave her a few hits off the mask. This was how she kept track, she thought, by who was helping her find Mark and how toxed she was herself. The O₂ helped; there was a little more in it than God's pure oxy. She and Jolene sat out under the eaves and looked down the canyon, held hands, didn't say much. Didn't have to.

"I get some work," Jolene was telling her after a while. Jolene's head was resting on her shoulder. Gina was a flaming hetero, but Jolene liked to keep her options open, as Jolene herself said. Being with someone who wasn't afraid of knowing you needed to be touched was okay whether your options were nailed down or wide open and flapping in the fucking breeze. "I get work from some of the indies, outlaws most of them with one leg over the fence, thinking about going legit. Don't get much legit air, but that's where the scene is getting to be. The Dive'll have people crawling through the clubs on their hands and knees to steal from us soon. Except you, Gina, because you're there already, aren't you?"

"Yah. They tell me to come, but I'm already there."

"Walk," Jolene said, suddenly urgent. "Walk away, what are they gonna do, throw you in debtors' prison?"

Gina nodded. "Does the phrase 'contempt of court' do anything for you?" She drew up her knees, rested her chin on them. "You know you could theoretically spend the rest of your life in the can on a c-of-c charge? Die of old age in the can for nothing more than saying, 'Fuck, no.' "

"You're lost, girl."

She laughed. "Oh, no. What it is, is, I been found. That's the fucking problem, I'm found, and they're gonna keep me. And Mark's the one so found he's lost for good."

– -

!! U B THE *!!

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Raid on Buenos Aires * Thrash-Out * Love Kills

The Buddy Holly Story (3rd-and BEST!!-remake)

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(Take-Out Xtra)

She read it through and then went back to the first line, puzzled. U B the asterisk? Was she too toxed or not toxed enough?

You be the ass to risk.

Gina nodded. For all she knew, she was looking at the secret of life. You be the ass to risk. Love Kills. 3rd-and BEST!!- remake.

Complete Rock Video Catalog, Too! Where old rock videos went to die, hers, Mark's, everyone, here in the wannabee parlors, in the wannabee pipe on the dataline for those who could foot that kind of FOB.

Quilmar hadn't had it quite right. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it, be it, or throw it away.

A woman with tiny old-fashioned movie reels twined in her hair and arcs of silvery spectrum mylar instead of eyebrows was trying to get a rabbity-looking guy in a rented bodyshield to step through the beaded curtain in the open doorway. "Anyone can say they'll make you a star, but we're the only ones who can really do it, whaddaya say? What you wannabee?" The mylar wiggled up and down, the beads swaying in the doorway clacked lightly, and the traffic on the boulevard nattered and chattered and popped.

"Come on, homeboy, it's so easy. What you wannabee? You wannabee Buddy Holly? You wannabee a raider on Buenos Aires, you wannabee a killer and get away with it?" She pushed up the sleeves of her slatternly kimono and took both his hands. "Come on, homeboy, tell me. I'm your Hollywood landlady with a full pot of coffee or whatever else you drink and all the time in the world to listen to you. Just tell me what you wannabee."

The guy looked around like he was afraid someone was going to catch him at this. "You got full-body hotsuits?" he asked. "Full coverage?"

"Homeboy, where are you from? We got the full coverage, the full coverage, they don't make em better than the ones we got. Ain't no part of you gonna be neglected, just tell me what you wannabee."

He looked around again, and his gaze snagged on Gina where she was standing by the sign. The woman frowned a little, no mean trick with mylar eyebrows. "That stuff with you?" she asked him.

"No," he said, but uncertainly, as if he weren't really sure. Gina wanted to laugh. Yah, I'll tell you what him wannabee. Him wannabee somebody who doesn't live in Culver City or Inglewood or some other damned place like that in a three-roomer with a two-screen dataline subscription, not knowing what to do with himself when he's used up all the series and the movies and the videos and the insty-parties and wondering why he can't go out and find a life like what he sees on a high-res screen, or at least why he can't afford a hotsuit with full coverage.

The guy's expression was a mixture of defiance and embarrassment as the woman pulled him through the curtain. The beads rippled, and then the woman poked her head through them again.

"You wannabee getting off my sidewalk, okay, homegirl?" Gina gave her the sign of the horns and moved off, laughing to herself.

"What's so funny, homegirl?" A real homegirl, a green-haired boulevardette wrapped in a red trash bag with the words Hazardous Waste stenciled in large repeat all over it and the same thing tattooed on her forehead.

"I'm lucky I can dance," Gina said.

They were all dancing in Forest Lawn, whether they actually could or not. The music was cranked up so loud that the cops had to be comatose not to hear it. Hit-and-run, but Mark wasn't there, either. Some little snipe named Dexter with a laptop had her backed up against Liberace's tomb, claiming he was a fucking orchestra, and off to one side a familiar figure with a cam was trying to look like he wasn't taking her picture.

He looked good tonight, too, and she could hear the sexy laugh in her mind, and what the hell, she could pretend there wasn't anything he wanted to know about, at least for the duration. But even if there hadn't been, all he'd be for her was another furnished room: whatever she needed, none of it hers.

"What's new?" he asked, coming over.

"You mean, what's news."

"However you want it," he said, sounding honest.

She glanced at the snipe, who was standing by on a wish and a prayer. "Whack the road," she told him, and he moved off trying to look too chill to be hurt.

"This how you get to night court?" she asked. "Go someplace you know the cops'll give you a ride from?"

He smiled, looked down the rise to where most of the jumping was taking place. The pickle stand was still in business, but the group had packed up their keyboards and motored; the music was coming out of a box now, but the kids weren't working out any less for it. She saw Clarence or Claw sweating in the middle of a frantic group of kids trying to peak before the cops got around to crashing the party.

"I got something might interest you," he said, after a bit.

"If I tell you what I know," she said. "Don't bother. I still don't know dick."

He looked at her speculatively for a long moment and then shrugged. "Would you tell me if you did?"

"What do I look like to you, General News? Pop-Cult Index?"

"Dear Mrs. Troubles."

She grinned. "Fuck you."

"I wouldn't rule it out."

Youwin the game, Mark had said once, as soon as you get them to say it. Then you do whatever you want. Which would have explained a lot, except she'd never said it to Mark, not once.

He waited, and she waited, and then he shrugged again. "Take a look." He set the cam on preview mode and gave it to her. She looked through the eyepiece and saw him sitting in the sand, leaning back on his hands and staring dreamily upward. "I took that tonight. From the state he was in, I'd say he's probably still there."

She gave the cam back to him. "Thank you."

He looked startled for a second and then covered it. "I thought you'd want to know. I did a little research on you. And him. It's kinda hard to do any research on one of you without getting the other. Tell me something, how did a soul sister come by a name like Ay-ee-see?"

"Eye-ay-see," she said. "It was easier than you'd think." She hopped down off Liberace's resting place and started to walk away.

"You want a ride?" he called after her. She turned around and looked at him. "To the Mimosa," he added. "You shouldn't be driving."

"Gotta drive." She grinned. "Too fuckin' toxed to walk."

He was on her in three fast strides, taking her to the gate. His hand on her arm said it was settled if she said so, but she could feel how he was willing to adapt to any changes she might want to make. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, sure, homeboy, you want that in any particular order?

Shit, she was old enough to be his mother, if she'd started a little young (just a little). So what was it? Her looks were an acquired taste, not popular demand, and they didn't make it a secret she was holding on for forty.

Then again, maybe it wasn't her; maybe it was him, all him. The gypsy journalist's urge to probe. Curiosity kills the cat, satisfaction brings him back, and brings him and brings him and brings him.

Nah. Mark was waiting on the Mimosa, and there'd been too many furnished rooms already.

She got there in time to see the Beater bending over him, looking harried and anxious, the slicked-back hair hanging loose now. Defiantly she knelt down next to Mark, now stretched out in the sand seeing miracles in the black sky.

"He got away from me," the Beater said. "I was trying to keep him detoxed. As long as you're here, you can give me a hand with him."

Mark's gaze slowly traveled over to her and stopped on her face. How come it always ends up like this? she asked him silently. Where are you, and what do you really do when you go there? Why did I ever want you, and why do I want you now? Because it can't just be the music, and it can't just be the video.

"Change for the machines," he said.

The Beater took one side, and she took the other, and they got him up on his feet. The gypsy got the footage of their leaving. What the fuck, he should go home with something, even if it was really nothing at all.

They took him back to the Beater's place and put him to bed on the couch. He was already asleep, or passed out, whichever. "They asked me to keep him clean," the Beater said, pulling off Mark's shoes. "So I told him you were gonna kill him and he could stay with me."

"I'd say 'fuck you' but I don't feel that friendly," Gina said.

"I didn't want him out loose where he could get into trouble. Rivera had him Purged once, I didn't want it to happen again."

She winced. "Christ, why didn't they just scour him out with a wire brush? That could have killed him."

The Beater nodded wearily. "Yah, well, I didn't find out till after the fact. I didn't find out a lot of shit till after the fact." He went to her and looked into her eyes carefully. "You keep this up, Rivera might Purge you, too."

"What's so fucking important that Rivera would Purge me?"

The Beater went past her into the kitchenette.

"What's going on?" she called after him. "What kind of sling is my ass in that I'd have to get Purged and I don't even fucking know it?"

He stuck his head out of the kitchenette. "You want some coffee?"

She stared at him evenly, and he dropped his gaze. "Maybe I should have let you take care of him." He pulled his head back, and she heard him fussing with the coffeepot. Son of a bitch was actually going to make fucking coffee. For real. She went to the kitchenette and stood in the doorway with her arms folded. The drip machine on the counter wheezed and bubbled as coffee poured into the carafe. Rediscovery Cuisine beverages. Little Jesus Jump-Up.

"First place you ever had of your own back in Boston had a real kitchen, with a table and chairs in it," he said. "I remember."

"That wasn't my first place. That was a few apartments later, by the time I met you. They all had kitchens, though."

He faced her in the tiny space. "Is it the tox, or are you just tired enough to have calmed down?"

"Maybe I'm getting old." She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "What's the fucking use. You gonna tell me all that whole lotta shit you found out after the fact now?"

"I can't. Not yet."

"And why the fuck not?"

"It's not mine, all right?"

"No, it's not all right, why the fuck would you think it was?"

The Beater ran a hand through his half-lacquered hair, wincing at the pull. "Christ, how many years was it? You think I'd let anybody hurt him now?"

"Galen would. Galen doesn't give a fuck about him. Neither does Rivera. And goddamn Joslin thinks Dachau was a fucking spa."

"It's something different," the Beater said heavily. "Whatever you're thinking, it's something different than that."

"Thanks for the juicy fucking hint." She pulled her shirt off. "And no, I don't want any fucking coffee." She headed toward the bedroom, shedding clothes.

"Gina!"

She stopped at the doorway and looked back.

"You better show for work tomorrow. You been gone three days. You got videos to do."

"Kiss me," she muttered. Stripped down to her T-shirt and underpants, she crawled into the Beater's bed. Sometime later she felt him slide in next to her. Old stuff; life is uncertain, catch bed space where you can get it. When she woke a few hours later, Mark was gone again.