Synners

20

The brain feels no pain.

Who had said that-Frank Sinatra or the Beater? Jim Morrison or Visual Mark? Mozart, or Canadaytime? The Living Sickle Orchestra… or that strange red-headed doctor?

Her mind turned fitfully like some sleeping giant in the grip of a dream about to become real. Real dreams.

Come along with me.

When was I ever not there for you?

There was a pause long enough to live and die in. Her point of view panned very slowly to the left and came to rest on her own face. Somehow it wasn't a shock to find she was looking at herself, because it wasn't her point of view. The taste of Mark was in her mind, and it was a taste, not a feeling, not a sense of presence, not a physical pressure but a taste.

She heard the scream of a jumper lifting off vertically, but the sound was muffled. Her point of view was still fixed on herself; she looked a little sour, she thought.

I didn't think you'd come. Mark's voice, addressing her. She saw her face shift its attention to him, or rather, to her new point of view.

I did, she saw herself say. I got them Bad Old Cosmic C-Word Blues Again.

His confusion was a light metallic something on her palate. What does 'c-word' mean?

It means continuing to believe even when you don't feel it. Not letting go even when you can't find squat to hold onto. Going all the way from the beginning to the end.

The scene melted away, leaving her in darkness. She became aware belatedly of an ache in her head-several aches in various spots-gone as soon as she thought of it, and then someone's voice, coming out of nowhere:

ATTENTION, GINA.

"Right, she mumbled. "You don't have to shout."

SORRY. YOU'LL GET USED TO IT. PLEASE CONCENTRATE.

We've been through this one before.

PLEASE MAKE A BOX.

"What kind of box?" she asked.

A SMALL CUBE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE. There was a pause, and she had a sense of someone speaking in another room, just beyond her hearing. PLEASE VISUALIZE A SMALL CUBE.

She obeyed, and the cube was there in front of her in the blackness. Somewhere people were applauding. She could not hear it, but she knew.

MAKE ANOTHER, requested the voice. There was a taste of plastic and metal. She obeyed again, and the requests went on, becoming more complicated, until the blackness had filled, overflowed, and filled again; still, she went on.

"We're going to play some music now, Gina. We'd like you to just let your mind go with it the same way you would if you were creating a video for it. All right?"

Video?

First you see video…

"All right?"

Video-

Then you wear video…

"All right?"

Video…

Then you eat video…

"Just run with it. Let the pictures come. All right?"

Video.

Then you … be…

It came easy, nothing too active but strong, a good, fine beat. This was an old one, one she'd heard not too long ago, or a hundred years ago, in a graveyard. Live music, remember it? Nothing like live music, nothing like it.

The Beater went past, whirling like a dervish, a younger version of a businessman with a good cosmetic surgeon. A flying multitude came after, dancing in the darkness, becoming sign and wonders in the night sky.

They were colors now, making patterns in the black, spurting, retreating, spreading down the bowl of the sky. Colored light streamed down into her hand; she flung it back up again, making new patterns. The colors came down to her again, and she hurled them back into the air each time, until the darkness had been completely covered over.

New colors came up from the east then, mixing with the night shades, tunnels of gold cutting through to push the night away. She moved back, trying to see it all at once, and suddenly she was falling softly backwards, and she kept falling and falling until she couldn't hear the music anymore.

A hand came out of nowhere to hold hers. Mark. She gripped his hand firmly, intending not to let him go.

The lake rippled under the cloudy light, putting more damp into the grey day. She looked down and saw the water lapping gently at the rocks strewn around the shoreline.

She turned her head through the gray air, feeling the cold move past her face. Mark looked better, younger; he was smiling just a little slyly, as if he had a secret he had not quit decided to tell her. He turned her around and walked her along the edge of the lake.

"What are we doing?" she asked, stumbling a little. She wasn't a country person by any stretch of the imagination. Th heels of her boots kept skidding on the rocks and pebbles.

"Taking a rest." His voice sounded smoother, almost musical. "Taking a rest in a secret place." He went on speaking, but she did not hear his voice as much as she felt it. It was a good feeling at first, a sense of being with him greater than anything she had experienced before.

The feeling of closeness intensified; sometime later she realized she was straining away from him even as she kept a grip on his hand. Abruptly his hand twisted out of hers, and she was moving away unhurriedly but quickly.

There was a long hiatus-or possibly a short one, she couldn't tell; her sense of time was gone-and then she seemed to be coming up out of a sleep almost deep enough to be coma.

HELLO, MARK.

The voice was back. He wanted to wiggle with pleasure. It had been stone-home lonely in here without the voice. Wherever here was.

WE'D LIKE YOU TO MAKE SOME MORE PICTURES FOR US. IF YOU WOULDN'T MIND.

Hell, no, he wouldn't mind. Making pictures was what he did, didn't they realize that by now?

THIS TIME, HOWEVER, WE'D LIKE YOU TO TELL US WHERE THEY COME FROM.

He smiled to himself. Nosy, nosy, nosy. Where did they think they came off? Who did they thing they were? It was enough that he made pictures. Christ; he didn't understand where half of them came from himself.

NOW, MARK, SURELY YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THEM.

Drifting along in the something/nothing/whatever, he could not imagine why they thought it was important. It wasn't important. Who could know for certain, anyway? The pictures just came, that was all. Life just came. When you came across something in life, did you get to stop and ask where it was from? Excuse me, is this for real, or is someone making this up on me? Forget it. Damned Schrodinger world, for chris-sakes.

ALL RIGHT, LET'S TRY THIS: ARE THEY MEMORIES?

Once you've thought of it, it's all memory. Don't you know that, homeboy?

He could feel them giving up and retreating. He made pictures anyway, whether they were there or not, all the time listening to the music playing on and on in his mind. Even in the something/nothing/whatever, the program director never took a break. Thank God.

She woke with the feeling that she had been asleep for days.

The semidark, windowless room was little more than a closet, but nicely appointed-everything she needed was built in, and small as things were, she almost didn't have to get out of bed for most of it, or so it seemed. But she did get up and take a few steps around the center of the room, holding her back. The mattress of the tiny single bed was entirely too soft.

Then abruptly she stopped and touched her head. Except for a few bald spots where the shaved hair was already growing back in, she felt no difference. Didn't even ruin the dreadlocks. Same old Gina. Same old-

ATTENTION, GINA.

She looked up, unsure whether she had actually heard anything or not.

PLEASE CONCENTRATE. PLEASE VISUALIZE A BOX.

She held her head with both hands until she was sure it was just a memory. Just a memory, just an awfully stone-fucking home intense fucker of a fucking memory. Feeling a little shaky, she sat down on the bed again, and a new memory intruded.

Lying on a padded slab; going with it now as the slab begins to move and the ceiling begins to move; head goes into a box; a short wait and the fast insect sting of needles, very deep, sinking far, far in and suddenly fading to a sensation of distant cold; murmur of voices, saying they are mapping this and mapping that, and the brain feels no pain, the brain feels no pain, the brain feels nothing at all-

But this brain feels something.

Something is there; something has come in and something is still coming in and

The pictures flashed quickly, one after another. She touched her head again, but it still didn't feel any different. Except for each small bump that marked the locations of the sockets. Bet I look pretty fucking drop-dead with wires in my skull. Medusa's ugly sister.

Mark.

She got up and tried the door, thinking she would find it locked and then she'd have to trash the place till alarms went off. But the door swung open, and she found herself in a long hallway. Down at the very end, a light was on in some kind of alcove.

Gina hesitated. No guards-excuse me, nurses-keeping watch? She scanned the light-track running the length of the ceiling. The light was damped down, either for night or for her and Mark's benefit, after their long sleep, but she saw nothing other than the unbroken strip of illumination. Fuck it, they wouldn't have been that obvious, to stick eyes where anyone could just look up and see them. And on the other hand, who did they think they were fooling? Did they really think she'd believe she was moving around unobserved after fucking brain surgery?

Fuck 'em. Take a good look at the walking, talking rock'n'roll animal. She went down the hall.

Mark was sitting at a table off to one side in the dormitory-style kitchenette set up in the alcove, eating something unidentifiable out of a plastic dish. She jerked her chin at it.

He held up his dripping spoon. "Fuck if I know, but it's supposed to boost your neurotransmitter production. Brain glop. Tastes a little fishy."

She pulled up the sleeves of the stretchy white jumpsuit or pajama or whatever it was. Mark was wearing the same thing; it made them look like a couple of overgrown kids sneaking a midnight snack while the adults were asleep.

"Is it what you wanted?" she asked.

His head jerked slightly. "Well, it's not what I didn't want, put it that way."

She moved behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. They felt bony and frail. Like always. Abruptly she thought of Gabe Ludovic. The image of him lying on the ground with his face bloody and confused came to her out of nowhere, as intense as one of those inserted images.

Mark put a hand on one of hers, twining their fingers. "I know what I'd like to do right now."

She held very still. He twisted around and looked up at her. He really didn't look too bad. Better than he had in ages, as if a great deal of trouble had dropped away from him. Maybe it was not having to worry anymore. He could just stick a socket in his head and out it would come, essence de V. Mark. Video on tap.

He stood up then and wrapped his arms around her. This was never the easy part. They weren't smooch-faces, it didn't work that way, for her or for him. In twenty-some-odd years she hadn't stopped too often to wonder how it could have gone.

One time, though…one time, three-four-five years into the madness, there'd been a space where they'd come together one night, and it had been different. Hadn't been the first time or the last, but it had definitely been different. Might've just been time for it, time to find out, or try to find out. He'd been reaching, and she'd been reaching, and for a little while there, they'd gotten through. Maybe that had been the night when the little overlapping space called their life had come into existence.

And as if to make the point, as if to make absolutely sure they both understood, he'd put on this music, straight audio, very old stuff, guy named Dylan. I Want You. Very old, very big; maybe too big for either one of them. She remembered being unable to move or talk, or do anything but listen, and at the same time some part of her wanting to laugh her old laugh to break it up and break it down-hey, jellyroll, let's us just sit down and read our profiles in the entrails of popular culture, whaddaya say, but another part of her, the bigger part, got it right away, and that was the part that kept her from laughing. Because if you didn't speak your truth, there was always something that would speak it for you that much louder.

Maybe there'd been a little too much truth in the room with them. Something had almost turned there, but the night ended, and after that they just couldn't ever get it right.

Now she let herself relax into him for the first time in a long time, resting her head on his hard, bony chest and slipping her arms around his waist. Her mind began to drift, unreeling a series of wordless memories and pictures in no particular order, scenes from the old days, from all the days before this one: Mark bending over a screen, his prematurely old face lit by the glow of the rough cut he was previewing for final editing; the Beater sitting at the permanently closed synthesizer, unmoving and unmoved, and Mark standing on the other side, trying to get his mind around it and having a bad time; Mark on the courthouse steps; the Beater facing her with it; the lake with the stony shore-

It came to her like a paper flower unfolding to reveal a secret center. The lake scene was the area where Mark had grown up in New England. She had seen it before, but she had never been there, until now. Whenever now had been.

Gingerly she concentrated, trying to detect a difference of feeling in her mind.

"It's good," he said suddenly, his voice low and easy but too much as if he'd been reading her thoughts-too much by fucking half-and yet she could not move even to look up at him. "I mean, I don't know if it's good, I don't know if it's right, but it sure is good. And I was born to do it, I've been trying to do it all my life, and I never knew it. Someday you're gonna come into a room, and you're gonna see this funny-looking thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console, and you're gonna stop and stare, because you won't be sure where the flesh stops and the chips and the circuits begin. They'll be, like, melted into each other, and some of the console'll be as alive as flesh and some of the flesh'll be dead as console, and that'll be me. All of that'll be me."

Gina said nothing. Her hands pressed into his back.

"I don't know if it's what I want," he added, "but it's what I'm supposed to be." He paused. "I'm sorry."

"What are you sorry for," Gina said quietly. "If it's for me, you're sorrying down the wrong fucking rain barrel." She felt him stiffen just slightly, and she suppressed a smile as she pulled her head back to look up at him. "You're the one who's always needed something to grab onto, someone to throw you a rope outa the deep water." Her mouth twitched. "I was always in it for the music."

His eyes lit up. "You wanna hear some music? Program director's got 'em cued up to the end of the night. There's some stuff in my room. Connection things, a monitor. We got the rest of the equipment."

They walked back to his room with their arms around each other and studied the rig together while she waited, with one part of her mind, to hear someone come down the hall and barge in and explain that they couldn't be doing that now.

But no one came, and eventually Mark was lying down on the narrow bed while she examined the slender wires to be put up against each target area, all of the latter still standing out as shaved areas on his scalp. Just like her own.

The first connection she made threw a green 3-D sketch of Mark's head up on the monitor, with the connection point highlighted amber. More amber points lit up in response to each connection she made, stars winking into existence in a new man-made constellation. You're hot with the poetry tonight, kid, she thought, looking from the monitor to Mark lying on the bed with his eyes closed and a shade of a smile on his lips and the wires flowing from his head in graceful lines. She had a sudden impulse to bend over and kiss him. It would be the first time in she didn't know how long. And maybe the last.

She considered this, looking at the simulation of Mark's brain on the monitor. Her hands were moving idly, palms sliding against each other. Got you a twenty-first-century human person here; maybe twenty-first-century human doesn't kiss. Like, doesn't have to. An image of the lake flashed in the mind and faded. Yah, we got something here a little more lasting than a kiss.

But he's hooked up to the machine, isn't he.

She rubbed a hand over her mouth as if trying to wipe away something; wasn't necessary. The impulse had passed without her doing anything about it. Just as well. It wasn't too cool to kiss someone while he was making love with someone else.

Abruptly he was groping with one hand in the semidark; wanting to hold hers. She reached over and touched his fingers. He grabbed and held on, but she worked her hand out of his grasp.

"I think I need two hands for this," she said, unsure of whether he would actually hear her or not. "You know where I am, though." His hand went back to rest on his stomach; he hadn't opened his eyes.

The image on the monitor gave a jump and disappeared; in its place came a muddy, out-of-focus scene that might have been the lake in an overcast twilight. Two figures moved in the scene, never coming clear before it whited out.

Music came up-she gave a surprised laugh. Very old piece, Lou for-chrissakes-Reed, "Coney Island Baby"; only the two of them would have placed it. The program director was on another nostalgia kick.

What faded back in wasn't Coney Island, a freaky spot that she had been to but the program director had not. Instead, the point of view was traveling low and slow over a terrain she recognized as hypermagnified carpet, pausing occasionally at odd cast-aside items: a shoe, a shirt, some loose change. It reached the side of a rumpled, unmade bed and rose, still moving as slowly as the music, to a shape under the sheets.

Gina made herself keep watching as the pov tracked along the shape, seeming to study the twists and dips in the bedclothes that concealed it. Abruptly the scene cut to an aerial view of a ragged gathering of people in a parking lot at night, and then the pov was tracking the folds in the covers again, winding along.

She swallowed, rubbing her hands together, as the pov moved sideways, showing there was more than one shape under the covers. It began to track along that one, inserting another brief view of the nighttime parking lot, closer this time so that the faces of the people, the crazy, thrown-together clothes, the wild, dancing movements, were clearly visible before the scene cut back to the bed and Mark's sleeping face. It wasn't a peaceful face; drained, if anything, worn out, a preview of a more final sort of rest.

The pov was excruciatingly slow as it moved across Mark's face to her own, lingering on the texture of her dreadlocks next to his pale, drawn flesh, finally moving on to the contrast of her deep brown skin, taking a lot of time to show that both her eyes were closed, but beneath the lids the eyes were moving back and forth restlessly.

Cut back to the hit-and-run in the parking lot, at ground level now: a frantic blond woman with multicolored feathers fighting the storm of her hair pulled the pov along, beckoning with one hand as she backed farther into the party. A young guy with waist-length dreadlocks and flip-aside lenses on his sunglasses joined the woman, grinning widely.

Cut back to the bed: the pov studied how their heads were leaning one on another, just where they touched, going slowly back up along his own face to show that his closed eyes were also in motion. Sliding over to her face again.

Cut: the pov was in the center of an enormous group of people now, trying to pull it every which way under the hard white lights swaying a little on their framework. Looking up at the lights now, the pov began to turn around and around, occasionally glimpsing some of the people around it, spinning faster and faster until the focus blurred and snapped back to the bed.

The pov cruised along her shoulder and down her arm hidden under the covers; then it was suddenly moving along a sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard under glaring sunlight, taking a good look at the signs on the wannabee parlors and the video joints, pausing to look back at the Chinese Theatre, where the tourists were trying on the footprints in the pavement and posing for pictures. A kid dressed in a red garbage bag with HAZARDOUS WASTE stenciled all over it flew into the frame and started batting her hands frantically at the pov, her mouth working angrily. The pov turned aside in imitation of a human ducking the blows, took in a few more of the street regulars coming to see what was going on, more and more faces, all crowded together, becoming smaller and smaller as the pov receded steadily, until the faces were all stones. The pov traveled upward to the grey-white sky, where the faint shadows of the clouds hinted at the twists and folds and dips of sheets before whiting out completely as the music faded.

The schematic of Mark's head, the amber points glowing, reappeared on the screen.

"I'm done," Mark's voice said clearly, coming through the speaker. "Pull 'em out for me, will you?"

He'd already given the command for disconnect. She leaned over and removed the wires from his head. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to move. Then he took a deep breath and sat up, grinning at her. "Pretty coherent, huh?"

"Great," she said. "If anyone wanted a video of some old music with some old people in it."

"The way we're actually gonna do it, the Beater says, is we're gonna take stuff provided by the bands-images, pictures, shit like that-and work it around into some form." He wiggled his eyebrows. "We're real synthesizers now. Real synners."

She looked at him. The question You wanna talk it over? was right behind her lips, just waiting for her voice, but her voice wouldn't come.

"You wanna try it" he asked.

"There's only one rig."

"We'll get yours. There's one in your room."

"There wasn't when I woke up."

"I bet there is now." He looked at her steadily.

"Yah? I bet we could figure out how to hook them together."

"Yah?" His eyes glittered. "Do you want that?"

"No." She bit the inside of her cheek, wondering if he knew she was lying.

He pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms around them. "Why do you think they let us get away with this?"

She laughed suddenly. "What makes you think we got away with anything?" She looked at the now-dark monitor. "I think they watched the whole thing." It hit her just as she said it that she believed that; they would be watching, listening, just as they would after any other kind of surgery. They just weren't being obvious about it. She leaned forward, putting her face close to his. "You wanna do any kind of funny experiments, maybe you oughta wait."

He reached out and put a hand on her cheek, then gathered her into his arms, pulling her onto the narrow bed with him.

She wasn't sure at first what he was doing, or even if he was sure. Then she was helping him strip away his jumpsuit, tearing off her own. Her urgency surprised her, and his surprised her even more. They might have been two frantic kids, hurrying to steal a moment in some space of uncertain privacy.

A feeling of intense familiarity swept through her, body and mind, warming her to him; there was nothing of each other they didn't know, it seemed, as if they had never had separate lives at all.

Manny watched the new video, if that was what it really was, twice through, paying no attention to Travis's running commentary about the clarity and the reality and all that shit.

He was still put out about Travis's failure to install full surveillance in the rooms.

It was every bit as good as Travis was saying it was. He just hoped he'd be able to get the burnout case it had come from focused in the right direction after they got back to the States.