William Gibson "Burning Chrome"
1986

 

 

The Gernsback Continuum

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to be-
come an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse,
it's peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome,
confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was
that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but
it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters
have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid un-
folding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane
monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented
Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to
New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-
length of probability. I've worked hard for that. Tele-
vision helped a lot.
 I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek
taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen's
corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them
thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina.
Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big,
trendy "trade" paperbacks: illustrated histories of the
neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Oc-
cupied Japan. I'd gone over to shoot a series of shoe
ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-
Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the
escalators of St. John's Wood and across the platforms
of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had
decided that the mystery of London Transport would
sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot.
And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in
New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was
due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fash-
ionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes,
who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art
historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside
Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS
WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.
 Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was
the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford pro-
ject, an illustrated history of what she called "Ameri-
can Streamlined Moderne." Cohen called it "raygun
Gothic." Their working title was The Airstream
Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.
 There's a British obsession with the more baroque
elements of American pop culture, something like the
weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans
or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films.
In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a
uniquely American form of architecture that most
Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn't sure
what she was talking about, but gradually it began to
dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday
morning television in the Fifties.
 Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler
on the local station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter
sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden
Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A
Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers
would putter around with this big old Nash with wings,
and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted
Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off,
but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land,
true home of a generation of completely uninhibited
technophiles. She was talking about those odds and
ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture
you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the
movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en-
ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the
chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran-
sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a
dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she
wanted me to photograph them for her.
 The Thirties had seen the first generation of Ameri-
can industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil
sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your
basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of
decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some
pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put to-
gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change
was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made
a certain kind of sense, because the most successful
American designers had been recruited from the ranks
of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a
series of elaborate props for playing at living in the
future.
 Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope
full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the
Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments lean-
ing steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a
dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax
Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing
Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the
employees of Johnson's Wax must have felt as though
they were walking into one of Paul's spray-paint pulp
utopias. Wright's building looked as though it had been
designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite
sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly
grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym-
metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places.
Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand
ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.
 "This thing couldn't have flown. . . ?" I looked at
Dialta Downes.
 
 "Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve
giant props; but they loved the look, don't you see?
New York to London in less than two days, first-class
dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz
in the evening... The designers were populists, you see;
they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What
the public wanted was the future."

I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a
really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the
package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what
isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and consequently a
very marketable talent. While I'm not bad at it, I'm not
exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my
Nikon's credibility. I got out, depressed because I do
like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because
I did make sure I'd gotten the check for the job, and I
decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of
the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me
some books on Thirties design, more photos of stream-
lined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes's fifty
favorite examples of the style in California.
 Architectural photography can involve a lot of wait-
ing; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you
wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want,
or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal
itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought
myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a
few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the
Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister
totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built
for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky:
ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American
subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive
along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress
wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas
stations in a big way.
 During the high point of the Downes Age, they put
Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas
stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo,
he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun
emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured
superfluous central towers ringed with those strange
radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style,
and made them look as though they might generate po-
tent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you
could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot
one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived
and drove right through the structural truth of plaster
and lathing and cheap concrete.
 "Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind
of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An
architecture of broken dreams."
 And that was my frame of mind as I made the sta-
tions of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my
red Toyota as I gradually tuned in to her image of a
shadowy America-that-wasn't, of Coca-Cola plants like
beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like
the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue
mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these
secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the in-
habitants of that lost future would think of the world I
lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-
stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze,
but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps
had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.
After the war, everyone had a car no wings for it and
the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the
sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and
pitted the miracle crystal. . .
 And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I
was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of
Ming's martial architecture, I penetrated a fine mem-
brane, a membrane of probability...
Every so gently, I went over the Edge
And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a
bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east
with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the
rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear maybe the echo
of jazz.

I took it to Kihn.
 Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive
line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees,
bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten con-
spiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American
mass mind.
 "It's good," said Kihn, polishing his yellow
Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian
shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true quill."
 But I saw it, Mervyn." We were seated poolside in
brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for
a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader
received messages from Them on her microwave oven.
I'd driven all night and was feeling it.
 "Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've
read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution
to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and country sim-
ple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long
hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare
 "see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing's
there, but people see them anyway. Because they need
to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the
score... .In your case, it's so obvious: You admit you
were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having
fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share of
drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in
California without having the odd hallucination? All
those nights when you discovered that whole armies of
Disney technicians had been employed to weave
animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the
fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when "
 "But it wasn't like that."
"Of course not. It wasn't like that at all; it was `in a
setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and
then there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar.
In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all
the time. You aren't even crazy. You know that, don't
you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler
beside his deck chair.
 "Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I
interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted
bya bar hade."
 ``A what?"
 "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar
hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying
saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin
Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two
cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up
behind its ears." He burped. -
 "It assaulted her? How?"
 "You don't want to know; you're obviously im-
pressionable. `It was cold' " he lapsed into his bad
southern accent " `and metallic.' It made electronic
noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods
from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a
witch. There's just no place for her to function in this
society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been
brought up on `The Bionic Man' and all those `Star
Trek' reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she
knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes
before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the
polygraph."
 I must have looked pained, because he set his beer
down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.
 "If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you
saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for in-
stance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that
permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens
that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phan-
toms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off
and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air-
ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That
plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You
picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not
to worry about it."
 I did worry about it, though.
 Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off
to hear what They had had to say over the radar range
lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down
in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still
worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note
on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane
to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor ("muties," he
called them; another of his journalistic specialties).
 I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill
that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shav-
ing kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.
 The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the
Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told
myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and
stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing
of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous
vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's
eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own
ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already think-
ing of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my
head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.
Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind
of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated
the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road
began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images,
glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.
 I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum
beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I
wondered what time it was in London, and tried to
imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hamp-
stead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines
and books on American culture.
 Desert nights in that country are enormous; the
moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and
decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to
worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were
more normal than I'd ever aspired to be saw giant birds,
Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and
solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s
pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to
sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattle-
snakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly
roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the
morning I'd drive down to Nogales and photograph the
old brothels, something I'd intended to do for years.
The diet pill had given up.

The light woke me, and then the.voices.
 The light came from somewhere behind me and
threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were
calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversa-
tion.
 My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their
sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the
steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of
my work shirt and finally got them on.
 Then I looked behind me and saw the city.
 The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one
of them contained sketches of an idealized city that
drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared
everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect
clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city
was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire
stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to
a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy
radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could
hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those
towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires,
crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads
of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant
wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of
the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose
gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance),
mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were
gyrocopters...
 I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat.
When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage
meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic
dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.
 "Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my
eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed
filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I
turned the headlights on.
 And saw them.
 They were blond. They were standing beside their
car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rud-
der jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like
a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was
gesturing toward the city. They were both in white:
loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes.
Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my
headlights. He was saying something wise and strong,
and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened,
frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had
ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city
behind me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out
of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, en-
tirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and
they frightened me.
 They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80-
that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were
white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They
were American. Dialta had said that the Future had
come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But
not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on
and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution,
the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was
possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly
content with themselves and their world. And in the
Dream, it was their world.
 Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept
the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them throng-
ing the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their
bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit
avenues and silver cars.
 It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth prop-
aganda.
 I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until
the bumper was within three feet of them. They still
hadn't seen me. I rolled the window down and listened
to what the man was saying. His words were bright and
hollow as the pitch in some Chamber of Commerce
brochure, and I knew that he believed in them abso-
lutely.
 "John," I heard the woman say, "we've forgotten
to take our food pills." She clicked two bright wafers
from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed
onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing
and shaking my head.

I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad
Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and
didn't seem to mind the call.
 "Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any
pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an in-
teresting frisson to your story, not having the pictures
turnout.
 But what should I do?
 "Watch lots of television, particularly game shows
and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love
Motel? They've got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just
what you need."
 What was he talking about?
 "Quit yelling and listen to me. I'm letting you in on
a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your
semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my
back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours.
Try it. What have you got to lose?"
 Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning
date with the Elect.
 "The who?"
 "These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the
microwaves. ~
 I considered putting a collect call through to Lon-
don, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him
his photographer was checked out for a protracted
season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine
mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and
climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los
Angeles.
 Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks
there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the
Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream
waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a
stretch of overpass near Disneyland, when the road
fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving
through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome tear-
drops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full
of people who looked too much like the couple I'd seen
in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making
ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio
decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he
made prints of all the negatives I'd accumulated on the
Downes job. I didn't want to look at the stuff myself. It
didn't seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he
was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them
like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air
freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that
was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all
the way.
 Cohen's congratulatory wire was forwarded to me
in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pic-
tures. He admired the way I'd ``really gotten into it,''
and looked forward to working with me again. That
afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but
there was something tenuous about it, as though it were
only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and
gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum
crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to
buy a plane ticket for New York.
 "Hell of a world we live in, huh?" The proprietor
was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig.
I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to
find a park bench where I could submerge myself in
hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in.
"But it could be worse, huh?"
 "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be
perfect."
 He watched me as I headed down the street with my
little bundle of condensed catasttophe.
 
Fragments of a Hologram Rose 
 

That summer Parker had trouble sleeping.
 There were power droughts; sudden failures of the
delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to con-
sciousness.
 To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature
alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a
battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer
would trigger the deck's playback circuit.
 He bought an ASP cassette that began with the sub-
ject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a
young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally
acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados
for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning's
exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The
microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case
explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha
to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been
able to sleep without an inducer for two years, won-
dered if this was possible.
 He had been able to sit through the whole thing
only once, though by now he knew every sensation of
the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most in-
teresting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at
the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift
glance down the white beach that picked out the figure
of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a black machine
pistol slung over his arm.
 While Parker slept, power drained from the city's
grids.
 The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark
implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the
shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The
cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare
ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake
fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra~something; with
other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP
deck.
Three in the morning.

   Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a
flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
   Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other
eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter fading with the
horizon it navigates across the mind's gray screen.
   Three in the morning.
   Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat
schematic images. What you said what she said
watching her pack dialing the cab. However you
shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hiero-
glyphs converging on a central component; you, stand-
ing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.
   The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss.
The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay
twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his
respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He
pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.
   The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you
the finger.

Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown
called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in
cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot
bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a
Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter
perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model
 heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to
buy a gun than a hot bath.
 He was in New York with forged papers a year
later, when two leading firms had the first portable
decks in major department stores in time for Christmas.
The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in
California never recovered.
 Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller
domes that had been the holo temples of Parker's
childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed
dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the
old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SEN-
SORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette
smoke.
 Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for
broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the
industry's human cameras.

The brown-out continues.
 In the bedroom, Parker prods the bru~hed-alu-
minum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light
flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he
crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day
before. The flashlight's beam probes the bare shelves
for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal
strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is
a white light reflection holo&ram of a rose.
 At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the
disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains,
but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between
thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward
the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as
steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shred-
ded into a thousand fragments.
 Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cas-
sette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women's
tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he
now hesitates to start the machine.
 Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to
comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of
the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP
stars have become increasingly androgynous in an at-
tempt to capture this segment of the audience.
 But Angela's own tapes have never intimidated him
before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that
can't be it it's simply that the cassette is an entirely
unknown quantity.

When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to
the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine.
At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to
indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he
lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company
hymns in formation each morning and usually manag-
ing to go over the compound fence at least once a month
for girls or the holodrome.
   The indenture would have terminated on his twen-
tieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee
status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two
stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over
the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three
days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime col-
lapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit
and ran in the streets. One or another of four different
"provisional" city governments had done such an effi-
cient job of stockpiling food that almost none was
available at street level.
 Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a
burned-out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin
teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer
points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent
weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with
anything he did or said.
 Years later he realized that he no longer had any
idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.
 * * *
The first three quarters of the cassette have been erased;
you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze
of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single
channel. The audio input is white sound the no-sound
of the first dark sea. . . .(Prolonged input from wiped
tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at
midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame
lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson.
The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white
sheet of heat lightning that had turned the pale branches
of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic
negative of themselves: carbon branches against mag-
nesium sky.
 Many of the refugees were armed.
 Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the
warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had main-
tained in the face of the Coast's attempted secession.
 The towns were built of plywood, cardboard,
plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies
of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and
Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and ter-
ritories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a
black-market economy.
 Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw
towns seldom found anything. But after each search, a
few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their
weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had
come too close to the contraband they had been sent to
find.
 After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods
were the only safe passage through the army cordons.
His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon,
skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low
over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body
of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry
cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a
leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He
began to search the creek bed for a length of brush-
wood.
 In the jacket's back, lust below her left shoulder
blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the
shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had been red once,
but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood.
With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went
looking for water.
 j-Ie never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he
found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in
plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right pocket
held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch
horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth
twice its weight in cocaine.
 He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump
passed over by the Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung
the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
 That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof,
waiting for one of the "lawyers" who worked passages
through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It
was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very
proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.

If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift
in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift
away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a
pre-holographic society, what should we expect
from this newer technology, with his promise of
discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction
of the full range of sensory perception?
 Roebuck and Pierhal, Recent
American History: A Systems
View.

Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped
tape into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a
strange city.
 Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...
 and the smell of dust.

 Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman
hasn't met you yet; you're hardly out of Texas) at the
gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons
whirl up and circle
  and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and
gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that
isn't there. And the tape ends.

The inducer's light is burning now.
  Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand
fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this
quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will
reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta,
he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments
revealing a whole he'll never know stolen credit
cards a burned- out suburb planetary conjunctions
of a stranger a tank burning on a highway a flat
packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin
as pain.
Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it
always this way? That instant of a European trip,
deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape is she closer
now, or more real, for his having been there?
 She had helped him get his papers, found him his
first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was
the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet,
and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the
perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at
the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back
through the contaminated rain.

 But each fragment reveals the rose from a different
angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before
he could ask himself what that might mean.

The Belonging Kind

by John Shirley and William Gibson

 

It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo's, or Sad
Jack's, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where
he'd first seen her. At any time, she might have been in
any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine
half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of
cigarette smoke . . . she moved through her natural ele-
ment, one bar after another.
 Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if
he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful tele-
scope, small and clear and very far away.
 He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It
was called the Backdoor because you entered through a
narrow back alley. The alley's walls crawled with graf-
fiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its
white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you
pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly
confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had
tried and failed in the same room under different
managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he
liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and
because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
 He wasn't very good at conversation with stran-
gers, not at parties and not in bars.
He was fine at the community college where he
lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with
the head of his department about sequencing and op-
tions in conversational openings. But he could never
talk to strangers in bars or at parties. He didn't go to
many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
 Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a
language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer,
unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion state-
ment that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife
told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn't look
as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn't
liked her saying that, because it was true.
 He hadn't ever had a girl like the one who sat with
her back arched slightly in the undersea light that
splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light
was screwed into the lenses of the bartender's glasses,
wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed
dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the
green of young corn, like a husk half stripped away,
showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the
slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that night. And,
that night, her eyes were green.
 He pushed resolutely between the empty chrome-
and-Formica tables until he reached the bar, where he
ordered a straight bourbon. He took off his duffle coat,
and wound up holding it on his lap when he sat down
one stool away from her. Great, he screamed to himself,
she'll think you're hiding an erection. And he was
startled to realize that he had one to hide. He studied
himself in the mirror behind the bar, a thirtyish man
with thinning dark hair and a pale, narrow face on a
long neck, too long for the open collar of the nylon shirt
printed with engravings of 1910 automobiles in three
vivid colors. He wore a tie with broad maroon and black
diagonals, too narrow, he supposed, for what he now
saw as the grotesquely long points of his collar. Or it
was the wrong color. Something.
 Beside him, in the dark clarity of the mirror, the
green-eyed woman looked like Irma La Douce. But
looking closer, studying her face, he shivered. A face
like an animal's. A beautiful face, but simple, cunning,
two-dimensional. When she senses you're looking at
her, Coretti thought, she'll give you the smile, disdain-
ful amusement or whatever you'd expect.
 Coretti blurted, "May I, um, buy you a drink?"
 At moments like these, Coretti was possessed by an
agonizingly stiff, schoolmasterish linguistic tic. Um. He
winced. Um.
 "You would, um, like to buy me a drink? Why,
how kind of you," she said, astonishing him. "That
would be very nice." Distantly, he noticed that her reply
was as stilted and insecure as his own. She added, "A
Tom Collins, on this occasion, would be lovely."
 On this occasion? Lovely? Rattled, Coretti ordered
two drinks and paid.
 A big woman in jeans and an embroidered cowboy
shirt bellied up to the bar beside him and asked the
bartender for change. "Well, hey," she said. Then she
strutted to the jukebox and punched for Conway and
Loretta's "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly."
Coretti turned to the woman in green, and murmured
haltingly:
 "Do you enjoy country-and-western music?" Do
you enjoy... ? He groaned secretly at his phrasing, and
tried to smile.
 "Yes indeed," she answered, the faintest twang
edging her voice, "I sure do."
 The cowgirl sat down beside him and asked her,
winking, "This li'l terror here givin' you a hard time?"
 And the animal-eyed lady in green replied, "Oh,
hell no, honey, I got my eye on `im." And laughed. Just
the right amount of laugh. The part of Coretti that was
dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in
phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic?
The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he
pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the
rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of
glass.
 "The name's Coretti," he said, his verbal
poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing
tough-guy mode, "Michael Coretti."
 "A pleasure," she said, too softly for the other
woman to hear, and again she had slipped into the lame
parody of Emily Post.
 "Conway and Loretta," said the cowgirl, to no one
in particular.
 "Antoinette," said the woman in green, and in-
clined her head. She finished her drink, pretended to
glance at a watch, said thank-you-for-the-drink too
damn politely, and left.
 Ten minutes later Coretti was following her down
Third Avenue. He had never followed anyone in his life
and it both frightened and excited him. Forty feet
seemed a discreet distance, but what should he do if she
happened to glance over her shoulder?
 Third Avenue isn't a dark street, and it was there,
in the light of a streetlamp, like a stage light, that she
began to change. The street was deserted.
 She was crossing the street. She stepped off the
curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair at
first he thought they were reflections. But there was no
neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared,
color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors
bled away and in three seconds she was white-blond. He
was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began
to writhe, twisting across her body like shrink-wrap
plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling
shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabu-
lous animal. When Coretti passed, it was green foam,
fizzing, dissolving, gone. He looked back up at her and
the dress was another dress, green satin, shifting with
reflections. Her shoes had changed too. Her shoulders
were bare except for thin straps that crossed at the small
of her back. Her hair had become short, spiky.
 He found that he was leaning against a jeweler's
plate-glass window, his breath coming ragged and harsh
with the damp of the autumn evening. He heard the
disco's heartbeat from two blocks away. As she neared
it, her movements began subtly to take on a new
rhythm a shift in emphasis in the sway of her hips, in
the way she put her heels down on the sidewalk. The
doorman let her pass with a vague nod. He stopped Cor-
etti and stared at his driver's license and frowned at his
duffle coat. Coretti anxiously scanned the wash of lights
at the top of a milky plastic stairway beyond the door-
man. She had vanished there, into robotic flashing and
redundant thunder.
 Grudgingly the man let him pass, and he pounded
up the stairs, his haste disturbing the lights beneath the
translucent plastic steps.
 Coretti had never been in a disco before; he found
himself in an environment designed for complete satis-
faction-in-distraction. He waded nervously through the
motion and the fashions and the mechanical urban
chants booming from the huge speakers. He sought her
almost blindly on the pose-clotted dance floot, amid
strobe lights.
 And found her at the bar, drinking a tall, lurid
cooler and listening to a young man who wore a loose
shirt of pale silk and very tight black pants. She nodded
at what Coretti took to be appropriate intervals. Coretti
ordered by pointing at a bottle of bourbon. She drank
five of the tall drinks and then followed the young man
to the dance floor.
 She moved in perfect accord with the music, strik-
ing a series of poses; she went through the entire
prescribed sequence, gracefully but not artfully, fitting
in perfectly. Always, always fitting in perfectly. Her
companion danced mechanically, moving through the
ritual with effort.
 When the dance ended, she turned abruptly and
dived into the thick of the crowd. The shifting throng
closed about her like something molten.
 Coretti plunged in after her, his eyes never leaving
her and he was the only one to follow her change. By
the time she reached the stair, she was auburn-haired
and wore a long blue dress. A white flower blossomed in
her hair, behind her right ear; her hair was longer and
straighter now. Her breasts had become slightly larger,
and her hips a shade heavier. She took the stairs two at a
time, and he was afraid for her then. All those drinks.
 But the alcohol seemed to have had no effect on her
at all.
 Never taking his eyes from her, Coretti followed,
his heartbeat outspeeding the disco-throb at his back,
sure that at any moment she would turn, glare at him,
call for help.
 Two blocks down Third she turned in at Lotha-
rio's. There was something different in her step now.
Lothario's was a quiet complex of rooms hung with
ferns and Art Deco mirrors. There were fake Tiffany
lamps hanging from the ceiling, alternating with
wooden-bladed fans that rotated too slowly to stir the
wisps of smoke drifting through the consciously mellow
drone of conversation. After the disco, Lothario's was
familiar and comforting. A jazz pianist in pinstriped
shirt sleeves and loosely knotted tie competed softly
with talk and laughter from a dozen tables.
 She was at the bar; the stools were only half taken,
but Coretti chose a wall table, in the shadow of a
miniature palm, and ordered bourbon.
 He drank the bourbon and ordered another. He
couldn't feel the alcohol much tonight.
 She sat beside a young man, yet another young man
with the usual set of bland, regular features. He wore a
yellow golf shirt and pressed jeans. Her hip was touch-
ing his, just a little. They didn't seem to be speaking,
but Coretti felt they were somehow communing. They
were leaning toward one another slightly, silent. Coretti
felt odd. He went to the rest room and splashed his face
with water. Coining back, he managed to pass within
three feet of them. Their lips didn't move till he was
within earshot.
 They took turns murmuring realistic palaver:
saw l~is earlier films, but "
 "But he's rather self-indulgent, don't you think?"
 "Sure, but in the sense that..
 And for the first time, Coretti knew what they
were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in
bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely
at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Func-
tions of the bar. The belonging kind.
 Something in him yearned for a confrontation. He
reached his table, but found himself unable to sit down.
He turned, took a deep breath, and walked woodenly
toward the bar. He wanted to tap her on her smooth
shoulder and ask who she was, and exactly what she
was, and point out the cold irony of the fact that it was
he, Coretti, the Martian dresser, ~he eavesdropper, the
outsider, the one whose clothes and conversation never
fit, who had at last guessed their secret.
 But his nerve broke and he merely took a seat
beside her and ordered bourbon.
 "But don't you think," she asked her companion,
"that it's all relative?"
 The two seats beyond her companion were quickly
taken by a couple who were talking politics. Antoinette
and Golf Shirt took up the political theme seamlessly.
recycling, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard.
Her face, as she spoke, was expressionless. A bird trill-
ing on a limb.
 She sat so easily on her stool, as if it were a nest.
Golf Shirt paid for the drinks. He always had the exact
change, unless he wanted to leave a tip. Coretti watched
them work their way methodically through six cocktails
each, like insects feeding on nectar. But their voices
never grew louder, their cheeks didn't redden, and when
at last they stood, they moved without a trace of
drunkenness a weakness, thought Coretti, a gap in
their camouflage.
 They paid him absolutely no attention while he
followed them through three successive bars.

 As they entered Waylon's, they metamorphosed so
quickly that Coretti had trouble following the stages of
the change. It was one of those places with toilet doors
marked Pointers and Setters, and a little imitation pine
plaque over the jars of beef jerky and pickled sausages:
We've got a deal with the bank. They don't serve beer
and we don't cash checks.
 She was plump in Waylon's, and there were dark
hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her
polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T-
shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peter-
bilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a
frantic minute in "Pointers," blinking in confusion at a
hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to
please  You aim too, please.
 Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a
petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright
vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men
dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever
behind the fogged plate glass of faded hotels.
 The bar they found there had no name. An ace of
diamonds was gradually flaking away on the unwashed
window, and the bartender had a face like a closed fist.
An FM transistor in ivory plastic keened easy-listening
rock to the uneven ranks of deserted tables. They drank
beer and shots. They were old now, two ciphers who
drank and smoked in the light of bare bulbs, coughing
over a pack of crumpled Camels she produced from the
pocket of a dirty tan raincoat.
 At 2:25 they were in the rooftop lounge of the new
hotel complex that rose above the waterfront. She wore
an evening dress and he wore a dark suit. They drank
cognac and pretended to admire the city lights. They
each had three cognacs while Coretti watched them over
two ounces of Wild Turkey in a Waterford crystal
highball glass.
 They drank until last call. Coretti followed them
into the elevator. They smiled politely but otherwise ig-
nored him. There were two cabs in front of the hotel;
they took one, Coretti the other.
 "Follow that cab," said Coretti huskily, thrusting
his last twenty at the aging hippie driver.
 "Sure, man, sure. . . ." The driver dogged the
other cab for six blocks, to another, more modest hotel.
They got out and went in. Coretti slowly climbed out of
his cab, breathing hard.
 He ached with jealousy: for the personification of
conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this
human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel and lost
his nerve. He turned away.
 He walked home. Sixteen blocks. At some point he
realized that he wasn't drunk. Not drunk at all.

In the morning he phoned in to cancel his early class.
But his hangover never quite came. His mouth wasn't
desiccated, and staring at himself in the bathroom mir-
ror he saw that his eyes weren't bloodshot.
 In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheep-
faced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles.

That night he went out to dinner, alone and ate
nothing. The food looked back at him, somehow. He
stirred it about to make it look as if he'd eaten a little,
paid, and went to a bar. And another. And another bar,
looking for her. He was using his credit card now,
though he was already badly in the hole under Visa. If
he saw her, he didn't recognize her.
 Sometimes he watched the hotel he'd seen her go
into. He looked carefully at each of the couples who
came and went. Not that he'd be able to spot her from
her looks alone but there should be a feeling, some
kind of intuitive recognition. He watched the couples
and he was never sure.
 In the following weeks he systematically visited
every boozy watering hole in the city. Armed at first
with a city map and five torn Yellow Pages, he gradually
progressed to the more obscure establishments, places
with unlisted numbers. Some had no phone at all. He
joined dubious private clubs, discovered unlicensed
after-hours retreats where you brought your own, and
sat nervously in dark rooms devoted to areas of fringe
sexuality he had not known existed.
 But he continued on what became his nightly cir-
cuit. He always began at the Backdoor. She was never
there, or in the next place, or the next. The bartenders
knew him and they liked to see him come in, because he
brought drinks continuously, and never seemed to get
drunk. So he stared at the other customers a bit so
what?
 Coretti lost his job.
 He'd missed classes too many times. He'd taken to
watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime.
He'd been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to
change his clothes. He refused night classes. He would
let a lecture trail off in the middle as he turned to gaze
vacantly out the window.
 He was secretly pleased at being fired. They had
looked at him oddly at faculty lunches when he couldn't
eat his food. And now he had more time for the search.
 Coretti found her at 2:15 on a Wednesday morn-
ing, in a gay bar called the Barn. Paneled in rough wood
and hung with halters and rusting farm equipment, the
place was shrill with perfume and laughter and beer. She
was everyone's giggling sister, in a blue-sequined dress,
a green feather in her coiffed brown hair. Through a
sweeping sense of almost cellular relief, Coretti was
aware of a kind of admiration, a strange pride he now
felt in her and her kind. Here, too, she belonged. She
was a representative type, a fag-hag who posed no
threat to the queens or their butchboys. Her companion
had become an ageless man with carefully silvered
temples, an angora sweater, and a trench coat.
 They drank and drank, and went laughing
 laughing just the right sort of laughter out into the
rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat
of Coretti's heart.
 Jockeying clumsily across the wet sidewalk, Coretti
scurried into the cab, dreading their reaction.
 Coretti was in the back seat, beside her.
 The man with silver temples spoke to the driver.
The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears,
and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened
streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti,
who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray
man and the laughing woman pushing him out and
pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or:
the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their
heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stop-
ping in an empty side street where they methodically
throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he
was an outsider.
 But they arrived at Coretti's hotel.
 In the dim glow of the cab's dome light he watched
closely as the man reached into his coat for the fare.
Coretti could see the coat's lining clearly and it was one
piece with the angora sweater. No wallet bulged there,
and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as
the man's fingers poised over it, and it disgorged
money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly
from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as
the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just
emerging from the chrysalis.
 "Keep the change," said the belonging man, climb-
ing out of the cab. Antoinette slid out and Coretti
followed, his mind seeing only the slit. The slit wet,
edged with red, like a gill.
 The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent
over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the
lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once
he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And
once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti's
own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall
ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground.
 Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors
are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audi-
ble sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices
speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor
corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect
vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on
the colorless carpet and even the beating of his out-
sider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that
decorated the wallpaper.
 He tried to count the small plastic ovals screwed on
the doors, each with its own three figures, but the cor-
ridor seemed to go on forever. At last the man halted
before a door, a door veneered like all the rest with im-
itation rosewood, and put his hand over the lock, his
palm flat against the metal. Something scraped softly
and then the mechanism clicked and the door swung
open. As the man withdrew his hand, Coretti saw a
grayish-pink, key-shaped sliver of bone retract wetly
into the pale flesh.
 No light burned in that room, but the city's dim
neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and al-
lowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people
who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the arm-
chairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he
thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized
that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nictitating mem-
branes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of
neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar
had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat
beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns
beside dusty factory clothes, biker's leather by brushed
Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had
vanished.
They were roosting.
 His couple seated themselves on the edge of the
Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti
hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years
of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others,
but something called to him across the distance, promis-
ing rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated,
shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the
genetic core of his body's every cell.
 Until they opened their eyes, all of them simul-
taneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the
alien calm of dwellers in the ocean's darkest trench.
 Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along
corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool
rain and the nearly empty streets.
 Coretti never returned to his room on the third
floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the
linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they
were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a
boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led
her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked
evening meal. She didn't mind that Coretti never joined
them for those meals; he explained that he was given
free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He
never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came
home drunk. Mr. Coretti was a little odd, but always
paid his rent on time. And he was very