Complete Stories (124 page)

“We can’t let it set up like this,” says Zep. “We can’t let the boring crud win.”

“I can help,” says Kaya, solemn beneath her hand-drawn eyebrows. “Me and my tiki.”

Standing erect on the rear of Zep’s board, Kaya stretches her arms along the curve of an invisible circle whose far perimeter rings the tiki goddess. Kaya undulates her arms with a snaky wriggle and then—she’s teleported herself to the longboard, replacing the tiki in the embrace of Lex Loach, with the tiki herself once again an amulet hanging from a bright red thread around Kaya’s neck.

With a quick, efficient motion, Kaya elbows Loach in the solar plexus. His hold weakens and just then one of the boob-blobs, hovering like a satellite around its former owner, flattens and goes hard. It catches Loach in the face, rocking him back on his heels. Kaya reaches out and gives Loach a graceful one-finger shove. He slides off the board and hangs in mid-air like cartoon shock personified: a fixed expression of gaping eyes, open mouth, raised eyebrows. And then he begins to fall, not quite touching the face of the nearly vertical wave.

It’s up to the three surfers to find a new home for the human race. With a supreme effort of will, Zep morphs his dinky Perfect Wave cave board into his good stick Chaos Attractor. The board’s oddly adhesive surface seethes with sharp-cornered cubic waves. With a grim smile, Zep ups the simulation chaoticity yet again.

Feeling the fresh burst of energy, Kaya swings her massive longboard about, sending a square-humped wake towards Del, passing him that last extra bit of force that he needs. And now Del flies up the glassy cliff towards the very peak of the wave, streaking like a shooting star, sliding across the still-living liquid crest.

“Lead the wave, Del!” calls Zep.

Looking down from his vantage point, Del sees Zep and Kaya stuck at the edges of a boring opaque stain that’s turning to obsidian, to coal, to black ice. And below that is—something worse. Del hears the crystals forming far below, the dull sound of degenerate matter clanking into place. But he knows better than to dwell on that.

“Tubeleader Aspect!” he cries, his personal war-whoop.

There’s still just room for him to ride, a thin, curling edge of dancing water. He crouches, feeling the outlines of the subdimensional reef viscerally through his feet, lowering his center of gravity to shift the moving mass of the wave.

The tipmost wave tube constricts and closes him in. But in a sense, he and his friends have designed this break. He knows what awaits them on the other side, for they’ve designed that too. Del’s creating it even now, sculpting it into being as he carves the planetary wave towards a new solution

“Surf into the light,” he tells himself, and laughs. And then he’s through the final tube.

-----

Lex Loach wakes as he always does, with an abrupt twitch that startles him out of sleep with a gasp. It’s always the same, the dream of an endless fall that ends the moment he hits the sand. His eyes gape and he chokes back a groan at once again finding himself curled up with a ratty old beach towel for a blanket, groggy under the boardwalk. Same old, same old—the scuffing footsteps of morning joggers overhead, the sand in his eyes and mouth and hair and all the creases of his skin. He drags himself out on hands and knees, squinting at the Inner Sun burning through the glary fog. Sandpipers patrol the wet strip just above the tide.

A cold shower in the public restrooms removes most of the sand. He blots himself with his sandy, sodden towel, then hits the hot air blower three times to dry his pubes, and a fourth time just because it is one of the day’s few pleasures.

As he trudges back down the beach toward his job, he glares at Zep’s mural—considers hawking phlegm on it, but he’s been caught at this before by the Surf Shack’s proprietor, with heavy consequences. The boss is a beast.

Lex rounds the corner of the restaurant, pushes open the back door, takes up the broom propped there and goes out again to sweep the parking lot. The trash bin reeks. Later he’ll be cleaning it out. Something to look forward to. As he’s brushing sullenly at spilled cornmeal and soda-straw wrappers, he hears a commotion down on the beach, and pokes his head around the corner.

There’s a platform under construction on a paved stretch near the playground, just above the sand. Giant speakers, a mike stand, and huge banners going up:

“SURF CITY WELCOMES TUBELEADER DELBERT!”

Frikkin’ Delbert, Loach thinks. Frikkin’ hometown homecoming for the hero, back from his epic journey across the interior of the earth, sweeping every tourney. Every night the TV in the Cheezemore Ratt Surf Shack is tuned to Delbert accepting some giant golden cup, or some enormous golden check for a million bucks, with golden babes hanging off his shoulders. While Lex is slaving here, living off discarded crusts and soda dregs, sleeping in the sand.

“Hey, Lex, whatcha doin?” Here she is, bugging him again.

“Hey, Jen,” says Lex with a shrug. Jen makes him nervous. He can’t figure out why she’s nice to a loser like him. Obviously there’s something wrong with her. “I got work to do,” he says. “He’ll be all over me if I stop.”

“Oh…okay, well…you know Delbert’s coming by in the afternoon? He’s in town for Zep and Kaya’s wedding anniversary? There’s gonna be a party at their beach cottage on the North End, and I was thinking, maybe, if you wanted to, you know, come with me, I could get you in?”

Lex stops moving, grabs onto the broom handle as if it’s a lifeline, a crutch, putting his whole weight into it. What the fuck is going on with him? Are those tears? His belly is spasming. He’s a crybaby now, on top of everything else?

“Sorry, Lex, if you don’t want to…”

“I don’t know, Jen, all right? Let me think about, okay? Jeez!”

She steps back and if she says anything else, it’s drowned out by the sound of the screen door slamming. The boss is coming after him. As usual.

“You done sweeping, Loach? Then get out the bleach and go after the dumpster.”

The voice is so harsh it cuts through Lex’s general despair and makes his base-line resentments seem like dreams of paradise. But what can he say? The old bastard has legally indentured Lex via some unsavory deal that Loach Senior could never bring himself to speak of—and then Loach Senior died. Lex has no choice but to live with the unbreakable contract. Under the boardwalk.

“Almost, yeah,” he mumbles.

“What’s that?” says the Surf Shack’s owner, coming in closer, leaning over him, the smell of melted cheese on his breath making Lex wilt away as if from one of the pizza ovens.

“Almost done, sir,” says Lex a bit louder.

“Squeak up, boy!”

Lex draws himself upright, to his full six foot two, from which height he still has to look up another foot or so to meet the black beady eyes of his employer.

“I said yes, sir, Mr. Ratt, sir, I’m almost done with the work,” barks Lex.

“That’s the right attitude,” says the shopkeeper, adjusting his tall silk hat. “That’s how it’s gotta be. Maybe someday, when you’ve paid off your debt, say five or ten years from now, I’ll let you call me Cheezemore. Like my friends do. Till then you’re mine, boy. I own you.”

The screen door slaps shut. Lex waits a moment, till Ratt is gone for sure, then sags against the broomstick he clutches. Jen comes to him again, gently rubbing his aching back.

Lex looks look out at the waves, wishing they could carry him away, but it’s hopeless. The ocean curves up and up into mist, offering no chance of escape. As far as he might sail, the great seas of the Hollow Earth would wrap around and bring him right back here.

It’s Del, Zep and Kaya’s world—at least for now. But perhaps there’s hope.

Maybe someday the perfect wave will break.

============

Written May, 2007.

Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
, 2008.

This is the fourth of the Surf City stories that Marc and I have co-authored over the years, following on “Probability Pipeline,” “Chaos Surfari,” and “The Andy Warhol Sand Candle.” In a loose transreal sense, I am Zep and Marc is Del. When we wrote “The Perfect Wave,” Marc was working at the game company, Valve, and he had some good ideas about the gaming environment. It takes a bit of effort to bring something new to the theme of video games merging with reality. I was happy how Marc worked in a reference to the Hollow Earth at the end. The tale got a great cover on
Asimov’s
.

Quite recently my antiquarian bookseller friend, Revel Gibson, came into possession of five previously unpublished letters written by William Burroughs in Tangier, Morocco. The letters are variously addressed to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and to Burroughs’s father, Mortimer. The letters date from December 20, 1954 to December 25, 1954; the first two are hand-written, and the final three are typed. The muse of history agreeably grants that these letters sketch out a sequel to the events I describe in my report, “The Imitation Game.” I am presently researching the history of the Burroughs Corporation’s Special Systems Research Lab in Paoli, Pennsylvania, 1954-1958, to see if further traces of Alan Turing’s hidden career can be found. — R.R.

-----

To Allen Ginsberg

Tangiers, December 20, 1954

Dear Allen,

I been pounding my keys for a silo-fulla-queer-corn story this month…to the point where my typewriter seize up and croak. So I come at you direct through my quivering quill. Imagine a hack writer fixes with ink and he enters his personal Xanadu pleasure dream. But then the Great Publisher reject him outta Eden.

I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got everything I want. Each trip to the homeland drags me more. How did we ever let our cops get so out of hand?

If I ever started feeling sorry for my parents, I’d never stop. I’m a disappointment, but having gone thus far, I’d be a fool not to go further. My word hoard is compost, from which the lovely lilies will bloom.

Too bad you and me didn’t contact personal for orgone fix, but I couldn’t make it to California with all them conditionals you were laying down.

Why are you scared of mind-meld? Our buddy-buddy microscopic symbiotes do it alla time. Dysenteric amoeba Bil meets sexy-in-his-bristles paramecium Al, they rub pellicles—ah, the exquisite prickling, my dear—and
shlup
! My protoplasm is yours, old thing, the two of us conjugated into a snot-wad so cozy. I see me in a Mother Bull Hubbard ectoplasmic gown, tatting antimacassars to drape over that
harrumph
Golgi apparatus of yours.

“Just a routine,” says Clem, standing bare-ass on the milking stool while the gray mare kicks screaming through the barn wall. “Sorry, old girl, I meant to use lard, not liniment.”

The local worthies presented me with the key to the city—a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques. Ululating crowds of Spanish and Arab boys bore my pierced sedan chair though the streets. I’m installed in a Casbah seraglio, $23 per month, a clean plaster suite at Piet the Procurer’s, with an extra bedroom and a balcony affording microscopic views of the souk.

Brilliant clear Mediterranean skies. I’m a myrmecophilous arthropod in the African anthill—a parasite/symbiote whom the Insect Trust tolerates on account of my tasty secretions.

Science-fiction idea for a virus that infects matter. It’s, like, a rune cast by alien cockroaches. The Roach Rune leeches the sparkle of the sun from the waves, the Japanese outlines from the pines, the exquisite curls of steam from my cup of mint tea. These stolen vital forces are channeled into reanimated zombie minions of Harry J. Anslinger patrolling every street corner of Our Cuntree. Vote Insect Trust or die.

Kiki seems genuinely glad to have me back. What relief, to have a boy who cares for me. I’ve already given him some of my new dry goods. The pith helmet. The feather-duster. I’m this staghorn beetle lurches in, legs furiously milling, the ants swarming over me like slow brown liquid, flensing off my waxy build-up, a peaceful click of chitin from my sun-stunned den.

Eukodal back in stock at the farmacia. But dollies, M tubes and codeineetas still in short supply. Brian Howard is like to have burned down the place this summer. “I just don’t
feel
right in the morning without I have my medication.” Brian’s gone home to the Riviera, buying a castle, my dear.

You gotta dig the Socco Chico when you and Jack come. The Little Market, the anything-goes interzone of the Interzone. Maybe I write a magazine piece about it for
Reader’s Digestive
, you be my agent, and we retain intergalactic telepathy rights.

By way of Socco Chico color, I run into an Oxbridge chum of Brian’s at the Cafe Central last night, a math professor type. I know him from the summer, but yesterday I hardly recognize him…his face all dead and gray. Calls himself Zeno Metakides, but he talk like a full-on Brit boffin. Languid blither, with stutters and pauses like Morse code. Pathetically glad to talk to me, and I’m all ears, lonely Ruth amid the alien corn.

Zeno thinks everything is a machine, says biology is programmable, and after I stand him to some cognacs, he unloads about his face. He says it’s a fake, a meat disk that he cultured in a pan and it’s grown onto him like a lichen on a boulder. While he’s talking, he picks shreds of flesh off his cheeks.

Picking up on my visceral repulsion, the prof reassures me that his face-rot is a personal condition and not a communicable disease. Says he’s “safe as houses” and that he goes running on the beach five miles every morning for his health. It’s a wonder the boys don’t tear him apart bare-handed and roast him like a goat.

He tells me he have another problem besides his face, viz. he is subject to eviction from his room for reasons of “financial embarrassment.” And then the evening break into blotches and streaks.

And now…oh the horror, Allen, the horror…I hear Zeno’s voice in the street. Real time message from the Burroughs memory unit: I offered to let the decaying math prof bunk in the spare room of this whorehouse suite where I hang my Writer shingle. He’s coming up the stairs with Piet the Procurer, his gray pieface aimed unerringly my way like a lamprey’s toothed sucker disk.