Strange Trades (27 page)

It was not the first time she had had the nightmare.

She was on a flat graveled rooftop in broad daylight, level with the upper stories of many surrounding buildings. Tin-walled elevator-shaft shack, a satellite dish, door to a stairwell, whirling vents, a couple of planters and deckchairs. Highly plausible, except that she had never been in such a place.

With her was Bullfinch.

In her hand, Shenda suddenly realized she clutched a tennis ball.

Bullfinch capered around her, leaping up for the Holy Grail of the ragged green ball, begging her to throw it.

So she threw, sidearm, expert and strong. Wildly, without care or forethought.

The ball sailed through the air, Bullfinch in hot pursuit, claws raking the gravel.

Over the parapet the ball sailed.

With a majestic leap, Bullfinch madly, blithely followed, sailing off into deadly space.

In the dream, Shenda screamed her denial.

Now she merely murmured, “No.…”

The “meaning” of the dream was plain enough: her duties were getting to her, the weight of her responsibilities to those she loved was making her imagine she might easily fuck up.

Hell, she
knew
she was gonna fuck up sooner or later. It was inevitable. Everyone fucked up continuously. That could almost be a definition of human existence. The 24-7 fuck-up. She didn’t need any dream to remind her of that.

All she prayed was that she wouldn’t fuck up too bad. Be left with enough of her faculties to pick up the pieces and start again.

Luck came into this somewhere.

And luck was one of the things beyond her control.

Her heart had calmed. Rising determinedly to her bare feet (the purple paint on her toenails was
all chipped
—she’d
have
to make time to see SinSin for a pedicure —not that she had, like, any
man
in her life these days to
appreciate
such details), Shenda went about getting ready for her day.

Her first instinctive action after the nightfright was to check on Bullfinch.

She found the dog snoring in the dining room.

Disdaining his very expensive catalog-ordered puffy cushion bed, Bullfinch had made himself a nest.

Somehow he had reached a corner of Titi Yaya’s antique linen cloth (remnant of old high times in Havana) where it hung down from the tabletop. He had dragged the cloth down, bringing two brass candlesticks with it. (God, she must have been dead to the
world
!) Then he had chewed the irreplaceable cloth to the shredded state most suitably evocative of some genetic memory of an African grass lair.

“Oh, Bully! Whatever is Titi going to say!”

Bullfinch swallowed a final snore in a gurgle, then awoke. His wattled, enfolded face peered innocently up at her. Breaking into an ingratiating, tongue-lolling smile, he wagged his stubby tail.

Shenda found her anger instantly dissipating.

Most empathetic people found it impossible to stay mad at bulldogs for long, as they were so mild mannered and goofy looking.

Especially one colored like a canary.

The employee at the animal shelter—a bearded, spectacled fellow with some kind of East European accent and a nametag reading jan cluj—walked Shenda back among the cages so that she could make her choice. Ambling down the wet cement aisle, she found herself wanting to take every one of the abandoned yelping mutts home. But it was not until she saw the bright yellow occupant of one cage that she stopped decisively.

“What’s the story with this one?”

“To my eyes, which are admittedly not of the most expert, our friend is the variety of English Bulldog. Was picked up on Kindred Street, near the college. Of tags, none. Meeting his maker in—” Jan Cluj checked the page slipped into a galvanized frame wired to the cage “—five more days.”

“But what about that
color
?”

Jan Cluj shrugged, as if the matter were of little interest. “It is unnatural. Most assuredly obtained chemically. I accuse some likely college boys. They are insufficiently studious and given to madcaps.”

Crouching, Shenda extended her fingers through the wire separating her and the yellow dog. He snuffled her fingers eagerly and sloppily. She stood.

“There’s no roots showing, or normal-colored patches the dye job would’ve missed.”

Exasperatedly: “Dear lady, the dog is as you see him, fit and active by medical ukase, most normal save for his hue. Explanations are superfluous. Will you have him?”

“I will have him.”

After signing the relevant forms, Shenda took the happy bounding yellow dog straight to a grooming salon known as Kanine Klips (recommended by Pepsi, who had her poodle, French Fry, done there regularly), where she had the anomalous bulldog dipped and clipped.

Then she waited for his normally colored fur to grow out.

Three years later, she was still waiting.

The dog was some kind of genetic sport. His naturally unnatural coloration was a shade most commonly associated with avian life forms.

Shenda had resisted naming the bulldog until he assumed his true form. Called him “Hey, you!” and “Here, doggie!” for weeks, out of some kind of feeling that to name him wrongly would be to warp his personality. But when the true state of his freakish coat became evident, there was no other possible name for such a specimen.

“Bullfinch,” said Shenda with weary patience, “get up off that tablecloth please. It’s time for you to go out and do your business.”

Bullfinch obeyed. He arose and trotted over to the back door of the house. Shenda opened it and the dog went outside into her small fenced yard.

While the criminally destructive canine was busy outside, Shenda gathered up the precious tatters, surveyed them mournfully, estimating possibilities of repair, then, clucking her tongue, chucked the rags into the trash.

Bullfinch re-entered the house. Promptly, the dog went over to the wastebasket and dragged the ruined fabric out and over to his bed. With great care and exactitude, employing paws and muzzle, he arranged the cloth atop the puffy cushion to his liking. He plopped his rear haunches down on his new dog blanket, and sat regarding his mistress.

Shenda gave up. “I don’t have time to play no tug-of-war with you, Bullyboy. My day is fuller than usual. And it starts
now
.”

As if to say,
Mine too!
, Bullfinch nodded his weighty corrugated head several times, then lowered his forequarters and was soon asleep.

Shenda showered and groomed. Those toenails had to go! In a robe, towelling her hair dry, she flipped on the bedroom radio automatically, thinking to catch the news, but then hardly listened. She put her panties on ass-backwards, caught herself, swore, and re-donned them correctly.

Dressed in baggy Gap jeans and a green silk shirt, she ate a chocolate Pop Tart standing up at the sink, washing it down with a tumbler of chocolate milk. Her face was blank, as if her mind were vacationing in a more alluring country than her body.

“ —cell-u-licious!” declaimed the radio.

Shenda snapped out of her fugue, looked at the clock, and exclaimed, “Louie Kablooie! Bully, I’ve got to run! You got plenty of kibbles, and tonight I’ll bring you a real treat. Promise!” She scuffled on a pair of open-toed Candies, grabbed up a courier-style satchel and her car keys.

The door slammed behind her. Bullfinch opened one eye, then the other. Seeing nothing that needed his attention, he closed them and returned to sleep.

He could fly. He really could. And that airborne tennis ball was
no problem
.

3.

Frozen Furniture

No dreams, pleasant or otherwise, but rather a mechanical device, awoke Marmaduke Twigg from his Midas-golden slumbers.

Like every other member of the Phineas Gage League, Twigg was physiologically incapable of dreaming. The relevant circuitry, along with much else, had been chemically and surgically excised from Twigg’s altered brain.

As a consequence, he was radically insane. And in the worst possible way.

The mania didn’t show, didn’t impede his daily functioning. Indeed, Twigg’s brand of insanity
increased
his cunning, ingenuity, deftness, manipulative social skills and will to power. Minute to grasping minute, hour to scheming hour, day to conquering day, he appeared to himself and others as a single-minded superman, apparently a paragon of efficient, rational action. Perched on the very uppermost rungs of the social ladder, Twigg seemingly owed all his accomplishments to the secret devastations willingly wrought on his gray matter.

Yet it was as if a dam had been erected in the brains of Twigg and his compatriots, a dam behind which fetid black waters were continually massing.

A dam which must one day give way, taking not only the well-deserving Twigg and his peers to their vivid destruction, but countless others, the more or less innocent and the less or more complicit.

Right now, of course, such a fate seemed vastly improbable.

Twigg thought—rather,
knew
—that he was a new and improved breed of human, superior to anyone not a League member.

He knew that the world was his oyster.

The only thing left to determine was at precisely which angle one should work the knife into the hapless stubborn bivalve, and how best to
twist
the sharp instrument properly.

Crack!

The shell halves fell apart.

And the raw meat was sucked greedily, gleefully down.

Twigg lay sleeping on his back in the exact center of the mattress of his enormous four-postered canopied bed. His chest- folded arms were clad in ebony silk salted with white dots. Beneath his crossed arms, crimson satin sheets and a crest-embroidered white duvet were drawn up in unwrinkled swaths. (The crest on the coverlet depicted a heraldic shield enclosing crossed iron rods with a superimposed eye, and the Gothic initials PGL.) Resting in the middle of a softer-than-down pillow, Twigg’s unlined face seemed the ivory mask of one of the lesser pharaohs.

Suddenly, without visible stimulation, Twigg’s pebbly eyes snapped open like rollershades, and he was instantly alert.

Twigg could feel the small unit consisting of pump and segmented reservoirs implanted inside him stop its gentle whirring. The same device (which regulated many hormonal functions previously so crudely performed by now missing gray matter) had sent him efficiently to sleep exactly four hours ago, during which time he had not stirred a limb.

He knew that most of his servants—especially those who had the least personal contact with him, knowing his peculiarities only through rumor—jokingly referred to him as one of the undead. But Twigg cared not.

All the lesser cattle were the true phantoms, without substance, ineffectual. Only he and his kind were truly alive.

Twigg’s breakfast would soon arrive, carried to him by his loyal factotum, Paternoster. In the meantime, he flew the jetcraft of his mind over the varied terrain of his day.

Meetings, public and private: legislators, aides, ambassadors, presidents, CEOs, media slaves. Acquisitions and sales: companies, divisions, patents, real estate, souls. Phone calls: conferenced and one-on-one. Presentations: from scientists, PR experts, lawyers, brokers, military strategists. Wedged into the interstices: meals and an intensively crafted scientific workout.

All of it absolutely necessary, absolutely vital to keeping all the delicately balanced plates of Isoterm’s myriad businesses spinning.

Yet all of it absolutely tedious.

But tonight. Tonight would make up for all the boredom.

For tonight was the monthly meeting of the Phineas Gage League.

Twigg smiled at the thought.

His smile appeared like fire burning a hole in the paper of his face.

Memories of his own entrance into the League trickled over his interior dam. These were not so pleasant. The initiation rituals were stringent. Had to be. No whiners or losers or weaklings allowed. Cull out the sick cattle right at the head of the chute. Still, the shock and the pain—

Twigg reflectively fingered a small puckered scar on his right temple. His smile had disappeared.

To recover his anticipation of this night’s pleasures, Twigg reached up to stroke one of his bed’s four canopy supports.

At each corner of the enormous imperial bed stood a life-sized naked woman, arms upstretched over her head, thus pulling her breasts high and flat. Each woman supported one corner of the heavy wooden frame that held the brocaded fabric canopy.

These caryatids were each one unique, sculpted with absolute realism, down to the finest hair and wrinkle. They were colored a uniform alabaster. Their surfaces were absolutely marmoreal, as unyielding as ice. Twigg’s hand, lasciviously molding the butt of one woman statue, neither dented nor jiggled the realistic curves. Rather, his hand slid over the human rondures as if they were curiously frictionless.

The door to Twigg’s bedroom, half a hundred feet away, opened. A man entered, bearing a domed tray. He crossed the carpet with measured elderly steps.