Strange Trades (3 page)

My stomach churned. I wanted to puke my breakfast. Somehow I kept it down.

My face must have blanched. Deatherage smiled. Suddenly, I regretted taunting him.

“Recognize it, do you, Holloway? I thought it might touch a chord in your past. Do you want to name it, or shall I?”

I wet my lips. Merely to summon up the name took an immense act of will.

“Estheticine,” I said.

“Exactly. In a nice convenient dermal patch. Would you like to guess where I found it?”

I said nothing.

“On the beach, with the used condoms and the empty bottles, during my morning jog.”

I swallowed gratefully. For an instant, I had been sure he was going to claim it had come from the club.

“I’m clean,” I said.

Deatherage looked at me solemnly. “I know that. Do you think I’d come to you if I thought you were the user? I know what you went through to kick the stuff. I want your help. I’ve just been on the phone to friends on the mainland. They say that, due to a series of busts, sources for E have dried up. It’s almost impossible to score now. Whoever’s using this might get your name somehow and come to you. At which point, you come to me, correct?”

I nodded.

“Very good.” Deatherage rose as if to leave, then sat again, seeming to remember something. I knew it to be a charade. The man forgot nothing.

“By the way. This singer of yours. Is he a Mex?”

“Why do you ask?”

“A lot of this stuff comes through Mexico. It could be that he’s our connection.”

“He’s a citizen,” I said. “You can check his card. And he told me he’s a HUB.” I don’t know why I lied, except that Deatherage had upset me so much.

“Hip Urban Black, huh? Well, well see.” Deatherage stood without pretense now. “Remember what I said, Holloway.” He left.

A lot of unpleasant memories swarmed in to fill his seat.

Once the world had seemed bright and beautiful. That was when I was young, and my lover was alive.

His name—we won’t get into his name. What essentials do names capture? He was a charming young mestizo boy of no fixed abode or occupation, whom I had met on a business trip to Guatemala, just before the war. (Once I had another job, another life, when I lived much as everyone else.)

Picturing his face now, for the first time in years, I realized how much Charlie resembled him.

I managed to get the boy a visa after I returned stateside, although even then, in the days before mandatory citizen IDs, the authorities were tightening up on immigration of the unskilled. I had to grease many bureaucratic palms.

I thought I was doing him an immense favor, lifting him up out of his poverty and squalor. I little knew then that I was arranging his death.

Life in the First World did not agree with him. Everything was too confusing; there were too many choices, too many options. He got into a fast crowd, took risks, became promiscuous—picked up AIDS.

He died six months before they announced the drug that cured me of the infection he had passed on to me.

Infection of the body, but not the heart.

When his death came, the world grew pale and dingy, an echoing stage filled with mocking mannequins and hollow props.

When I found estheticine, a new kind of beauty returned to fill the void. Unnaturally sharp, crystalline, infinitely seductive and ultimately unsatisfying, promising eventual meaning beyond words that never materialized.

But once estheticine left me—I truly feel that the drug spurned me, as if I were not good enough for it, rather than I the drug—how did the world look?

Curiously two-dimensional. A black-and-white place, leached of all emotional resonance.

Something of an improvement, I suppose, over the pain of stage two.

Thanks to estheticine.

Uglybuster, E, lotos, beardsley—call it what you will, it remained the quintessential drug of the late, late twentieth century.

In a world of ever-increasing ugliness, who did not occasionally wish that everything might appear beautiful?

At the beginning of the decade, experiments on the perception of beauty came to a head. (The publicity images persist: the wired people at the ballet, the museum, the edge of the Grand Canyon, their responses being plumbed and recorded.) Exact ratios and mixes of neurotransmitters were fingered as the agents; sites of stimulation in the brain were charted. Synthesis succeeded. The result: estheticine.

To be used only judiciously, of course. Let the connoisseur brighten Beethoven, magnify Mozart, uncage Cage.

Most definitely not recommended as a crutch.

How surprised the experts were when the public began to swallow it like candy, and the GNP dropped by three percent in six months. How quick the authorities were to outlaw it. How fast the underground sales sprang up.

And now it had reached me here, on my dead-end island in the sun.

Two concerns filled all my free time during the weeks following the meeting between Charlie and Christina.

Who was using estheticine on the island?

What was going on between my young singer and the woman with the semiprecious eyes?

I made no headway on the former. Deatherage did not approach me again, and try as I might, I could detect no users among my clientele—least of all Charlie, who I knew needed the drug no more than a fish needed a substitute for the clean sea in which it daily swam.

As for my impractical lie about Charlie’s origins, Deatherage never called me on it, perhaps believing my former addict’s brain was turning to mush.

I made more progress on the latter topic. In a sense, learning what they did together was easy. In another way, baffling.

Everyone in the Hesperides—except the reclusive and rum-sodden Koos van Staaden— knew the two were lovers. That much of their relationship was evident in their every gesture.

The two of them were together continuously, except when Charlie was performing.

Wearing hemosponge units, they dove in the azure waters surrounding the Hesperides. Once they even swam out and down to the UCLA research station bedded on the ocean floor. I remember how tired Charlie was at that night’s performance. The muscles in his lean flat legs twitched as he sat astride his stool, and he had to cancel his last set of the evening.

They rode motor scooters (no cars were allowed on the islands) all over the hilly interior and along the cliff paths. One morning, as I stood on the veranda watching the crowds of gawking daytrippers (the feverish pleasures indulged in by the rich in plain view on the beach never failed to shock them), I saw two small figures atop Sheepshead Bluff. I recognized the colored smudges intuitively for Charlie and Christina. Sunlight glinted off the chrome of their bikes and caused my eyes to tear. For a moment, I had the frightening delusion that they were about to jump, fulfilling some incomprehensible lovers’ suicide pact.

Water-skiing and hang-gliding, swimming and racing hydroplanes, the two enjoyed all the Hesperides had to offer. It seemed an idyll of young love, an eternal summer of instant fulfillment.

That much, as I’ve said, was easy to discern.

The baffling part was understanding how two such disparate personalities meshed. What had really prompted Christina to ask for that introduction? I couldn’t reconcile infatuation with a certain flintiness I sensed in her soul.

I felt I had to know more about her. I decided Blauvelt was the one to pump.

Around noon one day, I managed to catch the man as he idled past the club. At my insistence, he came inside for a drink. He favored the awful peach liqueur I so disliked to stock.

We sat at the same table where Deatherage and I had had our disturbing talk. I naturally compared the two men. Although of a size with the security chief, Blauvelt was somehow spongy, an amorphous thing masquerading as a man. In his sweaty tennis clothes, he looked like a wax dummy left too long in the sun. I knew I would have no trouble getting information from him.

“Henrik,” I said, “I need your help.” He looked flattered. “You understand that I have an enormous investment tied up in that singer of mine. He’s good for business, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

I was sure the mercenary angle would appeal to Blauvelt. His cynical smile confirmed it.

“So,” I continued, “I need to know all about Christina, and her relationship with him. After all, we wouldn’t want her father causing trouble, would we? How is it, by the way, that he’s not aware of what’s going on?”

Blauvelt sipped his syrupy drink. “Old Koos—he thinks I’m still chaperoning his daughter. He talks to no one—thinks all you Americans are
rooineks
, anyway. And I’m not about to tell him his girl’s seeing Charlemagne. Not as long as Christina keeps the money flowing my way.”

“Is Christina the type to form a romantic attachment so quickly?”

Blauvelt scowled, as if I had hit upon some sore spot. “Not in my book. There was never anything between us. Christina’s been a different person since the accident.”

“Accident?”

“Back in the Transvaal. One night on the road between Jo’burg and Pretoria, she drove right into a stupid
kaffir
and his cows crossing the highway. Her Mercedes flipped three times. Stupid wog was killed outright, of course. Christina sustained a lot of brain damage. Ever notice her hair?”

“Thin and white, I believe.”

“Grew back that way after they shaved her head for the operation. Used to be black as night before. Just like her mother’s. Those bangs of hers—they hide the scar on her forehead. Notice how she always wears a cap when she swims. She’s very self-conscious about it.”

“She seems quite normal now. How did they repair her injuries?”

Blauvelt waved his hand negligently, as if to dismiss as unimportant all things he could not understand. “Tissue transplant of some sort. Newest thing, it was. God, we had some smart bloody people before the bad times. But even they couldn’t stop the Black bastards, could they? Even A-bombing Capetown didn’t slow them down.”

He drained his drink and got to his feet. I considered Christina’s fleshed-in past.

“Do you think it’s love, then?” I asked.

Blauvelt shrugged. “Love for herself, yes. For that little songbird—hardly.” Then he left.

Alone, I tapped into the medical databases, curious as to how Christina’s apparently massive wounds had been healed.

Embryonic brain tissue had proven to be the only matter that could be planted to adapt and grow in the adult brain, repairing and substituting for lost sections. No in vitro process had yet been perfected to serve as an ethical source of the tissue, and so the procedure was not advocated in the West.

In old South Africa, they had had embryos to spare—”donated” by pregnant slum-dwellers in Soweto and elsewhere.

The clinics where such operations had been performed were the first places to be torched in the war. Then they were dismantled brick by charred brick.

The first time Charlie and Christina disappeared, it was for only three days, and I wasn’t too concerned. I, who never left the confines of La Pomme, knew best of anyone how close and stultifying the Hesperides could become. I assumed that they felt at last the need to explore their feelings for each other in a different setting. That could have been Charlie’s motives for the unscheduled trip, at least. What alien urges swayed Christina, I could not say.

In any event, my response was limited and simple. I posted notice of Charlie’s absence, pretending to my customers that it had been planned, and contacted the mainland agency I used for a new singer on a day-by-day basis. She was talented enough, I supposed, but lacked Charlie’s genius.

It was during the substitute’s first song, as I stood in the club with its strangely altered and diminished atmosphere, that I realized what freshness the Kid had brought to our artificial paradise. Had he arrived that morning weeks ago riding a dolphin and clutching a lyre, his advent could not have been more portentous or fraught with consequence.

My idle wondering about how Christina had managed such a long separation from her possessive father was satisfied when the rumor-mill ground out information on the whereabouts of Henrik Blauvelt. He had chartered a small boat, filled it with peach liqueur and two women, and anchored in Sturgeon Cove the day Charlie and Christina left. Evidently, in Koos van Staaden’s eyes, Blauvelt and Christina were off sailing.

On the morning of the fourth day, Jaime Ybarrondo, owner of the Hesperides’ lone hotel, called me. His bearded face floating in the holotank struck me like some apparition in a Delphic pool as he told me that Charlie had returned to his hotel room sometime after midnight. I thanked him and switched off.

I contained myself until Charlie arrived that evening at the club. I let him reach his dressing room before I joined him.

He sat on the couch with his musikit cradled gently in his lap. I recognized the tune he was fingering: “Love’s Labours Lost” by the beaIIles. Charlie had programmed the drums to sound exactly like Ringo, while he played Julian Lennon’s part.

I was shocked at the changes in his face. An indefinable something had left him, perhaps his air of invincible youth. New lines seemed graven about his cerulean eyes. His lips were tightly compressed.