The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (51 page)

No need to bother with a mirror. I just check out the feed from the others' headsets.

I mostly like what I see. The style is kind of severe, but its very plainness invites the use of jewelry. And the look is mature. I remember that Dad wants me to find an older look.

"You look like a schoolboy from Bombay," Anatole says, which deflates me a little.

"Wait a minute," said Lisa. "I know what he needs."

Lisa has acquired the body of a Taiwanese basketball player, tall and rangy, with almond eyes and long black hair. She walks to one of the white metal poolside tables, rummages around the packages for a moment, then returns with a pair of sunglasses. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek as she perches the shades on my nose.

"Ooh, nice," says Deva. I check her video feed. The shades are gold-rimmed wraparounds with deep jade-green lenses, and they've got camera pickups for flashcasting. Wearing them I viddie like a cross between the Bombay schoolboy and a dapper young gangster.

"Now you look like a vicious lawyer," Lisa says. I sneak a look at the online poll and seventy percent of the Demographic approve the look, with a furious twenty-five percent hating it. And even the twenty-five percent
care
.

"I like this look," I say. "We should become the Pack of Vicious Lawyers."

I sense a certain resistance in a few of the pack members, but after all I'm the star—so we all adopt the style, or something similar, and for the next several days the Pack of Vicious Lawyers crosses the Bay Bridge to a series of clubs in San Francisco. (As a loyal citizen of the East Bay, I refuse to call it "the City" like the natives do.) We invade clubs en masse, listen to bands like Sylvan Slide and The Birth of China, and are invited into the V.I.P. rooms by management eager for the free publicity. I meet and chat with famous people like the artist Saionji—who invites us all to his opening—and the producer Jane Chapman, who asks the name of my agent.

Considering that none of us can even drink legally, this isn't bad at all.

I regain a third of the audience I lost during the gorilla fiasco, but then the numbers begin to slide again. People have seen me go to clubs before.

I know the Pack of Vicious Lawyers is only a transitional phase. It's too mature a style for all the Demographic—a fourteen-year-old couldn't pull off the Vicious Lawyer look. And there's nothing in the package but clothing and style—the Vicious Lawyers don't
do
anything, they just stand around in groups and look intimidating. I hope it will last till I can find the new style that will bring the Demographic screaming back into my camp.

I start to sweat. I want all the love back. I'm knocking myself out looking for the next trend—and of course I'm going to college and being the Duck Monkey as well. Time is running out, and so for that matter is my audience.

And then I think I find it. The music is from Turkmenistan, coincidentally where my mother gave a lecture series a few years ago, and is called Mukam. It's descended from a traditional form that goes back for centuries, but everyone in Southwest Asia has been trading licks and musical styles for ages now, so in addition to using the flute and the two-string lute native to the area, the Turkmen imported the double-ended
dhol
drum from the Punjab along with modern electric instruments and insanely rigorous vocal styles from places like Tuva and Mongolia. The musical forms are incredibly complex, but the
dhol
drives the music forward and makes it compulsively danceable, at least if you can dance to 5/4 time or 6/8 or the even more complex polyrhythms native to the area.

And the clothing from the region is terrific. Baggy tops and drawers, and riding boots of leather or felt, and long fur-trimmed lambskin coats. Some of the coats have lace and trim and frogging that would do credit to a nineteenth-century drum major, and others are ornamented with wild, colorful felt appliqué.

The only element I don't care for are the huge fur hats the size of beachballs, which make people look like giant dandelions. I reckon we can do without the headwear.

The Turkmen style had everything. Music, movement, fashion. It had all that was needed for it to become a major trend, everything except exposure.

Exposure I could provide.

I call a meeting of the pack and specify that no cameras are to be worn. I draw the blinds on the clubhouse and play the music and show videos of the clothing.

"That's great," Anatole says. "But how are we supposed to dance to any of this?"

"People have been dancing to this music for hundreds of years," I point out.

Errol just gives me a blank stare. "
How?"

I don't have an answer for that one. "Let's look at the videos again," I suggest.

The videos don't help—they're all of professional dancers who are infinitely more skilled than we are. They even look good in those huge fur hats.

Lisa approaches me later, after we broke up in confusion. She is still very shy and doesn't like talking in front of the whole pack, but I guess she's comfortable with just me.

It's those trustworthy brown eyes, I decide.

"We could do research on the dancing," she says.

"Yes," I say. "But we don't want to do old stuff."

"It doesn't have to be new," she says. "It just has to be
new to your audience
."

I look at her for a moment. "You're right."

Lisa goes into the computer archives and digs up information about the sort of dances they were doing in Central Asian clubs about forty years ago. I find old instructional videos. Most of us aren't very good at it, but Lisa turned out to be a natural.

I'm the star and I get to pick my partners, so I dance with Lisa for most of the afternoon, and get her to tutor me. I ask her why she's so good at it.

"It's just a matter of counting. For most dances, all you have to do is count to four. For the waltz, you count to three. And for this . . . well, the left side of your brain counts to eight while the right side counts to five."

"Right."

But everybody's smart these days, and after a few more afternoons of practice, I get so I'm good at counting exactly that way.

Autumn comes on, wet and chill. My mother leaves for Mars, where she'll teach for a semester, and leaves me with Dad and tons of fresh-cooked gourmet food, which no longer being a gorilla I could not eat nearly fast enough.

We all get good at dancing like Turkmen. Clothing appears at the clubhouse. We listen to hours of music and pick our favorites for our debut, which we decide is going to be at the Cryptic Club down in the Castro—the management is happy to comp us for a night and play our music in exchange for all the free publicity.

I don't let anyone take video of any of our practice sessions. Not only because we don't all look particularly expert, but because I don't want any pictures getting out into the world. Nobody's going to know about the Turkmen style till I sprang it on the world Saturday night.

We make appointments to get hair extensions. I've decided that long, wild hair is going to be part of the look.

I'm on top of the world. I'm having enormous fun being the Duck Monkey. Kimmie's audience has stabilized at about a quarter the size of mine, and isn't getting any larger. I know that I'm about to popularize a style that will sweep the world and bring the Demographic back.

And I'm seeing a lot of Lisa. She isn't part of the pack because she wants to be around me, or to be famous, but because her cousin Anatole had talked her into it. That makes her different from the others. Lisa has friends outside the pack that she spends time with. She has a mind that analyzes and categorizes everything that goes on around her, including me. Sometimes I think she looks on me as just another artifact to be studied.

But sometimes when she looks at me it isn't analytical. I'm not analyzing her, either. I like the way she dances, the way she feels in my arms, her scent. Sometimes I want to lean over and kiss her, just to see what might happen.

I begin to think about that. I don't hurt so much anymore when I think about Kimmie. I think maybe Lisa's a part of that.

But Lisa and I are doomed. The Demographic would hate her—she isn't their style at all. They want me to go with strong, outgoing personalities who also happen to be really beautiful. If I start seeing Lisa, my numbers would start to slide.

And she'd get a ton of hate mail. I don't know whether she could cope with that. So for all sorts of reasons I don't kiss her.

But still I enjoy thinking about it.

The catastrophe happens on a Friday evening, the night before we're due to premiere our new style at the Cryptic. Tonight the pack is at Errol's place up in Berkeley looking at music videos the Demographic sent us. We listen and watch and give our verdicts, and the Demographic watches us and responds to what we're saying.

We're watching Fidel Nuñez lament the state of his
corazon
when I get a message on my headset from Deva.
Check Kimmie's new flash. Don't say anything
.

I look at Kimmie's flash through the splice on my optic nerve, and I feel like someone's just slammed me in the head with a crowbar.

Kimmie and her pack—there are only seven of them—are flashing live from a club I recognize, Toad Hall on Treasure Island, and they're wearing long fur-trimmed Turkmen coats and baggy pants and tall riding boots. They carry horse whips, and they're dancing to Mukam using the same steps that we planned to use. They have a different playlist than the one we built, but it has a lot of the same songs.

I sit in Errol's media room and watch my whole next phase crumble into dust. If I show up tomorrow night at the Cryptic, everyone will think I'm imitating Kimmie. I can't even prove the idea originated with me because I'd been so strict about not recording anything.

My head swims and I feel as if I'm going to faint. Then I realize that for some time I'd completely forgot to breathe. I take in some air, but it doesn't make me feel any better.

Fidel Nuñez finishes his song. There's a silence and I realize that the rest of the pack have been watching Kimmie's flash too.

"What do we think?" Errol asks. His tone is anxious.

There's more silence.

"I think it's
boring
," I say. I stand up and I reel because I'm still light-headed. "I think we need to get
moving
."

There is a certain amount of half-hearted approval, but mostly I think most of the pack are as stunned as I am.

I look at the pack and wonder which one of them told Kimmie about the Turkmen style.

One of my friends has betrayed me.

"Spending a Friday night looking at videos?" I ask. "How pathetic is
that?"

"Yeah!" Anatole says. "Let's get out of here!"

We go outside and the cool night air sings through my veins. There's a heavy dew on the grass and mist drifting amid the trees. I turn back and see Errol's house, with its red tile roof curving up at the corners like a Chinese temple, and the trellises carrying twining roses and ivy up the sides of the house, and the tall elm trees in the front and back.

"You know," I say, "this place would be great for gorillaball."

Errol looks at the house. "I'm glad you didn't say that back when—"

"Let's play now!"

Errol turns to me. "But we're not—we're—"

"I
know
we're not gorillas," I say. "But that's no reason we can't play gorillaball. Let's have the first gorillaball game without gorillas!"

Errol's horrified, but I insist. Errol's parents, who actually own the house, aren't home tonight, so they can't say no. I captain one team, and Errol captains the other. We choose up sides, all except for Amy and Lisa.

"I'm not playing," Lisa says. "This is just crazy."

Amy agrees.

"You can referee, then," I say.

We set up one ladder in the front and another out back. We put one goal in a tree in the front, another in a tree in the back. I win the toss and elect to receive.

The ball comes soaring over the house and Sanjay catches it. He goes for the ladder and I lunge for a trellis. Errol and his team are scrambling up the other side.

Sanjay reaches the roof but already two of Errol's teammates are on him. He passes the ball to me and I charge. I knock Michiko sprawling onto the roof tiles and then I hit Shawn hard under the breastbone, and he grabs me to keep from falling. So now we both fall, sliding down the tiles that are slippery with dew. As Shawn goes off the roof he makes a grab at the gutter, something he could have done easily as an ape, but he misses. I get the gutter myself and swing into a rosebush just as I hear Shawn's femur snap.

Thorns tear at my skin and my clothes. I drag myself free and run for the elm tree that overhangs the street. I grab the goalkeeper's foot and yank him out of the tree, then climb up myself and slam the ball into the bucket we've put in a crotch of the tree.

"
Goal!
" I yell.

The others are clustered around Shawn. I'm limping slightly as I join them. Blood thunders in my veins.
Which one of you ratted us out to Kimmie?
I think.

Errol turns to me.

"Shawn's smashed his leg up bad. Game's over."

"No," I say. "You're down one player, so we'll give up one to keep it fair." I turn to Sanjay. "You can take Shawn to the hospital. The rest of us can keep playing."

Lisa looks at me. "I'm going, too. This is insane."

I look at her in surprise. It's practically the first thing she's said in public.

"Go if you want," I said. "The rest of us are playing gorillaball."

And that's what the rest of us do. No more bones are broken, but that's only because we're lucky. By the end of the night I'm bruised and cut and bleeding, with sprained fingers and a swollen knee. The others look equally bad. I've scored seven points.

The trick, I decide, is not to care. If you don't care who you hit and who you walk over you can score a lot of points in this world. You could be like Kimmie.

We should have fought the Samurai
tonight
, I think. We'd have crushed them.