Vineland (22 page)

Takeshi's watch, one of whose readouts was on Tokyo time, beeped at him. “Holy smoke! Got to check in—with the Prof!” He found a pay phone out by the toilets and punched in a lengthy code. Professor Wawazume himself picked up. “First of all, your pal—Minoru, the bomb-squad guy—he never came back to work! Disappeared!”

“He knew something!” Takeshi darkly replied. “I should have found out what!”

“No problem!” cried the Professor in a mischievous tone that Takeshi, with some alarm, recognized.

“You don't mean that you—”

“
Hai!
Put the word out that Minoru told
you
everything! Just before his—mysterious fade-out!

“So now they'll come looking for me!”

“Exactly! Good thing you called in,
ne?
”

“Anything from the lab on that footprint?”

Yes, working feverishly around the clock, programmers at WL & N-L had come up with a Standardized Reflexology Analysis, based on the ancient idea that many meridians, or say major nerves, of the body come to dead ends upon the soles of the feet—the 3-D body is projected on the 2-D sole, a map of itself. All across the print left in the mud there had remained tiny electromagnetic signatures, some of them erased by the rain but enough there to provide a snapshot of what had been going on in all the major organs, including the brain, of whatever this foot had belonged to, at the instant it came down.

“Organs! Brain! You're saying—”

“Report reads—‘Consistent with the foot impression of a saurian creature on the order of—one hundred meters high'!”

“Let me recap—it wasn't an exploder's job, and you have now sent—whoever took care of Minoru—after me! does that—about cover it?”

“One more thing!” The Professor's voice was beginning to fade. In the interests of cost containment, Takeshi subscribed to the services of Cheapsat, an economy communications satellite that was not, like more expensive units, geosynchronous, or parked in orbit always above the same spot on the Earth—no, Cheapsat instead drifted continually backward through the heavens, always going over the horizon in the middle of people's phone calls, as it even now was doing. “The performance of Chipco!” Professor Wawazume desperately screaming down into inaudibility, “on the Tokyo Stock Exchange! It's suddenly become very—strange! Yes, ‘strange,' that's the word! For example—” at which point the low-rent orbiter set, and Takeshi, cursing, had to hang up.

He came back to the booth to find, in the turquoise shadows, his space occupied by a young fellow he didn't recognize, one, moreover, who had been scarfing away at Takeshi's Galaxy of Ribs, which had only just arrived—smoky, fragrant, permeated with a notorious sauce waiting to jump the mucosae of yet another unwary diner—and were already half gone. There was barbecue drippings all over the table, along with half a dozen longneck empties. “Hey!” this late-teenage-looking individual, even shorter than Takeshi, jumped up, nose running, eyes bright, as if gone psychotropic on hot peppers and mustard, to introduce himself as Ortho Bob Dulang, hitchhiker and, as it turned out, Thanatoid.

“The pretty lady said it was OK to start in on yer ribs, there, pardner, hope 'at's all right 'th you.” DL was looking on with a sociable and, to Takeshi's eye, entirely false smile. “Thanatoids don't get to see many major foods, such as ribs,” Ortho Bob continued, “food within the Thanatoid community never bein' that big a priority.”

“That would explain it, all right. Do you mind if I ask—”

“What's a Thanatoid. OK, it's actually short for ‘Thanatoid personality.' ‘Thanatoid' means ‘like death, only different.' “

“Do you understand this?” Takeshi asked DL.

“Near as I can tell, they all live together, in Thanatoid apartment buildings, or Thanatoid houses in Thanatoid villages. Housing's modular and pretty underfurnished, they don't own many stereos, paintings, carpets, furniture, knickknacks, crockery, flatware, none o' that, 'cause why bother, that about right, OB?”

“Uhk ee ahkhh uh akh uh Oomb,” said the kid through a big mouthful of Takeshi's food.

“ ‘But we watch a lot of Tube,'” DL translated. While waiting for the data necessary to pursue their needs and aims among the still-living, Thanatoids spent at least part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube. “There'll never be a Thanatoid sitcom,” Ortho Bob confidently predicted,” 'cause all they could show'd be scenes of Thanatoids watchin' the Tube!” Depending how desperate a sitcom viewer might be feeling, even this could've been marginally interesting had Thanatoids not long ago learned, before the 24-hour cornucopia of video, to limit themselves, as they already did in other areas, only to emotions helpful in setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the condition of death. Among these the most common by far was resentment, constrained as Thanatoids were by history and by rules of imbalance and restoration to feel little else beyond their needs for revenge.

“Understand she gave you the Vibrating Palm,” Ortho Bob surfacing at last from his meat inferno. Takeshi was about to fly into a dither when he recalled how, not so long ago, he'd bent the ear of his airplane seatmate on the very same topic—one, besides, that a Thanatoid in particular might enjoy hearing about. Ortho Bob stared brightly, expectantly, from one of them to the other with a “smile” Thanatoids, though no one else, considered pleasant enough.

“So—” Takeshi reaching for one of the fried peach pies DL had thought to order, checking the edges of the frame for lines of withdrawal and additional Thanatoids, “some rib joint, huh!”

“Yeah,” the “smile” widening, “‘some rib joint,' you're part Thanatoid yourself, ain't you, Mister.”

DL, the bodyguard, picked this point to jump in. “Prob'm with that, OB?”

“The difference,” Takeshi was remarking, “being, I think, that I'm trying to go—the opposite way! Back to life!”

“Thought once the Palm was on you, that's it.”

“She thinks she can reverse it—if she atones for it—in the correct way!”

“No offense, folks, but this sounds like . . . wishful thinkin', don't it?”

Takeshi snorted. “What else—have I got?”

“My mom would love this. She watches all these shows where, you got love, is always winnin' out, over death? Adult fantasy kind of stories. So you guys, it's like
guilt
against death? Hey—very Thanatoid thing to be doin', and good luck.”

Ortho Bob was heading back up to the Thanatoid village at the confluence of Shade Creek and Seventh River, in Vineland County. If they could get him up there, he could find them a place to stay.

Takeshi cocked an eye at DL and told her the news from Tokyo, the likelihood that Wawazume'd have to pay off on the lab-stomping disaster, the formidable pursuit set in motion against them thanks to the Professor's clever strategy.

“Guess we could use some cover,” said DL.

“You heard the—security office! Let's go, Ortho Bob-san!”

And it was this unscheduled layover in Shade Creek, as they recalled to Prairie years later, that got them into the karmic adjustment business. A whole town full of Thanatoids! It would provide an inexhaustible supply of clients, though most of them, owing to the cupidity of heirs and assigns, couldn't pay much. But as the lab-stomping case, though still wide open, grew less immediate, Takeshi and DL became slowly entangled in other, often impossibly complicated, tales of dispossession and betrayal. They heard of land titles and water rights, goon squads and vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and developers always described in images of thick fluids in flexible containers, injustices not only from the past but also virulently alive in the present day, like CAMP's promise of a long future of devoted enforcement from the sky. After a while DL and Takeshi started renting a conference room in the Woodbine Motel, just across the creek from town, for weekends anyway, though the rest of the time they preferred a back corner in the sprawling Zero Inn, where anybody could wander through and contribute to the day's testimony.

But right at the beginning DL had to sit Takeshi down for an elbows-on-the-table talk. “It ain't a-zackly Tokyo here, you know, you can't just go free-lancin' in ‘karmic adjustment,' whatever that is—nobody'll pay for it.”

“Ha-ha! But that's where you're wrong, Carrot-head! They'll pay us just like they pay the garbage men from the garbage dump, the plumbers in the septic tank—the mop hands at the toxic spill! They don't want to do it—so we'll do it for them! Dive right down into it! Down into all that—waste-pit of time! We know it's time lost forever—but they don't!”

“Keep hearin' this ‘we.' . . .”

“Trust me—this is just like insurance—only different! I have the experience, and—better than that, the—immunity too!”

She was afraid of what that meant. “Immunity from . . . ,” her eyes wavering to the skylight and windows, she gestured outside, at the unseen insomniac population of Shade Creek. “Takeshi-san . . . they're ghosts.”

He winked lewdly. “Do you want to—bite your tongue—or can I do it for you? That word—around here it's a no-no!” They were victims, he explained, of karmic imbalances—unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty—anything that frustrated their daily expeditions on into the interior of Death, with Shade Creek a psychic jumping-off town—behind it, unrolling, regions unmapped, dwelt in by these transient souls in constant turnover, not living but persisting, on the skimpiest of hopes.

He led her to their window to have a look. They'd been up most of the night, and by now it was dawn. Although the streets were irregular and steeply pitched, the entryways and setbacks and forking corners, all angles ordinarily hidden, in fact, were somehow clearly visible from up here at this one window—naive, direct, no shadows, no hiding places, every waking outdoor sleeper, empty container, lost key, bottle, scrap of paper in the history of the dark shift just being relieved, was turned exactly to these windows from which Takeshi and DL looked down at the first yawners and stirrers, begun now to disengage from public surfaces. . . . “They seem so close. . . can they see us?”

“It's a trick—of the morning light!” Had they continued to watch from here as the sun rose, they would have seen the town begin to change, the corners of things to rotate slowly, the shadows come in to flip some of the angles inside out as “laws” of perspective were reestablished, so that by 9:00
A.M.
or so, the daytime version of what was meant to be seen out the peculiar window would all be in place.

“Fumimota-san,” DL turning from the window, the newly sun-filled streets below, “some of these folks don't look too good.”

“What do you expect? What was done to them—they carry it right out on their bodies—written down for—all to see!”

“And by fixing each beef, that'll bring back the lost limbs, erase the scars, get people's dick to working again, that it?”

“No—and we don't restore youth, either! Why—you don't have enough else—to feel guilty about?”

“Yep—one foolish mistake, now I'm payin' it off for the rest of my life.”

“Only—for the rest of mine, angel!” as up out of a calm and sunny ocean the killer sub
Unspeakable
briefly poked its periscope, eyeballed their vessel, ascertained that it was not the Love Boat, and withdrew. But they were learning, together, slowly, how to take evasive action, and at the moment it was down through an austere maze of Shade Creek alleyways and vacant lots for an extended breakfast and another day's business.

Ortho Bob came lurching over, looking as awful as the night he must have spent, wanting to talk some more about his case. He had been damaged in Vietnam, in more than one way, from the list of which he always carefully—though it might only have been superstitiously—excluded death. There were items enough on his get-even agenda, relief for none of which was available through regular channels. “Fuck the money, rilly,” Ortho Bob had stipulated, “just get me some revenge, OK?”

“Go for the money,” Takeshi pleaded, “it's easier.” For example, revenge on whom? Ortho Bob, eager to help, had provided half a dozen names, which Takeshi was already running traces on. “Try to see my own problem,” he said as the former grunt, who on Earth time would be 28 or so now, sat down and started eating waffles off Takeshi's plate. “The amount of memory on a chip doubles every year and a half! The state of the art will only allow this to move so fast!” In traditional karmic adjustment, he went on, sometimes it had taken centuries. Death was the driving pulse—everything had moved as slowly as the cycles of birth and death, but this proved to be too slow for enough people to begin, eventually, to provide a market niche. There arose a system of deferment, of borrowing against karmic futures. Death, in Modern Karmic Adjustment, got removed from the process.

“Ee-ee hukh ngyu huh ay!”

“ ‘Easy for you—' “

“I got it! Don't worry—if this doesn't work—we can always go for the reincarnation option!”

One of the waitresses, a non-Thanatoid who commuted from Vineland, came over with a tabloid called the
Meteor
. “Nice goin', you guys, can I have your autographs on this?” On page 3 was a photo of Takeshi and DL, a nighttime exterior, both of them casually dressed and looking even more paranoid than usual.

“This background—I think it's—Sydney, Australia!” Takeshi muttered to DL. “Were you—ever there?”

“Never—you?”

“Nope, maybe we've both got—amnesia! Or maybe it's a—composite photo! ‘The shadowy Takeshi Fumimota, and—unnamed associate, vacationing—“Down Under” ‘! Always my favorite location,” allowing his gaze, with a Grouchoic roll, to rest, long enough, upon her pelvic area. She smiled grimly.