War Surf (3 page)

“Fifty says he’ll crack his skull on the floor.”

“I want part of that”

“Nasir, throw your rope!” Sheeba cried. Dear Sheeba child.

When a surf goes right, it’s transcendent. You plan ahead, prepare your gear. You anticipate every contingency. Then you enter the zone, all senses alert, adrenaline charging through your veins like speed. You smell a whiff of smoke. You see flames, hear the rumbling growl of a particle beam shearing steel. Deep inside, the drama catches you, and for a while, your life accelerates. Taking chances, teasing destiny, running the slalom gates of war, you pull spiritual G-forces that press you hard against the present moment, so hard you know in your gut it’s the only thing that’s real. Be Here Now. You want to shout at the stars. And that’s when you stretch beyond the envelope of your own puny life span. You spread out like fire and music, wider than thought, and for an instant, you brush against eternity. Ye idols of gold, I love it.

Radiant Sheeba, what did she think that afternoon as she secretly spied on our war surf? Her first vision of a zone, was she frightened? Or fascinated? As I sit alone in this anteroom, probing my past by the vile blink of fluorescence, I can only speculate. She’d never witnessed war. So far, her short young life had played out in softly cushioned therapy chambers with aromatic candles, sizz music and scented oils. No violence had touched her. Oh, I may have told her about war surfing. During our long and frequent therapy sessions, I possibly mentioned my exploits, but that’s not the same as seeing live action. Until that infamous afternoon when she lurked on our private Web site and watched me crash in flames, Sheeba didn’t know.

Sheeba Zee was my own personal find. I discovered her five years ago, toiling in a discount health church in Kotzebue. No one goes there anymore since the hot Alaskan currents drove that sludge up the coastline. But back then, Kotzebue advertised the best health-care bargains on the Bering Strait. And I’ve always liked saving money.

Picture Sheeba striding out to meet me in the tacky health church lobby. I’d booked a session, expecting the usual muscular nurse in whites and thick shoes. Instead, I got Sheeba, tall, wide-shouldered, regal as a goddess, poured into a leotard and dipped head to toe in gold paint. The church was running some kind of promotion. She took my voice away.

“Mr. Deepra?” she cooed, accenting the wrong syllable.

“Call me Nasir,” I finally managed to croak.

“Nasir. You look like you could use a good squeeze.” When she saw my reaction, she tossed her head back and laughed like a minx, a trill of high bubbly notes spilling upward. That carefree laugh got to me—that and the way the gold paint rippled when she moved.

“I mean your latissimus dorsi, beau. Deep massage. We’ll start with a shiatsu, then we’ll do some chromatherapy. Cool calming colors to tune your energy field. Indigo and jade would be right.”

Under the cheesy gold paint, Sheeba appeared like all young girls of the executive class, cheerful and vapid, with no distinguishing traits beyond loveliness. But oh how lovely she was. Just eighteen, fresh out of school, away from home for the first time, with nothing to hide and everything to learn. God, I wanted to trade places with her for just one day.

She had dimples in her cheeks, in net elbows, in the backs of her glittering gold hands. Wide mouth. Wide hips and shoulders. Long vigorous legs. Delectable breasts and a tight round belly. Not fashionable, that little belly, but arousing.

She also had preter-natural skills with her hands. Her first session took ISO years off my stress load, and when she put my right leg through a range-of-motion routine, she immediately diagnosed my hip joint malfunction and looked up the part number I needed. With charming nai’vete, she explained how much commission she would earn if I took her advice. What I took was her email address.

I brought her to Nordvik, set her up in private practice and coaxed my friends into booking her sessions. For the last five years, I’d been imbibing her therapy, doting on her splendors and hauling my heart around like a thick clay begging bowl.

That fateful afternoon when Grunze pulled me from the wreckage of the Copia.Com factory, Sheeba was already plunging toward me in a rented aircar, bringing blood plasma, trauma meds and polarizing magnets. While Grunze broadblasted my photo around the Net with tags like NASIR EXTRA CRISPY and DEEPRA-FRIED, Shee cradled my head in her lap and stroked my temples with an ankh.

“It’ll revive your life force, beau.” As she rubbbed the Egyptian talisman over my eyebrows, the ambulance lifted off, and I got a close-up view of her jiggling young bosom compressed in spandex.

“You’re right. I feel revived already.”

That day, she had lacquered her hair with midnight blue wax, lined her eyes to look oriental and covered her arms in temporary tattoos. Her contact lenses were yellow. Sheeba went in for strong fashion statements.

“Don’t worry about your ear. The docs can grow you another one.” She opened a small vial and tipped a drop of clear liquid onto my pillow. “Cypress oil. It heals psychic wounds.”

My health church wanted to keep me for seven weeks, but when I agreed to pay the full fees, they let me go after two days. I spent the next month holed up in my condo, mostly dozing in anesthetic haze while my bioNEMs rebuilt my burnt flesh cell by cell. I loathe convalescence. Memories of that time drool together like marbling paints, and the first lucid impression I recall is Sheeba standing in my doorway, a potted hothouse orchid cradled against her hip and a tin of southern-hemisphere chocolates tucked under her arm.

Her complexion may have been chartreuse mat day. She had a penchant for skin dyes—in fact, I’d never seen her natural skin tone. And her hair was a work of art. Waxed pale green to match her face, it was sculpted in a spiky crest, interspersed with something frilly and pink that might have been plastic bird feathers. She also wore contact lenses the color of tangerines. Now imagine her appetizing green body squeezed into a short, white, pearl-studded, faux-leather chemise.

“Showboat,” I said. “Come here and kiss me.”

She rewarded me with her lullaby of laughter, dropped her gifts on the floor—where the orchid pot cracked in two—then galloped across the room to jump on my bed. A bouncing rainbow of rouge and paint, her embrace set off my IBiS, and I bit my left thumb to stop the tingling.

“This is for you,” I said, offering her a box wrapped in fragile pink papyrus. Chad had gotten it through the Net.

“You don’t have to keep buying me things.” Sheeba eagerly tore off the paper and opened the box like a five-year-old kid on her birthday. “Wow!”

“You like it?” The gift was an antique seashell, rough and chalky outside, but inside, as pearly pink and smooth as the inside of Sheeba’s ear.

“I love it, beau.” She cradled the shell in both hands and gazed at it exactly the way I longed for her to gaze at me. Then she planted a wet, smacking kiss on my cheek. “You sweet man.”

‘I’m glad it pleases you,” I said, quietly thrilled. While she played with the shell, I slipped out a small minor and adjusted one dangling curl over my forehead.

“Nass, I have a million things to tell you. Scoot over so I can sit.” Sheeba made herself comfortable on my bed. “Let me see the flecks in your irises.”

For the next hour, she tuned my aura, ran kinesiology tests on my muscles and battened me on gossip, the choicest, most nourishing little slanders about everyone I knew. She made me laugh till my new skin prickled. Sheeba understood my appetites.

“What about the Agonists?” I finally asked. “Have they been surfing? I’m sans loop.”

Shee hopped off my bed and started kicking the pieces of broken flowerpot Her succulent lower lip protruded. “You guys ate always so hush-hush about war stuff.”

I knew what was coming. “Did Kat say something rude?”

“Katherine’s mad at the world.” Sheeba kicked the pot.

“Probably she’s upset because you lurked on our broadcast. It’s supposed to be private.”

Sheeba lifted one shoulder in a half shrug.

“Forget her. You can watch us anytime. I’ll give you the password, the dates, the places.” (Plus my fortune, my life’s blood, my layered soul, anything you ask, Sheeba—though this part I left unsaid.)

“Thanks, beau.” She picked up the naked orchid by its stem. Live plants were outrageously expensive—her gift flattered me and fanned my hopes. But she jiggled its curly roots with a roughness that wasn’t like my gentle darling. “They breed these things to live on pure air,” she said, “or maybe it needs a little mist. Where did I put the user’s guide?”

As she ripped angrily through her bag for the orchid’s documentation, I wondered why she’d become so agitated. Was it because I mentioned war surfing?

My sport wasn’t popular with junior execs. Call it a generational disconnect. Sheeba’s age group had missed the grisly Crash of 20S7. Junior execs had no conception how fast the climate changed or how disastrously the markets collapsed. They’d never witnessed crowds of storm refugees trying to sleep in noxious, waist-high water or clawing each other like animals for one can of sweetened milk. Sheeba’s friends couldn’t imagine how gruesomely people died—or how barbaric the survivors had to become. Kids like Shee grew up safe and secure, and their placid lives never drove them into frenzies of gut-wrenching boredom. So a lot of juniors just didn’t
get
our need for the salty thrills of the war zone.

But Sheeba was different. I didn’t see that at first. I assumed she disliked my sport as much as her friends did. So that night, I steered the discussion away from war surfing. While she gave me a deep-tissue massage that verged on sensual nirvana, I told wicked jokes about Kat that made her laugh till tears rolled down her cheeks. Then I coaxed her into helping me with my stretches. Sitting face-to-face with Shee in her workout shorts transformed the dull therapy routine into an act of libidinous pleasure. I drew the session out, asking for special guidance with the yoga moves and savoring the feel of her hands on my newly cloned skin.

As soon as she left, though, I linked into the Agonist Web site and browsed the latest video. Our crew had logged several fairly interesting surfs, and watching their archives made me antsy to get back in the action. I scanned their blogs all night.

Chad, my cyberassistant, called every few hours to go through my mail, doctors’ appointments and day trades. When I missed board meetings, Chad voted my proxy. He was also remodeling several floors of my eighty-story condo, and he kept flashing me color swatches. Avocado, lime, mint green—Chad blissed on the cutting edge of style.

“Stick with white. It goes with anything,” I said, which made Chad heave a quantum sigh.

One by one, the Agonists dropped in to see me. Verinne came first. Two meters tall, slender and cool, she stalked into my room like a frigid fashion model. Her pewter-colored hair lay flat to her skull like a pelt, and she’d plucked her widow’s peak into a sharp point, dividing her high forehead into two pale half-moons. Her narrow gray eyes canted upward at a slight angle, hinting Siberian lineage. She glanced at me briefly and dabbed her lips with gloss.

Her voice crackled. “You look better man I expected, Nasir.” Then she planted a dry kiss on my cheek.

Verinne’s ghoulish beauty had once bewitched me. But now, her dead-white skin wrinkled like fine crepe. After exhausting cosmetic creams and surgeries, Verinne resorted to high collars and long sleeves. She suffered from Sjogren’s Syndrome, a disease of desiccation mat not even bioNEMs could heal. Her skin, eyes, mouth, even her internal organs were literally drying up.

Once you love a woman, you never stop caring. That’s my belief. Verinne wasn’t beautiful anymore, but she’d always been a true friend. Solid. No nonsense. The sound of her failing voice tore at my heart.

“Do me a favor, Verinne.” I kicked restlessly at my bed covers. “Convince me why any sane person would choose to live this long.”

She coughed into her fist. “No time for chitchat. I need your condo password. The crew wants to meet tonight”

“You’re planning a surf?”

“I have to hurry. Watch the Web site. You’ll see.” Verinne was not the type to discuss personal issues.

Grunze visited the next morning. He brought me a gift, an ePage calendar he and some of his weight-lifter pals had self-published, with pictures of themselves in various brawny poses. Grunze was February. His pale blue spandex jumpsuit displayed every swell of his physique, knotted and overdeveloped to the point of grim vulgarity. All execs doped their genes to improve muscle mass, but Grunze went radical. A few decades ago, the docs diagnosed him with sarcopenia—age-related muscle weakness. Since then, he’d fixated on bodybuilding.

Grunzie’s fondness for me sometimes came out in awkward ways. Attached to the calendar was a schmaltzy gift card, and while I read the poem inside, he paced and blushed and rubbed his boulder head. He’d eliminated the problem of hair by surgically cauterizing his follicles.

“Grunze, why do we keep doing this?” I was in a pensive mood. The tedium of convalescence gave me black thoughts. “Why do we keep putting our bodies through this recuperative torture?”

He grinned uncertainly and shook my foot with rough affection. When we first met, his blue eyes had been round and bright, but now they looked like raisins, lost in the heavy musculature of his face. “How’s the new ear?’ he said. “Should’ve grown yourself a new prick while you were at it.”

I pounded the mattress. “I’m sick of getting well. Why don’t we just say, ‘Enough!’”

“You first, sweetheart.” He blew me a kiss.

Later that afternoon, Winston brought a sultry brunette and a hamper of champagne, though two of the four bottles were already empty and the brunette fell asleep across my feet. Good old Win, what an elegant man. His mane of auburn hair made him look like a statesman, or an actor, or perhaps a celebrity spokesman for life insurance. Noble chin, azure eyes, chiseled patrician nose. The features of his memory were a little less clear-cut.

“Why are you in this stupido bed, Nass? We’re having maximal fun war surfs. Kat’s talking about Heaven again. You’re missing everything.”

“Win, I had a little accident, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right. Yeah, I think I remember that.”