Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [113]
Brett produced the tag end of a roll of stickers from a glassine bag. She peeled off four ludicrously tiny adhesive dots. She attached two dots to the pulse point at her wrist, and another pair of dots to Maya’s.
Nothing happened.
“Don’t expect any rush of sensation,” Brett said. “This isn’t a mood-altering substance. This is a mood.”
“Well, it’s sure not doing much for me,” Maya said with relief. “All I feel is tired and sleepy. I could use a bath.”
“No bath here. They got a toilet. Behind that door. You don’t mind paying for this, do you, Maya? Five marks? Just to keep them in feedstocks?”
It was technically illegal to sell drugs. You could barter them, you could give them away, you could make them yourself. Selling them was an offense. “If it will help.”
Brett smiled, relieved. “I don’t know why Novak wanted to make you look so weird and sinister. You’re very sweet, you’re really nice.”
“Well, I have desires that don’t accord with the status quo.” She’d said that many times, and now, for the first time, she began to sense what the slogan really meant. Why vivid people had made those words their slogan, why they would say such an apparently silly thing and say it without a smile. The status quo was the sine qua non of denied desire. Desire was irrational and juicy and trasgressive. To accept desire, to surrender yourself to desire … to explore desire, to seek out gratification. It was the polar opposite of wisdom and discretion.
And it was the core of junkie romance. Gratification as naked as geometry—the euclidean pleasures of the central nervous system, a pure form of carnality for the gray meat of the brain. An ultimate form of desire—not love, not greed, not hunger for power, just purified little molecular venoms that did marvelous intimate cellular things to gray meat. Insight swept over her in a wave. She hadn’t seen the truth of the junkie life before because she’d been so busy despising them. Now she understood them better and she pitied them. The truth and the sadness were deeply and intimately linked. It was a truth that could not be grasped unless you were sad enough to let yourself understand.
Antonio and his two friends were busily working their tincture set. The proper use of a tincture set was something of a social art, it required composure and grace and foresight and attention to detail. The junkies had none of these qualities. They were awkward and rather clumsy and yet terribly determined. They were deeply intoxicated, so they made many small mistakes. Whenever they made a mistake they would retreat and try to think about it, and then they would mentally circle back to poke and prod and jiggle. It was like watching three little spiders gently preparing to eat a trapped and kicking insect.
She shuddered violently, and Brett gently stroked her arm. “Don’t be afraid.”
There hadn’t been any fear at all until Brett unleashed the word. Then of course there was fear. A cold gush of nasty fear from a brimming reservoir like a vast black ocean. What had she to fear? Why get panicky all of a sudden? There was nothing to fear. Nothing, of course, except that she had surrendered herself to desire. Desire had grown in her aging brain in gray wedges of new neural flesh. Her youthful joie de vivre was every bit as counterfeit as the arachnid twitchings of a junkie. They dreamed of the artificial paradise, but she had become the artificial paradise.
She was blundering through Europe as if no one would ever guess the truth, but how could they fail to guess? She’d brazened her way through three months of outlaw existence with nothing to guard her but a mad veneer of perfect happiness and confidence. The eggshell surface of a crazy confidence trick. She’d been walking a suspension bridge of other people’s disbelief. Only someone blind with manic exultation could believe that such a situation would last.
Of course they were going to catch her. Of course she would trip up eventually. Stark reality could shove its rhinoceros horn through the tissue of her fantasy at any moment.