Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [52]
I was just the wrong person to give it to.
At two a.m. I was back on 8, stumbling toward Howie’s place. Sitting in a bar on 30 I’d suddenly remembered Mal’s body, remembered it in the form of a line of small maggotlike creatures marching along the bar toward me and holding up little signs, “MAL’S DEAD,” said one; “PROBABLY PRETTY GROSS BY NOW” read another. When I looked more closely I saw that the maggots were in fact spares, limping and crawling with whatever limbs they had left. David was there, and Nanune. Whoever originally synthesized Rapt must have had some sense of humor. I’d only taken a moderate dose, not sure after five years how much I could stand. The news was I could have stood a lot more. I’d lost a couple of hours, but that was all. I was melted and seeing things, but I knew where I was; a particularly ill-favored bar on a dangerous floor, my shirt wet with whiskey that hadn’t made it as far as my mouth, my head burning, and a naked and dying fifteen-year-old shaking her wasted body at me from the top of the next table. I was the only person near her, and I hadn’t even noticed she was there. Everyone else in the bar appeared to be fucked up on Oprah, babbling about their lives to anyone who would listen, too wound up in themselves to tell whether it was day or night.
I didn’t want to be here anymore. I was falling too fast, and I wasn’t Rapt enough not to care.
I settled my tab with the barman, who was uglier than three types of shit in a one-shit bag. Another sixty dollars gone. Tilting my way out into the avenue, I burnt my finger lighting a cigarette from a nearly empty packet which I assumed was mine, and stared baffled at the moving shapes in front of me. Most of them resolved enough to reveal themselves as unimportant, and I made my way as best I could toward a men’s room. Inside, I dabbed at the stains on my clothes, rinsed my mouth out, and stared at myself in the mirror. The Rapt was beginning to fade, and the fog of sound had thinned to a haze. I decided I could cope and laughed hollowly at myself. Calmly appraising how fucked up I was took me back far more than walking into a police station would ever have done.
I took a local elevator down to 8 and walked unsteadily down the main street, buffeted by straight people. My mind was poised too precisely between caring and not caring to make any headway toward deciding what to do about anything at all. One of the things Rapt does is take you to a place between all options, where everything and nothing matters and you can just hide away. Once you’ve been there, snug and dead, you never want to leave. I passed a young couple standing on a corner, arms entwined and lips smacking against each other. The sound made little yellow sparks amidst the general background hum of mustard brown. Either I could hear a conversation which was taking place about a mile away, or my mind was making it up and muttering darkly to itself. It wasn’t a very interesting conversation, which figured. I was also slightly frightened of something unspecific, but that was okay. I don’t mind a little fear; it’s an old friend.
I was a couple of turns from Howie’s when I suddenly found myself crouching down by the side of a building with no memory of having done so. I looked up and saw passersby staring down at me, mildly amused. I let out a heavy, shaky breath, and realized that my hand was inside my jacket and gripping my gun. Maybe this should have reassured me, told me something about reflexes which were still miraculously intact. St didn’t. It-made me feel very bad indeed. For a while the street ceased to exist around me and I slid unthinkingly down the wall, heart beating hard and sweat appearing from nowhere on my forehead and neck. The foliage on the ceiling appeared to shift as one and a sky blackened above it, hot at the edges with liquid orange flames. I heard sounds, distant cries and a siren, and it took me a long moment to realize the sounds were coming from inside my head. Then I realized I was repeating a sentence to myself; something