Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [3]
Adjacent to the lobby was a bar and grill, a place of soft music and glimmering candles, uncrowded at this hour. Cray took a window table and ordered a margarita, then watched the fading sunset and the growing dark.
The mountains vanished into the night. But the city remained, a spread of twinkling color, large and misty.
Cray looked at the lights for a long time, lifting his glass now and then to taste the tequila’s soothing burn. It was not the lights that fascinated him. It was his awareness of the people represented by those lights, a half million people or more, with different names and different backgrounds, strangers to one another, living, struggling, dying, each one an individual.
Yet how easily their individuality could be discarded. And if it could be stripped away, then was it even real?
Or was it only a disguise, a persona—complex and subtle, yes, rich with nuance, elaborately refined, but nonetheless a mere facade?
Cray looked toward the long mahogany bar at the front of the room. A man in tapered jeans and a big-buckled Western belt had just mounted a bar stool beside an unescorted woman in an invitingly short skirt.
The man would say something, and the woman would respond. Perhaps he would offer to buy her a drink; perhaps she would agree. He would compliment her dress or her hair or her eyes, and she would ask what he did for a living.
The two of them operated purely on instinct and reflex. Every move, every word, every detail of their grooming had been prompted by the unconscious emulation of others or the irresistible pull of instinctual drives.
The man wore those jeans and that belt because he had seen other men wearing them; imitative as a monkey, he had bought them for himself.
He had come to a bar because it was where other people would come. He had taken the empty seat beside the woman because this too was the action that was expected of him.
His conversational gambits had been picked up from movies or TV shows or from dialogue he’d overheard in other bars—nothing original, lines spoken by strangers, who in turn copied behavior they had witnessed elsewhere.
The ritual of offering to buy a drink, of making some cheap and obvious toast, of clinking glasses, all of it was a show played out countless times by countless others.
And if the woman allowed him to take her home, she would do so only because it was expected of her, because she had been raised in a culture that permitted and slyly approved of such behavior; she would be fitting herself seamlessly into the social framework that had shaped her.
The only honest part of what either of them did was their instinctive need for sexual relief, and this was a need they shared with every animal.
Cray had heard much about the dignity of man, but what he had seen was only the vacant thoughtlessness of a herd. The mind was largely an illusion; the great majority of people were, for all practical purposes, unconscious most of the time. Their conscious minds, if functional at all, served only to provide a veneer of rationalization for behavior patterns already prompted by social conditioning and instinct.
Cray considered the woman in the short skirt, and saw a mandrill, her buttocks flaming red in sexual heat. He studied the man dutifully attempting to seduce her, and saw a rutting gorilla driven by the need to establish himself as the alpha male.
Those two were random examples. He could have focused on anyone around him and seen the same. There were exceptions, but they were rare. In his life he had found only one person able to understand, really understand.
One person besides himself.
“Sir? Would you like to see our dinner menu?”
A waitress had paused by the table, smiling at him from under a raft of loose auburn hair. Her name tag read DEBBI.
“Not quite yet,” Cray said. “Perhaps you could bring me another drink.”
“Right away.” Her smile brightened, and she shook her ringlets of red hair as she walked away.
Cray watched her go. She was most cheerful, a healthy and vital young animal, but he wondered how long her high