The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [134]
“ ‘Accident,’ ” he repeats, weighing the word. “Too bad for Couch about that accident. All that money of his.”
“Yeah, too bad,” she agrees. “I guess there’s a lake out there somewhere that won’t ever get subdivided.”
Chas gazes at her admiringly, his sinuous smile appearing.
“I’m not too worried about James, though,” she goes on. “He’s already going around chatting up the clients, restarting the business from scratch.”
He nods. “Sounds like Couch.”
They sit in silence for a minute.
“Me and Ivy are taking a trip,” she says. “Getting out of town for a while.”
Perhaps he knows she wouldn’t tell him, or perhaps he himself thinks it’s better for him not to know. Either way, he doesn’t ask where.
“She’ll like that,” he says.
“What about you, Chas? What are your plans now?”
He steeples his fingers, regarding with distaste the dirt beneath his manicured nails. “I’m thinking Japan,” he says. “That’s where the action is. They’re gearing up to dominate pop culture the same way they did with electronics a generation ago. They’re rewriting the English language as we speak.”
He reaches behind his back and pulls from the waistband of his orange prison pants a thin stack of white paper, folded neatly down the middle into a little booklet. He holds it carefully by the edges, perhaps to keep it clean.
“I want you to give this to Kyle Dice at Nestlé.”
He holds the papers up to the glass. They are filled with precise, minute handwriting, penciled in evenly spaced lines, adhering neatly to the same invisible margins on every page.
“I’d appreciate it if you could type it out first,” he adds. “But the main thing is to get it to him ASAP.”
Ursula shakes her head wonderingly. Chas still has an angle, even now.
“So you’ve gone right on doing business from prison,” she says. “Just like a drug lord.”
“No, not business. I expect no payment. It’s a gift.”
“ ‘A gift’?”
He nods, flipping through the pages and regarding them with something akin to tenderness. “Seeing this product hit the shelves will be all the payment I need. Actually,” he says, looking up, “it was really your idea, Ursula. I just ran with it.”
“My idea?” she asks. “I don’t remember having any idea.”
“Shit,” he says matter-of-factly.
She waits for him to say more. He doesn’t.
“ ‘Shit,’ ” she repeats.
“Yes. But not just Shit. Nestlé Shit. The perfect kid food. It can work, I’m sure of it.” His crystal eyes sparkle through the glass. “I want people to eat shit . . . ,” he says contemplatively, nodding to himself as though he has just articulated the most rationalistic and soothing of utopian visions. “. . . Then my work here will be done.”
Cyborgs
Interface
Ursula closes the station door behind her and crosses the small clearing, settling her pack on her shoulder. The rain forest greets her with its thick, sweet aroma of orchid and plum. Breathing is more like drinking here, and walking is more like swimming, especially just after dawn, as the cool fog heats and gently spirals up through the subcanopy branches and the dark spaghetti of vines to the luminous green of the canopy ten stories above, where the leaves interlock in jagged, crystalline patterns veined by the brightness of the sky and the blooms of even higher trees, sparkles of yellow, magenta, violet, winking through the green like daytime stars. Looking up induces the same feelings in her that it has every day for the last ten months, a mixture of dizziness, humility, sadness, and hope—sadness because of course it is disappearing, and for all the reality it represents the teeming life around her might as well be a painted backdrop; but hope simply because a place like this is actually possible.
She picks her way between the trees along a paca trail, feeling as tiny as a termite in a patch of tall reeds. She is not even exactly at ground level but rather at root level—the giant trees stand on their roots here as if on tiptoe. The hum of insects is constant, louder than rush-hour traffic, punctuated by the squawks of parrots, the howls of howler monkeys, and the