The Heart Goes Last - Страница 52

“Whose face did you get?” Charmaine asks. It’s a stupid question, she shouldn’t have asked it. The face of a Procedure is the answer: the face of someone who didn’t need their face any more. But they’d have been blissed out while it was peeled off them, they wouldn’t have known. And it was all for the best. The better. The good. She upends her drink.

“Those were early days,” Aurora says. “They’re doing things differently now.”

“Differently,” says Charmaine. “Things. You mean they’re killing them differently? Those prisoners? They’re not doing the Procedure?” She shouldn’t have blurted that out, she knows never to use the k-word. She’s had too much to drink. At least she didn’t say murdering.

“Killing is harsh,” says Aurora. “It was positioned as the alleviation of excessive pain. And happily there are now more ways than one of doing that! Alleviating the excessive pain. Ways that are less harsh.”

“You mean, they don’t kill them?” Even to herself, Charmaine sounds like a five-year-old. She’s overdoing it on the dumb.

“Hardly at all any more,” says Aurora. “The thing is, people get lonely; they want someone to love them. That can be arranged for anyone now, even if you look like something the cat coughed up. Why should anyone have to endure that kind of emotional damage? Lord knows I can identify with the whole solution! Considering the way my face … this face is, you can imagine I haven’t had much of a love life.”

“Poor you,” says Charmaine. “Of course, there can be a downside.”

“A downside to what?” says Aurora a little coldly.

“Well, you know. To a sex life. All of that,” says Charmaine. She could tell Aurora about a few of her own downsides, but why dwell on the negative?

“Not if the person is devoted,” says Aurora. “Not if they’re fixated on you. Only you. It can be done, they do it by changing the brain, it’s like a magic love potion.”

“Oh,” says Charmaine. “That would be …” What’s the word? Amazing? Impossible? She’s never felt she had a lot of choice with the love, especially with the hopeless kind. The kind that was mostly sex. You loved someone in that way, and wham! You couldn’t help yourself. It was like going down a water slide: you couldn’t stop. Or that’s how it was with Max. Maybe she’ll never be able to feel anything like that again.

“Jocelyn’s promised me,” says Aurora. “If I helped her. She says I can have that done, very soon now. I’ve been waiting so long! But now I can have a whole new life.” Her eyes tear up.

Charmaine is almost envious. A whole new life. How can she herself get one of those?

Escort

“You’ve snagged your first Elvis Escort gig,” Rob tells Stan at breakfast. Or at Stan’s breakfast. It’s more like lunch for Rob, but Stan slept in. They’re both eating much the same thing, however: undifferentiated foodstuffs. Things that come already sliced, things in foil packages, things in jars. The Elvisorium is not a gourmet establishment.

Stan pauses in mid-crackle. He has to stop gobbling Pringles, they’ll make him fat. “Where?” he says.

“Woman here for that broadcaster convention,” says Rob. “Television, or ex-television from the sound of it. Thought I ought to know who she was. She wants someone to take her to a show. Sounds harmless.”

It’s stupid, but Stan actually feels nervous. Performance anxiety, he tells himself. What’s there to worry about? This isn’t his real job, or the rest of his fucking life. “So, what exactly do I do?” he says.

“What she’s ordered up,” says Rob. “You don’t even have to do the dinner, it’s just the show. You won’t know about the sex till later in the evening; that can be an impulse buy. But remember to compliment them on their dress. Gaze into their eyes, all of that. At UR-ELF we’re noted for our discreet attention to every detail.”

“Okay, got it,” says Stan.

He goes for his usual stroll along the strip to quiet his nerves, poses for a few photos, collects a few dollars, and one fiver from a big spender from Illinois. When he gets back to the Elvisorium, Rob’s still in the kitchen. “Some guys were here looking for you,” he says. “They had your picture.”

“What kind of guys?” says Stan.

“Four guys. They were bald. They had sunglasses.”

“What’d you tell them?” says Stan. Four bald guys with sunglasses – that sounds ominous. Jocelyn never mentioned anything like that, and neither did Budge or Veronica. His contact is supposed to be just one person. Has Ed traced the data leak to its source, has he pulled off Jocelyn’s fingernails to extract Stan’s whereabouts from her? Are these guys Ed’s heavies? He sees himself being yanked into a car, then tied to a chair in a vacant garage and having the crap smashed out of him until he cries, “It’s in the belt buckle!” Already he’s sweating inside his Elvis carapace. Or sweating more than he was.

“I said they had the wrong address,” said Rob. “I didn’t like the feel of them.”

“What kind of picture?” Stan asks. He gets himself a beer, gulps down half of it in one swig. “Of me. You think it was taken here?” If so, he’s really in trouble.

“Nah, it was old,” says Rob. “You were standing on a beach with a hot blonde, with penguins on your shirt.”

Stan feels his stomach clench. It’s his honeymoon pic, it has to be. The last time he saw a copy of that was at Possibilibots; it was beside Charmaine’s head, and he himself had been deleted. The project is calling the shots on this, for sure. They’ve tracked him down.

Fuck it, he thinks. I’m fucked.

He figures it’s better to stay in crowds – the bald thugs won’t want to call attention to themselves while abducting him – so it’s good he has a client for the evening. Her name is Lucinda Quant, which rings a distant bell. Didn’t Charmaine used to watch a show this Lucinda did, back when they were living in their car? The first time he heard that name he could imagine the locker-room jokes it must have generated in her teenaged years.

He meets her at her hotel, as arranged; it’s the Venetian one. The lobby is crammed with NAB convention-goers, still with their badges on. Some of them look as if they ought to be famous, or have been, once; the others, the scruffier-looking ones, are probably from radio.

Lucinda Quant spots him before he spots her. “Are you my rent-boy Elvis?” she says. He peers down at her tag and growls, “Why yes, little lady.”

“Not bad,” says Lucinda Quant. She’s about fifty, or maybe sixty; Stan can’t tell because she’s so tanned and wrinkly. She grabs Stan’s arm, waves goodbye to a chattering group of her fellow broadcast journalists, and says, “Let’s get out of this freak show.”

Stan hands her into a taxi, goes around to the other side, and slides in beside her. He gives her his best rubbery-lipped smile, which she doesn’t return. She’s skinny in the arms, teeth-whitened, and covered with silver and turquoise ornaments. Her hair’s dyed black, her eyebrows are drawn on with a pencil, and on her head she’s wearing two little horns, like baby goat horns, orange in colour.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he says in his Elvis register. “I sure do admire those horns you got.” It’s as good a way as any of starting social chat.

She laughs the hoarse laugh of a long-time smoker. “Got them here, from a street vendor,” she says. “Supposed to be the horns of Nymp.”

“Nymp?” says Stan.

“It’s a nymphomaniac imp,” says Lucinda Quant. “Some comic book manga thing. My grandkids know about it, they say it’s all the rage.”

“How old are they?” Stan asks politely.

“Eight and ten,” says Lucinda. “They even know what ‘nymphomaniac’ means. When I was their age I didn’t know which end of the lollipop to put in my mouth.”

Is that an innuendo? Stan hopes not. Suck it up, Stan, he tells himself. Be a man. Better still, be some other man. Lucinda reeks of Blue Suede, an Elvis tribute scent Stan has inhaled a ton of lately. A lot of the old babes wear it; it’s must be sort of like cats rolling around on their dead owner’s sweatshirts. It’s weird to wear a perfume named after shoes, but what does he know? The aroma – a little like cinnamon, but with an undertone of leather preservative – wafts up from between Lucinda’s breasts, the tops of which are on display in the plunge neckline of her scarlet hibiscus-flowered dress.

“So first I thought, those horns are for kids,” says Lucinda, “but then I thought, why not? Go for it, gal! Live while you can, is what I say. I’m going to tell you right now this isn’t my real hair. It’s a wig. I’m a cancer survivor, or I am so far, touch wood, and right now I just want to enjoy the hell out of life.”

“That’s okay, these aren’t my real lips,” says Stan, and Lucinda laughs again. “You’re fabulous,” she says. She slides over and positions one of her bony little butt cheeks up against his thigh. Should he say, in his deep Elvis voice, “Whoa, darlin’, we’ve got all night”? No; that would hint, unfairly, of delights to come. Instead he says, “So, since you’ve shared with me, I feel I should tell you that I’m gay.”

She laughs her smoky laugh. “No, you’re not,” she says. She pats his white-clad knee. “But good try. We can discuss that later.”

Here they are at the venue, in the nick of time. The casino is a new one, with a Russian Empire theme; it’s called The Kremlin. Gold onion domes on the outside, servitors in red boots, a line of fire-eaters dressed as Cossacks waiting to welcome them. One of these helps Lucinda out of the car while raising his flaming torch high in the other hand.