Chapter Four

Four rings. Zach counted them with his teeth gritted, his free hand viciously shredding a fundamentalist tract he'd picked up somewhere, Tomb of the Unborn.

Then the gentle click of a lifted receiver, muted Dixieland jazz playing in the background. “Hi, this is Eddy Sung. ”

“EDDY FOR CHRISSAKE YOU GOT TO HELP ME I GOT TO GET OUT OF—”

The Dixieland changed abruptly to grinding industrial hardcore. “I'm sorry I'm not here, but if you leave your number I'll call you back as soon—”

“AWWWW SHIT, GODDAMMIT, EDDY, PLEASE BE THERE!!! PLEASE PICK UP!!! ”

A squealing snatch of violins; then Eddy's answering machine beeped in his ear. Zach took a deep sobbing breath, resisted the urge to slam his own phone into the cradle hard enough to crack its casing, and tried to speak calmly. “Ed-I'm in trouble. You always said you coveted my apartment, well, call me soon enough and you might get the goddamn thing. ”

He hung up, spun aimlessly in the middle of the room for several moments. The computer screen caught his eye, still pulsing like some obscene digital orifice. Yes, you could fall headlong into that screen, that alternate reality like a cradling mouth or womb, never coming up for air, never realizing that so slowly, so smoothly you took no notice, it was chewing and digesting you. . .

No. Blaming the computer for his troubles, that was like a terminal lung cancer victim blaming a pack of cigarettes or, worse, his faithful old Zippo. It was a tool and he had chosen to use it. His troubles were with They whose clammy suckered tentacle grasped the other end of that tool. William Burroughs had advised him to know what was on the end of his fork, but had he listened? Of course not-and now the dirty tines were on the verge of impaling his tongue.

But in that direction madness lay.

He leaned against the doorjamb that led into the bathroom-with its polished sea-green tiles and its skylight in the ceiling high above the tub, taking a shower here was like standing beneath a sunlit waterfall, and where would he ever find such a place again? A green waterfall of a bathroom-an apartment with all his things in it, a block from the wondrous bazaar that sold everything he needed, two blocks from the bank of the Mississippi that coursed. through the city like a throbbing brown artery?

Before moving in here two years ago, Zach had spent most of his time on the streets and at various friends' houses. This was the first place that had ever felt like home. He wasn't sure he knew how to live anywhere else, wasn't sure anywhere else would have him.

But that didn't matter. He had been cutting things too close, taking too many dumb chances. When he started hacking three years ago, it had been just another lark, another way of amusing himself, a curiosity like getting drunk on sloe gin or watching the Psychic Friends Network on late-night cable TV. During his brief high school career he had taken an elementary programming class and ended up getting himself kicked out of the school computer room, which robbed him of his only good reason to show up at the brain-numbing, tomblike institution at an inhuman hour each weekday morning.

At sixteen, two years after leaving home, Zach dropped out and started casting about for something better. He had known immediately that hacking was it. He'd only had a cheap PC-clone with a slow modem at first, but fucking around on the underground bulletin boards he found with his automatic dialing program led him to wonder about other networks, secret systems and databanks that were supposed to be hidden but were actually right there, tantalizingly there, vibrating behind a thin membrane of commands and passwords.

Free information and money, if only you could get at it. Zach soon discovered that he could. And it was so damn easy...

But if they caught you at things like stealing from credit card companies and breaking the systems of Southern Bell, affectionately known as the Gestapo among phreaks and hackers, it could be worth ten years in a federal prison. Sure, you might get out in half as many, or even less. But the thought of even one day in the pen was too much for most hackers, conjuring up vivid images of great tattooed baby-rapers and serial killers cornholing their lily-white butts, then snapping their skinny necks.

Zach let his knees buckle and slid down the door frame to the floor. He'd kicked off his sneakers at some point, and the green tiles were blessedly cool against the soles of his feet. He saw the round mirror above the sink reflecting his empty room, saw the dripping faucet that over the years had left a stain on the porcelain like the imprint of rusty teardrops, saw the blue ceramic mug that held two toothbrushes, one purple and one black. He kept an extra because Eddy had been known to sleep over on occasions when they watched one bad film too many or talked too far into the night or simply drank themselves into a stupor on the cheap bourbon Eddy loved.

There was nothing untoward to it, though, nothing sexual, not even a furtive drunken groping here or there. Zach liked Eddy too much for that.

But never mind who he liked. He was going to be on the road, playing it lonely for a while. Hackers were scared of prison, yes, and many of them would turn informer once they were nabbed. But most would also do anything they could to help a fellow outlaw, as long as they didn't endanger themselves. He had been communicating with other Mutanet users for more than a year; it was like frequenting some weird little coffeehouse, getting to know the regulars. He trusted Zombi as much as any of his less remote friends, knew Zombi wouldn't send him such a message unless his lead was reliable.

And it surely was. Any number of scary companies and agencies could be after him: if they caught you stealing they would try to fuck you up. And he had stolen a lot.

And didn't he have to admit, begrudgingly, that in some extra-perverse corner of his brain the idea of having to get out of town before sundown appealed to him? New Orleans had been the only constant thing in his life. But didn't he get an itchy foot sometimes, didn't he sometimes think about just throwing all his stuff in his car and going?

Of course he did. Everybody did, even normal people, the ones with triple mortgages and orthodontists' bills and responsibilities to everything except what they really wanted. Everyone dreamed of the open highway unspooling like a black satin ribbon beneath his wheels. It was in the American blood, some kind of racial memory. But most people never really did it; they became tied to a place by friends, possessions, habits. If you stayed in one place long enough, you started to send down taproots.

And yet it was always a possibility, just getting up one day and taking off. It was the kind of thing you thought about, but seldom did.

Until you had to.

Zach felt a million possibilities starting to unfold within him like a garden of dark flowers. The perfume was heady: the scent of strangers, of unknown cities and towns; the subtle bouquet of adventure and its twin, danger.

He was only nineteen and he wanted to know everything there was to know in the world, to do all things, to grasp every experience in his hands and drink it down like whiskey. This couldn't break his spirit, couldn't keep him down. So They were after him, the shadowy, faceless, infinitely sinister They that seemed a peculiarly American archetype of terror: dark trench coat, glowing eyes beneath a black slouch hat, badge in hand emblazoned with the dread legend FBI, or NSA, or worse, extended like a red-hot iron ready to sear its brand into your forehead. Every hacker, every phone phreak, every intelligent criminal Zach knew had his or her own visions and nightmares of Them.

But just because They were after him didn't mean They could get him.

He realized that his hands were clenched into fists and his heart was pounding painfully. Excitement did that to him; he supposed it would kill him someday, but he was addicted to it. He willed his pulse to slow down, made himself unfold his hands. Tomb of the Unborn was still crumpled in one palm. Should have been a horror movie, he thought; too bad someone had wasted such a great title on a piece of anti-choice propaganda, for that was what it was, complete with color shots of shredded fetuses in puddles of their own gore.

He balled up the tract and threw it across the room, pushed himself to his feet, shook off the headrush, tested his balance. Cool. He'd had a few bad moments there, but now he was ready for the next reel of the Grand Adventures of Zachary Bosch.

Zach didn't know if thinking of your life as a movie serial was healthy, but it certainly helped keep him sane.

Bourbon Street runs through the Vieux Carre for fourteen blocks, beginning on the more-or-less north side, at the wide avenue called Esplanade. On that side of the Quarter, Bourbon is funky and fashionable, paved with cobblestones, lined with dark little neighborhood bars and dearly priced studio apartments, haunted on hot nights by boys sweating in brazenly tight leather.

The middle blocks of Bourbon are part tawdry carnival and part efficient tourist mill, the tinsel and glitter of Mardi Gras for sale year-round, plastic cups of beer and frozen daiquiris and Hurricanes sold right on the sidewalk, racks of T-shirts, postcards, plastic alligators and mammy dolls, and “N'Awlins Voodoo Kits” side by side with window displays of glitter condoms, penis neckties, lurid latex vibrators. Here are the big strip clubs with their hucksters and roustabouts outside, bars flashing neon and touting endless drink specials, a few famous restaurants and a slew of pretenders. Every souvenir shop has poppers of amyl nitrite for sale in the back. In combination with the abuse of other substances, indulging in these makes the head seem to lift off the shoulders and fill the skull with a dazzling, infinitely expanding light.

But at the other end of Bourbon, the end that runs into Canal and the downtown skyscraper sprawl of the Central Business District, a different miasma hangs over the street. An air of dinginess that is somehow timeless, a seedy, mysterious air. The city looms above the old buildings of the Quarter, making them look gray and small and slightly faded. The bars feature no specials or cutely named cocktails, but the drinks are cheap and strong.

On this end of Bourbon Street, sandwiched between a pawnshop and a po-boy stand was the Pink Diamond Lounge. It was identifiable as a strip club only by the design stenciled on the door, a nude female silhouette inside a figure that might have been a diamond but looked a great deal more like a vulva. A lone bouncer nodded in the recesses of the doorway, letting loose a halfhearted line of patter when any likely customers passed by, knowing they had already heard it all farther up the street.

The interior of the Pink Diamond was dark except for the tiny, garishly lit stage. Smoke lurked in the corners and in a swirling blue layer near the ceiling. A few dancers wriggled gamely in front of beer-stained tables-not on top of them, as was popularly believed of table dances. No table in the Pink Diamond could bear the weight of a healthy girl, and most could have been reduced to matchsticks by a ninety-pound junkie.

One dancer stood in the dust-choked area behind the stage waiting for her cue. A muffled cough and snort sounded over the P. A. She would bet her day's tips that Tommy, the DJ, was doing a line right there in the booth. Usually he went to the men's room, but the manager wasn't here today, and no one else cared.

“And now-in her last set of the day-The Sweetest Charm of the Orient-MISS LEE! ”

The first notes of her music pounded out of the speakers, a Cure song cranked up so loud that the words were distorted, but it didn't matter because no one else in this club had ever heard of the Cure except maybe a couple of the other dancers, and no one cared what music she danced to anyway as long as she showed her tits. Miss Lee threw back the dusty velvet curtain and kicked one leg out, long and silky-pale, shod in a spike-heeled, silver-chained, black leather ankle boot, and the crowd went wild.

If you could call five or six unshaven, seedy-looking men a crowd.

And if a few listless hoots and whistles, the lewd waggling of a tongue in the general direction of her crotch, or the simple act of lifting beer to mouth could be considered wild.

Miss Lee undulated onto the tiny stage. A ring of globe-shaped bulbs lit her from below, playing over her black vinyl T-strap and bra as she moved, showing off what curves she had. Five or six of the bulbs were dead, spaced at uneven intervals like rotten teeth in a jaw. She stalked to the pole placed strategically at center stage, wrapped her arms around it, and straddled it. She arched her back and worked the pole with her hips, letting her mouth fall open and her eyes slip half-shut into the dazed, drugged-looking expression that was supposed to pass for ecstasy. Then she pushed away from the pole, paused in front of the first stage rat, and began a slow insistent grind in front of his face.

After a couple of minutes he pinched two crumpled dollar bills out of his shirt pocket and slid them into her garter, making sure to run his nicotine-withered fingers as far up her thigh as he thought he could get away with. His sour scowl never wavered. Miss Lee gave him a geisha smile and moved on to the next customer, who was marginally young and good-looking, and therefore less likely to tip.

She wondered what they would think if they knew where her stage name came from. She had been born in New Orleans of Korean parents, and Loup, the Pink Diamond's manager, had advised her to pick “some kinda fake Chinese name” to capitalize on her ethnic looks. (“Lotta guys go in for that kinda thing, ” he'd added as if letting her in on a big guy-secret. ) She had chosen the name Lee after a character from her favorite book, Naked Lunch. When a customer was nasty or business was bad or she was just in no mood to shake her ass for a bunch of human dildoes, she would think of junk-filled needles jabbing into putrescent veins, of swollen cocks leaking foul greenish slime, of beautiful boys fistfucking by the light of a rotten-cheese moon. It didn't make her happy, but it helped.

Her second song began. The Pixies' “No. 13 Baby. ” She glanced over at the DJ booth and saw Tommy grimace at the whining voice and churning psychedelic guitar: his tastes ran more to bands like Triumph and Foreigner, fake corporate metal, maybe a little Guns N' Roses if he was feeling really radical.

Miss Lee reached back to unhook her bra and felt a bill being tucked into the back of her garter, a dry hand whispering over her left buttcheek and gone before she could turn her head. She caught sight of the customer in one of the mirrors that ringed the stage. A tall black guy, head down, already disappearing into the darkness of the bar. For some reason the black men who liked her seemed embarrassed by their attraction. Maybe because she was so pale.

Surreptitiously she reached around and palmed the bill, slid it to the side of her leg. It was a ten. Jackpot. That pushed her over the hundred-dollar mark, good money for the day shift: she could actually afford to go home.

She stared at her reflection receding into infinity as she peeled the vinyl top away from her small firm breasts. A thin silver chain connected them, attached to delicate rings through both of her cafe-au-lait-colored nipples. The rest of her skin was a pale matte almond, ribs showing through like slats in a shutter, body too scrawny except for her rounded shelf of a butt and her tiny potbelly, legs muscled from six-hour shifts on spike heels and long walks through the French Quarter.

Her face was rather flat, her wide lips unrouged-she hated the way she looked in lipstick, especially the greasy pink-orange stuff most of the other dancers smeared on their mouths-and her dark narrow eyes smudged with purple shadow and black mascara, half hidden by her messy platinum wig. “Yew got the most beautiful hair Ah ever seen, ” a rube tourist had once told her reverently, and how she had longed to whip it off and drop it in his lap.

Instead she had smiled sweetly and taken his money.

Third song. Prince's “Darling Nikki, ” a small concession to the crowd, give 'em something they've heard before. And it was a dirty song, the famous dirty song that had kicked off the PMRC's entire Crusade Against Dirty Music, or whatever it was, by using the word masturbating in its lyrics. Bless it. Miss Lee hooked her thumbs into the elastic of her G-string, pulled the tiny scrap of vinyl tight over her crotch, so that the folds of her labia were all but outlined in shiny black. To get away with this trick she had to shave her pubic hair to the approximate size and shape of a Band-Aid, and it still wasn't enough; they always wanted to see more.

“Pull it to the side, ” some old fart would croak, waving a dollar in her face as if it were worth her job.

“Lemme see some hair. ”

“Hey, are you a natural blonde? ” That line was always good for a snigger.

The men who came here could never see enough of her body; it was as if they wanted to take her apart. If she could remove her G-string, they'd want her to bend over and spread her cheeks so they could look up her twat. If she could do that, she supposed, they'd want her to unzip her skin and peel it off.

But it was a job (though precious few of the men who paid her salary seemed to realize that; it was amazing how many thought the dancers did this to meet guys or get erotic thrills). It allowed her to set her own schedule and paid better than waiting tables, which she had also done; dancing was much less demeaning. People saw restaurant workers as automatons, extensions of the tables and chairs, fair game for anything from tip-stiffing to verbal abuse.

But dancers, especially ones with any kind of good looks, were often treated like the epitome of unattainable goddess-hood. Even in a joint like the Pink Diamond, the men were crude and gross and often infuriating, but hardly ever flat-out mean. And if they were, the dancers could have them kicked out. Some girls tried to get customers thrown out just for making raunchy remarks. Miss Lee thought this was stupid. Men who made such remarks were usually drunk, and drunk men usually tipped better. And she couldn't help pondering the morality of girls who shook their tits in the face of any guy with a dollar to his name, but blanched when they heard the word pussy.

It was an okay job, but she wouldn't mind winning the sweepstakes tomorrow.

She sank to the stage in a modified split that set them peering at her crotch in the eternal Quest to See Hair, collected a few more dollars, and disappeared behind the curtain as the last strains of “Darling Nikki” died. She and the next dancer, a tall muscular girl with bleached-blond hair and smooth ebony skin who called herself Baby Doll, groped their way past each other in the cramped coffinlike area. “How are they? ” Baby Doll whispered.

Miss Lee shrugged. “Not great. ”

“Honey, they're never great. ” Miss Lee laughed. Baby Doll dabbed at her liberally applied pinky-orange lipstick, hoisted her heavy breasts so that they rode high and round in the D-cups of her red sequined halter top, and ducked onstage as Tommy botched the lead-in to her first song.

Miss Lee walked down a short shabby corridor to the dressing room. The heels of her boots dug into the bare concrete floor and sent bolts of agony up her calves. Boots were more comfortable than the pumps most girls wore, since they gave her ankles some support, but at the end of a shift she could still feel every step she had taken on those four-inch spikes.

She tugged them off as soon as she hit the dressing room, collected the sweaty dollars stuffed into her garter and her G-string, peeled off both, and dove into her bag for street clothes. An oversize black Ministry shirt, a pair of cutoffs, and her Converse All-Stars, one black, one purple, safety-pinned and scribbled upon; she had another pair just like it at home. After six hours on high heels, there was nothing more comforting than shoving your sore toes into a pair of soft, sloppy sneakers.

She stopped by the DJ booth to tip out-don't spend it all in one place, Tommy, sniffle snort-and cut through the club. A blubbery redneck she'd table-danced for earlier tried to wave her over, but she stared right through him and kept heading for the door. Once she was done, she was done.

Just outside the door she stopped, whipped off the platinum wig, and stuffed it into her bag. Her hair underneath was black, buzzed nearly to the scalp except for wispy bangs that fell over her face and a few long skinny braids sprouting here and there. One of her small ears was pierced with thirteen silver hoops beginning at the lobe and curling gracefully up around the delicate rim. From the other dangled a single cross with a tiny ruby-eyed skull at its juncture.

She ran her hand through her buzz cut and breathed in the twilight air of the French Quarter and let Miss Lee go for another night. She was Eddy Sung now, and her evenings were her own.

The gas lamps were just beginning to come on, their soft yellow glow flickering on every corner. She thought of stopping off for a beer and a dozen oysters on the half-shell somewhere. The salty, briny flavor of them always drove the taste of a day's false smiles out of her mouth. But no, she decided, she would go home and check her mail and her messages, and then maybe she would call Zachary and see if he wanted to go eat oysters. They were supposed to be an aphrodisiac; maybe they'd work on him.

Ha. She should be so lucky.

Eddy allowed herself a rueful little laugh and set off through the Quarter for home.