I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and didn’t seem to mind the call. “Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an in- teresting frisson to your story, not having the pictures turnout. But what should I do? “Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel? They’ve got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need.” What was he talking about? “Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?” Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning date with the Elect. “The who?” “These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the microwaves. ~ I considered putting a collect call through to Lon- don, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him his photographer was checked out for a protracted season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass near Disneyland, when the road fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome tear- drops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I’d seen in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he made prints of all the negatives I’d accumulated on the Downes job. I didn’t want to look at the stuff myself. It didn’t seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all the way. Cohen’s congratulatory wire was forwarded to me in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pic- tures. He admired the way I’d “really gotten into it,” and looked forward to working with me again. That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York. “Hell of a world we live in, huh?” The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. “But it could be worse, huh?” “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.” He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of condensed catasttophe. Fragments of a Hologram Rose
That summer Parker had trouble sleeping. There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to con- sciousness. To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer would trigger the deck’s playback circuit. He bought an ASP cassette that began with the sub- ject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning’s exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette’s transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, won- dered if this was possible. He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by now he knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most in- teresting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift glance down the white beach that picked out the figure of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a black machine pistol slung over his arm. While Parker slept, power drained from the city’s grids. The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra~something; with other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP deck. Three in the morning.