“Here’s your quibble driver’s license,” Kathy said. She carefully passed him a small black card. “Now I’ll get started on your military service-status chit. That’s a little harder because of the full-face and profile photos, but I can handle that over there.” She pointed at a white screen, in front of which stood a tripod with camera, a flash gun mounted at its side.
“You have all the equipment,” Jason said as he fixed himself rigidly against the white screen; so many photos had been taken of him during his long career that he always knew exactly where to stand and what expression to reveal.
But apparently he had done something wrong this time. Kathy, a severe expression on her face, surveying him.
“You’re all lit up,” she said, half to herself. “You’re glowing in some sort of phony way.”
“Publicity stills,” Jason said. “Eight-by-ten glossy–”
“These aren’t. These are to keep you out of a forced-labor camp for the rest of your life. Don’t smile.”
He didn’t.
“Good,” Kathy said. She ripped the photos from the camera, carried them cautiously to her workbench, waving them to dry them. “These damn 3-D animateds they want on the military service papers–that camera cost me a thousand dollars and I need it only for this and nothing else . . . but I have to have it.” She eyed him. “It’s going to cost you.”
“Yes,” he said, stonily. He felt aware of that already.
For a time Kathy puttered, and then, turning abruptly toward him, she said, “Who are you _really?_ You’re used to posing; I saw you, I saw you freeze with that glad smile in place and those lit-up eyes.”
“I told you. I’m Jason Taverner. The TV personality guest host. I’m on every Tuesday night.”
“No,” Kathy said; she shook her head. “But it’s none of my business–sorry–I shouldn’t have asked.” But she continued to eye him, as if with exasperation. “You’re doing it all wrong. You really are a celebrity–it was reflexive, the way you posed for your picture. But you’re not a celebrity. There’s no one named Jason Taverner who matters, who is anything. So what are you, then? A man who has his picture taken all the time that no one’s ever seen or heard of.”
Jason said, “I’m going about it the way any celebrity who no one has ever heard of would go about it.”
For a moment she stared at him and then she laughed. “I see. Well, that’s cool; that’s really cool. I’ll have to remember that.” She turned her attention back to the documents she was forging. “In this business,” she said, absorbed in what she was doing, “I don’t want to get to know people I’m making cards for. But”–she glanced up–“I’d sort of like to know you. You’re strange. I’ve seen a lot of types–hundreds, maybe–but none like you. Do you know what I think?”
“You think I’m insane,” Jason said.
“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “Clinically, legally, whatever. You’re psychotic; you have a split personality. Mr. No One and Mr. Everyone. How have you survived up until now?”
He said nothing. It could not be explained.
“Okay,” Kathy said. One by one, expertly and efficiently, she forged the necessary documents.
Eddy, the hotel clerk, lurked in the background, smoking a fake Havana cigar; he had nothing to say or do, but for some obscure reason he hung around. I wish he’d fuck off, Jason thought to himself. I’d like to talk to her more .
“Come with me,” Kathy said, suddenly; she slid from her work stool and beckoned him toward a wooden door at the right of her bench. “I want your signature five times, each a little different from the others so they can’t be superimposed. That’s where so many documenters”–she smiled as she opened the door–“that’s what we call ourselves–that’s where so many of us fuck it up. They take one signature and transfer it to all the documents. See?”
“Yes,” he said, entering the musty little closetlike room after her.
Kathy shut the door, paused a moment, then said, “Eddy is a police fink.”
Staring at her he said, “Why?”
“‘Why?’ Why what? Why is he a police fink? For money. For the same reason I am.”
Jason said, “God damn you.” He grabbed her by the right wrist, tugged her toward him; she grimaced as his fingers tightened. “And he’s already–”
“Eddy hasn’t done anything yet,” she grated, trying to free her wrist. “That hurts. Look; calm down and I’ll show you. Okay?”
Reluctantly, his heart hammering in fear, he let her go. Kathy turned on a bright, small light, laid three forged documents in the circle of its glare. “A purple dot on the margin of each,” she said, indicating the almost invisible circle of color. “A microtransmitter, so you’ll emit a bleep every five seconds as you move around. They’re after conspiracies; they want the people you’re with.”
Jason said harshly, “I’m not with anyone.”
“But they don’t know that.” She massaged her wrist, frowning in a girlish, sullen way. “You TV celebrities no one’s ever heard of sure have quick reactions,” she murmured.
“Why did you tell me?” Jason asked. “After doing all the forging, all the–”
“I want you to get away,” she said, simply.
“Why?” He still did not understand.
“Because hell, you’ve got some sort of magnetic quality about you; I noticed it as soon as you came into the room. You’re”–she groped for the word–“sexy. Even at your age.”
“My presence,” he said.
“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “I’ve seen it before in public people, from a distance, but never up close like this. I can see why you imagine you’re a TV personality; you really seem like you are.”
He said, “How do I get away? Are you going to tell me that? Or does that cost a little more?”
“God, you’re so cynical.”
He laughed, and again took hold of her by the wrist. “I guess I don’t blame you,” Kathy said, shaking her head and making a masklike face. “Well, first of all, you can buy Eddy off. Another five hundred should do it. Me you don’t have to buy off–if, and only if, and I mean it, if you stay with me awhile. You have . . . allure, like a good perfume. I respond to you and I just never do that with men.”
“With women, then?” he said tartly.
It passed her without registering. “Will you?” she said.
“Hell,” he said, “I’ll just leave.” Reaching, he opened the door behind her, shoved past her and out into her workroom. She followed, rapidly.
Among the dim, empty shadows of the abandoned restaurant she caught up with him; she confronted him in the gloom. Panting, she said, “You’ve already got a transmitter planted on you.”
“I doubt it,” he answered.
“It’s true. Eddy planted it on you.”
“Bullshit,” he said, and moved away from her toward the light of the restaurant’s sagging, broken front door.
Pursuing him like a deft-footed herbivore, Kathy gasped, “But suppose it’s true. It could be.” At the half-available doorway she interposed herself between him and freedom; standing there, her hands lifted as if to ward off a physical blow, she said swiftly, “Stay with me one night. Go to bed with me. Okay? That’s enough. I promise. Will you do it, for just one night?”
He thought, Something of my abilities, my alleged and well-known properties, have come with me, to this strange place I now live in. This place where I do not exist except on forged cards manufactured by a pol fink. Eerie, he thought, and he shuddered. Cards with microtransmitters built into them, to betray me and everyone with me to the pols. I haven’t done very well here. Except that, as she says, I’ve got allure. Jesus, he thought. And that’s all that stands between me and a forced-labor camp.
“Okay,” he said, then. It seemed the wiser choice–by far. “Go pay Eddy,” she said. “Get that over with and him out of here.”
“I wondered why he’s still hanging around,” Jason said. “Did he scent more money?”
“I guess so,” Kathy said.
“You do this all the time,” Jason said as he got out his money. SOP: standard operating procedure. And he had tumbled for it.
Kathy said blithely, “Eddy is psionic.”
4
Two city blocks away, upstairs in an unpainted but once white wooden building, Kathy had a single room with a hotcompart in which to fix one-person meals.
He looked around him. A girl’s room: the cotlike bed had a handmade spread covering it, tiny green balls of textile fibers in row after row. Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room.
On a wicker table a copy of Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_.
“How far’d you get into it?” he asked her.
“To _Within a Budding Grove_.” Kathy double-locked the door after them and set into operation some kind of electronic gadget; he did not recognize it.