At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.
Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her casette is n the deck ready for playback. Some women’s tapes disorients him, but he doubts this is the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.
Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience.
But Angela’s own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that can’t be it – it’s simply that the casette is an entirely unknown quantity.
When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanise plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at least once a month for girls or the holodrome.
The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Fransisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different ‘provisional’ city governements had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level
Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with anything he did or said.
Years later he realized that he no longer had any idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.
The first three quarters of the cassette had been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound – the no-sound of the first dark sea . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lighting that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against magnesium sky.
Many of the refugees were armed.
Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had maintaned in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession.
The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governements and territories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy.
Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband thay had been sent to find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, igoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a lenght of brushwood.