She spent fifty on the clothes. She worked her way through eighteen racks in four shops, everything the mall had, before she made up her mind. The vendors didn’t like her trying on so many things, but it was the most she’d ever had to spend. It was noon before she’d finished, and the Florida sun was cooking the pavement as she crossed the parking lot with her two plastic bags. The bags, like the clothes, were secondhand: one was printed with the logo of a Ginza shoe store, the other advertised Argentinian seafood briquettes molded from reconstituted krill. She was mentally mixing and matching the things she’d bought, figuring out different outfits. From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant, like he’d warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he’d cut the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture’s coming. Mona turned a corner at random, automatic reflex avoiding a crazy, and found herself walking past sunfaded card tables spread with cheap Indo simstim sets, used cassettes, colored spikes of microsoft stuck in blocks of pale blue Styrofoam. There was a picture of Angie Mitchell taped up behind one of the tables, a poster Mona hadn’t seen before. She stopped and studied it hungrily, taking in the star’s clothes and makeup first, then trying to figure out the background, where it had been shot. Unconsciously, she adjusted her expression to approximate Angie’s in the poster. Not a grin, exactly.A sort of half-grin, maybe a little sad. Mona felt a special way about Angie. Because — and tricks said it, sometimes — she looked like her. Like she was Angie’s sister. Except her nose, Mona’s, had more of a tilt, and she, Angie, didn’t have that smear of freckles out to her cheekbones. Mona’s Angie half-grin widened as she stared, washed in the beauty of the poster, the luxury of the pictured room. She guessed it was a kind of castle, probably it was where Angie lived, sure, with lots of people to take care of her, do her hair and hang up her clothes, because you could see the walls were made of big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels. The writing across the bottom would say where it was, maybe, but Mona couldn’t read. Anyway, there weren’t any fucking roaches there, she was sure of that, and no Eddy either. She looked down at the stim sets and briefly considered using the rest of her money. But then she wouldn’t have enough for a stim, and anyway these were old, some of them older than she was. There was whatsit, that Tally, she’d been big when Mona was maybe nine. . . .
When she got back, Eddy was waiting for her, with the tape off the window and the flies buzzing. Eddy was sprawled out on the bed, smoking a cigarette, and the suit with the beard, who’d been watching her, was sitting in the broken chair, still wearing his sunglasses.
Prior , he said that was his name, like he didn’t have a first one. Or like Eddy didn’t have a last one. Well, she didn’t have a last name herself, unless you counted Lisa, and that was more like having two first ones. She couldn’t get much sense of him, in the squat. She thought maybe that was because he was English. He wasn’t really a suit, though, not like she’d thought when she’d seen him in the mall; he was onto some game, it just wasn’t clear which one. He kept his eyes on her a lot, watched her pack her things in the blue Lufthansa bag he’d brought, but she couldn’t feel any heat there, not like he wanted her. He just watched her, watched Eddy smoke, tapped his sunglasses on his knee, listened to Eddy’s line of bullshit, and said as little as he needed to. When he did say something, it was usually funny, but the way he talked made it hard to tell when he was joking. Packing, she felt light-headed, like she’d done a jumper but it hadn’t quite come on. The flies were fucking against the window, bumping on the dust-streaked glass, but she didn’t care. Gone, she was already gone. Zipping up the bag.