eXistenZ (15 page)

Each one contained an assortment of cooked reptiles and amphibians: frogs with bamboo shoots; deep-fried lizards in sesame seeds; a huge toad set upright amidst stuffed mushrooms, with a couple of pieces of corn pushed into his eye sockets; a soup thick with noodles and boiled newts; slices of roast snake with oyster sauce. The lazy Susan slowly drifted round and round, bearing this bizarre but strangely beautiful feast before them.

“My God,” Geller said.

“You take the words right out of my mouth.”

A single saucer-shaped bowl had a compartment to itself, and as it moved on toward Geller, Pikul pointed it out.

“Recognize a friend?” he said.

Geller took a closer look: it was the two-headed salamander that had ridden on the truck with them from the gas station.

Pikul gulped. “Two heads and six legs,” he said. “I think I’ve lost my appetite.”

The waiter was still hovering beside their table.

“Not hungry anymore?” he said. “Great shame, great pity. Mutant reptiles and amphibians provide new and previously unimagined taste sensations. Secret Oriental recipes.”

“Well, yeah,” Geller said. “Thanks, but no thanks. No offense, mind.”

“Shall I clear all this away?” the waiter said.

Pikul caught the glimmer of expression that had passed over Geller’s face. She was indicating: this is the special, this is something special, a game character told us to choose it.

“No, it looks terrific,” Pikul said decisively. He glanced back at Geller, who was nodding slowly. “Thank you. We’re happy.”

“Very good,” the waiter replied. “Enjoy.”

This time he walked away, holding his tray at his side.

Pikul looked thoughtfully at the array of animals lying before him, then reached out and selected the toad with mushrooms. He scooped the toad onto his plate, but returned the mushrooms to the lazy Susan.

With precise movements he began breaking the toad’s muscular limbs off and stripping away the meat.

“Pikul, what are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” He’d bitten into the side of the toad, feeling the flesh spreading as his jaw clamped down on it, and the bones of the animal’s skeleton breaking and separating. His mouth filled with the oily, meaty flavor of meat. “I find it disgusting, but I can’t help myself!”

“That’s great!” Geller wrinkled her nose in disdain at him. “You can’t help yourself.”

“This isn’t my choice,” he said with his mouth full. He swallowed, then took another bite. This time he took a leg. After he’d chewed on it a few times he turned the limb around with his fingers, then stripped the soft meat from the bone by pulling against his teeth.

He looked up from what he was doing. He had now dismembered the toad, with many of its largest bones lying on his plate. He set to work on the deep-fried lizards, scraping off the sesame seeds, pulling away the stringy flesh and laying out the tiny bones on his plate. Everything was stir-fried to perfection: the meat fell neatly from the bones.

Pikul’s fingers were slimy and gobbets of melted fat were dripping from the ends. As before, when he’d been sitting by the conveyor belt, his hands carried on their work of their own volition.

“I’m interested in what you’re doing,” Geller said when he seemed to be flagging.

“Interested?” Pikul said, glancing down with horror at what he was doing. “You think this is interesting?”

“Yeah, it’s fascinating to watch,” Geller said. “It’s a genuine game urge, obviously something your game character, Larry Ashen, was born to do and is good at. Don’t fight it.”

“Actually, I did start out by fighting it. But it didn’t do me any good, so I’m just rolling with it for the moment.”

As he spoke his hands were snapping one of the toad’s long thigh bones and twisting a strip of frog-sinew around it to form an angled piece. He and Geller watched with horrid fascination as his hands quickly pushed all the various pieces together, slotting them in with shreds of skin, gristle, and sinews to hold them in place, and using the amphibians’ own joints to form swivels and cogs and other moving parts.

The grotesquely twinned neckbone of the six-legged salamander was the last piece to be put into place. It seated itself neatly with a distinct click, and as Pikul held up the assembly, it was clear that the necks had formed the mechanism of a trigger.

He was holding a cadaver-gun almost identical to the one that had been used in the assassination attempt at the church.

“Oh my God!” Pikul said in a voice full of awe. “This looks awfully familiar. Are you sure this is okay?”

Geller was looking as uncomfortable as he felt.

“It should be okay,” she said, but she didn’t sound at all sure.

While his right hand held the gun, Pikul’s left hand suddenly moved. Smeared with grease and fragments of meat, it went into his mouth. He sensed a brief, horrifying taste of spicy meat tormenting his tastebuds, and felt his own fingers pulling and twisting at his teeth.

When the hand withdrew, it was holding a bridge of three teeth, one of them bearing a gold filling.

He loaded the teeth efficiently into the magazine of the new cadaver-gun. Bizarre objections to the cadaver-gun flashed through Pikul’s mind, about caliber and rifling and explosive power, but he had already seen how well the guns worked. He was in no mood to argue with his own hands.

“Is that your bridge?” Geller said, of the false teeth.

“You saw where the teeth came from.”

“I meant, do you wear a bridge in real life?”

“Absolutely not. My real teeth are perfect. Don’t ask me how I knew that thing was in my mouth.”

“It probably wasn’t,” Geller said dryly, “until you ordered the special.”

Pikul held the stock of the grotesque gun, and with a practiced motion slapped the magazine into the handle. He pulled the slide back and released it, and with a horrible sinister clicking noise one of the teeth snapped out of the bridge and moved precisely into the chamber.

Smiling devilishly, Pikul pointed the weapon at Geller.

“Death to the vile demoness Allegra Geller!” he said, and waggled his eyebrows at her mock-threateningly.

She slid her chair back in alarm. It scraped across the floor with a loud screeching sound. Her eyes were wide with fear.

“Hey, that’s not funny!” she shouted.

“I don’t mean it,” he said.

“I do. Put the goddamn gun down!”

He saw the real terror persisting in her eyes, so he lowered the gun at once. He shook his head in disbelief at what he’d done. Geller had gone pale, but without looking at him she moved her chair back so she was able to sit against the edge of the table once more. Her hands were trembling.

Pikul took all this in, filled with regret. Even so, his hand still held on to the cadaver-gun.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “I couldn’t resist that, somehow.”

“For a moment, I thought—I really thought you were going to do it.”

He shook his head. “Not you. I wouldn’t kill you. But you know, I really do feel an incredible urge to kill someone here. That’s what my script role is in the game. I’m an assassin.”

Geller gripped the edge of her bowl of newt soup, presumably the closest thing she had to a defensive weapon. Quite an effective one, Pikul instantly realized when he looked at what was in it. He didn’t relish the idea of having a dozen hot dead newts thrown in his face.

“You’re not the target,” he said. “Relax.”

“Then who is it?”

“I need to kill our friend the waiter.”

“Okay, that makes sense. I’ll call him.” Geller turned around in her chair and waved a hand. “Waiter! Waiter!”

“Do you mean that?” Pikul said. “You want me to go ahead?”

“If it’s in the game, just do it. Don’t hesitate even for a moment.”

“But everything feels so realistic. I don’t usually go around killing people. I don’t think I really could go through with it.”

“You won’t be able to stop yourself. You might as well find out what it feels like, and enjoy it.”

“Free will is obviously not a factor in this little game world of yours,” Pikul observed.

“It’s exactly like real life,” Geller said. “There’s just enough free will to make things interesting. Anyway, it’s not my world. It’s ours.”

“So you keep saying.”

Pikul spotted the waiter making his way toward them, weaving between the tables. He was wearing an expectant smile on his face. Other diners were trying to summon him to their tables, but he ignored them all. His expression evinced a total desire to please Pikul and Geller.

“Shit, he’s smiling,” Pikul said quietly.

“So what?”

“So I find him nice. What’s he ever done to me? I’m not going to go through with it.”

“You don’t have much choice,” Geller said. “Free will is restricted here. Remember?”

The waiter arrived at their table, holding his order pad expectantly.

“How may I help you?” the waiter said.

“Well, for a start you could quit smiling.”

“I’m sorry if I am causing offense, sir. But it is my job to make your lunch as pleasant as possible.”

“I don’t want you being nice, you hear?” Pikul lifted the gun up from the table and pointed it at the waiter. He tightened his finger on the trigger. “I found this in my soup, and I’m upset about it.”

“I can only apolo—”

But Pikul fired!

There was a loud bang and the gun recoiled. The tooth-bullet slammed into the waiter’s face, right under his eye. A chunk of his cheekbone flew away in a spray of blood, and the man’s head jerked like that of a prizefighter punched in the face.

The waiter staggered back, dropping his pad and pressing his hands to his face. His white jacket was already scarlet with blood, which was pumping out of him at a horrific rate. He collided with another table, stumbled, seemed about to collapse on the floor, but then recovered.

His face had been transformed into a hideous mask of bloodied anger. He lurched back toward their table, and as he did so he produced a long meat cleaver from under his jacket.

Geller snatched up the bowl of hot newt soup she’d been toying with and with both hands threw it in the waiter’s face. The steaming liquid, and all the newts, flooded over his face and shoulders. He screamed in agony, plucking desperately at the newts and the soft noodles, trying to wipe the sticky soup liquid out of his eyes. One newt was clinging stubbornly to the horrific bleeding cavity where his cheekbone had been.

Geller’s action delayed him for only a couple of seconds.

He came at them again, the cleaver raised above his head. Before either of them could dodge away, he brought the chopping knife down with horrific strength and muscular agility. It smashed against the cadaver-gun in Pikul’s hand, slicing off a tiny part of the tip of the muzzle, then collided with the edge of the Formica tabletop. It made a metallic ringing sound as it bounced away.

The gun began to bleed.

The waiter collapsed forward across the table, bashing into the lazy Susan and throwing the contents of the remaining dishes all over the floor.

He was still gripping the cleaver, and now he turned to Pikul, grappling with deadly menace across the ruined tabletop toward him. Blood was pumping from the injury in his shattered cheekbone. Noodles and dead newts were splattered on his hair and face.

Before the waiter could lever himself upright, Pikul shot him again. He fired the gun straight down the waiter’s open mouth.

A segment of the Chinese man’s skull blew out of the back of his head and skimmed across the tabletop like a tiny Frisbee. It landed, spinning. Pikul saw that a gold-capped tooth was buried in the bone.

The gun was bleeding heavily and covering his hand in gore. Pikul threw it aside in disgust.

Unseen by Geller or Pikul, the restaurant dog had left his spot in the sunlight and was now cowering close to their table. As the cadaver-gun landed on the floor and skittered across the polished boards, the dog leaped out from its position and took the gun in his jaws. He loped off with it to a nearby table and crouched down underneath, between the diners’ legs.

He began to gnaw at the gun, growling.

A tense stillness had spread across the entire restaurant. All the other diners were staring in horror toward their table; some were taking cover, ducking down as well as they could in the confined spaces. Pikul stood up slowly, feeling shaky but nonetheless determined to reassure the other people.

“It’s all right,” he said loudly to everyone within earshot. “Just a little misunderstanding over the check. Er . . . it’s all okay. Pay no attention and enjoy your meal.”

After a few more uncomfortable moments, the other diners turned back to their meals with an air of sinister reluctance. Those who had ducked to avoid being caught in the cross fire stood upright, looking embarrassed, then sat back down in their chairs and picked up their chopsticks.

Pikul looked around in confusion at the strangely inactive room. A wild fear was running through him.

“What do you think, Pikul?” Geller said.

“I think I feel a serious game-urge coming on me. I’m out of control. Let’s get out of here!”

He took her hand.

A movement on the far side of the room was pulling at his attention. There were two glass portholes in the white-painted metal serving doors leading to the kitchen, and through one of these Pikul had seen a man in a chef’s hat. He was beckoning urgently to them.