eXistenZ (6 page)

“I hear things. It’s hard to surprise me with anything. People in the game world are mostly okay, but there are a few crazies. You always get crazies, no matter what you do. What else did Kindred say?”

“Not a lot more. If you remember, you took away the pink-fone before we could finish. I think he sees me as your bodyguard, and that the Antenna Corporation is holding me responsible for your safety.”

“A bodyguard, you say?”

“I do what I can,” Pikul said modestly.

“Where do you keep your gun, bodyguard?”

“What?”

“Your gun. Bodyguards carry guns.”

“I’m one of the new generation of bodyguards. We have secret techniques.”

“You’re bullshitting. I know you aren’t armed. You didn’t even know what to do with the dead rat. How can you protect me without weapons?”

“I’ve got an electronic wand.”

“You mean your Boy Scout cattle prod? More like a calf prod for geeks! Get serious, Pikul.”

Bristling, he said, “Look, Geller, I’ll do what I can to save your life, but you ought to know I’m only a marketing trainee. My clinic master said I had to know how the whole company worked, so tonight he got me to moonlight as a security guard on your test preview.”

“That’s great, isn’t it?” Geller said. “Fucking great. I’m marked for death and they send me out on the road with a PR nerd.”

She stared angrily out of her side window. He reached out a hand to try to reassure her, but the moment his fingers brushed against her arm, she snatched it away from him. Then she let out a yell as the motion jerked her injured shoulder. Still she stared away from him, out into the night.

Pikul felt himself rising defensively to respond, but then thought better of it. He subsided mentally and for a few minutes concentrated on driving, but the larger implications of all this were starting to crowd in on him.

“You really are marked for death, aren’t you?” he said after a while. “Do you know what you did?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you think I have a right to know too?”

“Don’t sweat about it, Pikul. I can handle it. All we have to do is disappear for a while, and I reckon even you can do that without bungling it.”

“Thanks.”

“Meanwhile, we have to stop.”

“What, here?”

“Right now. Stop the car, please. Over there on the side.”

“Why?”

Geller said, through gritted teeth, “It’s time you and I had an intimate moment alone together.”

[
5
]

The intimate moment alone together occurred in the middle of the narrow road, between the trees. Insects stridulated in the warm summer night around them. Overhead, the leaves and branches were still and silent, casting the road into moonless shadows. They left the Land Rover with its engine idling, and went around to the front, into the frill glare of the headlights. Geller kneeled down on the hard tarmac, removed her jacket, and pulled the loose neck of her T-shirt down to bare her injured shoulder.

Pikul, frill of squeamishness and painfully aware of his total lack of experience, went about digging out the bullet with his Swiss Army knife. He tried to do it slowly, he tried to do it gently. But what he actually did was do it slowly.

Her eyes bright with tears, Geller said, “C’mon, Pikul,
c’mon!
If you’re gonna do it, do it!”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You failed. You’re hurting me. Just get the goddamn bullet out of me before I pass out.”

“Don’t faint,” he pleaded.

“All right, I’m not about to faint. But I am likely to kill if you don’t finish up soon.”

“Okay, okay. I’m doing my best.”

Sweat was bursting from his brow. He clenched his teeth and dug into the wound more recklessly than before. He could feel something hard and rounded inside, something that resisted the sharp point of the knife blade. If he could get the point a little deeper, to the side . . .

Something yellow and white flipped out of the wound and shot in a glistening arc through the brilliant beams from the headlights.

Geller gasped with agony and ducked away from him, once more clamping her hand over the aching, bleeding injury. She hung her head with her hair hiding her face, her breath rasping in and out.

Pikul dropped the knife and shuffled across to where he’d seen the object fall. He soon found it, lying on the tarmac surface of the road. It was hard and slippery, and eluded his grasp the first time he tried to pick it up. He wiped it with his fingers, then took it back to her, holding it up in the light.

“I got it. Look at that!”

“You found the bullet. Big deal.”

“No, look! Did someone bite you?”

“What do you mean?” Geller said, turning toward him. Her face was drawn and pale with pain.

“What I just dug out of you. It’s a tooth. A human tooth.”

He held it out for her to see, but after a quick glance. Geller turned away. She leaned back into the dark, found her MetaFlesh game-pod bag and rummaged around inside it.

“Let’s take another look at that weirdo pistol,” she said.

She quickly located the cadaver-gun and held it in both hands, examining it from different angles. After a moment of expert study she found the magazine, and popped it out of the grip. She examined it in the harsh light of the headlights, then passed it to Pikul.

The magazine, made of sheets of bone and fragments of gristle, was packed with teeth.

“What in hell . . . ?” Pikul said.

“As you said, the bullets are human teeth.” She held them close to her eyes and looked intently at them. “Look, this one’s got a cavity.”

“Filled with amalgam?” Pikul said, trying to make the gun normal in some horrid way.

“No, there’s no amalgam,” she said seriously. “That’s a metal compound, isn’t it? An alloy of mercury and silver?”

“I got it!” Pikul said, trying to grab the cadaver-gun from her. She kept it away from him. “No metal anywhere in the whole damn thing,” he said. “That gun is designed to go through metal or synthetics detectors. The whole thing is made of flesh and bone. Dichter got past me with that! I screened him with my wand, and there was no metal anywhere on him.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right. It’s incredible they’d go to so much trouble.”

Geller was looking giddy with disbelief about their bizarre discovery. “If they made smaller-caliber weapons,” she said, “they’d have to fill them with baby teeth! The tooth fairy could go into the arms business!”

“Dichter really did intend to kill you tonight.”

Geller looked at him long and hard, until Pikul found her gaze unnerving and had to look away. She remained silent. When he looked back, she was still staring at him, deep in thought.

“Yeah, I think he did,” Geller said soberly, returning from her brief flight of fantasy.

[
6
]

They stopped off at a Perky Pat to buy some takeout burgers, then rented a room at a place called the Salmon Falls Motel. The ill-lit room was furnished with old, dark wallpaper, a grimy carpet that once had been colored orange, and two large double beds. They each sat on one of the beds, putting the paper bags and food containers on the floor between them. They ate hungrily, dropping pieces of salad and gobbets of relish on the floor.

Neither of them said anything. Pikul was thinking about the rest of the night and having to share a bedroom with a woman who looked and acted the way Allegra Geller did. Even tired, injured, and frightened as she undoubtedly was, she acted casual, often affording him quick little smiles he found tantalizing and enthralling. He couldn’t figure her out, though. She wasn’t leading him on: nothing in anything she said or did gave that impression. She was just . . . good to be with. She seemed relaxed and familiar in his company, taking him for granted. At the motel office he’d asked for two separate rooms, but Geller intervened and told the clerk they wanted only one room.

“You bodyguard,” she’d said by way of explanation, as they headed down to find the room. “Me potential victim. Like it or not, you don’t leave my side tonight.”

Pikul had come to the conclusion he could put up with the situation.

As soon as she was through eating, Geller went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She pushed the door behind her, but neither locked nor closed it properly. The sound of rushing and splashing water drifted sensuously into the room. Pikul sat quietly on his bed, picking at his teeth with a fingernail and thinking about the most beautiful woman he’d ever met, naked and wet only a few feet away from him. Practically in the same room with him.

Then, a few minutes later, she
was
in the same room with him, her legs and shoulders still glistening with droplets. Allegra had wound a damp, inadequate motel towel around her body, and wrapped an even smaller one about her hair. She paced restlessly around the room for a while, dabbing the water off herself. Her thoughts were obviously miles away.

The towel was thin and threadbare from years of use, and clung to her body revealingly. To Pikul, she was a vision of naked arms and legs, and temptingly hinted at curves, at which he hardly dare glance.

The wound in her shoulder was still exposed, but it had stopped bleeding and the hot water had helped clean it up a little. At her suggestion, Pikul went out to the Land Rover and found the small onboard first-aid kit. He helped her place a dressing on the wound: an antiseptic lint pad held in place by two large plasters.

The physical nearness of her dazzled him; she smelled wonderfully of soap and shampoo. Water dripped from her hair onto his knee. As he placed the dressing on her shoulder she inclined her face, and he almost went mad at the shapes she made: the cool angles of collarbone, neck, throat, cheek, lips, soft skin, fair hair, gentle womanhood.

Afterward, he cleaned up the mess they had made with the food, while Geller sat across from him in the middle of the other bed. She had placed her game-pod on the towel covering her lap and jacked the UmbyCord into the bioport in her back. Her eyes were closed and her fingers twitched delicately over the sensitive surface of the game-pod. She seemed to be in a kind of trance, her body moving voluptuously in time to some unheard rhythm.

Pikul stared, entranced by the stresses her movements were causing on the too-small towel that so inadequately covered her body. The knot she’d tied in the towel under her armpit was working loose, as he’d secretly hoped all along it might. He watched with close interest as the edge of the piece of cloth slipped with maddening slowness, millimeter by millimeter, down the curve of her left breast. He was torn with indecision: Should he be the perfect gentleman and look away? Should he gently cover her? Or should he instead pretend not to notice, and let gravity and nature take their course?

Before he had to decide, Geller suddenly came out of her trance. She opened her eyes, saw him there and leaned over her pod to make some final adjustment. As she did, two things happened at once: the towel finally worked completely loose and her hand came up and grabbed it just in time.

She stared hard at the game-pod while she retied the knot under her arm.

When she spoke, it was in vague terms, not directly addressing him.

“The whole game world is in a kind of trance,” she said.

“I remember you said something like that, back at the meeting.” He realized his voice sounded a tone or two higher than usual.

“People are willing to accept so little,” she said. “They habitually sell themselves short. They’re trapped in a cage formed out of their own limited expectations. They think that what they see is everything they know, or everything they can ever know. They won’t imagine or dream or fantasize. To most people the limit of their horizon is a vacation every year, a trip away from home. Some people don’t even do as much as that. Yet the whole world is out there, waiting to be discovered. But now there’s more than just the world: virtual reality adds an extra dimension. You can explore the whole world, more than the whole world, simply by using your mind. The problem is a kind of courage. You need courage to throw off everything that’s familiar, to experiment. Very few people can conceive the amazing experiences that could be theirs were they only more daring.”

She stared reflectively at the dark wallpaper opposite the beds. Part of it was peeling, to reveal dark plaster beneath. She seemed untroubled by their dingy surroundings, wrapped up in her own thoughts.

Pikul said, “Just now with your game-pod . . . where were you? What were you doing?”

“I was wandering through
eXistenZ
. . . the new system, I mean.”

“Yeah. I could see that. But what were you actually doing?”

She looked directly at him, and for a moment he could have sworn he saw her tongue flick with quick relish across her lips. Then she smiled shyly and glanced away from him.

“Wandering,” she said. “I told you. That’s about all I can do on my own, all anyone can do. It’s kind of interesting, but only in the way a foreign country is interesting to a tourist. I was trapped in the cage of my own making. To get really involved you have to react to another player. It’s the old saying: it takes two. It can get pretty frustrating on your own.”

As she finished saying this she looked directly into his eyes, and the invitation was unmistakable.

“Would you like to play with me?” she asked. She turned toward him, her hand indicating the game-pod.

“Me?” he said. “But I’ve never . . .” Pikul felt panic inexplicably rising in him. Everything in him urged him to keep her at a distance. “Let’s get this problem sorted out!” he said, allowing the words to run out of him uncontrollably. “Why won’t you let me contact Antenna? They’ll be going crazy wondering what’s happened to you. I mean, it’s not like we’ve done anything wrong. We just ran because we didn’t know how many of them there were. Right? I think we owe it to Antenna to let them know you’re all right, to get them to send somebody to help you who knows what he’s doing . . .”

As he said all this Geller was unbuttoning his shirt, while continuing to stare invitingly into his eyes. When the last button was undone, she gently pulled the flaps out from his trousers and ran her arms around his waist. The tips of her breasts pressed softly through her thin towel against his bare chest, and he could smell her still-damp hair.