Mad Boys (13 page)

Royal didn’t even look like a boy anymore. He looked like a teenager. And while he talked play, he worked hard. He made telephone calls, added figures, wrote memos, cursed to himself. I was really a lot better at playing than he was. I’d grab a gun off the shelf, and I’d look out the window, aiming at this pedestrian or that and pretend I was picking ’em off. Big-shouldered men, slow-moving old ladies, and mothers pushing baby carriages—all made good targets, because they moved at a steady rate and didn’t make any sudden turns. For opposite reasons, kids were harder to hit. Mainly though I pretended to shoot at cars. I imagined their killed drivers losing control of their vehicles, which would careen into walls, roll over, and burst into flames. Actually, the way some of these people drove, you’d think they were already shot. Pretty soon Royal got sick of seeing me drumming around and making k-pshh noises, and he told me to saygit staygill and shaygut aygup.

“I can shut up, but I can’t sit still,” I said. “I mean I’ve tried, but if there’s one thing I can’t do it’s sit still. I twitch, I jerk, I wince, I quiver.”

“Web, you’re what is known as restless, and the reason you’re restless is TV deprivation.”

One thing about Royal, he could take any idea and put some sense into it, so I watched his television. I stood and paced and growled and would have thrown up if I had had any food in my belly. I wasn’t in front of the set fifteen minutes, when Royal said my viewing technique was all wrong.

“You’re getting steamed up over what’s on,” he said. “You’re hollering and jumping up and down, and acting like what you think and feel matters. It doesn’t. You need to learn zentensity.”

“Zentensity?” I didn’t know what Royal meant.

So he demonstrated. He sprawled, dropped his jaw, zeroed in his vision to the screen, and went into a trance. After a minute he jumped up and said, “That’s how it’s done. Now you try it.”

I sprawled, dropped my jaw, screwed my eyeballs to the screen. After a while, I went into a TV trance. It was sort of like sleeping with your eyes open, your ears listening. Without even knowing it, I was soon in a state of relaxed forgetfulness. I had mastered zentensity. Pretty soon I didn’t care what was on the tube.

When I was relaxed and Royal had completed his business for the day, he asked me a question: “Want your memory back?”

“I suppose so,” I said, taken off guard.

“Want the door opened to your brain cells? Want you to be you? Want total access to the uncanny?” He changed the tone of his voice, sounding like a hysterical cartoon character on Saturday morning television. “Switch back, switch back, switch back.”

“You hit me on the head, I had a psychotherapist, Father threatened to turn me over to a pervert. Nothing has worked.”

“That’s because nobody tried hypnosis.”

“Hypnosis.” I was fascinated.

“Listen, Web, I’ve got big plans, a lot bigger than guns and steroids. And I need you.”

I didn’t understand how having me hypnotized was going to help Royal, but I knew he had his reasons.

“Well, okay,” I said.

“Do you know what Artificial Experience is?” he asked.

“Like a movie?” I guessed.

“Close,” he said. “In a movie, you get the experience of killing or getting killed without pulling the trigger or falling dead yourself. But a movie is only a movie, two dimensions. Imagine yourself coming out of the screen, going back in the screen. Living the movie in multi-dimensions.”

“I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I lived it. I was born, falling out of a movie screen, landing in a swamp.”

“I know, you told me,” Royal said sarcastically. “That’s your reality. You can make your reality someone else’s reality; I’m talking about Artificial Experience. It’s the ultimate, the front stoop to doomsday.” He grabbed me by my shirt, his breath came in excited pants. “Soon the parents will be dead, soon the grown-ups will be enslaved, soon the girls will be our cheerleaders. We, the boys of America, will rule with weapons of Artificial Experience, Synthetic Encounters, and the Exposition of the Uncanny.”

Royal was completely mad, much crazier than myself, and he had taken my ideas for his own (I had invented the categories he’d mentioned), but he was the only friend I had.

“Okay,” I said.

“Congratulations. Let’s go to the Catacombs of Manhattan, for your trial by hypnosis.”

CATACOMBS OF MANHATTAN

Royal and I headed downtown in Royal’s limo. Thanks to profits from gun running, Royal could afford a driver these days. While Royal rode in the back making business calls from his cellular phone, he made me sit in the front with the driver. Royal, separated by a glass divider, wheeling and dealing over the phone, seemed far away; watching him was like watching a TV with the sound turned down.

The driver, in a chauffeur’s uniform, was a girl sixteen or seventeen years old. Her name was Siena. Her skin was dark, and she was lean, almost slinky. She had fierce black eyes, and a twist of anger in her lips. From her features, she might have passed for any race, or none of the known races, or all of them. We had the same skin color and features; we could have been brother and sister. She didn’t belong to the Souvz gang, but she was a Souvien native. As we traveled down the brightly lit streets of the city, we talked and smoked cigarettes. I liked the way she blew the smoke the way you’d spit out a kiss for a demon. Her English was good, because she’d been studying it since she was five.

“Where’d Royal find you? On the streets?” she asked.

“No, back in the woods.”

“Really, I’m surprised. There’s no profit in the woods, and Royal’s only motive is profit.”

“What about you? Where’d he find you?” I asked.

“I found him. I’m an illegal alien. My country is in the middle of a civil war, and I landed here to earn money for my family and get an education. I needed work. Royal said, ‘You’ll be my whore, right?’ I said, ‘No way.’ He said, ‘Then you’ll be my maid.’ I said, ‘I’ll be your whore before I’ll be your maid, and I’ve already told you I won’t be your whore.’ I thought then he’d throw me out, but he laughed. Next thing I knew, he’d hired me as his driver. I still don’t know why.”

“I figure you’re in love with him.”

“I’m in love with no man.”

“You don’t get the feeling?”

She stared at me so hard I thought she’d crash the car. “The feeling,” she said.

“Yah, what do you do when you get the feeling?”

“None of your business. And, you—I suppose you sexually harass yourself to get the feeling.”

“Me, I don’t get the feeling,” I said.

“Never?”

“Xiphi gets the feeling for me,” I said.

“Who’s Xiphi?”

“My demon. He gets the feeling, but I don’t.”

“Because you don’t want it.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Poor little flower,” she said. “Where do you live, back in the woods?”

“Used to. Right now I don’t live anywhere. Yourself?”

“I stay with the women in the Catacombs, but in my heart I’m still in Souvien with my family.”

“If you like it so much there, what are doing here?”

“I’m going to night school. I dream of bringing good government to my country. With good government, good cigarettes will follow.”

“You’ll have to fight in the civil war, won’t you.”

“All my people do is make war. I’m looking for a better way.”

After Royal had finished his private phone conversations, he called over the intercom for me to join him in the back. Siena pushed a button and the glass divider slid open and I crawled through into the back seat. The divider closed, and Siena seemed to have retreated into another world.

“I like Siena. She’s like a guy,” I said.

“She’s an ignorant savage,” Royal said.

I blinked, stung, as if it were I who had been insulted. “She’s serious-minded,” I said.

“Do you know what her people do when they’re desperate?” Royal said.

“How should I know? I’ve never been to Souvien.”

“They kill a chicken and drink its blood.”

“I’d like to try that,” I said.

“That’s because you’re a savage, too.” Royal flicked my lip with his forefinger. It hurt. I wanted to kill him. “See,” Royal chuckled. “I’ve unleashed your anger.”

I grabbed him, and we wrestled briefly on the seat until he pinned me. Then he said, “Siena doesn’t know it, but I’ve got big plans for her. Once we unleash
her
anger, she will do great harm on our behalf.”

A few minutes later, Siena pulled off the street and right up on the curb. We were in mid-town Manhattan. We stepped out of the car.

“Stand by,” Royal said to Siena. “I’ll beep you when I need you again.” The limo roared off, and Royal turned to me. “It costs me more to keep my car in a safe place than to rent that hole where I’m staying now.”

“With the money you make, you could live like a king,” I said.

“And I will. But not yet.” Royal looked at his watch.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Down,” Royal said.

A man who smelled like throw-up sat in the sidewalk selling scarfs. Another sold argyle socks. I bumped into a woman dressed in black, and she said something to me in a foreign language. An old man, standing on a street corner and tottering like a watchtower in an earthquake, gave us the hairy eyeball, but Royal went by him as if he didn’t exist. The streets were full of people like that; they didn’t look seriously human, they looked like unemployed clowns.

“There’s a couple of important rules in this city,” Royal said. “Never look anybody in the eye, and even more important, never run away. These people around here, they see you running and they act like crazed dogs after a rabbit.” Royal paused for a second and then, in an accent that reminded me of the way that Bik and Nox talked, he added, “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure,” I said, wondering whether I was a rabbit or a dog. And then I howled like a coyote. It felt good to howl. Not a soul in the city seemed to notice.

We went into a place full of weird little booths and pictures of naked women and guys wandering around.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Peep shows,” Royal said.

Royal strode up to a scowling black man and whispered something in his ear. The black man gave him a token.

Royal and I got into one of the booths. It smelled like pee; I thought, maybe instead of a peep show they ought to call it a pee show. Royal put the token in a slot and a picture came on the screen. It showed a man on top of a woman. I felt myself blush. I couldn’t stop looking, but I didn’t get the feeling either. I wished Doctor Thatcher was here.

“You brought me here to watch this?” I said.

“Just to see the look on your face,” Royal laughed. “That look is going to be worth money to both of us.”

The booth began to shake.

“We’re moving,” I said.

“Of course. We’re going down.”

I couldn’t unscrew my eyes from the monitor. “Are they really doing it?”

“Of course they’re really doing it. Don’t you know the facts of life?”

“More or less.” I didn’t sound very convincing.

“Didn’t anybody take you aside and give you the word?”

“I got the basics from Dirty Joe.”

“I wish I’d been there for the laugh.”

The booth/elevator came to a stop. The door slid open. I stepped out, although I kept watching the monitor. Now the woman was on top of the man. They both seemed to have the feeling. The door closed, and I looked around. Dark, grimy concrete. Light bulbs in wire cages. Train tracks.

“Subway tunnel?” I said.

“Watch out for the third rail,” Royal said.

We walked along the tracks about a hundred feet when I heard a train coming. I thought it was going to flatten us, but we ducked into one of the many concrete recesses built into the tunnel. The train screamed past.

We walked another couple hundred feet until we came to a grate. Royal bent down, grabbed the handle, and lifted. The grate came up with creak, a crick, and a come-on-in. We climbed down a metal ladder to a narrow, concrete cave no more than four or five feet wide. Royal had brought a flashlight. Good thing, because soon the cave was pitch black.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

“No, I like the dark. Where’s this go?” I asked.

“Corkscrews to the bottom of hell,” Royal said, and added one of those fake bru-ha-ha laughs. He was trying to scare me, but after all I’d been through there wasn’t much scare left in me.

We didn’t get very far when a flashlight beam blinded us. I heard a boy’s voice yell, “Secret password, or die!”

“Je me souviens,” Royal said. “Counter-password?”

“Meet me at the border. Code name?”

“DoubleZero. Your code name?”

“Grand-Pre.”

After that there was a reunion. Royal and the kid did a secret handshake, and I was introduced to Islands. He was about my age, very slight, even smaller than I was. He had brown hair, dark skin but blue eyes and a big grin.

“Okay, where’s your personal bodyguard?” Royal said.

Islands made a clicking noise with his tongue, and another boy stepped out of the dark. His name was the Pope of Death, tall, skinny, gray-pink skin full of pimples, and he never smiled. A look of hurt feelings never left his face. Islands and Pope were members of the Souvz boy gang.

Royal held a short meeting with the boys, making a deal to sell them some guns. While Royal and Islands discussed business, I passed the time talking with Pope. He was serious-minded, and unlike Siena he talked with a thick accent.

“Tell me how bad you hate the Shadows,” I said, expecting he’d say bad enough to torture them to death and flush their body parts down the toilet. But he surprised me.

“The Shadows are brave.” He sounded tired and old for a boy. “You can shoot them or knife them or whip them with chains; they yell and scream and cry their eyes out, but they never complain.”

“So you’d like to make peace between the gangs.”

“No way, I want war. I want to kill as many Shadows as I can. I want to kill them all.” He meant every word, I could tell. The same thing that had impressed me about Nox impressed me about Pope: he was sincere.

Royal and Islands finished up, and then the two Souv boys disappeared into the darkness. Royal and I continued down the tunnel. I told Royal that after having met the Souvz, I didn’t want to kill them.