Mona Lisa Overdrive (8 page)

She had a drill for getting dressed in the squat, and she could do it in the dark.
You got your thongs on, after giving them a quick knock together to dislodge possible
crawlies, and then you walked over to where you knew there was a roll of old fax on
a Styrofoam crate beside the window. You peeled off about a meter of fax, maybe a
day and a half of
Asahi Shimbun
, folded and creased it, put it down on the floor. Then you could stand on it, get
the plastic bag from beside the crate, undo the twist of wire that held it shut, and
find the clothes you wanted. When you stepped out of the thongs to put your pants
on, you knew you’d be stepping on fresh fax. It was an article of faith with Mona
that nothing was going to wander across the fax in the time it took her to step into
a pair of jeans and get the thongs back on.

You could put on a shirt or whatever, carefully reseal the bag, and get out of there.
Makeup, when required, went on in the corridor outside; there was some mirror left,
beside the derelict elevator, a Fuji biofluorescent strip glued above it.

There was a strong piss smell beside the elevator this morning, so she decided to
skip the makeup.

You never saw anybody in the building, but you heard them sometimes; music through
a closed door, or footsteps just gone around a corner at the far end of a corridor.
Well, that made sense; Mona had no desire to meet her neighbors either.

She took the stairs down three flights and into the gaping dark of the underground
garage. She had her flashlight in her hand, found her way with six quick little blinks
that steered her around stagnant puddles and dangling strands of dead optic cable,
up the concrete steps and out into the alley. You could smell the beach, sometimes,
in
the alley, if the wind was right, but today it just smelled of garbage. The side of
the squat towered away above her, so she moved fast, before some asshole decided to
drop a bottle or worse. Once she was out on the Avenue, she slowed, but not too much;
she was conscious of the cash in her pocket, and full of plans for spending it. Wouldn’t
do to get taken off, not when it looked like Eddy had wrangled them some kind of ticket
out. She alternated between telling herself it was a sure thing, that they were practically
gone, and warning herself not to get her hopes up. She knew Eddy’s sure things: hadn’t
Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the beaches were beautiful
and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot for a little working vacation
that had already stretched into the longest month Mona could remember. Well, it was
fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only beaches that weren’t private were polluted,
dead fish rolling belly-up in the shallows. Maybe the private stretches were the same,
but you couldn’t see them, just the chainlink and the guards in shorts and cop shirts
standing around. Eddy’d get excited by the weapons the guards carried and describe
each one to her in numbing detail. He didn’t have a gun himself, though, not as far
as she knew, and Mona figured that was a good thing. Sometimes you couldn’t even smell
the dead fish, because there was another smell, a chlorine smell that burned the roof
of your mouth, something from the factories up the coast. If there were cute guys,
they were still tricks, and the ones down here weren’t exactly offering to pay double.

About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to come by and
cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the bleach smell was
the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable cocktail, all those molecules
thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street.

She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food stalls. Her stomach
started growling at the
smell, but she didn’t trust street food, not if she didn’t have to, and there were
licensed places in the mall that would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpet in
the asphalt square that had been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced
and distorted off the concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the
market. A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the
gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he
wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank
chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt
at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man’s eyes
flashed God’s wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona turned left, between
rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in pyramids on their battered
metal carts.

She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent businesses:
sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters serving a dozen
kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little quieter. She found
a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The Chinese cook spoke to her in
Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her soup in a plastic bowl; she paid
him with the smallest of her bills, and he made change with eight greasy cardboard
tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she wouldn’t be able to use them; if they
stayed in Florida, she could always get some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go,
gotta. She shoved the worn yellow disks back across the painted plyboard counter.
“You keep ’em.” The cook swept them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue
plastic toothpick fixed at the corner of his mouth.

She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded noodle from
the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the cook’s pots and
burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else,
white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she thought.
But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He was pretending
to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his mouth set in what
he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the suit, what you could
see of him behind the beard and the glasses. The smile wasn’t pretty, though; it was
kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his teeth. She shifted a little on the
stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if you did it right, got the tax chip and
everything. She was suddenly aware of the cash in her pocket. She pretended to study
the laminated foodhandling license taped to the counter; when she looked up again,
he was gone.

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.

It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of
a nowhere sky. She’d never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.

Prior’s car was a white Datsun rental that drove itself and played elevator music
through quad speakers. It left them beside their luggage in a bare concrete bay and
drove away in the rain. If Prior had a bag, it wasn’t with him; Mona had her Lufthansa
bag and Eddy had two black gator-clone suitcases.

She tugged her new skirt down over her hips and wondered if she’d bought the right
shoes. Eddy was
enjoying himself, had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders tilted to show he
was doing something important.

She remembered him in Cleveland, the first time, how he’d come out to the place to
look at a scoot the old man had for sale, a three-wheel Skoda that was mostly rust.
The old man grew catfish in concrete tanks that fenced the dirt yard. She was in the
house when Eddy came, long high-walled space of a truck trailer up on blocks. There
were windows cut down one side, square holes sealed over with scratched plastic. She
was standing by the stove, smell of onions in sacks and tomatoes hung up to dry, when
she felt him there, down the length of the room, sensed the muscle and shoulder of
him, his white teeth, the black nylon cap held shyly in his hand. Sun was coming in
the windows, the place lit up bare and plain, the floor swept the way the old man
had her keep it, but it was like a shadow came, blood-shadow where she heard the pumping
of her heart, and him coming closer, tossing the cap on the bare chipboard table as
he passed it, not shy now but like he lived there, right up to her, running a hand
with a bright ring back through the oiled weight of his hair. The old man came in
then and Mona turned away, pretended to do something with the stove. Coffee, the old
man said, and Mona went to get some water, filling the enamel pot from the roof-tank
line, the water gurgling down through the charcoal filter. Eddy and the old man sitting
at the table, drinking black coffee, Eddy’s legs spread straight out under the table,
thighs hard through threadbare denim. Smiling, jiving the old man, dealing for the
Skoda. How it seemed to run okay, how he’d buy it if the old man had the title. Old
man getting up to dig in a drawer. Eddy’s eyes on her again. She followed them out
into the yard and watched him straddle the cracked vinyl saddle. Backfire set the
old man’s black dogs yelping, high sweet smell of cheap
alcohol exhaust and the frame trembling between his legs.