Punktown: Shades of Grey (22 page)

Amino acids…polypeptide chains…

Nothing hasty; be patient.

Polypeptide chains…alpha helices…protofibril…

It’s beautiful. Perfect. It’s worth a wait.

Alpha helices, protofibril, hydrogen bond… Hair.

The woman was young, Kalian, smart in her (untraditional) office attire.
Short, crisp leather jacket, milk-colored scarf, long, straight black hair falling down across her shoulders.
Her hair was blacker than the jacket, shimmering vividly, as if from within, as if her neck were a light source. Black hair…protofibril, hydrogen bond, melanocytes,
eumelanin
.

Griffin circled the phone booth—the Kalian inside like a specimen behind glass. She seemed oblivious, her mouth moving, her black eyes settled on the street.

She’s waiting for “The Worm.” She’s watching for it. Excellent
.

Confident in his assessment, Griffin floated further from the booth, hands in his pockets, objects in his hands. A soft buzzing sound came from behind—a metallic green dragonfly was blurring its wings, its long body stuck to the tar-like wall of a Grind House. The outer walls were pebbled with flies and grit spat up from the tracks. While the day was grey, there was enough light for shadow and the shadow of the building, its roof a tangle of dark pipes, leaned into the street. The pipes were like two black octopi wrestling.

Griffin watched for the shuttle, glanced at the woman, watched for the shuttle. He stole a look at her hair. Metal in one hand in his pocket. An old toothless Choom woman sat on what was left of a bench, mumbling. A silver plastic bag in her lap shifted as if full of lobsters.

It did not matter if the Kalian was beautiful (she was). He did not imagine what her clothing concealed. She was only long black hair, only molecules, eumelanin. She was leaning her back against the glass, her hair flattened, glossy.

The pipes up on the building gurgled and rumbled. A thick periscope whined up, higher than the pipes, rust flakes spilling down like cinnamon snow. Steam disgorged thickly and a bird thrust out of the pipe—too slow—it was swallowed by the cloud, shrieking.

The Worm shrieked as it pulled up to the broken bench. Griffin shot a look at the phone booth; as expected, the woman rushed out and trotted over in her heels. He let the old Choom get between him and his prey as they mounted the steps and ducked into the ribbed, black tube of the shuttle.

Sit behind her.

Griffin bit his lower lip. There were not many seats to choose from. A man squeezed over so that the Choom could sit and the Kalian proceeded further down the aisle. A handsome young man in a suit, scrunched into the back, scrunched further, smiled and patted his seat.

Shit!

The Kalian, her black hair waving tauntingly behind her, accepted the offer. Frowning, Griffin sank down next to a dozing woman and her obese toddler. The boy wore a helmet like a copper trilobite, its wires running down into his temples. Gazing blankly, he laughed and coughed for the next two miles.

The Worm rumbled into a tunnel, slanted down, descended under the city for a windowless carnival ride of bumps and turns. The tot’s mother was jarred out of her sleep and, noticing that she and her son had company, smiled. She had teeth the color of hydraulic oil. Griffin returned a polite smile, his eyes—even on this grey day, even in the subterranean dimness of The Worm’s belly—safe behind thin wrap-around sunglasses.

When the shuttle made its third stop, deep in the humming and clanging of the Bridgeport Forge, the black-haired woman came down the aisle from behind. Griffin smelled her perfume as she passed, something exotic—or was it the Kalian spices embedded in her skin?

Ahhh, she’s a secretary for Bridgeport. Mr. Business isn’t with her. Perhaps I’m not so unlucky after all.

Griffin was quick on the clacking heels of the Kalian as she made for the front of the shuttle, his face close to her shimmering black waterfall. Swiftly, he pulled the small scissors from his pocket, and—snip!

««—»»

Griffin’s neighbors were factories and warehouses. He crossed a skeletal footbridge over in-ground vats of molten purple where men in bulky toad-like suits prodded with staffs and stirred up violet mist like the ghosts of bruises.

Grim grey-tiled buildings huddled along streets that were rusted grates bejeweled with condensation. Griffin lived in one of these, above a metal casket company on the sixth floor with a view of a watery green chemical pond and a colossal black sculpture of a mastodon.

Locked in his flat, the man set hastily to work. The bedroom, kitchen and bath were all necessarily small to accommodate his work area, which bordered on an empty chamber he called The Womb. There was never much light in the lab and the baroque configuration of pipes and panels was the black of the Kalian’s hair, black as the carved mastodon. Here and there indicator bulbs winked like shy stars in a cluttered metal sky.

Griffin snapped on latex gloves and removed the stolen snippet of hair from a small airtight vial. His reflection, pale and distorted, showed in the dark of a sleeping view screen. His skin being what it was, it would have proved difficult to guess his age, though one might speculate that he was within the thirties range. Oh, didn’t I tell you? As a teenager working at Chemical Land, he had had an unfortunate encounter with an undesirable substance and suffered something known as The Puzzle.

Thyroid dysfunction, hair loss, liver damage, epidermal crystallization.
Layer upon layer of Griffin’s skin had hardened into a glistening exoskeleton. The doctors had drilled through it to insert a breathing tube and run another to administer fluids. Over a matter of weeks the petrified skin had cracked into jigsaw-piece shapes and flaked off, exposing the muscle beneath.

The skin replacement had taken well, though; Griffin’s new facade was a sheeny pink, overly soft and without hair. In an almost studied attempt at vanity, he had seeded his head, but the hair came in spotty and hard, like thorns from barbed wire.

In the suffocating cockpit-like lab, Griffin placed his silky black prize in a scanning box. The machine purred, the readout flashed a series of pale blue numbers. Next he fed the lock of hair into a glossy humming tube that broke it down into molecular bits and disseminated it into The Womb. That room, or chamber, was sealed behind a submarine’s door. There were no windows. A variety of spigots and vents fed into it from the ceiling and a number of cameras gazed from hidden panels in the walls.

Smoking, Griffin leaned forward and tapped on a keyboard. His reflection fractured into static as the vid-screen hissed to life. He leaned back, creaking in his chair and waited.

With his lab pulsing and humming, it was a wonder that he heard the door buzzer.

What? What?

In seconds he was out of his chair, out of the lab and checking the security-cam screen in the coffin-sized foyer. Little good it did him, though, for his entire vid-system had been malfunctioning as of late and whoever was standing outside his door seemed little more than a pillar of grey. Even so, he thought he recognized the pillar and buzzed the door open.

Mrs. Derringer, a tall, thin woman surgically made to look younger, stood scowling down, strangling in her own face.

Griffin smiled anxiously. “What a lovely suit-dress! Is it new?” (All suit-dresses looked the same to Griffin.)

Derringer was the owner of the metal coffin business downstairs and also Griffin’s landlady.

“I don’t know what you’re running in there, Griffin, but you just sucked the juice out of half my building. Melda Orange is having a fit because she lost power in the middle of her favorite game show.”

Griffin withered. “Ahh, I’m sorry, yes, sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on. Perhaps I need to do a bit of updating, yes?”

The woman seemed to scold him “You spend all your time in there—why don’t you go out and make some friends or something?”

That, but for the woman’s disgusted sigh as she whirled away, was the end of the conversation.

Griffin buzzed the door shut and invented a new stream of curses as he raced back to his creation. Safe in the burbling dark of his lab, he gazed expectantly into the screen. He chuckled, fumbling blindly on the counter for his smokes, unable to take his eyes away.

The screen flickered, the color coming and going as static danced. Somehow, squinting, Griffin could make out the room, the air thick with mucoid mist—something huddled on the floor. Still in the early stages, now integrated with the latest ingredient, it was a jumble of fidgeting organs in a tangled nest of great black hairs.

««—»»

At six o’clock the black metal box on Griffin’s bedside table popped open and a skull flew out, bouncing on its spring as sardonic laughter filled the room.

Rise and shine.

The jack-in-the-box alarm clock was one of his more whimsical, if not existential, creations.

Griffin showered, toweled off his pink flesh and took breakfast (coffee and a cigarette) in the lab. The vid-screen was fuzzy, but he could distinguish his creation. It had wormed up one of the walls and hung there pulsing, the frenzy of hair having grown some overnight. He flicked a switch and spoke into a microphone, “Good morning.”

It was a slow day at the plant so Griffin and some of his coworkers were sent down to the cellar where a blown containment-mount in the south wall had invited a flood of amber jelly. They spent the afternoon in protective suits shoveling the slime into empty fifty gallon barrels which were sent upstairs on a freight lift to be dumped in the waste truck.

The anticipation Griffin felt was a secret not to be shared with the louts he worked with—all through the long hours he dreamed and planned. There was so much to do, more components to gather. Bones would not be a major problem, but a brain…that would prove a challenge. Then there was the question of how much intellect to instill. There was also the problem of feeding. So many things to do!

One step at a time.

««—»»

Cigar Store Indian was a shop of curious collectibles just over the Vandermoor Bridge. Not much from the outside, the place was a virtual museum of oddities, including its namesake, who greeted all that entered. Ploom, the old Tikkihotto owner, had hung a bra on the thing.

Griffin was purposeful, wading through the treasures, the stuffed wildlife, the antique furniture, the primitive masks and exotic jewelry. There really was an intriguing array of goodies—primitive robotic limbs, swords, a plastic-sealed copy of the Koran floating in a big jar of blood, dolls, canes, synthetic jack-o’-lanterns, scary Tikkihotto marionettes, even gore-stained tiles from the Hobblehouse Massacre. The owner, bored it seemed, approached Griffin at one point, smiling.

“You’ve been in here before. I remember—those fascinating spikes on your head…”

Griffin grunted.

“Are you looking for something in particular?
A gift, perhaps?
Something for a lady…?”

“No lady,” Griffin said, not really looking at the Tikkihotto.

“I have some toys in the back room, if you’re interested…”

Griffin faced the man (he always stared at a Tikkihotto’s nose when conversing—better than trying to look those wavering tendrils in the eye).

“I’m looking for bones. Bones, yes. Humanoid, preferably.”

Ploom grinned. “I’m afraid I don’t have much to choose from, though a lovely snake skeleton came in last week… Wait! There is the orangutan…”