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Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted cafe was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths. The Sailor was polishing his nails on the lapels of his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through his shiny, yellow teeth. When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity. "Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need an advance of course." "On spec?" "So I don't have the twenty eggs in my pocket. I tell you it's jellied consomme, One little whoops and a push." The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were studying a chart. "You know I always deliver." "Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow. "Need a tube now, Fats." "Take a walk, you'll get one." The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor's face to cover his hand on the Sailor's pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor's face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disap- peared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies. "This will last a month," he decided, consulting an invisible mirror. All streets of the City slope down between deepen- ing canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. |
