Budayeen Nights (12 page)

He knows, as well as he knows anything in the world, exactly what she will say next.

She says it. “I rather only go home.”

“Home,” he repeats quietly. He finishes the wine in one long swallow, and signals the waiter.

“Kit,” she says, “I was in happy mood. You always do that. You always make me feel I choose wrong.”

I was in a happy mood, thinks Kit. Then I woke up, and we were married. But don’t let me kid you, sweetie. It’s been great.

“It is very early in the morning, and the haggard winter sun is rising over the red-tiled roofs of Santa Coloma. Wrapped in scarves, packaged in parkas, slapping their mittened hands together to fend off frostbite, Fawn and Dawn huddle against the fogged plate-glass window of the Instant Memories Modshop on Bridger Parkway. Fawn and Dawn are standing in a long line of people waiting for the manager to open the store. They’ve been waiting all night in the cold and wind and sleet, because today’s the day Honey Pilar’s new moddy,
Slow, Slow Burn
, goes on sale. Fawn and Dawn want to be the first in their neighborhood to own the new Honey Pilar. They want to get it as soon as the shop opens, and take it to school with them. Fawn and Dawn are in the ninth grade; these days in Santa Coloma, ninth graders all have their skulls amped, except for the trolls and feebs.

My God,’ mutters Fawn, shivering, ‘I haven’t felt my toes since midnight’

“‘I haven’t felt my lips,’ says Dawn. ‘Or my nose, or my ears, or my fingers.’

But if we leave now, I’m going to feel like a total fool.’

“‘We can’t leave now. These jerk-offs behind us will get our place.’

“Fawn makes a face. ‘If only the wind would stop blowing.’

“‘Oh, sure, the wind. If only the wind stopped blowing, it would still be, like, ten degrees below zero or something.’

“Fawn rubs her cheeks. ‘Hey!’ she cries. She points through the display window. ‘Here he comes!’

“‘Let us in now,’ Dawn prays to the store manager, ‘and you can have me right on top of the cash register.’

“The manager is, in fact, opening the front door. He’s smiling in anticipation; the store is going to make a fortune today.
Slow, Slow Burn
is stacked up four feet high in the front window, piled up beside every register, and loaded into cardboard dumps scattered all around the selling floor. You can’t turn around inside the store without staring into the liquid green eyes of Honey herself. Her holographic likeness is more than just inviting; if the mythical sirens had looked like Honey Pilar, they wouldn’t have needed to sing.

“When the door opens, of course, what disappears is any respect for the length of time Fawn and Dawn have been waiting in the freezing night air. They are pushed aside by the jerk-offs behind them, and by the jerk-offs behind
them
. Fawn and Dawn are cast aside by the charging throng of people. They announce that this is truly unfair and rude, that they’d stood in line longer, that they are going to complain, but no one listens. The flood of bakebrains shoves the two girls this way and that, until they are afraid of being trampled. At last, however, first Fawn and then Dawn are pitched up like driftwood at the front cash register, each with credit card in one hand, moddy in the other.

Wow,’ says Fawn, as she clutches her package and fights her way out of the shop.

“On the street again, with the air so cold it shocks nose and throat, the two girls wait for the bus to take them to school. ‘Are you and Adam going to use it tonight?’ asks Dawn.

“Fawn’s eyes open wider and she smiles. She taps the crown of her head, the corymbic plug invisible now beneath her hair. I’ve got it all down on this moddy,’ she says, her smile becoming sly. ‘Who needs him anymore?’

“Think what study period will be like, to be Honey Pilar in the throes of ecstasy, instead of Fawn and Dawn in the grip of homework.”

The two account executives sit on a couch in the north parlor. “Nice, huh?” says one of the admen. Kit thinks that “nervous” doesn’t begin to do the man’s condition justice.

“I think—” says Honey.

“She doesn’t like it, either,” says Kit. He has to be tough, and quick, or else she’ll say something and these Madison Avenue guys will think they’re doing her a favor. And then it will make it that much harder to deal with them the next time. Kit wonders why Honey hasn’t learned this by now.

“I think it work fine,” says Honey.

Kit gives her a stern glance, but she ignores it.

“Good,” says the adman, tremendously relieved. “We think we’ve put together a nice spot here.”

“I’m not sure,” says Kit. He doesn’t want these men to get too self-congratulatory.

“Kit,” says Honey, “be quiet. I like it. It’s for my moddy, I like it.”

Kit realizes that he’s going to have to have a serious talk with Miss Honey Pilar, International Star. He doesn’t tell her how to do
her
job, he doesn’t want her telling him how to do
his
.

“The girls, they pretty,” she says.

The account executive’s smile grows wider. “My daughters,” he says in a proud voice.

Later that evening, after the account executives have had dinner and gone back to their hotel, Kit watches what he has come to call Moodswing by Candlelight.

Honey Pilar marches, dressed in tight zebraskin pants—not zebra-stripe, but the genuine pelt of a former zebra, which is becoming less obtainable all the time—and a gauzy moire tunic created by the actual hands of Lenci Urban of Prague - not by one of his underling designers but by Lenci himself, making the item even dearer than the zebraskin - back and forth in front of the long, high picture window. Kit watches her eclipse first the lighthouse beyond, then the strings of lights marking the marina, then the sallow moon maundering over the ocean. Honey reaches the far end of the room and turns, blocking out the moon again. In the air is the heavy scent of incense, church incense, the fragrance Honey Pilar loves best because she thinks it reminds her of her childhood, but she’s not sure. Tonight Kit hates it, and he’s panting in shallow breaths, feeling an obscure panic begin. In a corner of the room is the largest commercial datalink money can buy, where Honey can keep an eye on it while she’s stalking first east and then west. Kit sits at the keyboard and calls up the first reactions to
Slow, Slow Burn
. Honey watches it indict her.

Total sales for the first seven hours of release: 825,000 units.

“Eight hundred thousand,” says Honey Pilar. She is carrying half a melon in one hand, hacking at it with a knife she holds in the other, and flicking seeds across the dusty rose carpet.

“Eight hundred thousand,” says Kit noncommittally.

“In one day, I sell eight hundred thousand. Eight hundred thousand people come out of their house all over the world, they just to get the new moddy. You don’t know what can be happening, the rain, the bombs in the airport, the police, all these people come out to pay money for me.”

Kit presses a key and columns of figures begin to scroll up the screen. “Sales are up in Provence and Aragon,” he says. “They love you here.”

“I see that, I see,” says Honey. She tosses the bulk of the melon into a corner of the white-on-white brocade couch. “I see also I have no million sales today, first day. I thought a million sales. You told me a million sales, so I don’t worry.”

Kit glances up at the ceiling, hoping for courage. “A million sales, eight hundred thousand, what difference does it make?”

“Sales up at home,” she says, turning her back on him, looking out the window. Far below, the crisp thin line of surf wrinkles toward the beach. “Sales down in England, Burgundy, Catalonia. That list get longer.” She faces the screen again, and the sales reports are like the incessant waves, each one weak by itself, but in their sum they are victorious, devastating. “Turn it off,” she pleads.

Kit is glad to kill the data. He watches Honey Pilar misplace her manic energy. How quickly she is drained and empty. She will not pace for another day, perhaps longer if this is a bad spell. Kit feels a peculiar thrill, knowing that none of the eight hundred thousand who have bought the new moddy could even imagine their dream lover in such a mood, that he alone is privileged with this intimacy. She lowers herself into a black leather chair and draws her small feet up on the cushion. She hugs her knees. Kit knows that she wants him to tell her the sales figures mean nothing; he does not say anything. He knows she wants him to come over and rub her neck and shoulders. She always does. He will not. It is a way for him to assert himself, to establish that he, too, has a life and an identity. He watches her massage her temples with trembling fingers. On the first day of sales, Honey Pilar’s latest moddy has sold eight hundred twenty-five thousand copies. Her previous moddy, on its first day, sold nine hundred seventy-two thousand. The one before that, one million, two hundred thousand. Is this a trend?

Goddamn right, it’s a trend, Kit thinks. If it weren’t, why have computers track the numbers? Honey and Kit respond differently, however. Kit doesn’t see any practical point in mourning a hundred thousand sales one way or the other.

Still, Honey Pilar weeps quietly. In the silence, in the candlelight, in the cloud of burning incense, there is a peculiarly supplicatory feeling in the house. Honey herself seems wrapped in a fragile innocence. Kit thinks that, for him, this was once one of her chief attractions.

“This is Jerome Nkoro for
New York Comm Net Morning Magazine
, and have I got a moddy for you. Today I’m going to be talking about
Slow, Slow Burn
, Honey Pilar’s new moddy from ABT.

“In these days, when, thanks to surgical and biological wonders we’ve all come to take for granted, men and women routinely maintain their youthful looks well past their seventieth or eightieth birthdays, it probably shouldn’t be too unusual that our number one fantasy girl has just celebrated her forty-fifth. Honey Pilar is forty-five. Does that make you feel old? It makes me feel like the last of the dinosaurs.

“I can remember having holos of Honey Pilar in my bedroom when I was twelve, alongside my Death to Argentina football and my scale model of the Mars colony. My first sexual experience was a dream in which Honey Pilar couldn’t remember her locker combination. And now they tell me this is her thirty-ninth moddy, and she’s old enough to be a grandmother.

“But don’t get me wrong, I still think Honey Pilar is the most exciting woman in the world. I’ve left word with my secretary that, if Honey calls, she can have my home phone number anytime. The problem with
Slow, Slow Burn
is not Honey, or the fact that she’s no pouting teenager anymore. The problem is that my moddy library has two full shelves devoted to her, and I’m beginning to ask myself, ‘Do I really need another Honey Pilar moddy?’

“I’ve never had a complaint yet from anyone when I’ve suggested we use one of Honey’s moddies. My partners agree with me that they’re likely to get more pleasure from Honey than from anyone else’s moddy (or from me, either, for that matter. Sometimes, when we explore the limits of the bizarre, we do it with no moddies chipped in, with our own unembellished brains. I don’t recommend this to you beginners out there). I use the moddies myself now and then, to see what it’s like from the Honey Pilar point of view, and it’s always an incendiary experience. So whether the moddy is turning my partner into a hungry, writhing Honey Pilar, or consuming me in one of Honey’s recorded sexual firestorms, there’s never any chance that she will fail to perform.

“The question is simply this: How will she continue to keep our interest? Her partner on
Slow, Slow Burn
is an uncredited seventeen-year-old. As she gets older, must her partners get younger? I am horrified by the vision of Honey Pilar offering the kids ten-speed bikes to entice them. And doesn’t a lifelong relationship with three-dozen plastic moddies begin to resemble (I hate to suggest this) a marriage? I mean, if for the sake of variety you decide not to use the Honey Pilar moddy tonight, what are you left with? You’re left with the person whose sexual performance led you to use the moddy in the first place.

“I realize that so far I haven’t said anything terribly cogent about
Slow, Slow Burn
itself. I’m not being fair to Honey Pilar, because her new moddy is right up to the standard she’s set throughout her long and dazzling career. I guess it’s just that after all these years, I’m beginning to realize that although I’ve been to bed with Honey Pilar a million times, I’m never actually going to have her, not in any real sense at all. All I’m going to have is two shelves of plastic with her name on it, and an exquisitely detailed knowledge of what she’s like in the sack.

“I wonder what Honey Pilar likes to talk about afterward. I guess I’m getting wistful in my old age. But don’t mind me, go out and buy Slow, Slow Bum. Like always, it does what it’s supposed to do.”

Kit and Honey are throwing a party in their hotel suite. This was the night of the annual Pammie Awards, and Honey is still clutching the special Lifetime Achievement statuette she was given. It has been a wonderful, satisfying evening for Honey Pilar. Reporters and fans and fellow artists come up to her and tell her again and again that the honor is long overdue. Honey knew well in advance that the Association was presenting her with the Lifetime Achievement, so her acceptance speech was gracious and tearful and as nearly grammatically correct as she could manage. She looks beautiful in her silver Lenci sheath.

Kit stands looking out across a city that seems to live for the night, toward a black harbor streaked with the pale green lights of bridges. He imagines that he’s on board one of the slowly moving ships creasing the dark water, going away, sailing off toward some useful existence. Beyond the window the world seems cold and clean. People are hurrying according to unknown but vital reasons, they are not…wandering. The stars are hard, white, not dimmed and hazy with smoke. Kit turns and gazes at the room, at the men and women talking and laughing. The hotel has catered this party, and the champagne is cheap and sweet. Kit sets his plastic champagne glass on the holoset for the maid to clear away. He looks for Honey.