MEMP’IS

BOOK THREE – “HEARTBREAK HOTEL”

(Chester Aspid reporting, from domestic surveillance materiels as secured through warrants from the Courts of Flux and Flow)

(Wednesday, January 4, 2035 - 2100 hours until midnight, and After)

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT – CODA: “BABY, LET’S PLAY HOUSE”

Reason and Jody's unit in the "B" lozenge being just a short walk from Norlin's own crib out by the West Node, getting there ain't the problem, it's what happens after... starting from the moment he walks in the door, finds this portrait of the kid (fex, he'll tell me) propped atop that phony fireplace stuck in all those places. That it's presumably free... a gift from her quickdraw boyfriend... only fuels his anger that's been gathering all night, since his meet with the Captain.

"Don't seem to have trouble spending the money I send you," he explodes, nearly tripping over a plastic tub of murky water and squirming, slithering tadpoles next to the fake fireplace. "What a kebbin' racket - watching surveillance PV all day for MAU and living in poetry in the kebbin' West Node of Jatesland by night. Poetry that won't buy my son a decent breakfast."

"At least I can turn my back on the collected Emily Dickinson," Reason lashes back, "without gettin' a shiv between my ribs."

Both their old men were cops. Norlin's father was in the EABI before coming down to Barataria, hers got killed in the New Orleans troubles, after the k'ball...

"Can't brush your teeth with art..." Norlin keeps raggin' her.

"Keb - it's worth, like, three kebbin' dollars, I was gonna... forget it!" She turns to Jody. "See what your father made me do? Well, I found my purse and money, no thanks to you..."

Norlin isn't sure whether she's blaming the boy, or him, then figures that it doesn't matter. It's kebbin' Jatesland, and everyone is guilty of something. "And just what the keb makes you think I got anything to do with it?"

"You want our son eatin' sawdust? You'd let him go out looking like some little gypsy beggar, so the boys at Basilisk Middle can treat him worse than they already do..."

"So all this fex gets turned around by having his picture done by some doop quicksketch artist from the Chinese Market?"

"He was really fast, dad..." Jody protests, removing a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolding it. "And he gave Ma two-for-one, he said I ought to give you one, 'cause you're my father. Fathers are m'portant."

"And those goddam tadpoles," Norlin points, "they come from the Chinese Market too?"

"Well, what of it?" Reason disputes, throwing on her coat. "You're a fine keb to look down on us - if you'd had half your father's sense, you'd be a Senior Detective by now, and we'd be living in the Northeast. You're no father to him, someone's got to be!"

"You mean Quick Draw McGraw..."

"Who?" Reason is flummoxed, but recovers... slamming the door on her way out, leaving Jody, Norlin and an awkward silence over the plastic tub, where four little, half-grown phibes wriggle, trying to crawl up a rock with stumpy little arms...

"They're really cool, dad, they've grown a lot. Watch this!"

He opens the refrigerator and rummages inside, finally taking out a ball of ground meat between his fingers, tearing it, and skimming one gobbet across the tubwater. A phibe seizes the treat and begins to gnaw with sharp, though half-formed teeth. Jody distributes the rest to the other phibes, and looks up at his father, satisfied.

"Jody, you're feeding 'em animal flesh! That's kebbin' illegal..." Norlin warns.

"But they won't eat tofu. Not even krajjit... it's what they do in the wild..."

"And that's where they ought to be... in the wild. The swamps. It's not... when I was a very little boy, younger than you, even, I used to have one of these animals they called dogs... you've seen 'em on PV..."

"Puh-leese! I know what dogs are," Jody rolls his eyes. Kebbin' grownups! "There's wild dogs all over the South Node... there's even one down the hall. Big, kebbin' secret!"

"Well, it's still against the law to keep them without special permits only a few giglios can get," Norlin lies, thinking of Troosh and, fexed, wondering whether he can wipe the crazy off her old, bipolar puss with a call-in to Animal Control. Culture on the skids, I've said already... dogs and deviances everywhere! Instinctively, he brushes his scalp, where that keb of an actor-hairdresser-priest mutilated his hair, leaving behind a nagging, preternatural itch. "Possession of an unregistered domestic animal not carefully bred to a transvegan diet is lifestyle crime, Jody... people get sent to prison. Now phibes aren't nearly the size of dogs, nothin's in the Code about keepin' em, not yet, but there is about feedin' em animal flesh. Where in the hell does a kid your age get meat?"

Jody turns crafty, like boys do... Norlin thinks... when they're doin' something that they shouldn't, when they're hiding something. Ol' Tom Norlin had his way of smokin' out lies...

"One of these kids, you know, bussed down from Mormentz, the cool kids..." Jody adds, with a noncommittal shrug.

"Nothin' cool about Mormentz, just kebbin' delinquents up there!" Norlin says.

"Says it comes from dead things he picks up along the road."

"Uh huh?" Kids... and lies! "How did you get the money... your mother give it to you?"

"Well, I found four dollar-bills... this guy comes round sometimes, throwin' rolled up dollar bills into the exercise yard. They're wrapped around pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, I guess... An' Mom did think I needed somethin', a present on account of their hurting me, you know?"

"Who? These kids? At Basilisk?" Norlin takes his notebook out of the inside pocket of his overcoat that he's thrown over Reason's couch. "What are their names?"

"No, dad... people at the schools! There's all this fex about those seniors they caught, you know, doin' it to each other... so these Doctors come in with kebbin' machines, they stick probes up my behind, way up, for measuring while they ask their questions and, like, it still hurts..."

"I... I don't want you using foul language, nevertheless..."

"Why the keb not? You do!"

"Well, not in front of your mother," Norlin excuses himself with a cough. "Anyway, women are different about these sort of... uh, so she knows?"

"She knows. Talk about foul language... she used the J-word..." Jody smirks.¹

"Well, at least keep it in the family. Things are different from what they used to be, when I was your age... hey, what's on the box?" Norlin says, determined, now, to make a night of it and not get spun further out into that place his own father used to show him, sometimes... that bad place manifesting, like a malignant Brigadoon, on the frontier between work and life.

Jody turns on the PV, and a KJAD announcer shrieks...

"Crimewatch! You're never safe!... on the streets, even locked behind doors in your own lozenge. They're out there, waiting for you. Robbers! Rapists! Lifestyle Criminals! Murderers! Watch Crimewatch... let our fears absorb and become yours. Up next, savage doops dukin' it out at the Tulane Hotel! Brought to you by Qual-Mart... where our prices are positively haunted..."

Killing the PV, Norlin asks: "Do you still have those pieces of puzzle that came with the dollar bills?"

Jody leaves Norlin to watch the tub of struggling little phibes, and returns with four white rectangles bisected by lines in black, yellow and two reds; they're random, edges don't fit, but he sorts and arranges them in varying patterns, then gives them to his father. Norlin tries to make sense of them a while, then they play chess - Jody winning two, Norlin one. Elvis, on KJAD, sings about Blue Hawaii. When 2300 hours rolls round, he turns the news back on, they munch HRI-approved popcorn and... knowing boys like things gross and gruesome... he tells a severely edited story about the dead bodies in the morgue and hairy things under Demmy's microscope, between slivers of news that, invariably, fail to live up to the plasmavision people's promises.

Reason blows in at 2330 hours, pretending not to be happy, Norlin thinks. At least she doesn't ask for money... he gives his son a hug, gathers his overcoat and steals a parting glance at the phibes in the tub before he's off. Later, duty done and in his own lozenge, Norlin watches the old man face on the clock his father left him morf back to a smiling infant at 2400 hours. "My Happiness" on the Jade winds up, and the overnight jukie breaks in.

"And now, for something different, KJAD radio dedicates from one who knows to those who ought to know better... here's John Coltrane's "A Love Divine"..."

And Norlin's lip curls in a perfect imitation of the King through the opening, unfamiliar strains - he finally tweaks the fex music off, storms to his telescope and trains it on Reason's window. His ex-wife seems to be having a sort of fit, arguing viciously with an unseen presence as Jody shudders in a corner. Fists clenching and unclenching, he turns away, dials his com...

"Prancing Pony, open eighteen hundred to three hundred hours, four hundred on Fridays, Saturdays and whatever the keb the City Council ends up callin' them... hello? Anyone there?" Molly Tandem brays.

Norlin hangs up Something insinuates against his thigh and he removes, then unfolds the sketch of his son from the Chinese Market, wanting to throw it away... but it's a good likeness, very good. He places it on the desk he uses for work he takes home from C-Squad, covers it with the file on Sickinger - still whining about his expulsion from the New Chinese horizon. He tries to sleep, but the bright strips of Jody's puzzle wriggle through his dreams like bacilli. The whisper of criminal genius torments and taunts him... the inhabiting presence speaking through Norlin's own lips, in sleep, but exhibiting wholly other sonic splashpatterns on Ray Angenieux's surveillance devices in the walls and crevices of the lozenge, as to cause perplexity and discomfort radiating upwards to the highest offices of the Trouble Factory.

"Know form, Norlin, some ordinary dance created... not by the objects of representation, but by I, Mondretto, and my Mondriaturists inhabiting this disordinary space. Plastic being created abomination; I have been able to take and re-make Plasma shapes to create crimes as shall cause phantoms as Mr. Jates, ever carrying his styrofoam coffins of Substance, to be as thoroughly jazzed from history as Lifestyle Criminals like DeQuincey or DeSade. When, under my new Plaslamic Dictatorship of Style, straight lines achieve Becomeability, they will give colour to new, plastic emotions.

"You shall tremble, in time, at my given name... but, for the present, simply remember and dread, from these dreams, the Iatollah of Incunabula!"

^l If Mrs. Norlin's domestic surveillance archives, obtained through lawful warrants and processed by MAU in strict confidentiality, did reveal use of the J-word in the presence of a minor, the Law Firm has expressed its opinion that, while criminal prosecution might prove fruitless, it is certainly possible that the boy, Jody, could be removed from her influence and placed in a State-approved facility. (C.A.)

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