Mona Lisa Overdrive

15 - The Silver Walks

She'd had this friend in Cleveland, Lanette, who'd taught her lots of things. How to get out of a car fast if a trick tried to lock the doors on you, how to act when you went to make a buy. Lanette was a little older and mainly used wiz, she said, "to move the down around," being frequently downed out on anything from endorphin analogs to plain old Te

She had Lanette on her mind because Lanette used to give her advice sometimes, like how to turn a bad night around. Tonight, she thought, Lanette would tell her to look for a bar and some company. She still had some money left from her last night's work in Florida, so it was a matter of finding a place that took cash.

She hit it right, first try. A good sign. Down a narrow flight of concrete stairs and into a smoky buzz of conversation and the familiar, muted thump of Shabu's "White Diamonds." No place for suits, but it wasn't what the pimps in Cleveland called a spot, either. She was no way interested in drinking in any spot, not tonight.

Somebody got up from the bar to leave just as she came in, so she nipped over quick and got his stool with the plastic still warm, her second sign.

The bartender pursed his lips and nodded when she showed him one of her bills, so she told him to get her a shot of bourbon and a beer on the side, which was what Eddy always got if he was paying for it himself. If somebody else was paying, he'd order mixed drinks the bartender didn't know how to make, then spend a long time explaining exactly how you made the thing. Then he'd drink it and bitch about how it wasn't as good as the ones they made in L.A. or Singapore or some other place she knew he'd never been.

The bourbon here was weird, sort of sour but real good once you got it down. She said that to the bartender, who asked her where she usually drank bourbon. She told him Cleveland and he nodded. That was ethanol and some shit supposed to remind you of bourbon, he said. When he told her how much of her money was left, she figured out this Sprawl bourbon was expensive stuff. It was doing its job, though, taking the bad edge off, so she drank the rest and started in on her beer.

Lanette liked bars but she never drank, just Coke or something. Mona always remembered one day she'd done two crystals at the same time, what Lanette called a two-rock hit, and she'd heard this voice in her skull say, just as clear as that, like it was somebody right in the room: It 's moving so fast, it's standing still. And Lanette, who'd dissolved a matchhead of Memphis black in a cup of Chinese tea about an hour before, did half a crystal herself and then they'd gone out walking, just ghosting the rainy streets together in what felt to Mona like some perfect harmony where you didn't need to talk. And that voice had been right, there was no jangle to the rush, no tight-jawed jitter, just this sense of something, maybe Mona herself, expanding out from a still center. And they'd found a park, flat lawns flooded with silver puddles, and gone all around the paths, and Mona had a name for that memory: the Silver Walks.

And sometime after that Lanette was just gone, nobody saw her anymore, and some people said she'd gone to California, some people said Japan, and some people said she'd OD'd and gotten tossed out a window, what Eddy called a dry dive, but that wasn't the kind of thing Mona wanted to think about, so she sat up straight and looked around, and, yeah, this was a good place, small enough that people were kind of crowded in but sometimes that was okay. It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn't, except their clothes fit right and you knew they'd bought them new.

There was a vid behind the bar, up over the bottles, and then she saw Angie there, looking square into the camera and saying something, but they had the sound down too low to hear over the crowd. Then there was a shot from up in the air, looking down on a row of houses that sat right at the edge of a beach, and then Angie was back, laughing and shaking her hair and giving the camera that half-sad grin.

"Hey," she said to the bartender, "there's Angie."

"Who?"

"Angie," Mona said, pointing up at the screen.

"Yeah," he said, "she's on some designer shit and decides to kick, so she goes to South America or somewhere and pays 'em a few mil to clean her act up for her."

"She can't be on shit."

The bartender looked at her. "Whatever."

"But how come she'd even start doing anything? I mean, she's Angie, right?"

"Goes with the territory."

"But look at her," she protested, "she looks so good ... " But Angie was gone, replaced by a black te

"You think that's her? That's a talking head."

"Head?"

"Like a puppet," a voice behind her said, and she swung around far enough to see a ruff of sandy hair and a loose white grin. "Puppet," and held up his hand, wiggling thumb and fingers, "you know?"

She felt the bartender drop the exchange, moving off down the bar. The white grin widened. "So she doesn't have to do all that stuff herself, right?"

She smiled back. Cute one, smart eyes and a secret halo flashing her just the signal she wanted to read. No suit trick. Kinda ski

"Michael."

"Huh?"

"My name. Michael."

"Oh. Mona. I'm Mona."

"Where you from, Mona?"

"Florida."

And wouldn't Lanette just tell her go for it?

Eddy hated art-crowd people; they weren't buying what he was selling. He'd have hated Michael more, because Michael had a job and this loft in a co-op building. Or anyway he said it was a loft, but when they got there it was smaller than Mona thought a loft was supposed to be. The building was old, a factory or something; some of the walls were sandblasted brick and the ceilings were wood and timbers. But all of it had been chopped up into places like Michael's, a room not much bigger than the one back at the hotel, with a sleeping space off one side and a kitchen and bath off the other. It was on the top floor, though, so the ceiling was mostly skylight; maybe that made it a loft. There was a horizontal red paper shade below the skylight, hooked up to strings and pulleys, like a big kite. The place was kind of messy but the stuff that was scattered around was all new: some ski

They started out on the couch but she didn't like the way her skin stuck to it, so they moved over to the bed, back in its alcove.

That was when she saw the recording gear, stim stuff, on white shelves on the wall. But the wiz had kicked in again, and anyway, if you've decided to go for it, you might as well. He got her into the pickup, a black rubber collar with trode-tipped fingers pressing the base of her skull. Wireless; she knew that was expensive.

While he was getting his own set on and checking the gear on the walls, he talked about his job, how he worked for a company in Memphis that thought up new names for companies. Right now he was trying to think of one for a company called Cathode Cathay. They need it bad, he said, and laughed, but then he said it wasn't easy. Because there were so many companies already that the good names had been used up. He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that made up words you could use for names, and another one that checked if the made-up words meant "dickhead" or something in Chinese or Swedish. But the company he worked for didn't just sell names, they sold what he called image, so he had to work with a bunch of other people to make sure the name he came up with fit the rest of the package.