Smoketown Read online

  She’s gone. But you can find her. You can bring her back. This one you can bring back.

  Anna stood staring, unable even to move.

  You’ll find her, but now you have to go. You have to hide. Disappear, Anna. Go.

  On that night, Anna did what the voice told her to, took what she needed and walked away from their home, into the woods. Wandering alone, she remembered those lost hours—not what she’d been thinking when she did it or how it felt. She remembered what she saw—that she could be certain of, that she knew.

  She knew that the woman had been beautiful in the light. Anna had stood centimeters from the platform watching her flow into the form that Anna had sculpted. It took no more than a few minutes for her to emerge. The wax turned brackish, darkest in the center and all else flowed from there, a network of veins and capillaries crackled their way throughout the wax. Actual arms grew inside the sculpted ones, and legs lengthened inside the wax shell. For a breath all movement stopped and Anna stepped closer, awed by what she saw. The overhead lamp made the woman’s skin glisten through the thin layer of wax that covered her. Anna could do no more than stare, her nose almost touching the other’s.

  The woman was born with her eyes open. Her first breath cracked the wax that covered her. With her second breath, she screamed. Anna remembered being knocked off her feet and the sight of the woman, terrified and half-naked, Bly’s bloodied jacket covering all but her legs, as she ran across the room, bumped into the frame of the window. And crashed through the glass. Shards of it rained down to the floor, shattering and shooting in all directions. Afterwards, Anna lay in the aftermath, grasping for a thought.

  Even in the woods, Anna’s daze would not lift, but some part of her remained alert. Only the voice maintained control, guiding her to rest and walk. That close to home, the woods were artificial, a carbon exchange environment meant to allay the guilt of distant city-states as they continued to chop and burn at will. Winding her way through the maze of saplings only added to the surreal quality Anna’s life had taken on. She had no family or friends. Bly had taught her that trusting could be dangerous, that she should be able to trust herself and if need be, only herself.

  So Anna wandered for months, her only companion a small crystal radio she’d made with her mother’s guidance. It had been her first inorganic creation. Oddly it had been more of a challenge than the animals and plants—not just because of the poisonous galena and other dangerous elements, but because things didn’t have a feel, just a set of rules to follow. Her creativity couldn’t help her.

  She had overcome the challenge, to her mother’s delight—creating first the detector and then the tuning coil. After a brief rest she produced the earphones in one whole piece. Just to watch Bly smile, Anna had replicated the long antennae wire slowly winding it around a diamond-shaped frame until it resembled a kite. The kite antennae peeked out of the top of her pack as she walked through the woods. It still picked up twenty-two of the twenty-four stations that had once filled their home with syncopated rhythms, late-night recitations, pulsar plays, and time-delayed music festivals from outlying colonies.

  Out amongst the long shadows and over-populated warrens of the woods, the radio provided Anna’s only comfort. Pulsar plays still dominated the hours between 22:00 and 23:00. If she had had the desire she could still shake her hips to 633’s rumba hop hour, but no such desire remained. The background of her life remained in place even if the foreground had shifted drastically.

  She rented rooms in bamboo motels so she could sit on their respective balconies and stare into space while mosquitoes beat against the netting that separated her from what lurked beyond. Always she kept moving.

  Walking from town to town, her baby fat fell away, her hair became unkempt. But she still showered daily, memories of her mother’s voice in her ear, “Anna, please, some things are meant to be pristine. You’re one of them.”

  Somewhere in the middle of the woods the radio stopped working: no more plays or recitations, no more rhythms to block out thought. Dark circles appeared under Anna’s eyes. Her gaze twitched from tree to tree until exhausted, she had to remind herself to stay alert, not to stare at her feet or at anyone with anything but certainty.

  Eventually the woods became a forest that gave through to a jungle with wide lanes carved below the canopy. There, trundlers and touristies filled with mild-mannered adventurers hovered above the undergrowth, recording their current hermetic travels for later viewing on even milder days. Anna avoided the crowds to find a more isolated path. She was running out of options and she feared that the anxiety in her expression would be all too readable for the opportunists who populated the jungle towns.

  Bly’s credit stick had gone from mellow pulsing green to an insistent red blinking and soon would go dead altogether. Anna had to do something and only one option seemed remotely palatable. After all, she told herself, doing virtually objectionable things still beat doing actual ones. Anna knew that she would have to become a virtuoso; it was just a matter of when.

  On the day after she ate her last pack of reconsti food, Anna walked straight into the center of an outpost to find the highest bidder. The outpost was an outdated electro town, Gene, with a few cars that still ran on gas ambling through the streets. Above them, tubes of neon spelled out slogans to touristies and passersby—a town sure to have virtu trade. She need only find the brightest lights, the loudest music and Anna was sure she could find someone to pay her to produce a real. She just hoped it would be the kind of real she could agree to do. Bly would not approve, but even her mother’s approval had become a luxury.

  Once Bly had been excited by virtu. She’d spent weeks talking about the possibilities that kind of technology opened up. But by the time Anna was fourteen, she’d warned her away from it. Of all the vices available, virtu, her mother had told her was the worst. The idea of neurologically recording one’s experiences and selling them to another to be played back while linked straight into the brain was not foreign to Anna. She’d grown up with the stories all over the Net, with shops dedicated to the sale of virtu reals, online sites that sold cut-rate packs good for a permanent blank stare and not much else. For Anna, virtu was as omnipresent as any other welcome distraction. Bly came to despise everything about it.

  “They make it sound good, Anna, but it’s not safe. People have lost their lives—trading them in and some just lost them altogether. Virtuoso used to mean something, something of substance,” Bly had said with visible disgust.

  The name wasn’t particularly fitting to many of the actions typically recorded on a real. But sometimes it took a bit of extra stroking to get someone to walk up to a black bear and, once there, not faint when the true size of its claws registered in the part of the mind that’s called upon to slow down the perception of time at such moments—this so that one seems to live longer than the few seconds that follow.

  Anna would not face any black bears she knew, but she would have to face her mother’s fear and not to lose herself in the process.

  Making her way through the center of the outpost, Anna walked toward the bright edge of town. Just as she suspected, people peppered the streets there, each one standing a short distance from the next, waiting for customers. There were a disproportionate number of kids—both girls and boys—and other people whom she could only describe as broken. Tossed about by some unknown current, they had all washed up here with only their brains and bodies left to trade for the necessities.

  Uncertain of how to begin, Anna walked the line, stealing looks at and around the virtuosos, trying to search out someone who might be in charge, one who might be looking to add another to a group of contractors.

  At the end of the line, a cheerful man wearing silk pajamas approached her and offered to buy her a cool refresca. Anna averted her eyes and hurried to the end of the block. A person stood at the corner leaning against the last building, a café. In her haste, Anna almost ran straight into her. It was a woman leaning, one hand supp
orting her weight with her head down. She wore a pair of blackout shades. Anna stood there, clothes sweated through, the beginning of a wildness in her eyes, and a stun stick gripped tightly in her hand.

  When the woman looked up, Anna took an unconscious step away, not sure if her mind was deceiving her. The woman from the wax stood gaping at her with the same disbelief that Anna felt. Freed from the wax, her face was more beautiful than Anna had remembered though she had acquired a short jagged scar on her jaw. The woman reached up to the temple of the shades she wore and pushed a small button as yet unseen by Anna. Anna watched the glasses give a bit where she touched them. The woman took the shades off quickly, folded them and stowed them in the black flack vest she wore, all the while continuing to stare at Anna.

  Anna took a cautious step forward. She leaned the top half of her body forward, feeling pulled in that direction. Anna saw a pretty young woman with an earnest face who seemed neither a threat nor a mirage. She didn’t look a thing like Bly, to Anna’s relief. The realization brought a faint question up in her mind but there were too many thoughts to give it any attention. The woman wore a black shirt beneath the flak vest, and heavy blue pants tucked into careworn worker’s boots. Anna was not so woodswise, more seed than tree, and certainly no root, so she didn’t recognize the gear that the woman wore: the telltale dark shades and thin black wire that led to an as-yet-unseen virtu recorder in the vest. Anna’s voice shook, but she spoke first.

  “Hello. My name is Anna Armour.”

  The woman retreated a step away from her as she surveyed the plane of Anna’s face from forehead to lips.

  “How did you find me?” the woman asked.

  Her voice sounded older than Anna’s. In fact she looked older—perhaps twenty for Anna’s fifteen years. And it wasn’t quite the response Anna had been hoping for, but to hear anyone answer at all—anyone outside of her own head—relieved some of the pressure that had been building inside her. Her hopes of ever finding the woman had dimmed to a glimmer and now after nearly a year she’d not been at all what Anna expected. She would have had trouble distinguishing the woman from anyone else she’d seen in the last several months. If anything the woman seemed healthier than the other people Anna had encountered. She had so many questions, but she knew she must let her take her time and share later. This was not Ms. Janks.

  The woman stood squared off, her feet planted as wide as her angled shoulders. Almost a fighting stance, Anna thought,though her expression looked less certain than her body.

  “I didn’t find you,” Anna responded, “I think you found me. What.” Anna blinked. “What is your name?”

  This seemed to appease the woman. She looked away, relaxed her shoulders. She said, “You can call me Peru.”

  “Ah, Peru. Perhaps I can buy you both a drink?” a stranger’s voice called from behind them. Anna turned to find the man in the silk pajamas standing a few meters away, smiling broadly. A soft breeze lifted the front of his shirt up to reveal wiry patches of hair covering his considerable girth.

  Peru agreed and turned to the café with the man, leaving Anna to stay behind for a few seconds and consider what to do. By the time she’d joined them at a small table in the café, they were already in negotiations.

  “My work is good,” Peru had said.

  “You’re building a reputation.” The man had glanced up at Anna. “This one too?”

  Peru’s jaw hardened momentarily, but she continued on, a slight edge in her voice. The virtu negotiations turned to Peru’s favor and Anna only half-listened. For the moment she was dumbfounded—by the nature of the negotiations as well as who sat next to her.

  But the next time that the silk-pajamaed man offered to buy them a drink, a week later, Anna answered first. Shortly after, they made their way to the open-air restaurant that would become their meeting place whenever the girls came to town. He still spoke to Peru almost exclusively. Anna told herself it was because Peru looked older. But eventually he offered Anna her first job. Peru asked if he had any more work, something simple she said, looking over at Anna.

  “Your name?”

  “Armour, Anna Armour.” She knew enough to lie, but when the question was posed to her she’d forgotten what she was supposed to say. She grimaced and answered again.

  “Armour, just Armour.”

  “I might have something for you. Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Good. Your client cannot, but he wants to participate in this year’s Epiphany. You’ll do it for him. Just pretend to be Greek Orthodox—and a boy. You can do that, can’t you?”

  She could. She didn’t retrieve the cross that the priest had flung into the water. She hung back in her dinghy for fear that even in the huge crowd of participants she’d be found out for who she was in the white T-shirt and frigid water, but she satisfied the contract and the customer. She had earned enough money to pay for the next two days at the motel and recharge the credit stick to a pale green. She could even pay for her very own recorder—an overly large second-generation affair, but it beat borrowing Peru’s. They could now make money at the same time, and perhaps even work together. As it turned out they rarely had the opportunity—in the end they worked on very different jobs.

  Anna’s first real had gone so well that the client requested her again. This time for a long luxurious swim out on the river. Apparently the real was his effort to help overcome a fear of drowning the agent told her. In a few weeks she already had a specialization: Anna handled surrogacies. All virtu work was rooted in surrogate sensations, but surrogacies in particular focused on walking for the wounded, seeing for the newly blind, dancing for the hopeless, doing what someone truly could not do—not just what they feared to do. Those assignments went to Peru.

  “Truly virtuous,” Peru would call Anna’s work, her tone indecipherable. At first Peru had passed the work on to Anna. It didn’t pay well, she said, but Anna suspected Peru wanted to protect her from the other jobs.

  “You’d just mess them up,” Peru would say, but Anna knew differently.

  After a few months, clients requested Anna by name, wanted “Armour” to swim for them, to climb their mountains. Peru continued to risk for her reward, facing other people’s fears and often their fetishes. The work wore on Peru. One late afternoon, Anna came back to the motel room to find Peru gone. Anna thought that perhaps she’d had another overnight assignment. She had them often enough, but Peru always gave Anna advance notice and frequently checked in on her while she was away. This time, nothing. For three days Anna waited—for a response to her messages or for Peru to come back. On the fourth night, Peru’s key in the lock woke Anna from sleep and she ran to her.

  Anna never asked where Peru had been; she was too thrilled that Peru had returned. Still something continued to plague Peru. To Anna, she would only speak of the work.

  “They’re selling my memories,” Peru said.

  “But not your actual memories, not from your actual life,” Anna replied.

  “I’m the one doing them, virtu pack or no. They’re my reactions, my sight, my life they’re selling. I did those things, not them.”

  “But still they don’t have what you do when you’re not wearing the pack.”

  Peru didn’t answer that line of reasoning. Whether because it poked a hole in her argument or not Anna couldn’t be sure. Because of it, Anna couldn’t help wondering if Peru took the gear off when she came to her that night.

  She had reached up to take off Peru’s shades and Peru stopped her hand.

  “It’s too bright without them,” Peru had said.

  “You don’t need to see. I’m right here. You can feel it,” Anna answered.

  Peru had exhaled brusquely and not moved one centimeter, only looked down at Anna until she started to feel uncomfortable with the intensity of her gaze.

  Too quickly, she had acquiesced, and opened to Peru’s hands, letting the power of their good times persuade her.

  She had neve
r planned on making love to Peru and in truth she didn’t; Peru took charge as was her nature, leaving Anna lying in the aftermath, guilty and satisfied, twisted by feelings that drove her out of the bed and out into the stand of trees outside the motel they’d been staying in. The feeling didn’t fit inside her. She knew it would soon spill out and for that at least she wanted solitude. A couple of men sat smoking and talking near the door, so Anna moved further into the foliage. She watched the orange tips of their cigars, the beginning of a chill setting in, unable to form a clear thought.

  She couldn’t articulate the tangle that rose up in her. There had always been something unnameable between them. For years, including the two that they were together and more so all those they spent apart, Anna could not fully understand it. She should have been the one who taught Peru about the world, instead of having to find her after she had learned cruel, unspoken lessons, who should have found a way for them to survive, who should have led.

  Anna wondered if Peru had made love to her that night so that Anna would miss her more after she left. She could almost understand why she would do such a thing. The grief with which she had created Peru must have left the other woman missing something. Peru had always insinuated it, and Anna knew she had sculpted her out of desperation as much as wax and drops of her mother’s blood.

  

  The morning after they made love, Peru had taken Anna deep into the jungle.

  “This is a sacred place,” Peru had said, looking out on the barren stretch of land she and Anna had trekked two days through dense brush to visit. It looked to Anna like an empty lot, a mistake in the middle of jungle that nature forgot to fill in, and considering how quickly the jungle usually reclaimed space, the emptiness dismayed Anna as quickly as a pimp on a street corner looking her way. She felt in violation of some unspoken rule, as though she shouldn’t be standing at there though she had every right.

  Peru took a few steps away from her, striding further onto the empty land. She swiveled her head back and forth, taking in Anna had no idea what. Anna waited for her to continue.