The glass hammer, p.1
The Glass Hammer, page 1
part #2 of Doctor Adder Series
One of the most extraordinary things about seeing yourself a lot on television is you dream about yourself in the third person. Civilians don’t do that. What is ultimately scary is when you dream about yourself, and you’re walking away from you, you know what the back of your head looks like. This of course is schizophrenia.
Gore Vidal, interviewed by Adam Mars-Jones The Sunday Times, London, September 16, 1984
As the glorious sun penetrates glass without breaking it... so the Word of God, the light of the Father, passes through the body of the Virgin, and then leaves it without undergoing any change.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)
Opening
Video within video. He watched the monitor screen, seeing himself there, watching. In the same space, the warehouse, that he sat in now. There were more objects held in the space inside the screen: the sleek mass of the sprint car, the mattress and blankets against one wall, scattered beer cans, and all the other evidence of his past. Now the warehouse was empty, swept bare, those things gathered up and placed beyond his reach, inside the screen. Only the chair, and the monitor and playback unit they had given him, existed now. And the tapes stacked beside him.
“Do you want to go straight through them?” A voice spoke behind him. He had forgotten there was someone else in the empty warehouse with him.
After a moment, he nodded. He reached down and pulled out the tape he’d taken at random, returned it to its place in the stack, then placed the top one in the playback unit.
He watched the screen, waiting for the images to form. Everything would be in the tapes, if he watched long enough.
Segment One
The man is the heart of the burning car.
“Shit,” said Norah Endryx. She sat forward, elbows to knees, and dropped her cigarette stub to the bare concrete. On the monitor screen, as she watched, another figure runs across the sand, tearing off his fire-mask. The missile trails skein above the night desert. She ground the stub out under her boot.
VIDEO: CLOSE-UP of the rescuer’s face as he tugs the limp, goggled body free of the wreck. His eyes, flame-reddened, narrow in puzzlement. Then the shot blurs. In SLOW MOTION grace, arms splaying wide, he is lifted backward by the bullet’s force. He strikes the wall of the warehouse and slides to the angle of the floor.
“Christ, what a mess.” Through the zipped-open sleeve of her jacket, Endryx punched the keypad in her forearm. On the monitor, Schuyler’s face freezes, the expression of surprise caught at the moment of fading beneath pain and blackout.
“Something wrong?”
She looked over her shoulder. The monitor’s glow threw her silhouette across Wyre as he bent over Schuyler’s car. Using the hood as a workbench, he probed with his thin chrome tools in the co-pilot’s access door. The light-panel’s glare above his eyes hid his face from her when he looked up from the metal box’s innards.
“Nothing.” She pushed her sweat-damp hair from her forehead. The thick Los Angeles heat, even this far through the night, pulsed blood-like outside; the air inside the warehouse synched in with it. The fibers of her shirt went through their simple program, drawing sweat away from her skin and dissipating it in air. She felt as if she were being sucked dry by little vampires. End up like one of those pruney leather guys you see scuttling around downtown, she thought. That’s part of the price you pay for coming to work in L.A. She managed a tired smile. “What could go wrong after a day like this?”
Wyre shrugged and went on poking inside the co-pilot. “Tape’s what counts, I guess. Long as you got good footage.” He drew out a cracked circuit board. His probes plucked out the flattened bullet embedded in the center. “Pierced to the vitals. Poor Amf—an innocent bystander.” Wyre rooted in his satchel for a new board.
“Will he be all right?”
“Amf? No problem. It didn’t hit the main processor or any of the memory boards. He’ll be his old nasty self.”
Across the back of Wyre’s hand the red numbers crawled like ants as he logic-checked the new board.
Endryx turned back to the monitor and Schuyler’s face. She tapped out CANCELSEQ on her forearm, then hesitated. The scramble of images and time sectors that had popped up on the screen—Schuyler dragging his fellow sprinter from the missile-struck car on last night’s run, overlaid with the Godfriend assassin’s bullet lifting Schuyler like a rag doll just a few hours ago, but already subsumed into the tape world—all that was the result of her fingers tapping on the keypad while her mind had been running through its own tapes, gray cigarette smoke drifting over a blank screen.
God knows what I punched in, she thought. A hash, most likely. She had every Schuyler file she’d done still banked in her shadow’s archives, from the first interview to the parameds loading him into the ambulance, buried under pumping life-supports.
Poor Schuyler, she thought as she gazed at the electrophores arranged into his face. Have to go see how he’s doing. Her watch read minutes to go before she’d have to leave for her meeting with Urbenton, the head of Speed Death Productions’ L.A. office and thus—ostensibly—her boss. On impulse she punched in RUNSEQ. Wasting time, she knew; that was all there was left to do at this hour. RETURN and the electrophores shifted, no longer Schuyler’s face, forming other images.
VIDEO: LONG SHOT, a car burning on the desert, tires smoking as they melt into the sand, a circle of flaring light catching the other shapes speeding by in darkness. DISSOLVE to
TRACKING SHOT, a motorcycle skids out of control and falls, wheels losing grip in a patch of gray slush, sparks as the motor’s edge digs through the ice and finds the asphalt beneath. The rider thrown in snow banked against a wall, arms flung wide
(—cross-cut memory to Schuyler held in air by the bullet—) black leather against white as if melting into the snow’s soft crucifix. CUT to
CLOSE-UP of the rider’s helmet, motionless, the dark-tinted faceshield reflecting the camera lens. DISSOLVE to
MEDIUM SHOT, SCHUYLER, silent, watching the monitor, video within video; on the screen within the screen, the motorcycle rider sprawled in snow. SCHUYLER points to the screen and says something. DISSOLVE to
REVERSE MOTION, fire gathering into a ball, condensing into a missile, and tracking a streak of light back up to one of the pursuit satellites hovering over the desert. CUT to
CLOSE-UP of a figure in barbarian’s furs and iron-studded leather, the warehouse’s bare walls and metal door behind. The figure’s hand pushes back the rough cowl and reveals a woman’s face. CUT to
REVERSE ANCLE, the expression on SCHUYLER’S face changes from bored resignation to amazement. He starts to speak, his mouth moving in silence. The bullet hits. CUT to
LONG SHOT, huts half-buried in wind-driven snow, metal blackened by long-dead fire. DISSOLVE to
Night and desert. CLOSE-UP of SCHUYLER’s face reflected in his car’s windshield as he looks up, tracing a streak of light in the sky. DISSOLVE to
Snow. DISSOLVE to
Fire. DISSOLVE to
SCHUYLER, locked on some revelation, lying crumpled against the wall, shirt leaking blood.
Endryx squeezed her hand hard on her forearm, shutting off the blood and the flow of images on the monitor. Behind her eyelids, as she kneaded the small ache between her brows, Schuyler’s face remained.
“Very avant-garde, that.”
She opened her eyes at the sound of the voice and cut from her thoughts to Wyre standing next to her, gazing at the blank screen. Amf’s box shape was cradled in one arm as he worked with an old-fashioned handheld soldering gun. “I didn’t know Speed Death was interested in that sort of thing.”
“They’re not.” She erased the sequence out of memory, the shadow’s archive, at least. She watched her hand zipping shut the jacket sleeve over the control pad. “They just want the straight stuff like usual. Nice, clean linear sequences.” They were Speed Death Productions and beyond them, Hombre Mejor and Stan’s CutRate—the indie rebroadcast satellites—and the international audience they served. Images for the hungry eyes of Asia and the Americas—the thought dug in by its own sharp edge. Let ’em eat TV. And all in straight lines: the sprinters’ cars across the desert, the missiles tracking and falling toward them, the video signal out of the induced visual field via Urbenton’s editing desk and to the satellites, and bounced back to the eager audience. Nothing but straight lines, she thought. Like a bullet.
“There.” Wyre’s voice brought her out of her reverie again. He turned Amf’s box around to show her. The patch he had soldered on covered the hole where the stray bullet had pierced the metal. “That gives him a nice scar to brag about at the bars.”
Endryx nodded and began folding up the monitor. Obediently, unbidden, the shadow rose on its spider legs and stepped toward her, a thin aperture under the lens turret sliding open. When the monitor was stowed inside she twisted around again on the chair. Wyre was gone, in his overly spooky way He had left the mended Amf sitting on the fender of Schuyler’s sprint car.
The shadow followed her over. She stopped and flicked Amf’s power switch to ON. The small LED above the speaker grille glowed red.
“Leave me alone,” grated the familiar synthed voice. “God, I feel like shit.”
“Are you all right?” Endryx bent close to the box’s mike. “Hell, no.” The voice flattened and twanged. “I suppose I’m fixed now, huh? I feel a new board.”
“Wyre put that in.”
“It sucks. It’ll take a week to get my protocols straightened out. Some bargain-basement cheapshit repla cement—I know that guy.” The LED flared brighter. “And who let those loonies in here, anyway? Goddamn dykes, with their furs and spears and shit. And that broad with the gun— Great. Just great.”
“Nobody knew that was going to happen.” Least of all me, she thought. Some major consultations with the New York office would have to take place, and soon, to factor this into their plans.
“So just your luck,” sneered Amf, “to be here when it did. Did you get it on tape all right? Me getting plugged? How nice—immortalized at last. Five minutes on the early morning wrap-up. Shit.”
Endryx shrugged. “I got you. Both you and Schuyler.”
“Schuyler? What’s wrong with him?”
She laid her hand on the box’s power switch. “He caught it too. The first shot.”
Amf’s speaker went silent for a moment. “He did? That jerk—”
“Good night, Amf.” The red LED died under her hand. Outside, she drew the warehouse’s rattling door back down to the ground. A couple of vibers, Schuyler’s neighbors, with the low harmonics rumbling out from the doorway behind them, glanced at her and went back to preening each other’s shining hair. Endryx thrust her hands deep in her jacket pockets and began threading her way out of the district’s alleys. Her shadow picked delicately through the layered rubble and trash, following her toward the downtown’s dark outlines.
VIDEO: CLOSE-UP of SCHUYLER, his eyes still open in bewilderment, gazing at the warehouse’s ceiling. His hands grope toward his reddening chest.
Endryx had told him about the accidental jumble of images she’d made. For some reason she hadn’t deleted it and it had shown up here in the archive of all the other tapes.
He hadn’t seen it before. Or any of the straight footage of the shooting. He looked at the image on the screen, of himself lying broken against the warehouse. I should feel something, he thought. Seeing this. He’d come that close to death; but the others went farther. A certain numbness sets in. He reached down and picked up the next tape.
* * *
The indies were doing replays of last night’s run. Above the night desert some of the stars shifted and crawled into new positions: the pursuit satellites readying their missiles, and Hombre Mejor and Stan’s CutRate beaming the ritual pre-run show to all points. By mutual agreement between the sprinters and Speed Death Productions, the area around the Phoenix factory manholes was out of the induced visual field’s range, making it a backstage area safe from the audience’s view. The band of sprinters, eighteen with Schuyler missing, clustered around a fire built in a discarded radar dish, warming their hands and watching the tape of a car burning.
Dennie pointed with his cast to the flat screen propped up on the trunk of one of the cars. “I could feel him grab me under the arms and start pulling.” The stiff foam binding the broken arm tapped at Schuyler’s tiny face under the screen’s glass. Dennie had ridden out with one of the others, so as not to miss the nightly gathering. “I figured it was him, ’cause he’d been trailing on my right all the way back.”
A few meters away, Cassem scuffed through the sand mixed with ash dumped from the fires on all the nights before. The sharp-edged wind had smeared the black into ragged patches beneath the circle of cars. She glanced over her shoulder at the screen’s blurred flames, then drained the last flat beer from the can and threw it clattering onto the other discards. The beer, still cold despite her holding it for so long, worked its chill down her throat.
“You could’ve gotten out, couldn’t you? On your own?” Paul Sim folded his arms tight over his chest as he watched the replay, as if to keep something buttoned tight under his jacket from leaping out and screaming. Fuckin’ pansy, thought Cassem, watching him.
“I don’t know, man. ” Dennie wiped the sweat of the beer in his uninjured hand across his brow. “I was pretty out of it. The shockwave hit me square on.”
“Out of it, my ass,” piped up Zister, Dennie’s co-pilot. “You were unconscious. You don’t remember Schuyler pulling you out; I told you about that.” The metal box had scorch marks on it from the wreck. Its insides had been saved by the automatic vapor system Wyre had built in.
“Damn straight,” agreed another co-pilot, followed by a jumbled chorus from the other boxes sitting on the car hoods. The sprinters ignored them, and whatever point they were making out of the superiority of metal over flesh.
“Schuyler told me in L.A. that he didn’t even get it from Amf to stop and pull you out. He just took a chance there wasn’t going to be a follow-up missile.”
Cassem closed her eyes, but could still hear the voices going back and forth.
“Lucky for him.”
“Yeah, and where does it get him? That wacko broad shows up and plugs him.”
At the same time Cassem found the case of beer was empty, the last cargo came up. With a box of RH chips cradled against his chest, one of the underground factory ruins’ denizens cleared the steel rim set flush with the desert sand. The burly mole placed the load of pre-war microcircuitry in the last open car hatch and slammed the lid down. “There you go,” he said, scribbling out the invoice. He tore off a copy for Popejoy, this night’s organizer, stuffed the rest in the front pouch of his overalls, and started back down the ladder to the moles’ dens far below. “Bon voyage.” Out of the sprinters’ sight, his voice echoed hollow over his boots striking the metal rungs.
“Time to hit it,” said Popejoy, tucking away the pink slip of paper.
Dennie went on watching the video. “They didn’t say anything about Schuyler. About his getting shot.” One of the indies’ color men filled the screen, sitting in front of a blow-up of Dennie’s arm being set in its cast.
“They’re probably still figuring out how to handle it.”
Popejoy picked up McHertz, his co-pilot, and carried it by the handle on top toward his car. “So as not to freak out everybody in Brazil or some place. Come on. It’s showtime.”
Cassem folded up the empty beer carton and threw it on the fire. The thermal foam shrank and bubbled over the embers of scrap wood. She watched Dennie switch off and stow away the video as the other sprinters split up to their cars.
“You’re drunk,” said lode disgustedly as Cassem wedged herself into the driver’s seat.
“No, I’m not.” The LED above lode’s speaker grille dimmed as she plugged the I/O cable into the car’s sensor relays. Cassem drew the seat straps around herself. “That’s the problem.”
The elevator went to the 32nd floor and died. Endryx got out in darkness and climbed the next seven stories to Urbenton’s office. She switched on the shadow’s range-finding beam, and the stair ladies scuttled out of its light, retreating to the doorless hallways that branched off the stairwell. The walls glistened black with the layered soot of their cooking fires.
Urbenton swiveled his gaze around from the bank of monitors when she let herself into the office. The screens were old phosphor-dot models, dug up from God knew where, instead of the standard multi-plane electrophoretic displays. His desk filled the blue pool of light cast by them. “It’s, uh—Endryx,” he said, squinting past the shadow’s beam. “Turn that damn thing off.”
The building’s darkness folded closer around them as she sat down and pressed the fat CANCEL button through the leather sleeve. “You’re turning into a mushroom up here,” she said, digging out a cigarette. The small flame of her lighter danced Urbenton’s wide silhouette across the monitors. “Or one of those cave fish—live their whole life out of the sunlight. Pretty soon you won’t be able to see anything if it’s not on those screens.” She snapped the lighter shut.
He shrugged, the lift of his shoulders tightening his shirt over his paunch. “Speed Death doesn’t pay me to look at anything else. That’s what you’re for. So I can look at what you look at.”
Leaning back, she gazed across the monitors. The isolation shots of last night’s run filled all but one of the screens; that one held the overview of the induced visual field, each blip a sprinter racing across the cathode-ray desert as it scrolled left to right, Phoenix to Los Angeles. The open circles that stood for the pursuit satellites drifted on a slow diagonal, readying their aim.
