Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

There was a girl with blue hair sitting cross-legged on the corner of the street. Her hair fell down her back in thick, fuzzy dreadlocks, like someone had nailed a dozen baby aliens to her head. She was dressed in what I assumed to be an artful arrangement of fabric swatches intended to resemble rags, rather than actual shambling homeless/nutcase out-and-out rags. Tartan, paisley, plaid, things that looked like they belonged as wallpaper in a kid’s room, things that looked like they’d been ripped off clowns at knifepoint. She had her back to me, and, as I approached, I expected to see a hat in front of her, or a little cardboard sign with the hand-scrawled message NEED MONEY FOR FOOD/DRUGS/CLOWN-STABBING. As I walked around her, I saw that she was just sitting there, eyes closed, hands on her knees, perfectly still and calm.

She had… well, I thought it was Sharpie or makeup around her eye, at first. A wobbly circle, with stitch marks crossing it, drawn like the sort of roundish patch you’d see sewn into teddy bears or old denim jeans. She sort of came to as I walked around her, smiled as if she’d just woken up, and rubbed her face. The marking didn’t smear. It was tattooed on.

She rubbed her eyes, and then looked up at me, giving me the gentlest smile. “Hello,” she said softly.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re sitting asleep on the corner of the street.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was listening.”

“To what?”

She nodded at the street, still with that serene smile. “The traffic. Sit with me.” She patted the sidewalk next to her. Calculating that, after this, the day just couldn’t get any weirder, I said the hell with it and sat down next to her.

She nodded toward the street. “The traffic. I’m listening to the traffic.”

“What’s so interesting about the sound of cars? Is this one of those art things I never get?”

She laughed, and it was a soft low laugh, like the flow of water in a brook. There was no tension in the girl at all. I couldn’t imagine anything affecting that pool of relaxation around her. Just sitting there, I felt the knots in my back slowly sliding apart.

“No. Well, not really. I’m listening for the future.”

“The future.”

“Do you know anything about the Native Americans?”

“Only the usual stuff about poisoning them with infected blankets. I always wondered why we don’t give little blankets to each other at Thanksgiving.”

There was almost a frown there. “That’s just nasty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out of me without really thinking. I suddenly didn’t want to spoil her and her zone of no-tension.

“The Native American shamans,” she said, “listened for the future in the sound of horses. They divined it, from the patterns of hoofbeats. They would sit like this, and just listen. In those days, horses were the sound of their world, the true sound of motion, and they believed that their movement through time let in leakages of the future. Presentiments of what will be.”

“I don’t see any horses.”

“Then you’re not looking.” She smiled, indulgent. “This is the sound of our world in motion, right here. Cars. The strike of hooves became the point where the rubber meets the road. Now, I’m a new American. My family came over on the boat from Spain only a hundred years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the people who were here before. In fact, I think it means I ‘must’ learn from them, if I’m going to stay here and look after this land properly. If only to make up for your smallpox-infected blankets, right? So here I sit. A New American shaman, divining the future from the sound of cars.”

As the strangeness of my days go, this was really kind of benign in its insanity. And I was enjoying the peace of her. So I drew my knees up and around until I was cross-legged like her, and we sat together like Zen hoboes on the corner of the street.

“What do you hear?” I asked.

She inclined her head slightly, toward the constant blur of metal accelerating past us. Just listening. It took a minute before she gave a little laugh.

“What?” I said.

“I hate the way this sounds. It makes me sound like a carny fortune-teller.”

“Go on.”

“You’re going on a long journey, Mike.”

“Oh, God. Tell me there’s no tall dark stranger.”

She giggled. “I think you’re the tall dark stranger. But, no, you’re going on a long journey. Sounds like you’re going to cross the country before you’re done. And yourself. It’s going to be strange for you. But that’s not a bad thing. Traveling is good.”

“You travel a lot?”

“I do nothing but travel,” she said, glancing at me. “Look at my face. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can’t get a job, buy a house, any of the things we’re supposed to want to do. When I got the tattoo, I knew I was drawing a crooked line between myself and society. But that’s okay. It stops me from giving up on myself. It stops me from settling for something ordinary. You shouldn’t want ordinary things, either. You’re unusual. I know you can’t hear the future, but it comes to you, anyway, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it the future.”

“That’s because you can’t hear it.”

“Back up a second,” I said, feeling like I’d missed a step. “I just thought of something.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you my name.”

“No.” She smiled. “You didn’t.”

“I should really get moving,” I said, standing up, suddenly very cold.

She beamed up at me. “Yes, you should. You just came into quite a lot of money. You should spend a little on yourself before you have to spend it on necessities. You don’t need to start your journey just yet. Enjoy yourself a little bit.”

“I just thought of an old song,” I said.

“Which one?”

“‘Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.’”

“That’s right,” she said, eyes drawn back to the traffic. “It’s always later than you think. I won’t be here tomorrow. And neither will you. Go have a drink.”

Anhour later, I walked into some freak bar on Bleecker Street and yelled, “I’m buying a hundred drinks—for me !”

Oh, they beat the shit out of me.

BySunday, I’d moved into the Z Hotel, where the doormen dress like ninjas and stab passing poor people in the neckbits with wooden swords.

I spent the day reading the handheld, in between horrible abuse of room service and watching all the Filth-O-Vision pay-TV porno I could handle. It turned out that regular vanilla sex hadn’t been changed while I’d been away in the prison of chastity forced upon me by the world, but apparently all men and women everywhere now like anal sex, and no one uses a rubber to prevent pregnancy when there is the opportunity to ejaculate up a woman’s nostril.

There was actually a porno documentary pasted between the hump flicks as “bonus programming.” A scrawny girl with pretty eyes and teeth like a ninety-year-old chainsmoker cackled to the camera that, while tampering with her female coperformer, her “entire fuckin’ arm went right up there! It was awesome!” Sitting there naked but for a light crusting of popcorn crumbs, I scratched my belly and considered for a few moments the erotic voltage of someone’s forearm suddenly appearing in your abdomen. I just couldn’t see it.

A thin man in a jacket someone had plainly advised him to buy as a sick joke sat in front of the camera next, attending carefully to his 1983 flicked hair with a sensitive palm. He was one of those disturbing people who only appear to have a chin from certain angles. When he inclined his head, his chin became a tiny couch-like thing sitting an inch above his collarbone. He was introduced as America’s premier male adult performer. It was explained that he was a triple threat as producer, writer, and trained cock with body attached. Despite plainly being convinced that he was also America’s greatest comedy genius (“I have two funny voices. That’s one more than most people. John Cleese only has one funny voice.”), he wasn’t entirely stupid. He had a Kim Jong Il–like moment where he seemed to claim that he’d invented anal sex, but he said something interesting after that.

“Anal sex was edgy. It wasn’t a mainstream thing. But time was, cum shots were edgy. And there was a response to cum shots, and then every porno had cum shots, and now there’s bukkake. Same with anal sex. Big shock when it was first shown, and now anal sex is in every movie. The audience takes that on and then says, What’s next? What’s new? So all this stuff, that was hidden away for years, is mainstream now. You know what else? There was a movie in England last year, an arty movie, based on a literary kind of novel. And it has blowjobs. The actress—and this was straight actors and actresses, not adult performers—had to suck the actor off on camera. Porno’s already crossed over, man. We’re mainstream American shit now. If people out there want to worry about something, tell them to worry about what comes next. Worry about what comes after us.”

I had no idea what bukkake was, and absolutely no interest in finding out. But the rest of it resonated with what the chief of staff had said to me the day before. Things people tried to not even conceive of in the 1950s were matter-of-fact daily life in the 00s.

Is it the Oh-Ohs, I wondered? Or the Zero-Zeros? More beer was required to puzzle this one out.

The room service people pleaded with me not to answer the door dressed entirely in popcorn again.

I put the phone down, picked up the handheld again, and sank into the luxurious sofa with it.

If the documents filling the handheld were to be believed, they’d spent the last two years using every paranoia-inducing spook operation you’ve ever heard of in tracking the book down. FBI, CIA, NSA, even ISA, which I knew were the president’s own spooks, formed by Carter in the seventies. Lots of rumors, third-party reports, hearsay and bullshit, and a litany of hotspots missed by months or years.

The book didn’t seem to stay in anyone’s hands for long. It appeared to be considered an asset to be traded. The mysterious Chinese woman from San Francisco started the game by trading it to a rogue private hospital in Texas in return for a multiple trepanation operation. She had a circle of small holes drilled in her head, just below the hairline, that supposedly allowed her to transmit hypnotic mental radio. She died in Guatemala in 1985, attended by eighty-eight Fortune 500 figures, all of whom had enjoyed extended sexual knowledge of her.

The book stayed in Texas for six months, before being traded to an unknown figure in NASA in return for one of their experimental neural implant transceivers. A notation insisted that the patent actually exists, and was lodged by NASA—a two-way radio smaller than a dime and designed to be placed directly into the brain. Space-flight is all about reducing the weight of whatever you’re trying to fire into orbit, and two ounces in the brain has to be better than ten pounds of radio in the cockpit.

Unless you’re the guy having a jagged circle of steel built with lowest-bidder components wedged into your living brain, I guess.

Additional notation explained that a secret NASA memo released on the Internet in 1996 revealed that the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was actually a CIA blind created specifically to cover a possible breach of security over astronauts with extensive bioelectronic modification escaping the system and going public.