Blackfish City(14)

City Without a Map had not steered him wrong. This place was electric, alive. A beautiful boy, seated on a rough and brightly patterned blanket, caught Fill staring. He smiled, a complicit and friendly smile that somehow underscored Fill’s outsider status.

Boom. A memory. Triggered by that boy’s pretty face. Pornography, one of the first clips little Fill ever saw, a similarly pretty face, eyes closed, face upturned, waiting, frightened—brave—excited, and then a spray of semen across his cheeks, another, several. The memory-boy smiled, laughed.

Fill flushed, embarrassed, unsure whether anyone could see his half erection in the darkened crowd. He scanned the crowd—no one looking in his direction but a well-maintained and very old man at the grid’s edge.

Boom. Another image flashed in his mind’s eye. Another pretty face, seen from above, turned up. A total stranger, someone Fill had no memory of, although that meant little considering how much he’d done while out of his mind on some combination of alcohol and drugs and actual ecstasy, and anyway, Fill was usually the face being sprayed, not the one spraying the face. Not pornography, either—too real for that, too vivid, with smells attached, and sounds, the roar of a distant train, a subway car, but what the hell, there were no subways left . . .

Boom. Children looking down from the windows of burning buildings.

Boom. Soldiers shooting crowds that tried to breach a roadblock. Broad, bizarre cityscapes rising in the distance, the original Shanghai, the vanished S?o Paulo. Not dreams, not hallucinations. Memories. Someone else’s memories.

Fill began to cry. He cried for a long time.

“Hello,” said the old man, speaking New York English. At some point, he had come over to stand beside Fill. “I’m sorry to intrude. Let me guess—City Without a Map brought you here.”

Fill nodded, then regretted it. He squeezed the last few tears out, gathered his wits, searched for something suitably devastating to slay this sad troll with. But the troll had placed his hand on Fill’s, was looking into his eyes, was opening his mouth, and before Fill could hiss, Get the fuck out of my face you disgusting ancient queen, the old man said, “It’s the breaks, isn’t it?”

Which made Fill burst back into tears. He nodded, and the man leaned forward to hug him. The hug was kind, grandmotherly, sexless.

“Forgive my presumption. But I had many similar experiences, early in my diagnosis. And I know how alienating it can be. My name is Ishmael Barron. Most people call me by my last name. It is so much more dramatic.”

“Fill.” Shaking the man’s talcum-powdery hand, he felt afraid he might break the thing. And did Barron’s eyes widen from pain, from lecherous pleasure, from something else entirely? “It felt like memories. So vivid. But nothing I experienced. Stuff that happened a long time before I was born. How is that possible?”

“Them’s the breaks,” the old man said, and smiled, so Fill figured there was probably an old joke he didn’t get in there, so he wrung out a laugh. The length of the man’s ears was truly preposterous, and his nose seemed superhuman, as though extreme old age was sucking life and skin away from the rest of his face and flooding those places. “Talking helps. I had no one, when I was diagnosed. Do you want to get a caffè alghe? Talk about this?”

“We can get real coffee,” Fill said. “I hate that toasted algae stuff, and I don’t mind paying.”

Barron shrugged. “Well okay, Your Excellency.”

“Think nothing of it,” Fill said, standing up straighter, because manners were easy, this is what they were there for; the genteel affectations of wealth were a suit of armor you could wear when the world threatened to wash you away.

“IT’S PROBABLY BEEN FIVE YEARS since I tasted this,” the old man said. “And before that it was probably another five years.”

“We’ll do this again in five years,” Fill said, knowing neither one of them would be alive then.

“Would you believe I used to have five or six cups of this a day?”

“Wow,” Fill said, barely hiding his boredom, because he hated when old people talked about How Awesome Everything Used to Be. Yeah, but you also used to die from cancer and get hangovers and spend your whole life unable to understand 80 to 99 percent of the people in the world when they spoke, so good luck with that nostalgia thing.

But he couldn’t hold on to any anger, not for this man, his baby-pink skin and senile good cheer, and Fill liked speaking New York English, it made him feel close to his grandfather. Above them, at street level, a rather delicious dark bearded thing caught Fill’s eye. He must think I’m a rent boy, Fill thought with a flush of pride, paid by this old thing to whip him bloody or sit naked by a window or something.

“I believe the breaks have been around longer than people suspect,” Barron said. “Fifteen years, twenty. It went unnoticed, or was mistaken for schizophrenia or adolescent-onset Alzheimer’s because the symptoms are psychological. My theory is that it’s not one disease but several, originating in a number of different locations, and when one person becomes infected with multiple strains, a new, hybrid strain is formed. Far stronger than the two that created it.”

I think I got them from him. And they’re moving fast. It’s a bad strain.

Fill frowned into his coffee, remembering that stranger’s messages, the boy who said he’d gotten the breaks from the same person as Fill. Although that was crazy. How could this random stranger know such a thing? It’s not like Ram had infected him with information along with a disease. And yet—he had known Fill’s private handle.