“Worthless,” spits Conrad. “Kitchen oregano in a cheap capsule!”
“Cilantro, actually,” says Williams. Her voice is rich, mild and faintly mocking.
“And you claim they perform miracles. How can you possibly justify–”
“The contention that the pills’ contents cause no direct chemical change doesn’t mean they’re ineffective.” Williams is smiling. One of her teeth is gold. “There are older and more basic forces at work. We are legitimately changing people’s lives. We’re–” She leans forward, thumbing an intercom. “What did I call us, Van?”
“‘Consorts and enablers of the placebo effect,'” says a tinny voice.
“Yes,” she says. “That.”
It catches him across the jaw and the world’s a blinking, spinning mess, as he tumbles on the long axis of his body to spit blood on the stubblegrass of Fort Wayne, Indiana. What the fuck’s in Fort Wayne anyway? A credit union, two Comfort Inns, herds of engineers and all her childhood. She grew those doe-brown eyes here, and those legs and those white teeth: learned to count, drank beer, stole candy, killed a rabbit in her mother’s van. He came to meet Fort Wayne, and it met him back, with the sharp clean ring of copper pipe on bone.
“I’m telling you, listen, he’s useless. He’s inert,” hisses Annabeth. “You’re not going to make him into a real actor with a few lightbulbs!”
“One of the things you’ll learn about this town is it’s all appearances.” Mo grins. She’s playing cat’s cradle while her assistants scuttle like ants in a skillet. “Lighting is all. That and makeup. Okay, guys, wanna hit it?”
There’s an audible whump as the spots power up. Annabeth drops her clipboard.
Standing there lit like a beacon in the focus of their stares, Terence is pretty bored. He idly thinks about dope, and about doing it.
Joanna rinses, spits, and settles her squashy old badger on her head. It’s still asleep, lucky thing.
In the hall, Hoban’s securing little Madison’s new chipmunk for her–it’s her first day of school. Joanna squats to chuck her chin. “Look at you! So big! You’re going to need a raccoon in a month.”
Madison giggles, and Joanna rises to kiss her husband with the tiniest hesitation. She wishes Hoban hadn’t bought the Facelift Sables. The color’s pretty, sure, and his skin stays taut, but vanity! Vanity! And anyway, the spots where their claws grip his face are starting to show.
“What do you call your freckles?”
Saff pauses. “I don’t think anybody’s ever asked,” she says, a little bemused. “I’m not sure I call them anything.”
“It’s just that they’re not technically freckles,” says Eileen. “Or not the melaton–I mean, melanin irregularity that people call freckles.”
Saff touches her cheek, where the spray of tiny dark spots spreads from her eyes. Her skin is baker’s chocolate; the spots are nearly black. “But they must be. They weren’t there when I was younger… Oh, I remember!” She smiles. “My mom had them. She called them ‘sunspots.'”
Eileen laughs. “I’m stealing that!”
They’re walking closer again. Marvin notices this once in a while.
“Have you been to Slipdisc?” she asks. “It’s great. Just this great indie store, really… I can take you there, yeah?”
Marvin feels electric, in his arms and shoulders, in his fingertips. Not love, he decides. Nor lust. Something else.
“It’s really good to see you,” he says.
“Yeah, it is.”
“I already said that.” His hands are in his pockets, and hers behind her back. She drops back, hops forward; he takes two Monkee-strides and falls back in step.
“It’s true.”
They’re walking closer again. Surely she notices too.
The rain is very sudden. All down the street, people scramble for doors.
Jared doesn’t have a hat and doesn’t care. He wants to be wet and cold. This is his rain; he called it down with shouts and anger, matched its thunder with his fist against the doorframe. That’s not true, though. The storm is solid, and something inside him is breaking up. He starts to shiver.
Luther catches him at the corner. He’s beautiful. His hands are on Jared’s face.
The scurriers have arrived in safety. All down the street, umbrellas pop out and begin to twirl water away.
It was never a real court–just a back lot and the unpainted fence where they hung the goal. That fence was just waiting to collapse on any kid who pulled. Peta learned never to dunk, never to showboat, but to pull for the layup: steady, stacking, point after point through tireless afternoons. First she never won. Then she always won.
She’s wearing sneakers now, cleaner than the ones she wore back then, and her feet scuff the same pattern. But her brother’s not there. She’s alone, in the noise of the exhaust fan and the swimming-pool smell of wet concrete.
It is, indeed, his father’s Oldsmobile. Ding would recognize that fishing-joke front license plate anywhere, even now, obscured as it is with dirt and oil.
The car’s gone feral in the long years since his disappearance, though, and it seems to have been a rough transition. Its wood-laminate panels are scarred and dented; he can see it’s starving. It growls at him, six cylinders throbbing with desperate hunger.
Ding steps slowly away from the wild Buick he’s skinning, careful not to look the Olds in the headlights. “Easy, boy,” he says softly. “Easy there. Just let me get to my Truckbuster…”
Holography was easy enough, once the tech was there. The eye has a refresh rate and effective megapixel rating; it was just a matter of waiting for Moore’s Law to catch up.
Except for Clarence. He’s literally one in a million, part of a very small population whose eyes are always out of phase. Where everyone else sees opaque light, he sees nothing, or a flickering ghost.
Not that Clarence minds. He realized eventually that there must exist those who’d understand his ability to disbelieve illusions as a dangerous, valuable talent. After that, it didn’t take him long to find them.