Her wrist still hurt like hell, but the sharp stabs of pain had subsided into a dull ache. She slipped the brace off and rotated the wrist in slow and exquisite agony, swearing out loud. She kept up the exercise with dogged determination, filled with the perverse pleasure/pain of pulling the bandage off a scab. Once in a while a reluctant breeze would push a shallow breath of air into the apartment, tainted with the smell of the city. Soon she broke a sweat.
Her body still buzzed faintly with the nervous residue of her connection to Freddie. The feeling had stabilized, its tiny shocks replaced by a warm glow. She wondered if Freddie was back at work, casting a net of interaction with the bored and lonely shutins of the electronic city. She considered what it would be like to log on to the AcNet chat line and anonymously converse with ME. But there was no modem on her deck. For that matter, she didn't have a phone, and she hardly had the money to pay AcNet's steep connection fees. But she found herself thinking of him.
By the time the timer rang, the sunset had diminished to a finger-width streak of blood red.
'Beer in hand, she toured the closet in the reddish half-light. It was Monday, and the Glory Hole was open tonight. There were really only two choices: extravagant evening wear or her rumpled Mets shirt. With her pretty Asian face, she preferred not to do the lipstick dyke routine. It would be overkill. She slipped the Mets shirt on without putting down her beer and sought out a pair of mercifully cool pinstriped pants that tied at the waist. Somewhere, she found a blue pair of deck sneakers. They fit after she flattened her arches a few centimeters. She tried them with socks, but it was too hot.
Her hair was a frizzy mass of angst. She, ran her good hand through it and considered the dog trimmer she had bought on Canal Street the week before. It could be set in centimeter increments and could buzz the whole fucking mess away before her beer got warm. As she had several times since purchasing the trimmer, she pulled it out of its black vinyl case and threatened the unruly hair. It was no use. Contemplating an irreversible change in her appearance was almost impossible. She was too used to editing her appearance, refining and redacting until it matched an image in her mind's eye. But, she consoled herself, her nerve was slowly building. One day soon.
She tied a red bandanna around her neck and combed a palmful of Stiff Stuff into her hair. The synthetic-smelling goo partly tamed it. With her hair combed back, she looked more masculine.
But the face was still too pretty. The crowd at Glory Hole was too rowdy for the angelic, rich-looking Chinese girl who stared back at her from the mirror. She contemplated a small shift of her skull to make her brow more manly, but the thought of it gave her a headache. In the last twenty-four hours she had done enough shifting for a week.
What did monomorphs do at times like this? In one of the milk cartons in the closet was a cluttered box of makeup implements stolen over the years. She rarely used them. A tube of black lipstick seemed hopeful, but what made Anglo girls look tough made her Asian face look like a geisha's. She wiped it off. The makeup box also held a switchblade. She flicked it open a few times before the mirror, posing with it between her teeth. It put an edge on her soft appearance, but she could hardly carry it openly.
She ran the flat of its blade down her white and perfect cheek. The answer was obvious, really.
Her stove was the ancient gas kind that could still be found in the projects. It heated the apartment noticeably, but it boiled water faster than a microwave. Once the water was bubbling, she swished the knife blade in it until its metal handle grew hot. She sat down in front of the mirror, having collected a handful of tissues from the box beside her bed. Even though she knew the pain would be trivial compared with a change, it was hard to get started. She blocked the nerves of her right cheek as best she could and made an inch-long cut. The blade was duller than it looked.
The pain seemed far away, but it had a nasty, throbbing edge that she wasn't used to. She let it bleed freely for a while, watching the blood surface and run with morbid fascination. It had the tardy pace of violence in an old western, welling and dripping down her face like slow motion. After half a minute, she turned her concentration to sealing the cut while she wiped her neck and chin dry. She dulled the red of the scar: a little to make the wound look older.
Her face was perfect now. The thin line of the scar added the touch of asymmetry she had been searching for. The wound toughened the angle of her high cheekbones and made her dark eyes seem wiser and older. It made it easier to wear the expression she preferred in the Glory Hole: wicked and vulpine.
She reached into the ashtray beside her door, pocketing her smartcard and a few dollar coins. She ignored the condoms. As she pulled the door open, her wrist gave a sharp pang, and she remembered to put on the brace. She took the stairs leisurely. It was a couple of hours before the Glory Hole would open.
One last wrinkled Times was left at the corner bodega, and there was a free table in the Paradise Lounge on Houston. By the time her bean soup arrived, a soggy mountain of rice rising from the center of the bowl, her hands were streaked with the Times' bright pastel hues. The heavy food had soon soothed her stomachs.
As she walked toward the West Village, there were traces of relief from the heat. The streets were still wet from the day's intermittent rain and a breeze off the East River had broken the humidity. The traffic on Houston was light, even for a Monday.
Soon she saw why. West Houston was ripped up for construction. Deep, muddy gouges in the street bared the subterranean complex of the city's sewage, heating, and communication systems. She saw an old steam pipe and thought of Freddie's theory of simultaneous decay. The concrete pipe looked ancient and decrepit beside the fluorescent color-codes of the fiber-optic PVC tubing piggybacked along it. Surely the wiring, fibering, and piping couldn't all go bad at once. But the notion of a city rebuilt from the ground up still appealed to her.
They were widening Houston to add a high-occupancy transport and freight lane where the median had been. It was designed for trucks and busses from the West Side VTOL port. The sidewalks were open to pedestrians, though the big machines were still at work in the harsh glare of halogen floodlights. The machines were awesomely loud, their gas-driven engines enveloping the street in a thick cloud of fumes. She turned uptown. The club was a few blocks north of Houston, on what native New Yorkers still called Sixth Avenue.
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The floor of the Glory Hole was tiled with the likeness of a chained dog. The mosaic was crude and Roman-looking. The club's theme was Pompeii: revelry before the eruption. The cover was twenty dollars. She knew from experience that there was no arguing with the doorwomen. She usually didn't pay covers on principle, but the club was only open once a week, and at least there was no waiting around outside to be checked out. Not for women, anyway.