She popped four aspirol, and managed to drink about a third of the water before puking.
Hours later, the afternoon sun hitting her windows straight on, she woke up again. Her stomachs were on fire from the aspirol, but her head was steady. The puke by the bed was dried and thin. It reeked of alcohol. Her hands and the pillow smelled like chlorine.
In the shower, the water swung wildly between cold and hot, but she hardly noticed. Drying herself, she realized vaguely that her wrist was better. The muscles were still tender from disuse, but for the first time since curing Freddie the wrist felt whole again. She took the brace off and pitched it into the closet room.
She sat before the mirror. The vaguely familiar person that stared back at her looked pathetic. The muscles in her face were slack from the hangover. Her eyes were as bloodshot as a junkie's. The scar on her cheek was starting to scab, and her ass was sore with a fingertip-sized bruise. This last was Kathy's doing, -he guessed.
She stood and bent at the waist until the top of her head touched the floor. She stayed that way, thankful that the aspirol had removed all dizziness. Vertigo was the part of a hangover she couldn't stand. Her arms rotated slowly through a full windmill, one way and then the other, and she straightened. Her hair looked like shit. She swore. It was time to deal with the hair once and for all.
She uncased the dog trimmer, and yanked open a spot on the power strip nearest the mirror. Plugging the trimmer in, she fumbled to set the blade into its carrier. She decided two centimeters was fine.
The operation was painless. The little motor buzzed against her head in a distant, benign sort of way. Dark locks fell around her like autumn leaves, only a straight, even burr remaining.
When she was done, she touched her own head with fascination. More than the way it looked, the feel of the buzzed, stiffly erect hair intrigued her. Her palm was tickled by its touch. She explored every square centimeter of her scalp. Looking at herself, she almost managed to smile. Between the red eyes, her scar, and the buzz, she looked like one mean bitch.
She sprayed down the puke with ammonia, and scraped it up with a handful of paper towels. She swept the pile of hair clippings into the biodegradable plastic bag she'd brought her last groceries home in and threw it all into the compost can down on the ninth floor.
On the way back up, she scratched her head. There was something she had to do today. Then she remembered. Track down the invisible. Find Bonita.
In her shoe was the receipt she had found in Bonita's pocket. It seemed to be from a restaurant. The name of the place wasn't on the receipt, just items and prices. On the back was a scribbled phone number and a name: Candy.
She didn't have a phone.
She dressed, moving cautiously in the fog of hangover. It was daylight, so she opted for the anonymity of all black. She found a mesh shirt that was fine enough to obscure her breasts and loose enough to keep her cool. The shorts she chose were a man's size, but their tight elastic waist held them on. They went down almost to her knees. She put on her fullerine sunglasses, which remained transparent in the dark apartment. The ashtray by the door was out of change, but there were three twenties under it. Between that and the $400 or so in her smart account, she wasn't doing badly; her next welfare direct deposit was tomorrow.
************************************
New York State gave her use of the apartment, subsidized by the Feds with FDPRA money. She rated Displaced Person status because of her welfare identity: Milica Raznakovic, a Serb refugee severely wounded in the vengeance bombardments after the Macedonian revolt. She had slipped in among a planeload of DPs at Kennedy, changed to an anthropologically generic Serbian body type with a horribly crushed leg and arm. She'd learned a few words of the most obscure Macedonian dialect she could find and claimed to know no Serbo-Croatian or Greek, just a half-fluent English. The overworked INS officials at JFK were happy with this unlikely identity. At the time, a lot of Eastern Europeans were showing up without their papers intact. She was given asylum, and eventually citizenship.
A few X-rays of her shattered limbs and she had been rated A-2 in the Cuomo hierarchy: set for life. On top of her $720 a week, she received a medical dispensation for prosthetics once a year. Her income wasn't much, but her needs were simple. If she ever wanted more money, she figured she could use her talent to get it, one way or another.
The prosthetics bonus had covered anatomy classes at Hunter College for two years. In that time, she'd learned everything relevant that the monomorph professors could teach her. The next bonus went to a computer. She poached various City University libraries for anatomy disks before her Hunter ID expired. Her true curricula, however, were the live bodies she picked up in bars. Anatomy classes were limited. The professors' understanding of the body was based on the static bulk of a cadaver, but her interest lay in the vital form. The bodies of her lovers, extended to their limits in the exhausting work of passion, were better textbooks than any disk she'd booted at Hunter.
************************************
The hall was hot and smelled of Spanish cooking. The elevator seemed to be working, but it passed her floor several times without stopping. She took the stairs philosophically; if the city were any more efficient, maintaining her welfare identity wouldn't have been so easy.
She changed two dollar coins into quarters at the corner bodega and fed its pay phone. Without any idea of what to say, she dialed the number. A digitized voice asked for two more quarters. She looked at the receipt, and realized that the number was a 9900- exchange, a pay call. Great, Bonita was a phone sex fan. No doubt Candy was his favorite. This was probably a waste of time.
She dropped in the money. Another digitized voice came on:
You have reached the Second Federal Guaranty money line. The charge will be 86 cents per minute. Hang up now if you do not want to be billed.
A resigned curiosity kept her on the line. She had more quarters.
Enter the PIN code for the account you wish to access . . . now.
It took a few moments for her to realize what was going on. When the voice asked her to, she pressed the # key for more time and dropped more quarters. Then she input 2-2-6-3-9: Candy. There were the obligatory pops and clicks of access. The voice came back, all business now.
Main Menu:
Touch 1 for account balance;
Touch 2 for last five transactions;
Touch 3 for the current rate;
Touch 4 to transfer money between working and high interest funds.
Touch 9 for an account specialist.