Something brushed her shoulder. She started and turned. Billowing above her in the constant breeze of a wind machine was a long silver bolt of cloth. In the high windows of the building, silhouetted against the night sky, two muscle-builders, a man and a woman, posed. An occasional flash of light revealed that they were naked except for single sashes of cloth across their shoulders. Each sash was ten meters long. The sashes were as shiny and fluid as lame but the wind lofted them as lightly as tissue paper. As she stared, she realized that the man and woman were slowly moving, their pose shifting almost imperceptibly to the frantic dancebeat. She noted their overdeveloped musculature with pleasure. Their forms had the clean lines of synthesized muscles, artificially exercised by small jolts of electricity. She strained her eyes as a strobe began to flash and tried to see the tiny scars where the generators had been surgically implanted. She could see very well when she wanted to.
In the midst of this revelry, something cold and hard was pressed into her hand. She looked down. It was a Rolling Rock. Smiling at the boy, she tasted the beer cautiously. It seemed all right. The boy also seemed all right. He wore a collarless silk jacket over a white tee. A pair of brightly shined dog tags twinkled on his chest. His haircut looked expensive. He was white. He watched her expectantly and sipped his beer.
Finally, he inclined the neck of his bottle toward hers and said, "You drink Rock?"
"I do."
"To Rock!" He toasted so hard she thought for a moment that the bottles had broken.
There was another expectant pause. It was easy to talk n Payday, even on the dance floor. The dancebeat was loud, but most of the frequencies of human speech were high enough to be heard over the pulse. This boy, like many males, sounded nasal here on the dance floor, the lower register of his voice drowned out by the infrabass. She had cultivated a voice that cut through the dancebeat clearly.
The boy was uncomfortable. She waited, keeping eye contact. There was a nervous energy about him, as if he was slowly building up to another burst of conversation.
There was a flicker in his eye before he spoke.
"Freddie," was all he said.
"Lee." It was one of her standbys. She never decided in advance what her name would be.
"Where are you from?"
"I'm from Seoul, Korea," she lied.
"What's it like?"
She thought for a moment. "It's exactly like New York City."
He let out a burst of laughter.
"No fuckin' way. There's no place like New York City!"
"Why not?"
"People wouldn't stand for it." They laughed together.
She decided to tell the truth. "I was born in New York. Projects. Loisaida girl."
He stroked an imaginary beard, as if contemplating this revelation. She saw that he wore a brace on his right forearm. It started at some point inside the jacket, covered the back of his hand and his palm but left the fingers free, separating only the thumb. As they talked, she stole guilty glances at it, wondering whether it compensated for a deformity or a broken bone. It looked like the braces worn by roller bladers to keep their wrists from snapping when they fell, but those were usually made of black plastic and trimmed with fluorescent green or red. The boy's brace was the dirty beige of an Ace bandage.
He was from Nevada. His mom had been a telemarketer, laid off during the mid-nineties bank failures and still out of work. No dad was mentioned. The boy had the self-assured talk of the young men who had arrived in New York in time for the city's renaissance at the turn of the century and had made good, or at least better than the rest of the country. He also had the self-deprecating manner of immigrants when they meet a native. He was vital but not dangerous. Refreshingly, he did not paint, act, or play music.
She said little about herself. She was good at drawing others out. Constructing a new body for the night was hard enough without creating a new history as well. Her body, whatever its form, was solid and real. For any personal stories to make sense, she would have to fill them with lies.
It didn't take much to draw Freddie out. He offered his ideas about the park's demolition. He admitted that the planned light rail was already obsolete, since even the Canadians were building mag-lev lines now, but he had little use for the protesters. He didn't mention the PWHs. He took her to task, as a native New Yorker, for the city's exploding steam pipes and crumbling bridges. Things would have to change, and soon. Fortunately, he said, a complete reworking of the city's infrastructure was at hand. He explained that planned obsolescence had a silver lining. The things built in New York two hundred years ago - the bridges, the roads - were built to last two hundred years. Things built a hundred years ago - the tunnels and housing - were built to last a hundred years. He asserted that nothing built in the last twenty years could possibly last more than twenty years-and the federal housing built, since the turn of the century, no more than five. Thus, the diminishing life spans were converging. Soon, in a colossal crash coordinated by humanity's shrinking foresight, everything would fall apart at the same moment. The city would be left as flat as Belgrade after the Intervention.
"And then," he paused for effect, "we start over. Just like they did. New factories, new roads, new housing: New York!"
"When?" she asked. Naturally, the idea appealed to her.
He looked at his watch gravely, and they laughed.
He liked to find solutions for things. He was a technophile, but practical in a serpentine way. His opinions were long and complex, turning aside from obvious conclusions, contradicting themselves. She was soon comfortable with Freddie. When the beers were gone they finally accepted the music's insistent call, dancing until they broke a solid sweat. The DJ was punctuating the music with sudden pauses. Short sampled phrases, sound bites lifted from the president's latest reelection ads, stabbed into the silences. Out of context and isolated, his rhetoric sounded emptier than usual. As they danced, she noticed that Freddie was also listening.
The music slowly elided into a more Gothic beat, until the infrabass shudder became unnerving. She bought a round, with cash, and led Freddie down to the water's edge behind the amphitheater. A few hundred feet of the park had been fenced off and incorporated into Payday. They watched an ancient F train lumber across the Manhattan bridge.
She took his hand, the one without the brace, in hers. He looked puzzled, rubbed his fingers across her palm, and caught her eye. One of his nervous pauses began. She waited. Then he slowly lifted her hand into the light and stared.