Karuna, Inc
an extract from the novella
by Paul Di Filippo

He learned about pain and death from an ugly dying dog. It had been run over and lay by the side of the road, its chest crushed, bloody foam bubbling from its mouth. When he bent over it the dog gazed at him with glasslike eyes that already saw into the next world.

To understand what the dog was saying he put his hand on its stumpy tail. "Who mandated this death for you?" he asked the dog. "What have you done?"

Maybe he should get himself a dog.

A dog--a pet, a constant companion, something to fuss over--might help.

But then again, maybe not. It was so hard to know, to make up his mind.

Considering his unique situation. His special troubles. His extra share of suffering.

Adding any unknown factor to the sad equation of his life might disguise its solution, remove any answer forever beyond his powers of philosophical computation. (Assuming his life--anyone's life--was solvable at all.)

But how could he know for sure without trying?

Yet did he dare try?

Foolish as the dilemma seemed, it was a real quandary, seemingly his alone.

Others seemed not to have such problems.

For instance. Everyone in Thurman Swan's life had a dog, it seemed. All the people he hung with daily at the Karuna Koffeehouse. (He felt odd calling them "friends," upon such short acquaintance, even though they were starting to feel a little like that.) Shenda, Buddy, Chug'em, SinSin, Verity, Odd Vibe.... They were all dog owners, every manjack and womanjill of them. Big dogs or little dogs, mutts or purebreds, quiet or yippy, reserved or exuberant, shaggy or groomed, their dogs came in all varieties. But one thing all the animals had in common, Thurman had noticed: they were inseparable from their masters and mistresses, loyal behind questioning, and seemed to repay every attention lavished on them in some psychic coin.

Call it love, for lack of a less amorphous word.

Thurman could have used some of that.

The cheap clock radio came on then, dumb alarm-timer, unaware of Thurman's insomnia, activating itself needlessly. The device was the only item on his nightstand. There had been a framed picture of Kendra and Kyle, but when the letters and calls stopped coming, he had stored the picture of his ex-wife and child in his lone suitcase on the high closet shelf.

Thurman had already been lying awake for hours, although he hadn't had the energy to get out of bed. He didn't sleep much these days. Not since the war.

The war that had held so many mysteries in its short span, and changed so much--for him, if no one else.

Furnace skies. Sand lacquered with blood. And greasy, roilsome black clouds....

He was in one of the ammo-packed, barrel-stacked bunkers that made up the conquered fortified maze at Kamisiyah, laying the charges that would bring the place down like a bamboo hut in a typhoon. He wore no protective gear, hadn't thought he needed it. His superiors certainly hadn't insisted on it. Dusty sunlight probed through wall-slits like Olympian fingers. Sweat leaked out from beneath his helmet liner. He took a swig from his plastic liter bottle of water, then returned to work. His deft actions raised spectral echoes in the cavernous concrete room, ovenlike in its heat and feeling.

But exactly what was it baking?

So intent was Thurman on the delicate wiring job that he didn't notice the entrance of visitors.

"Specialist Swan."

Thurman jumped like a cricket.

Major Riggins stood in the doorway. With him was a civilian.

Civilians made everyone antsy, and Thurman was no exception. But there was something extra disturbing about this guy.

As thin as a jail-cell bar and just as rigid, wearing an expensive continental-tailored suit so incongruous in this militarized desert setting, the guy radiated a cold reptilian menace. A stance and aura reminiscent of a fly-cocked iguana was reinforced by shaved head, pasty glabrous skin and bulging eyes.

Major Riggins spoke. "As you can see, Mister Durchfreude, the demolition is calculated to leave absolutely nothing intact."

Durchfreude stepped into the room and began running a gnarly hand lovingly, as if with regret, over the piles of crated munitions. Thurman's gaze followed the ugly manicured hand in fascination, as if fastened by an invisible string. For the first time, he noticed what appeared to be a trademark stamped on many of the crates and drums and pallets.

It was a stencilled bug. A termite?

The civilian returned to the doorway. "Excellent," he dismissively hissed, then turned and walked off.

Major Riggins had the grace to look embarrassed. "You can return to your work, Swan," he said brusquely.

Then his commander left, hurrying after the civilian like a whipped hound.

Thurman went back about his task. But his concentration refused to return.

And a day later, at 1405, March 4, 1991, when Thurman and his fellow members of the 37th Engineer Battalion assembled at a "safe" distance from the bunkers, video cameras in hand, the proper signals were sent, liberating a force that shook the earth for miles around and sending up a filthy toxic plume that eventually covered thousands of surrounding hectares, including, of course, their camp. Thurman, uneasily watching, thought to see the mysterious civilian's face forming and dissolving in the oily black billows.

A commercial issued from the bedside radio. "Drink Zingo! It's cell-u-licious!"

A drink would taste good. Not that Zingo crap, but a very milky cappuccino. More milk than coffee, in fact. With half a plain bagel. No schmear. Thurman's stomach wasn't up to much more.

Now, if he could only get up.

He got up.

In the bathroom, Thurman hawked bloody sputum into the sink--pink oyster on porcelain--put prescription unguent on all his rashes, took two Extra-strength Tylenol for his omnipresent headache, counted his ribs, combed his hair and flushed the strands in the comb down the toilet. In the bedroom he dressed gingerly, in loose sweats and unlaced sneakers, so as to avoid stressing his aching joints. Halfheartedly, he neatened the sweaty bedcovers. No one would see them, after all.

In the entryway of his small apartment, he scooped up pill vials and inhalers, pocketing them. Claiming his aluminum cane with the foam back-bolster clipped to it, he left his two semifurnished rooms behind.

Another busy day of doing nothing awaited. Retiree city. Adult day care. Park bench idyll.

Not the worst life for a sick old man.

Too bad Thurman was only twenty-seven.

"No!"

Shenda Moore burst the shackles of her bad dream with an actual effort of will. There was nothing involuntary or accidental about her escape. No built-in handy mental trapdoor opened automatically, no cluster of ancient guardian neurons on the alert triggered its patented wake-up! subroutine. No, it was all Shenda's own doing. The disengagement from the horrifying scenario, the refusal to participate in her subconscious's fear-trip, the determination to leave the grasping fantasies of sleep behind for the larger consensual illusion called reality-- It was all attributable to the force of Shenda's character.

Really, everyone who knew her would have said, So typical of the girl!

Sometimes Shenda wished she were different. Not so driven, so in-charge, so capable. Sure, mostly she was grateful every minute of every day to Titi Yaya for bringing her up so. Shenda liked who she was.

But being responsible for everything was really so much work! An endless roster of sweaty jobs: mopping up messes, straightening crooked lives, building and repairing, shoring up, tearing down, kissing all the boo-boos better. Mwah! And now: stop yer sobbin'.

Dancing with the Tarbaby, Shenda called it.

And there was no stopping allowed.

Especially now--with Karuna, Inc., taking off and demanding so much of her time--Shenda awoke most mornings with a hierarchical tree of chores arrayed neatly in her head, a tree where any free time hung like forbidden fruit at the farthest unreachable branch tips.

But even coming online to such a formidable task-array was better than waking like this.

Shenda's heart was still pounding like a conga, her shouted denial still bouncing around the bedroom walls. She clicked on a table lamp and swung her slim and muscular caramel legs out from under the sheets, sitting upright in her cotton Hanro nightshirt. She massaged each temple with two fingers for a while, lustrous and wavy black hair waterfalling around her lowered face, while contemplating the nightmare.

It was not the first time she had had the nightmare.

She was on a flat graveled rooftop in broad daylight, level with the upper stories of many surrounding buildings. Tin-walled elevator-shaft shack, a satellite dish, door to a stairwell, whirling vents, a couple of planters and deckchairs. Highly plausible, except that she had never been in such a place.

With her was Bullfinch.

In her hand, Shenda suddenly realized she clutched a tennis ball.

Bullfinch capered around her, leaping up for the Holy Grail of the ragged green ball, begging her to throw it.

So she threw, sidearm, expert and strong. Wildly, without care or forethought.

The ball sailed through the air, Bullfinch in hot pursuit, claws raking the gravel.

Over the parapet the ball sailed.

With a majestic leap, Bullfinch madly, blithely followed, sailing off into deadly space.

In the dream, Shenda screamed her denial.

Now she merely murmured, "No...."

The "meaning" of the dream was plain enough: her duties were getting to her, the weight of her responsibilities to those she loved was making her imagine she might easily fuck up.

Hell, she knew she was gonna fuck up sooner or later. It was inevitable. Everyone fucked up continuously. That could almost be a definition of human existence. The 24-7 fuck-up. She didn't need any dream to remind her of that.

All she prayed was that she wouldn't fuck up too bad. Be left with enough of her faculties to pick up the pieces and start again.

Luck came into this somewhere.

And luck was one of the things beyond her control.

Her heart had calmed. Rising determinedly to her bare feet (the purple paint on her toenails was all chipped--she'd have to make time to see SinSin for a pedicure--not that she had, like, any man in her life these days to appreciate such details), Shenda went about getting ready for her day.

Her first instinctive action after the nightfright was to check on Bullfinch.

She found the dog snoring in the dining room.

Disdaining his very expensive catalog-ordered puffy cushion bed, Bullfinch had made himself a nest.

Somehow he had reached a corner of Titi Yaya's antique linen cloth (remnant of old high times in Havana) where it hung down from the tabletop. He had dragged the cloth down, bringing two brass candlesticks with it. (God, she must have been dead to the world!) Then he had chewed the irreplaceable cloth to the shredded state most suitably evocative of some genetic memory of an African grass lair.

"Oh, Bully! Whatever is Titi going to say!"

Bullfinch swallowed a final snore in a gurgle, then awoke. His wattled, enfolded face peered innocently up at her. Breaking into an ingratiating, tongue-lolling smile, he wagged his stubby tail.

Shenda found her anger instantly dissipating.

Most empathetic people found it impossible to stay mad at bulldogs for long, as they were so mild mannered and goofy looking.

Especially one colored like a canary.

The employee at the animal shelter--a bearded, spectacled fellow with some kind of East European accent and a nametag reading JAN CLUJ--walked Shenda back among the cages so that she could make her choice. Ambling down the wet cement aisle, she found herself wanting to take every one of the abandoned yelping mutts home. But it was not until she saw the bright yellow occupant of one cage that she stopped decisively.

"What's the story with this one?"

"To my eyes, which are admittedly not of the most expert, our friend is the variety of English Bulldog. Was picked up on Kindred Street, near the college. Of tags, none. Meeting his maker in--" Jan Cluj checked the page slipped into a galvanized frame wired to the cage "--five more days."

"But what about that color?"

Jan Cluj shrugged, as if the matter were of little interest. "It is unnatural. Most assuredly obtained chemically. I accuse some likely college boys. They are insufficiently studious and given to madcaps."

Crouching, Shenda extended her fingers through the wire separating her and the yellow dog. He snuffled her fingers eagerly and sloppily. She stood.

"There's no roots showing, or normal-colored patches the dye job would've missed."

Exasperatedly: "Dear lady, the dog is as you see him, fit and active by medical ukase, most normal save for his hue. Explanations are superfluous. Will you have him?"

"I will have him."

After signing the relevant forms, Shenda took the happy bounding yellow dog straight to a grooming salon known as Kanine Klips (recommended by Pepsi, who had her poodle, French Fry, done there regularly), where she had the anomalous bulldog dipped and clipped.

Then she waited for his normally colored fur to grow out.

Three years later, she was still waiting.

The dog was some kind of genetic sport. His naturally unnatural coloration was a shade most commonly associated with avian life forms.

Shenda had resisted naming the bulldog until he assumed his true form. Called him "Hey, you!" and "Here, doggie!" for weeks, out of some kind of feeling that to name him wrongly would be to warp his personality. But when the true state of his freakish coat became evident, there was no other possible name for such a specimen.

"Bullfinch," said Shenda with weary patience, "get up off that tablecloth please. It's time for you to go out and do your business."

Bullfinch obeyed. He arose and trotted over to the back door of the house. Shenda opened it and the dog went outside into her small fenced yard.

While the criminally destructive canine was busy outside, Shenda gathered up the precious tatters, surveyed them mournfully, estimating possibilities of repair, then, clucking her tongue, chucked the rags into the trash.

Bullfinch re-entered the house. Promptly, the dog went over to the wastebasket and dragged the ruined fabric out and over to his bed. With great care and exactitude, employing paws and muzzle, he arranged the cloth atop the puffy cushion to his liking. He plopped his rear haunches down on his new dog blanket, and sat regarding his mistress.

Shenda gave up. "I don't have time to play no tug-of-war with you, Bullyboy. My day is fuller than usual. And it starts now."

As if to say, Mine too! Bullfinch nodded his weighty corrugated head several times, then lowered his forequarters and was soon asleep.

Shenda showered and groomed. Those toenails had to go! In a robe, towelling her hair dry, she flipped on the bedroom radio automatically, thinking to catch the news, but then hardly listened. She put her panties on ass-backwards, caught herself, swore, and re-donned them correctly.

Dressed in baggy Gap jeans and a green silk shirt, she ate a chocolate Pop Tart standing up at the sink, washing it down with a tumbler of chocolate milk. Her face was blank, as if her mind were vacationing in a more alluring country than her body.

"--cell-u-licious!" declaimed the radio.

Shenda snapped out of her fugue, looked at the clock, and exclaimed, "Louie Kablooie! Bully, I've got to run! You got plenty of kibbles, and tonight I'll bring you a real treat. Promise!" She scuffled on a pair of open-toed Candies, grabbed up a courier-style satchel and her car keys.

The door slammed behind her. Bullfinch opened one eye, then the other. Seeing nothing that needed his attention, he closed them and returned to sleep.

He could fly. He really could. And that airborne tennis ball was no problem.

No dreams, pleasant or otherwise, but rather a mechanical device, awoke Marmaduke Twigg from his Midas-golden slumbers.

Like every other member of the Phineas Gage League, Twigg was physiologically incapable of dreaming. The relevant circuitry, along with much else, had been chemically and surgically excised from Twigg's altered brain.

As a consequence, he was radically insane. And in the worst possible way.

The mania didn't show, didn't impede his daily functioning. Indeed, Twigg's brand of insanity increased his cunning, ingenuity, deftness, manipulative social skills and will to power. Minute to grasping minute, hour to scheming hour, day to conquering day, he appeared to himself and others as a single-minded superman, apparently a paragon of efficient, rational action. Perched on the very uppermost rungs of the social ladder, Twigg seemingly owed all his accomplishments to the secret devastations willingly wrought on his grey matter.

Yet it was as if a dam had been erected in the brains of Twigg and his compatriots, a dam behind which fetid black waters were continually massing.

A dam which must one day give way, taking not only the well-deserving Twigg and his peers to their vivid destruction, but countless others, the more or less innocent and the less or more complicit.

Right now, of course, such a fate seemed vastly improbable.

Twigg thought--rather, knew--that he was a new and improved breed of human, superior to anyone not a League member.

He knew that the world was his oyster.

The only thing left to determine was at precisely which angle one should work the knife into the hapless stubborn bivalve, and how best to twist the sharp instrument properly.

Crack!

The shell halves fell apart.

And the raw meat was sucked greedily, gleefully down.

Twigg lay sleeping on his back in the exact center of the mattress of his enormous four-postered canopied bed. His chest-folded arms were clad in ebony silk salted with white dots. Beneath his crossed arms, crimson satin sheets and a crest-embroidered white duvet were drawn up in unwrinkled swaths. (The crest on the coverlet depicted a heraldic shield enclosing crossed iron rods with a superimposed eye, and the Gothic initials PGL.) Resting in the middle of a softer-than-down pillow, Twigg's unlined face seemed the ivory mask of one of the lesser pharaohs.

Suddenly, without visible stimulation, Twigg's pebbly eyes snapped open like rollershades, and he was instantly alert.

Twigg could feel the small unit consisting of pump and segmented reservoirs implanted inside him stop its gentle whirring. The same device (which regulated many hormonal functions previously so crudely performed by now missing grey matter) had sent him efficiently to sleep exactly four hours ago, during which time he had not stirred a limb.

He knew that most of his servants--especially those who had the least personal contact with him, knowing his peculiarities only through rumor--jokingly referred to him as one of the undead. But Twigg cared not.

All the lesser cattle were the true phantoms, without substance, ineffectual. Only he and his kind were truly alive.

Twigg's breakfast would soon arrive, carried to him by his loyal factotum, Paternoster. In the meantime, he flew the jetcraft of his mind over the varied terrain of his day.

Meetings, public and private: legislators, aides, ambassadors, presidents, CEOs, media slaves. Acquisitions and sales: companies, divisions, patents, real estate, souls. Phone calls: conferenced and one-on-one. Presentations: from scientists, PR experts, lawyers, brokers, military strategists. Wedged into the interstices: meals and an intensively crafted scientific workout.

All of it absolutely necessary, absolutely vital to keeping all the delicately balanced plates of Isoterm's myriad businesses spinning.

Yet all of it absolutely tedious.

But tonight. Tonight would make up for all the boredom.

For tonight was the monthly meeting of the Phineas Gage League.

Twigg smiled at the thought.

His smile appeared like fire burning a hole in the paper of his face.

Memories of his own entrance into the League trickled over his interior dam. These were not so pleasant. The initiation rituals were stringent. Had to be. No whiners or losers or weaklings allowed. Cull out the sick cattle right at the head of the chute. Still, the shock and the pain--

Twigg reflectively fingered a small puckered scar on his right temple. His smile had disappeared.

To recover his anticipation of this night's pleasures, Twigg reached up to stroke one of his bed's four canopy supports.

At each corner of the enormous imperial bed stood a life-sized naked woman, arms upstretched over her head, thus pulling her breasts high and flat. Each woman supported one corner of the heavy wooden frame that held the brocaded fabric canopy.

These caryatids were each one unique, sculpted with absolute realism, down to the finest hair and wrinkle. They were colored a uniform alabaster. Their surfaces were absolutely marmoreal, as unyielding as ice. Twigg's hand, lasciviously molding the butt of one woman statue, neither dented nor jiggled the realistic curves. Rather, his hand slid over the human rondures as if they were curiously frictionless.

The door to Twigg's bedroom, half a hundred feet away, opened. A man entered, bearing a domed tray. He crossed the carpet with measured elderly steps.

Twigg bounded out of bed lithely.

His black pajamas, it was now revealed, were embroidered with hundreds of identical white termites.

"Ah, Paternoster! Well done! On the table if you please!"

The old and crabbed servant--longish hair the shade of old celluloid--set his burden down.

The table was a large piece of gold-rimmed glass borne aloft on the backs of two kneeling naked men arranged parallel. One of the humaniform trestles was a middle-aged paunchy type; the other young and lean.

Twigg moved to an antique desk of normal construction, where a high-end computer incongruously sat. He powered it up, eager to begin his day of bending and shaping, betrayal and coercion. Simultaneously, with seeming unconcern, he questioned his servant.

"Birthday this week, Paternoster? Am I correct?"

"As always, sir."

"Not thinking of retirement yet, are you?"

A fearful tremor passed over Paternoster's worn features. "No, sir! Of course not! I served your father for his whole life, and his father before him! How could I even think of retiring!"

"Very good!" Twigg ceased his typing. As if pondering a different topic, he said, "I must find a hassock for this room! Well, I'll get around to it some day."

The servant seemed on the verge of fainting. "Any--anything else, sir?"

"No, Paternoster, you may go."

Twigg's braying laughter escorted Paternoster out.

Whipping the silver cover off the tray, Twigg disclosed his breakfast.

It was a single uncapped bottle of sinisterly effervescent Zingo, whose label featured the famous lightning-bolt Z.

Twigg grabbed the bottle and downed its bright Cool Mint Listerine-colored contents.

Cell-u-licious!

Setting the empty bottle down, the man picked up a device off the table. It resembled a standard remote-control unit.

Pivoting, Twigg raised the unit and pointed across the vast room.

On the far side of the interior acreage stood a full-sized statue of a Siberian tiger, absolutely lifelike save for its unvarying artificial whiteness. The beast's face was frozen open in a toothy snarl, every ridge of its pallid gullet delineated; one mammoth paw was lifted in midgesture. Separate from the statue, strapped around its neck, was a collar and small box.

Twigg pressed a button.

The tiger's anguished roar filled the room, its striped face a Kabuki mask of rage. Like an orange, white and black express train, it raced at its tormentor. Twigg stood like a statue himself.

Several yards distant from its infuriating quarry, the tiger leaped, its maw a slick red cavern, claws extended.

At the last possible moment Twigg pressed another button.

The stasis-transfigured tiger, now vanilla white, fell with a heavy thud to the deep carpet, nearly at Twigg's bare feet.

"Yes!" said Twigg gleefully. "Like to see even that cool bastard Durchfreude do better."

Naming the Dark Intercessor aloud seemed to cast a shadow on Twigg's pleasure.

The man was a valuable nuisance. Every use of his talents simultaneously decreased his utility and increased the liability he represented.

One day the balance would tip decisively on the side of liability.

And then, Twigg grimly suspected, it would take more than the easy press of a button to put Kraft Durchfreude away.

The wide, welcoming, windowed wood door to the Karuna Koffeehouse had its own unique method of announcing customers.

Mounted inside above the entrance was a Laff Bag: one of those innocuous sacks that contained a device to play tinny mechanical maniacal laughter. Every passage through the door pulled the string that triggered the abridged five-second recording.

Making a pompous entrance into the gaily-painted Karuna was practically impossible.

Not that there weren't folks who still tried.

Fuquan Fletcher for one.

Thurman had just arrived that morning, setting off his own personally impersonal gale of guffaws. This early, he had found his favorite table empty, the one by the moisture-misted south window. Taking a seat, he unclipped the cylindrical foam bolster from his cane and arranged it against the small of his back.

The fragrant atmosphere of the Koffeehouse was filled with the gurgles and chortles of various brewing devices, the chatter of the trio of workers on duty, the savoring sipping sounds of sleepy humans gradually coming up to full mental speed with the aid of friendly plant derivatives. The ceiling-mounted speakers suddenly crackled alive with the sounds of Respighi. A wide-mouthed toaster noisily ejected its crisped bagel passengers.

All was right with the world.

If not with Thurman himself.

Lining up his various prescriptions on the tabletop, Thurman tried not to feel too sorry for himself. An attitude that didn't do any good, he knew from the recent bitter years, though surely easy enough to fall into.

Looking up from his chesslike array of bottles, Thurman saw one of the baristas approaching.

Normal service at the Karuna involved placing one's order while standing at the long, oaken, display-case-dotted counter separating customers from the employees and the exotic tools of their trade, and then maneuvering with the expeditiously filled order through the crush toward an empty or friend-occupied table. The baristas generally ventured out only to clear tables of post-java debris and swab them down. (And even these incursions into the customer area were infrequent, thanks to the unusual self-policing neatness of most Karuna patrons.)

But for Thurman--and anyone else who obviously needed special attention--exceptions were easily made.

Just part of the thoughtful charm that found expression in the Karuna's motto:

The place to come when even home isn't kind enough.

The phrase Thurman always involuntarily associated with the young female barista named Verity Freestone was "pocket-sized." Pixie-cut black hair topping a seventy-five pound package of cheerful myopia.

Today Verity wore a striped shirt that exposed her pierced-navel belly, brown corduroy pants that would've fit Thurman's twelve-year-old nephew, Raggle, and a pair of Birkenstocks. Verity filled her pants, however, in a more interesting--to lonely Thurman--fashion.

Verity pushed her thick glasses up on a mildly sweaty snub nose. "Hi, Thur. The usual?"

"Um, sure. Except maybe just wave the beans over the cappuccino, okay? The old stomach--"

"Thurman, you look wicked peaked. Are you okay?"

"As okay as I'll ever get."

Verity eyed the pill vials ranked before Thurman and frowned. "All those unnatural chemicals can't be good for you. Haven't you tried any alternative healing methods? Maybe get the old chi flowing. What about vitamins? You take any vitamins?"

Thurman waved the advice away. "Verity, really--I appreciate your concern. But I can't change any part of my medical care right now. Strict doctor's orders. I'm barely holding on as it is."

Verity's expression changed from faintly hectoring to triumphantly assured. "I know just what you need, Thur."

This was more than Thurman himself knew. "And what might that be?"

"Some espresso eggs! They're not on the menu. We--the help, that is--we make them just for ourselves. But I'm gonna fix you up some special!"

The treat sounded nauseating to Thurman. "Verity, I don't know if I can take any espresso in my eggs--"

"Oh, they don't have any coffee in them. We just call them that because we make them using the espresso machine steamjet."

"Well, if they're mild--"

"Mild don't even come close!"

Before Thurman could object any further, Verity clomped determinedly off.

Thurman plucked the rumpled morning newspaper from the adjacent window ledge and unfolded it. A headline caught his attention:

He made an effort to focus on the smaller print.

Just then the door laughed.

Fuquan Fletcher was the Karuna's coffee-bean roaster. A master at his craft, he was indispensable to the quality of the Karuna's drinks, and thus responsible for much of its success.

That single and singular virtue failed to compensate for the fact that he was an utter prick.

At least in Thurman's eyes. But not, he suspected, in his alone.

Always dapperly dressed and impeccably groomed, the trim mustachioed Black man had no admirers more fervent and appreciative of his immense hypothetical charms than himself. He was a loud walking arrogant billboard for his own athletic, sexual, financial and terpsichorean prowess.

"Ladies!" bellowed Fuquan from the door. "Show me a hot oven, and I'll get right down to some sweaty work!"

Returning to Thurman's table, an unfazed Verity passed by her coworker. "Morning, Fuquan."

The man made as if to embrace her, a move Verity deftly eluded with a twist and a skip, all without spilling a drop of the drink on her tray.

"Freestone! I got you pegged, girl! You're one of them sex elves like I seen in a comic once! Show the world your pointy ears, girl! Let them puppies out to play! Then you and me will go into your fantasy world!"

Thurman was highly embarrassed by this display. For the nth time, he pondered putting Fuquan in his place. Once he would have done it automatically. Visceral memories of R&R barroom brawls tweaked his flaccid muscles. But now he had neither the energy nor the ability.

Verity was unfazed by the familiar routine. "Fuquan, you'd better cut the talk and get to work. We're running low on Jamaican."

"One day you're gonna give me some of your good stuff, Miss Peanut."

"Don't count on it. Thurman, here's those eggs I was talking about."

Moving irrepressibly on to other equally futile love conquests and bouts of braggadocio, Fuquan went behind the counter where Thurman could see him donning a neck-to-knee apron.

"Don't you ever get sick of him?"

"Oh, he's harmless. It's the ones who don't say anything you have to watch out for."

Thurman instantly felt that perhaps he was one of those suspiciously quiet ones, and fumbled for some sort of conversational tidbit, as Verity disburdened her tray onto the table.

"Uh, how's your dog doing?"

Verity owned a long-haired dachshund (referred to by Fuquan as, of course, "Hairy Weenie"). "Slinky Dog is just fine. He goes out to stud next week. Slinky makes his girlfriends happy, and I make a little extra cash."

The mention of even canine stud duty saddened and embarrassed the unstudly afflicted Thurman. "Um, great, I guess...."

"Now, try these, Thur, and tell me what you think."

Before him, fluffy white-flecked yellow clouds of whipped and steam-cooked eggs seemed to float an inch off their plate. Thurman had never seen such ethereal scrambled eggs. Plainly, there was a component of antigravity to their recipe.

Thurman forked some up and delivered them to his taste buds.

There was not even any sensation of them resting on his tongue. The sweet creamy taste of the eggs seemed to suffuse directly into his bloodstream. Chewing was definitely superfluous.

"These--these are the best eggs I've ever had!"

Verity smiled and patted his shoulder. "Part of your regular order from now on, Thurman. We'll get a little flesh back on those bones."

Thurman finished his eggs with gusto, as well as his usual plain bagel half and cappuccino (oh, all right: weakly flavored hot sugary milk). Feeling better than he had in months, he settled back to absorb the busy evolving scene around him.

People-watching was Thurman's main recreational activity these days. Cost nothing, and took little strength.

Odd Vibe came in. A quiet and generally unsmiling Norwegian who bore the unfortunately twistable name of Otto Wibe, he was the Karuna's baker.

Thurman could hear Fuquan greet his backroom coworker.

"Odd Vibe, my man! You sleep in those clothes or roll a bum and strip him?"

"Fletcher, you go and sit on a biscotti, by gosh!"

"Oh, sharp one, Oddy! We'll have you playing the dozens yet!"

Around eleven, Tibor "Chug'em" Gruntpat made his daily appearance. Chug'em was a sanitation worker, fiftyish and gnarled, just coming off shift. He had been up since about 3:00 A.M. Without a word, Buddy Cheetah--drummer for a struggling band called the Beagle Boys, who was working the counter with Verity--lined up four double-mochaccinnos in front of the grey-haired muscular man, who knocked them back in a total of sixteen seconds. Then Chug'em left to sleep through the day.

Others less and more memorable came and went, the latter category featuring SinSin Bang and Pepsi Scattergood from the Kwik Kuts salon three doors down the block. As usual, the brace of beauticians were impeccably trigged out. The Misses Mode O'Day. And, natch, their hairstyles had changed since last week.

Nelumbo Nucifera, good-looking Italo-American boy who kept all the females happy with his tight T-shirts, came out from behind the counter to clear Thurman's dish and refill his cup.

"Thanks, Nello."

"Hey, want to hear a joke, man? This guy walks into a bar with an alligator on a leash...."

In the buttery sunlight after Nello's departure, Thurman began to grow sleepy.

And then the door's chortles, sounding somehow lighter and more vibrant, announced Shenda Moore.

Her arrival had the same effect on Thurman's nerves as a Scud missile intersecting the Aegis defense system. He came instantly awake, his heart thumping to a salsa beat.

Wasn't she just so achingly damn beautiful?

And wow!

Peeking out of her open-toed shoes--

Those Easter-egg nails!

[...end of extract. The full version of this novella is available in Paul Di Filippo's collection Strange Trades, published by Golden Gryphon Press.

© Paul Di Filippo 2001
"The Reluctant Book" was first published
in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination

Elsewhere in infinity plus:

• fiction - The Relucant Book.
• nonfiction - Paul Di Filippo interviewed by Jeff VanderMeer (March 2000) and interviewed by Nick Gevers (September 2001).
• features - a Paul Di Filippo bibliography.
• contact - e-mail Paul Di Filippo.

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