A slim metal hand s.n.a.t.c.hed the coffee. "s.h.i.t! You're okay, kiddo. I'm going to have to put you in my will."

Coffin took the cigars out and offered them.

"Whoa. Now cut that out," the robot rasped, "you're getting me all choked up."

Two skinny little arms worked to rip the smokes open while a third tilted the coffee so that the relic could sip. A bit of dark liquid sputtered from the mouth vent and ran down over the robot's dented chest, blurring spray-painted expletives.

Coffin raised his Styrofoam in a parting gesture and spoke over his shoulder as he walked away, "Maybe tomorrow I'll bring you a cup of Kalian marsh-bean roast."

The robot coughed a little and called, "Thanks, pal!"

Mort's was a secondhand place with two big windows like fish eyes. Twin garishly colored plastic cigar store Indians minded the door. Hologram word balloons sporadically puffed like smoke from their molded faces, offering such irresistible enticements as: COME IN AND SEE OUR RARE COLLECTION OF DISCONTINUED SCREWS, and: Z-12 TUNING k.n.o.bS ON SALE. The inside was a clutter of odd items which the proper antique shops deemed unsuitable...a jumbled maze of rusty components and plastic tendrils. Coffin, who secretly admired the disheveled texture of the place, often came here to gather building materials for his private city.

The owner, a sagging little man with too many fingers on one hand and not enough on the other, helped Coffin find what he was looking for.

At the counter, Mort tapped one of his too-few digits on the wheel. "Yes, indeed, a fine wheel, this. Model seventy-two task-bot...they don't build 'em like that anymore. You got one of those babies at home?"

"It's for a friend." Coffin said.

With a cup of Kalian coffee in one hand, and a wheel under his arm, Coffin made his way onto Fortune Street. The tenements stood there, chipped and waiting for rain, and the afternoon traffic was growing thick, punctuated with horns and sirens.

Coffin was not as eager to get home to his miniature city as he usually was. He felt like talking. Talking about anything. About the rain hiding in the clouds, or women, or even birds. Maybe he would tell the robot about Punktown Junior. Maybe, someday, he might even bring him up to see it. No one else had ever visited his city.

The pigeons were not in position; they were floundering about the stone steps of one of the yellow buildings, and they were making disgruntled sounds. There was a white Health Agent van parked by the alley and a man in a dark suit was giving orders, gesturing. The alley, apparently, had been deemed a health hazard.

Coffin picked up his pace when he noticed the squat aqua-colored hover-scow. It was hunched there at the curb, by the van by the alley, and a mighty jointed limb was lifting a large scoop up, to dump the contents into the rusty jaws that snarled at the sky. A frail metal arm was sticking up out of the scoop, quavering. Rusty fingers dropped a peanut.

"No!" Coffin called, dashing into the street to a tune of horns.

The contents of the scoop thundered down into the hulking turtle-backed scow and an engine shrilled like a swarm of dentist drills. Panting, having survived the traffic, Coffin reached the gutter, clinging to the coffee, his gla.s.ses half down his nose. There wasn't even time to protest. All he could do was stand there and listen to the terrible sound of grinding.

Late into the rainy night he stooped above the little city. The sirens outside were soft in the distance, as if they too were in miniature. The buildings were huddled together, some with gla.s.s domes glowing a shade of peach, some dark and Deco, some thorned and gothic. Some had rotating antennae, and vents that shook the tiny garments strung on clotheslines between tenements.

The sun was starting up when Coffin finished his latest addition. It was a squat miniature robot sitting at the mouth of an alley, a very small cup of coffee-made from paper to approximate Styrofoam-in its hand. Gathered around the robot were minute pigeons, delicately shaped from cotton, and a sad shade of grey.

I HAVE KILLED MILLIONS.

No one could explain The Dusk that had hung upon the city for close to a week. The atmospheric control systems appeared to be functioning properly, the pollution containing complexes were intact and still there was no difference between day and night-only the odd luminous grey.

There were only rumors-a plague, the end of the world, a dimensional anomaly. Over in the ghetto of Phosnoor Village, Paxton, there had been reports of black sticky footprints in the street and frost on morning windows, even though the temperatures were above freezing. There was a rash of bird suicides-pigeons repeatedly slamming themselves into walls or flying in front of cars.

Jax found himself in the wastes of Phosnoor clanging up five metal flights in a tenement. There were many doors in a hall of unfurling wallpaper, feeble light from a window at one end. He stepped over an incongruous merry-go-round horse, dull in its cobwebs like a spider's abandoned prey.

There was no door to kick in this time. Pistol first, Jax floated into the room. The room was a sepia box-no furnishings, no windows. An emaciated naked man was slumped in the corner with a large beetle on his chest like a lacquered chest plate. Two thin tendrils ran from the creature's armor into the man's blood-crusted nostrils. He stared dully, grinning, and muttered, "I have killed millions."

Jax backed out of the room and tucked the stocky pistol back under his coat. He was headed for the stairs when he heard a crash and turned to see a pigeon stuck in the cracked window like a bug in a web.

There was an open barrel of rotting sausages outside the motel office. Jax dropped his cigarette into them and it hissed. The sausages shifted as if something were buried in the thick of them; angry flies flew up. It smelled like mothb.a.l.l.s in the office and an old woman with blood-caked nostrils and bandaged wrists sat behind the counter.

"One night," Jax said. He stood behind the woman in a mirror-lean, tinted, unshaven, somewhat older looking than his thirty-five years.

"Forty-five," the woman said, as if she could read the caliber of his pistol through his coat.

Jax squinted. "How'd you know that?"

The woman smirked. "Because I work here. Forty-five munits a night..."

"Ah, right."

Jax slid his money across the counter and she slid him a scan card. There were sores from an infected tattoo on her trembling hand. The man took the card and walked to the door. The woman stared at his back as he left.

He could see into the other rooms as he walked past toward number six. In one, dim behind open blinds, screams came from a shape beneath a tent of rippling sheets. In the next, a naked woman, her back to Jax, sat on the edge of a bed working a skeleton marionette. In the room next to his own, something like a human, though grey and shriveled as a raisin, was writhing on the mattress.

Jax locked himself in and inspected the room. It was small, with stains like melted hair on the walls. The shower stall was streaked with rust, the faucet dripping, the mirror with a big spray-painted black X.

There was a bible and a p.o.r.n mag in the plastic bedside dresser (one corner shriveled black where a ray beam had caught it). The magazine was a cheapie, black and white, the photos blurry and poorly lit. On one page, where a woman lay spread-eagled, some previous guest had drawn an arrow pointing to her v.a.g.i.n.a, had written: you are here.

On the following pages, the thin, sunken-eyed woman was seen engaging in s.e.x with a plump, hairless, toddler-sized creature with a face like a cabbage and too many arms. There was an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a snuff mag on the last page-a shot of a naked plump woman hanging from cellar pipes, her eyes white. The magazine was called...

The tenement looked something like an ancient Crosley radio, though truncated pipes were hissing steam out of one side where the lower left corner had been blackened in a fire. Two young girls sat on the stone steps poking sticks at a small twitching black octopus. They glanced blandly at Jax as he pa.s.sed and pushed his way through the rusted door.

Metal stairs led up into moths and darkness. On the seventh floor, Jax pulled out his gun. The sound of a rolling metal can made him turn. There was nothing to see but dark footprints tracing his path from the stairwell.

"There you are!" It was a rotting general, a rickety stained uniform of teetering khaki. Jax had never seen this old man, was surprised that the old fellow could speak with his mouth looking the way it did.

"Do I know you?" Jax asked.

"You did. You served under me in the Klu-Koza conflict."

Jax stepped back into the black prints. "I'm sorry, you're mistaken."

The general grinned and winked, his nostrils rusty with old blood. He began whistling softly and pa.s.sed Jax. It took him a long time to clang down the stairs.

Jax shuddered. He smoked half a cigarette before proceeding. When he found the room he was looking for, he kicked the door open and shoved in his pistol. The room was a box of dusk-no furnishings, no windows. A naked store mannequin hung from a light fixture, swaying gently.

Down seven flights of stairs into The Dusk. The two little girls were in the gutter where something small was burning. Jax moved past them quickly to his helicar. He had to sc.r.a.pe the frost off the windows before leaving.

He could hear the bed creaking in the room next door. His head ached and the greasy dilkies he had eaten at the diner across the street had filled his stomach with spinning grey. It was late and a dull luminosity slithered through the closed blinds. Now he could hear someone vomiting.

Jax had purchased some small p.o.r.n disks at a shop by a bombed-out abortion clinic. He played them on the vid-screen in his room. The quality of the recordings was poor, grainy, grey. Even the screams sounded m.u.f.fled. One p.o.r.no showed the plump woman from the advertis.e.m.e.nt, her jiggling hanging, ended with a shot of the pooled urine beneath her. Another, vague in locust-static, showed a nude teenage boy writhing in shadows, a plastic bag tied over his head. The third offered a brittle toothless woman being drowned in a bath tub, her lower legs poking out of the water like convulsive cranes. The eighth video showed him what he was looking for.

Jax brushed the dead pigeons off his helicar and drove north into The Dusk. Bored tenements stood in the gloom. Outside one, where the corpse of a car smoldered, faceless women in robes ran up to his window and shrieked at him in Arabic.

In the ninth tenement on Dusmoor Street he found another empty room. No furnishings, no windows. Only webs and his shadow and sticky footprints.

"I knew you'd be back."

Jax turned. It was the general. His mouth looked even worse than before, his nostrils crusted.

"I don't know you," Jax said.

"Sure you do. Remember, the war?"

"I was never in a war."

"Okay, the 'conflict' then, the Klu-Koza conflict."

"No. I wasn't there. No one survived that war."

The old man staggered back. He put a hand to his mouth and began weeping.

"If you bother me again," Jax warned, "I'll kill you."

"Easy enough," the man wept, "you've probably killed millions."

"I'll make it a million and one."

The man with gla.s.ses came out at last. He was bald, thin, with scabs for nostrils, a baggy silk suit the color of the sky. He bought a paper at the corner, a coffee after that. Jax kicked through dead birds behind him. The Punktown skyline offered its spires and boxes, its daubed neon and sagging steam.

Mr. Gla.s.ses moved with a certain delicacy, his paper rolled like a club. He sat quietly beneath the plastic awning of a bus stop and tapped his foot. A slush-colored bus hissed up and the man unfolded, boarded. Jax followed. He had treated his weapon with an illegal spray to make it undetectable by some weapon-scanning devices. Fortunately the unsophisticated apparatus of this ghetto bus did not register it. He squeezed down the aisle and sat directly behind Mr. Gla.s.ses.

The bus was half empty, the bored occupants gazing out into the grey. Mr. Gla.s.ses was reading the funnies. Jax could hear his foot tapping. He thought of the final vid disk he had watched in the motel, remembered the spastic flashes of legs rapping, the bare legs of a woman, white against the shadows of the floor, white against the dark blood.

Jax slowly drew his pistol, heavy and black. The bus was approaching a tunnel-a pigeon thumped against the windshield. Mr. Gla.s.ses was chuckling to himself, pushed his spectacles back up his nose. Jax waited until the tunnel swallowed the bus, then he held the revolver's snout to the back of the bald head.

Jax bent close to the man's ear and whispered, "Helen Jax."

Mr. Gla.s.ses sat up in his seat and Jax shot him. He shot him once-again and again, gave him terrible backward mouths. The burbling wreckage slumped forward, but Jax was not done-he shot him again and again and again. He emptied all six shots into the other man's head. He would have shot him a million times if he had enough bullets.

UNDER THE CHRUB.

I imagine my wife Medea lying face-down on a table at the spa on Vinca Street. She is naked with a towel draped over her b.u.t.tocks and a muscular black man is ma.s.saging her shoulders. They are alone in a small dim room and there is pleasant small talk about nothing of significance. Medea is attractive, blond, her hair on the short side, perky some might think, but more mannered, almost professional in my opinion. She has taken care of herself and even after two children and nearing forty-five her body is notably attractive. I see her close her eyes as the black man slides his fingers over her back.

She doesn't seem to mind when the ma.s.seuse's hands move low and nudge the towel partly down her b.u.t.tocks, revealing the split. He digs his fingers into the small of her back; she groans. Lower still, and the white towel pushes down, slips off entirely, drops to the floor. The black man grins at her pale back and glides his glistening hands up and down her body.

Medea does not resist when the man moves her legs apart and runs his big slippery hands up the insides of her thighs. She seems to push her b.u.t.tocks into the air, offering, and the man claps his hands onto them loudly. The oil adds to the smacking sound and she moans as he repeatedly slaps her.

Next there is a hand between her legs, rubbing, and Medea is gasping into the leather of the ma.s.sage table. Her face looks red, her motherly features feral. The man bends down over her and his mouth opens wide and long black tendrils come swirling out, like feelers or snakes. He nudges his face between Medea's legs and the tongues flick and dart, slurping. They slink into her orifices and dance around the edges, draw slick trails through the crease of her backside.

Medea clutches at the table, bites the leather, squinting, cursing, begging the man to do things to her.

My phone beeps. I am on Crane Avenue at lunch hour and a crowd is gathered at the corner. Through legs and bodies I see something like a smashed pumpkin in the road and sirens float up out of the distance.

"Denton," I say to the phone.

I squeeze through the crowd, make it around the corner.

"Yes, yes," I say. "Wednesday will be fine."

I snap the phone shut and slip it into my jacket pocket. Crane Avenue is now behind me; I have reached a pleasant pedestrian walking mall where coffee houses and quaint shops border a cobblestone courtyard. There are cheery plantings and benches and a sidewalk cafe where bright pink umbrellas catch the sunlight. Medea sits beneath one.

"Ahhh, you beat me," I say, bending to kiss her cheek.

"My session was so nice that I asked for an extra half hour. I was afraid I'd be late, so I took a cab. The man drove like a demon!"

Smiling, I sit next to her. "How do you feel?"

Medea has a pretty smile, wholesome even. "Like rubber. It was that woman with the death grip."

I chuckle. "The n.a.z.i."

"Oh, stop. She's Swiss or something."

"Does she have pigtails?"

Medea looks at me slyly. "She's bald, Dean."

A waiter appears, a slender Hispanic man in a tight silvery miniskirt. Thin matching ribbons dangle from either side of the bone he wears through his nose, giving a Fu Manchu effect. We order salads and sushi.

"I'm meeting that fellow from Sov-Labs Wednesday, for lunch," I say.

Medea seems distracted. She cranes her head to look past me and I admire the way the sun finds her hair.

"You look lovely," I say, though it is uncertain whether she hears me, whether she blushes or whether it is the pink light coming from the umbrella.

"Wednesday," she repeats, almost to prove that she heard something I'd said. Then, squinting, she says, "What are all those sirens?"