ESSA LIVES UP NEAR NAGA ZONE
1560 4D
I get to my old place in a crevice off Jarmann Street, this tiny squeeze-hole with one yellow ceiling strip-lamp, and I smear my body with FastMend and ‘caine, and I slip on my old black bodysuit. Then I unhide my bottle of pyro caps, and I get ready to drop the last four, and I stop.
Pyro‘s got me just like it’s got Jackie B, but six months in stat have loosened its grip. I clutch those caps and I slide to the back of the squeeze past the cabinet with the three books of Thringe‘s poems and the vids of her performing with her shock band up at Tyrae a year ago. My bed takes up half the width of the squeeze, and it’s just wide enough to hold me. The squeeze smells like rotted fruit, my last home meal half a year back.
Just beyond the bed stands the white lat box, with its touch of piss-aroma, its lid up. I want to flush the caps away, but my arm and my hand go out and come back and the caps are still clutched in my fingers. Then I want to drop them in my mouth but I keep dragging my hand away again. I go back and forth like that four times.
Streetrat, Ma called me.
My arm jerking, I throw the caps down the lat, and slap down the lid to flush it. There. I lie down on my bed and look up at the narrow, rounded ceiling arch; water gurgles, the lat cycles again, and I feel virtuous and clean for a few breaths just like the so many times I’ve tried this before.
I must have just slept. Nothing has changed; the air vent still sighs, the ceiling light’s yellow glow eats into the litter on my floor: trashed pharma boxes from my last stolen pyro shipment, tattered and soiled undersuits, crusts of sweetloaf. Now the pyro calls with that sexual tug at my spine. “Come and take me into you, Tomas, be my woman. Let me pump your noose for you.”
Frantic, I rummage for the stash of metal I keep for times like this, and I remember that I used it the night before Nadienne and Georg came to me.
Nothing there. No metal, no pyro, so I’ll have to knock down some new metal. And not find Rask and the Argaz. If they see me, they’ll kill me and my ma. I rub my tender, almost-skinless arm.
Essa. I’d forgotten all about her. If she’s still working at Caladrina‘s, she should be almost home to her own squeeze by now. She lives up near Naga Zone, off Ring Seven not far from Aswar Nagrasai. I don’t like it up there — too high-nosed for me, at least until they come down to me with the song in their crotch and beg me for pyro. Down here, sweating in their highstyle catsuits and trying not to look scared, they’re mine just like Jackie B. But he stays.
