The Pleasure Tube Read online

  By turn eight, three to go, I am back at her right rear wheel, up on the high side of the track, teasing her line and watching her rear end chatter and slip. I can take it down to the Ferrari's proper line and get by, but I wait, want her higher still, push her through the next two turns.

  I know I've won; I tell myself, Easy, now, as we perch up for the last left, shift down a gear and right into the center of the sweet spot of maximum torque as I aim the nose for the lowest line I can imagine and slip by her, through the chute and thrown out by its massive G's propelled dead center on the track, booming toward the checkered flag, Eva Steiner a length or more behind—like tick-tack-toe, lady, and I had the first move—cross the line, I am exhilarated, high out of my mind, float through a victory lap on the sunbathed track, barely make that on the gas I've got remaining.

  I guzzle from a split of Asti Spumanti, accepting Massimo's congratulations, I am radiant. What driverly moves in the final turns, Massimo tells me, not a mistake. Why did I drift up in the first straight? Reckless but somehow right, since I gained time. What a triumph for the Ferrari, he laughs expansively, trionfo, vittoria.

  This is genuine pleasure, I tell him, impossible to program, dazzling to grasp.

  Pulling into the pits, I saw Collette in the first row of the grandstand, wide-eyed and carriage erect as I have not seen her since our first meeting.

  Helped from the cockpit of the black Formula E, Eva Steiner is ashen, a pallor to her face visible under the sweat-smeared grime.

  "Si raccoglie quel che si semina," Massimo says.

  "Which means?"

  "How you say? If you dig the pit, you will fall into the pit."

  She pulls her racing helmet from her head, swings it by its chin strap, arches, and slams it into the car—then lets the helmet fall clattering to the concrete floor.

  "You drove well, Eva," Massimo says kindly.

  She takes a long breath and glares at him, at me. "I'm mortified, of course," she says to me. "But you're reckless. I didn't see that in you, but you're reckless, you're dangerous, now I can see that in your eyes. You nearly killed us both in the first straight."

  I slosh some wine in my mouth and watch her expression. I still don't know what happened there, and it seems inconsequential; something happened, yes, the Ferrari was out of control, but from that error I locked into her slipstream and perhaps won the race because of it.

  The skin surrounding her gray eyes is creased with fatigue, but her head is erect and her lips tight. "I might have won with my own car," she says bitterly. "I could have pulled far enough away from you. Such a race isn't worth my life." She is motioning toward the chain-link gate, to the pasty, older man looking after the women of her entourage.

  "Campari?" Massimo offers. "Eva, you drove well, you have no need to be ashamed. Rawley has run the lap in 202. 202!! That is faster than my own best time."

  "Perhaps you will allow me to make some arrangements," she says to me. "I'm not so sure I feel bound by our agreement. You're a dangerous man, I can see it in your eyes, I don't trust you. You tried to kill me in the straight."

  "Now, Eva," Massimo says, "such things can be in a race, do not misunderstand—"

  “Prego,” I say, interrupting him, I talk to Eva Steiner. "I never did like your game. You're about as interesting a prize as a lovesick Doberman. Tell your man to bring those women over here. Maybe we can reach a compromise."

  * * *

  An anger rises in my blood as I stand before Collette, look from her body to her face. Her hair is tucked under a vaguely military hat the same charcoal as the severe suit she wears; she looks severe, but passion and fright bleed through the glaze of her green eyes. Her lips—her lips are in almost an inviting smile, full and glossy, they compress as I squint every so slightly at her. When I ask her to turn and she does, she ends up facing me but not looking at me now, her lips tightly drawn, her face paling. Her whole bearing, the scent of her, the warm familiarity of her face so close to mine, make my heart skip a beat. I exhale nervously and turn away.

  "This one," I say. I've gone slightly out of breath and look to Massimo, whose thick features are flushed, whose suppressed grin begins to move my own.

  In the end I listen to Eva Steiner nervously asking that what happened this afternoon, our agreement, the race and its outcome, be kept confidential. What she does on theTube as a passenger is a private matter, she says—this affair might be a disaster for her on the outside, it would be a humiliation.

  She is relieved when I tell her I wasn't thinking of filing any codex numbers to make official Collette's transfer, manages a thin smile when she suggests that there are ways in which we might enjoy one another after all. "It is your recklessness," she says. "I didn't know. If I had, I wouldn't have raced you. There are other games we might have played," she goes on, her smile actually widening.

  What a strange thing for her to say—to a pilot whose last eight years have depended on control in the face of default, on total attention to the operation of a flight to return a lame ship. She is a small and insecure woman, finally—at least that's what shows in her when I tell her I don't think she'd enjoy what I have in mind, and I laugh.

  "Yet we might see one another again after all," she says before she leaves. I send Collette over to the canopied trackside table where Massimo and I had lunch; la fortuna mei, Massimo keeps saying. He is going out in the Ferrari to better my lap time "as act of love," he laughs. In which case, he says, still laughing, maybe it is he who should see Eva Steiner again.

  "It is the magic of this place," he tells me. "Everywhere else is like Rome now—so many people, barely the food, there is no joy in life. This place. Ah, if all the world could be so."

  An Italian steward is adjusting a sun screen as I sit across from Collette, cappuccino for her and pastries between us. She won't look up, but I can see that her eyes have become wet, and the long, thin fingers of her right hand tremble as she takes her coffee.

  "Well, you sure do look familiar," I say. "But I'm not sure I know who you are. Max, is it'?"

  She looks up, hurt, her breasts are heaving. "My name's Collette," she says. "Service codex 782, service codex." She's gorgeous, the bitch. Her face is flushed, her head is uncovered now and her hair blown back, her lips are shiny.

  "Look here, Max," I say, "tell me about SciCom retirement pay. Is it as good as they say it is?"

  "My name is Collette," she pleads, biting her lip. "My codex is a service codex, a service codex."

  I tell her that she talks exactly like a computer terminal. I mean to make her smile, but her eyes close and her face pinches up and she begins to cry, tears slipping down her high, flushed cheeks, her breath coming in sobs, a napkin in front of her nose. For a minute it seems she wants to bury herself in its fabric. Her shoulders shake, her breath becomes a gasp, and she turns her face down toward her knee—too much for me to bear. I sigh, move my chair over next to hers, and put my hand on her shoulder, try to calm her down.

  "I'd like to hear the story," I say. "You can still talk to me."

  "Please don't make me talk about that woman. Please don't send me back to her."

  "I don't see that anybody deserves her," I say, half to myself. "I just thought we could talk about the time we spent together. I'd just like to know the truth, Collette."

  "Oh, Rawley, I have so much to say to you. I should never have lied to you in the first place. God, how stupid. And that woman, too, she's part of it. Service Control transferred me to her for discipline. They knew we went off the grounds when we went hiking—they were watching us, Rawley, I didn't know what to do."

  I lean back in the chair—well, I fall back, too, trying to comprehend. This is new—watching us; I think: That pavilion. A blue-white Formula E approaches through the near turn, the rising and falling whistle of its passing bringing a chill down my spine.

  "I didn't know if the man I saw was really you this morning," she says. "It was like a dream. We had just been woken, and the drugs..." Co
llette drinks half her coffee at once, puts the cup down, and looks at me tearfully. "I didn't think I'd ever see you again," she says, her breasts heaving with a deep breath. "Oh, Rawley, you drove so well."

  There is such a look to her face that I can do nothing but lean closer and kiss her warm, damp lips—and so taste the salt of her tears. "Thanks," I say. "Erica said you didn't leave, they... took you away. Whichever, I felt pretty bad to find you gone."

  "Oh, this job," she says, squeezing the napkin in her fist. "How I hate this job. That woman and her games— God, what a pain in the ass being a slave—every time something like this happens, I say to myself..."

  I give Collette my napkin to wipe her face. Her lower lip is quivering as she tries to laugh at what she's said; her makeup is smeared. I don't quite know what to think. Everything's become so complicated in the last two days, and Collette—well, what has she been through? What, exactly? I can't take my eyes off her.

  "I need to know how you're involved with SciCom," I say. "I need to know what they're after."

  "I want to tell you, Rawley. I want to tell you everything. Can we talk here? God, how I wish I'd told you the truth. I lied to you and then... Do you know why I lied to you? I lied to protect this job, this lousy job, this ugly job. How stupid I am. You trusted me and I fell for you. I had already lied, and the things you told me about yourself that afternoon... meant you really trusted me. I felt so bad. But I didn't tell them anything. I said we talked about sex, we spent the whole time talking about sex. God, it was awful."

  'Told whom?"

  "I was straight with you until I was missing that night, believe me. I swear to you, Rawley. Do you remember? The third night, at the rest house? There was a signal from Service Control for me to remain, you left... and these two men came in an electric cart and took me across the meadow. They questioned me and questioned me and told me I had to report on you. They weren't just interested in that, either. There was one with bushy hair and glasses, he's as bad as Eva Steiner, he's..."

  "Taylor," I say. "Taylor was at the biosphere reserve."

  "That's right," she says. "Taylor. And the other one's name was Mancek. They had just come in, I think they had just found out where you were, because they wanted to know what we had been doing since Thursday. I don't think they knew where you had gone from Guam."

  But they knew exactly where I was then, I think, yet didn't approach me.

  I stare at the track at the sound of Massimo's passing, see the Ferrari as a red blur. What do they want? I told Collette about my hallucinations, my nightmares, that second afternoon. They are a personal key to something, I'm certain of that—the horror of the experience, I think, though that doesn't seem right. Is that what they want? Do they want to destroy me with the horror of the blow? Is that what they did with Cooper, was that his psychotic episode? My visions aren't horrible, only having them is.... It's spooky, not right.

  "And then after the fantasy co-op. It was about four a.m. I didn't betray you, Rawley. I made up some stories, and that's when they knew I was lying. I told them we never left the grounds on the day we had. They knew we had hiked off. They turned me over to Service Control. He told them to 'see that I'm taken care of,' that's what Taylor said. The next thing I knew, there was Eva Steiner...."

  I bite my lip and look around, look up into the stands and see the videotape crew still at work, shooting across the track, some people in the stands. It is becoming like the ship again, life on the Daedalus, my life consumed by problems of navigation and confrontations with SciCom, looking for a way to go but not drifting—as I have been, I think, as I have been since we touched down in the Pacific a little more than a month ago.

  "How do I know you're telling the truth?'

  "Please," Collette says. "Please don't be like them. I am telling you the truth. Rawley, they're going to try to take you back to Guam. I thought they had."

  "You don't say," I mutter.

  "Oh, Rawley, please, I'm telling you everything I know. Believe me, in the end I wanted to protect you. Please let me stay with you. I'll do anything you want me to. Even if I only have a day—you'll see. I just want to be with you again. I want to sleep in your bed. Maybe there's a way we can spend the rest of the trip together. In more time I can show you. I love you. When I thought I'd never see you again, I kept saying to myself, 'Oh, shit, Collette, you dummy, oh, shit, you did it so wrong....'"

  I take her smooth hand and move the gold bracelet at her wrist, feel the warmth of her skin, she's feverish. "I saw the same men two days ago," I tell her. "I've filed an appeal, but they've set up orders that ship me back to Guam tomorrow morning. They're pulling me back."

  "God, how I hate this world," Collette says in a shaky voice, looking away. Then she sobs.

  I squeeze her hand and there is a distant siren, then a siren close at hand. Yellow lights begin to flash along the track, the scattered crowd is climbing the grandstand to see something in the distance, I rise, I can see it from where I stand—a column of dirty black smoke mushrooming from the far side of the course. Massimo's pit crew is up and phoning, his car lapped a few minutes ago, he is still on the track. Nothing's come by under the yellow—and now the track lights flash red and stay red as the fire-crew alarm moans a kilometer away and sirens whine and scream from all directions.

  I see the Lancia coupe still in the shade, the chief mechanic begins telling me to go, I am going, anyway. I clamber into the cockpit and fire up the engine, rap it to a purr. Collette is standing where I left her, tall and erect, her dancer's body motionless, her hand over her mouth. I sigh; it still makes me angry to see her. I motion her in.

  There are cars scattered, stopped here and there on the course under the flashing red warning lights. I weave the Lancia through the turns cautiously in second and third, watching for Massimo's Guidici. A red and white ambulance moves a half kilometer ahead, full speed, the wail of its siren blending with the sirens farther off.

  We pass down the main straight. The pits are filled with cars, jump-suited mechanics, spectators. The crowd in the grandstand is up, watching the distance. The black smoke rises off to the west, not far off to the west now, a narrow column near the ground fanning into a growing cloud.

  We swing through a wide left. Ahead is the shorter straight, the chute of its exit hairpin blocked by a welter of emergency vehicles, more than fifty people milling on the track, the brake lights of the ambulance flash red. Beyond is wreckage. I cannot see Massimo's car; every racer on the infield border is squat Formula E.

  The smoke is deeply black, dense, rising slowly in its own weight. Chemicals ooze over the road surface at the inner edge of the crowd down from the crown of the track. I slide the Lancia, barely moving, through on the infield edge, on the infield. There is a single, burning car on end against the concrete outer wall of the curve, the wall itself is smeared black for a distance, the flames are orange-red, searing, the car itself invisible in its compact fireball, the acrid smoke wafts around—and whump, there is a minor explosion. I think, Fuel, combustion, Massimo, while a piece of crumpled sheet metal catches the periphery of my vision. Clambering out of the cockpit, I see scattered fragments on the infield. Blood-red. Ferrari.

  I push my way through the crowd, spectators have somehow gotten onto the track, the car is still burning, upended and burning with orange-red flames, the heat is palpable and intense. Chemicals now plume toward the track wall in arcs, the fireball abating, but the smoke for a minute becomes a dense gray fog in which we are all consumed.

  The car falls to its side, its cockpit creased, charred metal unmistakably the Ferrari—its frame folded on its driver's side—the flames begin to settle under the load of foam. I have searched the crowd with a sinking heart for Massimo, don't want to look at the wreckage, but do, and focus, and see: the mangled sleeve of a jump suit protruding from the wrenched metal, limp as if empty. Metal crushed like wadded paper. I have to turn away.

  "Who is it?" Collette is asking. "Rawley, is it that man?"r />
  I stumble past and she turns from the fire, I feel myself gagging from the sharp odor, look into the blank reflective faces of vehicle crews, see in their faces the strange mixture of satisfaction and awe in the face of destruction so complete.

  I have walked down the track. Higher toward the wall at the chute to the turn there are two wide black swaths smeared on the concrete. Someone is moving toward me through the thin edge of the crowd, a technician rolling an instrument along the road surface with fierce attention. The technician wears thin-rimmed glasses, steps carefully, absorbed in following the dead center of the lower swath along the banked surface, the ticks of his instrument just audible through the welter of other noise.

  "Skid?" I yell to him, my voice uncontrollably cracking. "A hundred meters of skid?"

  "More than that," he yells back without looking up. "Don't look like near enough, wasn't near enough. That machine was at two hundred when it hit."

  At the hairpin, I am thinking, the decreasing radius hairpin, the slowest curve on the track.

  A hundred meters away the wreckage is still smoldering; ash and acrid smoke hang in the air. The site is encircled by red flashing lights, yellow lights, blue lights, while eerie figures in silver flameproof suits approach behind their own chemical clouds, making a way for a white van backing perpendicularly up the track to the Ferrari.

  I look down at my feet. Squat down, look closely in a numb daze at the wide, distinct tire marks on the road surface—rubber seared onto concrete, welded. I see only waste at first, then for an instant I am frighteningly disoriented. The rubber fragments vulcanized into oozing tar masses gather on the wreckage side of the texture of the concrete; I feel reversed on the track.