He felt himself floating, free of sensation. This would take only a few hours, and then he could be back working. He felt the splice-ins activate, tapping directly into the sensory zones of his cerebrum. He fell—faster, faster, into something far below—
—Sitting. Sitting in a wicker chair. A sluggishness filled him. Added weight, a paunch at his middle, clothes tight. An itch on the right thigh. Gradually the room filled in, emerging from a fog.
Glazed glass walls, tiles, a ceramic clatter as waiters removed plates from nearby tables. Pale yellow light. Garlic butter taste in his mouth. A slick, imitation-elegant tablecloth under his left palm. Background murmur of conversation. Humidity adding weight to each breath he took. A woman across the table, attractive, talking (he suddenly realized) to him—
“We’re not doing anything,” Helen said.
“We’ve seen a lot,” her husband murmured defensively.
“The Berkeley ruins, the Monument of Bones, the arroyos,” she said. “Then we have dinner and go to bed. That’s all. And the bed part is no great attraction, is it?”
“Just last night we went to Casa Sigma—”
“If you weren’t with me you’d find some, you know, places.”
Robert had to admit this was true. He pretended to concentrate on draining the last of his drink and studied her expression through slitted eyes. She had made her hair blue and rather longer than usual today and the soft moonlight gave it a lush cast. He did not like it very much. She had tuned her skin to a fashionable pallor for the evening, but here in sun-baked California it was unconvincing because one knew it had to be artificial. On the other hand, perhaps that was largely immaterial these days. The thin lines of irritation around her mouth set the tone of her whole expression. There seemed to be little she could do about that. An hour after a facial tuning they returned, as deep as before.
“Before we came on this trip you said we would take a spice bath.”
“Not here, Helen. It’s illegal. Wait until Japan.”
“There must be, well, places here.”
“Filthy ones, yes. The Americans would stare at us. Especially at you. They don’t take women to them here. The Americans are rigid. It’s comic, I know, but—”
“You’re the rigid one.”
He played his hole card. “Those spots are full of insects. The Americans don’t mind them.”
She blinked. “If I was alone in as exotic a place as this you can be sure I’d go to all sorts of these spots.”
“The motorbike dances …”
She scoffed. “Clumsy. Those are for tourists.”
He began to notice his anger. He had spent a good deal of money to bring her along on this business trip. He had left her behind so often before. Lately his conscience had begun to bother him about it. Decades before, their marriage had been the central fact in his life, a fulfillment. Those feelings had ebbed away. He had gotten caught up in the raw competitive world of men. And he had relished that sense of rasping conflict, of heady victories after strenuous effort.
Still, he felt a duty to her. But traveling with a woman you don’t love was proving worse than living with her.
He finished his drink and slammed the glass down on the marble tabletop. “My,” she said archly.
He stood up. His chair scraped harshly and a waiter, startled, came quickly. Robert waved the man away. “All right,” he said loudly. “I’ll find something. Your kind of place.” He spat out the last word.
Robert left the ornamented hotel and walked down Ashby. He was feeling warm from the meal or from the anger and he moved quickly. He did not noticed the thin man who came up alongside him and said in an oily way, “Something?”
Robert stopped. “I’ve got my own woman,” was all he could immediately think to say.
“An appetizer, then?”
“What?”
“A boy?”
Strong, confusing emotions swept through him. He pushed the man aside and made a rough, incoherent noise.
He walked away swiftly, his steps bringing a harsh slap from the damp paving stones. He went two blocks without seeing the neon jumble around him or noting the sleazy shops.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw the same gaunt man, this time standing at a safe distance. There was a look of bland, wise confidence on the man’s face.
“Senso?” he asked.
Robert paused and was surprised to find he had no anger left. The walking had leached it from him.
“How much?”
With the taxi and the thin man as guide it came to over a thousand yen. Robert knew the man had hiked the price over the usual street value, from the look on his face, but that did not matter. This would provide a simple way to stop Helen’s prattle about “places” and it might even be enjoyable. Better than the real thing had been for quite a long while, at least. He turned back to fetch Helen.
The three of them took a route north into Richmond, over a slimy canal crusted with salt from the deadlands to the north. The taxi wheezed through twisting streets and stopped outside a sprawling bungalow with dim orange lights outside. “Perfectly ghastly,” Robert muttered to himself, but Helen did not reply.
They went up creaking wooden stairs and beneath a punctured solar heating panel that had slid halfway off the roof. “Is this a commercial one?” Helen asked and reached for his arm.
“Of course not,” he said stiffly, pulling away from her. “It’s illegal here.”
They clumped across linoleum floors and through two empty rooms. The guide slipped a key into a door-plate and a wall swung free. This let them into a red-lit room with two glossy, molded chairs perched among a tangle of electronics. A bored-looking attendant stood up from a couch where he had been watching a 3-D. He helped the two of them into the chairs. The equipment looked reasonably new. It had the comfortable cerebral lead-ins Robert had seen in the European advertisements. His opinion of the place rose. Helen made a fuss about getting the attachments settled at her neck and wrists and then quieted down for the first run.
The first was a warm-up, an erotic hors d’oeuvre. A middle-aged man met a younger woman in a restaurant. After a few perfunctory bits of social back-and-forth, they went to her apartment. The senso consisted of extensive foreplay and some fantasizing, though the graphic parts were convincing and strong. He felt the languid satin rub of the woman’s skin, the delicious pull of young muscles, the musky smell, a red lust building in the young man. Robert liked the piece overall, though the woman’s hairdo reminded him of someone he knew and that rather spoiled the associations for him. He guessed that their guide had picked this particular one because the man rather resembled himself, and using a younger woman would cater to the self-images of both parties. He smiled at the calculation.
When it was over be found himself panting slightly and said, “Adequate,” as though he were experienced at this.
