Cyberpunk

Jack was saying. “Look in there.”
    I didn’t want to, but he leaned in front of me to stare. His face was hard and bitter. I realized I was playing way out of my league.
    The eyes. Like I said before, they were spinning dark holes, empty sockets forever draining no place. I thought of Edgar Allen Poe’s story about some guys caught for days in a maelstrom, and thinking this, I began to see small figures flailing in the dark spirals, Jack’s remembered friends and loved ones maybe, or maybe other dead souls.
    The whirlpools fused now to a single dark, huge cyclone, seemingly beneath me. I was scared to breathe, scared to fall, scared even that Kerouac himself might fall into his own eyes.
    A dog ran up to us and the spell snapped. “More trinken ,” said Jack. “Go get another bottle, Al. I’ll wait here.”
    “Okay.”
    “The player,” rasped Jack. “You have to leave the soul-player here, too.”
    “Fine.” I set it down on the ground.
    “Out on first,” said Kerouac. “The pick-off. Tell the bitch leave me alone.” With that he snatched up the soul-player and ran down to the river. I let him go.
    Well, I figured that was that. It looked like Kerouac turned himself off by carrying the soul-player into the river and shorting it out . . . which was fine with me. Meeting him hadn’t been as much fun as I’d expected.
    I didn’t want to face Karla with the news I’d lost her machine, so I biked over to my office to phone her up. For some reason Diaconescu was there, waiting for me. I was glad to see a human face.
    “What’s happening, Ray?”
    “Karla sent me. She saw you two from her window and phoned me to meet you here. You’re really in trouble, Alvin.”
    “Look, it was her decision to lend me that machine. I’m sorry Kerouac threw it in the river and ruined it, but . . .”
    “He didn’t ruin the machine, Alvin. That’s the point. The machine is waterproof.”
    “Then where’d he go? I saw him disappear.”
    “He went underwater, you idiot. To sneak off. It’s the most dangerous thing possible to have a dead soul in control of its own player.”
    “Oh, man. Are you sure you don’t have any weed?”
    I filled my knapsack up with beer bought at a newsstand—they sell alcohol everywhere in Germany—and pedaled on home. The seven- kilometer bike-ride from my university office to our apartment in the Foreign Scholars Guest House was usually a time when I got into my body and cooled out. But today my mind was boiling. The death and depression coming off Kerouac had been overwhelming. What had that been in his eyes there? The pit of hell, it’d seemed like, a vortex ring sort of, a long twisty thread running through each of his eyes, and whoever was outside in the air here was variable. The thought of not being able to die terrified me more than anything I’d ever heard of: for me death had always seemed like sweet oblivion, a back-door to the burrow, a certain escape. But now I had the feeling that the dark vortex was there, full of thin hare screamers, ineluctable whether or not a soul-player was around to reveal it at this level of reality. The only thing worse than death is eternal life.
    Back home my wife, Cybele, was folding laundry on our bed. The baby was on the floor crying.
    “Thank God you came back early, Alvin. I’m going nuts. You know what the superintendent told me? He said we can’t put the dirty Pampers in the garbage, that it’s unsanitary. We’re supposed to tear them apart and flush the pieces, can you believe that? And he was so rude , all red-faced and puffing. Jesus I hate it here, can’t you get us back to the States?”
    “Cybele, you won’t believe what happened today. I met Jack Kerouac. And now he’s on the loose.”
    “I thought he died a long time ago.”
    “He did, he did. This witch-girl, Karla? I met her over at Diaconescu’s?”
    “The time you went without me. Left me home with the baby.”
    “Yeah, yeah. She conjured up his ghost somehow, and I was supposed to keep control of it; keep control of Kerouac’s ghost, but we got drunk together and he freaked me out so much I let him get away.”
    “You’re drunk now?”
    “I don’t know. Sort of. I bought some beer. You want one?”
    “Sure. But you sound like you’re off your rocker, Alvin. Why don’t you just sit down and play with the baby. Maybe there’s a cartoon on TV for you two.”
    Baby Joe was glad to see me. He held out his arms and opened up his mouth wide. I