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the Man.”
Despite himself, Kelly got the picture. Computers the size of houses with wires to brains in jars at the bottom of a deep gray canyon of chemical nutrient. Hadn’t there even been some movie?
“So they got this guy’s brain, but they didn’t get all the personality out.”
“How do you know they got him, Lloyd?”
“He’s been trying to fucking CONTACT me.” It was almost a wail. Lloyd had been getting coded messages on his telephone and electric bills. They looked like gibberish. He couldn’t figure them out. The poor bastard was on the ragged end of a weeklong speed run—couldn’t tell the traffic buzz from the one in his head.
Lloyd heard the thought, the way they sometimes could on crank. “Fuck you, Kelly. I didn’t say I b-believed it. I’m just laying it down the way I think about it. I think about it a lot. And how strange is it compared to all the other weird shit going on out there?
Weird shit. That was for sure.
Daddy’s Stash
T
    he foco, their revolutionary cell, hung out at Gallagher’s place on the Lower East Side.The living was communal and informal, but the lifestyle was highly politicized, an ongoing planning session involving the core group—Kevin, Gloria, Leo, and Juan. Lloyd Chamberlain came and went, usually delivering drugs, and Irene hovered at the fringes as legal consultant, scrupulously avoiding firsthand knowledge of their plots and schemes. They all had their own places in the city, but they might as well have lived at Kevin’s, as much time as they spent there. Gloria slept with him regularly—at first. But as his head issues became apparent, she tailed off. He needed for her to be his “whore” or his “bitch” and that doggie-style thing was way too hung up. He was, she soon realized, damaged. A user, a hustler, a loser. For the rest: Leo lacked discipline, Lloyd was a drug addict, and poor Juan just wanted to be wherever Irene was.
    Originally they’d bonded over their shared belief in the corruption and imminent failure of the establishment. All were certain that there were things they could do to hasten the inevitable end. The most radical group dedicated to this mission was a shadowy band of dedicated revolutionaries who called themselves the Motherfuckers. In the foco only Juan and Lloyd weren’t Motherfucker dropouts, Gloria and Irene by choice, Leo and Kevin because of their “adventurism,” which Kevin claimed was Motherese for having more brains than they—very unlikely in Gloria’s view. They bounced him because, no matter what Kevin said, they recognized him as a liability.
    As far as Gloria was concerned, the Mother commitment to violent overthrow of the established order was too limited, too inflexible—suicidal, really, which was what made it sexy. Kevin was obsessed with doing something to impress them, to show them they’d made a mistake about him. So he was always talking about spectacular schemes like kidnapping someone from Mundi Enterprises or blowing up government buildings.
    At this moment, for example, he was coiled on the edge of his ratty couch, intense and crazy. Gloria, he announced, would dress in maternity clothes, padded big, like seven or eight months pregnant. She’d come into a station house in obvious distress and ask to use the ladies’ room.Then she’d plant two sticks of dynamite hidden in the stuffing, along with a simple alarm clock detonator, behind the toilet or in the trash can.
    Juan nodded eagerly, ready for anything. Leo was excited about doing something big with Kevin. Lloyd was off somewhere, but that was okay. No one really counted on him for anything except pot. Gloria contemplated walking around with dynamite taped to her, setting alarm clock detonators in a police station bathroom, while her accomplices waited, blocks away.
It was always the same pattern: Kevin concocting a bold scheme that involved someone else taking the risk. Not that it
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    mattered. His plans never came to