Read The Grand Ballast for Free Online Page B

and layers there, and be
glad . Be
grateful.
    A small act.
    A start.
     
     
    LOVE; OH, MY
LOVE
     
    “ Who is he?” Bode asked
after O’ Fauh had left. He had a headache coming on. He stayed
seated on the windowsill, letting the slight draft ground
him.
    Kilroy remained standing,
staring at O’ Fauh’s vacated chair. The air in the room was all
spent smoke and chemicals. “O’ Fauh?”
    “ Yeah.” Bode curled his
arms around his legs and knocked his forehead lightly against his
knees. Looked up. “What’s he do?”
    “ Bodeee.” Kilroy grinned as
he walked to the coat tree by the door. “You’ve met him
before.”
    Bode closed his eyes
briefly. Maybe they’d met face to face, or maybe they’d met with
Bode on his knees. Maybe they hadn’t met at all, and Kilroy was
just screwing with him. “I don’t remember.”
    Kilroy shrugged his jacket
on and tugged it straight. “He’s an obnoxious wind-up toy. X-show
owners crank him up and send him buzz-stepping off to other X-show
owners. He goes around to the shows and says, ‘Oh, but lookee what
they’re doing over here .’” Kilroy buttoned his jacket. “He wants me to feel
threatened, like there are shows out there better than
mine.”
    He picked up the vase with
the empress weed and carried it to the bathroom. Bode watched him
fill it. A memory took hold of Bode then let him go. “What is
Harkville?”
    Kilroy brought the vase
back to the desk and set it down. “A western Sodom full of losers
and whores. I wouldn’t waste the spit it’d take to say its
name.”
    Bode plucked at a thread on
his shirt. He felt relaxed tonight. Kilroy’s anger was focused on
something other than him, and nothing in the world seemed too awful
or frightening to handle. “What makes it so bad?”
    “ It’s an illusion.” Kilroy
tilted his head, studying the empress weed. “It claims to be
something real, something marvelous. But its people are all painted
and broken and fucking one another and bored, the same as
everywhere else.” He turned to Bode. “They just dress it up
better.”
    “ How do you know? Have you
been there?”
    Kilroy gave him a look so
black Bode almost laughed. “I’ve seen it.” Kilroy’s voice was flat.
“Designed like some old tumbleweed town. No automobiles, no
computers. People pretending to be ‘in touch’ with their feelings.
Pretending to love and to create.”
    “ Are you sure you’re not
jealous?” Bode had meant it half as a taunt, half as the sort of
gentle tease he’d offered Kilroy in the days when they’d lived
together.
    Kilroy shook his head.
“Nooo. No. I’m not jealous of that whorestown. I’ll even admit
they’ve done some good. Their doctors are strange beasts.” He took
a slug from a whiskey bottle behind the desk. “The hole in
Sibyata’s side? That was the work of a doctor who’d fled Harkville.
And humanity has Harkville to thank for the cures to countless
sexually-transmitted maladies.”
    “ So what’s the unrest
there? If they’re happy and in touch with their feelings and
all?”
    Kilroy recapped the bottle.
“They hate the X-shows. ‘Cruel,’ ‘exploitative…’ But you should see
the monkey circuses they’ve got going on there.
Hypocrites.”
    Bode stretched. “Real
monkeys?”
    Kilroy raised a brow. “No,
smartshit.” He paused. “Get in the coffin car before I put my boot
so far up your ass you puke shoe leather.”
    “ Kinky,” Bode muttered,
sitting up.
    Kilroy cocked a hip and
twitched one side of his mouth up. “You know… I think you’ve got
more spunk now than you did before the Haze. It chewed you up and
spat out a better you, don’t you think?” He grabbed Bode by the
hair and pulled him to his feet. Bode gritted his teeth and
clutched Kilroy’s wrist with both hands, but he couldn’t loosen the
grip. Kilroy slugged him in the stomach then spat in his face. Bode
blinked rapidly, and Kilroy spat again. Again. Until saliva dripped
down Bode’s nose and slid over