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spirit.
    A day and a half in Avignon touring the streets, and I can’t figure out if I’m just too bat-shit to realize no one’s actually following me, or if I’m just too anxious to truly notice. I’ve still got another day paid up at the hotel, but I make my way to the train anyway and take the first one to Paris. I open my head on the train and take in all the bodies on the way with me. In my car alone three people have genetic diseases—ALS, sickle-cell, and the beginnings of Tay-Sachs—things I’d have to focus on all day to do anything with. Even then I could only do one a month. Five people have myelin-sheathing issues, either too much or too little. A seven-year-old boy will become blind because of it next week. A five-year-old girl has some sort of chronic respiratory distress. Her blood’s not fully oxygenated and hasn’t been for a while. Neglectful parents, or someone’s too busy cheating on their wife to notice; chronic respiratory problem girl’s dad has gonorrhea, her mom doesn’t.
    The woman with the smell of donkey sausage on her hands behind me has broken two bones in her life. Ten people have hypertension. Five people are drunk. I’m swimming in their biorhythms.
    â€œTicket, please,” the conductor asks me. Missed him. Damn. I just felt a mass of cells and neurons. I give him his billet, and he stops looking at me as a hobo. At least temporarily. Fuck him. Parkinson’s is maybe five years away for that guy.
    I’m not mad at him, really. More at myself. I’m used to combat situations where I can trash about recklessly or covert ops where no one knows what I can do and I operate with impunity. To do this right I have to blend in. I have to have total access to my skills and not look like an epileptic who forgot his medication as I utilize them. Chewing gum and walking. It shouldn’t be hard, but it’s the price I’m paying for living in virtual solitude for the past few years.
    I can’t remember the last time I was in Paris. Razor-neck tends to stay away from tourist traps. We’ve got people in Clichy-sous-Bois, some suburbs in the east, but they’ve only been there three months. Still, I could call them, I think. Then . . . FUCK! I’m solo in this. No razor-neck. I’m grabbing the razor around my neck, letting it cut into my hand. I want to yank it off and send it sailing. But something primitive and scared deep in my belly in a place even my powers can’t see demands I don’t. I’ve seen enough of it to know the razor is indstructible. I’m afraid of what other dark tricks it might possess. Instead I find a pay phone.
    I dial numbers I thought I’d forgotten. It works just like the former CIA spook I paid to set it up said it would. I wait for a clean minute then hear a tone like a fax machine trying to dial in. I punch in another set of numbers, my brother’s ID number on his psych-ward bracelet, and I retrieve messages. No amicable operator telling me what numbers to press. One to hear, two to advance, three to erase.
    Yasmine’s voice sends my heart into spasms again. Cayenne-flavored honey. Extended vowels to cover a slight lisp. Well-manicured teeth massaged by a tongue that’s mastered so many languages she gets them confused in casual conversations. I know she’s hurt. I know it’s not fake. I know she called me a freak. I don’t care. I’m coming. I punch two sixes and a nine. No way Suleiman could know about it. It’s an automatic phone trace. You’d have to be another client of the CIA spook to get around it. The number spits back in robot Farsi and I memorize it. Then it’s two nines and a six. The line is dead and buried in the ground so deep down the devil couldn’t find it in hell. It was worth the ten grand to set up. I hang up the phone and pickpocket a cell phone from a café. I quick-dial the number. I hear a British