Malibu Burns E-Book

Mark Richardson

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Near-future San Francisco is a dark world where reality is changeable and different dimensions overlap.

Teen Malibu Makimura discovers she can feel people’s emotions, and senses an ominous voice growing inside her. She lands a job at a women’s nightclub drawing surrealist caricatures. One night while drawing a portrait, she feels a sinister emotion projected by a woman named Luciana, who invites Malibu to her Presidio Heights mansion.

There, she makes a peculiar request - and Malibu agrees. With each following act the evil inside her grows, and Malibu begins to wonder if she will ever be in control again… or if she even wants to be.

From the author of The Sun Casts No Shadow and Hunt for the Troll, 'Malibu Burns' is a dystopian noir tale full of surrealistic elements.

Leseprobe

MALIBU BURNS

MARK RICHARDSON

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I. San Francisco—March 17, 2049

A Snaking Emotion

Malibu Meets Max

The Chesterfield

II. Palo Alto, California—September 9, 2048

Malibu In The Loony Bin

Shrunken Heads

III. Santa Monica, California—September 9, 2046

When the Santa Anas Blow

Painting With Mom

The Dead Have No Emotions

IV. San Francisco—March 19, 2049

First Day Of Spring

Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine

Finding Cottage Number One

A Cottage Wants to Die

Malibu Gives Max An Answer

Enter the Engineer

Malibu Kills a Cottage

Vic and the Pelican

Malibu Has a Cocktail

Breakfast With Max

So Long Hank

Malibu’s Father’s Letter

Malibu Burns a Second Cottage

Breakfast With Max

The Engineer, The Bowery King, and Morpheus

Breakfast With Luciana

The Forgotten Cottage

Vic Is Next

Malibu Buys a Red Dress

Malibu Finds Cottage Number Eight

The Wind is Low, The Birds Will Sing

Cottage Number Eight

Beware Dead Crows

Another Self Portrait

Under The Hot Lights

V. San Francisco—2052

Malibu Awakens

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2022 Mark Richardson

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Elizabeth White

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

For my dad

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

—Salvador Dali

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Continued gratitude to Rob, Al, and Greg for your feedback and ongoing support. A special thanks to Tracy Richardson and Elizabeth White for your editorial expertise.

With love for Jenn. You’re the tops, babes!

PARTONE

SAN FRANCISCO—MARCH 17, 2049

A SNAKING EMOTION

Malibu Makimura was drawing the final touches to a woman’s portrait when she felt the creeping sensation of someone else’s emotion. Her lower half twitched as the emotion hit her feet and slithered up her legs, just like how a snake feels vibrations on the surface of the earth. Only a snake’s sensory capabilities are more dependable than her psionic powers, which were annoyingly unpredictable.

Malibu focused on this feeling as it methodically slithered its way up her leg. The word sinister sprang to mind. Was that even an emotion? No, it probably wasn’t. Still, sinister was the word that best described what Malibu felt.

Malibu leaned back in her chair, spun the pencil between her fingers, and focused on trying to shake loose from the alien feeling. She shook her body, head to toe.

No dice—the emotion held firm.

In fact, it continued its upward climb. It no longer felt like a snake, but an octopus wrapping its tentacles around her limbs, her neck, suffocating her.

“Are you okay, dear?” asked the older woman whose portrait Malibu had been sketching. The pancake makeup on the woman’s face had been packed on extra thick, her cheeks colored red, her eyebrows shaved and painted on like big, wide, black rectangles. She looked pitiful and clownish.

“I’m fine,” said Malibu, which was suddenly true. The alien emotion, although still poisonous in nature, felt weirdly seductive as well, and almost as if Malibu was pulling the sensation toward her. She could sense the emotion slip through her skin and seep inside and spark to life something savage and angry that had been dormant.

Yes, hissed Malibu’s inner voice, a presence she was loath to acknowledge. It welcomed the feeling, found nourishment in its villainous nature.

“Can I take a peek?” the woman asked, meaning the portrait.

“Not yet. It’s not quite done.”

Malibu returned her focus to her work. She drew caricatures, although not the goofy, comical types you’d see drawn at tourist hot spots. Malibu’s drawings were surrealist abstracts, a blend of Picasso and Dali. She liked what she had done with this one. The eyes were particularly cool. One was placed high on the head, and the other down near the cheek. The contrast worked. Overall, she made a point to have the woman come across as interesting and not ridiculous; Malibu could be thoughtful that way. The portrait was more or less finished, but on a whim Malibu added one more feature—a knife. Working quickly, she drew it so it looked as if it had been recently plunged into the side of the woman’s head. Small traces of blood covered the part of the knife that touched the head. Perfect.

Malibu picked up the canvas and turned it to give the woman a look at what she’d drawn. The woman’s eyes narrowed and then widened. A horrified expression spread across her face.

“That’s me?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But it doesn’t look anything like me.” The woman’s thin lips narrowed into a line.

“It’s your essence.”

“My essence?” Her lips pursed, the makeup around them cracked.

“Think of it this way,” Malibu said, trying to add a professorial air to her voice. “We all exist in different realms simultaneously, parallel worlds. I focus on breaking down the doors that separate those realms of existence and capturing different elements of who you truly are. That’s what I draw, those different elements.”

It was a practiced speech, one designed to make the subject feel like a mystery was being unveiled. Years earlier, Malibu had read part of an essay on Charles Manson that discussed his obsession with the Beatles’ White Album, how he believed its songs had a hidden, deeper meaning, a meaning the Beatles themselves were unaware of. As if an unknown force was able to use the pop group to channel its message. Malibu obviously didn’t approve of the murderous path Manson and his family had followed, but she was drawn to the multi-world imagery. Mainly, though, she’d found the speech helped to pacify unhappy clients.

“I…I see,” the woman said. She leaned forward to get a closer look. A sense of understanding seemed to wash over her face. Her eyes brightened, sparkled, and the painted-on eyebrows were lifted higher on her forehead. “I love it!”

“I’m so happy.” The malevolent feeling wrapped its tentacles more tightly around Malibu’s body and squeezed. It felt hard to breathe.

“The knife is so…” The woman trailed off, smiled, as if happy to have been let in on a delicious secret. The woman dug into her enormous purse and pulled out five shekels. She placed the coins into Malibu’s hand, took the drawing, and hurried toward the exit.

Malibu worked at the Kit Kat Club, a women-only nightclub on Green Street, two blocks off Broadway, situated on the edge of North Beach. She had been employed there for three weeks; hired by the club’s owner, the multi-jowled, wig-wearing Hilda Martinez. Hilda had played a hunch and brought Malibu on board in the hopes her off-center artistic talent would appeal to the club’s refined clientele. Sadly, the experiment hadn’t paid off. There was scant customer demand for portraits. The well-heeled women who frequented the club for the most part didn’t want their portraits drawn; they wanted to cut loose. Malibu had caught murmurings within the ranks that Hilda was reconsidering her decision and Malibu’s days were likely numbered.

The base pay at the club was dismal, and the cocktail waitresses, bartenders, and other young women who worked there were all expected to survive on tips. To drum up business, most wore eye-catching getups: miniskirts, Daisy Duke shorts, fishnet stockings, cleavage-flashing tops, stiletto heels, and extra-fragrant perfume designed to climb up a customer’s nose, tickle the inside, and solicit an animalistic reaction.

Malibu didn’t consider herself a prude, and although she was nineteen and could have pulled off one of the risqué costumes, she had always been on the mousy side, and frankly didn’t feel comfortable advertising herself that way. When working, she opted to wear dresses that fell to just above the ankles and thin cardigan sweaters. Like her drawings, the outfits failed to generate any significant customer interest. Really, she was something of a bust.

On her first day working at the club, Malibu had gathered that the real action was found in the back rooms. What happened there was never discussed, but it was not hard to guess.

Malibu fiddled with the five shekels she gotten for her portrait, juggled them in the palm of her hand. A few feet away, a Persian girl in a belly dancer outfit sashayed toward a table where a sad-looking woman decked out in bling-bling jewelry sat alone. Malibu could hear the girl whisper in the woman's ear: Would you like a private party? The woman stifled a smile and nodded. Malibu watched as the belly dancer took the woman by the hand and walked them to a side door.

Perhaps it was inevitable Malibu would find herself slipping into a more racy outfit and going down that route as well. After all, a girl needs to survive and her options were limited. And since the tragedies with her parents, she was on her own. Now surely the backroom shenanigans paid much more than five measly shekels. Besides, she would do almost anything to avoid returning to the homeless encampment.

So…

The black-hearted alien emotion gave her neck a squeeze, as if protesting that it was being ignored. Malibu dropped the shekels into the side pocket of her sweater. She let her eyes roam around the room until they landed on a woman on the opposite side seated at a round table sipping a cocktail. She wore a leopard-spotted dress. In the filmy light, it was hard to gauge her age. Forties?More likely fifties, but she was put together in such a neat package, gave off such an air of authority, that her age seemed irrelevant. One of her legs was hooked over the other at the knee. The foot in the air wiggled. Her tortoise-shell glasses sat perched at the end of her nose. As Malibu’s eyes lingered, she felt the emotion become fiercer, overwhelming, and the voice inside her grew louder, as if the two entities fed off each other.

The woman turned her head and looked directly at Malibu. She pushed her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, appearing to try and get a clearer look. Forcing the presence inside her down, Malibu blinked and diverted her eyes, as if it was deadly to look at the woman for too long, as if she’d snuck a peek at the sun and now her pupils burned.

Leaving her art stand, Malibu walked behind the bar where Hilda was hand-washing glasses.

“Do you know her story?” Malibu asked Hilda. “The one in the leopard-print blouse.”

Hilda’s wig that day was a bright purple. She wore an extra-large black kimono with red polka dots draped over her rotund figure. Hilda lifted her eyes and glanced at the woman. With a frown, she said, “That’s Luciana. She works for the Chairman. I suggest you steer clear.”

“The Chairman?” Malibu snuck another peek at Luciana, welcomed the burn, and wanted to feel it even more. As if listening to her plea, the dark emotion practically strangled her. She coughed.

“Steady,” Hilda said, and patted her on the back. “That’s right, the Chairman.” She didn’t elaborate. She’d finished washing the glasses and had started using a fresh towel to dry them.

The Chairman. It sounded cartoonish, a name you might give a crime boss featured in a comic book. Malibu didn’t know who the Chairman was and she frankly didn’t care. Her mind was fixed on Luciana. “So was she his moll or something?”

Hilda shrugged. “Doesn’t fit the profile. People say she’s a witch, that she can control the weather, crazy shit. Like I said, it’s best to stay clear.”

“Control the weather?”

Hilda shrugged again.

Malibu continued to look at Luciana, who now had her head tilted back and seemed to have let her mind drift elsewhere, maybe contemplating the meaning of the universe. The sinister emotion shifted again, and now it felt like a black cloud that hung all around her. In this form, it was slightly easier to breathe.

Hilda tried to slip around Malibu so she could reach a clump of dirty glasses on the opposite side, but the area behind the bar was tight and her body was so wide the two women were momentarily stuck at their midsections. Malibu sucked in her stomach, which allowed Hilda to squeeze through.

“A witch. That’s crazy. I bet she helps with gambling, drugs, extortion—that sort of thing,” Malibu offered.

Hilda frowned. She made a wheezing sound as she labored to catch her breath after the recent brief exertion. “You watch too many movies.”

Malibu couldn’t argue with that. She was a movie buff, always had been, as far back as she could remember. Malibu saw a man approach Luciana’s table. She’d never seen a man in the club before, and she half expected him to burst into flames. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a shiny bald head and a thick neck. His face had a grim, serious expression, his mouth locked in a frown. He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and white gloves. He was the spitting image of Max in Sunset Boulevard, a movie Malibu had watched dozens of times despite it being nearly one hundred years old.

Max, as Malibu thought of him, bent at the waist and whispered into Luciana’s ear. As he spoke, Malibu felt the black cloud that had been lingering around her evaporate. Luciana took another sip of her drink and placed the still half-full glass down on the table. She stood as Max dropped some shekels on the round cocktail table. Malibu watched as Max cupped Luciana by the elbow and led her out the exit.

Malibu left the club at exactly sunset—7:48 p.m.—slipping on a trench coat and walking outside. Fog had rolled in and coated the streets and buildings with dew. It was twilight, and the remaining sunlight slipped between the large wisps of fog, the light becoming splintered and scattered and as it reflected off the damp streets.

Malibu walked to Chinatown, onto Waverly Place, to the unmarked entrance of a Memory Station den. The place was a relic, one of the few dens that still existed, built at a time when such establishments were common. Before most people—those who could afford them, at least—had consoles installed in their homes. Malibu gripped a handrail as she walked down a steep and narrow stairwell, pushed open a door. A gusty wind blew down the stairs and followed her through the entrance.

A lonely looking man sat on the floor, shoulders slumped, head down, eyelids heavy. As the door slammed shut, he pulled his gaze up at Malibu. He wore wingtip shoes that looked like they were a million years old with holes on the bottoms and no shoelaces. With drowning eyes, he asked Malibu, “Can you spare a shekel? I want to see my daughter again. I want to see my wife.”

Malibu reached inside her trench coat and pulled a coin out of the pocket of her sweater. She walked to where the man sat and placed the dirty coin on his open palm. His hands looked rusty and covered with grease. He squeezed the coin tightly, his eyes bugged out of his head. He sprung to his feet with surprising vigor and hurried to a counter where an old Chinese woman sat leafing through a magazine. The woman’s hair was gray and thinning, coarse and wild, like a used Brillo pad.

“One hour, one hour, one hour,” the man said as he smacked the coin loudly down onto the counter.

The woman picked the shekel up off the counter with her thumb and forefinger, as if she were lifting something distasteful, lifting a turd. She nodded toward a hallway. “Room three.”

After the man brushed past her, Malibu went to the counter and said, “I’ll take an hour as well.” As she spoke, Malibu touched the old woman’s hand and got a glimmer of her thoughts. She had only seen the thoughts of one other person, her father. It was jarring to have it happen again, and with a stranger. What had triggered the insight, what had caused the thin fabric that kept their two realities apart to dissipate? Malibu could only guess. The woman’s mind was focused on the prosaic realities of life—rent, food, family. Before Malibu could get a fix on anything more substantial, the psychic vision stopped, like a wall being put in place.

“Room number nine,” the woman said as she pulled her hand away from Malibu’s touch.

The hallway was covered with a filthy, threadbare carpet. The door to room nine was open. Malibu entered and closed the door behind her. Inside the walls were yellow, the paint badly chipped. There was a recliner and above it a console, which looked like an old-style hair dryer, the kind you used to see in vintage black-and-white movies. The red power light was on. Malibu sat in the chair and pulled the console down over her head. She imagined she could feel it synch with her cortex, a marriage of mind and machine. Where in the brain were memories stored? It was a question Malibu had asked before, but never bothered to investigate.

Within seconds, she was thrust into a sleeplike state, eyes shut, eyeballs flicking left and right.

But she wasn’t asleep, and she could still maintain control of her conscious thoughts, enough to let her mind sort through a catalog of memories until she landed on the right one. It was a memory she had returned to again and again. She felt it marked a turning point in her life, at least with how she interacted with her father. With each review, what struck Malibu was how many new details were uncovered, how the scene came into sharper focus. When living through an event, it seemed she could only process so much. Images, like a movie, danced across her mind.

Santa Monica beach. October.

Despite it being the early weeks of fall, the rays of the sun hit like a hammer. Malibu watched her sixteen-year-old self as she splashed in the Pacific Ocean, just a few feet from the shore. At the edge of the water was her mother, a smile spread across her face. Malibu noticed that her mother’s toes were dug into the wet sand and her arms were slightly pinked, shoulders freckled. Her blonde hair fell from under a wide-brimmed hat, and in her oversized sunglasses and black two-piece bathing suit her mother sparkled like a movie star.

Farther up the beach, her father sat upright on a beach towel. Unlike her mother, he wore no hat or sunglasses or any protection from the sun. Even though he was sitting down, Malibu could see that he was trim, his stomach flat and as firm as a surfboard. He was reading a book and his face wore a serene expression. The same expression Malibu had seen in all the pictures taken of her father as far back as his days as a boy in Japan. His hair was long, falling down to his shoulders. Crow’s feet had formed around the edges of his eyes. He wore a leather necklace with a shark tooth dangling at the end. He looked more like a surfer than the physicist professor he was.

The book he read was a memoir written by Timothy Leary, the 1960s Harvard professor and LSD pioneer. Malibu’s father had recently become obsessed by the consciousness-expanding powers of the drug. He had read countless scientific journals on the topic of psychedelic drugs and testimonials from people who claimed LSD had delivered mystical experiences that allowed them to shed the shackles of the material world and experience something more profound, more spiritual. Malibu’s father believed the drug might offer a path to better connect with his daughter, to reach her on a level where she existed but he could not reach.

Earlier that day, he had gotten a tab of LSD from a colleague at the California Institute of Technology who had recently reinstituted an LSD testing program. It was a small dose, only a hundred micrograms. “Since it’s your first trip,” the colleague had said, “I suggest you go easy. Ideally, you should be accompanied by a guide, someone who can step you through the process.”

Malibu’s father assured the colleague a guide was unnecessary. He had picked the beach for his first time because he knew it was a place where he felt particularly comfortable. Without telling his wife or daughter, he had placed the tab on his tongue and washed it down with a sip of water an hour before the Memory Station-generated memory Malibu was watching had begun. The tab was a small square of paper with a picture of Yoda on one side. As soon as the day-glow effects began to kick in, Malibu could recognize the difference in her father’s thought processes. His thoughts were always delivered in a clear signal, one she could tune in to like a radio station. Although she’d become somewhat accustom to the experience, the fact she could read his thoughts shook Malibu—mind and soul. Mindreading should be impossible. Right?

The Memory Station allowed Malibu to access the memory of her entering her father’s mind just as the drug kicked. His thoughts expanded and became beautifully bizarre. She could sense him fighting the more extreme effects of the drug, while also allowing himself to be carried down a river of shifting consciousness. It was all a bit much for a sixteen-year-old girl to handle; still a bit much for a nineteen-year-old, although the repeated viewings had tamped down the impact.

“What am I thinking of?” her father asked.

Malibu felt the question float through time and space and crash into her mind. Her father had placed the book down and looked across the stretch of sand to where she splashed in the water.

She saw an image of a kangaroo as vividly as if it were hopping in front of her. “A kangaroo,”Malibu thought in response.

“Now?” he asked.

“Our dog, Sadie.”

“Now?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she thought.“Let’s give it a rest.”

Her response fell on deaf ears. Malibu’s father continued to lob her questions, to prod her. His scientific mind was eager to gather more data. But after a few minutes, he stopped. Malibu detected that his mind had traveled further along an unsettling and strange and circuitous path. Colors had become more vibrant, sounds more alive, his feelings more intense. All of his perceptions were heightened. And in way, Malibu’s perceptions were heightened as well. She could access his experience, while also keeping a foot firmly planted in her drug-free mind.

Malibu’s mother waded into the water, as her motherly instinct told her that her daughter needed a distraction. With one hand, she pressed her floppy hat down onto her head, while with the other she splashed Malibu. Malibu splashed her back, eliciting a screech.

“Come join us,” her mother yelled and waved.

To Malibu’s surprise, her father did, pulling himself off the towel and running to the water, his mind still trapped in a hallucination. He leapt into the ocean cannonball style, beads of water landing on both Malibu and her mother.

Under the console, Malibu’s eyeballs twitched faster beneath her closed lids.

As she observed the memory, Malibu became overwhelmed with a sense of loss, so she pulled back from the scene. The Memory Station was equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allowed her to manipulate the memory so she could take different perspectives from the one she’d actually experienced. The AI effectively rebuilt that memory, like a video game, allowing the viewer to get a deeper perspective than real life. Malibu lifted her vantage point upward, established a bird’s-eye view. She looked down below where she and her mother and father splashed and laughed. Off to the side, she could see Santa Monica Pier, Los Angeles farther in the distance. A pelican skimmed across the water. She pulled her perspective even higher so that all the people looked like dots, like ants scurrying along the shore.

She stayed at that godlike perch as the time in her hour clicked by.

MALIBU MEETS MAX

The next day, Malibu pulled on another oversized dress and went back to work at the Kit Kat Club. She was working the night shift, so the place was hopping. The small, round cocktail tables were filled with tipsy women, while frisky young waitresses wearing high heels and fishnet stockings glided around the tables like river water flowing past rocks.

After about an hour, Max from the previous night pushed through the front door. He stood out like a sore thumb. His very presence changed the character of the room, as if the universe itself had been tilted on its axis. Still, no one bothered him—he was just ignored. Max wore a nearly carbon copy outfit to the one he had donned the day before—a dark suit with a white shirt and white gloves—only this time he had on a bow tie. His lips were still pushed down into a frown.

He approached the back of the room where Malibu had set up shop. “Will you draw my picture?” he asked.

“It takes some time.”

“I have time.” He sat down as Malibu flipped to a blank sheet of paper. “I’m Max,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Of course?” he repeated, twisting the words into a question.

“You’re the spitting image of Max from Sunset Boulevard. It’s like you stepped off the screen. Even your outfit is just like the movie.”

“Like the movie?” Max again took the words and bent them into a question. As he spoke, Malibu could detect an Austrian accent.

“It’s uncanny. Have you seen it?”

“Sunset Boulevard?”

“That’s right.”

Max’s frown dipped lower. He shook his head. “Never heard of it.” He sat with his legs pressed together and his feet planted firmly on the ground. His back was rod straight. He didn’t look at Malibu but stared off into the distance, as if he was observing a scene only he could see.

“I’m jealous,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“It has the biggest impact when you watch it the first time.”

“Is that so?”

Malibu nodded. “Emotionally, yes. But there are benefits in watching something over and over. You pick up new details each time. It becomes richer. But the first time always packs the biggest wallop.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” Max asked.

“I don’t drink.”

“Not while you work?”

“No. Not just then. Never. It’s not by choice. It’s an Asian thing. I’m allergic. Just one sip and my neck turns red, it’s hard to breathe.”

“I see. I won’t drink either then.”

“Suit yourself.”

There was a lull in the conversation while Max let Malibu focus on the portrait. The drawing went surprisingly well. She typically used colored pencils to capture different moods, but with Max everything was black and white. Malibu was able to tap into the essence of Max. Although, was it really the Max sitting next to her, or Max von Mayerling from the movie? She even caught herself adding a director’s megaphone to the drawing, but stopped herself before committing it to the paper.

“Is your last name von Mayerling?” Malibu asked.

“It’s Strobl.”

“Austrian?”

“That’s right.”

“Close enough.”

“When was this Sunset Boulevard released?” Max’s eyes were still fixed in the distance.

“1950.”

“So you like older movies.”

“Vintage Hollywood, yeah. I got the bug from my mother. She was a film buff. She grew up near Hollywood. Her grandfather actually worked in pictures, back in the day. He knew Billy Wilder, the director of Sunset Boulevard. My grandfather was a friend of Humphrey Bogart. They used to play chess together.” Malibu bit her lower lip to stop herself from talking. She didn’t normally like to reveal too much of herself. But she felt strangely connected to the man next to her, as if he was someone she knew intimately, as if he was a friend.

Max pulled his eyes from whatever he was looking at, and without turning his head, gazed sideways at Malibu. As he did, an image popped into Malibu’s mind, just as it had when she touched the Chinese woman at the Memory Station den. She saw Luciana sitting in a wing chair, petting a black cat that rested on her lap. It felt like Luciana was starring back at her. The image continued to unfold. Luciana stood and seemed to step from wherever she was and into the club. In Malibu’s mind, Luciana took her by the hand and led her to one of the back rooms. The psychic vision—if that’s what it was—dissolved, leaving Malibu feeling shaken. She paused and took a few deep breaths through her nose.

“I’m not going to sleep with that woman,” Malibu said to Max. “I don’t care how much she pays.”

To Max, the comment came completely out of the blue. It might as well have been dropped down from Mars. “Sleep with who?”

“Luciana.”

“Why would you say that?” He frowned so deeply that it looked painful.

“I just want to make it clear,” Malibu said, feeling a tad self-conscious.

“Have you done that the type of activity before? Slept with a woman for money?”

“No. I haven’t. But it’s sort of baked into the cake here. With all the others, at least.”

Max’s mouth turned upward; not to a smile, but landing on neutral. “You need not worry about your virtue. Luciana has other plans for you.”

“Other plans?” As Malibu spoke she kept drawing. She added a leopard-skin etching to the background of Max’s portrait, as if the essence of Luciana was wrapped around his head.

“She wants you to work for her.”

“Doing what?”

“You’ll have to ask her yourself.” Max reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a white business card. “Here,” he said as he placed the card on the rim of the easel.

Malibu looked down and saw an address printed in black letters: 36 Pacific Avenue. Malibu was roughly familiar with location. Presidio Heights, at the edge of the former Spanish military base.

“Madam lives there,” said Max. “She wants to see you tomorrow night. Can you come by at eight?”

“I’m working.”

“Skip work. Luciana pays much better.”

“I’ll think about it,” Malibu said, although she had already decided to go. In fact, she felt pulled toward the home, as if she were a kite at the end of a long string and Luciana was slowly but inexorably winding the string back, drawing Malibu toward her.

They drifted into silence again. The noise around them grew louder. Women laughed and ice cubes clinked. Malibu shifted her head to the side so she could get a different perspective on her work. She added a few final touches to Max’s bow tie, then in a singsong voice said, “Voila. I’m finished.” She waved her hand theatrically and turned the easel so Max could see the drawing. Just as she had the other day, she made the eyes in the portrait disjointed—one up, one down. One eye was shut and the other wide open. Max’s nose was bent impossibly to one side. She had drawn a line down the middle of his face and shaded one half gray. Leopard spots danced all around. What really popped out were the lips, which were exaggeratedly large and bent, naturally, downward.

Max observed the portrait with the same faraway look in his eyes he had employed before when gazing off into the distance. He didn’t offer any expression at all, not a narrowing of the eyes or a nod of his head. His facial expression did not change. It was a bit deflating. He stood and dug a handful of shekels out of his trouser pocket and deliberately stacked them on the table next to Malibu’s easel.

“We’ll be waiting for you tomorrow night,” he said. He took the portrait out of Malibu’s hand and rolled it up, tucking it along the side of his body, under his arm. He marched toward the door with the purpose of a man who had a place to go.

THE CHESTERFIELD

The Chesterfield Cinema on Market Street had been built back in the 1970s when porn movie theaters became the rage. It had never completely stopped operation, but the flow of business dropped to a trickle with the boom of online porn just before the turn of the century and beyond. Why bother with the hassle of schlepping downtown when you could handle your business in the comfort of home? But the outlawing of the Internet ten years earlier had served to rekindle interest in places like the Chesterfield.

“It’s a scientific fact that sometimes a man has got to shoot his load,” Hank McDonald, the cinema’s owner, told Malibu the day she applied for the sole one-bedroom apartment above the theater. “If he doesn’t, the jizz will just build up inside him until it practically bursts out of his eyeballs. You ladies will never understand.”

By that tine, Malibu had already spent one week working at the Kit Kat Club, where she’d seen her share of fever-eyed women hand over ridiculously large numbers of shekels to miniskirt-wearing party girls, so she thought she did understand. But she didn’t argue the point with McDonald; Malibu desperately wanted the room. It was the cheapest she could find, and after living at a homeless tent camp on Martin Luther King Way near the old crumbling baseball park, she wanted a real roof over her head.

Normally, when her shift ended Malibu would walk home. But since Max had given her so much money, she decided to catch a ride. Personal ownership of cars had been banned at the same time as the Internet, but there was a fleet of self-driving commuter cars that zipped around the city. They were electric four-door sedans, painted black and yellow like old-time taxis. The wait for a car was never long. Their AI was so refined the cars could predict where and when a passenger would need a ride and magically appear at that spot, no matter where it was in the city. It was creepy but so convenient.

Just outside the club’s entrance, a car pulled up to the curb and Malibu slid into the back seat. “The Chesterfield Theater,” she said.

“Two shekels,” the car responded. The voice was a deep, male baritone with what seemed to be a Russian, or at least Slavic, accent. All the robotic commuter voices were unique, as if by customizing them this way lent an air of humanity. Malibu deposited two coins in a metal slot and the car sped off noiselessly.

They drove from North Beach through the Financial District to Market Street. The sidewalks were empty of people and no cars were parked along the side of the roads. It was what Malibu was accustomed to, but she had seen old photographs of San Francisco and imagined that to an old-timer the barrenness would look odd, almost postapocalyptic.

The car turned right on Market, drove a few more blocks, and dropped Malibu in front of the theater. She stepped onto the sidewalk and was hit by sheets of fog. It was thin enough that it allowed Malibu to make out the outline of the full moon, which hung high in the sky like an eerie white skull. At the entrance to the theater, a woman screamed at a man who was lying on the ground. She repeatedly hit his head with what looked like an old pillow. The man didn’t bother to cover his head, but just accepted the blows as penance for some unknown crime. Directly above them the neon lights of the theater shone brightly red.

McDonald had given Malibu a key to a side entrance, which she typically used so she could avoid the lecherous eyes of the men who frequented the theater.

After climbing the stairs and entering her apartment, Malibu deposited the haul of coins she’d acquired that night into a shoebox she kept covered by a blanket under her bed. The box was now half full. She reapplied the blanket and pushed the box as far as she could under the bed. It wasn’t an optimal security method, but it would do for now.