Perhaps that had been my subconscious intent. It seemed incredible that my impulsive action had not killed her. As I knelt beside her she began to snore, deeply and rhythmically. Her ribs rose and fell in great slow swells. She lay on her back, arms at her sides, perfectly relaxed. It was not completely dark, there was a moon somewhere out there. When someone has been simultaneously starved and unceasingly stimulated for days on end, it is not the best idea in the world to depress their respiratory center. I staggered to a couch and sat down and felt my nose and fainted. In near-total darkness she raised the lamp on high and came at me and I lunged inside the arc of her swing and punched her in the solar plexus. Its cord was stapled to the floor and would not yield, so she set her feet and yanked and it snapped off clean at the base. We cannoned off each other and I managed to keep my feet she whirled and grabbed the lamp. Well, I thought, it'll be a long day and a night before she can move a voluntary muscle again, and then she hit me before I knew she had left the chair, breaking my nose with the heel of one fist and bouncing the other off the side of my head. What it did was the exact opposite, and the effect was just as striking. Her body did not go rigid as if galvanized. I moved before she could force her neglected body to react, whipped the plug out of the wall, and stepped back warily. My intention must have shown on my face, and I think she even understood it-the smile began to fade. She could take a drink when she happened to think of it and if she forgot, well, what the hell. She had plainly meant her suicide to last: she had arranged to die of hunger rather than thirst, which would have been quicker. It was held in place by small bits of surgical tape at her jaw, neck, and shoulder, and from there it ran in a lazy curve to the big fifty-liter water-cooler bottle on the floor. I could not look at the smile a small plastic tube ran from one corner of the smile and my eyes followed it gratefully. She saw me now, and impossibly the smile became a bit wider. She had sat there in total transcendent ecstasy for at least five days. The plug was snapped into a jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure center of her brain was located. It ended in the tangled snarl of her hair, at the crown of her head, in a miniplug. The output cord disappeared beneath the chair, but I knew where it ended. The input cord was long, and fell in crazy coils from the wall socket. That timer is required by law on all juice rigs sold, and you need special tools to defeat it. The switch was on, and the timer had been jiggered so that instead of providing one five- or ten- or fifteen-second jolt per hour, it allowed continuous flow. The transformer lay on the floor beside the chair, where it had been dropped. It is by definition a solitary vice, and all the public usually gets to see is a sheeted figure being carried out to the wagon. I knew about wireheading, of course-I had lost a couple of acquaintances and one friend to the juice. Into it were plugged the lamp, the clock, and her. From where I now stood, I could see a triple socket in the wall beneath the window. The second horrible thing was the one that explained all the rest. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. That was probably just as well, because I had just seen the two most horrible things. I moved to where she could see me, and she did not see me. I judged her to be about twenty-five years old. The combined effluvia had prepared me to find a senior citizen, paralyzed by a stroke or some such crisis. It is the smell of a person who is starving to death. The predominant odor was of fresh-baked bread. These were only part of what I had smelled. Dried vomit was caked on her chin and between her breasts, and down her ribs to the chair. She sat in a ghastly sludge of feces and urine. Her hair was in rats, her nails unpainted and untended, some overlong and some broken. Her skin was the color of vanilla pudding. A plastic block table next to it held a clock, a dozen unopened packages of self-lighting Peter Jackson cigarettes, an empty ashtray, a full vial of cocaine, and a lamp with a bulb of at least a hundred and fifty watts. It was placed beside the large living room window, which was transparent. She was sitting in a tan plastic-surfaced armchair, the kind where the front comes up as the back goes down.
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