A segment of THE REASON

A knockout! Drop dead gorgeous, killer good looks. She was that kind of beautiful described best by reference to death and violence. She was a punch in the gut. A jab in the eye, a jaw dropper, dazzlingly dangerously superstar pretty. I have to put on sunglasses just to think about her kind of bright. Her blinding beauty disconnected my brain from my feet...

This is where my new hobby of marstini's has led me: face to chest with stardom. Launch tank launched to hit squarely the chef's tunic clad Armando. Moon gravity accentuates my drunken slapstick to true stoogian proportions. Her laughter leads me to assume mine is not the first face that cleavage has cushioned.

Armando's on Luna makes by far the best Marstini in Solsys. Armando stands behind his formula or in this case stands wearing it. The toss out onto the promenade is gentle comparatively for a first toss from a new place.

She was next to me before I stopped rolling.

“Oh I'm so sorry! Are you OK? That Armando! His temper!” She reached down to help me up. The palisade lighting cast her face in a glowing halo of gossamer hair.

“Oof...” I did need her help. Our brief struggle with the weak gravity brought me closer then merely face to cleavage. She wore a fashionable outfit that left no systems to the imagination. She smelled deliciously of ambergris and electronic ozone.

“Here... let me buy you a drink? To make up for this.” She was taking the blame for my drunken stumblings like she knew what her beauty could do to foot traffic. “I'm such a klutz. Who'd believe I'm a dancer!” She laughed the laugh of someone who's never clearly heard themselves laugh. It was cute right to snorks that faded from her pneumatic chest. What could I say?

“Where? They just threw me outta there.”

Down a dingy service alley she leads me to a common utility door. A holo logo glows a subtle blue 'A.S.E.R.' Meaning: 'a small empty restaurant'. Go through the door into a vestibule to face another door whose simple sign says 'Guido's Italian'. We go through this door into an empty restaurant, very old style stereotypical decor of checked tablecloths topped with Chianti bottles dripping colored wax from the twinkling candles, Naples or Bologna peeking through painted stone windows. We are greeted as family with exuberant hugs by two old people on duty, somehow they know our names but still get them wrong calling us Romeo and Jullietta, the man: hairy eared mustachioed Guido, the womyn: dark and round equally hairy Maria. Guido and Maria argue and bicker constantly in dialect like two people who've been together for ages. It all is quite charming. The food superb. Very romantic. Other then us very empty.

I love Hillbert restaurants so much I've never eaten in the same one twice. You go back another time and the place is gone, replaced by 'Fifi's French' or 'Shaky Pizza' or any one of the thirty six that are in the stack. Where's Guido? It's a toss of the electron. Scroll through the list of available small empty restaurants till you might find 'Guido's Italian', beyond the vestibule and the Guido you get could be some other actor, that's cause that is what it is: performance; dinner theater for for hungry horny drunk people. There is vid out there of couples clearing the table for desert, so to speak, while Guido and Maria or Fifi and Jacques or Kieko and Soata-san quietly duck into the back to total the new bill.

“I'm Paul Dvorak.”

“My name is Sandalor.” She gave me a look like I was supposed to react.

Naturally we had slurp-y Felliniesque dinners of pasta. We saved desert for later while she told me her life story. She loved it here in the stack of restaurants. She liked to eat alone in public. The Hillberts were less stressful then having to deal with fans pestering her for autographs, DNA, pieces of clothing, hanks of hair. Not that she doesn't love them for making her fabulously wealthy, “It's just too much sometimes.”

I was trying hard to sympathize with her but frankly I'd never heard of her before. Suit played me some vid of her wowing crowds of rabid fans with her dub pop classical style EDM cover of the ancient 'Always look on the bright side of life'. She's famous! Which would be more fun if she didn't think she was a fraud. It was all her Svengali, a hyper wealthy ENT mogul. Gone to sacred Hollywood she had been reduced by lack of talent to being a model. She was sent by an agency to model for him.

“Well, he asked me to wear a billowy dress with no underwear and stand over him like this” she gets up to demonstrate, feet wide apart leaning forward looking downward, “and strum a guitar. I did it a few times for him and it was kinda kinky, I didn't mind, it was kinda fun. Then one day after I strummed he looked up at me and said 'You know this would be better if you could actually play the guitar. Here's some money so you can get lessons and learn a real song.' It was a lot of money. He said: 'Pick a good song you think I'd enjoy then come back stand over me in the dress and play it.' So I did. I took guitar lessons and had a trim and a wax and played him a song I wrote. He liked it very much and bought me a car so I could get to singing and dance lessons too. And so I wrote more songs and the rest is history!” This explains the art on her first album, her, the guitar, the dress. It sure looked like she wasn't wearing underwear in the photo.

Sandalor moved in with me at grandmothers domed crater in Earthrise Estates. Seclusion for artistic reasons announced. Grandmother is in California with Mother grafting vines. I became involved completely in the background of Sandalor's life, which she lived to a world audience. Was I in love? She was lovable, I could not resist. Was she in love with me? She said so often, sometimes in front of witnesses.

You know how it is with someone you love, with every caress you get to know all the features of their skin. It was like that. She had a mole, not a large one, a cute one actually, on her hip. My hand would always return to it like it was magnetic to me. It felt often beneath my hand and then once it was not. The mole was gone.

I asked: “Did you have your mole removed?”

She said: “What mole?” Of course she had to have seen it, no mirror required.

“The mole right there...” I touched the spot. She changed the subject.

I didn't think much more about it till I noticed the scar that wasn't on her finger, usually hidden by her topaz ring. She had removed the ring and the scar was gone. She had before explained that as a girl she had inserted that finger into the bathtubs spigot then slipped, the finger wrenched and cut by the metal edge.

It was the missing appendectomy scar that really started to freak me out. Laying under her while she strummed her hit songs got a bit creepy.

Truth was despite body swapping nightmares she was getting even more beautiful. A message woke me up. Hollywood beckoned with ever more money then she could spend. She could go from fabulously wealthy to unbelievably ultra wealthy. The audio only 'dear Paul' said she loved me but...

She loved me but... I believe it when I need a boost. When I hear she's become the greatest dramatic actress to appear in tasteful nude scenes I think that the disappearing mole and scars must have been all part of her career plan. Though that there is more then one of her is a thought that persists.

It got lonely at grandmothers dome. Her most attractive servant was not programmed properly for standing guitar. Soon I couldn't look at the furniture without seeing memories of her sprawled strumming. I called a taxi limo from grandmothers service to take me to Balance where I could bar hop till something else to do found me.

We weave the lunar orbital scenery to arrive just as the clipper shuttle was boarding at the next airlocks. I got off the Luna shuttle aimed for the Boom Room to try to wash my memories in close up images of table dancers. I had a clear shot at the ramp that twists when two people crashed into my local fraction of gravity. I spun into them to be confronted by a very ugly guy clutching the arm of Sandalor. She left me for this guy!? Only Sandalor received most of the impact. I helped her up into the vertical and there was no topaz ring to hide the scar on her finger. I gave her a pat to “just brush you off...” to touch the not today missing mole on her hip. “Sandalor...”

“Lets go.” Her escort was up, tugging her into the clipper boarding gate. She averted her eyes and went. ”Sandalor...what?...bye.”

Boom Room is no place to take a broken heart. It's a place to have your heart broken. Eagles Landing a little further away round the down of the doughnut, is my walk of shame through the people of thirty cultures crammed in here all going elsewhere. The Landing is it's usual half full of sad drunks. They keep it dark so you can't see the weeping. It's got a low ceiling as a damper of any enthusiasm. The walls and furnishings dark brown fake wood. The atmosphere of quietly conversing drunks, coms displays flickering, beverage containers clinking, comfortable wide broadband padded booth soft lounge muzak lulls me into the marstini numb confusion that is my best working state.

People lose moles all the time... scars fade... but... then come back? What's up with her? Does she have a twin? Am I being twin rolled somehow? Why? Points on the big list if I have been sleeping with twins. Marstini truth is cold and misty. Till the 'to do' holo calls into my com cone.

Junior the nose is smiling. He's completed his assignment. Many millions of barrels of three types of alcohols went into the swamp near a certain complex of bio labs. Warrants I file, open subpoenas I ready. The supposition is they are bootlegging rocket fuel to tax dodgers. I will visit the area as soon as I’m thrown out. Augg, I'm having a musical allergic reaction to muzaks twinkling xylophone loops. I get suit to crank up 'wrestler' with intent to offend.

Wrestler doesn't get through the first “FUCK YOU!” before I have to tune it down to hear what the smiling nose is trying to tell me, but, he's not smiling now, he's frowning... “zombies!” “Is that a good drink? I heard of that... do they go good after several marstini's?”

“No S.R. Dvorak! The site! The alcohol swamp! It's got zombies now! They just declared a quarantine. It's on the news. Brain eating zombies!” I dropped his call to hit the ENT channels.

What timing! I would’ve gone there yesterday, last week, instead I waited to hide Sandalor from paparazzo. Well, now I really have to go there, and it's got zombies. So that's it. Zombies again. It's always zombies. Easy for history to blame it all on the undead. Who're they gonna sue? Living lawyers won't work for brains yet, thank god for that, or better: thank chemistry. And what is it this time? alien parasitic spores once more? mass puffer fish venom poisoning? supernatural infectious suggestion? more brain worms? evil scientist slave army? bossy fungus’s? new apocalyptic bio war staggerers? Where does it end? I should'a guessed months ago any serious booze research would lead to zombies.