When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger Read Free Book Online

right,” I told her, steering her through the dark, cool bar.
    Nikki’s eyes opened wide, she threw up her hands. “Everything will be all right,” she said, laughing. “Inshallah.” Her mockery of Hassan sounded hollow. She tore off the Arabic daddy. That’s about the last I remember of that night.
     
     
     

 
    4
     
     
    You know what a hangover is. You know about the pounding headache, the vague and persistent sick stomach, the feeling that you’d just rather lose consciousness entirely until the hangover went away. But do you know what a massive hypnotic-drug hangover is like? You feel as if you’re in somebody else’s dream; you don’t feel real. You tell yourself, “I’m not actually going through all this now; this happened to me years and years ago, and I’m just remembering it.” Every few seconds you realize that you are going through it, that you are here and now, and the dissonance starts a cycle of anxiety and an even greater feeling of unreality. Sometimes you’re not sure where your arms and legs are. You feel like someone carved you out of a block of wood during the night, and if you behave, someday you’ll be a real boy. “Thought” and “motion” are foreign concepts; they are attributes of living people. Add all that on top of a booze hangover, and throw in the abysmal depression, bone-breaking fatigue, more nausea, more anxiety, tremors, and cramps that I owed from all the tri-phets I’d taken the day before. That’s how I felt when they woke me up at dawn. Death warmed over—ha! I hadn’t been warmed over at all.
    Dawn, yet. The loud banging on my door started just as the muezzin was crying, “Come to prayer, come to prayer. Prayer is better than sleep. Allah is Most Great!” I might have laughed at the “prayer is better than sleep” part, if I’d been able. I rolled over and faced the cracked green wall. I regretted that simple action immediately; it had felt like a slow-motion film with every other frame missing. The universe had begun to stutter around me.
    The banging on the door wouldn’t go away. After a few moments, I realized that there were several fists trying to slam their way in. “Yeah, wait a minute,” I called. I crawled slowly out of bed, trying not to jar any part of my body that might still be alive. I made it to the floor and rose up very slowly. I stood there and wobbled a little, waiting to feel real. When I didn’t, I decided to go to the door anyway. I was halfway there when I realized I was naked. I stopped. All this decision-making was getting on my nerves. Should I go back to the bed and throw on some clothes? Angry shouts joined the pounding fists. The hell with the clothes, I thought.
    I opened the door and saw the most frightening sight since some hero or other had to face Medusa and the other two Gorgons. The three monsters that confronted me were the Black Widow Sisters, Tamiko, Devi, and Selima. They all had their preposterous breasts crammed into thin black pullovers; they were wearing tight black leather skirts and black spike-heeled shoes: their working outfits. My sluggish mind wondered why they were dressed for work so early. Dawn. I don’t ever see dawn, unless I’m coming at it from the other side, going to bed after the sun rises. I supposed the sisters hadn’t been to—
    Devi, the refugee from Calcutta, shoved me backward into my room. The other two followed, slamming the door. Selima—Arabic for “peace”—turned, drew her right arm up and, snarling, jabbed the hard point of her elbow up into my gut just below my breastbone. All the air was forced out of my lungs, and I collapsed to my knees, gasping. Someone’s foot kicked my jaw viciously, and I went over backward. Then one of them picked me up and the other two worked me over, slowly and carefully, not missing a single tender and unprotected spot. I had been dazed to begin with; after a few deft and punishing blows, I lost all track of what was happening. I hung