pulse.txt

III

A pulse doesn't begin in the hands or the feet, and it certainly doesn't begin in the glasses. You feel it through the body, but there's only one place that makes it. Only one place starts the same beat that throbs in your temples and your wrists, and that, it goes without saying, is the heart. And the heart may not be the oldest part of the body, but once it gets going, the whole thing either goes with it or goes into the ground and the great beyond.

So it stands to reason that Narumi – once the hottest, hippest, newest part of town and now the hottest, hippest, newest habitat for opportunistic sea life – never would be the source of that beat. And with the district gone – destroyed in a terrible wave, in an awful and confusing disaster that nobody wants to discuss – well, tragedy that it was, the pulse goes on. As things get back to normal, the beat keeps thumping through the wires, the air, and the talk of the town.

And where else would that beat come from if not the very heart of communication and information in Sumaru City: Aoba.

See, the Aoba ward is where the signal starts, and as the kid's gonna say in about half a decade, you can't stop the signal. Whether it's in the glamorous glossy pages gathered and printed at a place like Kismet Publishing, or in living color on the sets streamed to your set right from Sumaru TV, or live and on stage in the concerts at Aoba Park – well, live may be the wrong word now, and may its memory make the flowers sing forever. But hell, this was the first place in town that knew to embrace the digital age, so if you feel like surfing the information superhighway while sipping down soda slung by some surly, slack-jawed sum-bitch, only one cafe in Sumaru is stocked with enough Ethernet to enter the internet and it, too, is right here in Aoba.

Now, here in the heart it may not be as hot in the colloquial sense, but being further inland the heat beats its feet against the street along with everyone else you meet. Yes, it's summertime, and the living is easy, but nobody's jumping – only slumping, pulse pumping sluggish in the sweltering city sauna. See, the kind of heat that makes you wanna eke open your icebox, burn your hands on the bottle that's been there for months, screw it open, pour it colder than hell, clearer than heaven, slow and syrupy with subzero sleep. But when you're out – and I know you're out – then you have only one other option, and that's to have it handed to you.

But of course, that's what parts the panels at Parabellum on a Friday afternoon, 3:19 ish, or thereabouts, well before the salary stiffs will holler home to let the ladies know they're leaving late. No pedestrian pedestrian pulses in around this time – it's much too soon for shooting shots – but the barkeeper knows without looking up that the fleet and frisky footfalls fumbling through the threshold belong to no prosaic patrons of his, no sir.

"If I recall," he clearly calls, "the last I let this provocateur pair enter my establishment unaccompanied, the commotion nearly claimed my collector's consignment as a casualty."

"That was one time!" the woman cries out, already three sheets to the wind.

"It was a misunderstanding too," the man in the mustard suit says, seeking separately to support both her polemic proclamation and her vulnerable vestibular perambulation.

But the barkeeper won't sway even a little bit as much as that woman will. "The press were here," he reminded them. And as an aside, "You are aware that the sale of firearms in this country is prohibited by law, correct?"

"I don't see why that should be any more of a problem than it already is," the tall man says with a shrug of his single free shoulder. "Everyone and their mother knows what they can get here."

It's not clear how a man can lock eyes with someone when his own eyes seem perpetually closed, let alone with a fellow wearing shades, but somehow the Parabellum barkeeper manages. "Do you know," he says slowly, "what under the table means?"