All Tomorrow's Parties
   
    
   
William Gibson

   
   To
   
   GRAEME AND THE BADCHAIRS
   
   
   
   
   This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents
   either are the product of the author's imagination or are used
   fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
   business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
   (duh)
   
   
   Copyright © 1999 by William Gibson.  ISBN 0-399014579-6.
   Ripped+Encoded by L17m4s7r (mar252000)
   
   Get the [1]Volt font for best viewing
   
   
   
   
1. Cardboard City

   
   THROUGH this evening's tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid
   hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a
   single organism into the station's airless heart, comes Shinya
   Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of
   some modest but moderately successful marine species.
   
   Evolved to cope with the jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping
   bags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of
   information go down into the neon depths, toward this tributary of
   relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel escalators.
   
   Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked
   with dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers.  Behind the
   columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in a
   ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless.
   Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of
   commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of mission,
   and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
   
   He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed
   in Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes with an expensive
   three-wheeled stroller.  Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki
   glimpses the infant passenger through flexible curtains of some
   pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a video display winking as its mother
   trundles determinedly away.
   
   Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters.  He
   wonders briefly what the passing commuters will, to see him enter the
   carton fifth from the left.  It is scarcely the height of his chest,
   longer then the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged
   white corrugate serving as its door.
   
   Perhaps they will not see him, he thinks.  Just as he himself has
   never seen anyone enter or exit on of these tidy hovels.  It is as
   though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the transaction
   that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station.
   He is a student of (p2) existential sociology, and such transactions
   have always been his particular concern.
   
   And now he hesitates, fight the urge to remove his shoes and place
   them beside the rather greasy-looking pair of yellow plastic sandals
   arranged beside the entrance flap on a carefully folded sheet of Parco
   gift-wrap.  No, he thinks, imagining himself waylaid within,
   struggling with faceless enemies in a labyrinth of cardboard.  Best he
   not be shoeless.
   
   Sighing again, he drops to his knees, the notebook clutched in both
   hands.  He kneels for an instant, hearing the hurrying feet of those
   who pass behind him.  Then he places the notebook on the ceramic tile
   of the station's floor and shoves it forward, beneath the corrugate
   flap, and follows it on his hands and knees.
   
   He desperately hopes that he has found the right carton.
   
   He freezes there in unexpected light and heat.  A single halogen
   fixture floods the tiny room with the frequency of desert sunlight.
   Unventilated, it heats the space like a reptile's cage.
   
   "Come in," says the old man, in Japanese.  "Don't leave your ass
   hanging out that way."  He is naked except for a sort of breechclout
   twisted from what may have once been a red T-shirt.  He is seated,
   cross-legged, on a ragged, paint-flecked tatami mat.  He holds a
   brightly colored toy figure in one hand, a slender brush in the
   other.  Yamazaki sees that the thing is a model of some kind, a robot
   or military exoskeleton.  It glitters in the sun-bright light, blue
   and red and silver.  Small tools are spread on the tatami: a razor
   knife, a sprue cutter, curls of emery paper.  The old man is very
   thin, clean-shaven but in need of a haircut.  Wisps of gray hair hang
   on either side of his face, and his mouth is set in what looks to be a
   permanent scowl of disapproval.  He wears glasses with heavy black
   plastic frames and archaically think lenses.  The lenses catch the
   light.
   
   Yamazaki creeps obediently into the carton, feeling the door flap drop
   shut behind him.  On hands and knees, he resist the urge to try to
   bow.
   
   "He's waiting," the old many says, his brush tip poised above the
   figures in his hand.  "In there." Moving only his head. (p3)
   
   Yamazaki sees that eh carton has been reinforced with mailing tubes, a
   system that echoes the traditional post-and-beam architecture of
   Japan, the tubes lashed together with lengths of salvaged poly-ribbon.
   There are to many objects here, in this tiny space, towels and
   blankets and cooking pots on cardboard shelves, books, a small
   television.
   
   "In there?"  Yamazaki indicates what he takes to be another door, like
   the entrance to a hutch, curtained with a soiled square of
   melon-yellow, foam-cored blanket, the sort of blanket one finds in a
   capsule hotel.  But the brush tip dips to touch the model, and the old
   man is lost in the concentration this requires, so Yamazaki shuffles
   on his hands and knees across the absurdly tiny space and draws the
   section of blanket aside.  Darkness.
   
   "Laney-San?"
   
   What seems to be a crumpled sleeping bag.  He smells sickness -
   
   "Yeah?" A croak.  "In here."
   
   Drawing a deep breath, Yamazaki crawls in, pushing his notebook before
   him.  When the melon-yellow blanket falls across the entrance,
   brightness glows through the synthetic fabric and the thin foam core,
   like tropical sunlight seen from deep within some coral grotto.
   
   "Laney"?
   
   The American groans.  Seems to turn, or sit up.  Yamazaki can't see.
   Something covers Laney's eyes.  Read wink of a diode.  Cables.  Faint
   gleam of the interface, reflected in a thin line against Laney's
   sweat-slick cheekbone.
   
   I'm deep in, how," Laney says, and coughs.
   
   "Deep in what?"
   
   "They didn't follow you, did they?"
   
   "I don't think so."
   
   "I could tell  if they had."
   
   Yamazaki feels sweat run suddenly from both his armpits, coursing down
   across his ribs.  He forces himself to breath.  The air here is foul,
   thick.  He thinks of the seventeen known strains of
   multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis.
   
   Laney draws a ragged breath.  "But they aren't looking for me, are
   they?"(p4)
   
   "No," Yamazaki says, "they are looking for her."
   
   "They won't find her," Laney says.  "Not here.  Not anywhere. Not
   now."
   
   "Why did you run away, Laney?"
   
   "The syndrome," Laney says and coughs again, and Yamazaki feels the
   smooth, deep shudder of an incoming maglev, somewhere deeper in the
   station, not mechanical vibration but a vast pistoning of displaced
   air.  "It finally kicked in.  The 5-SB.  The stalker effect."
   Yamazaki hears feet hurrying by, perhaps an arm's length away, behind
   the cardboard wall.
   
   "It makes you cough?"  Yamazaki blinks, making his new contact lenses
   swim uncomfortably.
   
   "No," Laney says, and coughs into his pale and upraised hand.  "some
   bug.  They all have it, down hre."
   
   "I was worried when you vanished.  They began to look for you, but
   when she was gone---"
   
   "The shit really hit the fan."
   
   "Shit?"
   
   Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones.
   Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from
   the display reveals Laney's hollowed eyes.  "It's all going to change,
   Yamazaki.  We're coming up on the mother of all nodal points.  I can
   see it, now.  It's all going to change."
   
   "I don't understand."
   
   "Know what the joke is? It didn't' change when they thought it would.
   Millennium was a Christian holiday.  I've been looking at history,
   Yamazaki.  I can see the nodal points in the history.  Last time we
   had one like this was in 1911."
   
   "What happened in 1911?"
   
   "Everything changed."
   
   "How?"
   
   "It just did.  That's how it works.  I can see it now."
   
   "Laney," Yamazaki says, "when you told me about the stalker effect,
   you said that the victims, the test subjects, became obsessed with one
   particular media figure."(P5)
   
   "Yes."
   
   "And you are obsessed with her?"
   
   Laney stares at him, eyes lit by a backwash of data. "No. Not with
   her.  Guy named Harwood.  Cody Harwood.  There coming together,
   though.  In San Francisco.  And someone else.  Leaves a sort of
   negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he's not
   there..."
   
   "Why did you ask me here, Laney?  This is a terrible place.  Do you
   wish me to help you escape?"  Yamazaki is thinking of the blades of
   the Swiss Army knife in his pocket.  One of them is serrated; he could
   easily cut his way out through the wall.  Yet the psychological space
   is powerful, very powerful, and overwhelms him.  He feels very far
   from Shinjuku, from Tokyo, from anything.  He smells Laney's sweat.
   "You are not well."
   
   "Rydell," Laney says, replacing the eyephones.  "That rent-a-cop from
   the Chateau.  The one you knew.  The one who told me about you, back
   in LA."
   
   "Yes?"
   
   "I need a man on the ground, in San Francisco.  I've managed to move
   some money.  I don't think they can trace it.  I dicked with
   DatAmerica's banking sector.  Find Rydell and tell him he can have it
   as a retainer."
   
   "To do what?"
   
   Laney shakes his head.  The cables on the eyephones move in the dark
   like snakes.  "He has to be there, is all.  Something's coming down.
   Everything's changing."
   
   "Laney, you are sick. Let me take you---"
   
   Back to the island? There's nothing there.  Never will be, now she's
   gone."
   
   And Yamazaki knows this is true.
   
   "Where's Rez?" Laney asks.
   
   "He mounted a tour of the Kombinant states, when he decided she was
   cone."
   
   Laney nods thoughtfully, the eyephones bobbing mantis-like in the
   dark.  "Get Rydell, Yamazaki.  I'll tell you how he can get the
   money."(p6)
   
   "But why?"
   
   "Because he's part of it.  Part of the node."
   
   
   LATER Yamazaki stands, staring up at the towers of Shinjuku, the wall
   of animated light, sign and signifier twisting toward the sky in the
   unending ritual of commerce, of desire.  Vas faces fill the screens,
   icons of a beauty at once terrible and banal.
   
   Somewhere below his feet, Laney huddles and coughs in his cardboard
   shelter, all of DataAmerica pressing steadily into his eyes.  Laney is
   friend, and his friend is one.  The Americans' peculiar talents with
   data are the result of experimental trials, in a federal orphanage in
   Florida, of a substance known as 5-SB.  Yamazaki has seen what Laney
   can do with data, and what data can do to Laney.
   
   He has no wish to see it again.
   
   As he lowers his eyes from the walls of light, meditated faces, he
   feels his contacts move, changing as they monitor his depth of focus.
    This still unnerves him.
   
   Not far from the station, down a side street bright as day, he finds
   the sort of kiosk that sells anonymous debit cards.  He purchases
   one.  At another kiosk, he uses it to buy a disposable phone good for
   a total of thirty minutes, Tokyo-LA.
   
   He asks his notebook for Rydell's number.
   
   
   
2. Lucky DragOn

   
   "HEROIN," declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at
   the lucky Dragon on Sunset.  "It's the opiate of the masses."
   
   Durius had finished sweeping up.  He held the big industrial dustpan
   carefully, headed for the inbuilt hospital-style sharps container, the
   one with the barbed biohazard symbol.  That was where they put the
   needles, when they found them.
   
   They averaged five or six a week.  Rydell had never actually caught
   anyone shooting anything up, in the s tore, although he wouldn't have
   it past them.  It just seemed like people dropped used needles on the
   floor, usually back by the cat food.  You could find other things,
   sweeping up the Lucky Dragon: pills foreign coins, hospital
   identification bracelets, crumpled paper money from countries that
   still used it. Not that you wanted to go poking around in that
   dustpan.  When Rydell swept up, he wore the same Kevlar gloves that
   Durius was wearing now, and latex underneath that.
   
   He supposed Durius was right though, and it made you wonder: all the
   new substances around to abuse, but people didn't' forget the ones
   that had been around forever.  Make cigarettes illegal, say, and
   people found a way to keep smoking.   The lucky Dragon wasn't allowed
   to sell rolling papers, but they did a brisk trade in Mexican
   hair-curler papers that worked just as well.  The most popular brand
   was called Biggerhair, and Rydell wondered if anyone had ever actually
   used any to curl their hair.  And how did you curl your hair with
   little rectangles of tissue paper anyway?
   
   "Ten minutes to," Durius said over his shoulder.  "You wanna do the
   curb check?"
   
   At four o'clock, one of them got to take a ten-minute break, out
   back.  If Rydell did the curb check, it meant that he got to take his
   break first, then let Durius take one.  The curb check was something
   that Lucky Dragon's parent corporation, back in Singapore, had
   instituted on the advice of an in-house team of American cultural
   anthropologist.  (p8)Mr. Park, the night manager, had explained this
   to Rydell, ticking off points on his notebook.  He'd tapped each
   paragraph on the screen for emphasis, sounding thoroughly bored with
   the whole thing, but Rydell had supposed it was part of the job, and
   Mr. Park was a definite stickler.  "'In order to demonstrate Lucky
   Dragon's concern with neighborhood safety, security personnel will
   patrol curb in front of location on a nightly basis.'"  Rydell had
   nodded.  "You not out of the store too long," Mr. Park added, by way
   of clarification.  "Five minute.  Just before you take break." Pause.
   Tap. "'Lucky Dragon security presence will be high-profile, friendly,
   sensitive to local culture.'"
   
   "What's that mean?"
   
   "Anybody sleeping, you make them move.  Friendly way.  Hooker working
   there, you say hello, tell joke, make her move."
   
   "I'm scared of those old girls," Rydell said, deadpan.
   "Christmastime, they dress up like Santa's elves."
   
   "No hooker in front of Lucky Dragon."
   
   " 'Sensitive to local culture'?"
   
   "Tell joke.  Hooker like joke."
   
   "Maybe in Singapore," Durius had said, when Rydell had recounted
   Park's instructions.
   
   "He's not from Singapore," Rydell had said.  "He's from Korea."
   
   "So basically they want us to show ourselves, clear the sidewalk back
   a few yards, be friendly and sensitive?"
   
   "And tell joke."
   
   Durius squinted.  "You know what kinda people hang in front of a
   convenience store on Sunset, four in the morning?  Kids on dancer,
   tweaked off their dimes, hallucinating monster movies.  Guess who gets
   to be the monster?  Plus there's your more mature sociopaths; older,
   more complicated, polyphramic..."
   
   "Say what?"
   
   "Mix their shit," Durius said.  "Get lateral."
   
   "Gotta be done. Man says"
   
   Durius looked at Rydell.  "You first." He was from Compton, and the
   only person Rydell who had actually been born in Los Angeles.
   
   "You're bigger."(p9)
   
   "Size ain't everything"
   
   "Sure," Rydell had said.
   
   
   
   ALL That summer Rydell and Durius had been night security at the Lucky
   Dragon, a purpose-built module that had been coptered into this former
   car-rental lot on the Strip.  Before that, Rydell had been night
   security at the Chateau, just op the street, and before that he'd
   driven a wagon for IntentSecure.  Still farther back, briefly and he
   tried not to think about it to often, he'd been a police officer in
   Knoxville, Tennessee.   Somewhere in there, twice he'd almost made the
   cut for Cops in Trouble, a show he'd grown upon but now managed never
   to watch.
   
   Working nights at the Lucky Dragon was more interesting then Rydell
   would have imagined.  Durius said that was because it was the only
   place around, for a mile or so, that sold anything that anyone
   actually needed, on a regular basis or otherwise.  Microwave noodles,
   diagnostic kits for most STDs, toothpaste, disposable anything, Net
   access, gum, bottled water . . . There were Lucky Dragons all over
   America, all over the world for that matter, and to prove it you had
   your trademark Lucky Dragon Global Interactive Video Column outside.
   You had to pass it entering and leaving the store, so you'd see
   whichever dozen Lucky Dragons the sunset franchise happened to be
   linked with at that moment: Paris or Huston or Brazzaville, wherever.
   These were shuffled, every three minutes, for the practical reason
   that it had been determined that if the maximum viewing time was any
   more, kids in the world's duller suburbs would try to win bets by
   having sex on camera.  As it was, you got a certain amount of mooning
   and flashing.  Or, still more common, like this shit-faced guy in
   downtown Prague, as Rydell made his exit to do the curb check,
   displaying the universal finger.
   
   "Same here," Rydell said to this unknown Czech, hitching up the
   neon-pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack he was contractually obligated to
   wear on duty.  He didn't mind that though, even if it did look like
   shit: it was bulletproof, with a pull-up Kevlar baby bib to fasten
   around your neck if the going got rough.  A severely lateral customer
   with a ceramic (p10) switchblade had tried to stab Rydell through the
   Lucky Dragon logo his second week on the job, and Rydell had sort of
   bonded with the thing after that.
   
   He had that switchblade up in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage.
   They'd found it below the peanut butter, after the LAPD had taken the
   lateral one away.  It had a black blade that looked like a sandblasted
   glass.  Rydell didn't like it; the ceramic blade gave it a weird
   balance, and it was so sharp that he'd already cut himself with it
   twice.  He wasn't sure what he should do with it.
   
   Tonight's curb check looked dead simple.  There was a Japanese girl
   standing out there with a seriously amazing amount of legs running
   down from an even more amazingly small amount of shorts.  Well, sort
   of Japanese.  Rydell found it hard to make distinctions like that in
   LA.  Durius had said hybrid vigor was the order of the day, and Rydell
   guessed he was right.  This girl with all the legs, she was nearly as
   tall as Rydell, and he didn't think Japanese people usually were.  But
   then maybe she'd grown up here, and her family before her, and the
   local food had made them taller.  He'd heard about that happening.
   But, no, he decided, getting closer, the thing was, she wasn't
   actually a girl.  Funny how you got that.  Usually it wasn't anything
   to obvious.  It was like he really wanted to buy into everything she
   was doing to be girl, but some subliminal message eh got from her bone
   structure just wouldn't let him.
   
   "Hey," he said.
   
   "You want me to move?"
   
   "Well," Rydell said, "I'm supposed to."
   
   "I'm supposed to stand out here convincing a jaded clientele to buy
   blow jobs.  What's the difference?"
   
   Rydell thought about it. "You're freelance," he decided, "I'm on
   salary.  You go down the street for 20 minutes, nobody's going to fire
   you." He could smell her perfume through the complicated pollution and
   that ghostly hint of oranges you got out here sometimes.  There were
   orange trees around, had to be, but he'd never found one.
   
   She was frowning at him.  "Freelance."
   
   "That's right."
   
   She swayed expertly on her stacked heels fishing a box of Russian
   (p11) Marlboros from her pink patent pink purse.  Passing cars were
   already honking at the sight of the Lucky Dragon security man talking
   to this six-foot-plus boygirl, and now she was deliberately doing
   something illegal.  She opened the red-and-white box and pointedly
   offered Rydell a cigarette. There were two in there, factory-made
   filter tips, but one was shorter then the other and had blue metallic
   lipstick on it.
   
   "No thanks."
   
   She took out the shorter one, partially smoked, and put it between her
   lips. "You know what I'd do if I were you?"  Her lips, around the tan
   filter tip, looked like a pair of miniature water beds plastered with
   glittery blue candy coat.
   
   "What?"
   
   She took a lighter from her purse.  Like the ones they sold in those
   tobacciana shops.  They were going to make that illegal to, he'd
   heard.  She snapped it and lit her cigarette.  Drew in the smoke, held
   it, blew it out, away from Rydell.  "I'd fuck off into the air."
   
   He looked into the lucky Dragon and saw Durius say something to Miss
   Praisegod Satansbane, the checker on his shift.  She had a fine sense
   of humor, Praisegod, and he guessed you had to, with a name like
   that.  Her parents where some particularly virulent stripe of the
   SoCal Neo-Puritan, and taken the name Satansbane before Praisegod had
   been born.  The thing was, she'd explained to Rydell, nobody much knew
   what "bane" meant, so if she told people her last name, they mostly
   figured she was a Satanist anyway.  So she often went by the surname
   Proby, witch has been her father's before he'd gotten religion.
   
   Now Durius said something else, and Praisegod threw back her shoulders
   and laughed. Rydell sighed.  He wished it had been Durius's turn to do
   the curb check.
   
   "Look," Rydell said, "I'm not telling you you can't stay stand out
   here, the sidewalk's public property.  It's just that there's this
   company policy."
   
   "I'm going to finish this cigarette," she said, "and them I'm calling
   my lawyer."
   
   "Cant' we just keep it simple?"
   
   "Uh-uh."  Big metallic-blue, collagen-swollen smile.
   
   Rydell glanced over and saw Durius making had signals at him. (p12)
   Pointing to Praisegod, who held a phone. He hoped they hadn't called
   LAPD.  He had a feeling this girl really did have a herself a lawyer,
   and Mr. Park wouldn't like that.
   
   Now Durius came out. "For you," he called.  "Say it's Tokyo."
   
   "Excuse me," Rydell said, and turned away.
   
   "Hey," she said.
   
   "Hey what?" He looked back.
   
   "You're cute."
   
   
   
3. Deep In

   
   
   Laney hears his piss gurgle into the screw-top plastic liter bottle.
   It's awkward kneeling here, in the dark, and he doesn't like the way
   the bottle warms in his hand, filling.  He caps it by feeling and
   stands it upright in the corner that's farthest from his head when he
   sleeps. In the morning, he'll carry it under his coat to the Men's and
   empty it.  The old man knows he's to sick now to crawl out, to walk
   the corridor every time, but they have this agreement.  Laney pisses
   in the bottle and takes it out when he can.
   
   He doesn't know why the old man lets him stay here. He's offered to
   pay, but the old man just keeps building his models.  It takes him a
   day to complete one, and there always perfect.  And where do the go
   when he finishes them?  And what where do the kits come from?
   
   Laney has a theory that the old man is a sensei of kit building, a
   national treasure, with connoisseurs shipping in kits from around the
   world, waiting anxiously for the master to complete their vintage
   Gundamns with his unequaled yet weirdly casual precision. His Zen
   moves, perhaps leaving each one with a single minute and somehow
   perfect flaw, at once his signature and a recognition of the nature of
   the universe.  How nothing is perfect, really.  Nothing can ever be
   finished.  Everything is a process; Laney assures himself, zipping up,
   settling back into his squalid nest of sleeping bags.
   
   But the process is a lot stranger then he ever bargained for, he
   reflects, bunching a fold of sleeping bag to pillow his head against
   the cardboard, through witch he can feel the hard tile wall of the
   corridor.
   
   Still, he thinks, he needs to be here.  If there's any place in Tokyo
   Rez's people won't find him, this is it.  He's not quite sure how he
   got here; things got a little fuzzy around the time the syndrome
   kicked in.  Some kind of state change, some global shift in the in
   nature of this perception.  Insufficient memory.  Things hadn't stuck.
   
   Now he wonders if in fact he did make some deal with the old man.
   Maybe he's already covered this, the rent, whatever. Maybe that's why
   (p13) the old man gives him food and bottles of flat mineral water and
   tolerates the smell of piss.  He thinks that might be it, but he isn't
   sure.
   
   It's dark in here, but he sees colors, faint flares and swathes and
   striplings, moving.  Like the afterimages of the DatAmerica flows are
   permanent now, retinaly ingrained.  No light penetrates from the
   corridor outside - he's blocked every pinhole with black tape - and
   the old man's halogen is off.   He assumes the old man sleeps there,
   but he's never seen him do it, never heard any sounds that might
   indicate a transition from the model building to sleep.  Maybe the old
   man sleeps upright on his mat, Gundam in one hand, brush in the other.
   
   Sometimes he can hear music from the adjacent cartons, but it's faint,
   as though the neighbors use earphones.
   
   He has no idea how many people live here in this corridor.  It looks
   as though there might be room for six, but he's seen more, and it may
   be that they shelter here in shifts.  He's never learned much
   Japanese, not after eight months, and even if he could understand, he
   guesses, these people are all crazy, and they'd only talk about the
   things crazy people talk about.
   
   And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and
   his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his
   bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too.
   
   But he isn't.  He knows he isn't, in spite of everything.  He has the
   syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that
   Gainesville orphanage, but he isn't crazy.  Just obsessed.  And the
   obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own
   weight.  He knows it form himself, can differentiate, so he goes back
   to it whenever he needs to and checks on it.  Monitors it.  Makes sure
   it still isn't him.  It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way
   he felt once when was in love and didn't want to be.  How his tongue
   always found the tooth, or how he'd always find that ache, that
   absence in the shape of the beloved.
   
   But the syndrome wasn't like that.  It was separate from him and had
   nothing to do with anyone or anything he, Laney, was even interested
   in.  When he'd felt it starting, he'd taken it for granted that it
   would be about her, about Rei Toei, because there he was, close (p14)
   to her, or as close as you could get to anyone who didn't physically
   exist.  They'd talked almost every day, Laney and the idoru.
   
   And at first, he considered now, maybe it had been about her, but then
   it was as though he'd been following something back through the data
   flows, doing it without really thinking about it, the way your hand
   will find a thread on a garment and start pulling at it, unraveling
   it.
   
   And what had unraveled was the way he'd thought the world worked.  And
   behind that he'd found Harwood, who was famous, but famous in that way
   of being famous for being famous.  Harwood who they said had elected
   the president.  Harwood the PR genius, who'd inherited Harwood Levine,
   the most powerful PR firm in the world, and had taken it somewhere
   seriously else, into a whole other realm of influence.  But who'd
   managed somehow never to become prey to the mechanism of celebrity
   itself.  Which grinds, Laney so well knew, exceedingly fine.  Harwood
   who, maybe, just maybe, ran it all, but somehow managed never to get
   his toe caught in it.  Who managed somehow, to be famous without
   seeming to be important, famous without being central to anything.
   Really, he'd never even gotten much attention, except he'd split with
   Maria Paz, and even then it had been the Padanian who'd made the top
   of every sequence, with Cody Harwood smiling from a series of
   sidebars, embedded hypertext lozenges: the beauty and this
   gentle-looking, secretive, pointedly uncharismatic billionaire.
   
   "Hello," Laney says, his fingers finding the handle of a mechanical
   flashlight from Nepal, a crude thing, its tiny generator driven by a
   mechanism like a pair of spring-loaded pliers.  Pumping it to life, he
   raises it, the faintly fluctuating beam finding the cardboard
   ceiling.  Which is plastered, inch-by-inch, with dozens of stickers,
   mall and rectangular, produced in order by a vending machine inside
   the station's west entrance: each one a different shot of the
   reclusive Harwood.
   
   He can't remember going to the machine, executing a simple image
   search for Harwood, and paying to have these printed out, but he
   supposes he must have.  Because he knows that that is where they are
   from.  But neither can he remember peeling the adhesive backing from
   each one and sticking them up on the ceiling.  But someone did. "I see
   you," Laney says and relaxes his hand, letting the dim beam brown and
   vanish. (p16)
   
   
   
4. Formal Absences of Precious Things

   
   
   
   IN Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal
   configuration has just seen a girl.  Drowned down three decades, she
   steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage.  And
   he remembers, in that instant that she is dead, and he is not, and
   that this is another century, and this quite clearly another girl,
   some newly minted stranger, one with whom he will never speak.
   
   And passing this one now, through a faint chromatic mist of incoming
   night, he bows his head some subtle increment in honor of the other,
   that earlier passing.
   
   And sighs within his long coat, and the harness he wears beneath that:
   a taking in and giving up of one resigned breath, thronged around by
   the traders descending from their various places of employment.  Who
   continue to emerge into the October Street, toward drink or diner or
   whatever home, whatever sleep, awaits them.
   
   But now the one with whom he will not speak is gone as well, and he
   awash in some emotion, not loss exactly but a very particular
   awareness of his own duration in the world and in it its cities, and
   this one most of all.
   
   Beneath his right arm, reliably concealed, depends a knife that sleeps
   head down, like a vampire bat, honed to that edge required by
   surgeons, when surgeons cut with steel.
   
   It is secured there with magnets set within a simple hilt of nickel
   silver.  The blade's angled tip, recalling a wood carver's chisel,
   inclines toward the dark arterial pulse in the pit of his arm, as if
   reminding him that he too is only ever inches from that place the
   drowned girl went, so long ago, that timelessness.  That other
   country, waiting.
   
   He is by trade a keeper of that country.
   
   Drawn, the black blade becomes a key.  When he holds it, he holds the
   wind in his hand. (p17)
   
   The door swings gently open.
   
   But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired
   man, wolfishly professorial, in the coat of grayish green, the color
   of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small
   round glasses and razes his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow
   they do not, as they easily might rush to claim it as their own, and
   the man steps past them his cheeks seamed vertically in deep
   parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile.
   They do not seem him smile.
   
   
   
   THE Tao, he reminds himself, mired in traffic on Post Street, is older
   then God.
   
   He sees a beggar seated beneath a jeweler's windows.  In those windows
   are small empty pedestals, formal absences of precious things, locked
   away for the night.  The beggar has wrapped his legs and feet in brown
   paper tape, and the effect is startlingly medieval, as though someone
   has partially sculpted a knight from office materials.  The trim
   calves, the tapered toes, an elegance calling out for ribbons.  Above
   the tape, the man is a blur, a spastic scribble, his being abraded by
   concrete and misfortune.  He has become the color of pavement, his
   very race in question.
   
   The cab lurches forward.  The man in the loden coat reaches within to
   adjust the knife against his ribs.  He is left-handed, and he has
   thought often about such subtle polarities.
   
   The girl who drowned so long ago has settled now, swept down in a
   swirl of toffee hair and less hurtful memories, to where his youth
   turns gently, in its accustomed tides, and he is more comfortable that
   way.
   
   The past is the past, the future unformed.
   
   There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
   
   And now he leans forward, to rap, once upon the driver's tinted safety
   shield.
   
   He asks to be taken to the bridge.
   
   
   THE cab draws up before a rain-stained tumble of concrete tank traps,
   huge rhomboids streaked with rust, covered with the stylized initials
   of forgotten lovers. (p18)
   
           This spot has a certain place in the local mythology of
   romance and has been the subject of any number of popular ballads.
   
           "Pardon me, sir," says the cab driver through several layers
   of protective plastic and digital translation, "but do you wish me to
   leave you here? This neighborhood is dangerous.  I will be unable to
   wait for you."  The question is rote, required by law against the
   possibility of litigation.
   
   "Thank you.  I will be in no danger."  His English as formal as that
   of the translation program.  He hears a musical rattle, his words
   rendered in some Asian language he doesn't recognize.  The driver's
   brown eyes back at him mild and dispassionate, through goggles,
   shield; multiple layers of reflection.
   
   The driver releases a magnetic lock.
   
   The man opens the door and steps from the cab, straightening his
   coat.  Above him, beyond the tank traps, lift the ragged, swooping
   terraces, the patchwork superstructure in which the bridge is
   wrapped.  Some aspect of his mood lifts: it is a famous sight, a
   tourist's postcard, the very image of this city.
   
   He closes the door, and the cab pulls away, leaving behind it the
   backing-sugar sweetness of exhausted gasohol.
   
   He stands looking up at the bridge, at the silvered plywood of
   uncounted tiny dwellings.  It reminds him of the favelas of Rio,
   though the scale of the parts is different, somehow.  There is a fairy
   quality to the secondary construction, in contrast to the alternating
   swoop and verticality of the core structure's poetry of suspension.
   The individual shelters - I in fact they are shelters - are very
   small, space being at an absolute premium.  He remembers seeing the
   entrance to the lower roadway flanked with guttering touches, though
   now, he knows, the residents largely cooperate with the city's
   air-pollution measures.
   
   "Dancer?"
   
   In concrete shadow she palms the tiny vial.  Feral grimace intended to
   facilitate commerce. This drug causes the user's gums steadily to
   recede, producing in those few who survive its other rigors a
   characteristic and terrible smile.
   
   He replies with his eyes, the force of his gaze punching through her
   (p19) intent as if through paper. Briefly in her eyes the light of
   panic, then she is gone.
   
   Toffee hair swirls in the depths.
   
   He looks down at the toes of his shoes.  They are black and very
   precise, against random mosaic of impacted litter.
   
   He steps over an empty can of King Cobra and walks between the nearest
   rhomboids, toward the bridge.
   
   These are not kindly shadows through witch he moves, the legs his
   narrow trousers like the blades of a deeper darkness.  This is a
   lurking place, where wolves come down to wait for the weaker sheep.
   He has no fear of wolves, nor of any other predator the city might
   field, tonight or any other night.  He simply observes these things,
   in the moment.
   
   But now he allows himself to anticipate the sight that awaits him,
   past the last rhomboid: the bridge's mad maw, the gateway to dream and
   memory, where sellers of fish spread there wares on the beds of dirty
   ice.  A perpetual bustle, a coming and going, that he honors as the
   city's very pulse.
   
   And steps out, into unexpected light, faux-neon redline glare above a
   smooth sweep of Singaporean plastic.
   
   Memory is violated.
   
   Someone brushes past him, too close, unseeing and very nearly dies,
   the magnets letting go with that faint click that he feels more then
   hears.  But he does not draw the blade fully, and the drunk staggers
   on, oblivious.
   
   He reseats the hilt and stares bleakly at this latest imposition:
   LUCKY DRAGON swirling into bland script up a sort of fin or pylon
   whose bases seems comprised of dozens of crawling video screens. (p20)
   
   
   
5. MARIACHI STATIC

   
   
   "SO she left you for this TV producer," the country singer said,
   slipping what was left of thirteen ounces of vodka back into the
   waistband of his indigo jeans, so new and taut that they creaked when
   he walked.  The flat bottle's concavity rode there behind an antique
   buckle that resembled an engraved commemorative plaque, something that
   someone had once won, Rydell supposed, for calf-roping or some similar
   competitive activity.  Rydell powered the side window down, a creak,
   to let the fumes out.
   
   "Production coordinator," Rydell said, wishing the vodka would put his
   passenger, whose name was Buell Creedmore, to sleep again.  The man
   had spent the better part of their drive up the coast asleep, snoring
   lightly, and Rydell hadn't minded that.  Creedmore was a friend, or
   maybe more of an acquaintance, of Durius Walker's. Durius had been a
   drug dealer before, in South Central, and had gotten addicted to the
   stuff.  Now that he'd gotten his recovery, he spent a lot of time with
   other people who had drug problems, trying to help them.  Rydell
   assumed Buell Creedmore was one of those, though as far as he could
   see the man was just basically a drunk.
   
   "Bet that one burned your ass," Creedmore said, his eyes slit with
   spirits.  He was a small man, lightly built, but roped with the sort
   of whipcord muscle that had never seen the inside of a gym.
   Ditchdigger muscle. What Rydell took to be several layers of
   artificial tan were wearing off over an inherent pallor.  Bleached
   hair with dark roots was slicked straight back with some product that
   kept it looking like he'd just stepped out of a shower.  He hadn't,
   though, and he was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning.
   
   "Well," Rydell said, "I figured it's her call."
   
   "What kind of bleeding-ass liberal bullshit is that?" Creedmore
   asked.  He pulled the bottle from his waistband and eyed the remaining
   liquor narrowly, as though he were a carpenter checking a level.  It
   seemed to fail to meet his standards just then, so he returned it to
   its (p21) commemorative plaque. "What kind of man are you, anyway?"
   
   Rydell briefly entertained the idea of pulling over the margin,
   beating Creedmore senseless, then leaving him there at the side of the
   Five, to get up to San Francisco as best he could.  But he didn't and,
   in fact, said nothing.
   
   "Pussy-assed attitude like that, that's what's wrong with America
   today."
   
   Rydell thought about illegal chokeholds, brief judicious constriction
   of the carotid artery.  Maybe Creedmore wouldn't even remember if
   Rydell put on him.  But it wouldn't keep him under, not that long
   anyway, and they'd taught Rydell in Knoxville that you couldn't count
   on how a drunk would react to anything.
   
   "Hey, Buell," Rydell asked, "Whose car is this anyway?"
   
   Creedmore fell silent.  Grew, Rydell felt, restive.
   
   Rydell had wondered from the start if the car might not be stolen. He
   hadn't wanted to think about it really, because he needed the ride up
   to NoCal.  A plane ticket would've had to come out of his severance
   from the Lucky Dragon store, and he had to be extra careful with that
   until he determined whether or not there was anything to this story of
   Yamazaki's that there was money for him to earn, up in San Francisco.
   
   Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself.  He'd never actually figured
   out what it was that Yamazaki did.  Sort of a freelance Japanese
   anthropologist who studied Americans, as near as Rydell could tell.
   Maybe the Japanese equivalent of the Americans Lucky Dragon hired to
   tell them they needed a curb check.  Good man, Yamazaki, but not easy
   to say where he was coming from. The last time he'd heard from
   Yamazaki, he'd wanted Rydell to find him a netrunner, and Rydell had
   sent him this guy named Laney, a quantitative researcher who'd just
   quit Slitscan, and had been moping around the Chateau, running up a
   big bill.  Laney had taken the job, had gone over to Tokyo, and Rydell
   had subsequently gotten fired for, they called, it fraternizing with
   the guests.  That was basically how Rydell had wound up working night
   security in a convenience store, because he'd tried to help Yamazaki.
   (P22)
   
   Now he was driving this Hawker-Aichi roadster up the Five, very
   definitely the designated driver, no idea what was waiting for him up
   there, and halfway wondering if he weren't about to transport a stolen
   vehicle across a state line.  And all because Yamazaki said that the
   same Laney, over in Tokyo, wanted to hire him to do some fieldwork.
   That was what Yamazaki called it, "fieldwork."
   
   And that, after he'd talked with Durius, had been enough for Rydell.
   
   The Lucky Dragon had been starting to get old for Rydell.  He hadn't
   ever gotten along with Mr. Park to well, and when he'd take his break,
   out back, after the curb check every morning, he'd started to feel
   really down.  The patch of ground the Lucky Dragon had been set down
   on was sort of scooped out of the foot of the hillside there. At some
   point the exposed, nearly vertical cut had been quake-proofed with
   some kid of weird, gray, rubbery polymer, a perpetual semi-liquid that
   knit the soil behind it together and trapped whatever was thrown or
   pressed against it in a grip like summer tar.  The polymer was studded
   with hubcaps, because the place had been a car lot once.  Hubcaps and
   bottles and more nameless junk.  In the funk that had started to come
   over him, out back there on his breaks, he'd collect a handful of
   rocks and stand there, throwing them, as far as he could, into the
   polymer.  They didn't make much of a noise when they hit, and in fact
   they vanished entirely.  Just ripped straight into it and then it
   sealed over behind them, like nothing had happened.  And Rydell had
   started to see that as emblematic of broader things, how he was like
   those rocks, in his passage through the world, and how the polymer was
   like life, sealing over behind him, never leaving any trace at all
   that he'd been there.
   
   "Hit you a hubcap, man," Durius would advise, "break you a bottle."
   
   But Rydell hadn't wanted to.
   
   And when Rydell had told Durius about Yamazaki and Laney and some
   money, maybe, to be made up in San Francisco, Durius had listened
   carefully, asking a few questions, then advised Rydell to go for it.
   (P23)
   
   "What about job security?"  Rydell has asked.
   
   "Job security? Doing this shit?  Are you crazy?"
   
   "Benefits," Rydell countered.
   
   "You tried to actually use the medical coverage they give you here?
   Gotta go to Tiahuana to get it."
   
   "Well," Rydell had said, "I don't like to just quit."
   
   "That's 'cause you got fired from every last job you ever had," Durius
   had explained.  "I seen your résumé."
   
   So Rydell had given Mr. Park written notice, and Mr Park had promptly
   fired him, citing numerous violations of Lucky Dragon policy on
   Rydell's part, up to and including offering medical aid to the victim
   of a one-car collision on Sunset, and act which Mr. Park insisted
   could have involved Lucky Dragon's parent corporation in costly
   insurance litigation.
   
   "But she walked in here under her own power," Rydell had protested.
   "All I did was offer her a bottle of iced tea and called the traffic
   cops."
   
   "Smart lawyer claim the ice tea put her in systemic shock."
   
   "Shock my butt."
   
   But Mr. Park had known that if he fired Rydell, the last paycheck
   would be smaller then if Rydell quit.
   
   Praisegod, who could get all emotional if someone was leaving, had
   cried and given him a big hug, and then, as he'd left the store, she'd
   slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sunglasses, with inbuilt phone and
   AM-FM radio, about the most expensive item Lucky Dragon carried.
   Rydell hadn't wanted to take them, because he knew they'd turn up
   missing on the next inventory.
   
   "Fuck the inventory," Praisegod had said.
   
   Back in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage, six blocks away and
   just below Sunset, Rydell had stretched out on his narrow bed and
   tried to get the radio in the glasses to work.  All he'd been able to
   get, though, was static, faintly inflected with what might have been
   mariachi music.
   
   He'd done a little better with the GPS, which had a rocker keypad
   built inot the right temple.  The fifteen-channel receiver seemed to
   have really good lock-on, but the tutorial seemed to have been
   translated (p24) badly, and all Rydell could do was zoom in and out of
   what he quickly realized was a street map of Rio, not LA.  Still, he'd
   thought, taking the classes off, he'd get the hang of it.  Then the
   phone in the left temple had beeped, so he'd put the classes back on.
   
   "Yeh?"
   
   "Rydell, hey."
   
   "Hey, Durius."
   
   "You want a ride up to NoCall tomorrow in a nice new car?"
   
   "Who's going?"
   
   "Name of Creedmore.  Knows a guy I know in the program."
   
   Rydell had an uncle who was a Mason, and this program Durius belonged
   to reminded him of that.  "Yeh? Well, I mean, is he ok?"
   
   "Prob'ly not," Durius had said, cheerfully, "So he needs a driver.
   This three-week-old 'lectric needs to get ferried up there though, and
   he says it's fine to travel.  You used to be a driver, didn't you?"
   
   "Yeh."
   
   "Well, it's free.  This Creedmore, he'll pay for the charge."
   
   Which was how Rydell came to find himself, now, driving a Hawker-Aichi
   two-seater, one of those low-lung wedges of performance-materials that
   probably weighed, minus its human cargo, about as much as a pair of
   small motorcycles. There didn't seem to be any metal involved at all,
   just streamlined foam-core sandwiches reinforced with carbon fiber.
   The motor was in the back, and the fuel cells were distributed through
   the foam sandwiches that simultaneously passed for chassis and
   bodywork.  Rydell didn't want to know what happened if you hit
   something, driving a rig like this.
   
   It was damn near silent though, handled beautifully, and went like a
   bat once you got it up to speed.  Something about it reminded Rydell
   of a recumbent bicycle he'd once ridden, except you didn't have to
   pedal.
   
   "You never did tell me whose car this is," Rydell reminded Creedmore,
   who'd just downed the last two fingers of his vodka.
   
   "This friend of mine," Creedmore said, powering down the window on his
   side and tossing out the empty bottle. (P24)
   
   "Hey," Rydell said, "that's a ten-thousand-dollar fine, they catch
   you."
   
   "They can kiss our asses good-bye, is what they can do," Creedmore
   said.  "Sons of bitches," he added, then closed his eyes and slept.
   
   Rydell found himself starting to think about Chevette again.
   
   Regretting he'd ever let the singer get him on the topic. He knew he
   didn't want to think about that.
   
   Just drive, he told himself.
   
   On a brown hillside, off to his right, a wind farm's white masts.
   Late afternoon sunlight.
   
   Just drive. (P26)
   
   
6. SILENICO

   
   SILENCIO gets to carry. He's the smallest, looks almost like a kid.
   He doesn't use, and if the cops grab him, he can't talk.  Or anyway
   about the stuff.
   
   Silencio has been following Raton and Playboy around for a while now,
   watching them use, watching them get the money they need in order to
   keep using.  Raton gets mean when he's needing to use, and Silencio's
   learned to keep back from him then, out of range of feet and fists.
   
   Raton has a long, narrow skull and wears contacts with vertical
   irises, like a snake.  Silencio wonders if Raton is supposed to look
   like a rat who's eaten a snake, and now maybe the snake is looking out
   through its eyes.  Playboy says Raton is a pinche Cupacabra from
   Watsonvile and they all look this way.
   
   Playboy is the biggest, his bulk wrapped in a long, formal topcoat
   worn over jeans and old work boots.  He has a Pancho Villa mustache,
   yellow aviator glasses, a black fedora.  He is kinder to Silencio,
   buys him burritos from the stalls, water, cans of pop, one time a big
   smooth drink made from fruit.
   
   Silencio wonders if maybe Playboy is his father.  He doesn't know who
   his father might be.  His mother is crazy, back in los projectos.  He
   doesn't think Playboy is his father really, because he remembers how
   he met Playboy in the market on Bryant Street, and that was just an
   accident, but sometimes he wonders anyway, when Playboy buys him food.
   
   Silencio sits watching Raton and Playboy use, here behind this empty
   stall with its smell of apples. Raton has a little flashlight in his
   mouth so he can see what he is doing.  It is the black tonight, and
   Raton is cutting the little plastic tube with the special knife, its
   handle longer then its short curved blade.  The three of them are
   sitting on plastic crates.
   
   Raton and Playboy use the black two, maybe three times in a day and a
   night.  Three times with the black, then they must use the white as
   well.  The white is more expensive, but too much black and they start
   to talk fast and maybe see people who are not there.  "Speaking with
   Jesus," Playboy calls that, but the white he calls "walking with the
   king."  But it is not walking: white brings stillness, silence,
   sleep.   Silencio prefers the white nights.
   
   Silencio knows that they buy the white from a black man, but the black
   from a white man. And he assumes this is the mystery depicted in the
   picture Raton wears on the chain around his neck: the black and the
   white teardrops swirling together to make roundness; in the white
   teardrop a small circle of black, in the black a small circle of
   white.
   
   To get the money they talk to people, usually in dark places, so the
   people are frightened.  Sometimes Raton shows them a different knife,
   while Playboy holds their arms so they cannot move.  The money is in
   little tabs of plastic printed with pictures that move.  Silencio
   would like to keep these when the money is gone out of them, but this
   is not allowed.  Playboy throws them away, after whipping them
   carefully.  He drops them down the slots beside the street.  He does
   not wan his fingers to leave marks on them.  Sometimes Raton hurts the
   people, so that they will tell the charms that make money come from
   the moving pictures. The charms are names, letters, numbers Silencio
   knows every charm that Raton and Playboy have learned, but they do not
   know this; if he told them, they might be angry.
   
   The three of them sleep in a room in the Mission.  Playboy pulls the
   mattress from the bed and puts it on the floor.  Playboy sleeps there,
   Raton on the other part of the bed.  Silencio sleeps on the floor.
   
   Now Raton has cut the tube and puts half of the black on Playboy's
   finger.  Playboy has licked his finger so the black will stick.
   Playboy puts the finger in his mouth and rubs the black against his
   gums.  Silencio wonders what it tastes like, but he does not ever wish
   to speak with Jesus.  Now Raton I rubbing his own gums with black, the
   flashlight forgotten in his other hand.  Raton and Playboy look
   foolish doing this, but it does not make Silencio laugh.  Soon they
   will want to use again, and the black gives them energy to get the
   money they will need.  Silencio knows there is now no money, because
   they have not eaten since yesterday.
   
   Usually they find people in the dark places between the big shapes at
   the foot of Bryant Street, but now Raton thinks the police are
   watching those places. Raton has told Silencio that the police can see
   in the dark.  Silencio has looked at the eyes of the police; passing
   in their cars, and wondered how they can see in the dark.
   
   But tonight Raton has led them out, onto the bridge where people live,
   and he says they will find money here.  Playboy has said he does not
   like the bridge, because the bridge people are pinche; they do not
   like outsiders working here.  Raton says he feels lucky.
   
   Raton tosses the empty vial into the darkness, and Silencio hears it
   hit something, a single small click.
   
   Raton's snake-eyes are wide with the black.  He runs his had back
   through his hair and gestures.  Playboy and Silencio follow him.
   
   
   
   SILENCIO passes the bodega for the second time, watching the man in
   his long coat, where he sits at his small white table, drinking
   coffee.
   
   Raton says it is a fine coat.  See the old man's glasses, says Raton:
   they are made of gold.  Silencio supposes Playboy's are made of gold
   to, but Playboy's have yellow glass.  The man's are plain.  He has
   gray hair cut very short and deep lines in his cheeks.  He sits alone,
   looking at the smallest cup of coffee Silencio has ever seen.  A
   doll's cup.
   
   They have followed the old man here.  He has walked in the direction
   of Treasure Island.  This part of the bridge is for the tourists,
   Playboy says.  There are bodegas, shops with glass windows, many
   people walking.
   
   Now they are waiting to see which way the old man goes when he
   finishes his little coffee.  If he walks back, toward Bryant, it will
   be difficult.  If he goes on, toward Treasure, Raton and Playboy will
   be happy.
   
   It is Silencio's job to tell them when the man leaves.
   
   Silencio feels the man's eyes on him as he passes, but the man is only
   watching the crowd.
   
   
   SILENCIO Watches Raton and Playboy follow the man toward Treasure
   Island.
   
   They are in the bridge's lower level now, and Silencio keeps looking
   up to see the bottom of the upper deck, its paint peeling.  It reminds
   him of a wall in los projectos.  They are only a few bridge people
   here.  Only a few lights.  The man walks easily.  He does not hurry.
   Silencio feels the man is only walking; he has nowhere to go.
   Silencio feels the man needs nothing: he is not looking for money, to
   eat or to use.  This must be because he already has the money he needs
   to eat or to use, and this is why Raton and Playboy have chosen him,
   because they see he has the money they need.
   
   Raton and playboy keep pace with the man, but they hang back.  They do
   not walk together.  Playboy has his hands in the pockets of his big
   coat.  He has taken off his yellow glasses and his eyes are
   dark-circled with the look of those who have used the black.  He looks
   sad when he is going to get the money to use.  He looks like he is pay
   very close attention.
   
   Silencio follows them, looking back sometimes.  Now it is his job to
   tell them if someone comes.
   
   The man stops, looking into the window of a shop.  Silencio steps
   behind a cart piled with rolls of plastic, as he sees Raton and
   Playboy step behind other things, in case the man is watching the
   street in the glass.  Silencio has done this himself.
   
   The man does not look back.  He stands with his hands in the pockets
   of his long coat, looking into the glass.
   
   Silencio unbuttons his jeans and quietly waters the rolls of plastic,
   careful that it makes no sound.  As he buttons his jeans, he sees the
   man step away from the window, still moving toward Treasure, where
   Playboy says there are people who live like animals.  Silencio, who
   knows only dogs and pigeons and gulls, has a picture in his head of
   dog-toothed men with wings.  When Silencio has a picture in his head,
   the picture doesn't go away.
   
   Stepping from behind the car, as Raton and Playboy step out follow the
   man, Silencio sees the man turn right.  Gone.  The man is gone.
   Silencio blinks, rubs his knuckles against his eyes, looks again.
   Raton and Playboy are walking faster now.  They are not trying to
   hide. Silencio walks faster too, not to be lost, and arrives at the
   place where the man (p30) turned.  Raton's narrow black goes around
   that corner after Playboy and is gone.
   
   Silencio stops. Feels his heart beating.  Steps forward and looks
   around the corner.
   
   It is a space where a shop is meant to be, but there is no shop.
   Sheets of plastic hang down from above.  Pieces of wood, more rolls of
   plastic.  He sees the man.
   
   The man stands at the back of the space and looks from Playboy to
   Raton to Silencio.  Looks through the round pieces of glass.  Silencio
   feels how still the man is.
   
   Playboy is walking toward the man, his boots stepping over the wood,
   the plastic.  Playboy says nothing.  His hands are still in the
   pockets of his coat.  Raton is not moving but is ready to, and then he
   takes the knife from where he keeps it and opens it, flicking his
   wrist that way he practices, letting the man see it.
   
   The man's face does not change when he sees it, and Silencio remembers
   other faces, how they changed when they saw Raton's knife.
   
   Now Playboy steps down from the last of the wood, his hands coming out
   to take the man by the arms and spin him.  That is how it is done.
   
   Silencio sees the man move but only, it seems, a little.
   
   Everything stops.
   
   Silencio knows that he has seen the man's left hand reach into the
   long coat; witch was button before but now is not.  But somehow he has
   not seen that hand return, and still it has.  The man stands with his
   fist against Playboy's chest, just at the center.  Pressing the thumb
   of his closed fist against Playboy's coat.  And Playboy is not
   moving.  His hands have stopped, almost touching the man, fingers
   spread, but he is not moving.
   
   And then Silencio sees Playboy's fingers close, on nothing, and open.
   And the man's right hand comes up to push Playboy back, and the thin
   black thing is pulled out of Playboy's chest, and Silencio wonders how
   long it could have been hidden there, and Playboy falls back over the
   wood and the rolls of plastic.
   
   Silencio hears someone say pinche madre and this is Raton.  When Raton
   uses the black and fights, he is very fast and you do not (p31) know
   what he will do; he hurts people and then shakes, laughing, sucking
   air through his mouth.  Now he comes over the rolls of plastic like he
   is flying, with his knife shining in his hand, and Silencio sees the
   picture of a man with dog teeth and wings, and Raton's teeth are like
   that, his snake eyes wide.
   
   And the black thing, like a long wet thumb, goes through Raton's
   neck.  And everything stops again.
   
   Then Raton tries to speak, and blood comes on his lips.  He swings his
   knife at the man, but the knife cuts only air, and Raton's fingers can
   no longer hold it.
   
   The man pulls the black thing from Raton's throat.  Raton sways on
   loose knees, and Silencio thinks of how it is when Raton uses to much
   white, then tries to walk.  Raton puts his hands up to cover his
   throat on both sides.  His moth moves, but no words come out. One of
   Raton's snake eyes falls out.  The eye behind it is round and brown.
   
   Raton falls down on his knees, with his hands still on his throat.
   His snake eye and his brown eye look up at the man, and Silencio feels
   they look from different distances, seeing different things
   
   Then Raton makes a small, soft sound in his throat and falls over
   backward, still on his knees, so that he lies on his back with his
   knees spread wide and his legs twisted back, and Silencio watches
   Raton's gray pants go dark between his legs.
   
   Silencio looks at the man, who is looking at him.
   
   Silencio looks at the black knife, how it rests in the man's hand.  He
   feels that the knife holds the man.  That the knife may decide to
   move.
   
   Then the man moves the knife.  Its point is almost square, like the
   real point has been snapped off.  It only moves a little. Silencio
   understands this means he must move.
   
   He steps sideways so the man can see him.
   
   The point moves again.  Silencio understands.
   
   Closer. (p32)
   
   
   
7. SHAREHOUSE

   
   LEAVE a house empty in Malibu, Tessa told Chevette, and you get the
   kind of people come down from the hills and barbecue dogs in your
   fireplace.
   
   Hard to get rid of those kind of people, and locks wouldn't keep them
   out.  That was why the people who used to live here, before the Spill,
   were willing to rent them out to students.
   
   Tessa was Australian, a media sciences student at USC and the reason
   Chevette was out here now, couching it.
   
   Well, that and the fact that she, Chevette, didn't have a job or any
   money, now she'd split with Carson.
   
   Tessa said Carson was a piece of work.
   
   And look where it had all gotten her, Chevette thought, pumping her
   way up the trainer's illusion of a Swiss mountain road and trying to
   ignore the reek of moldy laundry from the other side of the drywall
   partition.  Someone had left a wet load in the machine, probably last
   Tuesday, before the fire, and now it was rotting in there.
   
   Which was too bad, because that made it hard to get into riding the
   trainer.  You could configure it for a dozen different bikes, and as
   many terrains, and Chevette liked this one, an old-fashioned
   steel-frame ten-speed you could take up this mountain road,
   wildflowers blurring in your peripheral vision.  Her other favorite
   was a balloon-tired cruiser you rode along a beach, which was good for
   Malibu because you couldn't ride along the beach, not unless you
   wanted to climb over rusty razor wire and ignore the biohazard
   warnings every hundred feet.
   
   But that gym-sock mildew reek kept catching in the back of her
   sinuses, nothing alpine meadow about it at all, telling her she was
   broke and out of work and staying in a share house in Malibu.
   
   The house was right on the beach, with the wire about thirty feet out
   from the deck.  Nobody knew exactly what it was that had spilled,
   because the government wasn't telling.  Something off a freighter,
   some people said, and some said it was a bulklifter that had come down
   in a (p33) storm.  The government was using nanobots to clean it up
   though; everybody agreed on that, and that was why they said you
   shouldn't walk out there.
   
   Chevette had found the trainer her second day here, and she'd ride two
   or three times a day or, like now, late at night.  Nobody else seemed
   to be interested in it or ever to come into this little room off the
   garage, next to the laundry room, and that was fine with her.   Living
   on the bridge, she'd been used to people being around, but everybody
   had always had something to do up there. The share house was full of
   USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat
   around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever
   seemed to get done.
   
   She felt sweat run between the headband of the interface visor and her
   forehead, then down the side of her nose.  She was getting a good burn
   on now; she could feel groups of muscles working her back, ones that
   didn't usually get it.
   
   The trainer did a better job on the bike's chartreuse lacquer then on
   the shift levers, she noticed.  They were sort of cartoony, with road
   surface blurring past beneath them in generic texture map.  The clouds
   would be generic too, if she looked up; just basic fractal stuff.
   
   She was definitely not to happy with being here, or with her life in
   general at this point.  She'd been talking with Tessa about that after
   dinner. Well, arguing about it.
   
   Tessa wanted to make this documentary.  Chevette knew what a
   documentary was because Carson had worked for a channel, Real One,
   that only ran those, and Chevette had had to watch about a thousand of
   them. As a result, she thought, she now knew a whole lot about nothing
   in particular, and nothing in particular about whatever it was she was
   actually supposed to know.  Like what to do now that her life had
   gotten her to this place.
   
   Tessa wanted to take her back up to San Francisco, but Chevette had
   mixed feelings.  The documentary Tessa wanted to make was about
   interstitial communities, and Tessa said Chevette had lived in one,
   because Chevette had lived on the bridge.  Interstitial meant in
   between things, and Chevette figured that that made a kind of sense,
   anyway. (p34) And she did miss it up there, miss the people, but she
   didn't like thinking about it.  Because of how things had gone since
   she'd come down here, and because she hadn't kept in touch.
   
   Just pump, she told herself, cresting the illusion of a rise.  Shift
   again.  Pump harder.  The road surface stated to look glassy in
   places, because she was overtaking the simulator's refresh rate.
   
   "Zoom in." Tessa's voice, in miniature.
   
   "Shit," Chevette said. Flipping up the visor.
   
   The camera platform, like a helium-filled cushion of silver Mylar, at
   eye level in the open doorway.  Kid's toy with little caged
   propellers, controlled from Tessa's bedroom.  Ring of light reflected
   in the lens housing as it extruded, zooming.
   
   The propellers blurred to gray, brought it forward through the door,
   stopped; blurred to gray again, reversing.  Rocked there, till it
   steadied on the ballast of the underslung camera.  God's Little Toy,
   Tessa called her silver balloon.  Disembodied eye.  She sent it on
   slow cruises through the house, mining for image fragments.  Everyone
   who lived here was constantly taping everyone else, except Iain, and
   Iain wore a motion capture suit, even slept in it, and was recording
   every move he ever made.
   
   The trainer, performance machine that it was, sensed Chevette's loss
   of focus and sighed, slowing, complex hydraulics beginning to
   deconfigure. The narrow wedge of seat between her thighs widened,
   spreading to support her butt in beach-bike mode.  The handlebars
   unfolded, upward, raising her hands.  She kept on pedaling, but the
   trainer was winding her down now.
   
   "Sorry." Tessa's voice from the tiny speaker. But Chevette knew she
   wasn't.
   
   "Me too," Chevette said, as the pedals made a final arc, locking for
   dismount.  She swung the bars up and stepped down, batting at the
   platform, spoiling Tessa's shot.
   
   "Une petite problemette.  Concerns you, I think."
   
   "What?"
   
   "Come into the kitchen and I'll show you." Tessa reversed one set of
   props, turning the platform on its axis.  Then two forward and it
   sailed (p35) back through the doorway, into the garage.  Chevette
   followed it, pulling a towel from a nail driven into the doorjamb.
   Closing the door behind her.  Should've had it closed when she was
   riding, but she'd forgotten.  Cod's Little Toy couldn't open doors.
   
   The towel needed washing.  A little stiff but it didn't smell bad.
   She used it to wipe sweat from her pits and chest.  She overtook the
   balloon, ducked under it, and entered the kitchen.
   
   Sensed roaches scurrying for cover.  Every flat surface, except the
   floor, was solid with unwashed dishes, empties, and pieces of
   recording equipment.  They'd had a party, the day before the fire, and
   nobody had cleaned up yet.
   
   No light here now but a couple of telltales and the methodical flicker
   as the security system flipped from one external night-vision camera
   to the next.  4:32 AM.  Showing in the corner of the screen.  They
   kept maybe half the security shut down beacues people were in and out
   all day, and ther was always someone there.
   
   Whir of the platform as Tessa brought it up behind her.
   
   "What is it?" Chevette asked.
   
   "Watched the driveway."
   
   Chevette moved closer to the screen.
   
   The deck, slung out over the sand ...
   
   The space between the house and the next one ...
   
   The driveway.  With Carson's car sitting there.
   
   "Shit," Chevette said, as the Lexus was replaced with the between
   houses view on the other side, then a view from a camera under the
   deck.
   
   "Been there since 3:24."
   
   The deck...
   
   "How'd he find me?"
   
   Between houses...
   
   "Web search, probably.  Image matching.  Someone was uploading
   pictures from the party.  You were in some of them."
   
   The Lexus in the driveway.  Nobody in it.
   
   "Where is he?"
   
   Between the houses...
   
   (p36)
   
   Under the deck...
   
   "no idea," Tessa said.
   
   "Where are you?"
   
   Deck again.  Watch this and you start to see things that aren't
   there.  She looked down at the mess on the counter and saw a foot-long
   butcher knife lying in what was left of a chocolate cake, the blade
   clotted with darkness.
   
   "Upstairs," Tessa said.  "Best you come up."
   
   Chevette felt suddenly cold in her bike shorts and T-shirt.  Shivered.
   Left the kitchen for the living room.  Pre-dawn gray through walls of
   glass.  English Iain stretched, snoring lightly, on a long leather
   couch, a red LED on his motion-capture suit winking over his sternum.
   The lower half of Iain's face never seemed to be focus to Chevette;
   teeth uneven, different colors, like he was lightly pixilated.  Mad,
   Tessa said.  And never changed the suit he slept in now; kept laced
   corset-tight.
   
   Muttered in his sleep, turning his back to her as she passed.
   
   She stood with her face a few inches from the glass, feeling the chill
   that radiated from it.  Nothing on the deck but a ghostly white chair,
   empty beer cans. Where was he?
   
   The stair to the second floor was a spiral, wedge-shaped sections of
   very think wood spun out from an iron shaft.  She took that now, the
   carbon0fiber pedal clips set into the sloes of her shoes clicking with
   each step.
   
   Tessa waited at the top, slim blonde shadow bulked in a puffy coat
   Chevette knew was burnt-orange in the daylight.  "The van's parked
   next door," she said. "Let's go."
   
   "Where?"
   
   "Up the coast.  My grant came through.  I was up talking to Mum,
   telling her that, when the boyfriend arrived."
   
   "Maybe he just wants to talk," Chevette said.  She'd told Tessa about
   him hitting her that time.  Now she half regretted it.
   
   "I don't think that's a chance you want to take.  We're away, right?
   See? I'm packed." Bumping her hip against the bulging rectangle of a
   gear bag slung from her shoulder.
   
   "I'm not," Chevette said.(p37)
   
   "You never unpacked, remember?" Which was true.  "We'll go out over
   the deck, go 'round past Barbara's, get in the van: we're gone."
   
   "No," Chevette said, "let's wake everybody up, turn on the outside
   lights.  What can he do?"
   
   " don't know what he can do.  But he can always come back.  He knows
   you're here now.  You cant' stay."
   
   "I don't know for sure he'd try to hurt me, Tessa."
   
   "Want to be with him?"
   
   "No."
   
   "Did you invite him here?'
   
   "No."
   
   "Want to see him?"
   
   Hesitation. "No."
   
   "Then get your bag." Tessa pushed past, leading with the gar bag.
   "Now," she said, over her shoulder, descending.
   
   Chevette opened her moth to say something, then closed it. Turned,
   felt her way along the corridor, to the door to her room.  A closet,
   this had been, though bigger inside then some houses on the bridge. A
   frosted dome came on in the ceiling when you opened the door. Someone
   had cut a thick slab of foam so that it fit the floor down half the
   length of the narrow, windowless space, between an elaborate shoe rack
   of some pale tropical hardwood and a baseboard of the same stuff.
   Chevette had never seen anything made of wood that was put together
   that well.  The whole house was like that, under the sharehouse dirt
   and she'd wondered who'd lived in it before, and how they'd felt about
   having to leave.  Whoever it was, to judge by the rack, had had more
   shoes then Chevette had owned in her life.
   
   Her knapsack sat at the end of the narrow foam bed and, like Tessa had
   said, still packed.  Open, though.  The mesh bag with her toilet stuff
   and makeup beside it.  Skinner's old bicker jacket hung above it,
   shoulders set broad and confident on a fancy wooded hanger.  Black
   once, its horsehide had gone mostly gray with wear and time.  Older
   then she was, he'd said.  A pair of new black jeans were draped over
   the rod beside it.  She pulled these down and worked her feet out of
   the (p38) knapsack.  Smell of clean cotton as she pulled it over her
   head; she'd washed everything, at Carson's when she'd decided she was
   leaving.  She crouched at the foot of the foam, lacing up lug-soled
   high-tops, no socks.  Stood and took Skinner's jacket from the
   hanger.  It was heavy, as if it retained the weight of horses.  She
   felt safer in it.  Remembering how she'd always ridden with it in San
   Francisco, in spite of the weight.  Like armor.
   
   "Come on." Tessa, calling softly from the living room.
   
   Tessa had come over to Carson's with another girl, South African, the
   day they'd first met, to interview him about his work at Real One.
   Something had clicked; Chevette smiling back at the skinny blonde
   whose features were all a little too big for her face; who looked
   great anyway and laughed and was so mart.
   
   Too smart, Chevette thought, stuffing the mesh bag into the knapsack,
   because now she was on her way to San Francisco with her, and she
   wasn't' sure that was such a good idea.
   
   "Come on."
   
   Bent to stuff the mesh bag into the knapsack, buckle it.  Put that
   over her shoulder.  Saw the riding shoes.  No time now.  Stepped out
   and closed the closet door.
   
   Found Tessa in the living room, making sure the alarms on the sliding
   glass doors were deactivated.
   
   Ian grunted, thrashing out at something in a dream.
   
   Tessa tugged one of the doors open, just wide enough to get out, its
   frame scraping on the corroded track.  Chevette felt cold sea air.
   Tessa stepped out, reached back through to pull her gear bag out.
   
   Chevette stepped through, knapsack rattling against the frame.
   Something brushed her hair, Tessa reaching out to capture God's Little
   Toy there. She handed the inflated platform to Chevette who took it by
   one of the propeller cages; it felt weightless and awkward and to easy
   to break.  Then she and Tessa both grabbed the door handle one handed,
   and together they pulled it shut against the friction of the track.
   
   She straightened, turned, looked out at the lightening gray that was
   all she could see of the ocean now, past the black coils of razor
   wire, and felt a kind of vertigo, as though for just a second she
   stood at the very edge of the turning world.  She'd felt that before,
   on the bridge, up on the roof of Skinner's place, high up over
   everything; just standing there in a fog that socketed the bay,
   throwing every sound back at you from a new and different distance.
   
   Tessa took the four steps down to the beach, and Chevette heard the
   sand squeak under her shoes.  It was tat quiet.  She shivered. Tessa
   crouched, checking under the deck.  Where was he?
   
   And they never saw him, not then, as they trudged through the sand,
   pat old Barbara's deck, where the wide windows were all blanked with
   quilted foil and sun-faded cardboard.  Barbara was an owner form
   before the Spill, and not often seen.  Tessa had tried to cultivate
   her, wanted her in her documentary, an interstitial community of one,
   become a hermit in her house, holed up amid sharehouses.  Chevette
   wondered if Barbara was watching them go, past her house and around
   between it and the next, back to where Tessa's van waited, almost
   cubical, its paintwork scoured with windblown sand.
   
   All this more dreamlike somehow with each step she took, and now Tessa
   was unlocking the van, after checking through the window with a
   flashlight to see he wasn't waiting there, and when Chevette claimed
   up the passenger side and settled in the creaking seat, blanket laced
   over ripped plastic with bungee cord, she knew that she was going
   Somewhere.
   
   And that was ok with her. (p40)
   
   
   
8. THE WHOLE

   
   DRIFT.
   
   Laney is in drift.
   
   That is how he does it.   It is a matter, he knows, of letting go.  He
   admits the random.
   
   The danger of admitting the random is that the random may admit the
   Hole.
   
   The hole is that which Laney's being is constructed around.  The Hole
   is the absence at the fundamental core.  The Hole is that into which
   he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information.
   
   Mainly - lately - information.
   
   Information.  This flow.  This ... corrosion.
   
   Drift.
   
   
   ONCE, before he'd come to Tokyo, Laney woke in the bedroom of his
   suite in the Chateau.
   
   It was dark, only a shush of tires up from Sunset; muffled drumming of
   a helicopter, hunting the hills behind.
   
   And the Hole right there, beside him in the lonely queen-size expanse
   of his bed
   
   The Hole, up close and personal.(p41)
   
   
9. SWEEP SECoND

   
   BRIGHT pyramids of fruit, beneath buzzing neon.
   
   He watches as the boy drains a second liter of the pulped drink.
   Swallowing the entire contents of the pulped drink.  Swallowing the
   entire contents of the tall plastic cup in an unbroken stream, with no
   apparent effort.
   
   "You should not drink cold things so quickly."
   
   The boy looks at him. There is nothing between the boy's gaze and his
   being: no mask.  No personality.  He is not, apparently, deaf, because
   he has understood the suggestion of the cold drink.  But there is no
   evidence, as yet, that he is capable of speech.
   
   "żTú háblas espańól?"(Do you speak Spanish?)  This in the language of
   Madrid, unspoken for many years.
   
   The boy places the empty cup beside the first one and looks at the
   man.  There is no fear in him.
   
   "The men who attacked me, they were your friends?"  Raising an
   eyebrow.
   
   Nothing at all.
   
   "How old are you?"
   
   Older, the man guesses, then his emotional age.  Touches of razored
   stubble at the corners of his upper lip.  Brown eyes clear and placid.
   
   The boy looks at the two empty plastic cups on the worn steel
   counter.  He looks up at the man.
   
   "Another?  You wish to drink another?"
   
   The boy nods.
   
   The man signals to the Italian behind the counter.  He turns back to
   the boy.
   
   "Do you have a name?"
   
   Nothing.  Nothing moves in the brown eyes.  The boy regards him as
   calmly as might some placid dog.
   
   The silver pulping machine chugs briefly, amid the stacked fruit.
   Shaved ice whirs into the pulp.  The Italian transfers the drink into
   a plastic cup and places it before the boy.  The boy looks at it.
   (p42)
   
    The man shifts on the creaking metal stool, his long coat draped like
   resting wings.  Beneath his arm, carefully cleaned now, the knife in
   its magnetic sheath swings free, sleeping.
   
   The boy raises the cup, opens his mouth, and pours the thick sludge of
   ice and fruit pulp down his throat.
   
   Defective, the man thinks, syndromes of the city's' tragic womb.  The
   signal of life distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of
   fortune.  Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly
   where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be.  It is the Tao:
   darkness within darkness.
   
   The boy places the empty cup beside the other two.
   
   The man straightens his legs, stands, buttoning his coat.
   
   The boy reaches out.  Two fingers touch the watch the man wears on his
   left wrist. He opens his mouth as if to speak.
   
   "The time?"
   
   Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes.
   
   The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a
   fortified arcade in Singapore.  It is military ordnance.  It speaks to
   the man of battles fought in another day.  It reminds him that every
   battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters,
   matters absolutely.
   
   The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one's
   funeral, and how could it be otherwise?
   
   The boy leans forward, now the thing behind his eyes seeing only the
   watch.
   
   The man thinks of the two he leaves tonight on the bridge.  Hunters of
   sorts, now they will hunt no more.  And this one, following them, to
   pick up the scraps.
   
   "You like this?"
   
   Nothing registers.  Nothing breaks the concentration, the link between
   that which has surfaced behind the boy's eyes and the austere black
   face of the watch.
   
   The Tao moves.
   
   The man unfastens the steel buckle that secures the strap.  He hands
   the watch to the boy.  He does this without thought. He does this
   (p43) with the same unthinking certainty with which, earlier, he
   killed.  He does this because it fits, is fitting; because his life is
   alignment with the Tao.
   
   There is no need to say good-bye.
   
   He leaves the boy lost in contemplation of the black face, the hands.
   
   He leaves now.  The moment is in balance. (p44)
   
   
   
10. AMERICAN ACRoPOLIS

   
   RYDELL managed to get part of the San Francisco grid on the Brazilian
   glasses coming in, but he still needed Creedmore to tell him how to
   get to the garage where they were leaving the Hawker-Aichi.
   Creedmore, when Rydell woke him for that, seemed uncertain as to who
   Rydell was, but did a fairly good job of covering it up. He did know,
   after consulting a folder business card he took from the watch pocket
   of his jeans, exactly where they should go.
   
   It was an old building, in the kind of area where buildings like that
   were usually converted into residential, but the frequency of razor
   wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory.  There were
   a couple of Universal square badges controlling the entry, a firm that
   mostly did low-level industrial security.  They were set up in an
   office by the gate, watching Real One on a flatscreen propped up on
   big steel desk that looked like someone had gone over every square
   inch of it with a ball peen hammer.  Cups of take-out coffee and white
   foam food containers.  It all felt kind of homey to Rydell, who
   figured they'd be going off shift soon, seven in the morning. Wouldn't
   be a bad job, as bad jobs went.
   
   "Delivering a drive-away," Rydell told them.
   
   There was a deer on the flatscreen.  Behind it the familiar shapes of
   the derelict skyscrapers of downtown Detroit.  The Real One logo in
   the lower right corner gave him the context: one of those nature
   shows.
   
   They gave him a pad to punch in the reservation number on Creedmoor's
   paper, and it came up paid.  Had him sign on the pad, there.  Told him
   to put it in slot twenty-three, level six.  He left the office; got
   back into the Hawker, swung up the ramp, wet tires squealing on
   concrete.
   
   Creedmore was conducting a grooming operation in the illuminated
   mirror behind the passenger-side sun visor.  This consisted of running
   his fingers repeatedly back through his hair, whipping them on his
   jeans, then rubbing his eyes.  He considered the results.  "Time for a
   drink," he said to the reflection of his bloodshot eyes. (p45)
   
   "Seven in the morning," Rydell said.
   
   "What I said," Creedmore said, flipping the visor back up.
   
   Rydell found the number twenty-three painted on the concrete, between
   two vehicles shrouded in white dustcovers.  He edged the Hawker
   carefully in and started shutting it down.  He was able to do this
   without having to go to the help menu.
   
   Creedmore got out and went over to urinate on somebody's tire.  the
   (capitalization unchanged) harness, leaned over to pull the
   passenger-side door shut, popped the trunk, opened the driver-side
   door, checked that he had the keys, got out, closed the door.
   
   "Hey, Buell.  Your friend's gonna pick this up, right?"  Rydell was
   pulling his duffel out of the Hawker-Aichi's weirdly narrow trunk, a
   space suggestive of the interior of a child's coffin.  There was
   nothing else in there, so he assumed Creedmore was traveling without
   luggage.
   
   "No," Creedmore said, "they gonna leave it up here get all dusty." He
   was buttoning his fly.
   
   "So I give the keys to those Universal boys downstairs?"
   
   "No," Creedmore said, 'you give 'me to me."
   
   "I signed," Rydell said.
   
   "Give 'em to me."
   
   "Buell, this vehicle is my responsibility now.  I've signed it in
   here." He closed the trunk, activated the security systems.
   
   "Please step back," said the Hawker-Aichi.  "Respect my boundaries as
   I respect yours." It had a beautiful, strangely genderless voice,
   gentle but firm.
   
   Rydell took a step back, another.
   
   "That's my friend's car and my friend's keys, and I'm supposed to give
   'em to him."  Creedmore rested his hand on the big roper's buckle like
   it was the wheel of his personal ship of state, but he looked
   uncertain, as though his hangover were learning on him.
   
   "Just tell him the keys'll be here.  That's how you do it.  Safer all
   'round, that way." Rydell shouldered his bag and started down the
   ramp, glad to be stretching his legs.  He looked back at Creedmore.
   "See you 'round, Buell."
   
   "Son of a bitch," Creedmore said, though Rydell took it to be more a
   reference to the universe then had created Rydell than to Rydell
   himself.  Creedmore looked lost and disconnected, squinting under the
   greenish-white strip lighting.
   
   Rydell kept walking, down the battered concrete spiral of the parking
   garage, five more levels, till he came abreast of the office at the
   entrance. The Universal guards were drinking coffee, watching the end
   of there nature show.  Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew
   sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and
   monumental heart, vast black tines of prick reaching up to vanish in
   the white sky.
   
   They made a lot of nature shows there.
   
   He went out into the street, looking for a cab or a place that made
   breakfast.  Smelling how San Francisco was a different place then Los
   Angeles, and feeling that was fine by him.  He'd get something to eat.
   Use the Brazilian glasses to phone Tokyo.
   
   Find out about that money. (p46)
   
   
   
11 oTHER GUY

   
   
   CHEVETTE had never driven a standard, so it fell to Tessa to drive
   them up to San Francisco.  Tessa didn't seem tot mind.  She had her
   head full of the docu they were going to make, and she could work it
   out as she drove, telling Chevette about the different communities she
   wanted to cover and how she was going to cut it all together.  All
   Chevette had to do was listen, or look like she was listening, and
   finally just fall asleep.  She fell asleep as Tessa was telling her
   about a place called the Walled City, how there'd actually been this
   place, by Hong Kong, but it had been torn down before Hong Kong went
   back to being part of China.  And then these crazy net people had
   built their own version of it, like a big communal website, and they'd
   turned it inside out, vanished in there.  It wasn't making much sense
   when Chevette nodded out, but it left pictures in her head.  Dreams.
   
   "What about the other guy?" Tessa was asking, when Chevette woke from
   those dreams.
   
   Chevette blinked out at the Five, the white line that seemed to reel
   up beneath the van. "What other guy?"
   
   "The cop.  The one you went to Los Angeles with."
   
   "Rydell," Chevette said.
   
   "So why didn't that work?" Tessa asked.
   
   Chevette didn't really have an answer. "It just didn't,"
   
   "So you had to hook up with Carson?"
   
   "No," Chevette said, "I didn't have to." What were those white things,
   so many of them off in a field there? Wind things: they made
   electricity.  "It just seemed like the thing to od."
   
   "I've done a few of those myself," Tessa said. (p47)
   
   
12. EL PRIMERO

   
   FONTAINE'S first glimpse of the boy comes as he starts to lay out the
   morning's stock in his narrow display window: rough dark hair above a
   forehead pressed against the armored glass.
   
   Fontaine leaves nothing of value in the window at night, but he
   dislikes the idea of an entirely empty display.
   
   He doesn't like to think of someone passing and glimpsing that
   vacancy.  It makes him think of death.  So each night he leaves out a
   few items of relatively little value, ostensibly to indicate the
   nature of the shop's stock, bur really as a private act of
   propitiatory magic.
   
   This morning the window contains three inferior Swiss mechanicals,
   their dials flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with jigged bone
   handles and shield, fair condition, and an East German militarily
   field telephone that looks as though it has been designed not only to
   survive a nuclear explosion but to function during on.
   
   Fontaine, still on the morning's first coffee, stares down, through
   the glass, at the matted spiky hair. Thinking at first a corpse, and
   not the first he's discovered this way, but never propped thus,
   kneeling, as in attitude of prayer.  But no, this one lives: breath
   fogs Fontaine's window.
   
   In Fontaine's left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase,
   manual wind, gold-filled case, in very nearly the condition in which
   it left the factory.  In his right, a warped red plastic cup of black
   Cuban coffee.  The shop is filled with the smell of Fontaine's coffee,
   as burnt and acrid, as he likes it.
   
   Condensation slowly pulses on the cold glass: gray aureoles outline
   the kneeler's nostrils.
   
   Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his
   better stock, narrow divisions of faded green velour holding a dozen
   watches.  He sets the tray aside, on the counter behind which he
   stands when he does business, transfers the red plastic cup to his
   left hand, and with his right reassures himself of the Smith & Wesson
   .32-.22  Kit Gun in the right side pocket of the threadbare trench
   coat that serves him as a dressing gown.
   
   The little gun is there, older then some of his better watches, its
   worn walnut grip comforting and familiar.  Probably intended to be
   kept in a freshwater fisherman's tackle box, against the dispatching
   of water snakes or the decapitation of empty beer bottles, the Kit Gun
   is Fontaine's considered choice:  a six-shot rimfire revolver with a
   four-inch barrel.  He doesn't want to kill anyone, Fontaine, though if
   truth be known, he has, and very probably could again.  He dislikes
   recoil, in a handgun, and excessive report, and distrust
   semi-automatic weapons.  He is an anachronist, a historian:  eh knows
   that the Smith & Wesson's frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire
   round, long extinct, that was once the standard for American pocket
   pistols.  Rechambered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model,
   well into the middle of the twentieth century.  A handy thing and,
   like most of his stock, a rarity.
   
   He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the counter beside the
   tray of watches.
   
   He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archaic
   one-handed duelist's stance he has been known to pick the pips from a
   playing card.
   
   He hesitates before unlocking the shop's front door, a complicated
   process.  Perhaps the kneeler is not alone.  Fontaine has had few
   enemies on the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have
   drifted in from either end, San Francisco or Oakland?  And the wilds
   of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of crazy.
   
   But still.
   
   He throws the last haps and draws the pistol
   
   Sunlight falls through the bridge's wrapping of scrap wood and plastic
   like some strange benison.  Fontaine scents the salt air, a source of
   corrosion.
   
   "You," he says, "mister."  The gun in his hand, hidden by the folds of
   the trench coat.
   
   Under the trench coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears faded
   plaid flannel pajama bottoms and along-sleeved white thermal
   undershirt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process.
   Black (p50) shoes, sockless and unlaced, their gloss gone matte in the
   deeper creases.
   
   Dark eyes look up at him, from a face that somehow refuses to come
   into focus.
   
   "What you doing there?"
   
   The boy cocks his head, as if listening to something Fontaine cannot
   hear.
   
   "Get away from the window."
   
   With a weird and utter lack of grace that strikes Fontaine as
   amounting to a species of grace in itself, this person gets to his
   feet.  The brown eyes stare at Fontaine but somehow do not see him, or
   do not recognize him, perhaps, as another being.
   
   Fontaine displays the Smith & Wesson, his finger on the trigger, but
   he does not quite point it at the boy.  He never points a gun at
   anyone he is not quite ready to shoot, a lesson learned long ago from
   his father.
   
   This kneeler, this breather on his glass, is not of the bridge.  It
   would be difficult for Fontaine to explain how he knows this, but he
   does.  It is a function of having lived here a long time.  He doesn't
   know everyone on the bridge, nor would he want to, but he nonetheless
   distinguishes bridge dwellers from others, and with absolute
   certainty.
   
   This one, now, has something missing.  Something wrong; not a state
   bespeaking drugs, but some more permanent mode of not-being-there.
   And while the population of the bridge possesses its share of these,
   they are not somehow worked into the fabric of the place and not
   inclined to appear thus, so randomly, as to disturb mercantile ritual.
   
   Somewhere high above, the bay wind whips a loose flap of plastic, a
   frenzied beating, like the idiot wing of some vast wounded bird.
   
   Fontaine, looking into brown eyes in the face that still refuses to
   come into focus (because, he thinks now, it is incapable), regrets
   having unlocked his door. Salt air even now gnaws at the bright metal
   vitals of his stock.  He gestures with the barrel of his pistol: go.
   
   The boy extends his hand.  A watch.
   
   "What? You want to sell that?"(p51)
   
   The brown eyes register no language.
   
   Fontaine, motivated by something he recognizes as a compulsion, takes
   a step forward, his finger tightening on the pistol's double-action
   trigger.  The chamber beneath the firing pin is empty, for safety's
   sake, but a quick, long pull would do the trick.
   
   Looks like stainless.  Black dial.
   
   Fontaine takes in the filthy black jeans, the frayed running shoes,
   the faded red T-shirt hiked above a paunch that betrays the
   characteristic bloat of malnutrition.
   
   "You want to show that to me?"
   
   The boy looks down at the watch in his hand, then points to the three
   in the window.
   
   "Sure," Fontaine says,  "We got watches. All kinds. You want to see?"
   
   Still pointing, the boy looks at him.
   
   "Come on," Fontaine says, "come in.  Cold out here." Still holding the
   gun, though his finger has relaxed, he steps ack into the shop. "You
   coming?"
   
   After a pause, the boy follows holding the watch with the black dial
   as though it were a small animal.
   
   Be nothing, Fontain thinks.  Army Waltham with the guts rusted out.
   Bullshit.  Bullshit he's let this freak in here.
   
   The boy stands, staring, in the center of the shop's tiny floor
   space.  Fontaine closes the door, locks it once, only and retreats
   behind his counter.  All this done without lowering the gun, getting
   within grabbing distance, or taking his eyes off his visitor.
   
   The boy's eyes widen as he sees the tray of watches. "First things
   first," Fontaine says, whisking the tray out of sight with is free
   hand. "Let's see." Pointing at the watch in the boy's hand.  "Here,"
   Fontaine commands, tapping the faded gilt Rolex logo on a padded mat
   of dark green leatherette.
   
   The boy seems to understand.  He places the watch on the pad.
   Fontaine sees the black beneath the ragged nails as the hand
   withdraws.
   
   "Shit," Fontaine says.  Eyes acting up.  "Back up, there, a minute,"
   he says, gently indicating direction with the barrel of the Smith &
   Wesson. The boy takes a step back. (p52)
   
   Still watching the boy, he digs in the left side pocket of the trench
   coat and comes up with a black loupe, which he screws into his left
   eye. "Don't you move now, okay?  Don't want this gun to go off..."
   
   Fontaine picks up the watch, affords himself a quick squint through
   the loupe.  Whistles in spite of himself.  "Jaeger LeCoultre."  He
   unsquints, checking; the boy hasn't moved.  Squints again, this time
   at the ordinance of markings on the caseback.  "Royal Australian Air
   Force, 1953,"  he translates.  "Where'd you steal this?"
   
   Nothing.
   
   Fontaine squints through the loupe.  "All original?"
   
   Fontaine wants this watch.
   
   He puts it down on the green pad, atop the worn symbol of a golden
   crown, noting that the black calf band is custom-made, handsewn around
   bars permanently fixed between the lugs.  This work itself, which he
   takes to be either Italian or Austrian, may have cost more then some
   of the watches in his tray.  The boy immediately picks it up.
   
   Fontaine produces the tray.  "Look here.  You want to trade?  Gruen
   Curvex here.  Tudor 'London,' 1948; nice original dial.  Vulcain
   Cricket here, gold head, very clean."
   
   But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to
   divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him.
   Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what
   his father called "sharp practices," and he invariably fails.
   
   The boy is leaning forward over the tray, Fontaine forgotten.
   
   "Here," Fontaine says, sliding the tray aside and replacing it with
   his battered notebook. He opens it to the pages where he shops for
   watches.  "Just push this, then push this, it'll tell you what you're
   looking at."  He demonstrates.  A Jaeger with a silver face.
   
   Fontaine presses the second key.  "1945 Jaeger chronometer, stanless
   steel, original dial, engraving on the case back," says the notebook.
   
   "Case," the boy says.  "Back."
   
   "This," Fontaine shows the boy the stainless back of a gold-filled
   Tissot tank.  "But with writing on, like 'Joe Blow,  twenty-five years
   with Blowcorp, congratulations.'"
   
   The boy looks blank. Presses a key.  Another watch appears on the
   screen.  He presses the second key.  "A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour,
   chrome, brassing at lugs, dial very good."
   
   "'very good,'" Fontaine advises.  "Not good enough.  See these spots
   here?" Indicating certain darker flecks scattered across the scan.
   "If it were 'very fine,' sure."
   
   "Fine," says the boy, looking up at Fontaine.  He presses the key that
   produces the image of another watch.
   
   "Let me see that watch, ok?" Fontaine points at the watch in the boy's
   hand.  "It's okay. I'll give it back."
   
   The boy looks from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith &
   Wesson away in its pocket. Shows the boy his empty hands.
   
   "I'll give it back."
   
   The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.
   
   "You gonna tell me where you got this?"
   
   Blank.
   
   "You want a cup of coffee?"
   
   Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate.
   Smells its bitter brew, thickening.
   
   The boy understands.
   
   He shakes his head.
   
   Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles into contemplation.
   
   Damn.  He wants this watch.
   
   
   LATER in the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch, the
   Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine's gray tweed
   slacks, high-waisted and extravagantly pleated, but Fontaine knows
   that the watch is not his.  The boy has been put in the back of the
   shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides Fontaine's business
   from his private life, and Fontaine has become aware of the fact that
   he can, yes, smell his visitor; under the morning's coffee smell a
   definite and insistent reek of old sweat and unwashed cloths.
   
   As the bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine undoes the
   clips on his own box.  Tempura today, not his favorite for bento,
   because it cools, but still he's hungry. Stream wafts from the bowl of
   Miso as he unsnaps its plastic lid.  He pauses.
   
   "Hey," he says, back into the space behind the shop, "you want some
   Miso?" No reply. "Soup, you hear me?"
   
   Fontaine sighs, climbs off his wooden stool, and carries the steaming
   soup into the back of the shop.
   
   The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on his
   lap.  Fontaine sees the image of a large, very complicated chronometer
   floating there on the screen.  Something from the eighties, by the
   look of it.
   
   "You want some Miso?"
   
   "Zenith," says the boy.  "El Primero.  Stainless case.  Thirty-one
   jewels, 3019PHC movement.  Heavy stainless bracelet with flip lock.
   Original screwdown crown.  Crown dial and movement signed."
   
   Fontaine stares at him.
   
   
13 SECONDHAND DAYLIGHT

   
   YAMAZAKI returns with antibiotics, packaged foods, coffee in
   self-heating tins.  He wears a black nylon flight jacket and carries
   these things along with his notebook, in a blue mesh bag.
   
   He descends into the station through a crowd of only density, well
   before the evening rush hour. He has found it difficult to sleep, his
   dreams haunted by the perfict face of Rei Toei, who is in a sense his
   employer, and who in another sense does not exist.
   
   She is a voice, a face, familiar to millions.  She is a sea of code,
   and the ultimate expression of entertainment software.  Her audience
   knows that she does not walk among them; that she is media, purely.
   And that is a large part of her appeal.
   
   If not for Rei Toei, Yamazaki considers, Laney would not be here now.
   It was in the attempt to understand her, to second-guess her
   motivation, that had originally brought Laney to Tokyo.  In the employ
   of Rez's management team, the singer Rez having declared his intention
   to marry her.  And how, they asked, was that to be?  How could any
   human, even one so thoroughly mediated, marry a construct, a congeries
   of software, a dream?
   
   And Rez, the Chinese-Irish singer, the pop star, had tried.  Yamazaki
   knows this.  He knows sas much about his as any living human,
   including Rez, because Rei Toei has discussed it with him. He
   understands that Res exists as thoroughly, in the realm of digital, as
   it is possible for a living human to exist.  If Rez-the-man were to
   die, today, Rez-the-icon would certainly liveon.  But Rez's yearning
   was to go there, literally to go where Rei Toei is.  Or was, she
   having now effectively vanished.
   
   The singer had sought to join her in some realm of the digital or in
   some yet-not-imagined borderland, some intermediate state.  And had
   failed.
   
   But, has she gone there now? And why had Laney fled as well?
   
   Rez tours the Kombinant states now. Insists on traveling by rail.
   (p56) Station to station,  Moscow his gal, rumors of madness
   flickering in the band's wake.
   
   It is a dark business; Yamazaki thinks and wonders, taking the stairs
   to the cardboard city, what exactly Laney is about here. Speaking of
   nodal points in history, of some emerging patter in the texture of
   things. Of everything changing.
   
   Laney is a sport, a mutant, the accidental product of covert clinical
   trials of a drug that induced something oddly akin to psychic
   abilities in a small percentage of test subjects. But Laney isn't a
   psychic in any nonrational sense; rather he able, through the organic
   changes wrought long ago by 5-SB, this drug, to somehow perceive
   change emerging from vast flows of data.
   
   And now Rei Toei is gone, her management claims, and how can that be?
   Yamazaki suspects that Laney may know why, or where, and that is a
   factor in Yamazaki's having decided to return here and find him.  He
   has been extremely careful to avoid being followed, but he also knows
   that that can mean next to nothing.
   
   The smell of Tokyo subway, familiar as the smell of his mother's
   apartment, comforts him now.  It is a smell at once utterly
   distinctive and impossible to describe.  It is the smell of Japanese
   humanity, of which he very much feels  himself a part, as manifested
   in this singular environment, this would of tubes, white corridors, of
   whispering silver trains.
   
   He finds the passageway between the two escalators, the tiled
   columns.  He half suspects that the shelters will be gone.
   
   But they are here, and when he dons a white micropore mask and enters
   the model-builder's brightly lit hutch, nothing has changed except the
   kit the old man concentrates on now: a multi-headed dinosaur with
   robotic hind limbs in navy and silver.  The brush tip works in the eye
   of one reptilian head.  The old man does not look up.
   
   "Laney?"
   
   Nothing from behind the square of melon-yellow blanket.
   
   Yamazaki nods to the old man and crawls past on hands and knees,
   pushing his mesh bag of supplies before him.
   
   "Laney?"
   
   "Hush," Laney says, from the narrow fetid dark.  "He's talking,"
   
   "Who is talking?"  Pushing the bag past the limp, foam-filled fabric,
   its touch on his face reminding him of nursery school.
   
   As Yamazaki enters, Laney activates a projector in the clumsy
   eyephones:  the images he sees splay across Yamazaki, blinding him.
   Yamazaki twists to avoid the beam.  Sees figures framed in the
   secondhand daylight.  "--'magine he does this on a regular basis?"
   Hand-held but digitally stabilized.  "Something to do with the phases
   of the moon>"
   
   Zooms in on one of the figures, lean and male, as all are. Mouth
   obscured by a dark scarf.  Stiff black hair above a high white
   forehead.  "No evidence of that Opportunistic.  He waits for them to
   come to him.  Then he takes them.  These," and the camera swings
   smoothly to frame the face and bare chest of a dead man, eyes staring,
   "are jackers.  This one had dancer in his pocket."  There is a dark
   comma on the dead man's pale chest, just below the sternum.  "The
   other one was stabbed through the throat, but somehow he managed to
   miss the arteries."
   
   "He would," says the unseen man.
   
   "We have profiles," the man with the scarf says, off-camera, the face
   of the corpse thrown across Laney's cardboard wall, the melon blanket.
   "We have a full forensic psych run-up.  But you ignore them."
   
   "Of course I do."
   
   "You're in denial." Two pairs of hands, in latex gloves, grasp the
   dead man, flip him over. There is a second smaller wound visible,
   beneath one shoulder blade; blood has pooled within the body,
   darkened. "He poses as real a danger to you as to anyone else."
   
   "But he's interesting, isn't he?"
   
   The wound, in the close-up, is small a small unsmiling mouth.  The
   blood reads black.  "Not to me."
   
   "But you aren't interesting, are you?"
   
   "No," and the camera pans up, light catching a sharp cheekbone above
   the black scarf, "and you don't want me to be, do you?"
   
   There is a faint chime as the transmission is terminated.  Laney
   throws back his head, the image of the man with the scarf in
   freeze-frame across the ceiling of the carton, to bright, distorted,
   and Yamazaki sees that the cardboard there is shingled with tiny, self
   (58) adhesive printouts, dozens of different images of a bland-looking
   man, oddly familiar.  Yamazaki blinks, his contacts shifting, and
   misses his glasses.  He feels incomplete without them. "Who was that
   man, Laney?"
   
   "The help," Laney says.
   
   "'Help'?"
   
   "Hard to get good help these days." Laney kills the projector and
   removes the massive eyephones.   In the sudden gloom, his faces is
   reduced to a child's drawing, smudged black eyeholes against a pallid
   smear. "The man who was taking that call--"
   
   "The one who spoke?"
   
   "He owns the world.  Near as anyone does."
   
   Yamazaki frowns. "I have brought medicine--"
   
   "That was from the bridge, Yamazaki."
   
   "San Fancisco?"
   
   "They followed my other man there. They followed him, last night, but
   they lost him.  They always do.  This morning they found those
   bodies."
   
   "Followed who?"
   
   "The man who isn't there.  The one I'm having to infer."
   
   "These are pictures of Harwood?  Of Harwood Levine?"  Yamazaki has
   recognized the face replicated on the stickers.
   
   "Spooks are his.  Best money can buy, probably, but they can't get
   close to the man who isn't there."
   
   "What man?"
   
   "I think he's some Harwood .. collected.  Collects people. Interesting
   people. I think he might've worked for Harwood, taken commiions.  He
   doesn't leave a trace, none at all.  When he crosses someone's path,
   they're just gone.  Then he erases himself."
   
   Yamazaki fumbles in the antibiotics bag from his bag.  "Will you take
   these, Laney? Your cough--"
   
   "Where's Rydell, Yamazaki? He's supposed to be up there now. It's all
   coming together."
   
   "What is?"
   
   "I don't know,"  Laney says, leaning forward to dig through the
   contents of the bag. He finds a coffee and activates it, tossing it
   from hand to hand as it heats.  Yamazaki hears the pop, the vacuum
   hiss, as Laney opens it.  Smell of coffee.  Laney sips from steaming
   can.
   
   "Something's happening,' Laney says and coughs into his hand, slopping
   hot creamed coffee on Yamazaki's wrist.  Yamazaki flinches.
   "Everything's changing. Or it's not, really.  How I see it is
   changing.  But since I've been able to see it in the new way,
   something else has started.  There's something building up.  Big.
   Bigger then big.  It'll happen soon, then there'll be a cascade effect
   ..."
   
   "What will happen?"
   
   "I don't know."  Another fit of coughing requires that he set a side
   the coffee.  Yamazaki has opened the antibiotics and tries to offer
   them.  Laney waves them aside. "Have you been back to the island? Do
   they have any idea where she is?"
   
   Yamazaki blinks.  "No She is simply not present."
   
   Laney smiles, faint gleam of teeth against the darkness of his mouth.
   "That's good.  She's in it too, Yamazaki." He reaches for the coffee.
   "She's in it too". (60)
   
   
14. BeaKFAST, Cooking

   
    
   
   RYDELL found a place in one those buildings that had clearly been a
   bank, when banks had needed to have buildings.  Thick walls.  Someone
   had turned it into an all-day breakfast special place, and that was
   what Rydell was after.  Actually it looked like it had been some kind
   of discount store before that, and who knew what else before, but it
   had that eggs-and-grease smell, and he was hungry.
   
   There were a couple of size-large construction types, covered with
   white drywall dust, waiting for a table, but Rydell saw that the
   counter was empty, so he went over there and took a stool.  The
   waitress was a distracted-looking woman of indeterminate ancestry,
   acne scars sprinkled across her cheekbones, and she poured his coffee
   and took his order without actually indicting she understood English.
   Like the whole operation could be basically phonetic, he thought, and
   she' have learned the sound of "two eggs over easy" and the rest. Hear
   it, translate into whatever she wrote in, then give it to the cook.
   
   Rydell got the Brazilian glasses out, put them on, and scrolled for
   the number Yamazaki had given him in Tokyo.  Someone picked up on the
   third ring, but the glasses didn't map a location for the answering
   phone.  Probably meant another mobile.
   
   Silence on the line, but it had a texture.
   
   "Hey," Rydell said, "Yamazaki?"
   
   "Rydell? Laney--" Cut off by a burst of coughing and then dead silence
   as someone hit mute.
   
   "When Laney came back on, he sounded strangled.  "Sorry.  Where are
   you?"
   
   "San Fancisco," Rydell said.
   
   "I know that," Laney said.
   
   "In a diner on, on ..." Rydell was scrolling the CPS menu, trying to
   get in, but he kept getting what looked like Rio transit maps.
   
   "Never mind," Laney said.  Sounded tired.  What time would it be in
   Tokyo?  That would be in the phone menu, if he could find it.  "What
   matters is you're there."
   
   "Yamazaki said you had something for me to do up here."
   
   "I do," said Laney, and Rydell remembered his cousin's wedding,
   Clarence having sounded just about as happy, saying that.
   
   "You want to tell me what it is?"
   
   "No," said Laney, "but I want to put you on retainer.  Money up front
   for as long as you're up there."
   
   "Is it legal, Laney, what you want done?"
   
   There was a pause. "I don't know," Laney said.  "Some of it hasn't
   ever been done before probably, so it's hard to say."
   
   "Well, I think I need to know a little more then that before I can
   take it on," Rydell said, wondering hwo the hell he'd ever get back
   down to Los Angeles if this didn't pan out. Or indeed if there was any
   point in his going back.
   
   "You could say it's a missing person," Laney said after another pause.
   
   "Name?"
   "Doesn't have one.  Probably has a few thousand, more like it. Listen,
   you like cop stuff, right?"
   
   "What's that supposed to mean?"
   
   "No offense; you told me cop stories when I met you, remember? Okay:
   so this person I'm looking for is very, very good at not leaving
   traces.  Nothing ever turns up, not in the deepest quantitative
   analysis." Laney meant netsearch stuff; that was what he did.  "He's
   just a physical presence."
   
   "How do you know he's a physical presence if he doesn't leave traces?'
   
   "Because people die," Laney said.
   
   And just then there were people taking seats on either side of him and
   a sharp reek of vodka--
   
   "Get back to you," Rydell said, thumbing the pad and pulling the
   glasses off.
   
   Creedmore grinning on his left. "Howdy," said Creedmore. "This here's
   Marjane."(62)
   
   "Maryalice." On the stool to Rydell's right, a big old blonde with
   most of the top of her strapped up into something black and shiny, the
   unstrapped part forming a cleavage where Creedmore could easily wedged
   one of those pint bottles.  Rydell caught something deep in her tired
   eyes, some combination of fear, resignation, and a kind of automatic
   hope: she was not having a good morning, year, or life probably, but
   there was something there that wanted him to like her. Whatever it
   was, it stopped Rydell from getting up with his bag and walking out,
   which was really what he knew he should be doing.
   
   "Ain't you gonna say hi?"  Creedmoor's breath was toxic.
   
   "Hey, Maryalice," Rydell said.  "Name's Rydell.  Pleased to meet you."
   
   Maryalice smiled, about a decade's wear lifting, just for a second,
   from her eyes. "Buell here tells me you're from Los Angeles, Mr.
   Rydell."
   
   "Does he?" Rydell looked at Creedmore.
   
   "Are you in the media down there, Mr. Rydell?" she asked.
   
   "No," Rydell said, fixing Creedmore with the hardest look he could
   muster, "retail."
   
   "I'm in the music business myself," Maryalice said.  "My ex and I
   operated one of the most successful country music venues in Tokyo.
   But I felt the need to get back to my roots. To God's country, Mr.
   Rydell."
   
   "You talk to much," said Creedmore, across Rydell as the waitress
   brought Rydell's breakfast.
   
   "Buell," Rydell said, with something approximating of even good cheer,
   "shut the fuck up."  Rydell started cutting the hardened edges off his
   eggs.
   
   "Beer me," Buell said.
   
   "Oh, Buell," Maryalice said.  She hauled a big plastic zip bag up off
   the floor, some kind of advertising giveaway, and rummaged inside.
   Came up with a tall sweaty can of something she passed to Creedmore
   over Rydell's lap, under the counter.  Creedmore popped it, held it to
   his ear, as if admiring the hiss of carbonation.
   
   "Sound of breakfast cooking,' he said then drank.
   
   Rydell sat there, chewing his leathery eggs.
   
   
   "SO you go to this site," Laney was saying,  "give them my name,
   'Colin-space-Laney,' cap C, cap L, first four digits of this phone
   number, and 'Berry.'  That's your nickname, right?"
   
   "Actually it's my name," Rydell said.  "Family name on my mother's
   side."  He was seated in a capacious but none too clean cubicle in the
   former bank's restroom.  He'd gone in there to get away from Creedmore
   and company, and so he could ring Laney back.  "So I give them that.
   What'll they give me?"  Rydell looked up at his bag, where he'd hung
   it on the sturdy chrome hook on the cubicle door.  He hadn't wanted to
   leave it out in the restaurant.
   
   "They'll give you another number. You take that to any banking
   machine, show it picture ID, key the number.  It'll issue you a credit
   chip.  Should be enough to hold you for a few days, but if it's not,
   phone me."
   
   Something about being in there made Rydell feel like he was in cone of
   those old-fashioned submarine movies, the part where they shut off the
   engines and wait, really quiet, for the depths charges they know are
   on the way.  It was that quiet in here, probably because the bank was
   so solidly built; the only sound was the running of the toilet tank,
   which he thought added to the illusion.
   
   "Okay," Rydell said, "assuming all that works, who is it you're
   looking for, and what was that you said about people dying?"
   
   "European male, mid to late fifties, probably has a military
   background but that was a long time ago."
   
   "That narrows it to maybe a million probable, up here in NoCal alone."
   
   "How this is going to work, Rydell.  Is he'll find you. I'll tell you
   where to go and what to ask for, and one thing and another will bring
   you to his attention."
   
   "Sounds to easy."
   
   "Coming to his attention will be easy.  Staying alive once you do will
   not be."(64)
   
   Rydell considered.  "So what am I supposed to do for you when he finds
   me?"
   
   "Ask him a question."
   
   "What question?"
   
   "I don't know yet," Laney said. "I'm working on it."
   
   "If I knew that," Laney said, and suddenly he sounded very tired,  "I
   wouldn't have to be here." He fell silent. Clicked off.
   
   "Laney?"
   
   Rydell sat listening to the toilet run.  Eventually he got up, took
   his bag down from the hook, and exited the cubicle. He washed his
   hands in a trickle of cold water that ran into a black imitation
   marble sink crusted with yellowish industrial soap and made his way
   back along a corridor made narrow by cartons of what he took to be
   janitorial supplies.
   
   He hoped that Creedmore and the country music mamma would've forgotten
   about him, gone away.
   
   Not so.  The woman was working on her own plate of eggs, while
   Creedmore, his beer clipped between his denim thighs, was staring
   balefully t the two enormous, gypsum-dusted construction workers.
   
   "Hey," Creedmore said, as Rydell walked past, carrying his bag.
   
   "Hey, Buell," Rydell said, heading for the door to the street.
   
   "Hey, where you going?"
   
   "To work," Rydell said.
   
   "Work," he heard Creedmore say and "shit," but the door swung shut
   behind him, and he was on the street.
   
   
15 BAck Up Here

   
   CHEVETTE stood beside the van, watching Tessa Release God's Little
   Toy.  The camera platform, like a Mylar muffin or an inflated coin,
   caught the day's watery light as it rose wobbling, then leveled out,
   swaying, at fifteen feet or so.
   
   Chevette felt very strange, being here, seeing this: the concrete tank
   traps, beyond them the impossible shape of the bridge itself.  Where
   she had lived, though it now seemed a dream, or someone else's life,
   atop the nearest cable tower.  Way up in a cube of plywood there,
   sleeping while the wind's great hands shoved and twisted and clawed,
   and she'd heard the tendons of the bridge groan all in secret, a sound
   carried up the twisted strands for only her to hear, Chevette with her
   ear pressed against the graceful dolphin back of cable that rose
   through the oval hole sliced for it through Skinner's plywood floor.
   
   Now Skinner was dead, she knew.  He'd gone while she was in Los
   Angeles, trying to become whoever it was she'd thought she wanted to
   be.  She hadn't come up.  The bridge people weren't big on funerals,
   and possession, here, was most points of the law.  She wasn't
   Skinner's daughter, and even if she had been, and had wanted to hold
   his place atop the cable tower, it would've been a matter of staying
   there as long as she intended it to be her.  She hadn't wanted that.
   
   But she'd had no way to grieve him in Los Angeles, and now it all came
   up, came back, and time she'd lived with him. How he had found her, to
   sick to walk, and taken her home, feeding her soups he bought from the
   Korean vendors until she was well.  Then he'd left her alone, asking
   nothing, accepting her there the way you'd accept a bird on a
   windowsill, until she'd learned to ride a bicycle in the city and
   become a messenger. And soon the roles had reversed: the old man
   failing, needing help, and she the one to go for soup, bring water,
   see that coffee was made.  And that was how it had been, until she'd
   gotten herself into the trouble that had resulted in her first having
   met Rydell.(p66)
   
   "Wind'll catch that," she cautioned Tessa, who had put on the glasses
   that let her watch the feed from the floating camera.
   
   "I've got three more in the car," Tessa said, pulling a sleazy-looking
   black control glove over her right hand.  She experimented with the
   touch pads, revving the platform's miniature props and swinging it
   through a twenty-foot circle.
   
   "We've got to hire someone to watch the van," Chevette said, "if you
   want to see it again."
   
   "Hire someone? Who?"
   
   Chevette pointed at a thing black child with dusty dreadlocks to his
   waist.  "You.  What's your name?"
   
   "What's it to you?"
   
   "Pay you to watch this van.  We come back, chip you fifty.  Fair?"
   
   The boy regarded her evenly.  "Name Boomzilla," he said.
   
   "Boomzilla," Chevette said, "you take care of this van?"
   
   "Deal," he said.
   
   "Deal, Chevette said to Tessa.
   
   "Lady," Boomzilla said, pointing up at God's Little Toy, "I want
   that."
   
   Stick around," Tessa said.  "We'll need a grip."
   
   Tessa touching fingers to the black-padded palm.  The camera platform
   executing a second turn and gliding out of sight, above the tank
   traps. Tessa smiling, seeing what it saw.  "Come on," she said to
   Chevette and stepped between the nearest traps.
   
   "Not that way,"  Chevette said.  "Over here."  There was a path you
   followed if you were just walking through.  To take another route
   indicated either ignorance or the desire to do business.
   
   She showed Tessa the way.  It stank of urine between the concrete
   slabs. Chevette walked more quickly, Tessa behind her.
   
   And emerged again into that wet light, but here it ran not across the
   stalls and vendors of memory but across the red-and-white front of a
   modular convenience store, chunked down front and center across the
   entrance to the bridge's two levels, LUCKY DRAGON and the shudder of
   video up the trademark tower of screens.
   
   "Fucking hell," said Tessa, "how interstitial is that?"
   
   Chevette stopped, stunned. "How could hey do that?"
   
   "It's what they do," Tessa said.  "Prime location."
   
   "But it's like . . . Nissan County or something."
   
   "'Gated attraction.'  The community's a tourist draw, right?"
   
   "Lots of people won't go where there's no police."
   
   "Autonomous zones are their own draw," Tessa said.  "This one's been
   here long enough to become the city's number-one postcard."
   
   "God-awful," Chevette said.  "It . . . ruins it."
   
   "Who do you think Lucky Dragon Corp is paying rent to?" Tessa asked,
   swinging the platform around for a pan across the store.
   
   "No idea," Chevette said. "It's right in the middle of what used to be
   the street"
   
   "Never mind," Tessa said, moving on, into the pedestrian traffic
   flowing to and from the bridge. "We're just in time.  We're gong to
   document the life before it's theme-parked."
   
   Chevette followed, not knowing what it was exactly that she felt.
   
   
   THEY ate lunch in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.
   
   Chevette didn't remember it from before, but places changed names on
   the bridge.  They changed size and shape too. You'd get these strange
   mergers, a hair place and an oyster bar deciding to become a bigger
   place that cut hair and sold oysters.  Sometimes it worked: one of the
   longest-running places on the San Francisco end was an old-style,
   manual tattoo parlor that served breakfast.  You could sit there over
   a plate of eggs and bacon and watch somebody get needled with some
   kind of hand-drawn flash.
   
   But Dirty Is God was just Mexican food and Japanese music, a pretty
   straightforward proposition.  Tessa got the huevos rancheros and
   Chevette got a chicken quesadilla.  They both had a Corona, and Tessa
   parked the camera platform up near the tented plastic ceiling.  Nobody
   noticed it up there apparently, so Tessa could do the documentary
   while she ate.
   
   Tessa ate a lot.  She said it was her metabolism: one of those people
   who never gains any weight regardless of how much she ate, but she
   needed to do it keep her energy up.  Tessa put away her huevos before
   Chevette was halfway through her quesadilla.  She drained her glass
   (p68) bottle of Corona and started fiddling with the wedge of lime
   squeezing it, working it into the neck.
   
   "Carson," Tessa said. "You worried about him?"
   
   "What aobut him?"
   
   "He's an abusive ex, is what about him.  That was his car back in
   Malibu, wasn't it?"
   
   "I think so," Chevette said."
   
   "You think so? You aren't sure?"
   
   "Look," Chevette said, "It was early in the morning.  It was all
   pretty strange.  It wasn't my idea to come up here, you know? It was
   your idea. You want to make your movie."
   
   The lime popped down into the empty Corona bottle, and Tessa looked at
   it as though she'd just lost a private wager. "You know what I like
   about you? I mean one of the things I like about you?"
   
   "What?" Chevette asked.
   
   "You aren't middle class.  You just aren't.  You move in with this
   guy, he starts hitting you, what do you do?"
   
   "Move out."
   
   "That's right.  You move out.  You don't take a meeting with your
   lawyers."
   
   "I don't have any lawyers," Chevette said.
   
   "I know. That's what I mean."
   
   "I don't like lawyers," Chevette said.
   
   "Of course you don't. And you don't have any reflex to litigation."
   "Litigation?"
   
   "He beat you up. He's got eight hundred square feet of strata-title
   loft. He's got a job.  He beats you up, you don't automatically order
   a surgical strike; you're not middle class."
   
   "I just don't want anything to do with him."
   
   "That's what I mean.  You're from Oregon, right?"
   
   "More or less," Chevette said.
   
   "You ever think of acting?" Tessa inverted the bottle.  The squashed
   lime wedge fell down into the neck.  A few drops of beer fell on the
   scratched black plastic of the table.  Tessa inserted the little
   finger of her right hand and tried to snag the lime wedge.
   
   "No."
   
   "Camera loves you. You've got a body makes boys chew carpet."
   
   "Get off," Chevette said.
   
   "Why do you think they were putting those party shorts of you up on
   the website back in Malibu?"
   
   "Because they were drunk," Chevette said. "Because they don't have
   anything better to do. Because they're media students."
   
   Tessa hooked the lime wedge, what was left of it, out of the bottle.
   
   "Right on all three," she said, "but the main reason's your looks."
   
   Behind Tessa, on one of Dirty Is God's recycled wall screens, a very
   beautiful Japanese girl had appeared. "Look at her," Chevette said.
   "That's looks, right?"
   
   Tessa looked over her shoulder. "That's Rei Toei," she said.
   
   "So she's beautiful. She is."
   
   "Chevette," Tessa said, "she doesn't exist.  There's no live girl
   there at all.  She's code.  Software."
   "No way," Chevette said.
   
   "You didn't know that?"
   
   "But she's based on somebody, right? Some kind of motion-capture
   deal."
   
   "Nobody," Tessa said. "Nothing.  She's th real deal.  Hundred-percent
   unreal."
   
   "Then that's what people want," Chevette said, watching Rei Toei swan
   through some kind of retro Asian nightclub, "not ex bicycle messengers
   from San Francisco."
   "No," Tessa said, "You've got it exactly backwards.  People don't know
   what they want, not before they see it.  Every object of desire is a
   found object.  Traditionally, anyway."
   
   Chevette looked at Tessa across the   tow empty Corona bottles.
   
   "What are you getting at, Tessa?"
   
   "The documentary. It has to be about you."
   
   "Forget it."
   
   "No.  I've got vision thing working big-time on this.  I need you for
   the focus. I need narrative traction.  I need Chevette Washington."
   
   Chevette was actually starting to feel a little scared.  It made her
   (p70) angry. "Don't you have a grant to do this one particular project
   you've been talking about?  These innersitual things--"
   
   "Look," Tessa said, "if that's a problem, and I'm not saying it is,
   it's my problem.  And it's not a problem, it's an opportunity. It's a
   shot.  My shot."
   
   "Tessa, there is no way you are going to get me to act in your movie.
   None.  You understand?"
   
   "'Acting' isn't in it, Chevette. All you have to do is be yourself.
   And that will involve finding out who you really are.  I am going to
   make a film about you finding out who you really are."
   
   "You are not," said Chevette.  Getting up and actually bumping onto
   the camera platform, which must have descended to level with her head
   while they were talking.  "Stop that!" Swatting at God's Little Toy.
   
   The other four customers in Dirty Is God just looking at them.
   
   
   
16 SUB-ROUTINES

   
   THAT Hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying absence, he
   begins to suspect, is not  so much an absence in the self as of the
   self.
   
   Something has happened to him since his decent into the cardboard
   city.  He has started to see that previously he had, in some
   unthinkably literal way, no self.
   
   But what was there, he wonders, before?
   
   Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to
   approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney.  And
   he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always,
   somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly
   wrong.
   
   Something tells him this.  Something in the core and totality, it
   seems, of DatAmerica.  How can that be?
   
   But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the
   earth's core, and beyond the cardboard walls are wall of concrete,
   sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country,
   Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces,
   the shifting of continent-wide plates.
   
   Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting.  There is
   movement, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why
   he is no longer afraid.
   
   And all of this somehow a gift of the sickness.  Not of the cough, the
   fever, but that underlying dis-ease that he takes to be the product of
   the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.
   
   We were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and
   follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging
   down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractially
   differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding
   some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.
   
   Something at once noun and verb.
   
   While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of
   informa-(p72)-tion, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a
   Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context.  A microscopic cog
   in some catastrophic plan.  But positioned, he senses, centrally.
   
   Crucially.
   
   And that is why sleep is no longer an option.
   
   
17. ZODIAC

   
   THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long face and the
   fat white man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls.
   Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black plastic pipes
   above.  Falls harder, stings.
   
   They have taken his clothes and shoes away in a plastic bag, and now
   the fat man returns, gives him soap. He knows soap.  He remembers the
   warm rain falling from a pipe in los projectos but this is better, and
   he is alone in the tall wooden room.
   
   Silencio with his belly full, soaping himself repeatedly, because that
   is what they want.  He rubs the soap into his hair.
   
   He closes his eyes against the burning of the soap and sees the
   watches arrayed beneath greenish, randomly abraded glass, like fish
   from some warmer season frozen hard in lake ice.  Bright highlights
   off steel and gold.
   
   He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended; the multifold fact
   of these potent objects, their endless differentiation, their
   individual specificities.  Infinite variety arising from the
   expression of dial, hands, numerals, hour markers ... He likes the
   warm rain but he needs desperately to return, to see more, to hear the
   words.
   
   He has become the words, what they mean.
   
   Breguette hands. Tapestry dial.  Bombay lugs. Original stem. Signed.
   
   The rain slows, stops. The fat man, who wears plastic sandals, brings
   Silencio a think dry cloth.
   
   The fat man peers at him.  "Watches, you say he likes?" the fat man
   asks the black man.  "Yes," the black man says, "he seems to like
   watches."
   
   The bearded man drapes the towel around Silencio's shoulders.
   
   "Does he know how to tell time?"
   
   "I don't know," says the black man.
   
   "Well," says the fat man, stepping back, "he doesn't know how to use a
   towel."
   
   Silencio feels confused, ashamed.  He looks down.
   
   "Leave him alone, Andy," the black man says. "Get me those clothes I
   brought."
   
   
   
   THE black mans' name: Fontaine.  Like a word in the language of los
   projectos, a meaning about water.  The warm rain in the wooden room.
   
   Now Fontaine leads him through the upper level, where some people call
   out, selling fruit, past others selling old things spread on blankets,
   to where a think dark man stands waiting beside a plastic crate.  The
   crate is upturned, its bottom padded with foam and ragged silver tape,
   and this man wears a striped cloth thing with pockets down his front,
   and in the pockets are scissors, and things like the thing Raton liked
   to run endlessly through his hair, when he had balanced the black
   perfectly with white.
   
   Silencio is wearing the clothes Fontaine has given him: they are
   large, loose, not his own, but they smell good. Fontaine has given him
   shoes made of white cloth.  Too white.  They hurt his eyes.
   
   The soap and the warm rain have made Silencio's hair strange as well,
   and now Fontaine tells Silencio to sit upon the crate, this man will
   cut his hair.
   
   Silencio sits, trembling, as the thin dark man flicks at his hair with
   one of the Raton-things from his pockets, making small noises behind
   his teeth.
   
   Silencio looks at Fontaine.
   
   "It's okay," Fontaine says, unwrapping a small sharp stick of wood and
   inserting it into the corner of his mouth, "you wont' feel a thing."
   
   Silencio wonders if the stick is like the black or the white, but
   Fontaine does not change.  He stands there with the stick in his
   mouth, watching the thin dark man snip away Silencio's hair with the
   scissors. Silencio watches Fontaine, listens to the sound of the
   scissors, and to the new language in his head.
   
   Zodiac Sea Wolf.  Case very clean.  Screw-down crown.  Original bezel.
   
   "Zodiac Sea Wolf," Silencio says.
   
   "Man," says the thin dark man, "you deep."
   
   
18. SELWYN TONG

   
   RYDELL had a theory about virtual real estate.  The smaller and
   cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and
   cheesier the website.  According to this theory, Selwyn F.X. Tong,
   notary public, of Kowloon, was probably opperating out of a rolled-up
   newspaper.
   
   Rydell couldn't' figure out a way to skip the approach segment, which
   was monolithic, vaguely Egyptian, and reminded him of what his buddy
   Sublett, a film buff, had called "corridor metaphysics." This was one
   long-ass corridor, and if it had been physical, you could've driven a
   very large truck down it.  There were baroque sconce lights, virtual
   scarlet wall-to-wall, and weird tacky texture mapping that tended to
   gold-flecked marble.
   
   Where had Laney found this guy?
   
   Eventually Rydell did manage to kill the music, something vaguely
   classing and swelling, but it still seemed to take him three minutes
   to get to Selwyn F.X. Tong's doors.  Which were tall, very tall, and
   mapped to resemble some generic idea of tropical hardwood.
   
   "Teak my ass," said Rydell.
   
   "Welcome," said a breathless, hyper-feminine voice, "to the offices of
   Selwyn F.X. Tong, notary public!"
   
   The doors swung open. Rydell figured that if he hadn't killed the
   music, it would be peaking about now.
   
   Virtually, the notary's office was about the size of an Olympic pool
   but scarce on detail.  Rydell used the rocker-pad on his glasses to
   scoot his POV right up to the desk, which was about the size of a pool
   table, and mapped in the same ramped-down wood look.  There were a
   couple of nondescript, metallic-looking objects on it and a few pieces
   of virtual paper.
   
   "What's the 'F.X.' stand for?" Rydell asked.
   
   "Francis Xavier," said tong, who presented as a sort of deadpan
   cartoon of a small Chinese man in a white shirt, black tie, black
   suit. His (p76) black hair and black suit were mapped in the same
   texture; a weird effect and one Rydell took to be unintentional.
   
   "I thought you might be in video," Rydell said, "like it's a nickname:
   FX, 'effects,' right?"
   
   "I am Catholic," Tong said, his tone neutral.
   
   "No offence," Rydell said.
   
   "None taken," said Tong, his plastic-looking face as shiny as his
   plastic-looking eyes.
   
   You always forgot, Rydell reflected, just how bad this stuff could
   look if it hadn't been handled right.
   
   "What can I do for you, Mr. Rydell?"
   
   "Laney didn't tell you?"
   
   "Laney?"
   
   "Colin," Rydell said. "Space.  Laney."
   
   "And ...?"
   
   "Six," Rydell said.  "Zero. Four. Two."
   
   Tong's plastic-looking eyes narrowed.
   
   "Berry."
   
   Tong pursed his lips.  Behind him, through a broad window, at a
   different rate of resolution, Rydell could see the skyline of Hong
   Kong.
   
   "Berry," Rydell repeated.
   
   "Thank you, Mr. Rydell," the notary said.  "My client has authorized
   me to give you this seven-digit identification number." A gold
   fountain pen appeared in Tong's right hand, like a continuity error in
   a student film. It was a very large pen, elaborately mapped with
   swirling dragons, their scales in higher resolution then anything else
   in the site.  Probably a gift, Rydell decided.  Tong wrote the seven
   digits on one of the sheets of virtual paper, then reversed on the
   desktop so that Rydell could read it.  The pen had vanished, as
   unnaturally as it had appeared.  "Please don't repeat this number
   aloud," Tong said.
   
   "Why not?"
   
   "Issues of encryption," Tong said obscurely.  "You have as long as you
   like to memorize the number."
   
   Rydell looked at the seven digits and began to work out a mnemonic.
   He finally arrived at one based on his birthday, the number of states
   when he was born, his father's age when he'd died, and a mental image
   of two cans of 7-Up.  When he was certain that he'd be able to recall
   the number, he looked up at Tong.  "Where do I go to get the credit
   chip?"
   
   "Any automated teller.  You have photo identification?"
   
   "Yes," Rydell said.
   
   "Then we are finished."
   
   "One thing," Rydell said.
   
   "What is that?"
   
   "Tell me how I get out of here without having to go back down that
   corridor of yours.  I just want a straight exit, right?"
   
   "Tong regarded him blandly. "Click on my face."
   
   Rydell did, using the rocker-pad to summon a cursor shaped like a neon
   green cartoon hand, pointing.  "Thanks," he said, as Tong's office
   folded.
   
   He was in the corridor, facing back to the way he had come.
   
   "Damn," Rydell said.
   
   The music began.  He worked the rocker-pad, trying to remember how
   he'd killed it before.  He wanted to get a GPS fix on the nearest ATM,
   though, so he didn't unplug the glasses.
   
   He clicked for the end of the corridor.
   
   The click seemed to trigger a metastatic surge of bit rot, every bland
   texture map rewritten in some weirder hand: the red carpet went
   gray-green, its knap grown strange and unevenly furry, like something
   at the bottom of a month old cup of coffee, while the walls went from
   whore-house marble to a moist fish-belly parlor, the sconce lights
   glowing dim and drowned in corpse candles.  Tong's fake-classical
   theme cracked and hollowed, weird bass notes rumbling in just above
   the threshold of the subsonic.
   
   It all took about a second to happen, and it took Rydell maybe another
   second to get the idea that someone wanted his undivided attention.
   
   "Rydell." It was on of those voices that they fake up from found
   audio: speech cobbled from wind down skyscraper canyons, the creaking
   of Great Lakes ice, tree frogs clanging in the Southern night.  Rydell
   (p78) had heard them before.  They grated on the nerves, as they were
   meant to, and conveniently disguised the voice of the speaker.
   Assuming the speaker had a voice in the first place.
   
   "Hey," Rydell said,  "I was just trying to click out."
   
   A virtual screen appeared in front of him, round-cornered rectangle
   whose dimensions were meant to invoke the cultural paradigm of
   twentieth-century video screens.  On it, an oddly angled,
   monochromatic view of some vast shadowy space, dimly lit from above.
   Nothing there.  Impressions of decay, great age.
   
   "I have important information for you." The vowel in you suggested a
   siren dopplering past, then gone.
   
   "Well," said Rydell, "if your middle name is 'F.X.,' you're sure going
   to some trouble."
   
   There was a pause, Rydell staring at the dead, blank space depicted or
   recorded on the screen.  He was waiting for something to move there;
   probably that was the point of it, that nothing did.
   
   "you'd better take this information very seriously, Mr.  Rydell."
   
   "I'm serious as cancer," Rydell said.  "Shoot."
   
   "Use the ATM at the Lucky Dragon, near the entrance to the bridge.
   Then present your identification at GlobEx franchise at the rear of
   the store."
   
   "Why?"
   
   "They're holding something for you."
   
   "Tong," Rydell said, "is that you?"
   
   But there was no answer.  The screen vanished, and the corridor was as
   it had been. Rydell reached up and disconnected the rented cable from
   the Brazilian glasses.
   
   Blinked.
   
   A coffee place near Union Square, the kind that had potted plants and
   hot desks.  An early office crowd was starting to line up for
   sandwiches.
   
   He got up, folded the glasses, tucked them into the inside pocket of
   his jacket, and picked up his bag.
   
   
19.   INTERSTITIAL

   
   CHEVETTE moves past the colorless flame of a chestnut vendor's
   charcoal fire, powdery gray burning itself down in the inverted,
   V-nosed hood of some ancient car.
   
   She sees another fire, in memory: coke glow of a smith's forge, driven
   by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner.  Beside her the old man held the
   drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly into a compact
   mass and fastened with a twist of rusty wire.  To be taken in the
   smith's tongs and placed within the forge.  To be beaten, finally,
   incandescent, into a billet of their strangely grained Damascus,
   ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is forged, quenched,
   shaped, and polished on the wheel.
   
   Where did that knife go? She wonders.
   
   She'd watched the maker craft and braise a hilt of brass, rivet slabs
   of laminated circuit board and shape them on a belt grinder.  The
   rigid, brittle-looking bard, layers of fabric trapped in green
   phenolic resin, was everywhere on the bridge, a common currency of
   landfills.  Each sheet mapped with dull metallic patterns suggesting
   cities, streets.  When they came from the scavengers they were studded
   with components, easily stripped with a torch, melting the gray
   solder.  The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards
   with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue of the second
   age of electronics.  And skinner would tell her that these boards were
   immortal, inert as stone, proof against the moisture and ultraviolet
   and every form of decay; that they were destined t little the planet,
   hence it was good to reuse them, work them when possible into the
   fabric of things, a resource when something needed to be durable.
   
   She knows she needs to be alone now, so she's left Tessa on the lower
   level, collecting visual texture with God's Little Toy. Chevette can't
   hear any more about how Tessa's film has to be more personal, about
   her Chevette, and Tessa hasn't been able to shut up about that, (p80)
   or take no for an answer. Chevette remembers Bunny Malatesta, her
   dispatcher when she rode here, how he'd say "and what part of 'no' is
   it that you don't understand?"  But Bunny could deliver lines like
   that as though he were a force of nature, and Chevette knows she
   can't, that she lacks Bunny's gravity, the sheer crunch required to
   get it across.
   
   So she's taken an escalator, one she doesn't remember, to the upper
   level, and is making her way, without really thinking about it, to the
   foot of the tower, the wet light having turned to a thin and gusting
   rain, blowing through the bridge's tattered secondhand
   superstructure.  People are hauling their laundry in, where they've
   hung it, draped on lines, and there's a general pre-storm bustle that
   she knows will fade if the weather changes.
   
   And so far, she thinks, she's not seen a single face she knows from
   before, and no one has greeter her, and she finds herself imagining
   the bridge's entire population replaced in her absence.  No, there
   went the bookstall woman, the one with the ivory chopsticks thrust
   into her dyed black bun, and she recognizes the Korean boy with the
   bad leg, rumbling his fathers soup wagon along as though it should
   have breaks.
   
   The tower she'd ascended each day to Skinner's plywood shack is
   bundled in subsidiary construction, its iron buried at the core of an
   organic complex of spaces appropriated for specific activities.
   Behind taut, wind-shivered sheets of milky plastic, the unearthly
   light of a hydroponics operation casts outsize leaf shadows.  She
   hears the snarl of an electric saw from the tiny workshop of
   furniture-maker, whose assistant sits patiently, rubbing wax into a
   small bench collaged from paint0flecked oak scavenged from the shells
   of older houses.  Someone else is making jam, the big copper kettle
   heated by a propane ring.
   
   Perfect for Tessa, she thinks: the bridge people maintaining their
   interstices.  Doing their little things.  But Chevette has seen them
   drunk.  Has seen the drugged and the mad dive to their deaths in the
   gray and unforgiving chop.  Has seen men fight to the death with
   knives.  Has seen a mother dumbstruck, walking with a strangled child
   in her arms, at dawn. The bridge is no tourist's fantasy.  The bridge
   is real, and to live here exacts its own price.
   
   It is a world within the world, and, if there be such places between
   the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there
   are things there, and places between them, and things in those places
   too.  And Tessa doesn't know this, and its not Chevette's plan to tell
   her.
   
   She ducks past a loose flap of plastic, into moist warmth and the
   spectrum of grow lamps.  A reek of chemicals.  Black water pumped amid
   pale roots.  These are medicinal plants, she supposes, but probably
   not drugs in the street sense.  Those are grown nearer Oakland, in a
   sector somehow allotted for that, and on warm days the fug of resin
   hangs narcotic in the air, bringing an almost perceptible buzz, faint
   alteration of perception and the will
   
   "Hey.  Anybody here?"
   
   Gurgle of liquid through transparent tubing.  A silt-slimed pair of
   battered yellow waders dangle nearby, but no sign of who hung them
   there.  She moves quickly, her feet remembering, to where corroded
   aluminum rungs protrude from first-size blobs of super-epoxy.
   
   The ball-chain zip pulls on Skinner's old jacket jingle as she
   climbs.  These rungs are a back way, an emergency exit if needed.
   
   Climbing past the sickly greenish sun of a glow lamp, housed in a
   corroded industrial fixture, she pulls herself up on the last aluminum
   rung and through a narrow triangular opening.
   
   It is dark here, shaded by walls of rain-swollen composite.  Shadowed
   where she remembers light, and she sees that the bulb, above, in this
   enclosed space, is missing.  This is the lower end of Skinner's
   "funicular," the little junkyard elevator trolley, built for him by a
   black man named Fontaine, and it was here that she'd lock her bike in
   her messengering days, after shouldering it up another, less covert
   ladder.
   
   She studies the cog-toothed track of the funicular, where the grease
   shows dull with accumulated dust.  The gondola, a yellow municipal
   recycling bin, deep enough to stand in and grasp the rim, waits where
   it should.  But if it is here, it likely means that the current
   resident of the cable tower is not.  Unless the car has been sent in
   expectation of a visitor, witch Chevette doubts. It is better to be up
   there with the car up.  She knows that feeling.
   
   Now she climbs wooden rungs, a cruder ladder of two-by-fours, (p82)
   until her head clears the ply and she winces in wind and silvery
   light.  Sees a gull hang almost stationary in the air, not twenty feet
   away, the towers of the city as a backdrop.
   
   The wind tugs at her hair, longer now then when she lived here, and a
   felling that she can't name comes like something she has always known,
   and she has no interest in climbing father, because she knows now that
   the home she remembers is no longer there.  Only its shell, humming in
   the wind, where once she lay wrapped in blankets, smelling machinist's
   grease and coffee and fresh-cut wood.
   
   Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being
   somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring.
   
   And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was she scarcely
   know it.
   
   She hunches her shoulders, drawing her neck down into the carapace of
   Skinner's jacket, and imagines herself crying, through she knows she
   won't, and climbs back down.

References

   1. http://delmoi.dhs.org/lib/volt.ttf