23.
But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful Groupvine soaring joyfully behind her as Laney grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he took then and forever as a look of simple recognition, not even of blame.
“This isn't working,” she said, as though she were indicating a minor appliance, and Laney heard himself whimper, a sound he hadn't made since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but couldn't, holding her. He was walking her backward, toward a wicker armchair he wasn't even aware he'd seen.
“Sit,” he said, as if to a stubborn child, and she did. He let go of her wrists. Ran for where he guessed the bathroom had to be. Towels there and some kind of tape.
And discovered himself kneeling beside her where she sat, red fingers curled in toward red palms, as if in meditation. He rolled a dark green hand towel around her left wrist and whipped the tape around it, some rubbery beige product meant to mask specific areas during the application of aerosol cosmetics. He knew that from her product-purchase data.
Were her fingers turning blue, beneath their coat of red? He looked up. Into that same recognition. One cheekbone brushed with blood.
“Don't,” he said.
“It's slowing.”
Laney wrapping her right forearm now, the tape-roll dangling from his teeth.
“I missed the artery.”
“Don't move,” Laney said, and sprang up, tripping over his own feet, crashing face-first into what he recognized, just before it broke his nose, as the work of the editor of lamps. The carpet seemed to whip up and smack him playfully in the face.
“Alison—”
Her ankle stepping past him, kitchenward.
“Alison, sit down!”
“Sorry,” he thought he heard her say, and then the shot.
Blackwell's shoulders heaved as he sighed, making a sound that Laney heard above the traffic. Yamazaki's glasses were filled with jittering pastels, the walls here all neon, a glare to shame Vegas, every surface lit and jumping.
Blackwell was staring at Laney. “This way,” he said, finally, and rounded a corner, into relative darkness and an edge of urine. Laney followed, Yamazaki behind him. At the far end of the narrow passage, they emerged into fairyland.
No neon here at all. Ambient glow from the towers overhead. Austere rectangles of white frosted glass, the size of large greeting cards, were daubed with black ideograms, each sign marking a tiny structure like some antique bathing cabin on a forgotten beach. Crowded shoulder to shoulder down one side of the cobbled lane, their miniature facades suggested a shuttered sideshow in some secret urban carnival. Age-silvered cedar, oiled paper, matting; nothing to pin the place in time but the fact that the signs were electric.
Laney stared. A street built by leprechauns.
“Golden Street,” said Keith Alan Blackwell.
8. Narita
Chia deplaned behind Maryalice, who'd had a couple of those vitamin drinks and then tied up one of the toilets for twenty minutes while she teased her extensions and put on lipstick and mascara. Chia couldn't say much for the result, which looked less like Ashleigh Modine Carter than something Ashleigh Modine Carter had slept on.
When Chia stood up, she felt like she had to tell her body to do every single thing she needed it to. Legs: move.
She'd gotten a few more hours sleep, somewhere back there. She'd packed her Sandbenders back in her bag, and now she was putting one foot in front of the other, as Maryalice, in front of her, shuffle-swayed along the narrow aisle in her white cowboy boots.
It seemed to take forever to get out of the plane, but then they were breathing airport air in a corridor, under big logos that Chia had known all her life, all those Japanese companies, and everything crowded and moving in one direction. “You check anything?” Maryalice asked, beside her.
“No,” Chia said.
Maryalice let Chia go ahead of her through Passport Control, where Chia gave the Japanese policeman her passport and the Cash-flow smartcard Zona Rosa had forced Kelsey to come up with because this was all Kelsey's idea anyway. In theory, the amount in the card represented the bulk of the Seattle chapter's treasury, but Chia suspected Kelsey would wind up footing the bill for the whole thing, and probably wouldn't even care.
The policeman pulled her passport out of the counter-slot and handed it back to her. He hadn't bothered to check the smartcard. “Two week maximum stay,” he said, and nodded her on.
Frosted glass slid open for her. It was crowded here, way more than SeaTac. So many planes must've come in at once, to have all these people waiting for their luggage. She edged aside to let a little robot stacked with suitcases pass. It had dirty pink rubber tires and big cartoon eyes that rolled morosely as it made its way through the crowd.
“Now, that was easy,” said Maryalice, behind her. Chia turned in time to see her take a long deep breath, hold it, and let it out. Maryalice's eyes looked pinched, like she was having a headache.
“Do you know which way I should go to get the train?” Chia asked. She had maps in her Sandbenders, but she didn't want to have get it out now.
“This way,” Maryalice said.
Maryalice worked her way between people, Chia following with her bag under her arm. Emerging in front of a carousel where bags were sliding down a ramp, bumping, swinging past and away.
“Here's one,” Maryalice said, snagging a black one and sounding so forcefully cheerful that it made Chia look at her. “And… two.” Another one like it, except this one had a sticker on the side from Nissan County, the third largest gated attraction in the Californias. “Would you mind carrying this for me, honey? My back goes out on long plane rides.” Passing Chia the bag with the sticker. It wasn't too heavy, like maybe it was only half-full of clothes. But it was too large for her; she had to lean over in the opposite direction to keep it off the ground.
“Thanks,” Maryalice said. “Here,” and she handed Chia a crumpled square of sticky-backed paper with a bar code on it. “That's the check. Now we just want to go this way…”
It was even harder getting through the crowd, lugging Maryalice's bag. Chia had to concentrate on not stepping on people's feet, and not bumping them too hard with the bag, and the next thing she knew, she'd lost Maryalice. She looked around, expecting to see hair-extensions bobbing above the crowd, who were mostly shorter than Maryalice, but Maryalice was nowhere in sight.
ALL ARRIVING PASSENGERS MUST EXIT THROUGH CUSTOMS.
Chia watched the sign twist itself up into Japanese letters, then pop back out as English.
Well, that was the way to go. She got in line behind a man in a red leather jacket that said “Concept Collision” across the back in gray chenille letters. Chia stared at that, imagining concepts colliding, which she guessed was a concept in itself, but then she thought it was probably just the name of a company that fixed cars, or one of those slogans the Japanese made up in English, the ones that almost seemed to mean something but didn't. This trans-Pacific jet lag thing was serious.
“Next.”
They were feeding Concept Collision's suitcase through a machine the size of a double bed, but taller. There was an official of some kind in a video-helmet, evidently reading feed off the scanners, and another policeman, to take your passport, slot it in the machine, then put your bags through. Chia let him take Maryalice's suitcase and flip it up, onto the conveyor. Chia handed him her carry-on. “There's a computer in there. This scan okay for that?” He didn't seem to hear her. She watched her carry-on follow Maryalice's bag into the machine.
The man in the helmet, eyes hidden, was bobbing his head from side to side as he accessed gaze-activated menus.
“Baggage check,” the policeman said, and Chia remembered she had it in her hand. It struck her as strange, handing it over, that Maryalice had thought to give her that. The policeman ran a hand-scanner over it.
“You packed these bags yourself?” asked the man in the helmet. He couldn't see her dire
ctly, but she assumed he could see the clips stored in her passport, and he could probably see her on live feed as well. Airports were full of cameras.
“Yes,” Chia said, deciding it was easier than trying to explain that it was Maryalice's bag, not hers. She tried to read the expression on the helmeted man's lips, but it was hard to say if he even had one.
“You packed this?”
“Yes…” Chia said, not sounding nearly as certain this time.
The helmet bobbed.
“Next,” he said.
Chia went to the other end of the machine and collected her bag and the black suitcase.
Through another sliding wall of frosted glass: she was in a larger hall, beneath a higher ceiling, bigger ads overhead but no thinning of the crowd. Maybe this wasn't so much a matter of crowds as it was of Tokyo, maybe of Japan in general: more people, closer together.
More of those robot baggage carts. She wondered what it cost to rent one. You could lie down on top of your luggage, maybe, tell it where you wanted to go, and then just go to sleep. Except she wasn't sure she felt sleepy, exactly. She transferred Maryalice's bag from her left to her right hand, wondering what to do with it if she didn't find Maryalice inside the next, say, five minutes. She'd had enough of airports and the space between them, and she wasn't even sure where she was supposed to sleep tonight. Or if it was night, even.
She was looking up, hoping to find some kind of time display, when a hand closed around her right wrist. She looked down at the hand, saw gold rings and a watch to match, fat links of a gold bracelet, the rings connected to the watch with little gold chains.
“That's my suitcase.”
Chia's eyes followed the hand's wrist to a length of bright white cuff, then up the arm of a black jacket. To pale eyes in a long face, each cheek seamed vertically, as if with a modelling instrument. For a second she took him for her Music Master, loose somehow in this airport. But her Music Master would never wear a watch like that, and this one's hair, a darker blond, was swept back, long and wet-looking, from his high forehead. He didn't look happy.
“Maryalice's suitcase,” Chia said.
“She gave it to you? In Seattle?”
“She asked me to carry it.”
“From Seattle?”
“No,” Chia said. “Back there. She sat beside me on the plane.”
“Where is she?”
“I don't know,” Chia said.
He wore a black, long-coated suit, buttoned high. Like some-thing from an old movie, but new and expensive-looking. He seemed to notice that he was still holding her wrist; now he let it go.
“I'll carry it for you,” he said. “We'll find her.”
Chia didn't know what to do. “Maryalice wanted me to carry it.”
“You did. Now I'll carry it.” He took it from her.
“Are you Maryalice's boyfriend? Eddie?”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“You could say that,” he said.
Eddie's car was a Daihatsu Graceland with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Chia knew that because Rez had ridden in the back of one in a video, except that that one had had a bath in it, black marble, big gold faucets shaped like tropical fish. People had posted that that was an ironic take on money, on the really ugly things you could do with it if you had too much. Chia had told her mother about that. Her mother said there wasn't much point in worrying what you might do if you had too much, because most people never even had enough. She said it was better to try to figure out what “enough” actually meant.
But Eddie had one, a Graceland, all black and chrome. From the outside it looked sort of like a cross between an RV and one of those long, wedge-shaped Hummer limousines. Chia couldn't imagine there'd be much of a Japanese market; the cars here all looked like little candy-colored lozenges. The Graceland was meshback pure and simple, designed to sell to the kind of American who made a point of trying not to buy imports. Which, when it came to cars, definitely narrowed your options. (Hester Chen's mother had one of those really ugly Canadian trucks that cost a fortune but were guaranteed to last for eighty-five years; that was supposed to be better for the ecology.)
Inside, the Graceland was all burgundy velour, puffed up in diamonds, with little chrome nubs where the points of the diamonds met. It was about the tackiest thing Chia had ever seen, and she guessed Maryalice thought so too, because Maryalice, seated next to her, was explaining that it was an “image” thing, that Eddie had this very hot, very popular country-music club called Whiskey Clone, so he'd gotten the Graceland to go with that, and he'd also started dressing the way they did in Nashville. Maryalice thought that look suited him, she said.
Chia nodded. Eddie was driving, talking in Japanese on a speakerphone. They'd found Maryalice at a tiny little bar, just off the arrivals area. It was the third one they'd looked in. Chia got the feeling that Eddie wasn't very happy to see Maryalice, but Maryalice hadn't seemed to care.
It was Maryalice's idea that they give Chia a ride into Tokyo. She said the train was too crowded and it cost a lot anyway. She said she wanted to do Chia a favor, because Chia had carried her bag for her. (Chia had noticed that Eddie had put one bag in the Graceland's trunk, but kept the one with the Nissan County sticker up front, next to him, beside the driver's seat.)
Chia wasn't really listening to Maryalice now; it was some time at night and the jet lag was too weird and they were on this big bridge that seemed to be made out of neon, with however many lanes of traffic around them, the little cars like, strings of bright beads, all of them shiny and new. There were screens that kept blurring past, tall and narrow, with Japanese writing jumping around on some of them, and people on others, faces, smiling as they sold something.
And then a woman's face: Rei Toei, the idoru Rez wanted to marry. And gone.
9. Out of Control
“Rice Daniels, Mr. Laney. Out of control.” Pressing a card of some kind to the opposite side of the scratched plastic that walled the room called Visitors away from those who gave it its name. Laney had tried to read it, but the attempt at focusing had driven an atrocious spike of pain between his eyes. He'd looked at Rice Daniels instead, through tears of pain: close-cropped dark hair, close-fitting sunglasses with small oval lenses, the black frames gripping the man's head like some kind of surgical clamp.
Nothing at all about Rice Daniels appeared to be out of control.
“The series,” he said. “‘Out of Control.’ As in: aren't the media? Out of Control: the cutting edge of counter-investigative journalism.”
Laney had gingerly tried touching the tape across the bridge of his nose: a mistake. “Counter-investigative?”
“You're a quant, Mr. Laney.” A quantitative analyst. He wasn't, really, but that was technically his job description. “For Slitscan.”
Laney didn't respond.
“The girl was the focus of intensive surveillance. Slitscan was all over her. You know why. We believe a case can be made here for Slitscan's culpability in the death of Alison Shires.”
Laney looked down at his running shoes, their laces removed by the Deputies. “She killed herself,” he said.
“But we know why.”
“No,” Laney said, meeting the black ovals again, “I don't. Not exactly.” The nodal point. Protocols of some other realm entirely.
“You're going to need help, Laney. You might be looking at a manslaughter charge. Abetting a suicide. They'll want to know why you were up there.”
“I'll tell them why.”
“Our producers managed to get me in here first, Laney. It wasn't easy. There's a spin-control team from Slitscan out there now, waiting to talk with you. If you let them, they'll turn it all around. They'll get you off, because they have to, in order to cover the show. They can do it, with enough money and the right lawyers. But ask yourself this: do you want to let them do it?”
Daniels still had his business card thumbed up against the plastic. Trying to focus on it again, Laney saw that someo
ne had scratched something in from the other side, in small, uneven mirror-letters, so that he could read it left to right:
I NO U DIDIT
“I've never heard of Out of Control.”
“Our hour-long pilot is in production as we speak, Mr. Laney.” A measured pause. “We're all very excited.”
“Why?”
“Out of Control isn't just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your story—Alison Shires' story—is precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. They've done well, they're established, they've proven themselves; now they want to give something back—to restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective.” The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. “Our producers are the producers of ‘Cops in Trouble’ and ‘A Calm and Deliberate Fashion.’”
“A what?”
“Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.”
“‘Counter-investigative’?” Yamazaki's pen hovered over the notebook.
“It was a show about shows like Slitscan,” Laney explained. “Supposed abuses.” There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Laney had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulated nicotine and cooking smoke.
“Ah,” Yamazaki said at last, “a ‘meta-tabloid.’”
The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll's hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.
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