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 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.
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 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.
'Do you speak Spanish? This is 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, than 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 to a plastic cup and places it before the boy. The boy looks at it.
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 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 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 in balance.
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 folded 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 to residential, but the frequency of razor wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory. There were a couple of Universal square badges controlling 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 a 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 Creedmore'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, wiping 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.
'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.
Rydell checked the interior to see they hadn't left anything, undid the 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 dowstairs?
'No, Creedmore said, 'you give 'em 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 leaning 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 that 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 their 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 brick 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 than 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.
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 to 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 do.
'I've done a few of those myself, Tessa said.
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, but 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 military field telephone that looks as though it has been designed not only to survive a nuclear explosion but to function during one.
Fontaine, still on the morning's first coffee, stares down, through the glass, at the matted, spiky hair. Thinking this 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 than 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 distrusts semi-automatic weapons. He is an anachronist, a historian: he 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 few enemies on the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have drifted in from either end, San Franciso or Oakland? And the wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of crazy.
But still.
He throws the last hasp 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 a long-sleeved white thermal undershirt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process. Black 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 my 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 yet entirely willing 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 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?
The brown eyes register no language.
Fontaine, motivated by something he recognizes as 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 will 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 on in. Cold out here. Still holding the gun, though his finger has relaxed, he steps back 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, Fontaine thinks. Army Waltham with the guts rusted out. Bullshit. Bullshit he's let this freak in here.
All Tomorrow's Parties bt-3 Page 5