Virtual light b-1

by William Gibson

  Yamazaki, on his way to purchase hot soup, had halted between a bookseller's wagon and a stall hung with caged birds. He felt awkward there, very much out of place, with the unaccustomed shape of the insulated canister under his arm. If this was a funeral, perhaps there was some required gesture, some attitude he might be expected to assume? He glanced at the bookseller, a tall woman in a greasy sheepskin vest, her gray hair bound back into a knot transfixed by two pink plastic chopsticks.

  Her stock, which consisted primarily of yellowing paperbacks in various stages of disintegration, each in a clear plastic bag, was stacked before her on her wagon. She had been crying her wares, when she saw the children masked as Shapely; she'd been calling out strange phrases that he supposed were titles: 'Valley of the dolls, blood meridian, chainsaw savvy .. .'Yamazaki, struck by the queer American poetry, had been on the verge of asking after Chainsaw Savvy. Then she'd fallen silent, and he too had seen the children.

  But there was nothing in her manner now that indicated the procession required anything more of her than whatever degree of her attention she might choose to afford it. She was automatically counting her stock, he saw, as she watched the children pass, her hands moving over the bagged books.

  The keeper of the bird stall, a pale man with a carefully groomed black mustache, was scratching his stomach, his expression mild and blank.

  After the children came five dancers in the skeleton-suits of La Noche de Muerte, though Yamazaki saw that several of the masks were only half-masks, micropore respirators molded to resemble the grinning jaws of skulls. These were teenagers, evidently, and shaking to some inner music of plague and chaos. There was a strong erotic undercurrent, a violence, to the black, bone-painted thighs, the white cartoon pelvises daubed on narrow denimed buttocks. As the bonedancers passed, one fixed

  Yamazaki with a sharp stare, blue adolescent eyes above the black, molded nostrils of the white respirator.

  Then two tall figures, black men in an ugly beige face-paint, costumed as surgeons, in pale green gowns and long gloves of scarlet latex. Were they the doctors, predominantly white, who had failed to rescue so many, prior ~o Shapely's advent, or did they somehow represent the Brazilian biomedical firms who had so successfully and lucratively overseen Shapely's transformation, the illiterate prostitute become the splendid source? And after them, the first of the bodies, wrapped and bound in layers of milky plastic, each one tiding a two-wheeled cart of the kind manufactured here to transport baggage or bulk foodstuffs. The carts, temporarily equipped with narrow pallets of plywood, were steered along, front and back, by men and women of no special costume or demeanor, though Yamazaki noted that they looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed to make no eye-contact with the onlookers.

  'There's Nigel,' the bookseller said, and probably built the cart they're taking him off on.'

  'These are the victims of the storm?' Yarnazaki ventured.

  'Not Nigel,' the woman said, narrowing her eyes as she saw that he was a stranger. 'Not with those holes in him…'

  Seven in all, each to its cart, and then a man and a woman, in identical paper coveralls, carrying between them a laminated lithograph of Shapely, one of those saccharine portraits, large of eye and hollow of cheek, that invariably left Yamazaki feeling slightly queasy.

  But then a small, red, capering figure. A tailless, hornless devil, perhaps, dancing with an enormous gun, an ancient AK-47, its bolt long gone, the curved magazine carved from wood, and all of it dipped, once, into red enamel, worn now by hands, by processions.

  And Yamazaki knew, without asking, that the red dancer represented the way of Shapely's going, like some terrible base stupidity waiting at the core of things.

  'Skinner-san?' The notebook ready. 'I saw a procession today. Bodies being taken from the bridgt~. The dead from the Storm.'

  'Can't keep 'em out here. Can't throw 'em in the water. City sticks on that. We pass 'em over for cremation. Some people, they don't hold with fire, they bury 'em over on Treasure. Kind of people live out on Treasure, you kind of wonder if that makes much sense.'

  'In the procession there were many references to Shapely, to his story.'

  Skinner nodded over his little television.

  'Children masked as J. D. Shapely, two black men painted as white doctors, Shapely's portrait…'

  Skinner grunted. Then, distantly: 'While since I saw one of those.'

  'And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.'

  'Uh-huh.' Skinner nodded.

  Yamazaki activated the notebook's transcription function.

  Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of him in everybody now. Couldn't see the point at my age and anyway I never held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn't have plenty of chances.

  You're too young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it's all there to play back. Digital. That's all that is, though: playback. You still don't remember what it felt like, watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just romping on us. But slow, slow, slowmotion thing. Those retroviruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old kind, and died of it, how we'd lived in this funny little pocket of time when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn't going to kill anybody, flot even a woman. See, they always had to worry anyway, every time it's a chance, get knocked up and maybe die in childbirth, die getting rid of it, or anyway your life's not gonna be the same. But in that pocket, there, there were pills for that, whatnot, shots for the other things, even the ones had killed people all over hell, before. That was a time, Scooter. So here this thing comes along, changes it back. And we're sliding up on woo, shit's changing all over, got civil wars in Europe already and this AIDS thing just kicking along. You know they tried to say it was the gays, said it was the CIA, said it was the U.S. Army in some fort in Maryland. Said it was people cornholing green monkeys. I swear to God. You know what it was? People. Just too goddamn many of 'em, Scooter. Flying all the fuck over everywhere and walking around back in there. Bet your ass somebody's gonna pick up a bug or two. Every place on the damn planet just a couple of hours from any other place. So here's poor fucking Shapely comes along, he's got this mutant strain won't kill you. Won't do shit to you at all, 'cept it eats the old kind for breakfast. And I don't buy any of that bullshit he was Jesus, Scooter. Didn't think Jesus was, either.

  'Any coffee left?'

  'I will pump stove.'

  'Put a little drop of Three-in-One in that hole by the piston-arm, Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.'

  She didn't see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something, coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn't any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can't watch it happening.

  Then she got down on her hands and her knees and started crawling. Because she couldn't just stand there and wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see her black pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was this smell from when he'd shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet burning, too, because she could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and sort of melted.

  Now she could hear him yelling, somewhere outside, hoarse and hollow and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR in the world, how they'd sold Hunnis Millbank, now they'd sell Sunflower. If she heard it right.

  'Down by the door, here. Driver side.'

  It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open.

  'He left the keys in here,' she said.

  'Think he's gone down there where the Dream Walls fr
anchise used to be.'

  'What if he comes back?'

  31 Driver side

  'Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?'

  She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell's head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she

  folded her legs up?

  'Why don't you lie down flat on the floor back there …' His voice from the driver's seat.

  'Lie down?'

  'Minimum silhouette.'

  'Huh?'

  'He's going to start shooting. When I do this-' Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm.

  Rydell must've gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission.

  She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.

  Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV's probably weren't meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.

  'Well fuck,' she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they'd had to keep explaining to her how'd she'd come down on her head, and each time they did, she'd forget.

  She was back in Skinner's room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history.

  He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they'd started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they'd slowed down to how people really moved, and then they'd been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody's idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin.

  Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.

  Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner's bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on.

  'He's right,' Chevette's mother said.

  'I 'com?'

  'About history, how they change it.'

  'Mom, you?'

  'Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn't any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.'

  Chevette started to cry.

  'Chevette-Marie,' her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, 'you've gone and hurt your head.'

  'How well you say you know this guy?' she asked.

  Rydell's SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he'd had time and a broom, he'd have swept it all out. As it was, he'd had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, otherwise Highway Patrol would've seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. 'I worked with him in L.A.,' he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.

  'I was just wondering if he'll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.'

  'Didn't know her,' Rydell said, 'I met her, on the plane. If Sublett's some kind of plant, then the whole world's a plot.' He shrugged. 'Then I could start worrying about you, say.' As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs.

  Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.

  Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINI( coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus's head

  32 Fallonville

  tought to have been. Somebody'd taken a .22 to the screen, it looked like.

  'Must be getting closer,' Rydell said.

  Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some of the water they'd gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.

  When he'd crashed out of that mall, he'd felt like they were sure to be right by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was just this low tumble of tan brick, windows bDarded up with sheets of that really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He'd gone screeching around this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mattresses to get in the way, until he'd found a way out through the chain link.

  But there wasn't any highway there, just some deserted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless had put a bullet into the navigation hardware, because the map was locked on downtown Santa Ana and just sat there, sort of flickering. Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.

  Chevette Washington was curled up by the fridge with her eyes closed, and she wouldn't answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her, too, but he knew he couldn't afford to stop until he'd put at least a little distance between them and the mall. And he couldn't see any bbod on her or anything.

  Finally he'd come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had supported the signs. The men's room door was ripped off the hinges; the women's chained and padlocked.

  Somebody had taken an automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the RV around to the back and saw this real old Airstream trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father's had lived in down in Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.

  Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who'd gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old khaki fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.

  'You just lost,' the man said, 'or is there some kind of problem?' Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.

  'No sir, no problem, but I'm definitely lost.' Rydell looked at the black Labs. They looked right back. 'Those dogs of yours there, they don't look too happy to see me.'

  'Don't see a lot of strangers,' the man said.

  'No sir,' Rydell said, 'I don't imagine they do.'

  'Got a couple of cats, too. Right now I'm feeding 'em all on dry kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you're lost?'

  'Yes sir, I am. I couldn't even tell you what s
tate we're in, right now.'

  The man spat on the ground. 'Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it's Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?'

  'No sir. What?'

  'A lot of that same happy horseshit. Like that woman camping in the goddamn White House.' He took the fishing cap off, exposing a couple of silver-white cancer-scars, wiped his brow with a grease-stained handkerchief, then pulled the cap hack on.

  'Say you're lost, are you?'

  'Yes sir. My map's broken.'

  'Know how to read a paper one?'

  'Yes sir, I do.'

  'What the hell'd she do to her head?' Looking past Rydell.

  Rydell turned and saw Chevette Washington leaning over the driver's bucket, looking out at them.

  'How she cuts her hair,' Rydell said.

  'I'll be damned,' the man said. 'Might be sort of good-looking, otherwise.'

  'Yes sir,' Rydell said.

  'See that box of Cream o' Wheat there? Think you can stir me up a cup of that into this water when it boils?'

  'Yes sir.'

  'Well, I'll go find you a map to look at. Skeeter and Whitey here, they'll just keep you company.'

  'Yes sir.'

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  And a taller cross rising beyond that, this one welded from rusty railroad track, a sort of framework stuck full of old televisions, their dead screens all looking out toward the road there.