Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  ‘Deer,’ Chevette Washington said.

  ‘Here to visit our friends, the Subletts?’ Rydell said, hoping he could distract the guard before he’d notice the bullet holes or anything. ‘Expecting us, if you wanna go call ’em.’

  ‘Can’t say you much look like Christians.’

  Chevette Washington sort of leaned across Rydell and gave the guard this stare. ‘I don’t know about you, brother, but we’re Aryan Nazarene, out of Eugene. We wouldn’t want to even come in there, say you got any mud people, any kind of race-mixing. Race-traitors all over, these days.’

  The guard looked at her. ‘You Nazarene, how come you ain’t skins?’

  She touched the front of her crazy haircut, the short spikey part. ‘Next thing you’re gonna tell me, Jesus was a Jew. Don’t know what this means?’

  He looked more than maybe just a little worried, now.

  ‘Got us some sanctified nails in the back, here. Maybe that gives you some idea.’

  Rydell saw the guard hesitate, swallow.

  ‘Hey, good buddy,’ Rydell said, ‘you gonna call up ol’ Sublett for us, or what?’

  The man went back into the blockhouse.

  ‘What’s that about nails?’ Rydell asked.

  ‘Something Skinner told me about once,’ she said. ‘Scared me.’

  Dora, Sublett’s mother, drank Coke and Mexican vodka. Rydell had seen people drink that before, but never at room temperature. And the Coke was flat, because she bought it and the vodka in these big plastic supermarket bottles, and they looked as though they’d already lasted her a while. Rydell decided he didn’t feel like drinking anyway.

  The living room of Dora’s trailer had a matching couch and reclining lounger. Dora lay back in the lounger with her feet up, for her circulation she said, Rydell and Chevette Washington sat side by side on the couch, which was more a loveseat, and Sublett sat on the floor, his knees drawn up almost under his chin. There was a lot of stuff on the walls, and on little ornamental shelves, but it was all very clean. Rydell figured that was because of Sublett’s allergies. There sure was a lot of it, though: plaques and pictures and figurines and things Rydell figured had to be those prayer hankies. There was a flat type of hologram of Rev. Fallon, looking as much like a possum as ever, but a possum that had gotten a tan and maybe had plastic surgery. There was a life-size head of J. D. Shapely that Rydell didn’t like because the eyes seemed to follow you. Most of the good stuff was sort of grouped around the television, which was big and shiny, but the old kind from before they started to get real big and flat. It was on now, showing this black and white movie, but the sound was off.

  ‘You’re sure you won’t have a drink, Mr. Rydell?’

  ‘No ma’am, thank you,’ Rydell said.

  ‘Joel doesn’t drink. He has allergies, you know.’

  ‘Yes ma’am.’ Rydell hadn’t ever known Sublett’s first name before.

  Sublett was wearing brand-new white denim jeans, a white t-shirt, white cotton socks, and disposable white paper hospital slippers.

  ‘He was always a sensitive boy, Mr. Rydell. I remember one time he sucked on the handle of this other boy’s Big Wheel. Well, his mouth like to turned inside-out.’

  ‘Momma,’ Sublett said, ‘you know the doctor said you ought to get more sleep than you been getting.’

  Mrs. Sublett sighed. ‘Yes, well, Joel, I know you young people want a chance to talk.’ She peered at Chevette Washington. ‘That’s a shame about your hair, honey. You’re just as pretty as can be, though, and you know it’ll just grow in so nice. I tried to light the broiler on this gas range we had, down in Galveston, that was when Joel was just a baby, he was so sensitive, and that stove about blew up. I just had had this perm, dear and, well…’

  Chevette Washington didn’t say anything.

  ‘Momma,’ Sublett said, ‘now you know you’ve had your nice drink…’

  Rydell watched Sublett lead the old woman off to bed.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Chevette Washington said, ‘what’s wrong with his eyes?’

  ‘Just light-sensitive,’ Rydell said.

  ‘It’s spooky, is what it is.’

  ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ Rydell said.

  Sublett came back, looked at the picture on the tv, then sighed and shut it off. ‘You know I’m not supposed to leave the trailer, Berry?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘It’s a condition of my apostasy. They say I might corrupt the congregation by contact.’ He perched on the edge of the recliner so he wouldn’t have to actually recline in it.

  ‘I thought you’d blown Fallon off when you came out to L.A.’

  Sublett looked embarrassed. ‘Well, she’s been sick, Berry, so when I came here I told ’em I was here to reconsider. Meditate on the box ’n’ all.’ He wrung his long pale hands. ‘Then they caught me watching Videodrome. You ever see, uh, Deborah Harry, Rydell?’ Sublett sighed and sort of quivered.

  ‘How’d they catch you?’

  ‘They’ve got it set up so they can monitor what you’re watching.’

  ‘How come they’re out here anyway?’

  Sublett ran his fingers back through his dry, straw-colored hair. ‘Hard to say, but I’d figure it’s got something to do with Reverend Fallon’s tax problems. Most of what he does, lately, it’s about that. Didn’t your job in San Francisco work out, Berry?’

  ‘No,’ Rydell said, ‘it didn’t.’

  ‘You want to tell me about it?’

  Rydell said he did.

  ‘I think he shot through something to do with the damned heater, too,’ Rydell said. They were back in the RV, outside the perimeter.

  ‘I like your friend,’ she said.

  ‘I do too.’

  ‘No, I mean he really cares about what’s going to happen to you. He really does.’

  ‘You take the bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll sleep up front.’

  ‘There’s no windshield. You’ll freeze.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Sleep back here. We did before. It’s okay.’

  He woke in the dark and listened to the sound of her breathing, to the creak of stiff old leather from the jacket spread over her shoulder.

  Sublett had listened to his story, nodding sometimes, asking a question here and there, his mirrored contacts reflecting tiny convex images of them sitting there on that loveseat. In the end he’d just whistled softly and said, ‘Berry, it sounds to me like you’re really in trouble now. Bad trouble.’

  Really in trouble now.

  Rydell slid his hand down, brushing one of hers by accident as he did it, and touched the bulge of his wallet in his back pocket. What money he had was in there, but Wellington Ma’s card was in there, too. Or what was left of it. The last time he’d looked, it had broken into three pieces.

  ‘Big trouble,’ he said to the dark, and Chevette Washington lifted the edge of her jacket and sort of snuggled in closer, her breathing never changing, so he knew she was still asleep.

  He lay there, thinking, and after a while he started to get this idea. About the craziest idea he’d ever had.

  ‘That boyfriend of yours,’ he said to her, in the tiny kitchen of Sublett’s mother’s trailer, ‘that Lowell?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Got a number we could reach him at?’

  She poured milk on her cornflakes. It was the kind you mixed up from powder. Had that thin chalky look. The only kind Sublett’s mother had. Sublett was allergic to milk. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think maybe I want to talk to him about something.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Something I think maybe he could help me with.’

  ‘Lowell? Lowell’s not gonna help you. Lowell doesn’t give a rat’s ass for anybody.’

  ‘Well,’ Rydell said, ‘why don’t you just let me talk to him.’

  ‘If you tell him where we are, or he has it traced back through the cel-net, he’ll turn us in. Or he would if he knew anybody was after us.’r />
  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s just like that.’ But then she gave Rydell the phone and the number.

  *

  ‘Hey, Lowell?’

  ‘Who the fuck is this?’

  ‘How you doin’?’

  ‘Who gave you—’

  ‘Don’t hang up.’

  ‘Listen, motherf—’

  ‘SFPD Homicide.’

  He could hear Lowell draw on a cigarette. ‘What did you say?’ Lowell said.

  ‘Orlovsky. SFPD Homicide, Lowell. That big fucker with the great big fucking gun? Came in the bar there? You remember. Just before the lights went out. I was over there by the bar, talking with Eddie the Shit.’

  Lowell took another drag, shallower by the sound of it. ‘Look, I don’t know what you—’

  ‘You don’t have to. You can just hang up right now, Lowell. But if you do, boy, you just better kiss your ass goodbye. Because you saw Orlovsky come in there for the girl, Lowell, didn’t you? You saw him. He didn’t want you to. He wasn’t in there on any SFPD business, Lowell. He was there on his own stick. And that’s one serious bad officer, Lowell. Serious as cancer.’

  Silence. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Then you just listen, Lowell. Listen up. You don’t listen, I’ll tell Orlovsky you saw him. I’ll give him this number. I’ll give him your description, and that skinhead’s, too. Tell him you been talking about him. And you know what he’ll do, Lowell? He’ll come out there and shoot your ass dead, that’s what he’ll do. And nobody to stop him. Homicide, Lowell. Then he can investigate it himself, he wants to. Man’s heavy, Lowell, I gotta tell ya.’

  Lowell coughed, a couple of times. Cleared his throat. ‘This is a joke, right?’

  ‘I don’t hear you laughing.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lowell said, ‘say it’s for real. Then what? What’re you after?’

  ‘I hear you know people can get things done. With computers and things.’ He could hear Lowell lighting a fresh cigarette.

  ‘Well,’ Lowell said, ‘sort of.’

  ‘Republic of Desire,’ Rydell said. ‘I need you to get them to do me a favor.’

  ‘No names,’ Lowell said, fast. ‘There’s scans set to pick things out of traffic—’

  ‘ “Them.” “Them” okay? Need you to get them to do something for me.’

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ Lowell said, ‘and it won’t be cheap.’

  ‘No,’ Rydell said, ‘it’ll cost you.’

  He pressed the button that broke the connection. Give old Lowell a little time to think about it; maybe look Orlovsky up on the Civil List, see he was there and he was Homicide. He flipped the little phone shut and went back into the trailer. Sublett’s mother kept the air-conditioning up about two clicks too high.

  Sublett was sitting on the loveseat. His white clothes made him look sort of like a painter, a plasterer or something, except he was too clean. ‘You know, Berry, I’m thinking maybe I better get back to Los Angeles.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘Well, Mrs. Baker’s here now, from Galveston? They been neighbors for years. Mrs. Baker can watch out for her.’

  ‘That apostate crap getting to you?’

  ‘Sure is,’ Sublett said, turning to look at the hologram of Fallon. ‘I still believe in the Lord, Berry, and I know I’ve seen His face in the media, just like Reverend Fallon teaches. I have. But the rest of it, I swear, it might as well be just a flat-out hustle.’ Sublett almost looked like he might be about to cry. The silver eyes swung around, met Rydell’s. ‘And I been thinking about IntenSecure, Berry. What you told me last night. I don’t see how I can go back there and work, knowing the kinds of things they’ll condone. I thought I was at least helping to protect people from a few of the evils in this world, Berry, but now I know I’d just be working for a company with no morals at all.’

  Rydell walked over and had a closer look at the prayer-hankies. He wondered which one of them was supposed to keep the AIDS off. ‘No,’ he said, finally, ‘you go back to work. You are protecting people. That part’s real. You got to make a living, Sublett.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Well, what about me?’

  ‘They’ll just find you and kill you, Berry. You and her.’

  ‘You, too, probably, if they knew what I’d told you. I shouldn’t ought’ve done that, Sublett. That’s one reason Chevette and I have to get out of here. So there won’t be any hassle for you and your mom.’

  ‘Well,’ Sublett said, ‘I’m not working for them anymore, Berry. But I’m leaving here, too. I just have to.’

  Rydell looked at Sublett, seeing him, somehow, in his full IntenSecure outfit, Glock and all, and suddenly that big crazy idea-thing sort of up and shook itself, and rolled over, revealing all these new angles. But you can’t get him involved, Rydell told himself, it just wouldn’t be fair.

  ‘Sublett,’ Rydell heard himself saying, about a minute later, ‘I bet I got a career-option here you haven’t ever even considered.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sublett said.

  ‘Getting in trouble,’ Rydell said.

  33 Notebook

  rice

  scouring pads

  broom

  detergent liquid

  sleeping bag

  stove fuel

  oil/gasket

  He sleeps now. Rice with the curry from the Thai wagon. Asks where the girl has gone. Tell him Fontaine has heard from her but does not know where she is or why. The pistol on the shelf. Reluctant to touch it (cold, heavy, smelling of oil, the dark blue finish worn to silver-gray down the sides of its muzzle, around the fluted segments of the cylinder. (‘SMITH & WESSON.’ Thomasson.) Tonight he spoke again of Shapely.

  How they did him like that, Scooter, that’s just some sorry shit. Same shit all over. Always some of ’em, anyway, makes you wonder how these damn religions last so long or what started it in the first place. Could be he’ll be that himself one day, crazy fuckers out killing people for him, or they’ll say it’s for him. Used to be these Crucified Jesus people, they wouldn’t talk at all except on Mondays, and that was the day they’d go and dig one spadeful of dirt out of their grave, Scooter. Every little while they’d get one of them thought he’d got the spirit in him and they’d just do it, do it with these special chrome nails they all carried, leather neck-pouch, see, it had to be unborn lambskin. Hell, you’d have to say they were crazier than the ones got him, Scooter. Put ’em all away, finally. Weren’t any left at all, after about 1998.

  34 Punching out of paradise

  ‘Inner Tube, honey,’ Mrs. Sublett said, ‘Talitha Morrow, Todd Probert, Gary Underwood. 1996.’ She was leaning back in the recliner with a damp washcloth folded across her forehead. It was the same color blue as her slippers, and they were terrycloth, too.

  ‘I never saw that,’ Chevette said, flipping through the pages of a magazine all about Reverend Fallon. There was this has-been actress, Gudrun Weaver, and she was up there hugging Fallon on a stage somewhere. If he’d turned around, Chevette thought, his nose would’ve barely come up to her breastbone. Looked like he’d had some kind of pink wax injected, all under his skin; had the creepiest-looking hair she’d ever seen, like a really short wig but it sort of looked like it might get up and walk off by itself.

  ‘All about television,’ Mrs. Sublett said, ‘so naturally it’s of special significance to the Church.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Talitha Morrow is this newswoman, and Todd Probert is a bank robber. But he’s a good bank robber, because he only needs the money to pay for a heart-transplant for his wife. Carrie Lee. Remember her? In a mature role, honey. More like a cameo. Well, Gary Underwood is Talitha’s ex, but he’s still got it for her, bad. In fact he’s got—whatcha callit?—erotomania, like it’s all he ever thinks about and, honey, it’s turned pure evil. First he’s sending her these chopped up Barbie dolls; sends her a dead white rabbit, then all this fancy underwear with
blood on it…’

  Chevette let the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune her out, the way she used to do with her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what it was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about. Up to something; whispering in the kitchen.

  She watched a fly buzz around the stuff on Mrs. Sublett’s shelves. It looked slow, like maybe the air-conditioning was too much for it.

  She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it was just that he’d showered and shaved and put on clean clothes from his stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the same as the ones he’d been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else. But she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. Sublett’s mother said he looked like a young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy Lee Jones? Or maybe it was because she had the idea somehow he was going to do something mean to Lowell. She’d thought she was still in love with Lowell, or something anyway, but now she didn’t think so, not at all If Lowell just hadn’t started doing dancer. She’d thought about how that Loveless had got when she’d dumped all that dancer in his Coke. She’d asked Rydell if that was enough to have killed him, and Rydell had said no. Said it was enough to keep him stone crazy for a while, and when he got back together, he was going to be hurting. Then she’d asked Rydell why Loveless had done that, banging his gun into his crotch that way. Rydell had sort of scratched his head and said he wasn’t sure, but he thought it had something to do with what it did to your nervous system. Said he’d heard it induced priapism, for one thing. She’d asked him what that was. Well, he’d said, it’s when the man is, like, overstimulated. She didn’t know about that, but it had given Lowell these total brickbat boners that just didn’t want to go away. And that would’ve been just fine, or anyway okay, except he got all mean with it, too, so she’d wind up all sore and then he’d be badmouthing her in front of these people he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about what Rydell might have in mind for Lowell, no way. What she did worry about was Skinner, whether he was okay, whether he was being taken care of. She was kind of scared to try phoning Fontaine now; every time Rydell made a call out, she worried it might get traced back or something. And it made her sad to think about her bike. She was sure somebody would’ve gotten it by now. She kind of hated to admit it, but that was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy getting killed that way. And Rydell had said he thought maybe Nigel had gotten shot, too.