‘And then,’ Sublett’s mother was saying, ‘Gary Underwood goes through this window. And he falls on one of those fences? Kind with spikes on top.’
‘Hey, Mom,’ Sublett said, ‘you’re bending Chevette’s ear.’
‘Just telling her about Inner Tube,’ Mrs. Sublett said, from under the washcloth.
‘1996,’ Sublett said. ‘Well, Rydell and I, we need her for something.’ Sublett gestured for her to follow him back into the kitchen.
‘I don’t think it’s a real good idea for her to go outside, Berry,’ he said to Rydell. ‘Not in the daytime.’
Rydell was sitting at the little plastic table where she’d had breakfast. ‘Well, you can’t go, Sublett, because of your apostasy. And I don’t want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.’
‘Can’t you just call them on the regular phone, Berry?’ Sublett sounded unhappy.
‘No.’ Rydell said, ‘I can’t. They just don’t like that. He says they’ll at least talk to me if I call them on an eyephone rig.’
‘What’s the problem?’ Chevette said.
‘Sublett’s got a friend here who’s got a pair of eyephones.’
‘Buddy,’ Sublett said.
‘Your buddy?’ she asked.
‘Name’s Buddy,’ Sublett said, ‘but that VR, eyephones ’n’ stuff, it’s against Church law. It’s been revealed to Reverend Fallon that virtual reality’s a medium of Satan, ’cause you don’t watch enough tv after you start doing it…’
‘You don’t believe that,’ Rydell said.
‘Neither does Buddy,’ Sublett said, ‘but his daddy’ll whip his head around if he finds that VR stuff he’s got under the bed.’
‘Just call him up,’ Rydell said, ‘tell him what I told you. Two hundred dollars cash, plus the time and charges.’
‘People’ll see her,’ Sublett said, his shy silver gaze bouncing in Chevette’s direction, then back to Rydell.
‘What do you mean, “see” me?’
‘Well, it’s your haircut,’ Sublett said. ‘It’s too unusual for ’em, I can tell you that.’
‘Now, Buddy,’ Rydell said to the boy, ‘I’m going to give you these two hundred-dollar bills here. Now when’d you say your father’s due back?’
‘Not for another two hours,’ Buddy said, his voice cracking with nervousness. He took the money like it might have something on it. ‘He’s helping pour a new pad for the fuel cells they’re bringing from Phoenix on the Church’s bulk-lifter.’ Buddy kept looking at Chevette. She had on a straw sun-hat that belonged to Sublett’s mother, with a big floppy brim, and a pair of these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames and lenses that sort of swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didn’t seem to help.
‘You’re friends of Joel’s, right?’ Buddy had a haircut that wasn’t quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an Adam’s apple about a third the size of his head. She watched it bob up and down. ‘From L.A.?’
‘That’s right,’ Rydell said.
‘I… I wanna g-go there,’ Buddy said.
‘Good,’ Rydell said. ‘This is a step in the right direction, you just believe it. Now you wait out there like I said, and tell Chevette here if anybody’s coming.’
Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind him. It didn’t look to Chevette like anybody Buddy’s age lived there at all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed Sublett’s mother’s air-conditioning. She took off that hat.
‘Okay,’ Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, ‘you sit on the bed here and pull the plug if we get interrupted.’ Buddy had already hooked up the jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor and put the helmet on, so she couldn’t see his eyes. Then he pulled on one of those gloves you use to dial with and move stuff around in there.
She watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on a pad that wasn’t there. Then she listened to him talking to the telephone company’s computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.
Then his hand came up again. ‘Here goes,’ he said, and started punching out this number he said Lowell had given him, his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the gloved hand to his lap.
He just sat there for a few seconds, the helmet kind of swiveling around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.
‘Okay,’ he said, his voice kind of funny, but not to her, ‘but is there anybody here?’
Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
‘Oh,’ he said, the helmet turning, ‘Jesus—’
35 The republic of desire
Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls; some were in places that had been movie theaters, some were in old department stores. He’d gone to one once that they’d put into an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.
There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.
But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He’d been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if you’d animated it. There’d always be a couple of girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they’d get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.
Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green light around a frame he’d drawn, and laying color and texture over that to see how different ones looked.
But what he remembered when he clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space was the sense you got, doing that, of what the space around Dream Walls was like. And it was a weird thing, because if you looked up from what you were doing, there really wasn’t anything there; nothing in particular, anyway. But when you were doing it, designing your car or whatever, you could get this funny sense that you were leaning out, over the edge of the world, and the space beyond that sort of fell away, forever.
And you felt like you weren’t standing on the floor of an old movie theater or a bowling alley, but on some kind of plain, or maybe a pane of glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles and miles, with no real end.
So when he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain, he just said ‘Oh,’ because he could see its edges, and see that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud or fog or sky that was no color and every color at once, just sort of seething.
And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain, so that Rydell got to feel like a bug, or a little toy.
One of them was a dinosaur, this sort of T. Rex job with the short front legs, except they ended in something a lot more like hands. One was a sort of statue, it looked like, or more like some freak natural formation, all shot through with cracks and fissures
, but it was shaped like a wide-faced man with dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids half-closed. But all stone and moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole mountains of shale.
Then he looked and saw the third one there, and just said ‘Jesus.’
This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television, these moving images winding and writhing together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man or a woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was like trying to watch a million channels at once, and this noise was rushing off it like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow wasn’t a sound at all.
‘Welcome to the Republic,’ said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. It smiled, the ivory of its teeth carved into whole temples. Rydell tried to look at the carvings; they got really clear for a second, and then something happened.
‘You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,’ the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. ‘You’re in K-Tel space…’
‘We could turn off the emulator,’ the thing made of television suggested, its voice modulating up out of the waterfall-hiss.
‘Don’t bother,’ said the dinosaur. ‘I don’t think this is going to be much of a conversation.’
‘Your name,’ said the mountain.
Rydell hesitated.
‘Social Security,’ said the dinosaur, sounding bored, and for some reason Rydell thought about his father, how he’d always gone on about what that had used to mean, and what it meant now.
‘Name and number,’ said the mountain, ‘or we’re gone.’
‘Rydell, Stephen Berry,’ and then the string of digits. He’d barely gotten the last one out when the dinosaur said ‘Former policeman, I see.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the mountain, who kept reminding Rydell of something.
‘Well,’ said the dinosaur, ‘pretty permanently former, by the look of it. Worked for IntenSecure after that.’
‘A sting,’ said the mountain, and brought a hand up to point at Rydell, except it was this giant granite lobster-claw, crusted with lichen. It seemed to fill half the sky, like the side of a space ship. ‘The narrow end of the wedge?’
‘They don’t come much narrower, if you ask me,’ the storm of television said. ‘You seem to have gotten our Lowell’s undivided attention, Rydell. And he wouldn’t even tell us what your name was.’
‘Doesn’t know it,’ Rydell said.
‘Don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, hee haw,’ said the mountain, lowering the claw, its voice a sampled parody of Rydell’s. Rydell tried to get a good look at its eyes; got a flash of still blue pools, waving ferns, some kind of tan rodent hopping away, before the focus slipped. ‘People like Lowell imagine we need them more than they need us.’
‘State your business, Stephen Berry,’ said the dinosaur.
‘There was something happened, up Benedict Canyon—’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the dinosaur, ‘you were the driver. What does it have to do with us?’
That was when it dawned on Rydell that the dinosaur, or all of them, could probably see all the records there were on him, right then, anywhere. It gave him a funny feeling. ‘You’re looking at all my stuff,’ he said.
‘And it’s not very interesting,’ said the dinosaur. ‘Benedict Canyon?’
‘You did that,’ Rydell said.
The mountain raised its eyebrows. Windblown scrub shifting, rocks tumbling down. But just on the edge of Rydell’s vision. ‘For what it’s worth, that was not us, not exactly. We would’ve gone a more elegant route.’
‘But why did you do it?’
‘Well,’ said the dinosaur, ‘to the extent that anyone did it, or caused it to be done, I imagine you might look to the lady’s husband, who I see has since filed for divorce. On very solid grounds, it seems.’
‘Like he set her up? With the gardener and everything?’
‘Lowell has some serious explaining to do, I think,’ the mountain said.
‘You haven’t told us what it is you want, Mr. Rydell.’ This from the television-thing.
‘A job like that. Done. I need you to do one of those. For me.’
‘Lowell,’ the mountain said, and shook its dreadlocked head. Cascades of shale in Rydell’s peripheral vision. Dust rising on a distant slope.
‘That sort of thing is dangerous,’ the dinosaur said. ‘Dangerous things are very expensive. You don’t have any money, Rydell.’
‘How about if Lowell pays you for it?’
‘Lowell,’ from that vast blank face twisting with images, ‘owes us.’
‘Okay,’ Rydell said, ‘I hear you. And I think I know somebody else might pay you.’ He wasn’t even sure if that was bullshit or not. ‘But you’re going to have to listen to me. Hear the story.’
‘No,’ the mountain said, and Rydell remembered who it was he figured the thing was supposed to look like, that guy you saw on the history shows sometimes, the one who’d invented eyephones or something, ‘and if Lowell thinks he’s the only pimp out there, he might have to think again.’
And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Any of you live in San Francisco?’
The dinosaur came flickering back. ‘What if we did?’
‘Well,’ Rydell said, ‘do you like it?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.’
‘Tokyo?’ The television-storm, coming back now as this big ball, like that hologram in Cognitive Dissidents. ‘Who told you that?’
Now the mountain was back, too. ‘There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…’
‘Tell us,’ the dinosaur said.
So Rydell did.
She had the hat back on, when he took the helmet off, but she was holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.
‘I don’t think I made sense of much of that,’ she said. She’d only been able to hear his side of it, but it had been mostly him talking, there at the end. ‘But I think you’re flat fucking crazy.’
‘I probably am,’ he said.
Then he got the time and charges on the call. It came to just about all the money he had left.
‘I don’t see why they had to put the damn thing through Paris,’ he said.
She just put those glasses back on and slowly shook her head.
36 Notebook (2)
The city in sunlight, from the roof of this box atop the tower. The hatch open. Sound of Skinner sorting and re-sorting his belongings. A cardboard box, slowly filling with objects I will take below, to the sellers of things, their goods spread on blankets, on greasy squares of ancient canvas. Osaka far away. The wind brings sounds of hammering, song. Skinner, this morning, asking if I had seen the pike in the Steiner Aquarium.
—No.
—He doesn’t move, Scooter.
Sure that’s all Fontaine said? But he’d found her bike? That’s no good. Wouldn’t go this long without that. Cost an arm and a fucking leg, that thing. Made of paper, inside. Japanese construction-paper, what’s it called? Useless, Scooter. Shit, it’s your language. Forgetting it faster than we are… Tube of that paper, then they wrap it with aramyd or something. No, she wouldn’t leave that. Day she brought it home, three hours down there spraying this fake rust on it, believe that? Fake rust, Scooter. And wrapping it with old rags, innertubes, anything. So it wouldn’t look new. Well, it makes more sense than just locking it, it really does. Know how you break a Kryptonite lock, Scooter? With a Volvo jack. Volvo jack fits right in there, like it was made for it. Give it a shove or two, zingo. But they never use ’em anymore, those locks. Some people still carry ’em, though. One of those up ’side the head, you’ll notice it… I just found her one day. They wanted to cart her down
to the end, let the city have her. Said she’d be dead before they got her off anyway. Told ’em they could fuck off into the air. Got her up here. I could still do that. Why? Hell. Because. See people dying, you just walk by like it was television?
37 Century city
Chevette didn’t know what to think about Los Angeles.
She thought those palm trees were weird, though. On the way in, Sublett’s electric car had pulled up behind this big white trailer-rig with A-LIFE INSTALLATIONS, NANOTRONIC VEGETATION across the back of it, and the heads of these fake palm trees sticking out, all wrapped in plastic.
She’d seen it all on tv once, with Skinner, how they were putting in these trees to replace the ones the virus had killed, some Mexican virus. They were kind of like the Bay maglev, or like what Rydell and Sublett said that that Sunflower company was going to do in San Francisco; these things that kind of grew, but only because they were made up of all these little tiny machines. One show she’d seen with Skinner, they’d talked about how these new trees were designed so that all kinds of birds and rats and things could nest in them, just like the ones that had died. Skinner told her that he’d run a Jeep into a real palm tree, in L.A., once, and about ten rats had fallen out, landed on the hood and just sort of stood there, until they got scared and ran away.
It sure didn’t feel like San Francisco. She felt kind of two ways about it. Like it was just this bunch of stuff, all spread out pretty much at random, and then like it was this really big place, with mountains somewhere back there, and all this energy flowing around in it, lighting things up. Maybe that was because they’d got there at night.
Virtual Light Page 25