Idoru

  “Outside the Lo/Rez organization, I mean. It's like not having socks.”

  “I have socks,” Laney said, indicating the basket on the bed. “Do you feel like watching a BBC documentary on Lo/Rez?”

  “No.”

  “I don't think I can turn it off. He'll know.”

  “Try lowering the volume. Manually.” She demonstrated.

  “A technician,” Laney said.

  “With a van. And umpti-million yen worth of equipment that didn't seem to do much for you.” She sat down in one of the room's two small armchairs, crossing her legs.

  Laney took the other chair. “Not your fault. You got me in there just fine. But it's not the kind of data I can work with.”

  “Yamazaki told me what you're supposed to be able to do,” she said. “I didn't believe him.”

  Laney looked at her. “I can't help you there.” There were three smiling suns, like black woodblock prints, down the inside of her left calf.

  “They're woven into the stockings. Catalan.”

  Laney looked up. “I hope you're not going to ask me to explain what it is people think they pay me to do,” he said, “because I can't. I don't know.”

  “Don't worry,” she said. “I just work here. But what I'm being paid to do, right now, is determine what it is we could give you that would allow you to do whatever it is that you're alleged to be able to do.”

  Laney looked at the screen. Concert footage now, and Rez was dancing, a microphone in his hand. “You've seen this video, right? Is he serious about that ‘Sino-Celtic’ thing he was talking about in that interview?”

  “You haven't met him yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “It's not the easiest thing, deciding what Rez is serious about.”

  “But how can there be ‘Sino-Celtic mysticism’ when the Chinese and the Celts don't have any shared history?”

  “Because Rez himself is half Chinese and half Irish. And if there's one thing he's serious about…”

  “Yes?”

  “It's Rez.”

  Laney stared glumly at the screen as the singer was replaced by a close-up of Lo's playing, his hands on the black-bodied guitar. Earlier, a venerable British guitarist in wonderful tweeds had opined as how they hadn't really expected the next Hendrix to emerge from Taiwanese Canto-pop, but then again they hadn't actually been expecting the first one, had they?

  “Yamazaki told me the story. What happened to you,” Arleigh McCrae said. “Up to a certain point.”

  Laney closed his eyes.

  “The show never aired, Laney. Out of Control dropped it. What happened?”

  He'd taken to having breakfast beside the Chateau's small oval pool, past the homely clapboard bungalows that Rydell said were a later addition. It was the one time of the day that felt like his own, or did until Rice Daniels arrived, which was usually toward the bottom of a three-cup pot of coffee, just prior to his eggs and bacon.

  Daniels would cross the terra cotta to Laney's table with what could only be described as a spring in his step. Laney privately wished to ascribe this to drug-use, of which he'd seen no evidence whatever, and indeed Daniels's most potent public indulgence seemed to be multiple cups of decaf espresso taken with curls of lemon peel. He favored loosely woven beige suits and collarless shirts.

  This particular morning, however, Daniels had not been alone, and Laney had detected a lack of temper in the accustomed spring; a certain jangled brittleness there, and the painful-looking glasses seeming to grip his head even more tightly than usual. Beside him came a gray-haired man in a dark brown suit of Western cut, hawk-faced and wind-burnt, the blade of his impressive nose protruding from a huge black pair of sunglasses. He wore black alligator roping-boots and carried a dusty-looking briefcase of age-darkened tan cowhide, its handle mended with what Laney supposed had to be baling wire.

  “Laney,” Rice Daniels had said, arriving at the table, “this is Aaron Pursley.”

  “Don't get up, son,” Pursley said, though Laney hadn't thought to. “Fella's just bringing you your breakfast.” One of the Mongolian waiters was crossing with a tray, from the direction of the bungalows. Pursley put his battle-scarred briefcase down and took one of the white-painted metal chairs. The waiter served Laney's eggs. Laney signed for them, adding a 15-percent tip. Pursley was flipping through the contents of his case. He wore half a dozen heavy silver rings on the fingers of either hand, some of them studded with turquoise. Laney couldn't remember when he'd last seen anyone carry around that much paper.

  “You're the lawyer,” Laney said. “On television.”

  “In the flesh as well, son.” Pursley was on “Cops in Trouble,” and before that he'd been famous for defending celebrity clients. Daniels hadn't taken a seat, and stood behind Pursley now with a hunched, uncharacteristic posture, hands in his trouser pockets. “Here we are,” Pursley said. He drew out a sheaf of blue paper. “Don't let your eggs get cold.”

  “Have a seat,” Laney said to Daniels. Daniels winced behind his glasses.

  “Now,” Pursley said, “you were in a Federal Orphanage, in Gainesville, it says here, from age twelve to age seventeen.”

  Laney looked at his eggs. “That's right.”

  “During that time, you participated in a number of drug trials? You were an experimental subject?”

  “Yes,” Laney said, his eggs looking somehow farther away, or like a picture in a magazine.

  “This was voluntary on your part?”

  “There were rewards.”

  “Voluntary,” Pursley said. “You get on any of that 5-SB?”

  “They didn't tell us what they were giving us,” Laney said. “Sometimes we'd get a placebo instead.”

  “You don't mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.”

  Which was true, but Laney just sat there.

  “Well?” Pursley removed his big heavy glasses. His eyes were cold and blue and set into an intricate topography of wrinkles.

  “I probably had it,” Laney said.

  Pursley slapped the blue papers on his thigh. “Well, there you are. You almost certainly did. Now, do you know how that substance eventually affected many of the test subjects?”

  Daniels unclamped his glasses and began to knead the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed.

  “Stuff tends to turn males into fixated homicidal stalkers,” Pursley said, putting his glasses back on and stuffing the papers into his case. “Comes on years later, sometimes. Go after media faces, politicians…. That's why it's now one of the most illegal substances, any damn country you care to look. Drug that makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians, well, boy, it'll get to be.” He grinned dryly.

  “I'm not one,” Laney said. “I'm not like that.”

  Daniels opened his eyes. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “What matters is that Slitscan can counter all our material by raising the possibility, the merest shadow, however remote, that you are.”

  “You see, son,” Pursley said, “they'd just make out you got into your line of work because you were predisposed to that, spying on famous people. You didn't tell them about any of it, did you?”

  “No,” Laney said, “I didn't.”

  “There you go,” said Pursley. “They'll say they hired you because you were good at it, but you just got too damn good at it.”

  “But she wasn't famous,” Laney said.

  “But he is,” Rice Daniels said, “and they'll say you were after him They'll say the whole thing was your idea. They'll wring their hands about responsibility. They'll talk about their new screening procedures for quantitative analysts. And nobody, Laney, nobody at all will be watching us.”

  “That's about the size of it,” Pursley said, standing. He picked up the briefcase. “That real bacon there, like off a hog?”

  “They say it is,” Laney said.

  “Damn,” Pursley said, “these Hollywood hotels are fast-lane.” He stuck out his hand. Laney shook it. “Nice meeting you, son
.”

  Daniels didn't even bother to say goodbye. And two days later, going over the printout of his charges, Laney would notice that it all began, the billing in his own name, with a large pot of coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, and a 15-percent tip.

  Arleigh McCrae was staring at him.

  “Do they know that?” she asked. “Does Blackwell?”

  “No,” Laney said, “not that part, anyway.” He could see Rydell's fax, folded on the bedside stand. They didn't know about that, either.

  “What happened then? What did you do?”

  “I found out I was paying for at least some of the lawyers they'd gotten for me. I didn't know what to do. I sat out there by the pool a lot. It was sort of pleasant, actually. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular. Know what I mean?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Then I heard about this job from one of the security people at the hotel.”

  She slowly shook her head.

  “What?” he said.

  “Never mind,” she said. “You make about as much sense as the rest of it. Probably you'll fit right in.”

  “Into what?”

  She looked at her watch, black-faced stainless on a plain black nylon band. “Dinner's at eight, but Rez will be late. Come out for a walk and a drink. I'll try to tell you what I know about it.”

  “If you want to,” Laney said.

  “They're paying me to do it,” she said, getting up. “And it probably beats wrestling large pieces of high-end electronics up and down escalators.”

  20. Monkey Boxing

  Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being.

  Chia and Masahiko had found two seats, between a trio of plaid-skirted schoolgirls and a businessman who was reading a fat Japanese comic. There was a woman on the cover with her breasts bound up like balls of twine, but conically, the nipples protruding like the popping eyes of a cartoon victim. Chia noticed that the artist had devoted much more time to drawing the twine, exactly how it was wrapped and knotted, than to drawing the breasts themselves. The woman had sweat running down her face and was trying to back away from someone or something cut off by the edge of the cover.

  Masahiko undid the top two buttons of his tunic and withdrew a six-inch square of something black and rigid, no thicker than a pane of glass. He brushed it purposefully with the fingers of his right hand, beaded lines of colored light appearing at his touch. Though these were fainter here, washed out by the train's directionless fluorescents, Chia recognized the square as the control-face of the computer she'd seen in his room.

  He studied the display, stroked it again, and frowned at the result. “Someone pays attention to my address,” he said, “and to Mitsuko's…”

  “The restaurant?”

  “Our user addresses.”

  “What kind of attention?”

  “I do not know. We are not linked.”

  —Except by me.

  “Tell me about Sandbenders,” Masahiko said, putting the control-face away and buttoning his tunic.

  “It started with a woman who was an interface designer,” Chia said, glad to change the subject. “Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in some-thing that felt like it was there…. And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone…. And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.”

  Masahiko's eyes were closed, and he seemed to be nodding slightly, though perhaps only with the motion of the train.

  “And it turned out some people liked that, too, liked it a lot. He started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano, with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick…”

  Masahiko's eyes opened, and she saw that not only had he been listening, but that he was impatient for more.

  “So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he'd been doing into something else. So she cashed out her stock in all the companies she'd worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon—”

  And the train pulled into Shinjuku, and everyone stood up, heading for the doors, the businessman closing his breast-bondage comic and tucking it beneath his arm.

  Chia was leaning back to look at the strangest building she'd ever seen. It was shaped like the old-fashioned idea of a robot, a simplified human figure, its legs and upraised arms made of transparent plastic over a framework of metal. Its torso appeared to be of brick, in red, yellow and blue, arranged in simple patterns. Escalators, stairways, and looping slides twisted through the hollow limbs, and puffs of white smoke emerged at regular intervals from the rectangular mouth of the thing's enormous face. Beyond it the sky all gray and pressing down.

  “Tetsujin Building,” Masahiko said. “Monkey Boxing was not there.”

  “What is it?”

  “Osaka Tin Toy Institute,” he said. “Monkey Boxing this way.” He was consulting the swarming squiggles on his control-face. He pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history. Which had pissed the teacher off totally, but Chia couldn't remember them drawing any palm trees. Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross, pointing left or pointing right, and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun, the kind they were always making out of those disposable flash-cameras, and the teacher had to call the police.

  “Ninth floor, Wet Leaves Fortune Building,” he said. He set off down the crowded pavement. Chia followed, wondering how long jet lag lasted, and how you were supposed to separate it from just being tired.

  Maybe what she was feeling now was what her civics program at her last school had called culture shock. She felt like everything, every little detail of Tokyo, was just different enough to create a kind of pressure, something that built up against her eyes, as though they'd grown tired of having to notice all the differences: a little sidewalk tree that was dressed up in a sort of woven basketwork jacket, the neon-avocado color of a payphone, a serious-looking girl with round glasses and a gray sweatshirt that said “Free Vagina.” She'd been keeping her eyes extra-wide to take all these things in, like they'd be processed eventually, but now her eyes were tired and the differences were starting to back up. At the same time, she felt that if she squinted, maybe, just the right way, she could make all this turn back into Seattle, some downtown part she'd walked through with her mother. Homesick. The strap of her bag digging into her shoulder each time her left foot came down.

  Masahiko turned a corner. There didn't seem to be alleys in Tokyo, not in the sense that there were smaller streets behind the big streets, the places where they put out the garbage, and there weren't any stores. There were smaller streets, and smaller ones behind those, but you couldn't gu
ess what you'd find there: a shoe-repair place, an expensive-looking hair salon, a chocolate-maker, a magazine stand where she noticed a copy of that same creepy comic with the woman all wrapped up like that.

  Another corner and they were back on what she took to be a main street. Cars here, anyway. She watched one turn into a street-level opening and vanish. Her scalp prickled. What if that were the way up to Eddie's club, that Whiskey Clone? That was right around here, wasn't it? How big was this Shinjuku place, anyway? What if the Graceland pulled up beside her? What if Eddie and Maryalice were out looking for her?

  They were passing the opening the car had disappeared into. She looked in and saw that it was a kind of gas station. “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Wet Leaves Fortune,” he said, pointing up.

  Tall and narrow, square signs jutting out at the corners of each floor. It looked like almost all the others, but she thought Eddie's had been bigger. “How do we get up there?”

  He led her into a kind of lobby, a ground-floor arcade lined with tiny stall-like shops. Too many lights, mirrors, things for sale, all blurring together. Into a cramped elevator that smelled of stale smoke. He said something in Japanese and the door closed. The elevator sang them a little song to tinkling music. Masahiko looked irritated.

  At the ninth floor the door opened on a dust-covered man with a black headband sagging over his eyes. He looked at Chia. “If you're the one from the magazine,” he said, “you're three days early.” He pulled the headband off and wiped his face with it. Chia wasn't sure if he was Japanese or not, or what age he might be. His eyes were brown, spectacularly bloodshot under deep brows, and his black hair, pulled straight back and secured by the band, was streaked with gray.

  Behind him there was a constant banging and confusion, men yelling in Japanese. Someone pushing a high-sided orange plastic cart crammed with folded, plaster-flecked cables, shards of plastic painted with gold gilt and Chinese red. Part of a suspended ceiling let go with a twanging of wires, crashed to the floor. More cries.