Virtual Light

  Red at the intersection.

  ‘Run the light,’ Warbaby instructed. Rydell did, amid horns of protest. The yellow stuff still there.

  ‘Pull over. No. Right up on the sidewalk. Yes.’ The Patriot’s Goodyear Streetsweepers bouncing up and over the jagged curb. ‘In the glove compartment.’

  A light came on as Rydell opened it. Windex, a roll of gray paper towels, and a box of throwaway surgical gloves.

  ‘Go on,’ Warbaby said. ‘Nobody bother us.’

  Rydell pulled a glove on, took the Windex and the towels, got out. ‘Don’t get any on you,’ he said, thinking of Sublett. He gave the yellow smear a good shot of Windex, wadded up three of the towels in his gloved hand, wiped until the glass was clean. He skinned the glove down around the wet wad, the way they’d shown him in the Academy, but then he didn’t know what to do with it.

  ‘Just toss it,’ Warbaby said from inside. Rydell did. Then he walked back from the car, five paces, and threw up. Wiped his mouth with a clean towel. He got back in, shut the door, locked it, put the Windex and the towels in the glove compartment.

  ‘You gonna gargle with that, Rydell?’

  ‘Shut up, Freddie,’ Warbaby said. The Patriot’s suspension creaked as Warbaby leaned forward. ‘Leavings from a slaughterhouse, most likely.’ he said. ‘But it’s good you know to take precautions.’ He settled back. ‘Had us a group here once called Sword of the Pig. You ever hear of that?’

  ‘No,’ Rydell said, ‘I never did.’

  ‘They’d steal fire-extinguishers out of buildings. Re-charge them with blood. Blood from a slaughterhouse. But they let it out, you understand, that this blood, well, it was human. Then they’d go after the Jesus people, when they marched, with those same extinguishers…’

  ‘Jesus,’ Rydell said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Warbaby said.

  ‘You see that door, there?’ Freddie said.

  ‘What door?’ The lobby of the Morrisey made Rydell want to whisper, like being in church or a funeral home. The carpet was so soft, it made him want to lie down and go to sleep.

  ‘That black one,’ Freddie said.

  Rydell saw a black-lacquered rectangle, perfectly plain, not even a knob. Now that he thought about it, it didn’t match anything else in sight. The rest of the place was polished wood, frosted bronze, panels of carved glass. If Freddie hadn’t told him it was a door, exactly, he would have taken it for art or something, some kind of painting. ‘Yeah? What about it?’

  ‘That’s a restaurant,’ Freddie said, ‘and it’s so expensive, you can’t even go in there.’

  ‘Well,’ Rydell said, ‘there’s lots of those.’

  ‘No, man,’ Freddie insisted, ‘I mean even if you were rich, had money out your ass, you could not go in there. Like it’s private. Japanese thing.’

  They were standing around by the security desk while Warbaby talked to somebody on a house phone. The three guys on duty at the desk wore IntenSecure uniforms, but really fancy ones, with bronze logo-buttons on their peaked caps.

  Rydell had parked the Patriot in an underground garage, floors down in the roots of the place. He hadn’t seen anything like that before: teams of people in chef’s whites putting together a hundred plates of some skinny kind of salad, little Sanyo vacuum-cleaners bleeping along in pastel herds, all this back-stage stuff you’d never guess was there if you were just standing here in the lobby.

  The Executive Suites, where he’d stayed in Knoxville with Karen Mendelsohn, had had these Korean robot bugs that cleaned up when you weren’t looking. They’d even had a special one that ate dust off the wallscreen, but Karen hadn’t been impressed. It just meant they couldn’t afford people, she said.

  Rydell watched as Warbaby turned, handing the phone to one of the guys in the peaked caps. Warbaby gestured for Freddie and Rydell. Leaned on his cane as they walked toward him.

  ‘They’ll take us up now,’ he said. The cap Warbaby had handed the phone to came out from behind the counter. He saw Rydell was wearing an IntenSecure shirt with the patches ripped off, but he didn’t say anything. Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy some clothes, and where he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie’s shirt, thinking Freddie probably wasn’t the guy to ask.

  ‘This way, sir,’ the cap said to Warbaby. Freddie and Rydell followed Warbaby across the lobby. Rydell saw how he jabbed his cane, hard, into the carpeting, the brace on his leg ticking like a slow clock.

  13 Tweaking

  Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.

  And she was starting to get that now, in spite of everything; if she just let go, quit thinking, let her mind sink down into the machinery of bone and gear-ring and carbon-wound Japanese paper…

  But Sammy Sal swerved in beside her, bass pumping from his bike’s bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bunny the curb to keep from going over on a BART grate. Her tires left black streaks as the particle-brakes caught, Sammy Sal braking in tandem, his Fluoro-Rimz strobing, fading.

  ‘Something eating you, little honey?’ His hand on her arm, rough and angry. ‘Like maybe some wonder product makes you smarter, faster? Huh?’

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘No way. I got you this job. You’re gonna blow it, I’m gonna know why.’ He slammed his other palm on the black foam around his bars, killing the music.

  ‘Please, Sammy, I gotta get up to Skinner’s—’

  He let go of her arm. ‘Why?’

  She started to cough, caught it, took three deep breaths. ‘You ever steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean, when you were working?’

  Sammy Sal looked at her. ‘No,’ he said, finally, ‘but I been known to fuck the clients.’

  Chevette shivered. ‘Not me.’

  ‘No,’ Sammy Sal said, ‘but you don’t pull tags all the places I do. ’Sides, you a girl.’

  ‘But I stole something last night. From this guy’s pocket, up at this party at the Hotel Morrisey.’

  Sammy Sal licked his lips. ‘How come you had your hand in his pocket? He somebody you know?’

  ‘He was some asshole,’ Chevette said.

  ‘Oh. Him. Think I met him.’

  ‘Gave me a hard time. It was sticking out of his pocket.’

  ‘You sure it was his pocket this hard time sticking out of?’

  ‘Sammy Sal,’ she said, ‘this is serious. I’m scared shitless.’

  He was looking at her, close. ‘That it? You scared? Stole some shit, you scared?’

  ‘Bunny says some security guys called up Allied, even called up Wilson and everything. Looking for me.’

  ‘Shit,’ Sammy Sal said, still studying her, ‘I thought you high, on dancer. Thought Bunny found out. Come after you, gonna chew your little bitch ear off. You just scared?’

  She looked at him. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, digging his fingers into the black foam, ‘what you scared of?’

  ‘Scared they’ll come up to Skinner’s and find ’em.’

  ‘Find what?’

  ‘These glasses.’

  ‘Spy, baby? Shot? Looking, like Alice ’n’ all?’ He drummed his fingers on the black foam.

  ‘These black glasses. Like sunglasses, but you can’t see through ’em.’

  Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one s
ide. ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘They’re just black.’

  ‘Sunglasses?’

  ‘Yeah. But just black.’

  ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘you had been fucking the clients, but only just the cute ones, like me, you’d know what those are. Tell you don’t have that many upscale boyfriends, pardon me. You date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you’d know what those are.’ His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip-tab at the neck of Skinner’s jacket. ‘Those VL glasses. Virtual light.’

  She’d heard of it, but she wasn’t sure what it was. ‘They expensive, Sammy Sal?’

  ‘Shit, yes. ’Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he’d bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put ’em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there’s this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that…’

  ‘But they’re solid black.’

  ‘Not if you turn ’em on, they aren’t. Turn ’em on, they don’t even look like sunglasses. Just make you look, I dunno, serious.’ He grinned at her. ‘You look too damn’ serious anyway. That your problem.’

  She shivered. ‘Come back up to Skinner’s with me, Sammy. Okay?’

  ‘Don’t like heights, much,’ he said. ‘That little box blow right off the top of that bridge, one night.’

  ‘Please, Sammy? This thing’s got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you, but I stop and I start thinking about it, I’m scared I’m gonna freeze up. What’ll I do? Maybe I get there and it’s the cops? What’ll Skinner say, the cops come up there? Maybe I go in to work tomorrow and Bunny cans me. What’ll I do?’

  Sammy Sal gave her the look he’d given her the night she’d asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he grinned. Mean and funny. All those sharp white teeth. ‘Keep it between your legs, then. Come on, you try to keep up.’

  He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neon-white when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.

  14 Loveless

  ‘You want another beer, honey?’

  The woman behind the bar had an intricate black tracery along either side of her shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural hairline. The tattoo’s style combined Celtic knots and cartoon lightning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some nocturnal animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen times, by a single length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘thank you.’

  ‘Don’t wanna get fucked up, or what?’ Her tone perfectly cheerful. He looked up from the notebook. She was waiting.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You wanna sit here, you gotta buy something.’

  ‘Beer, please.’

  ‘Same?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She opened a bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put it down on the bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

  Skinner has tried repeatedly to convey that there is no agenda here whatever, no underlying structure. Only the bones, the bridge, the Thomasson itself. When the Little Grande came, it was not Godzilla. Indeed, there is no precisely equivalent myth in this place and culture (though this is perhaps not equally true of Los Angeles). The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But when Godzilla came at last to Tokyo, we were foundering in denial and profound despair. In all truth, we welcomed the most appalling destruction. Sensing, even as we mourned our dead, that we were again presented with the most astonishing of opportunities.

  ‘That’s real nice,’ the man to his left said, placing his left hand on Yamazaki’s notebook. ‘That’s gotta be Japanese, it’s so nice.’ Yamazaki looked up, smiling uncertainly, into eyes of a most peculiar emptiness. Bright, focused, yet somehow flat.

  ‘From Japan, yes,’ Yamazaki said. The hand withdrew slowly, caressingly, from his notebook.

  ‘Loveless,’ the man said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Loveless. My name.’

  ‘Yamazaki.’

  The eyes, very pale and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching from beneath still water. ‘Yeah. Figured it was something like that.’ An easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.

  ‘Yes? Like?’

  ‘Something Japanese. Something ’zaki, something ’zuki. Some shit like that.’ The smile growing somehow sharper. ‘Drink up your Corona there, Mr. Yamazuki.’ The stranger’s hand, closing hard around his wrist. ‘Gettin’ warm, huh?’

  15 In 1015

  There was a product called Kil’Z that Rydell had gotten to know at the Academy. It smelled, but faintly, of some ancient hair-tonic, flowery and cool, and you used it in situations where considerable bodily fluids had been spilled. It was an anti-viral agent, capable of nuking HIV’s 1 through 5, Crimean-Congo, Mokola fever, Tarzana Dengue, and the Kansas City flu.

  He smelled it now, as the IntenSecure man used a black-anodyzed passkey to open the door into 1015.

  ‘We’ll be sure to lock it up when we go,’ Warbaby said, touching the brim of his hat with his index finger. The IntenSecure man hesitated, then said, ‘Yessir. Anything else you want?’

  ‘No,’ Warbaby said, and went into the room, Freddie on his heels. Rydell decided the thing for him to do was follow them in. He did, closing the door in the IntenSecure man’s face. Dark. The curtains drawn. Smell of Kil’Z. The lights came on. Freddie’s hand on the switch. Warbaby staring at a lighter patch of the brick-colored carpet, the place where the bed must’ve been.

  Rydell glanced around. Old-fashioned, expensive-looking. Clubby, sort of. The walls covered in some kind of shiny, white-and-green striped stuff like silk. Polished wooden furniture. Chairs upholstered mossy green. A big brass lamp with a dark green shade. A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. ‘Currier & Ives,’ it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse. Then he saw a round, brownish-purple splotch of dried blood on the glass. It had crackled up, the way mud does in a summer creek bed, but tiny. Hadn’t had any of that Kil’Z on it, either, by the look of it. He stepped back.

  Freddie, in his big shorts and the shirt with the pictures of pistols, had settled into one of the green chairs and was opening his laptop. Rydell watched him reel out a little black cable and pop it into the jack beside the telephone. He wondered if Freddie’s legs got cold, wearing shorts up here in November. He’d noticed that some black people were so far into fashion, they’d wear clothes like there wasn’t any such thing as weather.

  Warbaby just stared at the place where the bed had been, looking sad as ever. ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘I’m gettin’ it, I’m gettin’ it,’ Freddie said, twiddling a little ball on his laptop.

  Warbaby grunted. Watching him, it looked to Rydell as though the lenses of his black-framed glasses winked black for a second. Trick of the light. Then Rydell got this funny feeling, because Warbaby just looked right through him, his traveling gaze fixed on some moving something so keenly that Rydell himself was turning to look—at nothing.

  He looked back at Warbaby. Warbaby’s cane came up, pointing at the space where the bed would have been, then swung back down to the carpet. Warbaby sighed.

  ‘Want the site-data from SFPD now?’ Freddie asked.

  Warbaby grunted. His eyes were darting from side to side. Rydell thought of tv documentaries about voodoo, the priests’ eyes rolling when the gods got int
o them.

  Freddie twirled the trackball under his finger. ‘Prints, hair, skin-flakes… You know what a hotel room is.’

  Rydell couldn’t stand it. He stepped in front of Warbaby and looked him in the eye. ‘What the hell you doing?’

  Warbaby saw him. Gave him a slow sad smile and removed his glasses. Took a big, navy blue silk handkerchief from the side pocket of his long coat and polished the glasses. He handed them to Rydell. ‘Put them on.’

  Rydell looked down at the glasses and saw that the lenses were black now.

  ‘Go on,’ Warbaby said.

  Rydell noticed the weight as he slid them on. Pitch black. Then there was a stutter of soft fuzzy ball-lightning, like what you saw when you rubbed your eyes in the dark, and he was looking at Warbaby. Just behind Warbaby, hung on some invisible wall, were words, numbers, bright yellow. They came into focus as he looked at them, somehow losing Warbaby, and he saw that they were forensic stats.

  ‘Or,’ Freddie said, ‘you can just be here now—’

  And the bed was back, sodden with blood, the man’s soft, heavy corpse splayed out like a frog. That thing beneath his chin, blue-black, bulbous.

  Rydell’s stomach heaved, bile rose in his throat, and then a naked woman rolled up from another bed, in a different room, her hair like silver in some impossible moonlight—

  Rydell yanked the glasses off. Freddie lay back in the chair, shaking with silent laughter, his laptop across his knees. ‘Man,’ he managed, ‘you oughta seen the look you had! Put parta the guy’s porno on there from Arkady’s evidence report…’

  ‘Freddie,’ Warbaby said, ‘are you all that anxious to be looking for work?’

  ‘Nossir, Mr. Warbaby.’

  ‘I can be hard, Freddie. You know that.’

  ‘Yessir.’ Freddie sounded worried now.

  ‘A man died in this room. Someone bent over him on this bed,’ he gestured at the bed that wasn’t there, ‘cut him a new smile, and pulled his tongue out through it. That isn’t a casual homicide. You don’t learn those kinds of tricks with anatomy from watching television, Freddie.’ He held out his hand to Rydell. Rydell gave him the glasses. Their lenses were black again.