Virtual Light

  Rydell got his bag of cornflakes out of the cupboard and carefully unrolled it. About enough for a bowl. He opened the fridge and took out a plastic, snap-top, liter container with a strip of masking-tape across the side. He’d written MILK EXPERIMENT on the masking-tape with a heavy marker.

  ‘What’s that?’ Hernandez asked.

  ‘Milk.’

  ‘Why’s it say “experiment”?’

  ‘So nobody’ll drink it. I figured it out in the dorm at the Academy.’ He dumped the cornflakes in a bowl, covered them with milk, found a spoon, and carried his breakfast to the kitchen table. The table had a trick leg, so you had to eat without putting your elbows down.

  ‘How’s the arm?’

  ‘Fine.’ Rydell forgot about not putting his elbow down. Milk and cornflakes slopped across the scarred white plastic of the tabletop.

  ‘Here.’ Hernandez went to the counter and tore off a fat wad of beige paper towels.

  ‘Those are whatsisname’s,’ Rydell said, ‘and he seriously doesn’t like us to use them.’

  ‘Towel experiment,’ Hernandez said, tossing Rydell the wad.

  Rydell blotted up the milk and most of the flakes. He couldn’t imagine what Hernandez was doing here, but then he’d never have imagined that Hernandez drove a white Daihatsu Sneaker with an animated hologram of a waterfall on the hood.

  ‘That’s a nice car out there,’ Rydell said, nodding in the direction of the carport and spooning cornflakes into his mouth.

  ‘My daughter. Rosa’s car. Been in the shop, man.’

  Rydell chewed, swallowed. ‘Brakes or something?’

  ‘The fucking waterfall. Supposed to be these little animals, they come out of the bushes and sort of look at it, the waterfall, you know?’ Hernandez leaned back against the counter, flexing his toes into the nubby sandals. ‘Some kind of, like, Costa Rican animals, you know? Ecology theme. She’s real green. Made us take out what was left of the lawn, put in all these ground-cover things look like gray spiders. But the shop can’t get those fucking animals to show, man. We got a warranty and everything, but it’s, you know, been a pain in the ass.’ He shook his head.

  Rydell finished his cornflakes.

  ‘You ever been to Costa Rica, Rydell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s fucking beautiful, man. Like Switzerland.’

  ‘Never been there.’

  ‘No, I mean what they do with data. Like the Swiss, what they did with money.’

  ‘You mean the havens?’

  ‘You got it. Those people smart. No army, navy, air force, just neutral. And they take care of everybody’s data.’

  ‘Regardless what it is.’

  ‘Hey, fucking “A.” Smart people. And spend that money on ecology, man.’

  Rydell carried the bowl, the spoon, the damp wad of towels, to the sink. He rinsed the bowl and spoon, wiped them with the towels, then stuck the towels as far down as possible behind the rest of the garbage in the bag under the sink. Straightening up, he looked at Hernandez. ‘Something I can do for you, super?’

  ‘Other way around.’ Hernandez smiled. Somehow it wasn’t reassuring. ‘I been thinking about you. Your situation. Not good. Not good, man. You never get to be a cop now. Now you resign, I can’t even hire you back on IntenSecure to work gated residential. Maybe you get on with a regular square-badge outfit, sit in that little pillbox in a liquor store. You wanna do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good, ’cause you get your ass killed, doing that. Somebody come in there, take your little pillbox out, man.’

  ‘Right now I’m looking at something in retail sales.’

  ‘No shit? Sales? What you sell?’

  ‘Bedsteads made out of cast-iron jockey-boys. These pictures made out of hundred-year-old human hair.’

  Hernandez narrowed his eyes and shoved off the counter, headed for the living room. Rydell thought he might be leaving, but he was only starting to pace. Rydell had seen him do this a couple of times in his office at IntenSecure. Now he turned, just as he was about to enter the living room, and paced back to Rydell.

  ‘You got this hard-assed attitude sometimes, man, I dunno. You oughta stop and think maybe I’m trying to help you a little, right?’ Back toward the living room again.

  ‘Just tell me what you want, okay?’

  Hernandez stopped, turned, sighed. ‘Never been up to NoCal, right? San Francisco? Anybody know you up there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘IntenSecure’s licensed in NoCal, too, right? Different state, different laws, whole different attitude, they might as well be a different fucking country, but we’ve got our shit up there. More office buildings, lot of hotels. Gated residential’s not so big up there, not ’til you get out to the edge-cities. Concord, Hacienda Business Center, like that. We got a good piece of that, too.’

  ‘But it’s the same company. They won’t hire me here, they won’t hire me there.’

  ‘Fucking “A.” Nobody talking about hiring you. What this is, there’s maybe something there for you with a guy. Works freelance. Company has certain kinds of problems, sometime they bring in somebody. But the guy, he’s not IntenSecure. Freelance. Office up there, they got that kind of situation now.’

  ‘Wait a second. What are we talking about here? We’re talking about freelance armed-response?’

  ‘Guy’s a skip-tracer. You know what that is?’

  ‘Finds people when they try to get out from under debt, blow off the rent, like that?’

  ‘Or take off with your kid in a custody case, whatever. But, you know, those kinds of skips, they can mostly be handled through the net, these days. Just keep plugging their stats into DatAmerica, eventually you gonna find ’em. Or even,’ he shrugged, ‘you can go to the cops.’

  ‘So what a skip-tracer mostly does—’ Rydell suggested, remembering one particular episode of Cops in Trouble he’d seen with his father.

  ‘Is keep you from having to go to the cops.’

  ‘Or to a licensed private detective agency.’

  ‘You got it.’ Hernandez was watching him.

  Rydell walked past him, into the living room, hearing the German shower-sandals come squishing after him across the kitchen’s dull tile floor. Someone had been smoking tobacco in there the night before. He could smell it. It was in violation of the lease. The landlord would give them hell about it. The landlord was a Serb immigrant who drove a fifteen-year-old BMW, wore these weird furry Tyrolean hats, and insisted on being called Wally. Because Wally knew that Rydell worked for IntenSecure, he’d wanted to show him the flashlight he kept clipped under the dash in his BMW. It was about a foot long and had a button that triggered a big shot of capsicum gas. He’d asked Rydell if Rydell thought it was ‘enough.’

  Rydell had lied. Had told him that people who did, for instance, a whole lot of dancer, they actually liked a blast or two of good capsicum. Like it cleared their sinuses. Got their juices flowing. They got off on it.

  Now Rydell looked down and saw for the first time that the living room carpet in the house in Mar Vista was exactly the same stuff he’d crawled across in Turvey’s girlfriend’s apartment in Knoxville. Maybe a little cleaner, but the same stuff. He’d never noticed that before.

  ‘Listen, Rydell, you don’t want to take this, fine. My day off, I drive over here, you appreciate that? You get tweaked by some hackers, you fall for it, you push the response too hard, I can understand. But it happened, man, it’s on your file, and this is the best I can do. But listen up. You do right by the company, maybe that gets back to Singapore.’

  ‘Hernandez…’

  ‘My day off…’

  ‘Man, I don’t know anything about finding people—’

  ‘You can drive. All they want. Just drive. You drive the tracer, see? He’s got his leg hassled, he can’t drive. And this is, like, delicate, this thing. Requires some smarts. I told them I thought you could do it, man. I did that. I told them.’

  Monica’s
copy of People was on the couch, open to a story about Gudrun Weaver, this actress in her forties who’d just found the Lord, courtesy of the Reverend Wayne Fallon, in time to get her picture in People. There was a full-page picture of her on a couch in her living room, gazing raptly at a bank of monitors, each one showing the same old movie.

  Rydell saw himself on the futon from Futon Mouth, staring up at those big stick-on flowers and bumper-stickers. ‘Is it legal?’

  Hernandez slapped his powder-blue thigh. It sounded like a pistol shot. ‘Legal? We are talking IntenSecure Corporation here. We are talking major shit. I am trying to help you, man. You think I would ask you to do something fucking illegal?’

  ‘But what’s the deal, Hernandez? I just go up there and drive?’

  ‘Fucking “A”! Drive! Mr. Warbaby say drive, you drive.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Warbaby. This Lucius Warbaby.’

  Rydell picked up Monica’s copy of People and found a picture of Gudrun Weaver and the Reverend Wayne Fallon. Gudrun Weaver looked like an actress in her forties. Fallon looked like a possum with hair-implants and a ten-thousand-dollar tuxedo.

  ‘This Warbaby, Berry, he’s right on top of this shit. He’s a fucking star, man. Otherwise why they hire him? You do this, you learn shit. You still young, man. You can learn shit.’

  Rydell tossed the People back onto the couch. ‘Who they trying to find?’

  ‘Hotel theft. Somebody took something. We got the security there. Singapore, man, they’re in some kind of serious twist about it. All I know.’

  Rydell stood in the warm shade of the carport, gazing down into the shimmering depths of the animated waterfall on the hood of Hernandez’s daughter’s Sneaker, mist rising through green boughs of rain forest. He’d once seen a Harley done up so that everything that wasn’t triple-chromed was crawling, fast forward, with life-sized bugs. Scorpions, centipedes, you name it.

  ‘See,’ Hernandez said, ‘see there, where it blurs? That’s supposed to be some kind of fucking sloth, man. Some lemur, you know? Factory warranty.’

  ‘When do they want me to go?’

  ‘I give you this number.’ Hernandez handed Rydell a torn scrap of yellow paper. ‘Call them.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Hey,’ Hernandez said, ‘I like to see you do okay. I do. I like that.’ He touched the Sneaker’s hood. ‘Look at this shit. Factory fucking warranty.’

  8 Morning after

  Chevette dreamed she was riding Folsom, a stiff sidewind threatening to push her into oncoming. Took a left on Sixth, caught that wind at her back, ran a red at Howard and Mission, a stale green at Market, bopped the brakes and bunnied both sets of tracks.

  Coming down in a hard lean, she headed up Nob on Taylor.

  ‘Make it this time,’ she said.

  Legs pumping, the wind a strong hand in the small of her back, sky clear and beckoning at the top of the hill, she thumbed her chain up onto some huge-ass custom ring, too big for her derailleur, too big to fit any frame at all, and felt the shining teeth catch, her hammering slowing to a steady spin—but then she was losing it.

  She stood up and started pounding, screaming, lactic acid slamming through her veins. She was at the crest, lifting off—

  Colored light slanted into Skinner’s room through the tinted pie-wedge panes of the round window. Tuesday morning.

  Two of the smaller sections of glass had fallen out; the gaps were stuffed with pieces of rag, throwing shadows on the tattered yellow wall of National Geographics. Skinner was sitting up in bed, wearing an old plaid shirt, blankets and sleeping-bag pulled high up his chest. His bed was an eight-panel oak door up on four rusty Volkswagen hubs, with a slab of foam on top of that. Chevette slept on the floor, on a narrower piece of foam she rolled up every morning and stuck behind a long wooden crate full of greasy hand tools. The smell of tool grease worked its way into her sleep, sometimes, but she didn’t mind it.

  She snaked her arm out into the November chill and snagged a sweater off the seat of a paint-caked wooden stool. She pulled the sweater into her bag and twisted into it, tugging it down over her knees. It hung to her knees when she stood up, the neckband so stretched that she had to keep pushing it back up on her shoulder. Skinner didn’t say anything; he hardly ever did, first thing.

  She rubbed her eyes, went to the ladder bolted to the wall and climbed the five rungs, undoing the catch on the roof-hatch without bothering to look at it. She came up here most mornings now, started her day with the water and then the city. Unless it was raining, or too foggy, and then it was her turn to pump the ancient Coleman, its red-painted tank like a toy submarine. Skinner did that, on good days, but he stayed in bed a lot when it rained. Said it got to his hip.

  She climbed out of the square hole and sat on its edge, dangling her bare legs down into the room. Sun struggling to burn off the silvery gray. On hot days it heated the tar on the roof’s flat rectangle and you could smell it.

  Skinner had showed her pictures of the La Brea pits in National Geographic, big sad animals going down forever, down in L.A. a long time ago. That was what tar was, asphalt, not just something they made in a factory somewhere. He liked to know where things came from.

  His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street. That was in London. Skinner liked maps. Some of the National Geographics had maps folded into them, and all the countries were big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn’t been nearly as many of them. There’d been countries big as anything: Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of little ones where those had been. Skinner said America had gone that route without admitting it. Even California had all been one big state, once.

  Skinner’s roof was eighteen feet by twelve. Somehow it looked smaller than the room below, even though the walls of the room were packed solid with Skinner’s stuff. Nothing on the roof but a rusty metal wagon, a kid’s toy, with a couple of rolls of faded tarpaper stacked in it.

  She looked past three cable-towers to Treasure Island. Smoke rose, there, from a fire on the shore, where the low cantilever, cottoned down in fog, shot off to Oakland. There was a dome-thing, up on the farthest suspension tower, honeycombed into sections like new copper, but Skinner said it was just Mylar, stretched over two-by-twos. They had an plink in that, something that talked to satellites. She thought she’d go and see it one day.

  A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.

  The city looked the same as ever, the hills like sleeping animals behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought to be able to see that hotel.

  The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.

  She couldn’t believe she’d done that, been that stupid. The case she’d pulled out of that dickhead’s pocket was hanging up in Skinner’s jacket, on the iron hook shaped like an elephant’s head. Nothing in it but a pair of sunglasses, expensive-looking but so dark she hadn’t even been able to see through them last night. The security grunts in the lobby had scanned her badges when she’d gone in; as far as they knew, she’d never come back down. Their computer would’ve started looking for her, eventually. If they queried Allied, she’d say she forgot, blew the checkout off, took the service elevator down after she’d pulled her tag at 808. No way had she been at any party, and who’d seen her there anyway? The asshole. And maybe he’d figure she’d done him for his glasses. Maybe he’d felt it. Maybe he’d remember, when he sobered up.

  Skinner yelled there was coffee, but they were out of eggs. Chevette shoved off the edge of the hole, swung down and in, catching the top rung.

  ‘Want any, you’re gonna get ’em,’ Skinner said, looking up from the Coleman.

  ‘Save me coffee.’ She pulled on a pair of black cotton leggings and got into her trainers without bothering to lace them. She opened the hatch in the floor and climbed through, still worrying about the asshole, his glasses, her job. Down ten steel rungs off the side of an old crane. The cherry-picker b
asket waiting where she’d left it when she’d gotten back. Her bike cabled to an upright with a couple of Radio Shack screamers for good measure. She climbed into the waist-high yellow plastic basket and hit the switch.

  The motor whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom let her down the slope. Skinner called the cherry-picker his funicular. He hadn’t built it, though; a black guy named Fontaine had built it for him, when Skinner had started to have trouble with the climb. Fontaine lived on the Oakland end, with a couple of women and a lot of children. He took care of a lot of the bridge’s electrical stuff. He’d show up once in a while in a long tweed overcoat, a toolbag in each hand, and he’d grease the thing and check it. And Chevette had a number to call him at if it ever broke down completely, but that hadn’t happened yet.

  It shook when it hit the bottom. She climbed out onto the wooden walkway and went along the wall of taut milky plastic, halogen-shadows of plants behind it and the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down the stairs to the noise and morning hustle of the bridge. Nigel coming toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a delivery.

  ‘’Vette,’ with his big goofy grin. He called her that.

  ‘Seen the egg lady?’

  ‘City side,’ he said, meaning S.F. always, Oakland being always only ’Land. ‘Good one, huh?’ with a gesture of builder’s pride for his cart. Chevette saw the braised aluminum frame, the Taiwan-ese hubs and rims beefed up with fat new spokes. Nigel did work for some of the other riders at Allied, ones who still rode metal. He hadn’t liked it when Chevette had gone for a paper frame. Now she bent to run her thumb along a specially smooth braise. ‘Good one,’ she agreed.

  ‘That Jap shit delaminate on you yet?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘’S gonna. Bunny down too hard, it’s glass.’

  ‘Come see you when it does.’

  Nigel shook his hair at her. The faded wooden fishing-plug that hung from his left ear rattled and spun. ‘Too late then.’ He shoved his cart toward Oakland.

  Chevette found the egg lady and bought three, twisted up that way in two big dry blades of grass. Magic. You hated to take it apart, it was so perfect, and you could never get it back together or figure out how she did it. The egg lady took the five-piece and dropped it into the little bag around her scrawny lizard neck. She had no teeth at all, her face a nest of wrinkles that centered into that wet slit of a mouth.