Virtual Light

  Skinner was sitting at the table when she got back. More like a shelf than a table. He was drinking coffee out of a dented steel thermos-mug. If you just came in and saw him like that, it didn’t strike you right away how old he was; just big, his hands, shoulders, all his bones, big. Gray hair slicked back from his forehead’s lifetime collection of scars, little dents, a couple of black dots like tattoos, where some kind of grit had gotten into a cut.

  She undid the eggs, the egg lady’s magic, and put them in a plastic bowl. Skinner heaved himself up from his creaking chair, wincing as he took the weight with his hip. She handed him the bowl and he swung over to the Coleman. The way he scrambled eggs, he didn’t use any butter, just a little water. Said he’d learned it from a cook on a ship. It made good eggs but the pan was hard to clean, and that was Chevette’s job. While he broke the eggs, she went to the jacket on its hook, and took that case out.

  You couldn’t tell what it was made of, and that meant expensive. Something dark gray, like the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell of one of those eggs, but you could probably drive a truck over it. Like her bike. She’d figured out how you opened it the night before; finger here, thumb there, it opened. No catch or anything, no spring. No trademark, either; no patent numbers. Inside was like black suede, but it gave like foam under your finger.

  Those glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in the poster stuck to Skinner’s wall, black and white. Skinner said the way to put a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the glue. Kind that came in a can. Nothing much came in cans, anymore, but Chevette knew what he meant, and the weird big-faced guy with the black glasses was laminated solid to the white-painted ply of Skinner’s wall.

  She pulled them from the black suede, the stuff springing instantly back to a smooth flat surface.

  They bothered her. Not just that she’d stolen them, but they weighed too much. Way too heavy for what they were, even with the big earpieces. The frames looked as though they’d been carved from slabs of graphite. Maybe they had, she thought; there was graphite around the paper cores in her bike’s frame, and it was Asahi Engineering.

  Rattle of the spatula as Skinner swirled the eggs.

  She put them on. Black. Solid black.

  ‘Katharine Hepburn,’ Skinner said.

  She pulled them off. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Big glasses like that.’

  She picked up the lighter he kept beside the Coleman, clicked it, held the flame behind one lens. Nothing.

  ‘What’re they for, welding?’ He put her share of the eggs in an aluminum mess-tray stamped 1952. Set it down beside a fork and her mug of black coffee.

  She put the glasses on the table. ‘Can’t see through ’em. Just black.’ She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, picking up the fork. She ate her eggs. Skinner sat, eating his, looking at her. ‘Soviet,’ he said, after a swallow from his thermos-mug.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘How they made sunglasses in the ol’ Soviet. Had two factories for sunglasses, one of ’em always made ’em like that. Kept right on puttin’ ’em out in the stores, nobody’d buy ’em, buy the ones from the other factory. How the place packed it in.’

  ‘The factory made the black glasses?’

  ‘Soviet Union.’

  ‘They stupid, or what?’

  ‘Not that simple… Where’d you get ’em?’

  She looked at her coffee. ‘Found ’em.’ She picked it up and drank.

  ‘You working, today?’ He pulled himself up, stuffed the front of his shirt down into his jeans, the rusted buckle on his old leather belt held with twisted paper clips.

  ‘Noon to five.’ She picked up the glasses, turning them. They weighed too much for how big they were.

  ‘Gotta get somebody up here, check the fuel cell…’

  ‘Fontaine?’

  He didn’t answer. She bedded the glasses in black suede, closed the case, got up, took the dishes to the wash-basin. Looked back at the case on the table.

  She’d better toss them, she thought.

  9 When diplomacy fails

  Rydell took a CalAir tilt-rotor out of Burbank into Tuesday’s early evening. The guy in San Francisco had paid for it from the other end; said call him Freddie. No seatback fun on CalAir, and the passengers definitely down-scale. Babies crying. Had a window seat. Down there the spread of lights through the faint glaze of some previous passenger’s hair-oil: the Valley. Turquoise voids of a few surviving pools, lit subsurface. A dull ache in his arm.

  He closed his eyes. Saw his father at the kitchen sink of his mobile home in Florida, washing out a glass. At that precise moment the death no doubt already growing in him, established fact, some line crossed. Talking about his brother, Rydell’s uncle, three years younger and five years dead, who’d once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps on the bubblepack envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-52, and WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS.

  ‘Is that the Coast Highway, do you think?’

  Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him to peer through the film of hair-oil. Like Mrs. Armbruster in fifth grade; older than his father would be now.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rydell said. ‘Might be. All just looks like streets to me. I mean,’ he added, ‘I’m not from here.’

  She smiled at him, settling back into the grip of the narrow seat. Completely like Mrs. Armbruster. Same weird combination of tweed, oxford-cloth, Santa Fe blanket coat. These old ladies with their bouncy thick-soled shoes.

  ‘None of us are.’ Reaching out to pat his khaki knee. ‘Not these days.’ Kevin had said it was okay to keep the pants.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Rydell said, his hand feeling desperately for the recliner button, the little dimpled steel circle waiting to tilt him back into the semblance of sleep. He closed his eyes.

  ‘I’m on my way to San Francisco to assist in my late husband’s transfer to a smaller cryogenic unit,’ she said. ‘One that offers individual storage modules. The trade magazines call them “boutique operations,” grotesque as that may seem.’

  Rydell found the button and discovered that CalAir’s seats allowed a maximum recline of ten centimeters.

  ‘He’s been in cryo, oh, nine years now, but I’ve never liked to think of his brain tumbling around in there like that. Wrapped in foil. Don’t they always make you think of baked potatoes?’

  Rydell’s eyes opened. He tried to think of something to say.

  ‘Or like tennis shoes in a dryer,’ she said. ‘I know they’re frozen solid, but there’s nothing about it that seems like any kind of rest, is there?’

  Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front of him. A plastic blank. Gray. Not even a phone.

  ‘These smaller places can’t promise anything new in the way of an eventual awakening, of course. But it seems to me that there’s an added degree of dignity. I think of it as dignity, in any case.’

  Rydell glanced sideways. Found his gaze caught in hers: hazel eyes, mazed there in the finest web of wrinkles.

  ‘And I certainly won’t be there if he’s ever thawed, or, well, whatever they might eventually intend to do with them. I don’t believe in it. We argued about it constantly. I thought of all those billions dead, the annual toll in all the poor places. ‘David,’ I said, ‘how can you contemplate this when the bulk of humanity lives without air-conditioning?”

  Rydell opened his mouth. Closed it.

  ‘Myself, I’m a card-carrying member of Cease Upon the Midnight.’

  Rydell wasn’t sure what ‘card-carrying’ meant, but Cease Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia, and illegal in Tennessee. Though they did it there anyway, and someone on the force had told him that they left milk and cookies out for the ambulance crews. Did it eight or nine at a time, mostly. CUTM. ‘Cut ’em,’ the paramedics called it. Offed themselves with cocktails of legally prescribed drugs. No muss, no fuss. Tidiest suicides around.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ Rydell said, ‘but I’ve got to try to catch a little slee
p here.’

  ‘You go right ahead, young man. You do look rather tired.’

  Rydell closed his eyes, put his head back, and stayed that way until he felt the rotors tilting over into descent-mode.

  ‘Tommy Lee Jones,’ the black man said. His hair was shaped like an upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it. Sort of like a Shriner’s fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall and his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide. The shirt was lemon-yellow and printed with life-size handguns, in full color, all different kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy blue shorts that came to way below his knees, Raiders socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the size of five-dollar coins.

  ‘You got the wrong guy,’ Rydell said.

  ‘No, man, you look like him.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Tommy Lee Jones.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Was an actor, man.’ For a second Rydell thought this guy had to be with Reverend Fallon. Even had those shades, like Sublett’s contacts. ‘You Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth.’

  ‘You Freddie?’ Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C… The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell’s class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those? Maybe Sublett had a great big one. But when they’d run the program on Rydell in the Academy, he’d come up a dead ringer for Howie Clacton, the Atlanta pitcher; he’d didn’t remember any Tommy Lee Jones. But then he hadn’t thought he looked all that much like Howie Clacton, either.

  This Freddie extended a very soft hand and Rydell shook it. ‘You got luggage?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Just this.’ Hefting his Samsonite.

  ‘That’s Mr. Warbaby right over there,’ Freddie said, nodding in the direction of an exit-gate, where a uniformed chilanga was checking people’s seat-stubs before letting them out. Another black man loomed behind her, huge, broad as this Freddie, looking twice his height.

  ‘Big guy.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Freddie said, ‘and best we not keep him waiting. Leg’s hurting him today and he just insisted on walking in here from the lot to meet you.’

  Rydell took the man in as he approached the gate, handing his stub to the guard. He was enormous, over six feet, but the thing that struck Rydell most was a stillness about him, that and some kind of sorrow in his face. It was a look he’d seen on the face of a black minister his father had taken to watching, toward the end there. You looked at that minister’s face and you felt like he’d seen every sad-ass thing there was, so maybe you could even believe what he was saying. Or anyway Rydell’s father had, maybe, at least a little bit.

  ‘Lucius Warbaby,’ taking the biggest hands Rydell had ever seen from the deep pockets of a long olive overcoat stitched from diamond-quilted silk, his voice pitched so far into the bass that it suggested subsonics. Rydell looked at the proffered hand and saw he wore one of those old-fashioned gold knuckle-duster rings, WARBABY across it in diamond-chip sans-serif capitals.

  Rydell shook it, fingers curled over diamond and bullion. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr. Warbaby.’

  Warbaby wore a black Stetson set dead level on his head, the brim turned up all the way around, and glasses with heavy black frames. Clear lenses, windowpane plain. The eyes behind those lenses were Chinese or something; catlike, slanted, a weird goldy brown. He was leaning on one of those adjustable canes you get at the hospital. There was a carbon brace clamped around his left leg, big midnight-blue nylon cushions padding it. Skinny black jeans, brand new and never washed, were tucked into spit-shined Texas dogger boots in three shades of black.

  ‘Juanito says you’re a decent driver,’ Warbaby said, as though it was about the saddest thing he’d ever heard. Rydell hadn’t ever heard anybody call Hernandez that. ‘Says you don’t know the area up here…’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Up-side of that,’ Warbaby said, ‘is nobody here knows you. Carry the man’s bag, Freddie.’

  Freddie took Rydell’s soft-side with obvious reluctance, as though it wasn’t something he’d ordinarily care to be seen with.

  The hand with the knuckle-duster came down on Rydell’s shoulder. Like the ring weighed twenty pounds. ‘Juanito tell you anything with regard to what we’re doing up here?’

  ‘Said a hotel theft. Said IntenSecure was bringing you in on a kind of contract basis—’

  ‘Theft, yes.’ Warbaby looked like he had the moral gravity of the universe pressing down on him and was determined to bear the brunt. ‘Something missing. And all more… complicated, now.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Warbaby sighed. ‘Man who’s missing it, he’s dead now.’

  Something else in those eyes. ‘Dead how?’ Rydell asked, as the weight at last was taken from his shoulder.

  ‘Hom-icide,’ Warbaby said, low and doleful but very clear.

  ‘You’re wondering about my name,’ Warbaby said from the backseat of his black Ford Patriot.

  ‘I’m wondering where to put the key, Mr. Warbaby,’ Rydell said, behind the wheel, surveying the option-laden dash. American cars were the only cars in the world that still bothered to physically display the instrumentation. Maybe that was why there weren’t very many of them. Like those Harleys with chain-drives.

  ‘My grandmother,’ Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China, ‘was Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit boy. Army man. Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didn’t stick around. My daddy, his son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Rydell said, starting the big Ford and checking out the transmission. Saigon was where rich people went on vacation.

  Four-wheel drive. Ceramic armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers you’d need a serious gun to puncture. There was a cardboard air-freshener, shaped like a pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-vent.

  ‘Now the Lucius part, well, I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Mr. Warbaby,’ Rydell said, looking back over his shoulder, ‘where you want me to drive you to?’

  A modem-bleep from the dash.

  Freddie, in the plush bucket beside Rydell, whistled. ‘Motherfuck,’ he said, ‘that’s nasty.’

  Rydell swung back to watch as the fax emerged: a fat man, naked on sheets solid with blood. Pools of it, where the brilliance of the photographer’s strobes lay frozen like faint mirages of the sun.

  ‘What’s that under his chin?’ Rydell asked.

  ‘Cuban necktie,’ Freddie said.

  ‘No, man,’ Rydell’s voice up an octave, ‘what is that?’

  ‘Man’s tongue,’ Freddie said, tearing the image from the slit and passing it back to Warbaby.

  Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.

  ‘These people,’ Warbaby said. ‘Terrible.’

  10 The modern dance

  Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Skinner shave.

  Skinner sat on the edge of his bed, scraping his face pink with a disposable razor, rinsing the blade in a dented aluminum basin that he cradled between his thighs.

  ‘The razor is old,’ Yamazaki said. ‘You do not throw it away?’

  Skinner looked at him, over the plastic razor. ‘Thing is, Scooter, they just don’t get any duller, after a while.’ He lathered and shaved his upper lip, then paused. Yamazaki had been ‘Kawasaki’ for the first several visits. Now he was ‘Scooter.’ The pale old eyes regarded him neutrally, hooded under reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinner’s inward laughter.
br />   ‘I make you laugh?’

  ‘Not today,’ Skinner said, dropping the razor into the basin of water, suds and gray whiskers recoiling in a display of surface tension. ‘Not like the other day, watching you chase those turds around.’

  Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinner’s ‘neighborhood.’ Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as he’d tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next. The hoses swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner had explained, a mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that carried it into the municipal system.

  He’d made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridge’s program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinner’s story of the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key to the bridge’s existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his physical survey of secondary construction in order to spend as much time as possible in the old man’s company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he would send the day’s accumulation of material to Osaka University’s Department of Sociology.

  Today, climbing to the lift that would carry him to Skinner’s room, he had met the girl on her way to work, descending, her shoulder through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.

  Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.