“Tessa, there is no way you are going to get me to act in your movie. None. You understand?”
“‘Acting' isn't in it, Chevette. All you have to do is be yourself. And that will involve finding out who you really are. I am going to make a film about you finding out who you really are.”
“You are not,” said Chevette, getting up and actually bumping into the camera platform, which must have descended to level with her head while they were talking. “Stop that!” Swatting at God's Little Toy.
The other four customers in Dirty Is God just looking at them.
16. SUB-ROUTINES
THAT Hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.
Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self.
But what was there, he wonders, before?
Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.
Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality, it seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?
But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the earth's core, and beyond cardboard walls are walls of concrete, sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.
Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting. There is movement, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he is no longer afraid.
And all of this is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the cough, the fever, but of that underlying dis-ease that he takes to be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.
We were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.
Something at once noun and verb.
While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of information, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context. A microscopic cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned, he senses, centrally.
Crucially.
And that is why sleep is no longer an option.
17. ZODIAC
THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long face and the fat white man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls. Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black plastic pipes above. Falls harder, stings.
They have taken his clothes and shoes away in a plastic bag, and now the fat man returns, gives him soap. He knows soap. He remembers the warm rain falling from a pipe in los projectos but this is better, and he is alone in the tall wooden room.
Silencio with his belly full, soaping himself repeatedly, because that is what they want. He rubs the soap into his hair.
He closes his eyes against the burning of the soap and sees the watches arrayed beneath greenish, randomly abraded glass, like fish from some warmer season frozen hard in lake ice. Bright highlights off steel and gold.
He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended: the multifold fact of these potent objects, their endless differentiation, their individual specificities. Infinite variety arising from the expression of dial, hands, numerals, hour markers… He likes the warm rain but he needs desperately to return, to see more, to hear the words.
He has become the words, what they mean.
Breguette hands. Tapestry dial. Bombay lugs. Original stem. Signed.
The rain slows, stops. The fat man, who wears plastic sandals, brings Silencio a thick dry cloth.
The fat man peers at him. “Watches, you say he likes?” the fat man asks the black man. “Yes,” the black man says, “he seems to like watches.”
The bearded man drapes the towel around Silencio's shoulders. “Does he know how to tell time?”
“I don't know” says the black man.
“Well,” says the fat man, stepping back, “he doesn't know how to use a towel.”
Silencio feels confused, ashamed. He looks down.
“Leave him alone, Andy, the black man says. Get me those clothes I brought.”
THE black man's name: Fontaine. Like a word in the language of los projectos, a meaning about water. The warm rain in the wooden room.
Now Fontaine leads him through the upper level, where some people call out, selling fruit, past others selling old things spread on blankets, to where a thin dark man stands waiting beside a plastic crate. The crate is upturned, its bottom padded with foam and ragged silver tape, and this man wears a striped cloth thing with pockets down his front, and in the pockets are scissors, and things like the thing Raton liked to run endlessly through his hair, when he had balanced the black perfectly with the white.
Silencio is wearing the clothes Fontaine has given him: they are large, loose, not his own, but they smell good. Fontaine has given him shoes made of white cloth. Too white. They hurt his eyes.
The soap and the warm rain have made Silencio's hair strange as well, and now Fontaine tells Silencio to sit upon the crate, this man will cut his hair.
Silencio sits, trembling, as the thin dark man flicks at his hair with one of the Raton-things from his pockets, making small noises behind his teeth.
Silencio looks at Fontaine.
“It's okay,” Fontaine says, unwrapping a small sharp stick of wood and inserting it into the corner of his mouth, “you won't feel a thing.”
Silencio wonders if the stick is like the black or the white, but Fontaine does not change. He stands there with the stick in his mouth, watching the thin dark man snip away Silencio's hair with the scissors. Silencio watches Fontaine, listens to the sound of the scissors, and to the new language in his head.
Zodiac Sea Wolf. Case very clean. Screw-down crown. Original bezel.
“Zodiac Sea Wolf,” Silencio says.
“Man,” says the thin dark man, “you deep.”
18. SELWYN TONG
RYDELL had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website. According to this theory, Selwyn F.X. Tong, notary public, of Kowloon, was probably operating out of a rolled-up newspaper.
Rydell couldn't figure out a way to skip the approach segment, which was monolithic, vaguely Egyptian, and reminded him of what his buddy Sublett, a film buff, had called “corridor metaphysics.” This was one long-ass corridor, and if it had been physical, you could've driven a very large truck down it. There were baroque sconce lights, virtual scarlet wall-to-wall, and weird tacky texture mapping that tended to gold-flecked marble.
Where had Laney found this guy?
Eventually Rydell did manage to kill the music, something vaguely classical and swelling, but it still seemed to take him three minutes to get to Selwyn F.X. Tong's doors. Which were tall, very tall, and mapped to resemble some generic idea of tropical hardwood.
“Teak my ass,” said Rydell.
“Welcome,” said a breathless, hyper-feminine voice, “to the offices of Selwyn F.X. Tong, notary public!”
The doors swung open. Rydell figured that if he hadn't killed the music, it would be peaking about now.
Virtually, the notary's office was about the size of an Olympic pool but scarce on detail. Rydell used the rocker-pad on his glasses to scoot his POV right up to the desk, which was about the size of a pool table, and mapped in that same ramped-down wood look. There were a couple of nondescript, metallic-looking objects on it and a few pieces of virtual paper.
“What'
s the ‘F.X.’ stand for?” Rydell asked.
“Francis Xavier,” said Tong, who presented as a sort of deadpan cartoon of a small Chinese man in a white shirt, black tie, black suit. His black hair and the black suit were mapped in the same texture, a weird effect and one Rydell took to be unintentional.
“I thought you might be in video,” Rydell said, “like it's a nickname: FX, ‘effects,’ right?”
“I am Catholic,” Tong said, his tone neutral.
“No offense,” Rydell said.
“None taken,” said Tong, his plastic-looking face as shiny as his plastic-looking eyes.
You always forgot, Rydell reflected, just how bad this stuff could look if it hadn't been handled right.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Rydell?”
“Laney didn't tell you?”
“Laney?”
“Colin,” Rydell said. “Space. Laney.”
“And…?
“Six,” Rydell said. “Zero. Four. Two.”
Tong's plastic-looking eyes narrowed.
“Berry.”
Tong pursed his lips. Behind him, through a broad window, at a different rate of resolution, Rydell could see the skyline of Hong Kong.
“Berry,” Rydell repeated.
“Thank you, Mr. Rydell,” the notary said. “My client has authorized me to give you this seven-digit identification number.” A gold fountain pen appeared in Tong's right hand, like a continuity error in a student film. It was a very large pen, elaborately mapped with swirling dragons, their scales in higher resolution than anything else in the site. Probably a gift, Rydell decided. Tong wrote the seven digits on one of the sheets of virtual paper, then reversed it on the desktop so that Rydell could read it. The pen had vanished, as unnaturally as it had appeared. “Please don't repeat this number aloud,” Tong said.
“Why not?”
“Issues of encryption,” Tong said obscurely. “You have as long as you like to memorize the number.”
Rydell looked at the seven digits and began to work out a mnemonic. He finally arrived at one based on his birthday, the number of states when he was born, his father's age when he'd died, and a mental image of two cans of 7-Up. When he was certain that he'd be able to recall the number, he looked up at Tong. “Where do I go to get the credit chip?”
“Any automated teller. You have photo identification?”
“Yes,” Rydell said.
“Then we are finished.”
“One thing,” Rydell said.
“What is that?”
“Tell me how I get out of here without having to go back down that corridor of yours. I just want a straight exit, right?”
Tong regarded him blandly. “Click on my face.”
Rydell did, using the rocker-pad to summon a cursor shaped like a neon green cartoon hand, pointing. “Thanks,” he said, as Tong's office folded.
He was in the corridor, facing back the way he had come.
“Damn,” Rydell said.
The music began. He worked the rocker-pad, trying to remember how he'd killed it before. He wanted to get a GPS fix on the nearest ATM, though, so he didn't unplug the glasses.
He clicked for the end of the corridor.
The click seemed to trigger a metastatic surge of bit rot, every bland texture map rewritten in some weirder hand: the red carpet went gray-green, its knap grown strange and unevenly furry, like something at the bottom of a month-old cup of coffee, while the walls went from whorehouse marble to a moist fish-belly pallor, the sconce lights glowing dim as drowned corpse candles. Tong's fake-classical theme cracked and hollowed, weird bass notes rumbling in just above the threshold of the subsonic.
It all took about a second to happen, and it took Rydell maybe another second to get the idea that someone wanted his undivided attention.
“Rydell.” It was one of those voices that they fake up from found audio: speech cobbled from wind down skyscraper canyons, the creaking of Great Lakes ice, tree frogs clanging in the Southern night. Rydell had heard them before. They grated on the nerves, as they were meant to, and conveniently disguised the voice of the speaker. Assuming the speaker had a voice in the first place.
“Hey,” Rydell said, “I was just trying to click out.”
A virtual screen appeared in front of him, a round-cornered rectangle whose dimensions were meant to invoke the cultural paradigm of twentieth-century video screens. On it, an oddly angled, monochromatic view of some vast shadowy space, dimly lit from above. Nothing there. Impression of decay, great age.
“I have important information for you.” The vowel in you suggested a siren dopplering past, then gone.
“Well,” said Rydell, “if your middle name is ‘F.X.,’ you're sure going to some trouble.”
There was a pause, Rydell staring at the dead, blank space depicted or recorded on the screen. He was waiting for something to move there; probably that was the point of it, that nothing did.
“You'd better take this information very seriously, Mr. Rydell.”
“I'm serious as cancer,” Rydell said. “Shoot.”
“Use the ATM at the Lucky Dragon, near the entrance to the bridge. Then present your identification at the GlobEx franchise at the rear of the store.”
“Why?”
“They're holding something for you.”
“Tong,” Rydell said, “is that you?”
But there was no answer. The screen vanished, and the corridor was as it had been.
Rydell reached up and disconnected the rented cable from the Brazilian glasses.
Blinked.
A coffee place near Union Square, the kind that had potted plants and hotdesks. An early office crowd was starting to line up for sandwiches.
He got up, folded the glasses, tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and picked up his bag.
19. INTERSTITIAL
CHEVETTE moves past the colorless flame of a chestnut vendor's charcoal fire, powdery gray burning itself down in the inverted, V-nosed hood of some ancient car.
She sees another fire, in memory: coke glow of a smith's forge, driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside her the old man held the drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly into a compact mass and fastened with a twist of rusty wire. To be taken in the smith's tongs and placed within the forge. To be beaten, finally, incandescent, into a billet of their strangely grained Damascus, ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is forged, quenched, shaped, and polished on the wheel.
Where did that knife go? she wonders.
She'd watched the maker craft and braise a hilt of brass, rivet slabs of laminated circuit board and shape them on a belt grinder. The rigid, brittle-looking board, layers of fabric trapped in green phenolic resin, was everywhere on the bridge, a common currency of landfills. Each sheet mapped with dull metallic patterns suggesting cities, streets. When they came from the scavengers they were studded with components, easily stripped with a torch, melting the gray solder. The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue of the second age of electronics. And Skinner would tell her that these boards were immortal, inert as stone, proof against moisture and ultraviolet and every form of decay; that they were destined to litter the planet, hence it was good to reuse them, work them when possible into the fabric of things, a resource when something needed to be durable.
She knows she needs to be alone now, so she's left Tessa on the lower level, collecting visual texture with God's Little Toy. Chevette can't hear any more about how Tessa's film has to be more personal, about her, Chevette, and Tessa hasn't been able to shut up about that, or take no for an answer. Chevette remembers Bunny Malatesta, her dispatcher when she rode here, how he'd say “and what part of ‘no' is it that you don't understand?” But Bunny could deliver lines like that as though he were a force of nature, and Chevette knows she can't, that she lacks Bunny's gravity, the sheer crunch required to get it across.
So she's taken an e
scalator, one she doesn't remember, to the upper level, and is making her way, without really thinking about it, to the foot of their tower, the wet light having turned to a thin and gusting rain, blowing through the bridge's tattered secondhand superstructure. People are hauling their laundry in, where they've hung it, draped on lines, and there's a general pre-storm bustle that she knows will fade if the weather changes.
And so far, she thinks, she's not seen a single face she knows from before, and no one has greeted her, and she finds herself imagining the bridge's entire population replaced in her absence. No, there went the bookstall woman, the one with the ivory chopsticks thrust into her dyed black bun, and she recognizes the Korean boy with the bad leg, rumbling his father's soup wagon along as though it should have brakes.
The tower she'd ascended each day to Skinner's plywood shack is bundled in subsidiary construction, its iron buried at the core of an organic complex of spaces appropriated for specific activities. Behind taut, wind-shivered sheets of milky plastic, the unearthly light of a hydroponics operation casts outsize leaf shadows. She hears the snarl of an electric saw from the tiny workshop of a furniture-maker, whose assistant sits patiently, rubbing wax into a small bench collaged from paint-flecked oak scavenged from the shells of older houses. Someone else is making jam, the big copper kettle heated by a propane ring.
Perfect for Tessa, she thinks: the bridge people maintaining their interstices. Doing their little things. But Chevette has seen them drunk. Has seen the drugged and the mad dive to their deaths in the gray and unforgiving chop. Has seen men fight to the death with knives. Has seen a mother, dumbstruck, walking with a strangled child in her arms, at dawn. The bridge is no tourist's fantasy. The bridge is real, and to live here exacts its own price.
It is a world within the world, and, if there be such places between the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there are things there, and places between them, and things in those places too. And Tessa doesn't know this, and it is not Chevette's place to tell her.