34. Punching out of paradise

   Chevette let the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune her out, the way she used to do with her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what it was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about. Up to something; whispering in the kitchen.
   She watched a fly buzz around the stuff on Mrs. Sublett’s shelves. It looked slow, like maybe the air-conditioning was too much for it.
   She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it was just that he’d showered and shaved and put on clean clothes from his stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the same as the ones he’d been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else. But she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. Sublett’s mother said he looked like a young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy Lee Jones? Or maybe it was because she had the idea somehow he was going to do something mean to Lowell. She’d thought she was still in love with Lowell, or something anyway, but now she didn’t think so, not at all. If Lowell just hadn’t started doing dancer. She’d thought about how that Loveless had got when she’d dumped all that dancer in his Coke. She’d asked Rydell if that was enough to have killed him, and Rydell had said no. Said it was enough to keep him stone crazy for a while, and when he got back together, he was going to be hurting. Then she’d asked Rydell why Loveless had done that, banging his gun into his crotch that way. Rydell had sort of scratched his head and said he wasn’t sure, but he thought it had something to do with what it did to your nervous system. Said he’d heard it induced priapism, for one thing. She’d asked him what that was. Well, he’d said, it’s when the man is, like, overstimulated. She didn’t know about that, but it had given Lowell these total brickbat boners that just didn’t want to go away. And that would’ve been just fine, or anyway okay, except he got all mean with it, too, so she’d wind up all sore and then he’d be badmouthing her in front of these people he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about what Rydell might have in mind for Lowell, no way. What she did worry about was Skinner, whether he was okay, whether he was being taken care of. She was kind of scared to try phoning Fontaine now; every time Rydell made a call out, she worried it might get traced back or something. And it made her sad to think about her bike. She was sure somebody would’ve gotten it by now. She kind of hated to admit it, but that was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy getting killed that way. And Rydell had said he thought maybe Nigel had gotten shot, too.
   “And then” Sublett’s mother was saying, “Gary Underwood goes through this window. And he falls on one of those fences? Kind with spikes on top.”
   “Hey, Mom” Sublett said, “you’re bending Chevette’s ear.”
   “Just telling her about Inner Tube” Mrs. Sublett said, from under the washcloth.
   “1996” Sublett said. “Well, Rydell and I, we need her for something.” Sublett gestured for her to follow him back into the kitchen.
   “I don’t think it’s a real good idea for her to go outside, Berry” he said to Rydell. “Not in the daytime.”
   Rydell was sitting at the little plastic table where she’d had breakfast. “Well, you can’t go, Sublett, because of your apostasy. And I don’t want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.”
   “Can’t you just call them on the regular phone, Berry?” Sublett sounded unhappy.
   “No.” Rydell said, “I can’t. They just don’t like that. He says they’ll at least talk to me if I call them on an eyephone rig.”
   “What’s the problem?” Chevette said.
   “Sublett’s got a friend here who’s got a pair of eyephones.”
   “Buddy” Sublett said.
   “Your buddy?” she asked.
   “Name’s Buddy” Sublett said, “but that VR, eyephones ‘n’ stuff, it’s against Church law. It’s been revealed to Reverend Fallon that virtual reality’s a medium of Satan, ’cause you don’t watch enough tv after you start doing it…”
   “You don’t believe that” Rydell said.
   “Neither does Buddy” Sublett said, “but his daddy’ll whip his head around if he finds that VR stuff he’s got under the bed.”
   “Just call him up” Rydell said, “tell him what I told you. Two hundred dollars cash, plus the time and charges.”
   “People’ll see her” Sublett said, his shy silver gaze bouncing in Chevette’s direction, then back to Rydell.
   “What do you mean, ‘see’ me?”
   “Well, it’s your haircut” Sublett said. “It’s too unusual for ’em, I can tell you that.”
   “Now, Buddy” Rydell said to the boy, “I’m going to give you these two hundred-dollar bills here. Now when’d you say your father’s due back?”
   “Not for another two hours” Buddy said, his voice cracking with nervousness. He took the money like it might have something on it. “He’s helping pour a new pad for the fuel cells they’re bringing from Phoenix on the Church’s bulk-lifter.” Buddy kept looking at Chevette. She had on a straw sun-hat that belonged to Sublett’s mother, with a big floppy brim, and a pair of these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames and lenses that sort of swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didn’t seem to help.
   “You’re friends of Joel’s, right?” Buddy had a haircut that wasn’t quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an Adam’s apple ahout a third the size of his head. She watched it bob up and down. “From L.A.?”
   “That’s right” Rydell said.
   “I… I wanna g-go there” Buddy said.
   “Good” Rydell said. “This is a step in the right direction, you just believe it. Now you wait out there like I said, and tell Chevette here if anybody’s coming.”
   Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind him. It didn’t look to Chevette like anybody Buddy’s age lived there at all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed Sublett’s mother’s air-conditioning. She took off that hat.
   “Okay” Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, “you sit on the bed here and pull the plug if we get interrupted.” Buddy had already hooked up the jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor and put the helmet on, so she couldn’t see his eyes. Then he pulled on one of those gloves you use to dial with and move stuff around in there.
   She watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on a pad that wasn’t there. Then she listened to him talking to the telephone company’s computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.
   Then his hand came up again. “Here goes” he said, and started punching out this number he said Lowell had given him, his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the gloved hand to his lap.
   He just sat there for a few seconds, the helmet kind of swiveling around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.
   “Okay” he said, his voice kind of funny, but not to her, “but is there anybody here?”
   Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
   “Oh” he said, the helmet turning, “Jesus—”
   Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls; some were in places that had been movie theaters, some were in old department stores. He’d gone to one once that they’d put into an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.
   There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.
   But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He’d been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if you’d animated it. There’d always be a couple of girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they’d get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.

35. The republic of desire

   Rydell would be up closer to the entrance, molding these grids of green light around a frame he’d drawn, and laying color and texture over that to see how different ones looked.
   But what he remembered when he clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space was the sense you got, doing that, of what the space around Dream Walls was like. And it was a weird thing, because if you looked up from what you were doing, there really wasn’t anything there; nothing in particular, anyway. But when you were doing it, designing your car or whatever, you could get this funny sense that you were leaning out, over the edge of the world, and the space beyond that sort of fell away, forever.
   And you felt like you weren’t standing on the floor of an old movie theater or a bowling alley, but on some kind of plain, or maybe a pane of glass, and you felt like it just stretched away behind you, miles and miles, with no real end.
   So when he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain, he just said ‘Oh,’ because he could see its edges, and see that it hung there, level, and around and above it this cloud or fog or sky that was no color and every color at once, just sort of seething.
   And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain, so that Rydell got to feel like a bug, or a little toy.
   One of them was a dinosaur, this sort of T. Rex job with the short front legs, except they ended in something a lot more like hands. One was a sort of statue, it looked like, or more like some freak natural formation, all shot through with cracks and fissures, but it was shaped like a wide-faced man with dreadlocks, the face relaxed and the lids half-closed. But all stone and moss, the dreadlocks somehow stacked from whole mountains of shale.
   Then he looked and saw the third one there, and just said
   “Jesus.”
   This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television, these moving images winding and writhing together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man or a woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was like trying to watch a million channels at once, and this noise was rushing off it like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow wasn’t a sound at all.
   “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. It smiled, the ivory of its teeth carved into whole temples. Rydell tried to look at the carvings; they got really clear for a second, and then something happened.
   “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-Tel space…”
   “We could turn off the emulator” the thing made of television suggested, its voice modulating up out of the waterfall-hiss.
   “Don’t bother” said the dinosaur. “I don’t think this is going to be much of a conversation.”
   “Your name” said the mountain.
   Rydell hesitated.
   “Social Security” said the dinosaur, sounding bored, and for some reason Rydell thought about his father, how he’d always gone on about what that had used to mean, and what it meant now.
   “Name and number” said the mountain, “or we’re gone.”
   “Rydell, Stephen Berry” and then the string of digits. He’d barely gotten the last one out when the dinosaur said ‘Former policeman, I see.”
   “Oh dear” said the mountain, who kept reminding Rydell of something.
   “Well” said the dinosaur, “pretty permanently former, by the look of it. Worked for IntenSecure after that.”
   “A sting” said the mountain, and brought a hand up to point at Rydell, except it was this giant granite lobster-claw, crusted with lichen. It seemed to fill half the sky, like the side of a space ship. “The narrow end of the wedge?”
   “They don’t come much narrower, if you ask me” the storm of television said. “You seem to have gotten our Lowell’s undivided attention, Rydell. And he wouldn’t even tell us what your name was.”
   “Doesn’t know it” Rydell said.
   “Don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, hee haw” said the mountain, lowering the claw, its voice a sampled parody of Rydell’s. Rydell tried to get a good look at its eyes; got a flash of still blue pools, waving ferns, some kind of tan rodent hopping away, before the focus slipped. “People like Lowell imagine we need them more than they need us.”
   “State your business, Stephen Berry” said the dinosaur.
   “There was something happened, up Benedict Canyon—”
   “Yes, yes” said the dinosaur, “you were the driver. What does it have to do with us?”
   That was when it dawned on Rydell that the dinosaur, or all of them, could probably see all the records there were on him, right then, anywhere. It gave him a funny feeling. “You’re looking at all my stuff” he said.
   “And it’s not very interesting” said the dinosaur. “Benedict Canyon?”
   “You did that” Rydell said.
   The mountain raised its eyebrows. Windblown scrub shifting, rocks tumbling down. But just on the edge of Rydell’s vision. “For what it’s worth, that was not us, not exactly. We would’ve gone a more elegant route.”
   “But why did YOU do it?”
   “Well” said the dinosaur, “to the extent that anyone did it, or caused it to be done, I imagine you might look to the lady’s husband, who I see has since filed for divorce. On very solid grounds, it seems.”
   “Like he set her up? With the gardener and everything?”
   “Lowell has some serious explaining to do, I think” the mountain said.
   “You haven’t told us what it is you want, Mr. Rydell.” This from the television-thing.
   “A job like that. Done. I need you to do one of those. For me.”
   “Lowell” the mountain said, and shook its dreadlocked head. Cascades of shale in Rydell’s peripheral vision. Dust rising on a distant slope.
   “That sort of thing is dangerous” the dinosaur said. “Dangerous things are very expensive. You don’t have any money, Rydell.”
   “How about if Lowell pays you for it?”
   “Lowell” from that vast blank face twisting with images, “owes us.”
   “Okay” Rydell said, “I hear you. And I think I know somebody else might pay you.” He wasn’t even sure if that was bullshit or not. “But you’re going to have to listen to me. Hear the story.”
   “No” the mountain said, and Rydell remembered who it was he figured the thing was supposed to look like, that guy you saw on the history shows sometimes, the one who’d invented eyephones or something, “and if Lowell thinks he’s the only pimp out there, he might have to think again.”
   And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.
   “Wait” he said. “Any of you live in San Francisco?”
   The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?”
   “Well” Rydell said, “do you like it?”
   “Why do you ask?”
   “Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.”
   “Tokyo?” The television-storm, coming back now as this big ball, like that hologram in Cognitive Dissidents. “Who told you that?”
   Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…”
   “Tell us” the dinosaur said.
   So Rydell did.
   She had the hat back on, when he took the helmet off, but she was holding those sunglasses in her hand. Just looking at him.
   “I don’t think I made sense of much of that” she said. She’d only been able to hear his side of it, but it had been mostly him talking, there at the end. “But I think you’re flat fucking crazy.”
   “I probably am” he said.
   Then he got the time and charges on the call. It came to just about all the money he had left.
   “I don’t see why they had to put the damn thing through Paris” he said.
   She just put those glasses back on and slowly shook her head.

36. Notebook (z)

   The city in sunlight, from the roof of this box atop the tower. The hatch open. Sound of Skinner sorting and resorting his belongings. A cardboard box, slowly filling with objects I will take below, to the sellers of things, their goods spread on blankets, on greasy squares of ancient canvas. Osaka far away. The wind brings sounds of hammering, song. Skinner, this morning, asking if I had seen the pike in the Steiner Aquarium.
   –No.
   –He doesn’t move, Scooter.
   Sure that’s all Fontaine said? But he’d found her bike? That’s no good. Wouldn’t go this long without that. Cost an arm and a fucking leg, that thing. Made of paper, inside. Japanese construction-paper, what’s it called? Useless, Scooter. Shit, it’s your language. Forgetting it faster than we are… Tube of that paper, then they wrap it with aramyd or something. No, she wouldn’t leave that. Day she brought it home, three hours down there spraying this fake rust on it, believe that? Fake rust, Scooter. And wrapping it with old rags, innertubes, anything. So it wouldn’t look new. Well, it makes more sense than just locking it, it really does. Know how you break a Kryptonite lock, Scooter? With a Volvo jack. Volvo jack fits right in there, like it was made for it. Give it a shove or two, zingo. But they never use ’em anymore, those locks. Some people still carry ’em, though. One of those up ’side the head, you’ll notice it… I just found her one day. They wanted to cart her down to the end, let the city have her. Said she’d be dead before they got her off anyway. Told ’em they could fuck off into the air. Got her up here. I could still do that. Why? Hell. Because. See people dying, you just walk by like it was television?

37. Century city

   Chevette didn’t know what to think about Los Angeles.
   She thought those palm trees were weird, though. On the way in, Sublett’s electric car had pulled up behind this big white trailer-rig with A-LIFE INSTALLATIONS, NANOTRONIC VEGETATION across the back of it, and the heads of these fake palm trees sticking out, all wrapped in plastic.
   She’d seen it all on tv once, with Skinner, how they were putting in these trees to replace the ones the virus had killed, some Mexican virus. They were kind of like the Bay maglev, or like what Rydell and Sublett said that that Sunflower company was going to do in San Francisco; these things that kind of grew, but only because they were made up of all these little tiny machines. One show she’d seen with Skinner, they’d talked about how these new trees were designed so that all kinds of birds and rats and things could nest in them, just like the ones that had died. Skinner told her that he’d run a Jeep into a real palm tree, in L.A., once, and about ten rats had fallen out, landed on the hood and just sort of stood there, until they got scared and ran away.
   It sure didn’t feel like San Francisco. She felt kind of two ways about it. Like it was just this bunch of stuff, all spread out pretty much at random, and then like it was this really big place, with mountains somewhere back there, and all this energy flowing around in it, lighting things up. Maybe that was because they’d got there at night.
   Sublett had this little white Eurocar called a Montxo. She knew that because she’d had to look at the logo on the dash all the way from Paradise. Sublett said it rhymed with poncho. It was built in Barcelona and you just plugged it into the house-current and left it until it was charged. It wouldn’t do much more than forty on a highway, but Sublett didn’t like to drive anything else because of his allergies. She said he was lucky they had electric cars; he’d told her all about how he was worried about the electromagnetic fields and cancer and stuff.
   They’d left his mother with this Mrs. Baker, watching Spacehunter on the tv. They were both real excited about that because they said it was Molly Ringwald’s first film. They’d get excited about just about anything, like that, and Chevette never had any idea who they were talking about.
   Rydell was just spending more and more time on the phone, and they’d had to stop and buy fresh batteries twice, Sublett paying.
   It kind of bothered her that he didn’t give her any more attention. And they’d slept on the same bed again, in the room at the motel, but nothing had happened, even though Sublett had slept out in the Montxo, with the seats tilted back.
   All Rydell ever did now was talk to those Republic of Desire people Lowell knew, but on the regular phone, and try to leave messages on somebody’s voicemail. Mr. Mom or something. Ma. But he didn’t think anybody was getting them, so he’d called up the Desire people and gone on and on about the whole story, everything that happened to them, and they’d recorded it and they were supposed to put it in this Mr. Ma’s voicemail. Rydell said they were going to stuff it there, so there wasn’t any other mail. Said that ought to get his attention.
   When they’d got to L.A. and got a room in a motel, Chevette had been kind of excited, because she’d always wanted to do that. Because her mother had always seemed to have real good times when she went to motels. Well, it had turned out to be sort of like a trailer camp without the trailers, with these little concrete buildings divided up into smaller rooms, and there were foreign people cooking barbecues down in what had been the swimming pool. Sublett had gotten really upset about that, how he couldn’t handle the hydrocarbons and everything, but Rydell had said it was just for the one night. Then Rydell had gone over to the foreign people and talked to them a little, and came back and said they were Tibetans. They made a good barbecue, too, but Sublett just ate this drugstore food he’d brought with him, bottled water and these yellow bars looked like soap, and went out to sleep in his Montxo.
   Now here she was, walking into this place called Century City II, and trying to look like she was there to pull a tag. It was this kind of green, tit-shaped thing up on these three legs that ran up through it. You could see where they went because the walls were some kind of glass, mostly, and you could see through. It was about the biggest thing around; you could see it forever. Rydell called it the Blob.
   It was real upscale, too, kind of like China Basin, with those same kind of people, like you mostly saw in the financial district, or in malls, or when you were pulling tags.
   Well, she had her badges on, and she’d had a good shower at the motel, but the place was starting to creep her out anyway. All these trees in there, up all through this sort of giant, hollow leg, and everything under this weird filtered light came in through the sides. And here she was standing on this escalator, about a mile long, just going up and up, and around her all these people who must’ve belonged there. There were elevators, Rydell said, up the other two legs, and they ran at an angle, like the lift up to Skinner’s. But Sublett’s friend had said there were more IntenSecure people watching those, usually.
   She knew that Sublett was behind her, somewhere, or anyway that was how they’d worked it out before Rydell dropped them off at the entrance. She’d asked him where he was going then, and he’d just said he had to go and borrow a flashlight. She was starting to really like him. It sort of bothered her. She wondered what he’d be like if he wasn’t in a situation like this. She wondered what she’d be like if she wasn’t in a situation like this.
   He and Sublett had both worked for the company that did security for this building, IntenSecure, and Sublett had called up a friend of his and asked him questions about how tight it was. The way he’d put it, it was like he wanted a new job with the company. But he and Rydell had worked it out that she could get in, particularly if he was following her to keep track.
   What bothered her about Sublett was that he was acting sort of like he was committing suicide or something. Once he’d gotten with the program, Rydell’s plan, it was like he felt cut loose from things. Kept talking about his apostasy and these movies he liked, and somebody called Cronenberg. Had this weird calm like somebody who knew for sure he was going to die; like he’d sort of made peace with it, except he’d still get upset about his allergies.
   Green light. Rising up through it.
   They’d made her up this package at the motel. What it had in it was the glasses. Addressed to Karen Mendelsohn.
   She closed her eyes, told herself Bunny Malatesta would bongo on her head if she didn’t make the tag, and pushed the button.
   “Yes?” It was one of those computers.
   “Allied Messenger, for Karen Mendelsohn.”
   “A delivery?”
   “She’s gotta sign for it.”
   “Authorized to barcode—”
   “Her hand. Gotta see her hand. Do it. You know?”
   Silence. “Nature of delivery?”
   “You think I open them or what?”
   “Nature of delivery?”
   “Well” Chevette said, “it says ‘Probate Court,’ it’s from San Francisco, and you don’t open the door, Mr. Wizard, it’s on the next plane back.”
   “Wait, please” said the computer.
   Chevette looked at the potted plants beside the door. They were big, looked real, and she knew Sublett was standing behind them, but she couldn’t see him. Somebody had put a cigarette out on one, between its roots.
   The door open, a crack. “Yes?”
   “Karen Mendelsohn?”
   “What is it?”
   “Allied Messenger, San Francisco. You wanna sign for this?” Except there was nothing, no tag, to sign.
   “San Francisco?”
   “What it says.”
   The door opened a little more. Dark-haired woman in a long pale terrycloth robe. Chevette saw her check the badges on Skinner’s jacket. “I don’t understand” Karen Medelsohn said. “We do everything via GlobEx.”
   “They’re too slow” Chevette said, as Sublett stepped around the plant, wearing this black uniform. Chevette saw herself reflected in his contacts, sort of bent out at the middle.
   “Ms. Mendelsohn” he said, “afraid we’ve got us a security emergency, here.”
   Karen Mendelsohn was looking at him. “Emergency?”
   “Nothing to worry about” Sublett said. He put his hand on Chevette’s shoulder and guided her in, past Karen Mendelsohn. “Situation’s under control. Appreciate your co-operation.”
   “Wally Divac, Rydell’s Serbian landlord, hadn’t really wanted to loan Rydell his flashlight, but Rydell had lied and promised he’d get him something a lot better, over at IntenSecure, and bring it along when he brought the flashlight back. Maybe one of those telescoping batons with the wireless taser-tips, he said; something serious, anyway, professional and maybe quasi-illegal. Wally was sort of a cop-groupie. Liked to feel he was in with the force. Like a lot of people, he didn’t much distinguish between the real PD and a company like IntenSecure. He had one of those armed response signs in his front yard, too, but Rydell was glad to see it wasn’t IntenSecure. Wally couldn’t quite afford that kind of service, just like his car was second-hand, though he would’ve told you it was previously owned, like the first guy was just some flunky who’d had the job of breaking it in for him.
   But he owned this house, where he lived, with the baby-blue plastic siding that looked sort of like painted wood, and one of those fake lawns that looked realer than AstroTurf. And he had the house in Mar Vista and a couple of others. His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he’d come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.
   “What’s that you’re driving?” he’d asked, from the steps of the renovated Craftsman two blocks above Melrose.
   “A Montxo” Rydell said. “From Barcelona. Electric.”

38. Miracle mile

   You live in America” he’d said, his gray hair plastered neatly back from his pitted forehead. “Why you drive that?” His BMW, immaculate, reposed in the driveway; he’d had to spend five minutes disarming it to get the flashlight out for Rydell. Rydell had remembered the time in Knoxville, Christmas day, when the Narcotics team’s new walkie-talkies had triggered every car-alarm in a ten-mile radius.
   “Well” Rydell said, “it’s real good for the environment.”
   “It’s bad for your country” Wally said. “Image thing. An American should drive some car to feel proud of. Bavarian car. At least Japanese.”
   “I’ll get this back to you, Wally.” Holding up the big black flashlight.
   “And something else. You said.”
   “Don’t worry about it.”
   “When you pay rent on Mar Vista?”
   “Kevin’ll take care of it.” Getting into the tiny Montxo and starting up the flywheel. It sat there, rocking slightly on its shocks, while the wheel got up to speed.
   Wally waved, shrugged, then backed into his house and closed the door. Rydell hadn’t ever seen him not wear that Tyrolean hat before.
   Rydell looked at the flashlight, figuring out where the safety was. It wasn’t much, but he felt like he had to have something. And it was nonlethal. Guns weren’t that hard to buy, on the street, but he didn’t really want to have to have one around today. You did a different kind of time, if there was a gun involved.
   Then he’d driven back toward the Blob, taking it real easy at intersections and trying to keep to the streets that had designated lanes for electric vehicles. He got Chevette’s phone out and hit redial for the node-number in Utah, the one Godeater had given him, back in Paradise. God-eater was the one who looked like the mountain, or so he said. Rydell had asked him what kind of a name that was. He’d said he was a full-blood Blood Indian. Rydell sort of doubted it.
   None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he’d seen there might’ve been just one person. He thought about the woman in the wheelchair in Cognitive Dissidents. It could be her. It could be anybody. That was the spooky thing about these hackers. He heard the node-number ringing, in Utah. God-eater always picked up on five, in mid-ring.
   “Yes?”
   “Paradise” Rydell said.
   “Richard?”
   “Nixon.”
   “We have your goods in place, Richard. One little whoops and a push.”
   “You get me a price yet?” The light changed. Somebody was honking, pissed-off at the Montxo’s inability to do anything like accelerate.
   “Fifty” God-eater said.
   Fifty thousand dollars. Rydell winced. “Okay” he said, “fair enough.”
   “Better be” God-eater said. “We can make you pretty miserable in prison, even. In fact, we can make you really miserable in prison. The baseline starts lower, in there.”
   I’ll bet you got lots of friends there, too, Rydell thought. “How long you estimate the response-time, from when I call?”
   God-eater burped, long and deliberate. “Quick. Ten, fifteen max. We’ve got it slotted the way we talked about. Your friends’re gonna shit themselves. But really, you don’t wanna be in the way. This’ll be like something you never saw before. This new unit they just got set up.”
   “I hope so” Rydell said, and broke the connection.
   He gave the parking-attendant Karen’s apartment number. After this, it really wasn’t going to matter much. He had the flashlight stuck down in the back of his jeans, under the denim jacket Buddy had loaned him. It was probably Buddy’s father’s. He’d told Buddy he’d help him find a place when he got to L.A. He sort of hoped Buddy never did try that, because he imagined kids like Buddy made it about a block from the bus station before some really fast urban predator got them, just a blur of wheels and teeth and no more Buddy to speak of. But then again you had to think about what it would be like to be him, Buddy, back there in his three-by six-foot bedroom in that trailer, with those posters of Fallon and Jesus, sneaking that VR when his daddy wasn’t looking. If you didn’t at least try to get out, what would you wind up feeling like? And that was why you had to give it to Sublett, because he’d gotten out of that, allergies and all.
   But he was worried about Sublett. Pretty crazy to be worried about anybody, in a situation like this, but Sublett acted like he was already dead or something. Just moving from one thing to the next, like it didn’t matter. The only thing that got any kind of rise out of him was his allergies.
   And Chevette, too, Chevette Washington, except what worried him there was the white skin of her back, just above the waist of those black bike-pants, when she was curled on the bed beside him. How he kept wanting to touch it. And how her tits stuck out against her t-shirt when she’d sit up in the morning, and those little dark twists of hair under her arms. And right now, walking up to this terracotta coffee-module near the base of the escalator, the rectangular head of Wally’s pepper-spray flashlight digging into his spine, he knew he might never get another chance. He could be dead, in half an hour, or on his way to prison.
   He ordered a latte with a double shot, paid for it with just about the last of his money, and looked at his Timex. Ten ’til three. When he’d called Warbaby’s personal portable from the motel, the night before, he’d told him three.
   God-eater had gotten him that number. God-eater could get you any number at all.
   Warbaby had sounded really sad to hear from him.
   Disappointed, like. “We never expected this of you, Rydell.”
   “Sorry, Mr. Warbaby. Those fucking Russians. And that cowboy fucker, that Loveless. Got on my case.”
   “There’s no need for obscenity. Who gave you this number?”
   “I had it from Hernandez, before.” Silence.
   “I got the glasses, Mr. Warbaby.”
   “Where are you?”
   Chevette Washington watching him, from the bed. “In Los Angeles. I figured I’d better get as far away from those Russians as I could.”
   A pause. Maybe Warbaby had put his hand over the phone. Then, “Well, I suppose I can understand your behavior, although I can’t say I approve…”
   “Can you come down here and get them, Mr. Warbaby? And just sort of call it even?”
   A longer pause. “Well, Rydell” sadly, “I wouldn’t want you to forget how disappointed I am in you, but, yes, I could do that.”
   “But just you and Freddie, right? Nobody else.”
   “Of course” Warbaby had said. Rydell imagined him looking at Freddie, who’d be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.
   “You be down here tomorrow, Mr. Warbaby. I’ll call you at your same number, tell you where to come. Three o’clock. Sharp.”
   “I think you’ve made the right decision, Rydell” Warbaby had said.
   “I hope so” Rydell had said, then clicked off.
   Now he looked at his Timex. l’ook a sip of coffee. Three o’clock. Sharp. He put the coffee down on the counter and got the phone out. Started punching in Warbaby’s number.
   It took them twenty minutes to get there. They came in two cars, from opposite directions; Warbaby and Freddie in a black Lincoln with a white satellite-dish on top, Freddie driving it, then Svobodov and Orlovsky in a metallic-gray Lada sedan that Rydell took for a rental.
   He watched them meet up, the four of them, then walk in, onto the plaza under the Blob, past those kinetic sculptures, heading for the nearest elevator, Warbaby looking sad as ever and leaning on that cane. Warbaby had his same olive coat on, his Stetson, Freddie was wearing a big shirt with a lot of pink in it, had a laptop under his arm, and the Russians from Homicide had these gray suits on, about the color and texture of the Lada they were driving.
   He gave it a while to see if Loveless was going to turn up, then started keying in that number in Utah.
   “Please, Jesus” he said, counting the rings.
   “Your latte okay?” The Central Asian kid in the coffee-module, looking at him.
   “It’s fine” Rydell said, as God-eater picked up.
   “Yes?”
   “Paradise.”
   “This Richard?”
   “Nixon. They’re here. Four but not Smiley.”
   “Your two Russians, Warbaby, and his jockey?”
   “Got ’em.”
   “But not the other one?”
   “Don’t see him…”
   “His description’s in the package anyway. Okay, Rydell. Let’s do it.” Click.
   Rydell stuck the phone in his jacket pocket, turned, and headed, walking fast, for the escalator. The boy in the coffeemodule probably thought there was something wrong with that lane.
   God-eater and his friends, if they weren’t just one person, say some demented old lady up in the Oakland hills with a couple of million dollars’ worth of equipment and a terminally bad attitude, had struck Rydell as being almost uniquely full of shit. There was nothing, if you believed them, they couldn’t do. But if they were all that powerful, how come they had to hide that way, and make money doing crimes?
   Rydell had gotten a couple of lectures on computer crime at the Academy, but it had been pretty dry. The history of it, how hackers used to be just these smart-ass kids dicking with the phone companies. Basically, the visiting Fed had said, any crime that was what once had been called white-collar was going to be computer crime anyway, now, because people in offices did everything with computers. But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn’t know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the shit. Rydell’s class laughed dutifully. But not today, the Fed said; your modern hacker was about as romantic as a hit man from some ice posse or an enforcer with a dancer combine. And a lot harder to catch, although if you could get one and lean on him, you could usually count on landing a few more. But they were set up mostly in these cells, the cells building up larger groups, so that the most you could ever pop, usually, were the members of a single cell; they just didn’t know who the members of the other cells were, and they made a point of not finding out.
   God-eater and his friends, however many of them there were or weren’t, must’ve been a cell like that, one of however many units in what they called the Republic of Desire. And if they were really going to go ahead and do the thing for him, he figured there were three reasons: they hated the idea of San Francisco getting rebuilt hecause they liked an infrastructure with a lot of holes in it, they were charging him good money—money he didn’t have—and they’d figured out a way to do something that nobody had ever done before. And it was that last one that had really seemed to get them going, once they’d decided to help him out.
   And now, climbing the escalator, up through all these kinds of people who lived or worked up here, forcing himself not to break into a run, Rydell found it hard to believe that God-eater and them were doing what they’d said they could do. And if they weren’t, well, he was just fucked.
   No, he told himself, they were. They had to be. Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky. And out of it, fed in from wherever God-eater and his friends were, were coming these packages, no, packets, of signals. Packets, God-eater called them.
   And somewhere, high above the Blob, up over the whole L.A. Basin, was the Death Star.
   Rydell dodged past a silver-haired man in tennis whites and ran up the escalator. Came out under the copper tit. People going in and out of that little mall there. A fountain with water sliding down big ragged sheets of green glass. And there went the Russians, their wide gray backs heading toward the white walls of the complex where Karen’s apartment was. He couldn’t see Warbaby or Freddie.
   “Shit” he said, knowing it hadn’t worked, that God-eater had fucked him, that he’d doomed Chevette Washington and Sublett and even Karen Mendelsohn and it was one more time he’d just gone for it, been wrong, and the last fucking time at that.
   And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were, and he hadn’t ever seen anything like them. There were a bunch of them, maybe ten or a dozen, and they were black. They hardly made any sound at all, and they were sort of floating. Just skimming along. The players on the courts stopped to watch them.
   They were helicopters, but too small to carry anybody. Smaller than the smallest micro-light. Kind of dish-shaped. French Aerospatiale gun-platforms, the kind you saw on the news from Mexico City, and he guessed they were under the control of ECCCS, the Emergency Command Control Communications System, who ran the Death Star. One of them swung by, about twenty feet over his head, and he saw the clustered tubes of some kind of gun or rocket-launcher.
   “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.
   “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”
   A woman started screaming, from somewhere over by the mall, over and over, like something mechanical.
   “REMAIN CALM.”
   And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.
   Rydell started running.
   He ran past Svobodov and Orlovsky, who were looking at the three helicopters that were much lower now, and so clearly edging in on them. The Russians’ mouths were open and Orlovsky’s half-frame glasses looked like they were about to fall off.
   “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”
   But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands, or dark glossy paper bags from the mall. Watching the helicopters. Watching Rydell as he ran past them, their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.
   He ran past Freddie, who was flat down on the granite pavers, doing what the helicopters said, his hands above his head and his laptop between them.
   “REMAIN CALM.”
   Then he saw Warbaby, slouched back on a cast-iron bench like he’d been sitting there forever, just watching life go by. Warbaby saw him, too.
   “POLICE EMERGENCY.”
   His cane was beside him, propped on the bench. He picked it up, lazy and deliberate, and Rydell was sure he was about to get blown away.
   “REMAIN CALM.”
   But Warbaby, looking sad as ever, just brought the cane up to the brim of his Stetson, like some kind of salute.
   “DROP THAT CANE.”
   The amplified voice of a SWAT cop, bunkered down in the hardened sublevels of City Hall East, working his little Aerospatiale through a telepresence rig. Warbaby shrugged, slowly, and tossed the cane away.
   Rydell kept running, right through the open gates and up to Karen Mendelsohn’s door. Which was half-open, Karen and Chevette Washington both there, their eyes about to pop out of their heads.
   “Inside!” he yelled.
   They just gaped at him.
   “Get inside!”
   There were a bunch of big plants beside the door, in a terracotta pot about as high as his waist. He saw Loveless step around it, raising his little gun; Loveless had on a silvery sportscoat and his left arm was in a sling; his face was studded with micropore dressings that weren’t quite the right shade, so he looked like he had leprosy or something. He was smiling that smile.
   “No!” Chevette Washington screamed, “you murdering little fuck!”
   Loveless brought the gun around, about a foot from her head, and Rydell saw the smile vanish. Without it, he noticed, Loveless sort of looked like he didn’t have any lips.
   “REMAIN CALM” the helicopters reminded them all, as Rydell brought up Wally’s flashlight.
   Loveless never even managed to pull the trigger, which you had to admit was kind of impressive. What that capsicum did, it was kind of like when Sublett got an allergic reaction, but a lot worse, and a lot quicker.
   “You crazy, crazy motherfucker” Karen Mendelsohn kept saying, her eyes swollen up like she’d walked through a swarm of hornets. She and Chevette had both caught the edges of that pepper-spray, and Sublett was so worried about the residue that he’d gone into a closet in Karen’s bedroom and wouldn’t come out. “You crazy, outrageous motherfucker. Do you know what you’ve done?”
   Rydell just sat there, in one of her white Retro Aggressive armchairs, listening to those helicopters yelling outside. Later on, when it all came out, they’d find out that the Republic of Desire had set Warbaby and them up as these bomb-building mercenaries working for the Sonoran Separatist Front, with enough high explosives stored in Karen’s place to blow that nipple off the tit and clear to Malibu. And they’d also worked in this hostage-taking scenario, to guarantee the SWAT guys made a soft entry, if they had to. But when the real live Counterterrorism Squad got in there, it would’ve been pretty hairy, at least if Karen hadn’t been a lawyer for Cops in Trouble. Those were some angry cops, and getting angrier, at first, but then Pursley’s people seemed to have their ways to calm them down.
   But the funny thing was, they, the LAPD, never would, ever, admit to it that anybody had hacked the Death Star. They kept saying it had been phoned in. And they stuck to that, too; it was so important to them, evidently, that they were willing, finally, to let a lot of the rest of it just go.
   But when he was sitting there, listening to Karen, and gradually getting the idea that, yeah, he was the kind of crazy motherfucker she liked, he kept thinking about Nightmare Folk Art, and whatever that woman’s name was, over there, and hoping she was coping okay, because God-eater had needed an L.A. number to stick into his fake data-packet, a number where the tip-off was supposed to have come from. And Rydell hadn’t wanted to give them Kevin’s number, and then he’d found the Nightmare number in his wallet, on part of a People cover, so he’d given God-eater that.
   And then Chevette came over, with her face all swollen from the capsicum, and asked him if it was working or were they totally fucked? And he said it was, and they weren’t, and then the cops came in and it wasn’t okay, but then Aaron Pursley turned up with about as many other lawyers as there were cops, and then Wellington Ma, in a navy blazer with gold buttons.
   So Rydell finally got to meet him.
   “Always a pleasure to meet a client in person” Wellington Ma said, shaking his hand.
   “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ma” Rydell said.
   “I won’t ask you what you did to my voice-mail” Wellington Ma said, “but I hope you won’t do it again. Your story, though, is fascinating.”
   Rydell remembered God-eater and that fifty thousand, and hoped Ma and Karen and them weren’t going to be pissed about that. But he didn’t think so, because Aaron Pursley had already said, twice, how it was going to be bigger than the Pookey Bear thing, and Karen kept saying how telegenic Chevette was, and about the youth angle, and how Chrome Koran would fall all over themselves to do the music.
   And Wellington Ma had signed up Chevette, and Sublett, too, but he’d had to pass the papers back into that closet because Sublett still wouldn’t come out.
   Rydell could tell from what Karen said that Chevette had told her pretty much the whole story while she and Sublett had kept her there, and kept her from hitting any IntenSecure panic-buttons. And Karen, evidently, knew all about those VL glasses and how to get them to play things back, so she’d spent most of the time doing that, and now she knew all about Sunflower or whatever it was called. And she kept telling Pursley that there was a dynamite angle here because they could implicate Cody fucking Harwood, if they played their cards right, and was he ever due for it, the bastard.
   Rydell hadn’t ever even had a chance to see that stuff, on the glasses.
   “Mr. Pursley?” Rydell kind of edged over to him.
   “Yes, Berry?”
   “What happens now?”
   “Well” Pursley said, tugging at the skin beneath his nose, “you and your two friends here are about to be arrested and taken into custody.”
   “We are?”
   Pursley looked at his big gold watch. It was set with diamonds around the dial, and had a big lump of turquoise on either side. “In about five minutes. We’re arranging to have the first press-conference around six. That suit you, or would you rather eat first? We can have the caterers bring you something in.”
   “But we’re being arrested.”
   “Bail, Berry. You’ve heard of bail? You’ll all be out tomorrow morning.” Pursley beamed at him.
   “Are we going to be okay, Mr. Pursley?”
   “Berry” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit.” He clapped Rydell on the shoulder. “Cops in Trouble is here for you, boy, and, let me assure you, we are all of us going to make out just fine on this.”
   Chevette said jail sounded just fine to her, but please could she call somebody in San Francisco named Fontaine?
   “You can call anybody you want, honey” Karen said, dabbing at Chevette’s eyes with a tissue. “They’ll record it all, but we’ll get a copy, too. What was the name of your friend, the black man, the one who was shot?”
   “Sammy Sal” Chevette said.
   Karen looked at Pursley. “We’d better get Jackson Gale” she said. Rydell wondered what for, because Jackson Gale was this new young black guy who acted in made-for-tv movies.
   Then Chevette came over and hugged him, all of her pressing up against him, and just sort of looking up at him from under that crazy-ass haircut. And he liked that, even if her eyes were all red and her nose was running.
   On Saturday, the fifteenth of November, the morning after his fourth night with Skinner, Yamazaki, wearing an enormous, cape-like plaid jacket, much mended and smelling of candle-grease, descended in the yellow lift to do business with the dealers in artifacts. He brought with him a cardboard carton containing several large fragments of petrified wood, the left antler of a buck deer, fifteen compact discs, a Victorian promotional novelty in the shape of a fluted china mug, embossed with the letters ‘OXO,’ and a damp-swollen copy of The Columbia Literary History of the United States.
   The sellers were laying out their goods, the morning iron-gray and clammy, and he was grateful for the borrowed jacket, its pockets silted with ancient sawdust and tiny, nameless bits of hardware. He had been curious about the correct manner in which to approach them, but they took the initiative, clustering around him, Skinner’s name on their lips.
   The petrified wood brought the best price, then the mug, then eight of the compact discs. It all went, finally, except for the literary history, which was badly mildewed. He placed this, its blue boards warping in the salt air, atop a mound of trash. With the money folded in his hand, he went looking for the old woman who sold eggs. Also, they needed coffee.
   He was in sight of the place that roasted and ground coffee when he saw Fontaine coming through the morning bustle, the collar of his long tweed coat turned up against the fog.
   “How’s the old man doing, Scooter?”

39. Celebration on a gray day

   He asks more frequently after the girl…”
   “She’s in jail down in L.A.” Fontaine said.
   “Jail?”
   “Out on bail this morning, or that’s what she said last night. I was on my way over to bring you this.” He took a phone from his pocket and handed it to Yamazaki. “She has that number. Just don’t go making too many calls home, you hear?”
   “Home?”
   “Japan.”
   Yamazaki blinked. “No. I understand…”
   “I don’t know what she’s been up to since that damned storm hit, but I’ve been too busy to bother thinking about it. We got the power back but I’ve still got an injury case nobody’s bothered to claim yet. Fished him out of what was left of somebody’s greenhouse, Wednesday morning. Sort of down under your place, there, actually. Don’t know if he hit his head or what, but he just keeps coming around a little, then fading off. Vital signs okay, no broken bones. Got a burn along his side could be from a bullet, some kind of hot-shoe load…”
   “You would not take him to a hospital?”
   “No” Fontaine said, “we don’t do that unless they ask us to, or unless they’re gonna die otherwise. Lot of us have good reason not to go to places like that, get checked out on computers and all.”
   “Ah” Yamazaki said, with what he hoped was tact.
   “Ah so” Fontaine said. “Some kids probably found him first, took his wallet if he had one. But he’s a big healthy brother and somebody’ll recognize him eventually. Hard not to, with that bolt through his johnson.”
   “Yes” Yamazaki said, failing to understand this last, “and I still have your pistol.”
   Fontaine looked around. “Well, if you feel like you don’t need it, just chuck it for me. But I’ll need that phone back, sometime. How long you gonna be staying out here, anyway?”
   “I… I do not know.” And it was true.
   “You be down here this afternoon, see the parade?”
   “Parade?”
   “November fifteenth. It’s Shapely’s birthday. Something to see. Sort of Mardi Gras feel to it. Lot of the younger people take their clothes off, but I don’t know about this weather. Well, see you around. Say hi to Skinner.”
   “Hi, yes” Yamazaki said, smiling, as Fontaine went on his way, the rainbow of his crocheted cap bobbing above the heads of the crowd.
   Yamazaki walked toward the coffee-vendor, remembering the funeral procession, the dancing scarlet figure with its red-painted rifle. The symbol of Shapely’s going.
   Shapely’s murder, some said sacrifice, had taken place in Salt Lake City. His seven killers, heavily armed fundamentalists, members of a white racist sect driven underground in the months following the assault on the airport, were still imprisoned in Utah, though two of them had subsequently died of AIDS, possibly contracted in prison, steadfastly refusing the viral strain patented in Shapely’s name.
   They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God’s vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God’s gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever.
   But Shapely had been very wealthy when he had died, Yamazaki thought, joining the line for coffee. Perhaps he had even been happy. He had seen the product of his blood reverse the course of darkness. There were other plagues abroad now, but the live vaccine bred from Shapely’s variant had saved uncounted millions.
   Yamazaki promised himself that he would observe Shapely’s birthday parade. He would remember to bring his notebook.
   He stood in the smell of fresh-ground coffee, awaiting his turn.
   –«»—«»—«»—

Acknowledgments

   This book owes a very special debt to Paolo Polledri, founding Curator of Architecture and Design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Polledri commissioned, for the 1990 exhibition Visionary San Francisco, a work of fiction which became the short story ‘Skinner’s Room,’ and also arranged for me to collaborate with the architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts, whose redrawn map of the city (though I redrew it once again) provided me with Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers. (From another work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez’s powerful “Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype” I appropriated Yamazaki’s borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.)
   The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces ‘optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons’ (Mondo 2000).
   Rydell’s Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public space.
   I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, published by and for the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association, who kindly provided a complete file of back issues and then didn’t hear from me for a year or so (sorry). Mercury Rising exists ‘to inform, amuse, piss off, and otherwise reinforce’ the messenger community. It provided me with Chevette Washington’s workplace and a good deal of her character. Proj on!
   Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom provided crucial assistance, the right fragment at the right time, or artistic support: Laurie Anderson, Cotty Chubb, Samuel Delany, Richard Dorsett, Brian Eno, Deborah Harry, Richard Kadrey, Mark Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Pat Murphy, Richard Piellisch, John Shirley, Chris Stein, Bruce Sterling, Roger Trilling, Bruce Wagner, Jack Womack.
   Special thanks to Martha Millard, my literary agent, ever understanding of the long haul.
   And to Deb, Graeme, and Claire, with love, for putting up with the time I spent in the basement.
   Vancouver, B.C.
   January 1993

Idoru

William Gibson


The Bridge

Thanks
1. Death Cube K
2. Lo Rez Skyline
3. Almost a Civilian
4. Venice Decompressed
5. Nodal Points
6. DESH
7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires
8. Narita
9. Out of Control
10. Whiskey Clone
11. Collapse of New Buildings
12. Mitsuko
13. Character Recognition
14. Tokyo Chapter
15. Akihabara
16. Zona
17. The Walls of Fame
18. The Otaku
19. Arleigh
20. Monkey Boxing
21. Standover Man
22. Gomi Boy
23. Here at the Western World
24. Hotel Di
25. The Idoru
26. HakNani
27. That Physical Thing
28. A Matter of Credit
29. Her Bad Side
30. The Etruscan
31. The Way Things Work
32. The Uninvited
33. Topology
34. Casino
35. The Testhed of Futurity
36. Maryalice
37. Work Experience
38. Star
39. Trans
40. The Business
41. Candlelight and Tears
42. Checking Out
43. Toecutters Breakfast
44. La Puirissima
45. Lucky
46. Fables of the Reconstruction

Idoru

   for Claire

Thanks

   Sogho Ishii, the Japanese director, introduced me to Kowloon Walled City via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto. It was Ishii-san’s idea that we should make a science fiction movie there. We never did, but the Walled City continued to haunt me, though I knew no more about it than I could gather from Miyamoto’s stunning images, which eventually provided most of the texture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.
   Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about the Walled City in Architectural Review, where I first learned of City of Darkness, the splendid record assembled by Greg Girard and Ian Lambrot (Watermark, London, 1993). From London, John Jarrold very kindly arranged for me to receive a copy.
   Anything I know of the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal memoirs of Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read (Chopper from the Inside, Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has even fewer ears.
   Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Speed Tribes(HarperCollins, New York, 1994) richly fed my dreams of Laney’s jet lag.
   Stephen P. (“Plausibility”) Brown rode shotgun on the work in progress for many months, commenting daily, sometimes more often, and always with a fine forbearance, as I faxed him a bewildering flurry of disconnected fragments he was somehow expected to interpret as “progress.” His constant encouragement and seemingly endless patience were absolutely essential to this book’s completion.
   My publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, also demonstrated great patience, and I thank them.