All Tomorrow's Parties bt-3 Page 16

  'I don't know, Rydell said. 'It was shipped here GlobEx, but in Laney's name. Address in Melbourne, company called Paragon-Asia.

  She raised her eyebrows. 'Do you know why we are together in San Francisco, Berry Rydell?

  'No, he said, 'do you?

  'Laney believes that the world will end soon, she said, and her smile was luminous.

  He couldn't help but smile hack. 'I think we went through that one when the century rolled over.

  'Laney says that that was only a date. Laney says that this is the real thing. But I have not spoken with him in weeks, Berry Rydell. I do not know how much closer we are now, to the nodal point.

  37. A LITTLE SHIT MONEY

  BOOMZILLA, with a little shit money tonight, debit chip he got off those truck bitches, goes down to Lucky Dragon. That's where he goes when he gets money, because they got all the shit.

  Food he likes there, because it's not bridge food; food like on TV, out of a package. And everything: shit to look at, the games they got in there. Best place.

  Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him.

  Gets the chip out, walking up to the front, because if he has it in his hand, shows it to the security, security'd let him in. Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that.

  Tonight is different. Tonight a big white truck in front of Lucky Dragon. Biggest, cleanest truck he's ever seen. No writing on it, SoCal plates, couple of securities standing out by it. Boomzilla wonders if this what they bring the new games in? Never seen this before.

  So in the doors, holding up his chip, and heads over, like he does, first to the candy.

  Boomzilla likes this Jap candy that's like a little drug lab. You mix these different parts, it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden. When you eat it, it's just candy, but Boomzilla likes making it.

  Gets six of those, pissed there's no grape, and a couple or two chocos. Spends a good long time by the machine that makes magazines, watching screens, all the different shit you can get put in your magazine. Then back to get his noodles, kind you add water and pull the string.

  Back there, deciding between beef and chicken, he sees they've unfastened a whole piece of Lucky Dragon wall. Next to GlobEx and the cash machine.

  So he thinks this is what the white truck is about, some new thing to put in there, and he wonders if it's maybe a game.

  White men in white paper suits working on the section of wall.

  Watches them, then goes back to the front, shows his shit. Checker runs his shit over the window that counts, takes Boomzilla's chip and debits it, There goes his shit money.

  Takes his bag outside and finds a curb to sit on. Pretty soon he'll start making the first candy. Red one.

  He looks past the white truck to the screens there, by the front, and he notices white trucks on half the screens. So all over the world now, these white trucks sitting outside Lucky Dragons, so it must mean something new is being put in all of them tonight.

  Boomzilla unseals the candy and studies the multistage but entirely nonverbal instructions.

  Gotta get it right.

  38. VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING

  FONTAINE'S shop must be this narrow purple one with its high thin window caulked with enough silicone to frost a wedding cake. The whole front of the place had been painted the same flat purple, blistered now by sun and rain, and she had some faint memory of its earlier incarnation as something else, used clothing maybe. They'd put that purple over everything: over the droops and gobs of silicone, over the hardware on the old wooden door with its upper panels replaced with glass.

  If this was Fontaine's place, he hadn't bothered naming it, but that was like him. And the few things displayed in the window, under the beam of an antique Tensor, were like him as well: a few old-fashioned watches with their dials going rusty, a bone-handled jackknife someone had polished till it shone, and some kind of huge ugly telephone, sheathed in ridged black rubber. Fontaine was crazy about old things, and sometimes, before, he'd bring different pieces over, show them to Skinner.

  Sometimes she'd thought he'd just done that to get the old man started, and then Skinner's own Stories would come out. He hadn't been much for stories, Skinner, but turning some battered treasure of Fontaine's in his hands, he'd talk, and Fontaine would sit and listen, and nod sometimes, as though Skinner's stories confirmed some long-held suspicion.

  Made privy to Skinner's past, Fontaine would then handle the objects himself with a new excitement, asking questions.

  Fontaine lived in the world of things, it had seemed to her, the world of the things people made, and probably it was easier for him to approach them, people, through these things. If Skinner couldn't tell Fontaine a story about something, Fontaine would make up his own story, read function in the shape of something, read use in the way it was worn down. It seemed to comfort him.

  Everything, to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he'd built Skinner's funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, when the old man's hip had gotten too bad to allow him to easily climb, Fontaine had had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner's room.

  Now she stands there, looking into the window, at these watches with their foxed faces, their hands unmoving, and she fears history.

  Fontaine will fit her to history in some different way, she knows, and it is a history she has avoided.

  Through the thick pane of the door, thick enough to bend light, the way water in a glass does, she sees that the lights are on in a space behind the shop. Another door there, not quite closed.

  CLOSED/CERRADO says the dog-eared cardboard sign hung inside the glass on a suction-cup shower hook.

  She knocks.

  Almost immediately the inner door is opened, a figure silhouetted there against brightness.

  'Hey, Fontaine. Chevette. It's me.

  The figure shuffles forward, and she sees that it is in fact him, this angular black man whose graying hair is twisted into irregular branches that hang like the arms of a dusty houseplant in need of water. As he rounds the flat gleam of a glass-topped counter, she sees that he holds a gun, the old-fashioned kind with the cylinder that turns as the bullets are fired manually, one at a time. 'Fontaine? It's me.

  He stops there, looking. Takes a step forward. Lowers the pistol. 'Chevette?

  'Yeah?

  'Hold on. He comes forward and peers at her, past her. 'You alone?

  'Yes, she says, glancing to either side.

  'Hold on- a rattling of locks, bolts undone, and at last the door opens, and he blinks at her, mystified. 'You back.

  'How are you, Fontaine?

  'Fine, he says, 'fine, and steps back. 'Come in.

  She does. The place smells of machine oil, metal polish, burnt coffee. A thousand things gleam from the depths of Fontaine's history reef.

  'Thought you were in LA, he says.

  'I was. I'm back.

  He closes the door and starts locking it, an elaborate process but one he can do in the dark, in his sleep perhaps. 'Old man's gone. You know?

  'I know, she says. 'How?

  'Just old, he says, tucking his pistol away now. 'Wouldn't get out of bed, finally. Curled up there like a baby. Clarisse she came to nurse him. She been a nurse, Clarisse. Says when they turn to face the wall, that means it's over soon.

  Chevette wants so badly to say something, but it will not come.

  'I like your hair, girl, Fontaine says, looking at her. 'Not so fierce now.

  'It's changing, Fontaine says, mea
ning the bridge and how they live on it. He's told her about the tendency to build these shops, how most of them are built with nonresident money, the owners hiring people to live there and maintain possession. 'That Lucky Dragon, he says, cupping a white china mug of his bitter, silted coffee, 'that's there because someone decided the money was there for it to make. Tourists buying what they need to come out here. That wouldn't have happened, before.

  'Why do you think it is, that it's changing?

  'It just is, he says. 'Things have a time, then they change.

  'Skinner, she says, 'he lived out his life here, didn't he? I mean, when this was all what it was. He was here for all of that. Here when they built it.

  'Not his whole life. Just the end of it. That jacket you're wearing, he got that in England, when he was younger. He lived there and rode motorcycles. Told me about it. Rode them up to Scotland, rode them all over. Real old ones.

  'He told me a little about it, once, she says. 'Then he came back here and the Little Big One came. Cracked the bridge. Pretty soon he was out here.

  'Here, he says, 'I'll show you something. Opening a cabinet.

  Brings out a sheath knife, greenish handles inlaid with copper abstracts. Draws it from the waxed brown saddle leather. Blade of Damascus steel, tracked with dark patterns.

  The knife of Chevette's memories, its grip scaled with belt-ground segments of phenolic circuit board.

  'I saw that made, she says, leaning forward.

  'Forged from a motorcycle drive chain. Vincent 'Black Lightning, 1952. Rode that in England. It was a good forty years old too, then. Said there wasn't ever a bike to match it. Kept the chain till he found this maker. Passes the knife to her. Five inches of blade, five inches of handle. 'Like you to have it.

  Chevette runs her finger along the flat of the blade, the crocodile pattern of light and dark steel that had been formed as the links were beaten out. 'I was thinking about this before, Fontaine. Today. How we went to where the smith worked. Burned coke in an old coffee can.

  'Yes. I've seen it done. Hands her the sheath.

  'But you need to sell this stuff. Tries to hand it back.

  'It wasn't for sale, he says. 'I was keeping it for you.

  * * *

  FONTAINE has a strange boy in the shop's back room. Heavy, Hispanic, hair cut short. He sits the whole time, cross-legged, his head in an old eyephone rig that looks like it came out of some military robotics dump.

  With a worn-out old notebook on his lap. Endlessly, steadily, clicking from one screen to the next.

  'Who's this? she asks when they're back, Fontaine putting on a fresh pot of his terrible coffee. Thinking the boy can hear her.

  'I don't know, Fontaine says, turning to regard the boy in the eye-phones. 'He was outside this morning, breathing on my window.

  Chevette looks at Fontaine, not getting it.

  'He likes watches, Fontaine says, lighting the butane ring with a spark gun like a toy pistol. 'Showed him how to hunt for watches this morning, hasn't done much since. Fontaine crosses to where the boy sits, looks down at him.

  'I'm not sure how much he understands English, Fontaine says. 'Or he understands it but it gets through funny.

  'Spanish maybe?

  'I had big Carlos by here, Fontaine says. 'Didn't seem to make much difference.

  'You live here now, Fontaine?

  'Yeah, he says. 'Not getting along with Clarisse.

  'How's your kids?

  'They're okay. Hell, Tourmaline's okay too, by anybody's standards but her own. I mean, not to live with, understand, but her health's pretty good.

  Chevette picks up the sheathed Damascus boot knife and tries it in the inner, zippered pocket of Skinner's jacket. It fit, if you zipped the pocket shut, as far as you could, to hold it upright. 'What's he doing with your notebook?

  'He's hunting watches. I started him looking on the net auctions, but now he's looking everywhere. Gets places I don't understand how he does.

  'He gonna live here?

  Fontaine frowns. 'I hadn't planned on it.

  Chevette stands up, stretches, seeing the old man, Skinner, in memory, sitting up in his bed in the room atop the cable tower. What dancer she'd gotten off Creedmore has long since worn off, leaving an edge of tiredness. Long day. Very long day. 'We're sleeping in a van down the foot of Folsom, she says.

  'You and who?

  'Tessa. Friend of mine.

  'Know you're welcome here.

  'No, she says, 'Tessa'll be worried. I'm glad I saw you, Fontaine. She zips the jacket. 'Thank you for keeping his knife. Whatever history it was she'd felt herself dodging, she hasn't found it. She just feels tired now; otherwise, she doesn't seem to feel.

  'Your knife. Made it for you. Wanted you to have it. Told me. Looking up from beneath his sparse gray dreadlocks now. And gently says: 'Asked us where you were, you know?

  Her fit with history, and how that hurts.

  39. PANOPTICON

  LANEY'S progress through all the data in the world (or that data's progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does.

  The Hole, that blankness at the core of his being, ceases to trouble him here. He is a man with a mission, though he readily admits to himself that he has no real idea what that mission may finally be.

  This all began, he reflects, knocking back his cough syrup in the amniotic darkness of his cardboard hutch, with his 'interest' in Cody Harwood. The first prickings of the so-called stalker syndrome thought to eventually afflict every test subject ever dosed with 5-SB. His initial reaction, of course, had been denial: this couldn't be happening to him, not after all these years. He was interested in Harwood, and for good reason; his awareness of the nodal points, the points from which change was emerging, would repeatedly bring Harwood to his attention. It was not so much that he was focusing on Harwood, as that things swung toward Harwood, gently yet unavoidably, like the needle of a compass. His life, at that point, had been in stasis: employed by the management of Lo/Rez, the pop group, to facilitate the singer Rez's 'marriage' to the Japanese virtual star Rei Toei, Laney had settled into a life in Tokyo that centered around visits to a private, artificially constructed island in Tokyo Bay, an expensive nub of engineered landfill upon which Rez and Rei Toei intended to bring forth some sort of new reality. That Laney had never been able to quite grasp the nature of this reality hadn't surprised him. Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars, and Rei Toei, the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being iterated from experiential input. Rez was Rez, and thereby difficult, and Rei Toei was that river into which one can never step twice. As she became more herself, through the inputting of experience, through human interaction, she grew and changed. Rez hadn't, and a psychologist employed by the band's management had confided in Laney that Rez, whom the psychologist characterized as having narcissistic personality disorder, wasn't likely to. 'I've met a lot of people, particularly in this industry, the psychologist had said, 'who have that, but I've never met one who had had it.

  So Laney had climbed, each working day, from a Tokyo dock into an inflatable Zodiac. To skim across the gray metallic skin of the bay to that nameless and perfectly circular island, and there to interact with ('teach' was not the word, somehow) the idoru. And what he had done, although neither of them had planned it, was to take her with him, into that flow of information where he was most at home (or, really, farthest from his inner Hole). He had shown her, as it were, the ropes, although they were not ropes that he or anyone else had names for. He had shown her nodal points in that flow, and they had watched together as change had emerged from these into the physical world.

  And he had never asked her how it was, exactly, that she intended to 'marry' Rez, and he doubted that, in any ordinary sense, she knew. She simply continued to emerge, to be, to be more. More present. And Laney fell in love with her, although he understood that she had been designed for him (and for the world)
to fall in love with. As the amplified reflection of desire, she was a team effort; to the extent that her designers had done their jobs properly, she was a waking dream, a love object sprung from an approximation of the global mass unconscious. And this was not, Laney understood, a matter of sexual desire exclusively (though of course he felt that, to his great confusion) but of some actual and initially painful opening of his heart.

  He loved her, and in loving her understood that his most basic sense of what that word might mean had changed, supplanting every previous concept. An entirely new feeling, and he had held it close, sharing it with no one, least of all the idoru.

  And it had been toward the end of this that Cody Harwood, shy and smiling and gently elusive, someone Laney had never felt the least interest in, had begun to obsess him. Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation, one of those familiar icons who loom regularly on the horizons of media, only to drop away until they next appear. Laney had had no opinion of Harwood, other than that he felt he had been glimpsing him all his life, and didn't quite know why, and was vaguely tired of it. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here. His compulsive study of Harwood and things Harwoodian had led him to the recognition that history too was subject to the nodal vision, and the version of history that Laney came to understand there bore little or no relation to any accepted version.

  He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography, was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept.