Virtual Light Read online

  ‘Children masked as J. D. Shapely, two black men painted as white doctors, Shapely’s portrait…’

  Skinner grunted. Then, distantly: ‘While since I saw one of those.’

  ‘And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Skinner nodded.

  Yamazaki activated the notebook’s transcription function.

  Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of him in everybody now. Couldn’t see the point at my age and anyway I never held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn’t have plenty of chances. You’re too young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like, watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just romping on us. But slow, slow, slow-motion thing. Those retroviruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old kind, and died of it, how we’d lived in this funny little pocket of time when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn’t going to kill anybody, not even a woman. See, they always had to worry anyway, every time it’s a chance, get knocked up and maybe die in childbirth, die getting rid of it, or anyway your life’s not gonna be the same. But in that pocket, there, there were pills for that, whatnot, shots for the other things, even the ones had killed people all over hell, before. That was a time, Scooter. So here this thing comes along, changes it back. And we’re sliding up on 2000, shit’s changing all over, got civil wars in Europe already and this AIDS thing just kicking along. You know they tried to say it was the gays, said it was the CIA, said it was the U.S. Army in some fort in Maryland. Said it was people cornholing green monkeys. I swear to God. You know what it was? People. Just too goddamn many of ’em, Scooter. Flying all the fuck over everywhere and walking around back in there. Bet your ass somebody’s gonna pick up a bug or two. Every place on the damn planet just a couple of hours from any other place. So here’s poor fucking Shapely comes along, he’s got this mutant strain won’t kill you. Won’t do shit to you at all, ’cept it eats the old kind for breakfast. And I don’t buy any of that bullshit he was Jesus, Scooter. Didn’t think Jesus was, either.

  ‘Any coffee left?’

  ‘I will pump stove.’

  ‘Put a little drop of Three-in-One in that hole by the piston-arm, Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.’

  31 Driver side

  She didn’t see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something, coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can’t watch it happening.

  Then she got down on her hands and her knees and started crawling. Because she couldn’t just stand there and wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see her black pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was this smell from when he’d shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet burning, too, because she could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and sort of melted.

  Now she could hear him yelling, somewhere outside, hoarse and hollow and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR in the world, how they’d sold Hunnis Millbank, now they’d sell Sunflower. If she heard it right.

  ‘Down by the door, here. Driver side.’

  It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open.

  ‘He left the keys in here,’ she said.

  ‘Think he’s gone down there where the Dream Walls franchise used to be.’

  ‘What if he comes back?’

  ‘Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?’

  She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell’s head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up?

  ‘Why don’t you lie down flat on the floor back there…’ His voice from the driver’s seat.

  ‘Lie down?’

  ‘Minimum silhouette.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s going to start shooting. When I do this—’ Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm.

  Rydell must’ve gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission.

  She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.

  Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV’s probably weren’t meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.

  ‘Well fuck,’ she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they’d had to keep explaining to her how’d she’d come down on her head, and each time they did, she’d forget.

  *

  She was back in Skinner’s room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin.

  Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.

  Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner’s bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on.

  ‘He’s right,’ Chevette’s mother said.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘About history, how they change it.’

  ‘Mom, you—’

  ‘Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn’t any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.’

  Chevette started to cry.

  ‘Chevette-Marie,’ her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, ‘you’ve gone and hurt your head.’

  32 Fallonville

  ‘How well you say you know this guy?’ she asked.

  Rydell’s SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he’d had time and a broom, he’d have swept it all out. As it was, he’d had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, othe
rwise Highway Patrol would’ve seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. ‘I worked with him in L.A.,’ he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.

  ‘I was just wondering if he’ll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.’

  ‘Didn’t know her,’ Rydell said, ‘I met her, on the plane. If Sublett’s some kind of plant, then the whole world’s a plot.’ He shrugged. ‘Then I could start worrying about you, say.’ As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.

  Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’s head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a .22 to the screen, it looked like.

  ‘Must be getting closer,’ Rydell said.

  Chevette Washington sort of grunted. Then she drank some of the water they’d gotten at the Shell station, and offered the bottle to him.

  When he’d crashed out of that mall, he’d felt like they were sure to be right by a major highway. From the outside, the mall was just this low tumble of tan brick, windows boarded up with sheets of that really ugly hot-pressed recyc they ran off from chopped scrap, the color of day-old vomit. He’d gone screeching around this big empty parking lot, just a few dead clunkers and old mattresses to get in the way, until he’d found a way out through the chain link.

  But there wasn’t any highway there, just some deserted four-lane feeder, and it looked like Loveless had put a bullet into the navigation hardware, because the map was locked on downtown. Santa Ana and just sat there, sort of flickering. Where he was had the feel of one of those fallen-in edge-cities, the kind of place that went down when the Euro-money imploded.

  Chevette Washington was curled up by the fridge with her eyes closed, and she wouldn’t answer him. He was scared Loveless had put one through her, too, but he knew he couldn’t afford to stop until he’d put at least a little distance between them and the mall. And he couldn’t see any blood on her or anything.

  Finally he’d come to this Shell station. You could tell it had been Shell because of the shape of the metal things up on the poles that had supported the signs. The men’s room door was ripped off the hinges; the women’s chained and padlocked. Somebody had taken an automatic weapon to the pop machine, it looked like. He swung the RV around to the back and saw this real old Airstream trailer there, the same kind a neighbor of his father’s had lived in down in Tampa. There was a man there kneeling beside a hibachi, doing something with a pot, and these two black Labradors watching him.

  Rydell parked, checked to see Chevette Washington was breathing, and got down out of the cab. He walked over to the man beside the hibachi, who’d gotten up now and was wiping the palms of his hands on the thighs of his red coveralls. He had on an old khaki fishing cap with about a nine-inch bill sticking straight out. The threads on the embroidered Shell patch on his coveralls had sort of frayed and fuzzed-out.

  ‘You just lost,’ the man said, ‘or is there some kind of problem?’ Rydell figured him to be at least seventy.

  ‘No sir, no problem, but I’m definitely lost.’ Rydell looked at the black Labs. They looked right back. ‘Those dogs of yours there, they don’t look too happy to see me.’

  ‘Don’t see a lot of strangers,’ the man said.

  ‘No sir,’ Rydell said, ‘I don’t imagine they do.’

  ‘Got a couple of cats, too. Right now I’m feeding ’em all on dry kibble. The cats get a bird sometimes, maybe mice. Say you’re lost?’

  ‘Yes sir, I am. I couldn’t even tell you what state we’re in, right now.’

  The man spat on the ground. ‘Welcome to the goddamn club, son. I was your age, it was all of this California, just like God meant it to be. Now it’s Southern, so they tell me, but you know what it really is?’

  ‘No sir. What?’

  ‘A lot of that same happy horseshit. Like that woman camping in the goddamn White House.’ He took the fishing cap off, exposing a couple of silver-white cancer-scars, wiped his brow with a grease-stained handkerchief, then pulled the cap back on. ‘Say you’re lost, are you?’

  ‘Yes sir. My map’s broken.’

  ‘Know how to read a paper one?’

  ‘Yes sir, I do.’

  ‘What the hell’d she do to her head?’ Looking past Rydell.

  Rydell turned and saw Chevette Washington leaning over the driver’s bucket, looking out at them.

  ‘How she cuts her hair,’ Rydell said.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ the man said. ‘Might be sort of good-looking, otherwise.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Rydell said.

  ‘See that box of Cream o’ Wheat there? Think you can stir me up a cup of that into this water when it boils?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go find you a map to look at. Skeeter and Whitey here, they’ll just keep you company.’

  ‘Yes sir…’

  PARADISE, SO. CALIFORNIA

  A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

  THREE MILES

  NO CAMPING

  CONCRETE PADS

  FULL HOOKUPS

  ELECTRIFIED SECURITY PERIMETER

  FREE SWIMMING

  LICENSED CHRISTIAN DAYCARE (STATE OF SO. CAL.)

  327 CHANNELS ON DOWNLINK

  And a taller cross rising beyond that, this one welded from rusty railroad track, a sort of framework stuck full of old televisions, their dead screens all looking out toward the road there.

  Chevette Washington was asleep now, so she missed that.

  Rydell thought about how he’d used Codes’s phone to get through to Sublett’s number in L.A., and gotten this funny ring, which had nearly made him hang up right then, but it had turned out to be call-forwarding, because Sublett had this leave to go and stay with his mother, who was feeling kind of sick.

  ‘You mean you’re in Texas?’

  ‘Paradise, Berry. Mom’s sick ’cause she ’n’ a bunch of others got moved up here to SoCal.’

  ‘Paradise?’

  Sublett had explained where it was while Rydell looked at the Shell man’s map.

  ‘Hey,’ Rydell had said, when he had a general idea where it was, ‘how about I drive over and see you?’

  ‘Thought you had you a job up in San Francisco.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you about that when I get there.’

  ‘You know they’re saying I’m an apostate here?’ Sublett hadn’t sounded happy about that.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An apostate. ’Cause I showed my mom this Cronenberg film, Berry? This Videodrome? And they said it was from the Devil.’

  ‘I thought all those movies were supposed to have God in ’em.’

  ‘There’s movies that are clearly of the Devil, Berry. Or anyway that’s what Reverend Fallon says. Says all of Cronenberg’s are.’

  ‘He in Paradise, too?’

  ‘Lord no,’ Sublett had said, ‘he’s in these tunnels out on the Channel Islands, between England and France. Can’t leave there, either, because he needs the shelter.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Taxes. You know who dug those same tunnels, Berry?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hitler did, with slave labor.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Rydell had said, imagining this scary little guy with a black mustache, standing up on a rock and cracking a big whip.

  Now here came another sign, this one not nearly as professional as the first one, just black spraypaint letters on a couple of boards.

  R.U. READY FOR ETERNITY?

  HE LIVES! WILL YOU?


  WATCH TELEVISION

  ‘Watch television?’ She was awake now.

  ‘Well,’ Rydell said, ‘Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.’

  ‘God’s on television?’

  ‘Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.’

  ‘So they watch tv and pray, or what?’

  ‘Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter into them.’

  ‘We had Revealed Aryan Nazarenes, up in Oregon,’ she said. ‘First Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.’

  ‘Bad news,’ Rydell agreed, the RV cresting a little ridge there, ‘those kind of Christians…’ Then he saw Paradise, down there, all lit up with these lights on poles.

  The security perimeter they advertised was just coils of razor-wire circling maybe an acre and a half. Rydell doubted if it actually was electrified, but he could see screamers hanging on it, every ten feet or so, so it would be pretty effective anyway. There was a sort of blockhouse-and-gate set-up where the road ran in, but all it seemed to be protecting were about a dozen campers, trailers, and semi-rigs, parked on cement beds around what looked like an old-fashioned radio tower they’d topped with a whole cluster of satellite dishes, those little expensive ones that looked sort of like giant gray plastic marshmallows. Somebody had dammed a creek, to make a sort of pond for swimming, but the creek itself looked like the kind of industrial runoff you wouldn’t even find bugs around, let alone birds.

  Sure had the whole place lit up, though. He could hear the drumming of big generators as they drove down the incline.

  ‘Jesus,’ Chevette Washington said.

  Rydell pulled up by the blockhouse and powered his window down, glad it still worked. A man in a blaze-orange fleece jacket and a matching cap came out, carrying some kind of shotgun with a skeletal metal stock. ‘Private property,’ he said, looking at where the windshield should’ve been. ‘What happened to your windshield there, mister?’