All Tomorrow's Parties Read online

  The world Skinner had helped build was burning now, and she and Rydell might burn now with it, but the boy with the buzz cut was ready to fly.

  “Can you make it to the Embarcadero with that?”

  “Easily,” he said. She saw him shove the gun into the pocket of his black coat and grip the bar with both hands, lifting the glider. The breeze caught at it. He walked into the wind, reminding her somehow of a crow walking, one of those big ravens she'd grown up seeing, in Oregon. He was within a few feet of the edge now, the side of Skinner's room that faced China Creek. “You and your friend here caused me a great deal of trouble,” he said, “but you're either going to burn to death or asphyxiate now, so I suppose we're even.” He looked out, stepped forward.

  And Chevette, without having made any conscious decision at all, found herself on her feet, moving, drawing the knife Skinner had left for her. And ripping it down, as he stepped from the edge, through the black fabric, a three-foor slash, from near the center and straight out through the trailing edge.

  He never made a sound, then, as he went fluttering down, faster, spinning like a leaf, until he struck something and was gone.

  She realized that she was standing at the very edge, her toes out over empty air, and she took a step back. She looked at the knife in her hand, at the pattern locked there by the beaten links of motorcycle chain. Then she tossed it over, turned and went to kneel beside Rydell. His head was bleeding, from somewhere above the hairline. His eyes were open, but he seemed to be having trouble focusing.

  “Where is he?” Rydell asked.

  “Don't move your head,” she said. “He's gone.”

  The breeze shifted, bringing them smoke so thick the city vanished. They both started to cough.

  “What's that sound?” Rydell managed, trying to crane his neck around.

  She thought it must be the sound of the fire, but it resolved into a steady drumming, and she looked out to see, just level with her, it seemed, the block-wide impossible brow of a greasy-gray bulklifter, OMAHA TRANSFER painted across it in letters thirty feet high. “Jesus Christ,” she said, as the thing was upon them, its smooth, impossibly vast girth so close she might touch it.

  And then it jettisoned its cargo, close to two million gallons of pure glacial water destined for the towns south of Los Angeles, and she could only cling to Rydell and keep her mouth shut against the weight and the surge of it, and then she was somewhere else, and drifting, and it seemed so long, so long since she'd slept.

  67. SILVER CASTLE

  IN the gray fields Silencio finds a silver castle, an empty place and somehow new. There are no people here, only empty hallways, and he wonders why someone would build such a thing.

  The system of the watches leads him deeper, deep within, each hallway like the last, and he is tired of this, but the Futurematic is there still, and he will find it.

  And when he does, at last, in a very small room at the root of the silver world, he discovers that he is not alone.

  There is a man, and the man looks at Silencio and does not believe Silencio is there, and the man's eyes fill with a fear that Silencio feels must mirror his own fear, and Silencio wishes to tell the man he has only come here to find the watch, because it is part of the system of hands and faces and applied numerals, and Silencio means no harm, but the man's eyes are like the eyes of those to whom Raton shows the knife, and someone coughs behind Silencio. And turning, Silencio sees a terrible man, whose head is a cloud of blood, and whose mouth is open in a red-toothed scream, and the mouth does not move when this man says, “Hello, Harwood.”

  But now somehow he is with the bright one again.

  She tells Silencio to remove the hat, and he does, inside it the pictures of the castle, fading, and the room is filled with smoke, and out through the broken door is more smoke, and the black man, the gray branches of his hair hanging limp now, has cut a hole in the wall with his ax. Not a big hole but he puts his head and shoulders out through it now, and Silencio sees him jerk as if something strikes him. And he draws back inside, eyes wide, and wet, wet, running with water, and water is falling past the hole and the gray hair sticks in its tangles to the man's face, and now more water comes down, into the tunnel like a street, beyond the door, so much water.

  And the man in the long coat is standing there, hands in his pockets, and he watches the water come down, and Silencio sees the lines in this man's cheeks deepen. Then this man nods to Silencio, and to the black man, and goes out through the broken door.

  Silencio wonders if it is wet in the silver castle too.

  68. THE ABSOLUTE AT LARGE

  BOOMZILLA in the Lucky Dragon, back in there for what he knows is the first time they work this Lucky Dragon Nanofax, not a game but how you copy solid shit from one store to another. Not sure he gets that but there's free candy and big drinks for the kids, of which he is opting to be very definitely one, right now, but it's gone sideways with the bridge burning, and those motherfucker bulklifters come drop a fuckload of water on it, got about a hundred fire trucks and everything here, police, tactical squads, helicopters up in the air, so Lucky Dragon can't do the special thing for the first time they use the Lucky Dragon Nanofax, manager's going lateral, walks the aisle talking to himself. But the store's doing business big-time, home office won't let him close, and Boomzilla's started eating candy bars free because the securities are watching the smoke still rise off the wet black garbage, all that's left this end, so you can see the real bridge there, the old part, black too, hanging out in the air like something's bones.

  And finally the manager comes and reads from a notebook, ladies and gentlemen, this momentous occasion, jaw jaw, and now they are placing the first object in the unit in our Singapore branch (Boomzilla sees on TV, out on the pylon, it's a gold statue of the Lucky Dragon himself, smiling) and it will now be reproduced, at a molecular level, in every branch of our chain throughout the world.

  Checker and two securities, they clap. Boomzilla sucks on the ice in the bottom of his big drink. Waits.

  Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit through, he wanted to, and he wonders would that make more Boomzillas other places and could he trust those motherfuckers? If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he doesn't trust anybody, why should they?

  Light over the hatch turns green, and the hatch slides up and out crawls, unfolds sort of, this butt-naked girl, black hair, maybe Chinese, Japanese, something, she's long and thin, not much titties on her the way Boomzilla likes but she's smiling, and everybody, the manager, checker, securities, they jaw-hang, eyes popped: girl straightening up, still smiling, and walks fast to the front of the store, past the security counter, and Boomzilla sees her reach up and open the door, just right on out, and it'll take more than a naked Japanese girl get anybody's attention out there, in the middle of this disaster shit.

  But the crazy thing is, and he really doesn't get this, standing looking out through the doors at the video pylon, so that he has to go outside and fire up his last Russian Marlboro to think about it, after, is that when he sees her walk past the screens there, he sees her on every last screen, walking out of every Lucky Dragon in the world, wearing that same smile.

  Boomzilla still thinking about this when his Marlboro's done, but thinks it's time for a Lucky Dragon Muff-Lette microwave, he thinks of that as his businessman's breakfast, and he's got the money but when he gets back in they got no Muff-Lette, fucking firemen ate them all.

  “Fuck that,” he tells them. “Why don't you fax me one from fucking Paris?”

  So security throws his ass out.

  69. EVERYTHING TAKES FOREVER

  RYDELL wakes to pain, in what has been the nearest approximation of heaven he's known, this miraculously dry, brand-new, extremely high-tech sleeping bag, curled beside Chevette, his ribs on fire, and lies there listening to the helicopters swarming like dragonflies, wondering if there's maybe something bad for you in the stuff that holds duct tape on.

  T
hey'd found this bag, hermetically sealed in its stuff sack, in the wake of the flood, snagged on one of the spikes that held the scarf's hang-glider rack to the roof. And no more welcome find there ever was, to get out of wet clothes and into dry warmth, the bag's bottom water-and probably bullet-proof as well, a very expensive piece of ordnance. And lie there watching two more bulklifters come, huge, slow-moving cargo drones diverted from their courses, it will turn out, according to a plan arrived at several years before by a team of NoCal contingency planners, to dump still more water, extinguishing the fire at the Treasure end and damping down the central span as well. And each one, depleted and limp, starting to rise immediately, free of ballast, in a sort of awkward elephantine ballet.

  And held each other, up there, into the dawn, sea breeze carrying away the smell of burning.

  Now Rydell lies awake, looking at Chevette's bare shoulder, and thinking nothing much at all although breakfast does begin to come to mind after a while, though he can wait.

  “Chevette?” Voice from some tinny little speaker. He looks up to see a silver Mylar balloon straining on a tether, camera eye peering at them.

  Chevette stirs. “Tessa?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she says, voice sleepy. “What about you?”

  “It's a feature,” the voice from the balloon says. “Action. Big budget. I've got footage you won't believe.”

  “What do you mean it's a feature?”

  “I'm signed. They flew up this morning. What are you doing up there?”

  “Trying to sleep,” Chevette says and rolls over, pulling the bag over her head.

  Rydell lies watching the balloon bob on its tether, until finally he sees it withdrawn.

  He sits up and rubs his face. Rolls out of the bag, and stands, stiffly, a naked man with a big patch of silver duct tape across his ribs, wondering how many TV screens he's making, right now. He hobbles over to the hatch and climbs down into darkness, where he relieves himself against a wall.

  “Rydell?”

  Rydell starts, getting his ankle wet.

  It's Creedmore, sitting on the floor, knees up, wet-look head between his hands. “Rydell,” Creedmore says, “you got anything to drink?”

  “What are you doing up here, Buell?”

  “Got in that greenhouse thing down there. Thought there'd be water there. Then I figured my ass would boil like a fucking catfish, so I climbed up here. Sons of bitches.”

  “Who?”

  “I'm fucked,” Creedmore says, ignoring the question. “Randy's canceled my contract and the goddamn bridge has burned down. Some debut, huh? Jesus.”

  “You could write a song about it, I guess.”

  Creedmore looks up at him with utter despair. He swallows. When he speaks, there is no trace of accent: “Are you really from Tennessee?”

  “Sure,” Rydell says.

  “I wish to fuck I was,” Creedmore says, his voice small, but loud in the hollow of this empty wooden box, sunlight falling through the square hole above, lighting a section of two-by-fours laid long way up to make a solid floor.

  “Where you from, Buell?” Rydell asks.

  “Son of a bitch,” Creedmore says, the accent returning, “New Jersey.”

  And then he starts to cry.

  Rydell climbs back up and stands on the ladder with just his head out, looking toward San Francisco. Whatever Laney was on about, that end of the world thing, everything changing, it looked like it hadn't happened.

  Rydell looks over at the black mound of sleeping bag and reads it as containing that which he most desires, desires to cherish, and the wind shifts, catching his hair, and when he climbs the rest of the way, back up into sunlight, he still hears Creedmore weeping in the room below.

  70. COURTESY CALL

  IN the cab to Transamerica he closes his eyes, seeing the watch he gave the boy, where time arcs in one direction only across a black face, interior time gone rudderless now, unmoored by a stranger's reconstruction of Lise's face. The hands of the watch trace a radium orbit, moments back-to-back. He senses some spiral of unleashed possibility in the morning, though not for him.

  The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination: salt air, scavenged neon, the sliding cries of gulls. He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.

  Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.

  In the atrium he describes the purpose of his visit as a courtesy call. He is disarmed, searched, cuffed, and taken, per Harwood's orders, by his seven captors, into an elevator.

  And as its doors close he feels grateful that they are excited, and inexperienced, and have cuffed his hands in front, rather than behind his back.

  By the time the express elevator reaches Harwood's office floor, he will be alone.

  He touches the buckle of his belt, and thinks of the simple yet perfectly efficient tool concealed between the layers of fine Italian calf.

  And exists in the moment.

  71. YAMAZAKI

  YAMAZAKI, grim and nervous, descends into the early morning rush hour accompanied by a very large Australian, shaven-headed, with one mutilated ear.

  “You knew he was here?” the large man asks.

  “He desired secrecy,” Yamazaki says. “I am sorry.”

  Yamazaki leads the Australian to the cardboard city and points out Laney's carton and its entrance.

  “This one?”

  Yamazaki nods.

  The Australian produces a knife that telescopes silently at the touch of a button, both its edges serrated. He slits the top from Laney's carton, lifting it like the lid of a box of cereal, and Yamazaki sees the stickers of Cody Harwood that he glimpsed once before.

  The Australian, much taller than Yamazaki, stands staring down into the carton. Yamazaki himself is not yet ready to look.

  “What was he running from?” the Australian asks.

  Yamazaki looks up at the man's small, fiercely intelligent eyes, set in a face of the most abiding brutality. “Toward,” Yamazaki says. “He ran toward something.”

  A train arrives in the depths of the system, shunting a wall of stale warm air toward the surface streets and a new day.

  72. FONTAINE

  FONTAINE comes back from the blackened ribs toward Bryant with a jug of water and two Red Cross sandwiches. It's strange out there, very much the post-disaster scenario and not to his liking. Media vehicles outnumber emergency, though there are plenty of those. The body count is remarkably low, he gathers, and puts this down to the nature of bridge folk, their seriousness in survival and a certain belief in unorganized cooperation. Probably, he thinks, he'll never know what any of this was about, in terms of causality, though he's sure he's been witness to something.

  He hopes Chevette and her boyfriend have made it through, but somehow he assumes they have, and the professor has gone, off about whatever business a man of his sort pursues, and that is business best not known about. Martial will have to be told that his chain gun is gone, but that's just as well. (Opposite his shop, someone has sprayed a great deal of that stuff called Kil'Z, lest the smear that the chain gun left there prove seropositive in any troublesome way.)

  As he comes up to the shop he hears the sound of someone sweeping broken glass, and sees that it is the boy, flatfooted in his big white shoes, and sees that the kid's done quite a good job of it, really, down to rearranging things on the surviving shelves. That silver piece of hardware, like an oversized cocktail shaker, enjoys pride of place, up behind the glassless frame of Fontaine's counter, between lead soldiers and a pair of trench-art vases beaten from the Kaiser's cannon
casings.

  “Where'd she go?” Fontaine asks, looking up at this.

  The boy stops sweeping, sighs, leans on his broom, says nothing.

  “Gone, huh?”

  The boy nods.

  “Sandwiches,” Fontaine says, handing one to the boy. “We're going to be roughing it out here, for a while.” He looks up at the silver cannister again. Somehow he knows it no longer contains her, whoever, whatever she was. It has become as much history, no more, no less than the crude yet wistfully dainty vases pounded out of shell casings in some French trench. That is the mystery of things.

  “Fonten.”

  He turns, sees Clarisse there with a shopping bag in her arms. “Clarisse.”

  Something troubled there, in her sea-green eyes, some worry or concern. “You okay, then?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I thought you dead, Fonten.”

  “No.”

  “I brought you food.”

  “The kids okay?”

  “Scared,” she says. “They with Tourmaline.”

  “I'd be scared too, then.”

  A smile twitches the corner of her mouth. She comes forward, shifting the bag aside. Her lips brush his.

  “Thank you,” he says, taking the heavy bag, from which fine smells arise. “Thank you, Clarisse.”

  He sees tears in the corners of her eyes. “Bastard,” she says, “where's my dolls?”

  “I'm sorry,” he says, as gravely as he can manage, “but they were victims of the terrible fire.”

  And then they both start to laugh.

  73. SILENCIO

  “WHERE did you find it?”

  “Treasure Island,” the boy lies, passing the watch, a solid brown wafer of corrosion, across the glass countertop.

  Silencio peers through his loupe at the damp biscuit of metal. He scores the rust with a diamond scribe. “Stainless,” he admits, knowing the boy will know that that is good, though not good as gold. Worth the price of a meal.