Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Rydell said.

  The farmer didn’t answer. State law said he couldn’t have a gun, just the industrial-strength stunner he wore in a beat-up plastic holster, but he probably did anyway. One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.

  Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon—at least that had some kind of spin on it.

  He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn’t good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn’t read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickaninny jockey-boys it had been against the law to have on your lawn in Knoxville. The jockey-boys had all been freshly-painted with big, red-lipped, watermelon-eating grins. The bed was spread with a hand-stitched quilt patterned like a Confederate flag. When he looked for a price tag, all he found was a yellow SOLD sticker.

  ‘Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?’ Justine Cooper’s jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn’t have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn’t sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

  Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover’s defenses.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re from Knoxville?’ He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t have much of an accent.’

  ‘Well, I wish everybody felt that way.’ He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

  ‘Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?’

  Shit, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. ‘My father was, I guess. My mother’s people are from up around Bristol, mostly.’

  Justine Cooper’s dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.

  ‘Ms. Cooper?’

  She gave a violent start, as though he’d goosed her.

  ‘Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?’ Pointing at them.

  ‘Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.’

  Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. ‘Looks like hair,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘What else would it be?’

  ‘Human hair?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You mean like dead people’s hair?’ He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was lusterless and no particular color.

  ‘Mr. Rydell, I’m afraid that I may have wasted your time.’ She moved tentatively in his direction. ‘When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South…’

  ‘How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?’

  ‘What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.’

  Damn. That talking head in the agency display had been playing this shit back word for word.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve read Faulkner?’ She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.

  There it was again. ‘Nope.’

  ‘No, I didn’t think so. I’m hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.’

  Rydell blinked.

  ‘But you don’t convey that to me. I’m sorry.’ It looked like the invisible cobweb had come back.

  Rydell looked at the rentacop, but he didn’t seem to be listening to any of this. Hell, he seemed to be asleep.

  ‘Lady,’ Rydell said carefully, ‘I think you’re crazier than a sack full of assholes.’

  Her eyebrows shot up. ‘There,’ she said.

  ‘There what?’

  ‘Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.’

  Rydell had to think about that. He found himself looking at the jockey-boy bed. ‘Don’t you ever get any black people in here, complaining about stuff like this?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ she said, a new edge in her tone, ‘we do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.’

  Now he’d have to walk to whatever the nearest station was, take the subway home, and tell Kevin Tarkovsky he hadn’t been Southern enough.

  The rentacop was letting him out.

  ‘Where exactly you from, Ms. Cooper?’ he asked her.

  ‘New Hampshire,’ she said.

  He was on the sidewalk, the door closing behind him.

  ‘Fucking Yankees,’ he said to the Porsche roadster. It was what his father would have said, but he had a hard time now connecting it to anything.

  One of those big articulated German cargo-rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried chicken.

  5 Hay problemas

  The courier’s dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run, mountains the color of concrete. They are burying the orphans on a hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue. Clouds in the sky. The priest’s tall hat. They do not see the first shell coming in from the concrete mountains. It punches a hole in everything: the hillside, the sky, a blue coffin, the woman’s face.

  A sound too vast to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they hear, arriving only now, the distant festive pop-popping of the mortars, tidy little clouds of smoke rising on the gray mountainside.

  He comes upright, alone in the wide bed, trying to scream, and the words are in a language he no longer allows himself to speak.

  His head throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless carafe on the nightstand. The room sways, blurs, comes back into focus. He forces himself from the bed, pads naked to the tall, old-fashioned windows. Fumbles the heavy drapes aside. San Francisco. Dawn like tarnished silver. It is Tuesday. Not Mexico.

  In the white bathroom, wincing in the sudden light, scrubbing cold water into his numb face. The dream recedes, but leaves a residue. He shivers, cold tile unpleasant beneath his bare feet. The whores at the party. This Harwood. Decadent. The courier disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into contact with real wealth, genuine power. He meets people of substance. Harwood is wealth without substance.

  He puts out the bathroom light and gingerly returns to his bed, favoring the ache in his head.

  With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he begins to sort through the previous evening. There are gaps. Overindulgence. He disapproves of overindulgence. Harwood’s party. The voice on the phone, instructing him to attend. He’d already had several drinks. He sees a young girl’s face. Anger, contempt. Her short dark hair twisted up in spikes. />
  His eyes feel as if they are too large for their sockets. When he rubs them, bright sick flashes of light surround him. The cold weight of the water moves in his stomach.

  He remembers sitting at the broad mahogany desk, drinking. Before the call, before the party. He remembers the two cases open, in front of him, identical. He keeps her in one. The other is for that with which he has been entrusted. Expensive, but then he has no doubt that the information it contains is very valuable. He folds the thing’s graphite earpieces and snaps the case shut. Then he touches the case that holds all her mystery, the white house on the hillside, the release she offers. He puts the cases in the pockets of his jacket—

  But now he tenses, beneath the duvet, his stomach twisted with a surge of anxiety.

  He wore the jacket to that party, much of which he cannot remember.

  Ignoring the pounding of his head, he claws his way out of the bed and finds the jacket crumpled on the floor beside a chair.

  His heart is pounding.

  Here. That which he must deliver. Zipped into the inner pocket. But the outer pockets are empty.

  She is gone. He roots through his other clothing. On his hands and knees, a pulsing agony behind his eyes, he peers under the chair. Gone.

  But she, at least, can be replaced, he reminds himself, still on his knees, the jacket in his hands. He will find a dealer in that sort of software. Recently, he now admits, he had started to suspect that she was losing resolution.

  Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip the inner pocket, drawing out the case that contains his charge, their property, that which must be delivered. He opens it.

  The scuffed black plastic frames, the label on the cassette worn and unreadable, the yellowed translucence of the audio-beads.

  He hears a thin high sound emerge from the back of his throat. Very much as he must have done, years ago, when the first shell arrived.

  6 The bridge

  Careful to correctly calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki paid the fare and struggled out of the cab’s spavined rear seat. The driver, who knew that all Japanese were wealthy, sullenly counted the torn, filthy bills, then tossed the three five-dollar coins into a cracked Nissan County thermos-mug taped to the faded dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not wealthy, shouldered his bag, turned, and walked toward the bridge. As ever, it stirred his heart to see it there, morning light aslant through all the intricacy of its secondary construction.

  The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.

  Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy.

  He’d first seen it by night, three weeks before. He’d stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and vegetables, their goods spread out on blankets. He’d stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of scavenged neon. Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into that neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain.

  In all the world, surely, there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.

  He entered it now, Tuesday morning, amid a now-familiar stir—the carts of ice and fish, the clatter of a machine that made tortillas—and found his way to a coffee shop whose interior had the texture of an ancient ferry, dark dented varnish over plain heavy wood, as if someone had sawn it, entire, from some tired public vessel. Which was entirely possible, he thought, seating himself at the long counter; toward Oakland, past the haunted island, the wingless carcass of a 747 housed the kitchens of nine Thai restaurants.

  The young woman behind the counter wore tattooed bracelets in the form of stylized indigo lizards. He asked for coffee. It arrived in thick heavy porcelain. No two cups here were alike. He took his notebook from his bag, flicked it on, and jotted down a brief description of the cup, of the minute pattern of cracks in its glazed surface, like a white tile mosaic in miniature. Sipping his coffee, he scrolled back to the previous day’s notes. The man Skinner’s mind was remarkably like the bridge. Things had accumulated there, around some armature of original purpose, until a point of crisis had been attained and a new program had emerged. But what was that program?

  He had asked Skinner to explain the mode of accretion resulting in the current state of the secondary structure. What were the motivations of a given builder, an individual builder? His notebook had recorded the man’s rambling, oblique response, transcribing and translating it.

  There was this man, fishing. Snagged his tackle. Hauled up a bicycle. All covered in barnacles. Everybody laughed. Took that bike and he built a place to eat. Clam broth, cold cooked mussels, Mexican beer. Hung that bike over the counter. Just three stools in there and he slung his box out about eight feet, used Super Glue and shackles. Covered the walls inside with postcards. Like shingles. Nights, he’d curl up behind the counter. Just gone, one morning. Broken shackle, some splinters still stuck to the wall of a barber shop. You could look down, see the water between your toes. See, he slung it out too far.

  Yamazaki watched steam rise from his coffee, imagining a bicycle covered in barnacles, itself a Thomasson of considerable potency. Skinner had seemed curious about the term, and the notebook had recorded Yamazaki’s attempt to explain its origin and the meaning of its current usage.

  Thomasson was an American baseball player, very handsome, very powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1982, for a large sum of money. Then it was discovered that he could not hit the ball. The writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated his name to describe certain useless and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape. But the term has subsequently taken on other shades of meaning. If you wish, I can access and translate today’s definitions in our Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern Terms.

  But Skinner—gray, unshaven, the whites of his blue eyes yellowed, blotched with broken veins, had merely shrugged. Three of the residents who had previously agreed to be interviewed had cited Skinner as an original, one of the first on the bridge. The location of his room indicated a certain status as well, though Yamazaki wondered how many would have welcomed a chance to build atop one of the cable towers. Before the electric lift had been installed, the climb would have been daunting for anyone. Today, with his bad hip, the old man was in effect an invalid, relying on his neighbors and the girl. They brought him food, water, kept his chemical toilet in operation. The girl, Yamazaki assumed, received shelter in return, though the relationship struck him as deeper somehow, more complex.

  But if Skinner was difficult to read because of age, personality, or both, the girl who shared his room was opaque in that ordinary, sullen way Yamazaki associated with young Americans. Though perhaps that was o
nly because he, Yamazaki, was a stranger, Japanese, and one who asked too many questions.

  He looked down the counter, taking in the early-morning profiles of the other customers. Americans. The fact that he was actually here, drinking coffee beside these people, still struck a chord of wonder. How extraordinary. He wrote in his notebook, the pen ticking against the screen.

  The apartment is in a tall Victorian house, built of wood and very elaborately painted, in a district where the names of streets honor nineteenth-century American politicians: Clay, Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This morning, Tuesday, leaving the apartment, I noticed, on the side of the topmost newel, indications of a vanished hinge. I suspect that this must once have supported an infant-gate. Going along Scott in search of a cab, I came upon a sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features of the martyr Shapely, the AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very melancholy.

  ‘They shouldn’t oughta said that. About Godzilla, I mean.’

  Yamazaki found himself blinking up at the earnest face of the girl behind the counter.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They shouldn’t oughta said that. About Godzilla. They shouldn’t oughta laughed. We had our earthquakes here, you didn’t laugh at us.’

  7 See you do okay

  Hernandez followed Rydell into the kitchen of the house in Mar Vista. He wore a sleeveless powder-blue jumpsuit and a pair of those creepy German shower-sandals, the kind with about a thousand little nubs to massage the soles of your feet. Rydell had never seen him out of uniform before and it was kind of a shock. He had these big old tattoos on his upper arms; roman numerals; gang stuff. His feet were brown and compact and sort of bearlike.

  It was Tuesday morning. There was nobody else in the house. Kevin was at Just Blow Me, and the others were out doing whatever it was they did. Monica might’ve been in her place in the garage, but you never saw too much of her anyway.