Freddie swallowed. ‘Yessir, Mr. Warbaby. Sorry.’
‘How’d you do that?’ Rydell asked.
Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. They were clear now. ‘There are drivers in the frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly.’
‘It’s a virtual light display,’ Freddie said, eager to change the subject. ‘Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.’
‘Telepresence,’ Rydell said.
‘Naw,’ Freddie said, ‘that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.’
Rydell went to the drapes, pulled them apart, looked down into some night street in this other city. People walking there, a few.
‘Freddie,’ Warbaby said, ‘flip me that Washington girl off the decrypted IntenSecure feed. The one works for Allied Messenger Service.’
Freddie nodded, did something with his computer.
‘Yes,’ Warbaby said, gazing at something only he could see, ‘it’s possible. Entirely possible. Rydell,’ and he removed the glasses, ‘you have a look.’ Rydell let the drapes fall back, went to Warbaby, took the glasses, put them on. Somehow he felt it would be a mistake to hesitate, even if it meant having to look at the dead guy again.
Black into color into full face and profile of this girl. Fingerprints. Image of her right retina blown up to the size of her head. Stats. WASHINGTON, CHEVETTE-MARIE. Big gray eyes, long straight nose, a little grin for the camera. Dark hair cut short and spikey, except for this crazy ponytail stuck up from the crown of her head.
‘Well,’ Warbaby asked, ‘what do you think?’
Rydell couldn’t figure what he was being asked. Finally he just said ‘Cute.’
He heard Freddie snort, like that was a dumb thing to say.
But Warbaby said ‘Good. That way you remember.’
16 Sunflower
Sammy Sal lost her, where Bryant stuttered out in that jackstraw tumble of concrete tank-traps. Big as he was, he had no equal when it came to riding tight; he could take turns that just weren’t possible; he could bongo and pull a three-sixty if he had to, and Chevette had seen him do it on a bet. But she had a good idea where she’d find him.
She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams.
She skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved ice, in gray guts the gulls would fight over in the morning. The fish man yelled something after her, but she didn’t catch it.
She rode on, between stalls and stands and the evening’s commerce, looking for Sammy Sal.
Found him where she thought she would, leaning on his bars beside an espresso wagon, not even breathing hard. A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels was running him a cup. Chevette bopped the particle-brakes and slid in beside him.
‘Thought I’d have time for a short one,’ he said, reaching for the tiny cup.
Her legs ached with trying to keep up with him. ‘You better,’ she said, with a glance toward the bridge, then she gestured to the girl to run her one. She watched the steaming puck of brown grounds thumped out, the fresh scoop, the quick short tamp. The girl swung the handle up and twisted the basket back into the machine.
‘You know,’ Sammy Sal said, pausing before a first shallow sip, ‘you shouldn’t have this kind of problem. You don’t need to. There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?’
Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.
‘Crime,’ Sammy Sal said, ‘sex. Maybe drugs.’ He put his cup down on the wagon’s plywood counter. ‘About covers it.’
‘You fuck them,’ Chevette said. ‘You said.’
Sammy Sal shrugged. ‘I like to. Trouble comes down from that, I’m up for it. But you just went and did something, no reason. Reached through the membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea.’
Chevette blew on her coffee. ‘I know.’
‘So how you going to deal with whatever’s coming down?’
‘I’m going up to Skinner’s room, get those glasses, take ’em up on the roof, and throw ’em over.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then I go on the way I do, ’til somebody turns up.’
‘Then what?’
“Didn’t do it. Don’t know shit. Never happened.”
He nodded, slow, but he was studying her. ‘Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe not. Somebody wants those glasses back, they can lean on you real hard. Another way to go: we get ’em, ride back over to Allied, tell ’em how it happened.’
‘We?’
‘Uh-huh. I’ll go with you.’
‘I’ll lose my job.’
‘You can get you another job.’
She drank the little cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Job’s all I got, Sammy. You know that. You got it for me.’
‘You got a place to sleep, up there. You got that crazy old motherfucker took you in—’
‘I feed him, Sammy Sal—’
‘You got your ass intact, honey. Some rich man decide to screw you over, ’cause you took his data-glasses, maybe that ceases to be the case.’
Chevette put her empty cup down on the counter, dug in the pockets of her jacket. Gave the girl fifteen for the two coffees and a two-dollar tip. Squared her shoulders under Skinner’s jacket, the ball-chains rattling. ‘No. Once that shit’s in the Bay, nobody can prove I did anything.’
Sammy Sal sighed. ‘You’re an innocent.’
It sounded funny, like she didn’t know you could use the word that way. ‘You coming, Sammy Sal?’
‘What for?’
‘Talk to Skinner. Get between him and his magazines. That’s where I left them. Behind his magazines. Then he won’t see me get them out. I’ll go up on the roof and off them.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but I say you’ll just be fucking up worse.’
‘I’ll take the chance, okay?’ She dismounted and started wheeling her bike toward the bridge.
‘I guess you will,’ Sammy Sal said, but then he was off his bike, too, and pushing it, behind her.
There’d only ever been three really good, that was to say seriously magic, times in Chevette’s life. One was the night Sammy Sal had told her he’d try to get her on at Allied, and he had. One was the day she’d paid cash money for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there’d been the night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents—if you could count that now as lucky.
Which was not to say that these were the times she’d been luckiest, because those were all times that had been uniformly and life-threateningly shitty, except for the part where the luck cut in.
She’d been lucky the night she’d gone over the razor-wire and out of the Juvenile Center outside Beaverton, but that had been one deeply shitty night. She had scars on both palms to prove it.
And she’d been very lucky the time she’d first wandered out onto the bridge, the lower deck, her knees wobbling with a fever she’d picked up on her way down the coast. Everything hurt her: the lights, every color, every sound, her mind pressing out into the world like a swollen ghost. She remembered the loose, flapping sole of her sneaker dragging o
ver the littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how she had to sit down, finally, everything up and turning, around her, the Korean man running out of his little store to yell at her, get up, get up, not here, not here. And Not Here had seemed like such a totally good idea, she’d gone straight there, right over backward, and hadn’t even felt her skull slam the pavement.
And that was where Skinner had found her, though he didn’t remember or maybe want to talk about it; she was never sure. She didn’t think he could’ve gotten her up to his room on his own; he needed help to get back up there himself, with his hip and everything. But there were still days when an energy got into him and you could see how strong he must’ve been, once, and then he’d do things you didn’t think he could do, so she’d never be sure.
The first thing she’d seen, opening her eyes, was the round church-window with the rags stuck into the gaps, and sun coming through it, little dots and blobs of colors she’d never seen before, all swimming in her fevered eye like bugs in water. Then the bone-crack time, the virus wringing her like the old man had wrung the gray towels he wrapped her head in. When the fever broke and rolled away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out to there and over the rim of sickness, her hair fell out in dry clumps, stuck to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.
When it grew back, it came in darker, nearly black. So after that she felt sort of like a different person. Or anyway her own person, she’d figured.
And she’d stayed with Skinner, doing what he said to get them food and keep things working up in his room. He’d send her down to the lower deck, where the junk-dealers spread their stuff. Send her down with anything: a wrench that said ‘BMW’ on the side, a crumbling cardboard box of those flat black things that had played music once, a bag of plastic dinosaurs. She never figured any of it would be worth anything, but somehow it always was. The wrench bought a week’s food, and two of the round things brought even more. Skinner knew where old things came from, what they’d been for, and could guess when somebody’d want them. At first she was worried that she wouldn’t get enough for the things she sold, but he didn’t seem to care. If something didn’t sell, like the plastic dinosaurs, it just went back into stock, what he called the stuff ranged around the bases of the four walls.
As she’d gotten stronger, and her new hair grew in, she’d started ranging farther from the room on top of the tower. Not into either city, at first, though she’d walked over to Oakland a couple of times, over the cantilever, and looked out at it. Things felt different over there, though she was never sure why. But where she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all wrapped in it, all the people hanging and hustling and doing what they did, and the way the whole thing grew a little, changed a little, every day. There wasn’t anything like that, not that she knew of, not up in Oregon.
At first she didn’t even know that it made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever had left her a little crazy, but one day she’d decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she’d have to get used to it.
But it turned out you could be sort of happy and restless at the same time, so she started keeping back a little of Skinner’s junk-money to use to explore the city. And that was plenty to do, for a while. She found Haight Street and walked it all the way to the wall around Skywalker, with the Temple of Doom and everything sticking up in there, but she didn’t try to go in. There was this long skinny park that led up to it, called the Panhandle, and that was still public. Way too public, she thought, with people, mostly old or anyway looking that way, stretched out side by side, wrapped in silvery plastic to keep the rays off, this crinkly stuff that glittered like those Elvis suits in a video they’d showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton. It kind of made her think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in its own little piece of foil. They had a way of moving like that, just a little bit, and it creeped her out.
The Haight sort of creeped her out, too, even though there were stretches that felt almost like you were on the bridge, nobody normal in sight and people doing things right out in public, like the cops were never going to come at all. But she wasn’t ever scared, on the bridge, maybe because there were always people around she knew, people who lived there and knew Skinner. But she liked looking around the Haight because there were a lot of little shops, a lot of places that sold cheap food. She knew this bagel place where you could buy them a day old, and Skinner said they were better that way anyway. He said fresh bagels were the next thing to poison, like they’d plug you up or something. He had a lot of ideas like that. Most of the shops, she could actually go into, if she was quiet and smiled a little and kept her hands in her pockets.
One day on Haight she saw this shop called Colored People and she couldn’t figure out what it sold. There was a curtain behind the window and a few things set out in front of that: cactus in pots, big rusty hunks of metal, and a bunch of these little steel things, polished and bright. Rings and things. Little rods with round balls on the ends. They were hung on the needles of the cactus and spread out on the rusted metal. She decided she’d open the door and just look in, because she’d seen a couple of people going in and out and knew it wasn’t locked. A big fat guy in white coveralls, with his head all shaved, coming out, whistling, and these two tall women, black-haired, like handsome crows, all dressed in black, going in. She just wondered what it was.
She stuck her head in there. There was a woman with short red hair behind a counter, and every wall covered with these bright cartoony pictures, colors that made your eyes jump, all snakes and dragons and everything. So many pictures it was hard to take it in, so it wasn’t until the woman said come on, don’t just block the door, and Chevette had come in, that she saw this woman wore a sleeveless flannel shirt, open all the way down, and her front and arms all covered, solid, with those same pictures.
Now Chevette had seen tattoos in the Juvenile Center, and on the street before that, but those were the kind you did yourself, with ink and needles, thread and an old ballpoint. She walked over and took a good long look at the colors exploding between the woman’s breasts—which, though she was maybe thirty, weren’t as big as Chevette’s—and there was an octopus there, a rose, bolts of blue lightning, all of it tangling together, no untouched skin at all.
‘You want something,’ the woman said, ‘or you just looking?’
Chevette blinked. ‘No,’ she heard herself say, ‘but I was sort of wondering what those little metal things are, in the window.’
The woman swung a big black book around on the counter, like a school binder except its covers were chrome-studded black leather. Flipped it open and Chevette was looking at this guy’s thing, a big one, just hanging there. There were two little steel balls on either side of its wedge-shaped head.
Chevette just sort of grunted.
‘Call that an amphalang,’ the woman said. She started flipping through the album. ‘Barbells,’ she said. ‘Septum spike. Labret stud. That’s a chunk ring. This one’s called a milkchurn. These are bomb weights. Surgical steel, niobium, white gold, fourteen-carat.’ She flipped it back to the jim with the bolt, sideways through the end of it. Maybe it was a trick, Chevette thought, a trick picture.
‘That’s gotta hurt,’ Chevette said.
‘Not as much as you’d think,’ this big deep voice, ‘and then it starts to feel jus’ good…’
Chevette looked up at this black guy, his big white grin, all those teeth, a micropore filtration-mask pulled down under his chin, and that was how she’d met Samuel Saladin DuPree.
Two days later she saw him again in Union Square, hanging with a bunch of bike messengers. She’d already put messengers down as something to watch for in the city. They had clothes and hair like nobody else, and bikes with neon and light-up wheels, handlebars curved up and over like scorpion-tails. Helmets with little radios built in. Either they were going somewhere fast or they were just goofing, hanging, drinking coffee.
He was standing there with his legs ov
er either side of the cross-tube of his bike, eating half a sandwich. Music was coming out of the black-flecked pink frame, mostly bass, and he was sort of bopping to it. She edged up to get a better look at the bike, how it was made, the intricacy of its brakes and shifters pulling her straight in. Beauty.
‘Dang,’ he said, around a mouthful of sandwich, ‘dang, my am-phalang. Where did you get those shoes?’
They were Skinner’s, old canvas sneakers, too long for her so she’d stuck some paper in the toes.
‘Here.’ He handed her the other half of his sandwich. ‘I’m full already.’
‘Your bike,’ she said, taking the sandwich.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s… it’s…’
‘Like it?’
‘Uh-huh!’
He grinned. ‘Sugawara frame, Sugawara rings ’n’ ’railers, Zuni hydraulics. Clean.’
‘I like the wheels,’ Chevette said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s just flash. Lets some motherfucker see you ’fore he runs you over, y’know?’
Chevette touched the handlebars. Felt that music.
‘Eat that sandwich,’ he said. ‘Look like you need it.’
She did, and she did, and that was how they got to talking.
Shouldering their bikes up the plywood stairs, Chevette telling him about the Japanese girl, how she fell out of that elevator. How she, Chevette, wouldn’t even have been at that party if she hadn’t been standing right there, right then. Sammy grunting, his Fluoro-Rimz gone dead opal now they weren’t turning.
‘Who was it throwing this do, Chev? You think to ask anybody that?’
Remembering that Maria. ‘Cody. Said it was Cody’s party…’
Sammy Sal stopped, his brows lifting. ‘Huh. Cody Harwood?’
She shrugged, the paper bike next to weightless on her shoulder. ‘Dunno.’
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