William Gibson - Virtual Light

“There is nobody here, Skinner-san!”

The rain came down in an explosive sheet, hiding the lights of the city.

Yamazaki withdrew his head, feeling for the hatch, and closed it above him. He fastened the catch, wishing it were made of stronger stuff.

He descended the ladder.

Skinner was on his feet now, swaying toward his bed. “Shit” he said, “somebody’s broken my tv.” He toppled forward onto the mattress.

“Skinner?”

Yamazaki knelt beside the bed. Skinner’s eyes were closed, his breath shallow and rapid. His left hand came up, fingers spread, and scratched fitfully at the tangled thatch of white hair at the open collar of his threadbare flannel shirt.

Yamazaki smelled the sour tang of urine above the acrid edge of whatever explosive had propelled Loveless’s bullet. He looked at Skinner’s jeans, blue gone gray with wear, wrinkles sculpted permanently, shining faintly with grease, and saw that Skinner had wet himself.

He stood there for several minutes, uncertain of what he should do. Finally he took a seat on the paint-splattered stool beside the little table where he had so recently been a prisoner. He ran his fingertips over the teeth of the saw blades. Looking down, he noticed a neat red sphere. It lay on the floor beside his left foot.

He picked it up. A glossy marble of scarlet plastic, cool and slightly yielding. One of the restraints, either his or Skinner’s.

He sat there, watching Skinner and listening to the bridge groan in the storm, a strange music emerging from the bundled cables. He wanted to press his ear against them, but some fear he couldn’t name held him from it.

Skinner woke once, or seemed to, and struggled to sit up, calling, Yamazaki thought, for the girl.

“She isn’t here” Yamazaki said, his hand on Skinner’s shoulder. “Don’t you remember?”

“Hasn’t been” Skinner said. “Twenty, thirty years. Motherfucker. Time.”

“Skinner?”

“Time. That’s the total fucking mother fucker, isn’t it?”

Yamazaki held the red sphere before the old man’s eyes. “Look, Skinner. See what it became?”

“Superball” Skinner said.

“Skinner-san?”

“You go and fucking bounce it, Scooter.” He closed his eyes. “Bounce it high…”

Swear to God” Nigel said, “this shit just moved.”

Chevette, with her eyes closed, felt the blunt back of the ceramic knife press into her wrist; there was a sound like an inner-tube letting go when you’ve patched it too many times, and then that wrist was free.

“Shit. Jesus—” His hands rough and quick, Chevette’s eyes opening to a second pop, a red blur whanging back and forth around the stacked scrap. Nigel’s head following it, like the counterweighted head of a plaster dog that Skinner had found once and sent her down to sell.

Every wall in this narrow space racked with metal, debraised sections of old Reynolds tubing, dusty jam jars stuffed with rusting spokes. Nigel’s workshop, where he built his carts, did what shadetree fixes he could to any bike came his way. The salmon-plug that dangled from his left ear ticked in counterpoint to his swiveling head, then jingled as he snatched the thing in mid-bounce. A ball of red plastic.

“Man” he said, impressed, “who put this on you?”

Chevette stood up and shivered, this tremor running down through her like a live thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.

How she felt, now, was just the way she’d felt that day she’d come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there but a can of ravioli in a pot on the stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it.

She hadn’t eaten that ravioli and she hadn’t eaten any since and she knew she never would.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she’d moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, ’til she’d wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.

“You okay?” Nigel’s greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand, a cocktail toothpick with a spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of his mouth.

For a long time she’d wondered if maybe the fever hadn’t burned it out, hadn’t accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she’d gotten used to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next—whether she danced in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner’s room, where wind scoured the plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted (Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.

Now that was broken.

“ ’Vette?”

That jumper she’d seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water running from nose and mouth. Every bone broken or dislocated, Skinner said, if you hit just right. Ran through the bar naked and took a header off some tourist’s table nearest the railing, out and over, tangled in Haru’s Day-Glo net and imitation Japanese fishing floats. And didn’t Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of toxic lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the current that sailed the bridge’s dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?

Chevette bent over and threw up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.

“Hey, hey” Nigel dancing around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick and worried she’d puke over his work, something that might ultimately require the in-depth, never-before-attempted act of cleaning out, rather than up, his narrow nest. “Water? Want water?” Offering her the old coffee can he kept there to quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock, and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.

Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him and that grad student tied up up there with the plastic worms.

“Chev?”

He’d put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.

Nigel shifted, foot to foot, then turned and peered through the triangular shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating with the wind. “Stormin’” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. “Stormin’ down rain.”

Running from Skinner’s and the gun in the killer’s hand, from his eyes and the gold in the corners of his smile, bent low for balance over her bound hands and the case that held the asshole’s glasses, Chevette had seen all the others running, too, racing, it must have been, against the breaking calm, the first slap of rain almost warm when it came. Skinner would’ve known it was coming; he’d have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case like the wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, perched in his box on the top of the bridge. Maybe the other; knew, too, but it was the style to wait and then race it, biding out for a last sale, another smoke, some bit of business. The hour before a storm was good for that, people naking edgy purchases against what was ordinarily a bearable uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big enough, and not always the unestablished, the newcomers lashed with their ragged baggage to whatever freehold they might have managed on the outer structure; sometimes a whole patchwork section would just let go, if the wind caught it right; she hadn’t seen that but there were stories. There was nothing to stop the new people from coming in to the shelter of the decks, but they seldom did.