William Gibson: Virtual Light

“Well” Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, “I was watching this one old movie last night—”

Sublett perked up. “Which one?”

“Dunno” Rydell said. “This guy’s in L.A. and he’s just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, ’cause it’s ringing. Late at night. It’s some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they’ve just launched theirs at the Russians. He’s trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world’s gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.“

Sublett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. “Yeah? How’s it end?”

“Dunno” Rydell said. “I went to sleep.”

Sublett opened his eyes. “Who was in it?”

“Got me.”

Sublett’s blank silver eyes widened in disbelief. “Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch tv, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”

He wasn’t in the hospital very long, after he shot Kenneth Turvey; barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley himself, made the case that they should’ve kept him in there longer, the better to assess the extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated hospitals and anyway he didn’t feel too bad; he just couldn’t recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to deal with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was Chinese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in the Big Circle gang—though she advised Rydell not to bring it up.

Wellington Ma’s business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic quartz, laser-engraved with his name, “The Ma-Mariano Agency” an address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little gray suede envelope while Rydell was still in the hospital.

“Looks like you could cut yourself on it” Rydell said.

“You could, many no doubt have” said Karen Mendelsohn, “and if you put it in your wallet and sit down, it shatters.”

“Then what’s the point of it?”

“You’re supposed to take very good care of it. You won’t get another.”

Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not ’til quite a while later, but Karen would bring in a little briefcase with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with him in his office in LA. It was the sharpest telepresence rig Rydell had ever used, and it really did look just like he was right there. He could see out the window to where there was this lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked Wellington Ma what that was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but currently it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to L.A., which was going to be soon.

Turvey’s girlfriend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking set of separate actions against Rydell, the Department, the City of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that owned her apartment building. About twenty million in total.

Rydell, having become a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble was right there for him. They’d hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show. He had that gray hair, those blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling with, and wore jeans, Tony Lama boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-silver bob-ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from people like Turvey’s girlfriend and her lawyer.

Jenni-Rae Cline’s lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn’t have been in her apartment at all, that he’d endangered her life and her children’s by so doing, and that he’d killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr. Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-figure for little Rambo and Kelly, a born-again Christian, a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline, and the family’s sole means of support.

“Recovering?” Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn in his room in the airport Executive Suites. She’d just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae’s lawyer.

“Apparently he’d been to a meeting that very day” Karen said.

“What did he do there?” Rydell asked, remembering the Last Supper in drying blood.

“According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Milibank’s pantyhose and the assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.”

“Jesus” Rydell said. “And this was at one of those drug meetings, like A.A.?”

“It was” Karen Mendelsohn said, “though apparently Turvey’s performance has triggered an unfortunate sequence of relapses. We’ll send in a team of counselors, of course, to work with those who were at the meeting.”

“That’s nice” Rydell said.

“Look good in court” she said, “in the unlikely event we ever get there.”

“He wasn’t ‘recovering’” Rydell said. “Hadn’t even recovered from the last bunch he jammed up his nose.”

“Apparently true” she said. “But he was also a member of Adult Survivors of Satanism, and they are starting to take an interest in this case. Therefore, both Mr. Pursley and Mr. Ma feel it best we coast it but soon, Berry. You and me.”

“But what about the court stuff?”

“You’re on suspension from the Department, you haven’t been charged with anything yet, and your lawyer’s name is Aaron-with-two-a’s Pursley. You’re out of here, Berry.”

“To L.A.?”

“None other.”

Rydell looked at her. He thought about Los Angeles on television. “Will I like it?”

“At first” she said. “At first, it’ll probably like you. I know I do.”

Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer– one who smelled like a million dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.

“The Kill-Fix. Cyrinda Burdette, Gudrun Weaver, Dean Mitchell, Shinobu Sakamaki. 1997.”

“Never saw it” Rydebb said, sucking the last of his grande decaf cold capp-with-an-extra-shot from the milky ice at the bottom of his plastic thermos cup.

“Mama saw Cyrinda Burdette. In this mall over by Waco. Got her autograph, too. Kept it up on the set with the prayer-hankies and her hologram of the Reverend Wayne Falbon. She had a prayer-hanky for every damn thing. One for the rent, one to keep the AIDS off, the TB…”

“Yeah? How’d she use ’em?”

“Kept ’em on top of the set” Sublett explained, and finished the inch of quadruple-distilled water left in the skinny translucent bottle. There was only one place along this part of Sunset sold the stuff, but Rydell didn’t mind; it was next to a take-out coffee-bar, and they could park in the lot on the corner. Fellow who ran the lot always seemed kind of glad to see them.

“Prayer-hanky won’t keep any AIDS off” Rydell said. “Get yourself vaccinated, like anybody else. Get your momma vaccinated, too.” Through the de-mirrored window, Rydell could see a street-shrine to J.D. Shapely, up against the concrete wall that was all that was left of the building that had stood there once. You saw a lot of them in West Hollywood. Somebody had sprayed SHAPELY WAS A COCK-SUCKING FAGGOTin bright pink paint, the letters three feet high, and then a big pink heart. Below that, stuck to the wall, were postcards of Shapely and photographs of people who must’ve died. God only knew how many millions had. On the pavement at the base of the wall were dead flowers, stubs of candles, other stuff. Something about the postcards gave Rydell the creeps; they made the guy look like a cross between Elvis and some kind of Catholic saint, skinny and with his eyes too big.