Idoru (7 page)

He put his hand over hers.

And touch it, and know whether or not it's good
.

Just before dawn, the editor of lamps asleep in his bed, he watched the curve of the bay from the suite's balcony, the moon a milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.

In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.

Birds were waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.

Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laney's recuperation. He looked rested, she said.

He took to the seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting that another leave might prove permanent. She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.

The nodal point was different now, though he had no language to describe the change. He sifted the countless fragments that had clustered around Alison Shires in his absence, feeling for the source of his earlier conviction. He called up the music she'd accessed while he'd been in Mexico, playing each song in the order of her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-affirming; she'd moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine, whose relentlessly positive product was the musical equivalent of the Good News Channel.

Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her credit-provider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she'd purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher's intimacy with the subject could lead to loss of perspective. “It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We're a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”

The floor of Laney's apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at the deep end, on an inflatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shopping Channel. There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.

He sat on the slippery edge of the inflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartment. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent was paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fairly intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. “His reptile fund,” Kathy called it.

He could hold Alison Shires' history in his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he'd come to know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever had or would. Husbands didn't know their wives this way, or wives their husbands. Stalkers might aspire to know the objects of their obsession this way, but never could.

Until the night he woke after midnight, head throbbing. Too hot, something wrong with the conditioning again. Florida. The blue shirt he slept in clinging to his back and shoulders. What would she be doing now?

Was she staring up, awake, at faint bars of reflected light on the ceiling, listening to Upful Groupvine?

Kathy suspected he might be cracking up. He looked at his hands. They could be anybody's. He looked at them as though he'd never seen them before.

He remembered the 5-SB in the orphanage. The taste of it coming while it was still being injected. Rotting metal. The placebo brought no taste at all.

He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door slid aside. A single ancient leaf of lettuce sagged blackly through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty bottle of Evian on another. He held his cupped hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.

Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew he'd seen it. Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-mannered passage through the world of things.

“Hey there,” the fridge said. “You've left me open.”

Laney said nothing.

“Well, do you
want
the door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic
de
-frost…”

“Be quiet.” His hands felt better. Cooler.

He stood there until his hands were quite cold, then withdrew them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the fridge taking this opportunity to close itself without further comment.

Twenty minutes later he was on the Metro, headed for Hollywood, a jacket over his sleep-creased Malaysian oxford shirt. Isolated figures on station platforms, whipped sideways by perspective in the wind of the train's passing.

“We're not talking conscious decision, here?” Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear.

“No,” Laney said, “I don't know what I thought I was doing.”

“You were trying to save her. The girl.”

“It felt like something snapped. A rubber band. It felt like gravity.”

“That's what it feels like,” Blackwell said, “when you decide.”

Somewhere down the hill from the Sunset Metro exit he passed a man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the size of a pooltable, illuminated by the medicinal glow of a nearby streetlight. Laney saw the water beading on the perfectly even blades of bright green plastic. The plastic lawn was fenced back from the street with welded steel, upright prison bars supporting bright untarnished coils of razor-wire. The man's house was scarcely larger than his glittering lawn; a survival from a day when this slope to the hills had been covered with bungalows and arbors. There were others like it, tucked between the balconied, carefully varied faces of condos and apartment complexes, tiny properties dating from before the area's incorporation into the city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldn't see them.

The waterer looked up, and Laney saw that he was blind, eyes hidden by the black lozenges of video units coupled directly to the optic nerve. You never knew what they were watching.

Laney went on, letting whatever drew him set his course through these sleeping streets and the occasional scent of a blooming tree. Distant brakes sounded on Santa Monica.

Fifteen minutes later he was in front of her building on Fountain Avenue. Looking up. Fifth floor. 502.

The nodal point.

“You don't want to talk about it?”

Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwell's eyes across the table.

“I've never really told this to anyone,” he said, and it was true.

“Let's walk,” Blackwell said, and stood, his bulk seeming to lift effortlessly, as though he were a helium parade float. Laney wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was taking care of the bill.

He left Amos 'n’ Andes with them, out into a falling mist that wasn't quite rain, the sidewalk a bobbing stream of black umbrellas. Yamazaki produced a black object no larger than a business card, slightly thicker, and flexed it sharply between his thumbs. A black umbrella flowered. Yamazaki handed it to him. The curve of the black handle felt dry and hollow and very slightly warm.

“How do you fold it?”

“You don't,” Yamazaki said. “It goes away.” He opened another for himself. Hairless Blackwell, in his micropore, was evidently immune to rain. “Please continue with your account, Mr. Laney.”

Through a gap between two distant towers, Laney glimpsed the side of another, taller building. He saw vast faces there, vaguely familiar, contorted in inexplicable drama.

The nondisclosure agreement Laney had signed was intended to cover any incidences of Slitscan using its connections with DatAmerica in ways that might be construed as violations of the law. Such incidences, in Laney's experience, were frequent to the point of being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of research. Since DatAmerica had been Laney's previous employer, he hadn't found any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.

Laney's protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of criminal violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her building's foyer, activate the elevator, unlock the door of her fifth-floor apartment, and cancel the private security alarm that would automatically warrant an armed response if she did these things without keying in two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents were accosted in parking garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison Shires' code consisted of her month, date, and year of birth, something any security service strongly advised against. Her back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when she'd moved in and become a subscriber.

Laney softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its eight-story facade feinting toward someone's idea of Tudor Revival. Everything looking so sharply and comprehensively detailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.

23.

“So,” Blackwell supposed, “you just walked in. Punched up her codes and bang, there you were.” The three of them waiting to cross at an intersection.

—Bang.

No sound at all in the mirrored foyer. A sense of vacuum. A dozen Laneys reflected there as he crossed an expanse of new carpet. Into an elevator smelling of something floral, where he used part of the code again. It took him straight to five. The door slid open. More new carpet. Beneath a fresh coat of cream enamel the corridor's walls displayed the faint irregularities of old-fashioned plaster.

502.

“What do you think you're doing?” Laney asked aloud, though whether to himself or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he ever know.

The brass round of an antique security fish-eye regarded him from the door, partially occluded by a cataract of pale paint.

The key-pad was set flush with the door's steel frame, not quite level with the fish-eye. He watched his finger finding its way through the sequence.

23.

But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful Groupvine soaring joyfully behind her as Laney grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he took then and forever as a look of simple recognition, not even of blame.

“This isn't working,” she said, as though she were indicating a minor appliance, and Laney heard himself whimper, a sound he hadn't made since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but couldn't, holding her. He was walking her backward, toward a wicker armchair he wasn't even aware he'd seen.

“Sit,” he said, as if to a stubborn child, and she did. He let go of her wrists. Ran for where he guessed the bathroom had to be. Towels there and some kind of tape.

And discovered himself kneeling beside her where she sat, red fingers curled in toward red palms, as if in meditation. He rolled a dark green hand towel around her left wrist and whipped the tape around it, some rubbery beige product meant to mask specific areas during the application of aerosol cosmetics. He knew that from her product-purchase data.

Were her fingers turning blue, beneath their coat of red? He looked up. Into that same recognition. One cheekbone brushed with blood.

“Don't,” he said.

“It's slowing.”

Laney wrapping her right forearm now, the tape-roll dangling from his teeth.

“I missed the artery.”

“Don't move,” Laney said, and sprang up, tripping over his own feet, crashing face-first into what he recognized, just before it broke his nose, as the work of the editor of lamps. The carpet seemed to whip up and smack him playfully in the face.

“Alison—”

Her ankle stepping past him, kitchenward.

“Alison,
sit down!
”

“Sorry,” he thought he heard her say, and then the shot.

Blackwell's shoulders heaved as he sighed, making a sound that Laney heard above the traffic. Yamazaki's glasses were filled with jittering pastels, the walls here all neon, a glare to shame Vegas, every surface lit and jumping.

Blackwell was staring at Laney. “This way,” he said, finally, and rounded a corner, into relative darkness and an edge of urine. Laney followed, Yamazaki behind him. At the far end of the narrow passage, they emerged into fairyland.

No neon here at all. Ambient glow from the towers overhead. Austere rectangles of white frosted glass, the size of large greeting cards, were daubed with black ideograms, each sign marking a tiny structure like some antique bathing cabin on a forgotten beach. Crowded shoulder to shoulder down one side of the cobbled lane, their miniature facades suggested a shuttered sideshow in some secret urban carnival. Age-silvered cedar, oiled paper, matting; nothing to pin the place in time but the fact that the signs were electric.

Laney stared. A street built by leprechauns.

“Golden Street,” said Keith Alan Blackwell.

8. Narita

Chia deplaned behind Maryalice, who'd had a couple of those vitamin drinks and then tied up one of the toilets for twenty minutes while she teased her extensions and put on lipstick and mascara. Chia couldn't say much for the result, which looked less like Ashleigh Modine Carter than something Ashleigh Modine Carter had slept on.

When Chia stood up, she felt like she had to tell her body to do every single thing she needed it to. Legs: move.

She'd gotten a few more hours sleep, somewhere back there. She'd packed her Sandbenders back in her bag, and now she was putting one foot in front of the other, as Maryalice, in front of her, shuffle-swayed along the narrow aisle in her white cowboy boots.

It seemed to take forever to get out of the plane, but then they were breathing airport air in a corridor, under big logos that Chia had known all her life, all those Japanese companies, and everything crowded and moving in one direction. “You check anything?” Maryalice asked, beside her.