Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (12 page)

“The processing equipment’s aboard Oddjob; we’re hooked in real-time through a mega-plex infrared link. Micro-cameras on the headband. Come a long way from Umberto Boccioni.” The Bay Bridge uprooted booted feet and went buckarooing over Oakland while a fifteen-year-old girl confessed a long and labyrinthine dream into Ethan Ring’s middle ear. Luka pulled him toward the gateway of a covered market that shapeshifted into ideogram-stained teeth, a swallowing neon-lit maw. Within, the biogas-lit stalls with their pendulous racks of edibles and smokables became the pulsing organs of a post-cybernetic bodyscape; the bustling crowd, shouting in a dozen different Southeast Asian dialects, were swarms of platelets, macrophages, and antibodies.

Above the inner voice of a man describing a fantastic mescalin voyage beneath the linked geodesics of his own skin, Ethan shouted, “You’re a sick woman, Luka Casipriadin.”

“These aren’t my head dreams,” she shouted back. “This is some poor bastard of an HIV IV victim’s dream of one final DPMA trip into himself to battle the disease that has, by now, probably killed him. They’re all live. All real. 0898 FANTASY—at the tone leave your darkest dream, your brightest hope, confess it to Luka absolute confidentiality assured.”

“Except you blow it up over three city blocks and people pay to have it shoved through a little hole in their heads.”

“They all knew what I wanted to do with their fantasies. Logged five thousand calls in the three months I kept the line open. Tapped some deep, dark confessional urge in the population of the Greater Bay Area. You think I’m sick, you should hear some of the ones I didn’t use. I’d like to think that some of my sources will come and look at it and feel that their openness about their fantasies will help other poor repressed bastards.”

“Even for you that is a singularly weak self-justification.”

“Isn’t it just?”

The puckered, neon-spangled rectum of the market shat them and their yellow Dornier out at the foot of twenty stories of First Pacific Rim Bank morphing into a naked twenty-year-old man with fabulous black hair and muscles. As a fifty-something woman’s voice whispered sweet sexual imaginings to the accompaniment of a reconstructed Julie Andrews singing a pornographic version of “Favorite Things” (“Naked black sailors all tied up with string”), powerlines snapped and came twining through the air to coil and knot around the straining leviathan.

“Fucking hell,” said Ethan Ring, thinking of the man in the Shaker chair in the last wooden house in San Francisco.

Onward.

Through faerylands and Disneylands and
petit
Arcadias two blocks by three, heavens and hells, through blizzards of dollar bills while palm trees bent their mop heads close together and sang old Prince numbers in close harmony and cathedrals took off like gothic rockets beneath skies filled with plump Georges Méliès desmoiselles dressed as shooting stars and comets until, beneath a floodlit Coit Tower ecstatically transubstantiating into a Hieronymous Bosch cromlech/mushroom/phallus complete with dancing nymphs, flying sharks and goose-stepping storks, she kissed him. Hard. In the mouth. With much tongue.

“I could tie you up with string,” she said and pulled the tap out of his skull and vanished all dreams and yearnings and fantasies in a candy-colored pop! “Ethan, I’m sorry. Those years, what I did to you. I’m a coward. I’m like Buddha, I like to think I’m living in a perfect painless world of art and artifice, then comes the first sign of hurt and I press disengage. Fuck, even for me, that’s a singularly weak self-justification. Okay, Ethan Ring, here I am, if you’ll have me.” She slapped the Dornier’s yellow shell. “Get the hell home, Oddjob.”

They ate things cooked in aluminum foil in a Timorese sampan restaurant. They took a mopedcab down through the old Italian and slightly less old Vietnamese and newer Indonesian and new North Australian and newest Southern-States-white-trash-shanty districts to the bridge where they told the driver to wait for them, which meant that they were not going to go halfway and throw themselves off. They drank bourbon in a bar and got drunk but not too. They went back to Ethan Ring’s towertop suite with its view over the Euclidian geometry of city lights interrupted by the Mandelbrotian mathematics of the Bay.

“Wouldn’t you love to stand naked in front of that window?” Luka said, sitting on his bed and heaving and grunting at her boots. Ethan slipped off his riverboat gambler’s jacket and brocade waistcoat and was unfastening his pearl shirt buttons when she noticed.

“That would be a lot easier if you took your gloves off.”

A pause, while something like a spiked fist reached into his chest and tore out his heart.

“Ethan, what have you done with your hands, Ethan?”

He told her. His head reverberated to a vertiginous white roar as he told her about what he had done to his hands, to himself, to the man in the Shaker chair. He stood at the window and watched the transparent dirigibles filled with cold-gas holograms for diet Coke and Volkswagen-G.M. and Chanel 15 drift across the beautiful city until he heard the door click shut and lock behind him.

R
AW FIRE; BURNING DOWN
my throat. I cough, retch,
fire
goes down into my lungs. I spew up a spray of phlegm and bile and burning.

“It’s all right, Eth. Take it easy.” Another splash of liquid heat across my lips, down my throat. Distant monosyllables; Japanese. “Old Suntory, Eth. For the shock.”

Mas.
My voice is a ghastly rattlesnake rasp. I push the glass away.

“You’re all right now. The Tanazakis say we can stay here until you are able to go on.” Feeling behind my right ear my fingers encounter only the plastic disk of an empty socket.
Touch
solidifies the unfocused color field surrounding me into objects: a rectangle of light is a window filled with concrete-colored sky, a lozenge of fitful cerise and lilac a neon sign, a circle in the bottom right corner of the streaming window: a sticker,
PROTECTED BY TOSA SECURITIES INCORPORATED.
I try to struggle free from the bed; Mas’s hand is on my chest.

“Easy, Eth. You’ve had a bad shock.”

“Mas…”

“You came off the bike. You hit a rut. You were riding like… like something possessed, a demon. It’s a miracle you weren’t impaled on the cane.”

The dogs. The cane field. I remember. A young woman—eighteen, twentyish—enters with tea.

“The farmer got you into the back of the pickup and brought you here. You were shaking all over. Like a fit. Like epilepsy.”

That’s the bargain it makes. You use it, it uses you, and more, each time. I take the cup of tea between my gloved hands, savor the good, clean scald of it.

“I’ve called her, Eth. She’s hiring a car, she’ll be here by morning. She’ll be able to help you.”

She?
I want to ask,
she?
but a middle-aged woman has appeared at the side of the bed and is pressing self-adhesive tranquilizer dots to my acupuncture points.
She…?

B
IBLE STORIES FOR BUDDHISTS:
The Good Samaritan found the traveler by the side of the road and brought him to an inn. In the three hundred and twelve years since Ruichi Tanazaki I, inspired by a vision of the face of the Daishi in the tea leaves at the bottom of a bowl, opened his teahouse for the succor of weary henro, successive generations have added and enlarged and expanded until now the Tanazaki-ya stands as a marvelous miscegeny moteldinergaragegiftshopgasstationpharmacybathhousebarbershopkaraokeparlorcathousepickupjoint; a true and honest tribute to the spirit of vernacular building that finds its highest expression in roadside architecture. The Smithsonian should have it heli-lifted whole and preserved, with its motley, polyglot crew of Tanazakis, generations ten through twelve, for the delight and elucidation of future, poorer descendants. Wandering in post-tranq blur through the warren of extensions, annexes, and additions trying to find Mas, I feel like an unnoticed animal stowing away on some surreal ark sailing up through history. I keep arriving in the same bar snug where a small peer group of salarypersons with their jackets off are toasting each other and singing along to a sat-tel pop channel. Every time, they are that little bit drunker, that little bit more nicely out of tune.

The diner is unlit save for the neons along the self-serve bar and the unregarded television glow from the booth where Mas is talking with the girl who brought me tea. They are the sole occupants. Comic book on poles and crushed plastic beer cans litter the melamine tabletop: I feel vaguely blasphemous at having interrupted a private moment. Mas introduces the girl, Mariko. The perfect hostess, she bows and brings beer from the cool cabinet; very cold, very good.

“Mas. How long has Luka been here?”

He offers me one from his pack of Tiger Tails.

“She was held up in Tokyo. She came down here the day before yesterday. We were to meet her in Yawatahama.”

I breathe in the smoke from the
cañabarillo,
let it fry my head, just a little, let it knock me loose from the things that have been closing around me so inexorably. If you are going to sin, henro, then sin big, so that grace may all the more abound.

“It was her you were talking to, those long-distance calls. No wonder you switched the picture off.”

On the television, sumo wrestlers bump and grind silently in the sacred clay ring.

“It was planned long before Temple One. Back to that time you met in Capetown, when you told her you were thinking seriously of taking up my suggestion of the pilgrimage.”

“My God. A cozy little conspiracy. Where did you dream all this up, in bed together in some capsule hotel with a bottle of sake and pornographic comics?”

Though I know the depth of anger of which Mas is capable, the sudden nova-flare of it is still frightening.

“Do not ever, ever, talk about her that way. Ever, you bastard. Maier-Mikoyan commissioned a virtuality from her, up in Sapporo for the Ice Fest. We met there. She thought that the pilgrimage might be a way for you to break free. Save yourself, save your soul.”

“Well hallelujah for little Miss Salvation Army. So you knew about me all along. Was all that stuff, back at Muroto, made up for me too?”

For a moment I am certain, certain, that if there were anything sharper than a disposable chopstick to hand, Mas would have buried it in my throat.

“I don’t know what she sees in you. You are selfish, ungrateful, vicious, cowardly. You’re a child, Eth. She didn’t give away any of your fucking state secrets. You did that. You can’t even be trusted not to betray your country. She just said you were in trouble. Powerful trouble, and the pilgrimage might give you the space and strength to break free; that was all. And for some reason, I agreed to help her.

“She loves you. She has never loved anyone else and will never love anyone else and you hurt her. You have hurt her, you hurt her now, you will go on hurting her.”

“Oh, Christ, Mas.”

Voices, in the lobby. Mr. Tanazaki, and two others. Loud voices. Strong voices. Dangerous voices. I half rise, half turn in my seat, and they burst in through the door. Meat. Heavies. Akiras, two of. Camouflage parkas undecided between sickly neon and midnight black. Hair scraped back and thonged into oily pigtails. Wraparound visors streaked with alphanumerals; raster lines closing around my image.

I am on my feet, hands curled into loose fists in an instant of primal reaction. Laser sights paint red caste marks on my forehead and heart. Airborne dust traces them back to the Fiuzzi automatic pistols.

“You. You.” One red thread dances away to rest on the bridge of Mas’s nose. “With us.”

Shouting protest, Mr. Tanazaki tries to snatch a weapon. The red beam weaves over booths, ceiling, floor, then with the frightening casualness of chemically enhanced strength, the akira slams him against the cooler cabinet, smashes him with the butt of his weapon, smashes him, smashes him, smashes him. There is screaming in the lobby.

And I open my left hand.

Keter sends the akira—spasming, jerking, shivering—into the wall. In a flicker of violence, I am on top of him. All I know, all I understand, all I feel, is the anger, the years of anger, burning along my arm, drawing into a knot of white heat at the center of my left hand. I imagine my left hand pressed over his eyes and unholy joy blazes through me.

“Ethan! Leave him!” Mas. The second akira sends the searching finger of his targeting laser after me; I roll away, come into a crouch, left hand ready.

“No, Eth. Not this way.”

No. This is not the way. It was the way of Ethan Ring. It is not your way. My way. My hand opens like a lotus blooming. My right hand.

“Put the gun down.” The voice of absolute authority does not need to shout. Click of ceramics and steel on the floorboards. The laser sight draws a strict red terminator across the polished wood. “Squat down. On your heels. Hands on head. Stay that way until I tell you otherwise.”

He obeys. He cannot but. His camouflage parka turns cold neon blue.

“Who sent you?”

“Tosa Securities Aki Section Manager, on the instructions of the Chief Security Executive. Our Chapter are subcontractees.”

The classic pattern, divide and recruit your enemies. If even akiras serve and find it no dishonor, this land is more firmly in Tosa Securities’ fist than I had imagined. We cannot afford to remain even one hour more. Mrs. Tanazaki, Mariko, and eldest son are kneeling beside Mr. Tanazaki. There is a lot of blood and he does not move. Mrs. Tanazaki is rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Younger son is making a call on the lobby desk phone.

“No!” I shout. “Leave it!” His fingers hesitate over the touch buttons, then decide. “Look at me,” I order, right hand upheld. In the dark lobby, his pupils dilate. “Leave it.” The voicepiece clicks into its cradle.

“It was only an ambulance,” he says. Mariko looks at me with such hatred it is like a rod of frozen iron thrust up my spine. My Healing and Tranquillity fracters could help Mr. Tanazaki until we are gone and it is safe to call an ambulance but Mariko would not accept my gift and anyway I cannot spare the few minutes it would take to print them out.