All Tomorrow's Parties

57. EYE

AND when they are cleaning up, the next day, Fontaine will find a cardboard canister of coarse Mexican salt, holed, on the floor, in the back room.

And he will pick it up, the weight wrong somehow, and pour the salt out into the palm of his hand, through the entrance hole in the side, until out falls the fully blossomed exotic hollow-point slug that had penetrated the plywood partition, then straight into this round box of salt, upon its shelf, spending its energy there as heat. But it will be cold then, like a fanged bronze kernel of popcorn, evidence of the ways in which its makers intended it to rend flesh.

And he will place it on a shelf beside a lead soldier, another survivor of the war.

But now he can only move as in a dream, and what comes to him most strongly in this silence, this tangible silence through which he feels he moves as if through glycerine, is the memory of his father, against his mother's ardent fear, taking him briefly out, into the yard behind a house in tidewater Virginia, to experience the eye of a hurricane.

And in that eye, after the storm's initial rage, nothing moves. No bird sings. Each twig of each leafless tree defined in utter stillness, yet perhaps on the very edge of perception there can be some awareness of the encircling system. Something subsonic; felt, not heard. Which will return. That is certain.

And it is like that now as he rises and moves, seeing the boy's hands frozen, trembling, above the notebook's keys, head still helmed with that old military set. And thinks for a moment the boy is injured, but he sees no blood. Frightened only.

All guns exist to be fired, he knows, and Rydell has proven this by firing Martial's, that ugly thing, Russian, vicious booty out of the Kombinat states by way of Africa, out of wars of an abiding stupidity, ethnic struggles smoldering on for centuries, like airless fires down in the heart of a dry bog. A gun for those unable to be trained to shoot.

Reek of its propellant charge in the hack of his throat, harsh and chemical. A frosting of shattered glass beneath his shoes.

Rydell stands at the door, the ungainly chain gun dangling from his hand like a duelist's pistol, and now Fontaine stands beside him, looking out into the bridge's narrow covered thoroughfare as into a tableau or diorama, and opposite, there, all glitters with red. Though surely in the shadows one would find more solid, substantial evidence, bone and gristle perhaps, and that automatic gun.

'Chevette, Rydell says, not to her but as if reminding himself of her, and turns, crunching back through the glass, to find her.

Fontaine blinks at the queer red glitter over there, the smear that someone has so instantly become, and catches something moving, high up in the periphery of vision. Silver.

Flinches, but it's a balloon, a cushiony oblate of inflated Mylar, with, it looks like, little caged articulated props and a camera. This draws even with the front of his shop, halts itself with reversing props, then neatly rotates, so that the lens looks down at him.

Fontaine looks up at the thing, wondering if it has the wherewithal to hurt him, but it simply hangs there, staring, so he turns and surveys the damage to his shop. All this glass is the most evident breakage, bullet holes themselves being not so visible. Two of them, though, have punched through a round enamel Coke sign that previously would've rated an eighty percent, but now is scarcely 'very good.

It is the counter that draws him, though he dreads what he will find: his watches there beneath shards of glass, like fish in a shattered aquarium. Plucking up a Gruen 'Curvex' by its faux-alligator band, he finds it not to be ticking. He sighs. Clarisse has been after him for some time now, to buy a fire safe in which to place his more valuable stock at night. Had he done so, the watches would still be ticking. But this one is, the Doxa chrono with the gently corroded dial, a favorite of his which customers pass over repeatedly. He holds it to his ear, hearing the sound of a mechanism assembled years before his own birth.

But here he sees something which will make Clarisse more unhappy still: her Another One babies lie tumbled in a heap, like some tabloid photo from a nameless atrocity, their ruptured heads and torsos oozing silicone (which is either a liquid that behaves like a solid or vice versa, Fontaine can never remember which). Not one of them has survived intact, and as he bends for a closer look he hears one repeating, endlessly, an apparent single syllable, though whether in Japanese or English he cannot tell. This briefly and deeply fascinates him, and he remembers a similar feeling, as a child, when he viewed through a police line the rubble of a movie theater in Harlem; the fire that had gutted the place had stopped short of the candy counter, but everything in that counter had melted, had poured out and solidified into a frozen stream of refined sugar, smelling much better, even over the sourness of damp ashes, than this silicone does.

And hears Chevette and Rydell talking, arguing it seems, and he wishes they would stop.

He is in the eye, and he wishes simply to know it.