Idoru

15. Akihabara

Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo’s tinted, lace-curtained windows.

They passed an Apple Shires ad, a cobbled lane leading away into some hologram nursery land, where smiling juice bottles danced and sang. Laney’s jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a passage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.

“I thought we’d done with all of that when we got rid of those Siberian neuropaths,” Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely in black, which had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. He wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple pockets around its wide hem. Laney thought it looked vaguely Japanese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear. “Bent as a dog’s hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat states.”

“Neuropaths?”

“Filling Rez’s head with their garbage. He’s vulnerable to influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It’s a syndrome, is what it is.”

“Where are we going?”

“Akihbara.”

“Where?”

“Where we’re going.” Blackwell consulted an enormous, elaborately dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had been designed to do double duty as brass knuckles. “Took a month before they’d let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us what those bastards had been feeding him had made a pig’s breakfast of his endocrine system. Put him right, in the end, but it needn’t have happened, none of it.”

“But you got rid of them?” Laney had no idea what Blackwell was talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of conversation.

“Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a little Honda tree-shredder I’d purchased, just on the off chance,” Blackwell said.

“Not necessary. Showed them it, though. In the end, they were sent along with no more than a moderate touch-up.”

Laney looked at the back of the driver’s head. The right-hand drive worried him. He felt like there was nobody in the driver’s seat. “How long did you say you’d worked for the band?”

“Five years.”

Laney thought of the video, Blackwell’s voice in the darkened club. Two years ago. “Where are we going?”

“Be there, soon enough.”

They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely shabby buildings covered with unlit, inactivated advertising. Huge representations of media platforms Laney didn’t recognize. Some of the buildings revealed what he assumed was quake damage. Head-sized gobs of a brownish, glasslike substance protruded from cracks that ran diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.

“ ‘Electric Town,’ ” Blackwell said. “I’ll page you,” he said to the driver, who nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not particularly Japanese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with that same unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.

“Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination,” he said to Blackwell. It was true.

“Stop expecting,” Blackwell said.

The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike knobs opened into a white-and-pastel sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and conduits. Laney followed Blackwell down a central aisle. A few figures stood along other aisles to either side, but he had no way of knowing whether these were salespeople or potential customers.

An old-fashioned escalator was grinding away, at the end of the central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges of each ascending step worn sharp and bright. Blackwell kept walking. Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet barely seeming to move. Laney mounted hard behind him.

They rose up to a second level, this one displaying a less consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated recliners with massage-modules bulging from their cushions like the heads of giant mechanical grubs.

Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons, Blackwell with his scarred hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker’s dented thermos standing on a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum sawhorses. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.

“We’ve been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell,” someone said. “Not an easy thing.”

Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. “Had to collect him from the hotel.”

The space, walled off with the blue tarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney’s hotel room but considerably more crowded.

A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black consoles were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.

Blackwell kicked at it. “You might have tidied up.”

“We aren’t set-dressers,” the woman said. She sounded to Laney as though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair cut in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one Japanese and one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.

“Hell of a job on short notice,” the redhead said.

“Nonotice,” the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. His hair was pulled straight back, fastened high in a little samurai ponytail.

“What you’re paid for,” Blackwell said.

“We’re paid to tour,” the redhead said.

“If you want to tour again, you’d better hope that these work.” Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.

Laney saw a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall. It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there, a pair of eye-phones. Unfamiliar cables ran to the nearest console: flat ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The wall behind was plastered with an overlay of old advertising; a woman’s eye was directly behind the pink table, a yard wide, her laser-printed pupil the size of Laney’s head.

Laney moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his feet, a motion not unlike cross-country skiing.

“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”