Virtual Light

16. Sunflower

You know” Sammy Sal said, pausing before a first shallow sip, “you shouldn’t have this kind of problem. You don’t need to. There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?”

Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.

“Crime” Sammy Sal said, “sex. Maybe drugs.” He put his cup down on the wagon’s plywood counter. “About covers it.”

“You fuck them” Chevette said “You said.”

Sammy Sal shrugged. “I like to. Trouble comes down from that, I’m up for it. But you just went and did something, no reason. Reached through the membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea.”

Chevette blew on her coffee. “I know.”

“So how you going to deal with whatever’s coming down?”

“I’m going up to Skinner’s room, get those glasses, take ’em up on the roof, and throw ’em over.”

“Then what?”

“Then I go on the way I do, ’til somebody turns up.”

“Then what?”

“Didn’t do it. Don’t know shit. Never happened.”

He nodded, slow, but he was studying her. “Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe not. Somebody wants those glasses back, they can lean on you real hard. Anther way to go: we get ’em, ride back over to Allied, tell ’em how it happened.”

“We?”

“Uh-huh. I’ll go with you.”

“I’ll lose my job.”

“You can get you another job.”

She drank the little cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Job’s all I got, Sammy. You know that. You got it for me.”

“You got a place to sleep, up there. You got that crazy old motherfucker took you in—”

“I feed him, Sammy Sal—”

“You got your ass intact, honey. Some rich man decide to screw you over, ’cause you took his data-glasses, maybe that ceases to be the case.”

Chevette put her empty cup down on the counter, dug in the pockets of her jacket. Gave the girl fifteen for the two coffees and a two-dollar tip. Squared her shoulders under Skinner’s jacket, the ball-chains rattling. “No. Once that shit’s in the Bay, nobody can prove I did anything.”

Sammy Sal sighed. “You’re an innocent.”

It sounded funny, like she didn’t know you could use the word that way. “You coming, Sammy Sal?”

“What for?”

“Talk to Skinner. Get between him and his magazines. That’s where I left them. Behind his magazines. Then he won’t see me get them out. I’ll go up on the roof and off them.”

“Okay” he said, “but I say you’ll just be fucking up worse.”

“I’ll take the chance, okay?” She dismounted and started wheeling her bike toward the bridge.

“I guess you will” Sammy Sal said, but then he was off his bike, too, and pushing it, behind her.

There’d only ever been three really good, that was to say seriously magic, times in Chevette’s life. Oue was the night Sammy Sal had told her he’d try to get her on at Allied, and he had. One was the day she’d paid cash money for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there’d been the night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents—if you could count that now as lucky.

Which was not to say that these were the times she’d been luckiest, because those were all times that had been uniformly and life-threateningly shitty, except for the part where the luck cut in.

She’d been lucky the night she’d gone over the razor-wire and out of the Juvenile Center outside Beaverton, but that had been one deeply shitty night. She had scars on both palms to prove it.

And she’d been very lucky the time she’d first wandered out onto the bridge, the lower deck, her knees wobbling with a fever she’d picked up on her way down the coast. Everything hurt her: the lights, every color, every sound, her mind pressing out into the world like a swollen ghost. She remembered the loose, flapping sole of her sneaker dragging over the littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how she had to sit down, finally, everything up and turning, around her, the Korean man running out of his little store to yell at her, get up, get up, not here, not here. And Not Here had seemed like such a totally good idea, she’d gone straight there, right over backward, and hadn’t even felt her skull slam the pavement.

And that was where Skinner had found her, though he didn’t remember or maybe want to talk about it; she was never sure. She didn’t think he could’ve gotten her up to his room on his own; he needed help to get back up there himself, with his hip and everything. But there were still days when an energy got into him and you could see how strong he must’ve been, once, and then he’d do things you didn’t think he could do, so she’d never he sure.

The first thing she’d seen, opening her eyes, was the round church-window with the rags stuck into the gaps, and sun coming through it, little dots and blobs of colors she’d never seen before, all swimming in her fevered eye like bugs in water. Then the bone-crack time, the virus wringing her like the old man had wrung the gray towels he wrapped her head in. When the fever broke and rolled away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out to there and over the rim of sickness, her hair fell out in dry clumps, stuck to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.

When it grew back, it came in darker, nearly black. So after that she felt sort of like a different person. Or anyway her own person, she’d figured.

And she’d stayed with Skinner, doing what he said to get them food and keep things working up in his room. He’d send her down to the lower deck, where the junk-dealers spread their stuff. Send her down with anything: a wrench that said ‘BMW’ on the side, a crumbling cardboard box of those flat black things that had played music once, a bag of plastic dinosaurs. She never figured any of it would be worth anything, but somehow it always was. The wrench bought a week’s food, and two of the round things brought even more. Skinner knew where old things came from, what they’d been for, and could guess when somebody’d want them. At first she was worried that she wouldn’t get enough for the things she sold, but he didn’t seem to care. If something didn’t sell, like the plastic dinosaurs, it just went back into stock, what he called the stuff ranged around the bases of the four walls.

As she’d gotten stronger, and her new hair grew in, she’d started ranging farther from the room on top of the tower. Not into either city, at first, though she’d walked over to Oakland a couple of times, over the cantilever, and looked out at it. Things felt different over there, though she was never sure why. But where she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all wrapped in it, all the people hanging and hustling and doing what they did, and the way the whole thing grew a little, changed a little, every day. There wasn’t anything like that, not that she knew of, not up in Oregon.

At first she didn’t even know that it made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever had left her a little crazy, but one day she’d decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she’d have to get used to it.

But it turned out you could be sort of happy and restless at the same time, so she started keeping back a little of Skinner’s junk-money to use to explore the city. And that was plenty to do, for a while. She found Haight Street and walked it all the way to the wall around Skywalker, with the Temple of Doom and everything sticking up in there, but she didn’t try to go in. There was this long skinny park that led up to it, called the Panhandle, and that was still public. Way too public, she thought, with people, mostly old or anyway looking that way, stretched out side by side, wrapped in silvery plastic to keep the rays off, this crinkly stuff that glittered like those Elvis suits in a video they’d showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton. It kind of made her think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in its own little piece of foil. They had a way of moving like that, just a little bit, and it creeped her out.

The Haight sort of creeped her out, too, even though there were stretches that felt almost like you were on the bridge, nobody normal in sight and people doing things right out in public, like the cops were never going to come at all. But she wasn’t ever scared, on the bridge, maybe because there were always people around she knew, people who lived there and knew Skinner. But she liked looking around the Haight because there were a lot of little shops, a lot of places that sold cheap food. She knew this bagel place where you could buy them a day old, and Skinner said they were better that way anyway. He said fresh bagels were the next thing to poison, like they’d plug you up or something. He had a lot of ideas like that. Most of the shops, she could actually go into, if she was quiet and smiled a little and kept her hands in her pockets.

One day on Haight she saw this shop called Colored People and she couldn’t figure out what it sold. There was a curtain behind the window and a few things set out in front of that: cactus in pots, big rusty hunks of metal, and a bunch of these little steel things, polished and bright. Rings and things. Little rods with round balls on the ends. They were hung on the needles of the cactus and spread out on the rusted metal. She decided she’d open the door and just look in, because she’d seen a couple of people going in and out and knew it wasn’t locked. A big fat guy in white coveralls, with his head all shaved, coming out, whistling, and these two tall women, black-haired, like handsome crows, all dressed in black, going in. She just wondered what it was.

She stuck her head in there. There was a woman with short red hair behind a counter, and every wall covered with these bright cartoony pictures, colors that made your eyes jump, all snakes and dragons and everything. So many pictures it was hard to take it in, so it wasn’t until the woman said come on, don’t just block the door, and Chevette had come in, that she saw this woman wore a sleeveless flannel shirt, open all the way down, and her front and arms all covered, solid, with those same pictures.

Now Chevette had seen tattoos in the Juvenile Center, and on the street before that, but those were the kind you did yourself, with ink and needles, thread and an old ballpoint. She walked over and took a good long look at the colors exploding between the woman’s breasts—which, though she was maybe thirty, weren’t as big as Chevette’s—and there was an octopus there, a rose, bolts of blue lightning, all of it tangling together, no untouched skin at all.

“You want something” the woman said, “or you just looking?”

Chevette blinked. “No” she heard herself say, “but I was sort of wondering what those little metal things are, in the window.”

The woman swung a big black book around on the counter, like a school binder except its covers were chrome-studded black leather. Flipped it open and Chevette was looking at this guy’s thing, a big one, just hanging there. There were two little steel balls on either side of its wedge-shaped head.

Chevette just sort of grunted.

“Call that an amphalang” the woman said. She started flipping through the album. “Barbells” she said. “Septum spike. Labret stud. That’s a chunk ring. This one’s called a milkchurn. These are bomb weights. Surgical steel, niobium, white gold, fourteen-carat.” She flipped it back to the jim with the bolt, sideways through the end of it. Maybe it was a trick, Chevette thought, a trick picture.

“That’s gotta hurt” Chevette said.

“Not as much as you’d think” this big deep voice, “and then it starts to feel jus’ good…”

Chevette looked up at this black guy, his big white grin, all those teeth, a micropore filtration-mask pulled down under his chin, and that was how she’d met Samuel Saladin DuPree.

Two days later she saw him again in Union Square, hanging with a bunch of bike messengers. She’d already put messengers down as something to watch for in the city. They had clothes and hair like nobody else, and bikes with neon and light-up wheels, handlebars carved up and over like scorpion-tails. Helmets with little radios built in. Either they were going somewhere fast or they were just goofing, hanging, drinking coffee.

He was standing there with his legs over either side of the cross-tube of his bike, eating half a sandwich. Music was coming out of the black-flecked pink frame, mostly bass, and he was sort of bopping to it. She edged up to get a better look at the bike, how it was made, the intricacy of its brakes and shifters pulling her straight in. Beauty.

“Dang” he said, around a mouthful of sandwich, “dang, my am-phalang. Where did you get those shoes?”

They were Skinner’s, old canvas sneakers, too long for her so she’d stuck some paper in the toes.

“Here.” He handed her the other half of his sandwich. “I’m full already.”

“Your bike” she said, taking the sandwich.

“What about it?”

“It’s… it’s…”

“Like it?”

“Uh-huh!”

He grinned. “Sugawara frame, Sugawara rings ‘n’ ’railers, Zuni hydraulics. Clean.”

“I like the wheels” Chevette said.

“Well” he said, “that’s just flash. Lets some motherfucker see you ’fore he runs you over, y’know?”

Chevette touched the handlebars. Felt that music.

“Eat that sandwich” he said. “Look like you need it.”

She did, and she did, and that was how they got to talking.

Shouldering their bikes up the plywood stairs, Chevette telling him about the Japanese girl, how she fell out of that elevator. How she, Chevette, wouldn’t even have been at that party if she hadn’t been standing right there, right then. Sammy grunting, his Fluoro-Rimz gone dead opal now they weren’t turning.

“Who was it throwing this do, Chev? You think to ask anybody that?”

Remembering that Maria. “Cody. Said it was Cody’s party…”

Sammy Sal stopped, his brows lifting. “Huh. Cody Harwood?”

She shrugged, the paper bike next to weightless on her shoulder. “Dunno.”

“You know who that is?”

“No.” Reaching the platform, putting the bike down to wheel it.

“That’s some serious money. Advertising. Harwood Levine, but that was his father.”

“Well, I said it was rich.” Not paying him much attention.

“His father’s company did Millbank’s PR, both elections.”

But she was activating the recognition-loop now, not bothering with the screamers from Radio Shack. Sammy’s FluoroRimz pulsed as he set his bike down beside hers. “I’ll loop it to mine. Be okay here anyway.”

“That’s what I said” Sammy said, “last two I lost.” He watched her pull the loop out, twist it around his bike’s frame, careful of the pink-and-black enamel, and seal it with her thumbprint.

She headed for the yellow lift, glad to see it there, where she’d left it, and not at the top of the track. “Let’s do this thing, okay?” Remembering she’d meant to buy Skinner some soup from Thai Johnny’s wagon, that sweet-sour lemon one he liked.

When she’d told Sammy she wanted to mess, wanted her own bike, he’d gotten her this little Mexican headset taught you every street of San Francisco. Three days and she had it down, pretty much, even though he said that wasn’t like the map in a messenger’s head. You needed to know buildings, how to get into them, how to act, how to keep your wheels from getting stolen. But when he’d taken her in to meet Bunny, that was magic.

Three weeks and she’d earned enough to buy her first serious bike. That was magic, too.

Somewhere around then she started hanging out after work with a couple of the other Allied girls, Tami Two and Alice Maybe, and that was how she’d wound up at Cognitive Dissidents, that night she’d met Lowell.

“Nobody locks their door here” Sammy said, on the ladder below her, as she lifted the hatch.

Chevette closed her eyes, saw a bunch of cops (whatever that would look like) standing around Skinner’s room. Opened her eyes and stuck her head up, eyes level with the floor.

Skinner was on his bed, his little television propped on his chest, big old yellow toenails sticking out of holes in his lumpy gray socks. He looked at her over the television.

“Hey” she said, “I brought Sammy. From work.” She climbed up, making room for Sammy Sal’s head and shoulders.

“Howdy” Sammy Sal said.

Skinner just stared at him, colors from the little screen flicking across his face.

“How you doin’?” Sammy Sal asked, climbing up.

“Bring anything to eat?” Skinner asked her.

“Thai Johnny’ll have soup ready in a while” she said, moving toward the shelves, the magazines. Dumb-ass thing to say and she knew it, because Johnny’s soup was always ready; he’d started it years ago and just kept adding to the pot.

“How you doin’, Mr. Skinner?” Sammy Sal stood slightly hunched, feet apart, holding his helmet with both hands, like a boy saying hello to his girlfriend’s father. He winked at Chevette.

“What you winkin’ at, boy?” Skinner shut the set off and snapped its screen shut. Chevette had bought it for him off a container-ship in the Trap. He said he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between the ‘programs’ and the ‘commercials,’ whatever that meant.

“Somethin’ in my eye, Mr. Skinner” Sammy Sal said, his big feet shifting, even more like a nervous boyfriend. Made Chevette want to laugh. She got behind Sammy’s back and reached in behind the magazines. It was there. Into her pocket.

“You ever seen the view from up top here, Sammy?” She knew she had this big crazy grin on, and Skinner was staring at it, trying to figure what was happening, but she didn’t care. She swung up the ladder to the roof-hatch.

“Gosh, no, Chevette, honey. Must be just breathtaking.”

“Hey” Skinner said, as she opened the hatch, “what’s got into you?”

Then she was up and out and into one of the weird pockets of stillness you got up there sometimes. Usually the wind made you want to lie down and hang on, but then there were these patches when nothing moved, dead calm. She heard Sammy Sal coming up the ladder behind her. She had the case out, was moving toward the edge.

“Hey” he said, “lemme see.”

She raised the thing, winding up to throw.

He plucked it from her fingers.

“Hey!”

“Shush.” Opening it, pulling them out. “Huh. Nice ones…”

“Sammy!” Reaching for them. He gave her the case instead.

“See how you do this now?” Opening them, one side-piece in either hand. “Left is aus, right’s em. Just move ’em a little.” She saw how he was doing it, in the light that spilled up through the hatch from Skinner’s room. “Here. Check it out.” He put them on her.

She was facing the city when he did it. Financial district, the Pyramid with its brace on from the Little Grande, the hills behind that. “Fuck a duck” she said, these towers blooming there, buildings bigger than anything, a stone regular grid of them, marching in from the hills. Each one maybe four blocks at the base, rising straight and featureless to spreading screens like the colander she used to steam vegetables. Then Chinese writing filled the sky. “Sammy…”

She felt him grab her as she lost her balance.

The Chinese writing twisted into English.

SUNFLOWER CORPORATION

“Sammy…”

“Huh?”

“What the fuck is this?” Anything she focused on, another label lit the sky, dense patches of technical words she didn’t understand.

“How should I know” he said. “Let me see.” Reaching for the glasses.

“Hey” she heard Skinner say, his voice carrying up through the hatch, “it’s Scooter. What you doin’ back here?”

Sammy Sal pulled the glasses off and she was kneeling, looking down through the hatch at that Japanese nerd who came around to see Skinner, the college boy or social worker or whatever he was. But he looked even more lost than usual. He looked scared. And there was somebody with him.

“Hey, Scooter” Skinner said, “how you doing?”

“This Mr. Loveless” Yamazaki said. “He ask to meet you.”

Gold flashed up at Chevette from the stranger’s grin. “Hi there” he said, taking his hand out of the side pocket of his long black raincoat. The gun wasn’t very big, but there was something too easy in the way he held it, like a carpenter with a hammer. He was wearing surgical gloves. “Why don’t you come on down here?”

“How this works” Freddie said, handing Rydell a debit-card, “you pay five hundred to get in, then you’re credited for five hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.”

Rydell looked at the card. Some Dutch bank. If this was how they were going to pay him, up here, maybe it was time he asked them what he’d actually be getting. But maybe he should wait until Freddie was in a better mood.

Freddie said this Container City place was a good quick bet for clothes. Regular clothes, Rydell hoped. They’d left Warbaby drinking herbal tea in some kind of weird coffee joint because he said he needed to think. Rydell had gone out to the Patriot while Warbaby and Freddie held a quick huddle, there.

“What if he wants us, wants the car?”

“He’ll beep us” Freddie said. He showed Rydell how to put the debit-card into a machine that gave him a five-hundred-dollar Container City magstrip and validated the parking on the Patriot. “This way.” Freddie pointed at a row of turnstiles.

“Aren’t you gonna buy one?” Rydell asked.

“Shit, no” Freddie said. “I don’t get my clothes off boats.” He took a card out of his wallet and showed Rydell the IntenSecure logo.

“I thought you guys were strictly freelance.”

“Strictly but frequently” Freddie said, feeding the card to a turnstile. It clicked him through. Rydell fed it the magstrip and followed him.