Virtual Light

20. The big empty

Swear to God” Nigel said, “this shit just moved.”

Chevette, with her eyes closed, felt the blunt back of the ceramic knife press into her wrist; there was a sound like an inner-tube letting go when you’ve patched it too many times, and then that wrist was free.

“Shit. Jesus—” His hands rough and quick, Chevette’s eyes opening to a second pop, a red blur whanging back and forth around the stacked scrap. Nigel’s head following it, like the counterweighted head of a plaster dog that Skinner had found once and sent her down to sell.

Every wall in this narrow space racked with metal, debraised sections of old Reynolds tubing, dusty jam jars stuffed with rusting spokes. Nigel’s workshop, where he built his carts, did what shadetree fixes he could to any bike came his way. The salmon-plug that dangled from his left ear ticked in counterpoint to his swiveling head, then jingled as he snatched the thing in mid-bounce. A ball of red plastic.

“Man” he said, impressed, “who put this on you?”

Chevette stood up and shivered, this tremor running down through her like a live thing, the way those red bracelets had moved.

How she felt, now, was just the way she’d felt that day she’d come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there but a can of ravioli in a pot on the stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it.

She hadn’t eaten that ravioli and she hadn’t eaten any since and she knew she never would.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she’d moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, ’til she’d wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.

“You okay?” Nigel’s greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand, a cocktail toothpick with a spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of his mouth.

For a long time she’d wondered if maybe the fever hadn’t burned it out, hadn’t accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she’d gotten used to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next—whether she danced in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner’s room, where wind scoured the plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted (Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.

Now that was broken.

“ ’Vette?”

That jumper she’d seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water running from nose and mouth. Every bone broken or dislocated, Skinner said, if you hit just right. Ran through the bar naked and took a header off some tourist’s table nearest the railing, out and over, tangled in Haru’s Day-Glo net and imitation Japanese fishing floats. And didn’t Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of toxic lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the current that sailed the bridge’s dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?

Chevette bent over and threw up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.

“Hey, hey” Nigel dancing around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick and worried she’d puke over his work, something that might ultimately require the in-depth, never-before-attempted act of cleaning out, rather than up, his narrow nest. “Water? Want water?” Offering her the old coffee can he kept there to quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock, and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.

Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him and that grad student tied up up there with the plastic worms.

“Chev?”

He’d put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.

Nigel shifted, foot to foot, then turned and peered through the triangular shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating with the wind. “Stormin’” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. “Stormin’ down rain.”

Running from Skinner’s and the gun in the killer’s hand, from his eyes and the gold in the corners of his smile, bent low for balance over her bound hands and the case that held the asshole’s glasses, Chevette had seen all the others running, too, racing, it must have been, against the breaking calm, the first slap of rain almost warm when it came. Skinner would’ve known it was coming; he’d have watched the barometer in its corny wooden case like the wheel of some old boat; he knew his weather, Skinner, perched in his box on the top of the bridge. Maybe the other; knew, too, but it was the style to wait and then race it, biding out for a last sale, another smoke, some bit of business. The hour before a storm was good for that, people naking edgy purchases against what was ordinarily a bearable uncertainty. Though a few were lost, if the storm was big enough, and not always the unestablished, the newcomers lashed with their ragged baggage to whatever freehold they might have managed on the outer structure; sometimes a whole patchwork section would just let go, if the wind caught it right; she hadn’t seen that but there were stories. There was nothing to stop the new people from coming in to the shelter of the decks, but they seldom did.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took the beer from Nigel. Took a sip. It was warm. She handed it back to him. He took the toothpick from his mouth, started to raise the can for a swallow, thought better of it, put it down beside his welding-torch.

“Somethin’s wrong” he said. “I can tell.”

She massaged her wrists. Twin rings of rash coming up, pink and moist, where the plastic had gripped her. Picked up the ceramic knife and closed it automatically.

“Yeah” she said, “yeah something’s wrong…”

“What’s wrong, Chevette?” He shook hair out of his eyes like a worried dog, fingers running nervously over his tools. His hands were like pale dirty animals, capable in their mute and agile way of solving problems that would have hopelessly baffled the man himself. “That Jap shit delaminated on you” he decided, “and you’re pissed ….

“No” she said, not really hearing him.

“Steel’s what you want for a messenger bike. Weight. Big basket up front. Not cardboard with some crazy aramid shit wrapped around it, weighs about as much as a sandwich. What if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You got more m-mass than the b-bike, you flip over and c-crack open crack your…” His hands twisting, trying more accurately to frame the physics of the accident he was seeing. Chevette looked up and saw that he was trembling.

“Nigel” she said, standing up, “somebody just put that thing on me for a joke, understand?”

“It moved” he said. “I saw it.”

“Well, not a funny joke, okay? But I knew where to come. To you, right? And you took it off.”

Nigel shook his hair back into his eyes, shy and pleased. “You had that knife. Cuts good.” Then he frowned. “You need a steel knife…”

“I know” she said. “I gotta go now…” Bending to pick up the paint can. “I’ll toss this. Sorry.”

“It’s a storm” Nigel said. “Don’t go out in a storm.”

“I’ve got to” she said. “I’ll be okay.” Thinking how he’d kill Nigel, too, if he found her here. Hurt him. Scare him.

“I cut them off.” Holding up the red ball.

“Get rid of that” she said.

“Why?”

“Look at this rash.”

Nigel dropped the ball like it was poison. It bounced out of sight. He wiped his fingers down the filthy front of his t-shirt.

“Nigel, you got a screwdriver you’ll give me? A flathead?”

“Mine are all worn down…” The white animals running over a shoal of tools, happy to be hunting, while Nigel gravely watched them. “I throw those flathead screws away as soon as I get ’em off. Hex is how you want to go—”

“I want one that’s all worn down.”

The right hand pounced, came up with its prize, blackhandled and slightly bent.

“That’s the one” she said, zipping up Skinner’s jacket. Both hands offered it to her, Nigel’s eyes hiding behind his hair, watching. “I… like you, Chevette.”

“I know” she said, standing there with a paint can with vomit in it in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. “I know you do.”

Baffled by the patchwork of plastic that roofed the upper deck, the rain was following waste-lines and power-cables, emerging overhead at crazy angles, in random cascades, miniature Niagaras rushing off corrugated iron and plywood. From the entrance to Nigel’s workshop, Chevette watched an awning collapse, gallons of silver water splashing all at once from what had been a taut concavity, a bulging canvas bathtub that gave way with a sharp crack, instantly becoming several yards of flapping, sodden cloth. Nothing here was ever planned, in any overall sense, and problems of drainage were dealt with as they emerged. Or not, more likely.

Half the lights were out, she saw, but that could be because people had shut them down, had pulled as many plugs as possible. But then she caught the edge of that weird pink flash you got when a transformer blew, and she heard it boom. Out toward Treasure. That took care of most of the remaining lights and suddenly she stood in near darkness. There was nobody in sight, nobody at all. Just a hundred-watt bulb in an orange plastic socket, twirling around in the wind.

She moved out into the center of the deck, trying to watch out for fallen wires. She remembered the can in her hand and flung it sideways, hearing it hit and roll.

She thought of her bike lying there in the rain, its capacitors drained. Somebody was going to take it, for sure, and Sammy Sal’s, too. It was the biggest thing, the most valuable thing she’d ever owned, and she’d earned every dollar she’d put down on the counter at City Wheels. She didn’t think about it like it was a thing, more the way she figured people thought about horses. There were messengers who named their bikes, but Chevette never would have done that, and somehow because she did think about it like it was something alive.

Proj, she told herself, they’ll get you if you stay here. Her back to San Francisco, she set out toward Treasure.

They who? That one with his gun. He’d come for the glasses. Came for the glasses and killed Sammy. Had those people sent him, the ones who called up Bunny and Wilson the owner? Rentacops. Security guys.

The case in her pocket. Smooth. And that weird cartoon of the city, those towers with their spreading tops. Sunflower.

“Jesus” she said, “where? Where’m I going?”

To Treasure, where the wolf-men and the death-cookies hung, the bad crazies chased off the bridge to haunt the woods there? Been a Navy base there, Skinner said, but a plague put paid to that just after the Little Grande, something that turned your eyes to mush, then your teeth fell out. Treasure Island fever, like maybe something crawled out of a can at that Navy place, after the earthquake. So nobody went there now, nobody normal. You saw their fires at night, sometimes, and smoke in the daytime, and you walked straight over to the Oakland span, the cantilever, and the people who lived there weren’t the same, really, as the people over here in the suspension.

Or should she go back, try to get her bike? An hour’s riding and the brakes would be charged again. She saw herself just riding, maybe east, riding forever into whatever country that was, deserts like you saw on television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the road down from Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn’t any place out on a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light, in all the fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to anything, not even a place to sit down. A bike wouldn’t get her anywhere out there.

Or she could go hack to Skinner’s. Go up there and see– No. She shut that down, hard.

The empty rose out of the rain-rattled shadows like a gas, and she held her breath, not to breathe it in.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them. Took a mother’s leaving for you to know she’d ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everything, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil she had to drop into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up. Or Lowell. When she’d had Lowell—if she could say she ever had, and she guessed she hadn’t, really—but while he’d been there, anyway, he’d been a little like that– “Chev? That you?”

And there he was. Lowell. Sitting up cross-legged on top of a rusty cooler said SHRIMP across the front, smoking a cigarette and watching rain run off the shrimp man’s awning. She hadn’t seen him for three weeks now, and the only thing she could think of was how she really must look like total shit. That skinhead boy they called Codes was sitting up beside him, black hood of a sweatshirt pulled up and his hands hidden in the long sleeves. Codes hadn’t ever liked her.

But Lowell, he was grinning around the glow of that cigarette. “Well” he said, “you gonna say ‘hi’ or what?”

“Hi” Chevette said.