Virtual Light

21. Cognitive Dissidents

Rydell wasn’t too sure about this whole bridge thing, and less sure about what Freddie had had to say about it, in Food Fair and on the way back from North Beach. He kept remembering that documentary he’d seen in Knoxville and he was pretty sure there hadn’t been anything on that about cannibals or cults. He thought that had to be Freddie wanting him to think that, because he, Rydell, was the one who had to go out there and get this girl, Chevette Washington.

And now he was actually out on it, watching people hurry to get their stuff out of the way of the weather, it looked even less like what Freddie had said it was all about. It looked like a carnival, sort of. Or a state fair midway, except it was roofed over, on the upper level, with crazy little shanties, just boxes, and whole house-trailers winched up and glued into the suspension with big gobs of adhesive, like grasshoppers in a spider-web. You could go up and down, between the two original deck levels, through holes they’d cut in the upper deck, all different kinds of stairs patched in under there, plywood and welded steel, and one had an old airline gangway, just sitting there with its tires flat.

Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock.

But none of it done to any plan, not that he could see. Not like a mall, where they plug a business into a slot and wait to see whether it works or not. This place had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been intended for. He passed stalls faced with turquoise Formica, fake brick, fragments of broken tile worked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One place, already shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper slabs of desoldered component-board.

He found himself grinning at it all, and at the people, none of them paying him the least attention, cannibalistic or otherwise. They looked to be as mixed a bunch as their building materials: all ages, races, colors, and all of them rushing ahead of the storm that very definitely was coming now, wind stiffening as he threaded his way past carts and old ladies lugging straw suitcases. A little kid, staggering with his arms wrapped around a big red fire-extinguisher, bumped into his legs. Rydell hadn’t ever seen a little kid with tattoos like that. The boy said something in some other language and then he was gone.

Rydell stopped and got Warbaby’s map out of his jacket pocket. It showed where this girl lived and how to get up there. Right up on the roof of the damned thing, in a little shanty stuck to the top of one of the towers they hung the cables from. Warbaby had beautiful handwriting, really graceful, and he’d drawn this map out in the back of the patriot, and labelled it for Rydell. Stairs here, then you went along this walkway, took some kind of elevator.

Finding that first set of stairs was going to be a bitch, though, because, now that he looked around, he saw lots of narrow little stairways snaking up between stalls and shattered micro-bars, and no pattern to it at all. He guessed they all led up into the same rats-nest, but there was no guarantee they’d all connect up.

Exhaustion hit him, then, and he just wanted to know where and when he was supposed to sleep, and what was all this bullshit about, anyway? What had he let Hernandez get him in for?

Then the rain hit, the wind upping its velocity a couple of notches and the locals diving seriously for cover, leaving Rydell to hunch in the angle between a couple of old-fashioned Japanese vending-machines. The overall structure, if you could call it that, was porous enough to let plenty of rain in, but big enough and clumsy enough to tangle seriously with the wind. The whole thing started creaking and popping and sort of groaning. And the lights started going out.

He saw a burst of white sparks and a wire came down, out of that crazy tangle. Somebody yelled, but the words were pulled away into the wind and he couldn’t make them out. He looked down and saw water rising around his SWAT shoes. Not good, he thought: puddles, wet shoes, alternating current.

There was a fruitstand next to one of the vending-machines, knocked together from scavenged wood like a kid’s fort. But it had a sort of shelf under it, raised up six inches, and it looked dry under there. He hunched himself in, on top of it, with his feet up out of the water. It smelled like overripe tangerines, but it was ninety-percent dry and the vending-machine took most of the wind.

He zipped his jacket as high as it went, balled his fists into the pockets, and thought about a hot bath and a dry bed. He thought about his Futon Mouth futon, down in Mar Vista, and actually felt homesick. Jesus, he thought, be missing those stick-on flowers next.

A canvas awning came down, its wooden braces snapping like toothpicks, spilling maybe twenty gallons of rain. And right then was when he saw her, Chevette Washington, right out in plain sight. Just like he was dreaming. Not twenty feet away. Just standing there.

Rydell had sort of had this girlfriend down in Florida, after his father had moved down there and gotten sick. Her name was Claudia Marsalis and she was from Boston and her mother had her RV in the same park as Rydell’s father, right near Tampa Bay. Rydell was in his first year at the Academy, but you got a couple of breaks and his father knew ways to get a deal on plane tickets.

So Rydell would go down there on breaks and stay with his father and sometimes at night he’d go out and ride around with Claudia Marsalis in her mother’s Lincoln, which Claudia said had been cherry when they brought it down but now the salt was starting to get to it. Evidently up in Boston she’d only ever taken it out on the road in the summer, so the chemicals wouldn’t eat it out. It had these blue-and-white MASS. HERITAGE plates on it because it was a collector’s item. They were the old-fashioned kind, stamped metal, and they didn’t light up from inside.

It was kind of rough, around that part of Tampa, with the street signs all chewed up for target practice or the late-night demonstration of the choke on somebody’s shotgun. There were plenty of shotguns around to be demonstrated, too; a few in the window-rack of every pick-up and 4 X 4, and usually a couple of big old dogs. Claudia used to give Rydell a hard time about that, about these Florida boys in gimme hats, riding around with their guns and dogs. Rydell told her it didn’t have anything to do with him, he was from Knoxville, and people didn’t drive around Knoxville with their guns showing. Or shoot holes in street signs either, not if the Department could help it. But Claudia was one of those people thought everything south of D.C. was all just the same, or maybe she just pretended to to tease him.

But at night it smelled like salt and magnolia and swamp, and they’d drive around in that Lincoln with the windows down and listen to the radio. When it got dark you could watch the lights on ships, and on the big bulk-lifters that went drumming past like the world’s slowest UFOs. They’d maybe get in a little listless boogy in the back seat, sometimes, but Claudia said it just got you too sweaty in Florida and Rydell tended to agree. It was just they were both down there and alone and there wasn’t much else to do.

One night they were listening to a country station out of Georgia and ‘Me And Jesus’ll Whup Your Heathen Ass’ came on, this hardshell Pentecostal Metal thing about abortion and ayatollahs and all the rest of it. Claudia hadn’t ever heard that one before and she about wet her pants, laughing. She just couldn’t believe that song. When she’d gotten hold of herself and wiped the tears out of her eyes, she’d asked Rydell why he wanted to be a policeman anyway? And he’d felt kind of uncomfortable about that, because it was like she thought his going to the Academy was funny, too, as funny as she thought that dumb-ass song was. But also because it wasn’t actually something he’d thought about, much.

The truth was, it probably had a lot to do with how he and his father had always watched Cops in Trouble together, because that show seriously did teach you respect. You got to see what kind of problems the police were flat up against. Not just tooled-up slimeballs high on shit, either, but the slimeballs’ lawyers and the damn courts and everything. But if he told her it was because of a tv show, he knew she’d just laugh at that, too. So he thought about it a while and told her it was because he liked the idea of being in a position to help out people when they were really in trouble. When he’d said that, she just looked at him.

“Berry” she said, “you really mean that, don’t you?”

“Sure” he said, “guess I do.”

“But Berry, when you’re a cop, people are just going to lie to you. People will think of you as the enemy. The only time they’ll want to talk to you is when they’re in trouble.”

Driving, he glanced sideways at her. “How come you know so much about it, then?”

“Because that’s what my father does” she said, end of conversation, and she never did bring it up again.

But he’d thought about that, driving Gunhead for IntenSecure, because that was like being a cop except it wasn’t. The people you were there to help didn’t even give enough of a shit to lie to you, mostly, because they were the ones paying the bill.

And here he was, out on this bridge, crawling out from under a fruitstand to follow this girl that Warbaby and Freddie—who Rydell was coming to decide he didn’t trust worth a rat’s ass—claimed had butchered that German or whatever he was up in that hotel. And stolen these glasses Rydell was supposed to get back, ones like Warbaby’s. But if she’d stolen them before, how come she’d gone back to kill the guy later? But the real question was, what did that have to do with anything, or even with watching Cops in Trouble all those times with his father? And the answer, he guessed, was that he, like anybody else in his position, was just trying to make a living.

Solid streams of rain were coming down cut of various points in all that jackstraw stuff upstairs, splashing on the deck. There was a pink flash, like lightning, off down the bridge. He thought he saw her fling something to the side, but if he stopped to check it out he might lose her. She was moving now, avoiding the waterfalls.

Street-surveillance technique wasn’t something you got much training in, at the Academy, not unless yu looked like such good detective material that they streamlined you right into the Advanced CI courses. But Rydell had gone and bought the textbook anyway. Trouble was, because of that he knew you pretty well needed at least one partner to do it with, and that was assuming you had a radio link and some citizens going about their business to give you a little cover. Doing it this way, how he had to do it now, about the best you could hope for was just to sneak along behind her.

He knew it was her because of that crazy hair, that ponytail stuck up in the back like one of those fat Japanese wrestlers. She wasn’t fat, though. Her legs, sticking out of a big old biker jacket that might’ve been hanging in a barn for a couple of years, looked like she must work out a lot. They were covered with some tight shiny black stuff, like Kevin’s micropore outfits from Just Blow Me, and they went down into some kind of dark boots or high-top shoes.

Paying that much attention to her, and trying to stay out of sight in case she turned around, he managed to walk right under one of those waterfalls. Right down the back of his neck. Just then he heard somebody call to her, “Chev, that you?” and he went down on one knee in a puddle, behind this stack of salvaged lumber, two-by-fours with soggy plaster sticking to them. ID positive.

The waterfall behind him was making too much noise for him to hear what was said then, but he could see them: a young guy with a black leather jacket, a lot newer than hers, and somebody else in something black, with a hood pulled up. They were sitting up on a cooler or something, and the guy with the leather was dragging on a cigarette. Had his hair combed up in sort of a crest; good trick, in that rain. The cigarette arced out and winked off in the wet, and the guy got down from there and seemed to be talking to the girl. The one with the black hood got down, too, moving like a spider. It was a sweatshirt, Rydell saw, with sleeves that hung down six inches past his hands. He looked like a floppy shadow from some old movie Rydell had seen once, where shadows got separated from people and you had to catch them and sew them back on. Probably Sublett could tell him what that was called.

He worked hard on not moving, kneeling there in that puddle, and then they were moving, the two of them on either side of her and the shadow glancing hack to check behind them. He caught a fraction of white face and a pair of hard, careful eyes.

He counted: one, two, three. Then he got up and followed them.

He couldn’t say how far they’d gone before he saw them drop, it looked like, straight out of sight. He wiped rain from his eyes and tried to figure it, but then he saw that they’d gone down a flight of stairs, this one cut into the lower deck, which was the first time he’d seen that. He could hear music as he came up on it, and see this bluish glow. Which proved to be from this skinny little neon sign that said, in blue capital letters: COGNITIVE DISSIDENTS.

He stood there for a second, hearing water sizzle off the sign’s transformer, and then he just took those stairs.

They were plywood, stapled with that sandpapery no-slip stuff, but he almost slipped anyway. By the time he’d gotten halfway to the bottom, he knew it was a bar, because he could smell beer and a couple of different kinds of smoke.

And it was warm, down there. It was like walking into a steam bath. And crowded. Somebody threw a towel at him. It was soaking wet and hit him in the chest, but he grabbed it and rubbed at his hair and face with it, tossed it back in the direction it had come from. Somebody else, a woman by the sound, laughed. He went over to the bar and found an empty space at the end. Fished in his soggy pockets for a couple of fives and clicked them down on the counter. “Beer” he said, and didn’t look up when somebody put one down in front of him and swept the coins out of sight. It was one of those brewed-in-America Japanese brands that people in places like Tampa didn’t drink much. He closed his eyes and drank about half of it at a go. As he opened his eyes and put it down, somebody beside him said “Tumble?”

He looked over and saw this jawless character with little pink glasses and a little pink mouth, thinning sandy hair combed straight back and shining with something more than the damp in the room.

“What?” Rydell said.

“I said ‘tumble.’ ”

“I heard you” Rydell said.

“So? Need the service?”

“Uh, look” Rydell said, “all I need right now’s this beer, okay?”

“Your phone” the pink-mouthed man said. “Or fax. Guaranteed tumble, one month. Thirty days or your next thirty free. Unlimited long, domestic. You need overseas, we can talk overseas. But three hundred for the basic tumble.” All of this coming out in a buzz that reminded Rydell of the kind of voice-chip you got in the cheapest possible type of kid’s toy.

“Wait a sec” Rydell said.

The man blinked a couple of times, behind his pink glasses.

“You talking about doing that thing to a pocket phone, right? Where you don’t have to pay the company?”

The man just looked at him.

“Well, thanks” Rydell said, quickly. “I appreciate it, but I just don’t have any phone on me. If I did, I’d be happy to take you up on it.”

Still looking at him. “Thought I saw you before…” Doubt.

“Naw” Rydell said. “I’m from Knoxville. Just come in out of the rain.” He decided it was time to risk turning around and checking the place out, because the mirrors behind the bar were steamed up solid and running with drops. He swung his shoulder around and saw that Japanese woman, the one he’d seen that time up in the hills over Hollywood, when he’d been cruising with Sublett. She was standing up on a little stage, naked, her long curly hair falling around her to her waist. Rydell heard himself grunt.

“Hey” the man was saying, “hey…”

Rydell shook himself, a weird automatic thing, like a wet dog, but she was still there.

“Hey. Credit.” The drone again. “Got problems? Maybe just wanna see what they’ve got on you? Anybody else, you got the right numbers—”

“Hey” Rydell said, “wait up. That woman up there?”

The pink glasses tilted.

“Who is that?” Rydell asked.

“That’s a hologram” the man said, in a completely different voice, and walked away.

“Damn” said the bartender, behind him. “You just set a record for blowing off Eddie the Shit. Earned yourself a beer, my man.”

The bartender was a black guy with copper beads in his hair. He was grinning at Rydell. “Call him Eddie the Shit cause he ain’t worth one, don’t give another. Hook your phone up to some box doesn’t have a battery, push a few buttons, pass a dead chicken over it, take your money. That’s Eddie.” He uncapped a beer and put it down beside the other one.

Rydell looked back at the Japanese woman. She hadn’t moved. “I just came in out of the rain” he said, all he could think to say.

“Good night for it” the bartender said.

“Say” Rydell said, “that lady up there—”

“That’s Josie’s dancer” the bartender said. “You watch. She’ll dance her in a minute, soon as there’s a song she likes.”

“Josie?”

The bartender pointed. Rydell looked where he was pointing. Saw a very fat woman in a wheelchair, her hair the color and texture of coarse steel wool. She wore brand-new blue denim bib overalls and an XXL white sweatshirt, and both her hands were hidden inside something that sat on her lap like a sn gray plastic muff. Her eyes were closed, face expressionless. He couldn’t have said for sure that she wasn’t asleep.

“Hologram?” The Japanese woman hadn’t moved at all. Rydell was remembering what he’d seen, that night. The horned crown, all silver. Her pubic hair, shaved like an exclamation point. This one didn’t have either of those, but it was her. It was.

“Josie’s always projectin’” the bartender said, like it was something that couldn’t really be helped.

“From that thing on her lap?”

“That’s the interface” the bartender said. “Projector’s, well, there.” He pointed. “Top of that NEC sign.”

Rydell saw a little black gizmo clamped to the top of this old illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old camera, the optical kind. He didn’t know if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these signs, all different brands, and now he recognized a few of the names he decided they were ads for old electronics companies.

He looked at the gizmo, back at the fat woman in the wheelchair, and felt sad. Angry, too. Like he’d lost something. “Not like I knew what I thought it was” he said to himself.

“Fool anybody” said the bartender.

Rydeil thought about somebody sitting out there by that valley road. Waiting for cars. Like he and his friends would lie under the bushes down Jefferson Street and toss cans under people’s tires. Sounded like a hubcap had come off. See them get out and look, shake their heads. So what he’d seen had just been a version of that, somebody playing with an expensive toy.

“Shit” he said, and put his mind to looking for Chevette Washington in all this crowd. He didn’t notice the beer-smell now, or the smoke, more the wet hair and clothes and just bodies. And there she was, her and her two friends, hunched over a little round table in a corner. The sweatshirt’s hood was down now, showing Rydell a white, stubbled head with some kind of bat or bird tattooed off the side, up where it would be hidden if the hair grew in. It was the kind of tattoo somebody had done by hand, not the kind you got done on a computer-driven table. Baldhead had a hard little face, in profile, and he was wasn’t talking. Chevette Washington was telling something to the other one and not looking happy.

Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like there were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, failing back, riding in again, and women’s voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices dopplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren’t drums at all.

The Japanese woman—the hologram, Rydell reminded himself—raised her arms and began to dance, a sort of looping shuffle, timed not to the tempo of the drums but to the waves of static washing back and forth across the sound, and when Rydell thought to look he saw the fat woman’s eyes were open, her hands moving inside that plastic muff.

Nobody else in the bar was paying it any attention at all, just Rydell and the woman in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there on the bar, watching the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next.

Warbaby’s shopping list went like this: best he got the glasses and the girl, next best was the glasses, just the girl was definitely third, but a must if that was all that was going.

Josie’s music slid out and away for the last time and the hologram’s dance ended. There was some drunken applause from a couple of the tables, Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them.

The terrible thing about it, Rydell thought, was that there Josie was, shoehorned into that chair, and she just wasn’t much good at making that thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the park in Knoxville, who sat there all day strumming an antique National guitar. There he was, blind, had this old guitar, and he just couldn’t chord for shit. Never seemed to get any better at it, either. Didn’t seem fair.

Now some people got up from a table near where Chevette Washington was sitting. Rydell was in there quick, bringing the beer he’d won for getting rid of Eddie the Shit. He still wasn’t close enough to pick out what they were saying, but he could try. He tried to think up ways to maybe start up a conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not that he looked particularly out of place, because he had the impression that most of this crowd weren’t regulars here, just a random sampling, come in out of the rain. But he just didn’t have any idea what this place was about. He couldn’t figure out what ‘Cognitive Dissidents’ meant; it wouldn’t help him figure out what the theme, or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Washington and her guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort of heated.

Her guy, he thought. Something there in her body-language that said Pissed-Off Girlfriend, and something in how hard this boy was studying to show how little any of it bothered him, like maybe she was the Ex. All this abruptly coming to nothing at all as every conversation died and Rydell looked up from his beer to see Lt. Orlovsky, the vampire-looking cop from SFPD Homicide, stepping in from the stairwell in his London Fog, some kind of fedora that looked like it was molded from flesh-colored plastic on his head, and those scary half-frame glasses. Orlovsky stood there, little streams running off the hem of his rain-darkened coat and pooling around his wingtips, while he unbuttoned the coat with one hand. Still had his black flak vest on underneath, and now that hand came up to rest on the smooth, injection-molded, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H & K. Rydell looked for the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn’t see it.

The whole bar was looking at Orlovsky.

Orlovsky looked around the room, over the tops of his glasses, taking his time, giving them all a good dose of Cop Eye. The music, some weird hollow techie stuff that sounded like bombs going off in echo-chambers, started to make a different kind of sense.

Rydell saw Josie the wheelchair woman looking at the Russian with an expression Rydell couldn’t process.

Spotting Chevette Washington in her corner, Orlovsky walked over to her table, still taking his time, making the rest of the room take that same time. His hand still on that gun.

It seemed to Rydell like the Russian just might be about to haul out and shoot her. Sure looked like it, but what kind of cop would do that?

Now Orlovsky stopped in front of their table, just the right distance, too far for them to reach him and far enough to allow room to pull that big gun if he was going to.

The Boyfriend, Rydell was somehow pleased to see, looked fit to shit himself. Baldhead looked like he’d been cast in plastic, just frozen there, hands on the table. Between his hands, Rydell saw a pocket phone.

Orlovsky locked the girl with his full current of Eye-thing, his face lined, gray in this light, unsmiling. He jerked the brim of the plastic fedora, just this precise little fraction, and said “Get up.”

Rydell looked at her and saw her trembling. There was never any question the Russian meant her and not her friends—Boyfriend looking like he might faint any second and Baldhead playing statue.

Chevette Washington stood up, shaky, the rickety little wooden chair going over behind her.

“Out.” The hat-brim indicated the stairs. The hairy back of Orlovsky’s hand covered the butt of the H & K.

Rydell heard his own knees creak with tension. He was leaning forward, gripping the edges of the table. He could feel old dried pads of gum under there.

The lights went out.

Much later, trying to explain to Sublett what it had been like when Josie whipped her hologram on Orlovsky, Rydell said it looked sort of like the special effect at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, that part where those angels or whatever they were came swirling out of that box and got all over those Nazis.

But it had all been happening at once, for Rydell. When the lights went, they all went, all those signs on the wall, everything, and Rydell just tossed that table sideways, without even thinking about it, and Went For where she’d been standing. And this ball of light had shot down, expanding, from a point on the wall that must’ve marked the upper edge of that NEC sign. It was the color of the hologram’s skin, kind of honey and ivory, all marbled through with the dark of her hair and eyes, like a fast-forward of a satellite storm-system. All around that Russian, a three-foot sphere around his head and shoulders, and as it spun, her eyes and mouth, open in some silent scream, blinked by, all magnified. Each eye, for a fraction of a second, the size of the ball itself, and the white teeth big, too, each one long as a man’s hand.

Orlovsky swatted at it, and that kept him, for some very little while, from getting his gun out.

But it also gave off enough light to let Rydell see he was grabbing the girl and not Boyfriend. Just sort of picking her up, forgetting everything he’d ever been taught about comealongs and restraints, and running, best he could, for the stairs.

Orlovsky yelled something, but it must’ve been in Russian.

His uncle, the one who’d gone off to Africa in the Army, used to say, if he liked how a woman’s ass moved when she walked, that it looked like two baby bobcats in a croker sack. And that was the expression that popped into Rydell’s mind as he ran up those stairs with Chevette Washington held out in front of him like a big bunch of groceries. But it didn’t have anything to do with sexy.

He was just lucky she didn’t get an eye or break any of his ribs.