Virtual Light

24. Song of the central pier

Yamazaki knew that the central pier, the bridge’s center anchorage, had once qualified as one of the world’s largest pinhole cameras. In the structure’s pitch-black interior, light shining in through a single tiny hole had projected a huge image of the underside of the lower deck, the nearest tower, and the surrounding bay. Now the heart of the anchorage housed some uncounted number of the bridge’s more secretive inhabitants, and Skinner had advised him against attempting to go there. “Nothin’ like those Mansons out in the bushes on Treasure, Scooter, but you don’t want to bother ’em anyway. Okay people but they just aren’t looking for anybody to drop in, know what I mean?”

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation. He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande.

Godzilla. Yamazaki shivered, recalling television images of Tokyo’s fall. He had been in Paris, with his parents. Now a new city rose there, its buildings grown, literally, floor by floor.

The candlelight showed him Skinner’s little television, forgotten on the floor. Taking it to the table, he sat on the stool and examined it. There was no visible damage to the screen. It had simply come away from its frame, on a short length of multicolored ribbon. He folded the ribbon into the frame and pressed with his thumbs on either side of the screen. It popped back into place, but would it still function? He bent to examine the tiny controls. ON.

Lime-and-purple diagonals chased themselves across the screen, then faded, revealing some steadycam fragment, the NHK logo displayed in the lower left corner. “—heir-apparent to the Harwood Levine public relations and advertising fortune, departed San Francisco this afternoon after a rumored stay of several days, declining comment on the purpose of his visit.” A long face, horselike yet handsome, above a raincoat’s upturned collar. A large white smile. “Accompanying him” mid-distance shot down an airport corridor, the slender, dark-haired woman wrapped in something luxurious and black, silver gleaming at the heels of her shining boots, “was Maria Paz, the Padanian media personality, daughter of film director Carlo Paz—.” The woman, who looked unhappy, vanished, to be replaced by infrared footage from New Zealand, as Japanese peace-keeping forces in armored vehicles advanced on a rural airport. “—losses attributed to the outlawed South Island Liberation Front, while in Wellington—” Yamazaki attempted to change the channel, but the screen only strobed its lime-and-purple, then framed a portrait of Shapely. A BBC docu-drama. Calm, serious, mildly hypnotic. After two more unsuccessful attempts at locating another channel, Yamazaki let the British voiceover blot out the wind, the groaning of the cables, the creaking of the plywood walls. He focused his attention on the familiar story, its outcome fixed, comforting—if only in its certainty.

James Delmore Shapely had come to the attention of the AIDS industry in the early months of the new century. He was thirty-one years old, a prostitute, and had been HIV-positive for twelve years. At the time of his ‘discovery,’ by Dr. Kim Kutnik of Atlanta, Georgia, Shapely was serving a two hundred and fifty day prison term for soliciting. (His status as HIV-positive, which would automatically have warranted more serious charges, had apparently been ‘glitched.’) Kutnik, a researcher with the Sharman Group, an American subsidiary of Shibata Pharmaceuticals, was sifting prison medical data in search of individuals who had been HIV-positive for a decade or more, were asymptomatic, and had entirely normal (or, as in Shapely’s case, above the norm) T-cell counts.

One of the Sharmar Group’s research initiatives centered around the possibility of isolating mutant strains of HIV. Arguing that viruses obey the laws of natural selection, several Sharman biologists had proposed that the HIV virus, in its then-current genetic format, was excessively lethal. Allowed to range unchecked, argued the Sharman team, a virus demonstrating 100 percent lethality must eventually bring about the extinction of the host organism. (Other Sharman researchers countered by citing the long incubation period as contributing to the suivival of the host population.) As the BBC writers were careful to make clear, the idea of locating nonpathogenic strains of HIV, with a view of overpowering and neutralizing lethal strains, had been put forward almost a decade earlier, though the ‘ethical’ implications of experimentation with human subjects had impeded research. The core observation cf the Sharman researchers dated from this earlier work: The virus wishes to survive, and cannot if it kills its host. The Sharman team, of which Dr. Kutnik was a part, intended to inject HIV-positive patients with blood extracted from individuals they believed to be infected with nonpathogenic strains of the virus. It was possible, they believed, that the non strain would overpower the lethal strain. Kim Kutnik was one of seven researchers given the task of locating HIV-positive individuals who might be harboring a nonpathogenic strain. She elected to begin her search through a sector of data concerned with current inmates of state prisons who were (a) in apparent good health, and (b) had tested HIV-positive at least a decade before. Her initial search turned up sixty-six possibles—among them, J.D. Shapely.

Yamazaki watched as Kutnik, played by a young British actress, recalled, from a patio in Rio, her first meeting with Shapely. “I’d been struck by the fact that his T-cell count that day was over 1,200, and that his responses to the questionnaire seemed to indicated that ‘safe sex,’ as we thought of it then, was, well, not exactly a priority. He was a very open, very outgoing, really a very innocent character, and when I asked him, there in the prison visiting room, about oral sex, he actually blushed. Then he laughed, and said, well, he said he ‘sucked cock like it was going out of style’…” The actress-Kutnik looked as though she were about to blush herself. “Of course” she said, “in those days we didn’t really understand the disease’s exact vectors of infection, because, grotesque as it now seems, there had been no real research into the precise modes of transmission…”

Yamazaki cut the set off. Dr. Kutnik would arrange Shapely’s release from prison as an AIDS research volunteer under Federal law. The Sharman Group’s project would be hindered by fundamentalist Christians objecting to the injection of ‘HIV-tainted’ blood into the systems of terminally ill AIDS patients. As the project foundered, Kutnik would uncover clinical data suggesting that unprotected sex with Shapely had apparently reversed the symptoms of several of her patients. There would be Kutnik’s impassioned resignation, the flight to Brazil with the baffled Shapely, lavish funding against a backdrop of impending civil war, and what could only be described as an extremely pragmatic climate for research.

But it was such a sad story.

Better to sit here by candlelight, elbows on the edge of Skinner’s table, listening for the song of the central pier.

He kept saying he was from Tennessee and he didn’t need this shit. She kept thinking she was going to die, the way he was driving, or anyway those cops would be after them, or the one who shot Sammy. She still didn’t know what had happened, and wasn’t that Nigel who’d plowed into that tight-faced one?

But he’d hung this right off Bryant, so she told him left on Folsom, because if the assholes were coming, she figured she wanted the Haight, best place she knew to get lost, and that was definitely what she intended to do, earliest opportunity. And this Ford was just like the one Mr. Matthews drove, ran the holding facility up in Beaverton. And she’d tried to stab somebody with a screwdriver. She’d never done anything like that in her life before. And she’d wrecked that black guy’s computer, the one with the haircut. And this bracelet on her left wrist, the other half flipping around, open, on three links of chain– He reached over and grabbed the loose cuff. Did something to it without taking his eyes off the street. He let go. Now it was locked shut.

“Why’d you do that?”

“So you don’t snag it on something, wind up cuffed to the door-handle or a street sign—”

“Take it off.”

“No key.”

She rattled it at him. “Take it off.”

“Stick it up the sleeve of your jacket. Those are Beretta cuffs. Real good cuffs.” He sounded like he was sort of happy to have something to talk about, and his driving had evened out. Brown eyes. Not old; twenties, maybe. Cheap clothes like K-Mart stuff, all wet. Light brown hair cut too short but not short enough. She watched a muscle in his jaw work, like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t.