Virtual Light

30. Carnival of souls

But you built this room?”

“You ever watch a real carpenter work, Scooter?”

“Once, yes” Yamazaki said, remembering a demonstration at a festival, the black blades flying, the smell of cut cedar. He remembered the look of the lumber, creamy and flawless. A tea-house was being erected, to stand for the duration of the festival. “Wood is very scarce in Tokyo, Skinner-san. You would not see it thrown away, not even small scraps.”

“Not that easy to come by here” Skinner said, rubbing the ball of his thumb with the edge of a chisel. Did he mean in America, San Francisco, on the bridge? “We used to burn our scrap, before we got the power in. City didn’t like that at all. Bad for the air, Scooter. Don’t do that as much, now.”

“This is by consensus?”

“Just common sense…” Skinner put the chisel into a greasy canvas case and tucked it carefully away in the green box.

A procession was making its way toward San Francisco, along the upper deck, and Yamazaki instantly regretted having left his notebook in Skinner’s room. This was the first evidence he had seen here of public ritual.

In the narrow, enclosed space, it was impossible to view the procession as anything other than a succession of participants, in their ones and twos, but it was a procession nonetheless, and clearly funereal, perhaps memorial, in its purpose. First came children, seven by his hasty count, one behind the other, in ragged, ash-dusted clothing. Each child wore a mask of painted plaster, clearly intended to represent Shapely. But there was nothing funereal in their progress; several were skipping, delighted with the attention they were receiving.

Yamazaki, on his way to purchase hot soup, had halted between a bookseller’s wagon and a stall hung with caged birds. He felt awkward there, very much out of place, with the unaccustomed shape of the insulated canister under his arm. If this was a funeral, perhaps there was some required gesture, some attitude he might be expected to assume? He glanced at the bookseller, a tall woman in a greasy sheepskin vest, her gray hair bound back into a knot transfixed by two pink plastic chopsticks.

Her stock, which consisted primarily of yellowing paperbacks in various stages of disintegration, each in a clear plastic bag, was stacked before her on her wagon. She had been crying her wares, when she saw the children masked as Shapely; she’d been calling out strange phrases that he supposed were titles: “Valley of the dolls, blood meridian, chainsaw savvy …” Yamazaki, struck by the queer American poetry, had been on the verge of asking after Chainsaw Savvy. Then she’d fallen silent, and he too had seen the children.

But there was nothing in her manner now that indicated the procession required anything more of her than whatever degree of her attention she might choose to afford it. She was automatically counting her stock, he saw, as she watched the children pass, her hands moving over the bagged books.

The keeper of the bird stall, a pale man with a carefully groomed black mustache, was scratching his stomach, his expression mild and blank.

After the children came five dancers in the skeleton-suits of La Noche de Muerte, though Yamazaki saw that several of the masks were only half-masks, micropore respirators molded to resemble the grinning jaws of skulls. These were teenagers, evidently, and shaking to some inner music of plague and chaos. There was a strong erotic undercurrent, a violence, to the black, bone-painted thighs, the white cartoon pelvises daubed on narrow denimed buttocks. As the bonedancers passed, one fixed Yamazaki with a sharp stare, blue adolescent eyes above the black, molded nostrils of the white respirator.

Then two tall figures, black men in an ugly beige face-paint, costumed as surgeons, in pale green gowns and long gloves of scarlet latex. Were they the doctors, predominantly white, who had failed to rescue so many, prior to Shapely’s advent, or did they somehow represent the Brazilian biomedical firms who had so successfully and lucratively overseen Shapely’s transformation, the illiterate prostitute become the splendid source? And after them, the first of the bodies, wrapped and bound in layers of milky plastic, each one tiding a two-wheeled cart of the kind manufactured here to transport baggage or bulk foodstuffs. The carts, temporarily equipped with narrow pallets of plywood, were steered along, front and back, by men and women of no special costume or demeanor, though Yamazaki noted that they looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed to make no eye-contact with the onlookers.

“There’s Nigel” the bookseller said, “and probably built the cart they’re taking him off on.”

“These are the victims of the storm?” Yarnazaki ventured.

“Not Nigel” the woman said, narrowing her eyes as she saw that he was a stranger. “Not with those holes in him…”

Seven in all, each to its cart, and then a man and a woman, in identical paper coveralls, carrying between them a laminated lithograph of Shapely, one of those saccharine portraits, large of eye and hollow of cheek, that invariably left Yamazaki feeling slightly queasy.

But then a small, red, capering figure. A tailless, hornless devil, perhaps, dancing with an enormous gun, an ancient AK-47, its bolt long gone, the curved magazine carved from wood, and all of it dipped, once, into red enamel, worn now by hands, by processions.

And Yamazaki knew, without asking, that the red dancer represented the way of Shapely’s going, like some terrible base stupidity waiting at the core of things.

“Skinner-san?” The notebook ready. “I saw a procession today. Bodies being taken from the bridge. The dead from the Storm.”

“Can’t keep ’em out here. Can’t throw ’em in the water. City sticks on that. We pass ’em over for cremation. Some people, they don’t hold with fire, they bury ’em over on Treasure. Kind of people live out on Treasure, you kind of wonder if that makes much sense.”

“In the procession there were many references to Shapely, to his story.”

Skinner nodded over his little television.

“Children masked as J.D. Shapely, two black men painted as white doctors, Shapely’s portrait…”

Skinner grunted. Then, distantly: “While since I saw one of those.”

“And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.”

“Uh-huh.” Skinner nodded.

Yamazaki activated the notebook’s transcription function.

Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of him in everybody now. Couldn’t see the point at my age and anyway I never held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn’t have plenty of chances. You’re too young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like, watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just romping on us. But slow, slow, slowmotion thing. Those retroviruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old kind, and died of it, how we’d lived in this funny little pocket of time when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn’t going to kill anybody, not even a woman. See, they always had to worry anyway, every time it’s a chance, get knocked up and maybe die in childbirth, die getting rid of it, or anyway your life’s not gonna be the same. But in that pocket, there, there were pills for that, whatnot, shots for the other things, even the ones had killed people all over hell, before. That was a time, Scooter. So here this thing comes along, changes it back. And we’re sliding up on woo, shit’s changing all over, got civil wars in Europe already and this AIDS thing just kicking along. You know they tried to say it was the gays, said it was the CIA, said it was the U.S. Army in some fort in Maryland. Said it was people cornholing green monkeys. I swear to God. You know what it was? People. Just too goddamn many of ’em, Scooter. Flying all the fuck over everywhere and walking around back in there. Bet your ass somebody’s gonna pick up a bug or two. Every place on the damn planet just a couple of hours from any other place. So here’s poor fucking Shapely comes along, he’s got this mutant strain won’t kill you. Won’t do shit to you at all, ’cept it eats the old kind for breakfast. And I don’t buy any of that bullshit he was Jesus, Scooter. Didn’t think Jesus was, either.

“Any coffee left?”

“I will pump stove.”

“Put a little drop of Three-in-One in that hole by the piston-arm, Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.”

She didn’t see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something, coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can’t watch it happening.

Then she got down on her hands and her knees and started crawling. Because she couldn’t just stand there and wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see her black pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was this smell from when he’d shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet burning, too, because she could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and sort of melted.

Now she could hear him yelling, somewhere outside, hoarse and hollow and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR in the world, how they’d sold Hunnis Millbank, now they’d sell Sunflower. If she heard it right.

“Down by the door, here. Driver side.”

It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open.

“He left the keys in here” she said.

“Think he’s gone down there where the Dream Walls franchise used to be.”

“What if he comes back?”