Virtual Light

8. Morning after

She snaked her arm out into the November chill and snagged a sweater off the seat of a paint-caked wooden stool. She pulled the sweater into her bag and twisted into it, tugging it down over her knees. It hung to her knees when she stood up, the neckband so stretched that she had to keep pushing it back up on her shoulder. Skinner didn’t say anything; he hardly ever did, first thing.

She rubbed her eyes, went to the ladder bolted to the wall and climbed the five rungs, undoing the catch on the roof-hatch without bothering to look at it. She came up here most mornings now, started her day with the water and then the city. Unless it was raining, or too foggy, and then it was her turn to pump the ancient Coleman, its red-painted tank like a toy submarine. Skinner did that, on good days, but he stayed in bed a lot when it rained. Said it got to his hip.

She climbed out of the square hole and sat on its edge, dangling her bare legs down into the room. Sun struggling to burn off the silvery gray. On hot days it heated the tar on the roof’s flat rectangle and you could smell it.

Skinner had showed her pictures of the La Brea pits in National Geographic, big sad animals going down forever, down in L.A. a long time ago. That was what tar was, asphalt, not just something they made in a factory somewhere. He liked to know where things came from.

His jacket, the one she always wore, that had come from D. Lewis, Great Portland Street. That was in London. Skinner liked maps. Some of the National Geographics had maps folded into them, and all the countries were big, single blobs of color from one side to the other. And there hadn’t been nearly as many of them. There’d been countries big as anything: Canada, USSR, Brazil. Now there were lots of little ones where those had been. Skinner said America had gone that route without admitting it. Even California had all been one big state, once.

Skinner’s roof was eighteen feet by twelve. Somehow it looked smaller than the room below, even though the walls of the room were packed solid with Skinner’s stuff. Nothing on the roof but a rusty metal wagon, a kid’s toy, with a couple of rolls of faded tarpaper stacked in it.

She looked past three cable-towers to Treasure Island. Smoke rose, there, from a fire on the shore, where the low cantilever, cottoned down in fog, shot off to Oakland. There was a dome-thing, up on the farthest suspension tower, honeycombed into sections like new copper, but Skinner said it was just Mylar, stretched over two-by-twos. They had an plink in that, something that talked to satellites. She thought she’d go and see it one day.

A gray gull slid by, level with her eyes.

The city looked the same as ever, the hills like sleeping animals behind the office towers she knew by their numbers. She ought to be able to see that hotel.

The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.

She couldn’t believe she’d done that, been that stupid. The case she’d pulled out of that dickhead’s pocket was hanging up in Skinner’s jacket, on the iron hook shaped like an elephant’s head. Nothing in it but a pair of sunglasses, expensive-looking but so dark she hadn’t even been able to see through them last night. The security grunts in the lobby had scanned her badges when she’d gone in; as far as they knew, she’d never come back down. Their computer would’ve started looking for her, eventually. If they queried Allied, she’d say she forgot, blew the checkout off, took the service elevator down after she’d pulled her tag at 808. No way had she been at any party, and who’d seen her there anyway? The asshole. And maybe he’d figure she’d done him for his glasses. Maybe he’d felt it. Mayhe he’d remember, when he sobered up.

Skinner yelled there was coffee, but they were out of eggs.

Chevette shoved off the edge of the hole, swung down and in, catching the top rung.

“Want any, you’re gonna get ’em” Skinner said, looking up from the Coleman.

“Save me coffee.” She pulled on a pair of black cotton leggings and got into her trainers without bothering to lace them. She opened the hatch in the floor and climbed through, still worrying about the asshole, his glasses, her job. Down ten steel rungs off the side of an old crane. The cherry-picker basket waiting where she’d left it when she’d gotten back. Her bike cabled to an upright with a couple of Radio Shack screamers for good measure. She climbed into the waist-high yellow plastic basket and hit the switch.

The motor whined and the big-toothed cog on the bottom let her down the slope. Skinner called the cherry-picker his funicular. He hadn’t built it, though; a black guy named Fontaine had built it for him, when Skinner had started to have trouble with the climb. Fontaine lived on the Oakland end, with a couple of women and a lot of children. He took care of a lot of the bridge’s electrical stuff. He’d show up once in a while in a long tweed overcoat, a toolbag in each hand, and he’d grease the thing and check it. And Chevette had a number to call him at if it ever broke down completely, but that hadn’t happened yet.

It shook when it hit the bottom. She climbed out onto the wooden walkway and went along the wall of taut milky plastic, halogen-shadows of plants behind it and the gurgle of hydroponics. Turned the corner and down the stairs to the noise and morning hustle of the bridge. Nigel coming toward her with one of his carts, a new one. Making a delivery.

“Vette” with his big goofy grin. He called her that.

“Seen the egg lady?”

“City side” he said, meaning S.F. always, Oakland being always only ‘Land. “Good one, huh?” with a gesture of builder’s pride for his cart. Chevette saw the hraised aluminum frame, the Taiwanese hubs and rims beefed up with fat new spokes. Nigel did work for some of the other riders at Allied, ones who still rode metal. He hadn’t liked it when Chevette had gone for a paper frame. Now she bent to run her thumb along a specially smooth braise. “Good one” she agreed.

“That Jap shit delaminate on you yet?”

“No way.”

“’S gonna. Bunny down too hard, it’s glass.”

“Come see you when it does.”

Nigel shook his hair at her. The faded wooden fishing-plug that hung from his left ear rattled and spun. “Too late then.” He shoved his cart toward Oakland.

Chevette found the egg lady and bought three, twisted up that way in two big dry blades of grass. Magic. You hated to take it apart, it was so perfect, and you could never get it back together or figure out how she did it. The egg lady took the five-piece and dropped it into the little bag around her scrawny lizard neck. She had no teeth at all, her face a nest of wrinkles that centered into that wet slit of a mouth.

Skinner was sitting at the table when she got back. More like a shelf than a table. He was drinking coffee out of a dented steel thermos-mug. If you just came in and saw him like that, it didn’t strike you right away how old he was; just big, his hands, shoulders, all his bones, big. Gray hair slicked back from his forehead’s lifetime collection of scars, little dents, a couple of black dots like tattoos, where some kind of grit had gotten into a cut.

She undid the eggs, the egg lady’s magic, and put them in a plastic bowl. Skinner heaved himself up from his creaking chair, wincing as he took the weight with his hip. She handed him the bowl and he swung over to the Coleman. The way he scrambled eggs, he didn’t use any butter, just a little water. Said he’d learned it from a cook on a ship. It made good eggs but the pan was hard to clean, and that was Chevette’s job. While he broke the eggs, she went to the jacket off its hook, and took that case out.

You couldn’t tell what it was made of, and that meant expensive. Something dark gray, like the lead in a pencil, thin as the shell of one of those eggs, but you could probably drive a truck over it. Like her bike. She’d figured out how you opened it the night before; finger here, thumb there, it opened. No catch or anything, no spring. No trademark, either; no patent numbers. Inside was like black suede, but it gave like foam under your finger.

Those glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in the poster stuck to Skinner’s wall, black and white. Skinner said the way to put a poster up forever was use condensed milk for the glue. Kind that came in a can. Nothing much came in cans, anymore, but Chevette knew what he meant, and the weird big-faced guy with the black glasses was laminated solid to the white-painted ply of Skinner’s wall.

She pulled them from the black suede, the stuff springing instantly back to a smooth flat surface.

They bothered her. Not just that she’d stolen them, but they weighed too much. Way too heavy for what they were, even with the big earpieces. The frames looked as though they’d been carved from slabs of graphite. Maybe they had, she thought; there was graphite around the paper cores in her bike’s frame, and it was Asahi Engineering.

Rattle of the spatula as Skinner swirled the eggs. She put them on. Black. Solid black.

“Katharine Hepburn” Skinner said.

She pulled them off. “Huh?”

“Big glasses like that.”

She picked up the lighter he kept beside the Coleman, clicked it, held the flame behind one lens. Nothing.

“What’re they for, welding?” He put her share of the eggs in an aluminum mess-tray stamped 1951. Set it down beside a fork and her mug of black coffee.

She put the glasses on the table. “Can’t see through ’em. Just black.” She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, picking up the fork. She ate her eggs. Skinner sat, eating his, looking at her. “Soviet” he said, after a swallow from his thermos-mug.

“Huh?”

“How they made sunglasses in the ol’ Soviet. Had two factories for sunglasses, one of ’em always made ’em like that. Kept right on puttin’ ’em out in the stores, nobody’d buy ’em, buy the ones from the other factory. How the place packed it in.”

“The factory made the black glasses?”

“Soviet Union.”

“They stupid, or what?”

“Not that simple… Where’d you get ’em?”

She looked at her coffee. “Found ’em.” She picked it up and drank.

“You working, today?” He pulled himself up, stuffed the front of his shirt down into his jeans, the rusted buckle on his old leather belt held with twisted paper clips.

“Noon to five.” She picked up the glasses, turning them. They weighed too much for how big they were.

“Gotta get somebody up here, check the fuel cell…”

“Fontaine?”

He didn’t answer. She bedded the glasses in black suede, closed the case, got up, took the dishes to the wash-basin. Looked back at the case on the table.

She’d better toss them, she thought.

Rydell took a CalAir tilt-rotor out of Burbank into Tuesday’s early evening. The guy in San Francisco had paid for it from the other end; said call him Freddie. No seatback fun on CalAir, and the passengers definitely down-scale. Babies crying. Had a window seat. Down there the spread of lights through the faint glaze of some previous passenger’s hair-oil: the Valley. Turquoise voids of a few surviving pools, lit subsurface. A dull ache in his arm.

He closed his eyes. Saw his father at the kitchen sink of his mobile home in Florida, washing out a glass. At that precise moment the death no doubt already growing in him, established fact, some line crossed. Talking about his brother, Rydell’s uncle, three years younger and five years dead, who’d once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps on the bubblepack envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-52, and WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS.

“Is that the Coast Highway, do you think?”

Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him to peer through the film of hair-oil. Like Mrs. Armbruster in fifth grade; older than his father would be now.

“I don’t know” Rydell said. “Might be. All just looks like streets to me. I mean” he added, “I’m not from here.”

She smiled at him, settling back into the grip of the narrow seat. Completely like Mrs. Armbruster. Same weird combination of tweed, oxford-cloth, Santa Fe blanket coat. These old ladies with their bouncy thick-soled shoes.