Infrastructure.
The structure. Yeah. So now hes plugged in, to all that juice. Hes a landlord, and he owns these clubs, and has deals in music and vids and things.
Chia leaned over, dragging her bag from beneath the seat in front, putting away the Sandbenders. Do you live there, in Tokyo?
Part of the time.
Do you like it?
Its I well Weird, right? Its not like anyplace. This huge thing happened there, then they fixed it with what was maybe even a huger thing, a bigger change, and everybody goes around pretending it never happened, that nothing happened. But you know what?
What?
Look at a map. A map from before? A lot of its not even where it used to be. Nowhere near. Well, a few things are, the Palace, that expressway, and that big city hall thing in Shinjuku, but a lot of the rest of its like they just made it up. They pushed all the quake-junk into the water, like landfill, and now theyre building that up, too. New islands.
You know, Chia said, Im really sleepy. I think Ill try to go to sleep now.
My names Maryalice. Like its one word.
Mines Chia.
Chia closed her eyes and tried to put her seat back a little more, but that was as far as it could go.
Pretty name, Maryalice said.
Chia thought she could hear the Music Masters DESH behind the sound of the engines, not so much a sound now as a part of her. That whiter shade of something, but she could never quite make it out.
7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires
Shell try to kill herself, Laney said.
Why? Kathy Torrance sipped espresso. A Monday afternoon in the Cage.
Because she knows. She can feel me watching.
Thats impossible, Laney.
She knows.
You arent watching her. Youre examining the data she generates, like the data all our lives generate. She cant know that.
She does.
The white cup clicking down into its saucer. Then how can you know that she does? Youre looking at her phone records, what she chooses to watch and when, the music she accesses. How could you possibly know that shes aware of your attention?
The nodal point, he wanted to say. But didnt.
I think youre working too hard, Laney. Five days off.
No, Id rather
I cant afford to let you burn yourself out. I know the signs, Laney. Recreational leave, full pay, five days.
She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to Slitscans in-house agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a hotel with vast stone spheres ranged across the polished concrete of its glass-walled lobby. Beyond the glass, iguanas regarded the registration staff with an ancient calm, green scales bright against dusty brown branches.
Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. Hed been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.
He asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldnt have wanted. If people asked him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. He didnt try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrances theories about celebrity.
The woman replied that her company produced short-run furniture and accessories, lamps in particular. The actual manufacturing took place at any number of different locations, mainly in Northern California. Cottage industry. One maker might contract to do two hundred granite bases, another to lacquer and distress two hundred steel tubes in a very specific shade of blue. She brought out a notebook and showed him animated sketches. All of the things had a thin, spiky look that made him think of African insects hed seen on the Nature Channel.
Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow. She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She oversaw manufacture, transport to San Francisco, assembly in what once had been a cannery. If the design documents specified something that couldnt be provided, she either found a new supplier or negotiated a compromise in material or workmanship.
Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other people didnt have, she said. Or that other people didnt like? That too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the people who manufactured the components. Best of all, she told him, she liked the feeling of bringing something new into the world, of watching the sketches from Moscow finally become objects on the floor of the former cannery.
Its there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not its good.
Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.
He put his hand over hers.
And touch it, and know whether or not its good.
Just before dawn, the editor of lamps asleep in his bed, he watched the curve of the bay from the suites balcony, the moon a milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.
In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.
Birds were waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.
Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laneys recuperation. He looked rested, she said.
He took to the seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting that another leave might prove permanent. She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.
The nodal point was different now, though he had no language to describe the change. He sifted the countless fragments that had clustered around Alison Shires in his absence, feeling for the source of his earlier conviction. He called up the music shed accessed while hed been in Mexico, playing each song in the order of her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-affirming; shed moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine, whose relentlessly positive product was the musical equivalent of the Good News Channel.
Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her creditprovider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything shed purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathys advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researchers intimacy with the subject could lead to los of perspective. Its often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. Were a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.
The floor of Laneys apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at the deep end, on an inflatable guest bed hed ordered from the Shopping Channel. There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.
He sat on the slippery edge of the inflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartment. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent was paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fairly intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. His reptile fund, Kathy called it.