But now, Arleigh was explaining, as they climbed the first of those eleven flights of stairs, it was very definitely a commercial operation, the damaged building owing its continued survival to the unlicensed penthouse club that was its sole occupant. If in fact it continued to be unlicensed, and she had her doubts about that. There isnt a lot of slack here, she said, climbing, not for things like that. Everybody knows the Western Worlds here. I think theres a very quiet agreement, somewhere, to allow them to operate the place as though it were still unlicensed. Because thats what people want to pay for.
Who owns the building? Laney asked, watching Blackwell float up the stairs in front of them, his arms, in the matte black sleeves of the drovers coat, like sides of beef dressed for a funeral. The stairwell was lit with irregular loops of faintly bioluminescent cable.
Rumor has it, one of the two groups who cant quite agree on who owns our hotel.
Mafia?
Local equivalent, but only very approximately equivalent. Real estate was baroque, here, before the quake; now its more like occult.
Laney, glancing down as they passed one of the glowing loops, noticed, on the treads of the stairs, hardened trickles of something that resembled greenish amber. Theres stuff on the stairs, he said.
Urine, Arleigh said.
Urine?
Solidified, biologically neutral urine.
Laney took the next few steps in silence. His calves were starting to ache. Urine?
The plumbing didnt work, after the quake, she said. They couldnt use the toilets. People just started going, down the stairs. Pretty horrible, by all accounts, although some people actually get nostalgic about it.
Its solid?
Theres a product here, a powder, looks like instant soup. Some kind of enzyme. They sell it mainly to mothers with young kids. The kid has to pee, you cant get them to a toilet in time, they pee in a paper cup, an empty juice box. You drop in the contents of a handy, purse-sized sachet of this stuff, zap, its a solid. Neutral, odorless, completely hygienic. Pop it in the trash, its landfill.
They passed another loop of light and Laney saw miniature stalactites suspended from the edges of a step. They used that stuff
Lots of it. Constantly. Eventually they had to start sawing off the build-up
They still ?
Of course not. But they kept the Grotto. Another flight. Another loop of ghostly undersea light. What did they do about the solids? he asked.
Id rather not know.
Winded, his ankles sore, Laney emerged from the Grotto. Into a black-walled and indeterminate space defined by blue light and the uprights of gilded girders. After chemically frozen frescoes of piss, the Western World disappointed. A gutted office block dressed with mismatched couches and nondescript bars. Something looming in the middle foreground. He blinked. A tank. American, he thought, and old.
How did they get that up here? he asked Arleigh, who was passing her black coat to someone. And why hadnt the floor collapsed?
Its resin, she said. Membrane sculpture. Stereo lithography. Otaku thing: they bring them in in sections and glue them together.
Blackwell had given up his drovers coat, exposing a garment that resembled a suit jacket but seemed to have been woven from slightly tarnished aluminum. Whatever this fabric was, there was enough of it there for a double bedspread. He moved forward, through the maze of couches and low tables, with that same effortless determination, Laney and Arleigh drawn along in his wake.
Thats a Sherman tank, Laney said, remembering a CD-ROM from Gainesville, one about the history of armored vehicles. Arleigh didnt seem to have heard him. But then shed probably never played with CD-ROMs, either. Time in a Federal Orphanage had a way of acquainting you with dead media platforms.
If Arleigh were right, and the Western World were being kept on as a kind of tourist attraction, Laney wondered what the crowd would have been like in the early days, when the sidewalks below were buried in six feet of broken glass.
These people on the couches, now, hunched over the low tables that supported their drinks, seemed unlike any crowd hed seen so far in Tokyo. There was a definite edged-out quality there, and prolonged eye-contact might have been interesting in some cases, dangerous in others. Distinct impression that the rooms combined mass of human nervous tissue would have been found to be freighted with the odd few colorants. Or else these people were somehow preselected for a certain combination of facial immobility and intensity of glance?
Laney, Blackwell said, dropping a hand on Laneys shoulder and twirling him into the gaze of a pair of long green eyes, this is Rez. Rez, Colin Laney. Hes working with Arleigh.
Welcome to the Western World, smiling, and then the eyes slid past him to Arleigh. Evenin, Miz MacCrae.
Laney noticed something then that he knew from his encounters with celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between image and reality, between the mediated face and the face there in front of you. Hed noticed how it always seemed to speed up, that alternation, until the two somehow merged, the resulting composite becoming your new idea of the person. (Someone at Slitscan had told him that it had been clinically proven that celebrity-recognition was handled by one particular area in the brain, but hed never been sure whether or not they were joking.)
Those had been tame celebrities, the ones Kathy had already had her way with. In the building (but never the Cage) to have various aspects of their public lives scripted, per whatever agreements were already in place. But Rez wasnt tame, and was a much bigger deal in his own way, although Laney had only been aware of his later career because Kathy had hated him so.
Rez had his arm around Arleigh now, gesturing with the other into the relative darkness beyond the Sherman tank, saying something Laney couldnt hear.
Mr. Laney, good evening. It was Yamazaki, in a green plaid sportscoat that sat oddly on his narrow shoulders. He blinked rapidly,
Yamazaki.
You have met Rez, yes? Good, very good. A table is prepared, to dine. Yamazaki put two fingers inside the oversized, buttoned collar of his cheap-looking white dress shirt and tugged, as though it were far too tight. I understand initial attempts to identify nodal points did not meet with success. He swallowed.
I cant pull a personal fix out of something textured like corporate data. Hes just not there.
Rez was moving in the direction of whatever lay beyond the tank.
Come, Yamazaki said, then lowered his voice. Something extraordinary. She is here. She dines with Rez. Rei Toei.
The idoru.
24. Hotel Di
In this tiny cab now with Masahiko and Gomi Boy, Masahiko up front, on what shouldve been the drivers side, Gomi Boy beside her in the back. Gomi Boy had so many pockets in his fatigue pants, and so many things in them, that he had trouble getting comfortable. Chia had never been in a car this small, let alone a cab. Masahikos knees were folded up, almost against his chest. The driver had white cotton gloves and a hat like the hats cab drivers wore in 1940s movies. There were little covers made of starched white lace fixed to all the headrests with special clips.
She guessed it was such a small cab because Gomi Boy was going to be paying, cash money, and he made it clear he didnt have a lot of that.
Somehow they had ascended out of the rain into this crazy, impressive, but old-fashioned-looking multilevel expressway, its steel bones ragged with bandages of Kevlar, and were whipping past the middle floors of tall buildingsmaybe that Shinjuku again, because there went that Tin Toy Building, she thought, glimpsed through a gap, but far away and from another directionand here, gone so fast she was never sure shed seen him, through one window like all the rest, was a naked man, crosslegged on an office desk, his mouth open as wide as possible, as if in a silent scream.