Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we just started running. Cops falling back, and what were they protecting, anyway? Mainly the crowdorders they had, keep people from getting together in the street. They had their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us. Just made it easier. I had this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that link, it was maybe fifteen feet tall. Just kicked my toes in there and started climbing. Climb a fence like that easy, boots got a point. Up, man, I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of razor at the top, but people behind me were pushing up anything; hunks of two-by-four, coats, sleeping-bags. To lay across the wire. And I felt like weightless
Yamazaki felt that he was somehow close, very close, to the heart of the thing.
I jumped. Dont know who jumped first, but I just jumped. Out. Hit pavement. People yelling. Theyd crashed the barriers on the Oakland side, by then. Those were lower. We could see their lights as they ran out on the cantilever. The police copters and these red highway flares some of the people had. They ran toward Treasure. Nobody out there since the Navy people left We ran too. Met up somewhere in the middle and this cheer went up Skinners eyes were unfocused, distant. After that, they were singing, hymns and shit. Just milling around, singing. Crazy. Me and some others, we were stoked. And we could see the cops, too, coming from both ends. Fuck that.
Yamazaki swallowed. And then?
We started climbing. The towers. Rungs they welded on those suckers, see, so painters could get up there. We were climbing. Television had their own copters out by then, Scooter. We were making it to world news and we didnt know it. Guess you dont. Wouldntve give a shit anyway. Just climbing. But that was going out live. Was gonna make it hard for the cops, later. And, man, people were falling off. The man in front of me had black tape wrapped round his shoes, kept the soles on. Tape all wet, coming loose, his feet kept slipping. Right in front of my face. His foot kept coming back off the rung and Id get his heel in my eye, I didnt watch it. Near to the top and both of em come off at once. Skinner fell silent, as if listening to some distant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.
How you learn to climb, up here Skinner said, the first thing is, you dont look down. Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the bridge all the time. This guy, he didnt know that. And those shoes of his. He just went off, backward. Never made a sound. Sort of graceful.
Yamazaki shivered.
But I kept climbing. Rain had quit, light was coming. Stayed.
How did you feel? Yamazaki asked. Skinner blinked. Feel?
What did you do then?
I saw the city.
Yamazaki rode Skinners lift down to where stairs began, its yellow upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant. All around him, now, the rattle of an evenings commerce, and from a darkened doorway came the slap of cards, a womans laughter, voices raised in Spanish. Sunset pink as wine, through sheets of plastic that snapped like sails in a breeze scented with frying foods, woodsmoke, a sweet oily drift of cannabis. Boys in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were painted pebbles.
Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand on a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Skinners story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too iow for the foreign, wishful ear.
We are come not only past the centurys closing, he thought, the millenniums turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.
Modernity was ending.
Here, on the bridge, it long since had.
He would walk toward Oakland now, feeling for the new things strange heart.
11. Pulling tags
Tuesday, she just wasnt on. Couldnt proj. No focus. Bunny Malatesta, the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her ear.
Chev, dont take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or something?
Fuck off, Bunny.
Hey, I just mean youre not your usual ball of fire today. All I mean.
Gimme a tag.
655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.
Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag and back down. The day gone gray after mornings promise.
456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.
Pausing, her hand in the bikes recognition-loop. How come?
Says messengers carvin graffiti in the passenger elevators. Go freight or theyll toss you, be denied access, at which point Allied terminates your employment.
She remembered seeing Ringers emblem carved into the inspection plate in one of 456s passenger elevators. Fucking Ringer. Hed defaced more elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it with.
456 sent her to EC with a carton wider than she was supposed to accept, but that was what racks and bungles were for, and why give the cage-drivers the trade? Bunny buzzed her on her way out and gave her to Beale, the cafeteria on the second floor. She guessed that would be a womans purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she was right. Brown, sort of lizardskin, with a couple of green sprouts stuck in the corners of the bag. Women left their purses, remembered, called up, got the manager to send for a messenger. Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of the others would open them up, go through the contents, find drugs sometimes. She wouldnt do that. She thought about the sunglasses.
She couldnt get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes youd get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.
She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two flyers after the owner checked to see everything was there.
Restaurants supposed to take it to the cops Chevette said. We dont like to be responsible. Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.
298 Alabama Bunny said, as if offering her some pearl of great price. Tone those thighs
Bust her ass out there to get there, then shed pick up and do it. But she couldnt get on top of it, today.
The assholes sunglasses
For tactical reasons the blonde said, we do not currently advocate the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.
Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, days last tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bunnys pit wore something black and stretchy pulled over her face, three triangular holes cut in it. Blue letters at the bottom of the screen read FIONA X-SPOKESPERSON SOUTH ISLAND LIBERATION FRONT.
The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned running-shoes, and stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward memories of some unheated day-care basement in Oregon, winters colorless light slanting in through high dim windows. But now the street door banged open behind her, a pair of muddy size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin DuPree, his cheeks speckled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt, stood grinning at her, hugely.
Happy about something, Sammy Sal?
Allieds best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after hed got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sals bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasnt too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately.