All Tomorrows Parties
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Next page This is a task (he thinks of it as a function) requiring emptiness. He sits facing a nineteenth-century reproduction of a seventeenth-century refectory table. Six inches in from its nearest edge, two triangular sockets have been laser-cut into the walnut at precise angles. Into these, he has inserted a pair of nine-inch-long rods of graphite-gray ceramic, triangular in cross section, forming an acute angle. These hones fit the deep, laser-cut recesses perfectly, allowing for no movement whatever. The knife lies before him on the table, its blade between the ceramic rods. When it is time, he takes it in his left hand and places the base of the blade against the left hone. He draws it down, a single, 'smooth, sure stroke, pulling it toward him as he does. He is listening for any indication of imperfection, although this would only be likely if he had struck bone, and it has been many years since the knife struck bone. Nothing. He exhales, inhales, places the blade against the right hone. The telephone rings. He exhales. Places the knife on the table again, its blade between the hones. "Yes?" The voice, emerging from several concealed speakers, is a voice he knows well, although it has been nearly a decade since he has shared physical space with the speaker. He knows that the words he hears come in from a tiny, grotesquely expensive piece of dedicated real estate somewhere in the planet's swarm of satellites. It is a direct transmis 97 sion, and nothing to do with the amorphous cloud of ordinary human communication. "I saw what you did on the bridge last night," the voice says. The man says nothing. He is wearing a shirt cut from very fine gray cotton flannel, its collar buttoned but tieless, French cuffs secured with plain round links of sandblasted platinum. He places his hands on his thighs and waits. "They think you're mad," says the voice. "Who do you employ to tell you these things?" "Children," the voice says. "Hard and bright. The best I can find." "Why do you bother?" "I like to know." "You like to know," the man says, adjusting the crease along the top of his left trouser leg, "but why?" "Because you interest me." "Do you fear me?" the man asks. "No," the voice says, "I don't believe I do." The man is silent. "Why did you kill them?" the voice asks. "They died," the man says. "But why were you there?" "I wished to see the bridge." - "They think you went there knowing you'd attract someone, someone who'd attack you. Someone to kill." "No," says the man, a note of disappointment in his voice, "they died." "But you were the agent." The man shrugs. His lips purse. Then: "Things happen." "'Shit happens,' we used to say. Is that it?" "I am unfamiliar with that expression," the man says. "It's been a long time since I've asked for your help." "That is the result of maturation, I would think," the man says. "You are less inclined now to move counter to the momentum of things." 98 A Now the voice falls silent. The silence lengthens. "You taught me that," it says finally. When he is positive that the conversation has ended, the man picks up the knife and places the base of its blade against the top of the right hone. He draws it, smoothly, down and back. 99 24, TWO LIGHTS ON BEHIND THEY found a dark place that felt as though it hung out beyond where the bridge's handrails would've been. Not a very deep space, but long, the bar along the bridge side and the opposite all mismatched windows, looking south, past the piers, to China Basin. The panes were filthy, patched into their mulhions with yellowing translucent gobs of silicone. Creedmore in the meantime had become startlingly lucid, reaiy positively cordial, introducing his companion, the fleshy man, as Randall James Branch Cabell Shoats, from Mobile, Alabama. Shoats was a session guitarist, Creedmore said, in Nashville and elsewhere. "Pleased to meet you," said Rydell. Shoats'grip was cool and dry arid very soft but studded with concise, rock-hard calluses, so that his hand felt to Rydell like a kid glove set with rough garnets. '"Any friend of Buell's," Shoats said, with no apparent irony. Rydell looked at Creedmore and wondered what trough or plateau of brain chemistry the man was currently traversing and how long it would be until he decided to alter it. "I have to thank you for what you did back there, Buell," Rydell said, because it was true. It was also true that Rydell wasn't sure you could say Creedmore had done it so much as been it, but the way things had worked out, it looked as though Creedmore and Shoats had happened along at exactly the right time, although Rydell's own Lucky Dragon experience suggested to him that it was far from over. "Sons of bitches," Creedmore said, as if commenting generally on the texture of things. Rydell ordered a round of beer. "Listen, Buell," Rydell said, "it's possible they'll come looking for us, 'cause of what happened." "Why the fuck? We're here, them sons of bitches back there." "Well, Buell," Rydell said, pretending to himself he was having to explain this to a stubborn and willfully obtuse six-year-old, "I'd just picked up this package here, before we had us our little argument, and then you poked the security man in the gut. He won't be too happy about ~1~WILLIAMGI~O~ ' it, and chances are he'll recall that I was carrying this package. Big GhobEx logo here see? So he can look in the GIobEx records and get video of me, voiceprint, whatever, and give it to the police." The police? Sumbitch wants to make trouble we give it to im ~, right?" "No," said Rydelh, "that won't help." "Well, then," said Creedmore, resting his hand on RydeIl's shoulder, ~" "we'll come see you till you're out." "Well, no, Buell," Rydell said, shrugging off the hand. "I don't think he'll bother much about the police. More he'll want to find out who we work for and if he could sue us and win. "Sue you?" " Us. ~ "Huh," said Creedmore, absorbing this. "You in an ugly place." "Maybe not," said Rydell. "Matter of witnesses." "I hear you," said Randy Shoats, "but I'd have to talk to my label, see what the lawyers say." "Your label," said Rydell. "That's right." Their beer arrived, brown long necks. Rydell took a sip of his. "Is Creedmore on your label?" "No," said Randy Shoats. Creedmore looked from Shoats to Rydell, back to Shoats. "All I did was poke him one, Randy. I didn't know it had anything to do with our - - deal." "It doesn't," said Shoats, "long as you're able to go into the studio arid record." "Goddamn, Rydehl," said Creedmore, "I don't need you comin' in here and fucking things up this way." Rydelh, who was fumbling under the table with his duffel, getting the fanny pack out and opening it, looked at Creedmore but didn't say anything. He felt the Kraton grips of the ceramic switchblade. "You boys excuse me," Rydell said, "I've gotta find the can." He stood up, with the ClobEx box under his arm and the knife in his pocket and went to ask - - the waitress where the Men's was. ~A~ALL TOMORROW S PARTIES 101 For the second time that day, he found himself seated in hut not using a toilet stall, this one considerably more odorous than the last. The plumbing out here was as makeshift as any he'd seen, with bundles of scummy-looking transparent tubing snaking everywhere, and NoCal NOT POTABLE stickers peeling off above the sink taps. He took the knife out of his pocket and pressed the button, watching the black blade swing out and lock. Then he pressed it again, unlocking the blade, closed it, and opened it again. What was it about switchblades, he wondered, that made you do that? He figured that that was a big part of what made people want them in the first place, something psychological but dumb, monkey-brained.Actually they were kind of pointless, he thought, except in terms of simple convenience. Kids liked them because they looked dramatic, but if somebody saw you open one, then they knew you had a knife, and they'd either run or kick your ass or shoot you, depending on how they felt about it and how they happened to be armed. He supposed there could be very specific situations in which you could just click one open and stick somebody with it, but he didn't think they'd be too frequent. He had the GlobEx box across his lap. Gingerly, remembering how he'd cut himself back in LA, he used the tip of the blade to slit the gray tape. It went through the stuff like a wire through butter. When he got it to the point where he thought he'd be able to open it, he cautiously folded the knife and put it away. Then he lifted the lid. At first he thought he was looking at a thermos bottle, one of those expensive brushed-stainless numbers, but as he lifted it out, the heft of it and the general fineness of manufacture told him it was something else. He turned the thing over, finding an inset rectangular section with a cluster of micro-sockets, but nothing else except a slightly scuffed blue sticker that said FAMOUS ASPECT. He shook it. it neither sloshed nor rattled. Felt solid, and there was no visible lid or other way to open it. He wondered about something like that going through customs, how the GlobEx brokers could explain what it was, whatever that was, and not something full of some kind of contraband. He could think of a dozen 102 kinds of contraband you could stick in something this size and do pretty well if you got it here from Tokyo. Maybe it did contain drugs, he thought, or something else, and he was being set up. Maybe they'd kick the stall's door in any second and handcuff him for trafficking in proscnbed fetal tissue or something He sat there. Nothing happened. He lay the thing across his lap and searched through the fitted foam packing for any message, any clue, something that might explain what this was. But there was nothing, so he put the thing back in its box, exited the stall, washed his hands in non-potable bridge water, and left, intending to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when he'd picked up his bag, which he'd left them minding. Now he saw that the woman, that Maryahice, the one from breakfast, had joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar somewhere, a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a long - - crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars. Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his wet-look streaked-blonde hair gleaming in the bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look there, an exposed hunger, that made him feel funny, like he was seeing Creedmore want something through the wall of shit he kept up around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very human, and that somehow made him even less attractive. Now Shoats, absently, produced what looked like the top of an old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to play, using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out. The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had ALl. TOMORROW'S PARTIES gone absolutely silent under the scraping, looping expressions of Shoats' guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like. And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby. How the red light was his mind. 104 25 SUIT HAVING abandoned sleep, Laney, neither a smoker nor a drinker, has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown glass bottles of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still-popular Japanese remedy that consists of alcohol caffeine aspinn and liquid nicotine He knows somehow (somehow now he knows those things he needs to know) that this, along with periodic belts of a blue hypnotic cough syrup, is the combination he needs to continue. Heart pounding, eyes wide to incoming data, hands cold and distant, he plunges resolutely on. He no longer leaves the carton, relying both on Yamazaki (who brings medicines he refuses) and on a neighbor in the cardboard city, a - - meticulously groomed madman whom he takes to be an acquaintance of the old man, the builder of models, from whom Laney has leased, or otherwise obtained, this space. Laney doesn't remember the advent of this mad one, whom he thinks of as the Suit, but that is not something he needs to know. The Suit is, evidently, a former salaryman. The Suit wears a suit, the one suit, always. It is black, this suit, and was once a very good suit indeed, and it is evident from its condition that the Suit, in whichever carton he dwells, has a steam iron, lint rollers, surely a needle and thread, and the skill to use them. It is unthinkable, for instance, that this suit's buttons would be anything less than firmly and symmetrically |
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