Virtual Light

14. Loveless

You want another beer, honey?”

The woman behind the bar had an intricate black tracery along either side of her shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural hairline. The tattoo’s style combined Celtic knots and cartoon lightning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some nocturnal animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen times, by a single length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.

“No” he said, “thank you.”

“Don’t wanna get fucked up, or what?” Her tone perfectly cheerful. He looked up from the notebook. She was waiting.

“Yes?”

“You wanna sit here, you gotta buy something.”

“Beer, please.”

“Same?”

“Yes, please.”

She opened a bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put it down on the bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

Skinner has tried repeatedly to convey that there is no agenda here whatever, no underlying structure. Only the bones, the bridge, the Thomasson itself. When the Little Grande came, it was not Godzilla. Indeed, there is no precisely equivalent myth in this place and culture (though this is perhaps not equally true of Los Angeles). The Bomb, so long awaited, is gone. In its place came these plagues, the slowest of cataclysms. But when Godzilla came at last to Tokyo, we were foundering in denial and profound despair. In all truth, we welcomed the most appalling destruction. Sensing, even as we mourned our dead, that we were again presented with the most astonishing of opportunities.

“That’s real nice” the man to his left said, placing his left hand on Yamazaki’s notebook. “That’s gotta be Japanese, it’s so nice.” Yamazaki looked up, smiling uncertainly, into eyes of a most peculiar emptiness. Bright, focused, yet somehow flat.

“From Japan, yes” Yamazaki said. The hand withdrew slowly, caressingly, from his notebook.

“Loveless” the man said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Loveless. My name.”

“Yamazaki.”

The eyes, very pale and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching from beneath still water. “Yeah. Figured it was something like that.” An easy smile, pointed with archaic gold.

“Yes? Like?”

“Something Japanese. Something ’zaki, something ’zuki. Some shit like that.” The smile growing somehow sharper. “Drink up your Corona there, Mr. Yamazuki.” The stranger’s hand, closing hard around his wrist. “Gettin’ warm, huh?”