Virtual Light

34. Punching out of paradise

Chevette let the old lady talk. She could just sort of tune her out, the way she used to do with her own mother, sometimes. She wondered what it was Rydell and Sublett were so worked up about. Up to something; whispering in the kitchen.

She watched a fly buzz around the stuff on Mrs. Sublett’s shelves. It looked slow, like maybe the air-conditioning was too much for it.

She wondered if maybe she wasn’t starting to fall for Rydell. Maybe it was just that he’d showered and shaved and put on clean clothes from his stupid-looking suitcase. The clothes were exactly the same as the ones he’d been wearing before. Maybe he never wore anything else. But she had to admit he had a cute butt in those jeans. Sublett’s mother said he looked like a young Tommy Lee Jones. Who was Tommy Lee Jones? Or maybe it was because she had the idea somehow he was going to do something mean to Lowell. She’d thought she was still in love with Lowell, or something anyway, but now she didn’t think so, not at all. If Lowell just hadn’t started doing dancer. She’d thought about how that Loveless had got when she’d dumped all that dancer in his Coke. She’d asked Rydell if that was enough to have killed him, and Rydell had said no. Said it was enough to keep him stone crazy for a while, and when he got back together, he was going to be hurting. Then she’d asked Rydell why Loveless had done that, banging his gun into his crotch that way. Rydell had sort of scratched his head and said he wasn’t sure, but he thought it had something to do with what it did to your nervous system. Said he’d heard it induced priapism, for one thing. She’d asked him what that was. Well, he’d said, it’s when the man is, like, overstimulated. She didn’t know about that, but it had given Lowell these total brickbat boners that just didn’t want to go away. And that would’ve been just fine, or anyway okay, except he got all mean with it, too, so she’d wind up all sore and then he’d be badmouthing her in front of these people he hung out with, like Codes. Anyway, she wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about what Rydell might have in mind for Lowell, no way. What she did worry about was Skinner, whether he was okay, whether he was being taken care of. She was kind of scared to try phoning Fontaine now; every time Rydell made a call out, she worried it might get traced back or something. And it made her sad to think about her bike. She was sure somebody would’ve gotten it by now. She kind of hated to admit it, but that was starting to make her nearly as sad as Sammy getting killed that way. And Rydell had said he thought maybe Nigel had gotten shot, too.

“And then” Sublett’s mother was saying, “Gary Underwood goes through this window. And he falls on one of those fences? Kind with spikes on top.”

“Hey, Mom” Sublett said, “you’re bending Chevette’s ear.”

“Just telling her about Inner Tube” Mrs. Sublett said, from under the washcloth.

“1996” Sublett said. “Well, Rydell and I, we need her for something.” Sublett gestured for her to follow him back into the kitchen.

“I don’t think it’s a real good idea for her to go outside, Berry” he said to Rydell. “Not in the daytime.”

Rydell was sitting at the little plastic table where she’d had breakfast. “Well, you can’t go, Sublett, because of your apostasy. And I don’t want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.”

“Can’t you just call them on the regular phone, Berry?” Sublett sounded unhappy.

“No.” Rydell said, “I can’t. They just don’t like that. He says they’ll at least talk to me if I call them on an eyephone rig.”

“What’s the problem?” Chevette said.

“Sublett’s got a friend here who’s got a pair of eyephones.”

“Buddy” Sublett said.

“Your buddy?” she asked.

“Name’s Buddy” Sublett said, “but that VR, eyephones ‘n’ stuff, it’s against Church law. It’s been revealed to Reverend Fallon that virtual reality’s a medium of Satan, ’cause you don’t watch enough tv after you start doing it…”

“You don’t believe that” Rydell said.

“Neither does Buddy” Sublett said, “but his daddy’ll whip his head around if he finds that VR stuff he’s got under the bed.”

“Just call him up” Rydell said, “tell him what I told you. Two hundred dollars cash, plus the time and charges.”

“People’ll see her” Sublett said, his shy silver gaze bouncing in Chevette’s direction, then back to Rydell.

“What do you mean, ‘see’ me?”

“Well, it’s your haircut” Sublett said. “It’s too unusual for ’em, I can tell you that.”

“Now, Buddy” Rydell said to the boy, “I’m going to give you these two hundred-dollar bills here. Now when’d you say your father’s due back?”

“Not for another two hours” Buddy said, his voice cracking with nervousness. He took the money like it might have something on it. “He’s helping pour a new pad for the fuel cells they’re bringing from Phoenix on the Church’s bulk-lifter.” Buddy kept looking at Chevette. She had on a straw sun-hat that belonged to Sublett’s mother, with a big floppy brim, and a pair of these really strange old-lady sunglasses with lemon-yellow frames and lenses that sort of swooped up at the side. Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didn’t seem to help.

“You’re friends of Joel’s, right?” Buddy had a haircut that wasn’t quite skin, some kind of gadget in his mouth to straighten his teeth, and an Adam’s apple ahout a third the size of his head. She watched it bob up and down. “From L.A.?”

“That’s right” Rydell said.

“I… I wanna g-go there” Buddy said.

“Good” Rydell said. “This is a step in the right direction, you just believe it. Now you wait out there like I said, and tell Chevette here if anybody’s coming.”

Buddy went out of his tiny bedroom, closing the door behind him. It didn’t look to Chevette like anybody Buddy’s age lived there at all. Too neat, with these posters of Jesus and Fallon. She felt sorry for him. It was close and hot and she missed Sublett’s mother’s air-conditioning. She took off that hat.

“Okay” Rydell said, picking up the plastic helmet, “you sit on the bed here and pull the plug if we get interrupted.” Buddy had already hooked up the jack for them. Rydell sat down on the floor and put the helmet on, so she couldn’t see his eyes. Then he pulled on one of those gloves you use to dial with and move stuff around in there.

She watched his index finger, in that glove, peck out something on a pad that wasn’t there. Then she listened to him talking to the telephone company’s computer about getting the time and charges after he was done.

Then his hand came up again. “Here goes” he said, and started punching out this number he said Lowell had given him, his finger coming down on the empty air. When he was done, he made a fist, sort of wiggled it around, then lowered the gloved hand to his lap.

He just sat there for a few seconds, the helmet kind of swiveling around like he was looking at stuff, then it stopped moving.

“Okay” he said, his voice kind of funny, but not to her, “but is there anybody here?”

Chevette felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“Oh” he said, the helmet turning, “Jesus—”

Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls; some were in places that had been movie theaters, some were in old department stores. He’d gone to one once that they’d put into an old bowling alley; made it real long and narrow and the stuff sort of distorted on you if you tried to move it too fast.

There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color.

But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He’d been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if you’d animated it. There’d always be a couple of girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they’d get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.