Virtual Light

5. Hay problemas

With the striped duvet drawn up to his chin, he begins to sort through the previous evening. There are gaps. Overindulgence. He disapproves of overindulgence. Harwood’s party. The voice on the phone, instructing him to attend. He’d already had several drinks. He sees a young girl’s face. Anger, contempt. Her short dark hair twisted up in spikes.

His eyes feel as if they are too large for their sockets. When he rubs them, bright sick flashes of light surround him. The cold weight of the water moves in his stomach.

He remembers sitting at the broad mahogany desk, drinking. Before the call, before the party. He remembers the two cases open, in front of him, identical. He keeps her in one. The other is for that with which he has been entrusted. Expensive, but then he has no doubt that the information it contains is very valuable. He folds the thing’s graphite earpieces and snaps the case shut. Then he touches the case that holds all her mystery, the white house on the hillside, the release she offers. He puts the cases in the pockets of his jacket– But now he tenses, beneath the duvet, his stomach twisted with a surge of anxiety.

He wore the jacket to that party, much of which he cannot remember.

Ignoring the pounding of his head, he claws his way out of the bed and finds the jacket crumpled on the floor beside a chair.

His heart is pounding.

Here. That which he must deliver. Zipped into the inner pocket. But the outer pockets are empty.

She is gone. he roots through his other clothing. On his hands and knees, a pulsing agony behind his eyes, he peers under the chair. Gone.

But she, at least, can be replaced, he reminds himself, still on his knees, the jacket in his hands. He will find a dealer in that sort of software. Recently, he now admits, he had started to suspect that she was losing resolution.

Thinking this, he is watching his hands unzip the inner pocket, drawing out the case that contains his charge, their property, that which must be delivered. He opens it.

The scuffed black plastic frames, the label on the cassette worn and unreadable, the yellowed translucence of the audio-beads.

He hears a thin high sound emerge from the back of his throat. Very much as he must have done, years ago, when the first shell arrived.

Careful to correctly calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki paid the fare and struggled out of the cab’s spavined rear seat. The driver, who knew that all Japanese were wealthy, sullenly counted the torn, filthy bills, then tossed the three five-dollar coins into a cracked Nissan County thermos-mug taped to the faded dashboard. Yamazaki, who was not wealthy, shouldered his bag, turned, and walked toward the bridge. As ever, it stirred his heart to see it there, morning light aslant through all the intricacy of its secondary construction.

The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.

Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy.