Careful to correctly calculate the thirty-percent tip, Yamazaki paid the fare and struggled out of the cabs 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 Englands 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.
6. The bridge
Hed first seen it by night, three weeks before. Hed stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and vegetables, their goods spread out on blankets. Hed stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of scavenged neon. Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and hed walked slowly forward, into the neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and hed known that his journey had not been in vain.
In all the world, surely, there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.
He entered it now, Tuesday morning, amid a now-familiar stirthe carts of ice and fish, the clatter of a machine that made tortillasand found his way to a coffee shop whose interior had the texture of an ancient ferry, dark dented varnish over plain heavy wood, as if someone had sawn it, entire, from some tired public vessel. Which was entirely possible, he thought, seating himself at the long counter; toward Oakland, past the haunted island, the wingless carcass of a 747 housed the kitchens of nine Thai restaurants.
The young woman behind the counter wore tattooed bracelets in the form of stylized indigo lizards. He asked for coffee. It arrived in thick heavy porcelain. No two cups here were alike. He took his notebook from his bag, flicked it on, and jotted down a brief description of the cup, of the minute pattern of cracks in its glazed surface, like a white tile mosaic in miniature. Sipping his coffee, he scrolled back to the previous days notes. The man Skinners mind was remarkably like the bridge. Things had accumulated there, around some armature of original purpose, until a point of crisis had been attained and a new program had emerged. But what was that program?
He had asked Skinner to explain the mode of accretion resulting in the current state of the secondary structure. What were the motivations of a given builder, an individual builder? His notebook had recorded the mans rambling, oblique response, transcribing and translating it.
There was this man, fishing. Snagged his tackle. Hauled up a bicycle. All covered in barnacles. Everybody laughed. Took that bike and he built a place to eat. Clam broth, cold cooked mussels, Mexican beer. Hung that bike over the counter. Just three stools in there and he slung his box out about eight feet, used Super Glue and shackles. Covered the walls inside with postcards. Like shingles. Nights, hed curl up behind the counter. Just gone, one morning. Broken shackle, some splinters still stuck to the wall of a barber shop. You could look down, see the water between your toes. See, he slung it out too far.
Yamazaki watched steam rise from his coffee, imagining a bicycle covered in barnacles, itself a Thomasson of considerable potency. Skinner had seemed curious about the term, and the notebook had recorded Yamazakis attempt to explain its origin and the meaning of its current usage.
Thomasson was an American baseball player, very handsome, very powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1981, for a large sum of money. Then it was discovered that he could not hit the ball. The writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated his name to describe certain useless and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously art-like features of the urban landscape. But the term has subsequently taken on other shades of meaning. If you wish, I can access and translate todays definitions in our Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern Terms.
But Skinnergray, unshaven, the whites of his blue eyes yellowed, blotched with broken veins, had merely shrugged. Three of the residents who had previously agreed to be interviewed had cited Skinner as an original, one of the first on the bridge. The location of his room indicated a certain status as well, though Yamazaki wondered how many would have welcomed a chance to build atop one of the cable towers. Before the electric lift had been installed, the climb would have been daunting for anyone. Today, with his bad hip, the old man was in effect an invalid, relying on his neighbors and the girl. They brought him food, water, kept his chemical toilet in operation. The girl, Yamazaki assumed, received shelter in return, though the relationship struck him as deeper somehow, more complex.
But if Skinner was difficult to read because of age, personality, or both, the girl who shared his room was opaque in that ordinary, sullen way Yamazaki associated with young Americans. Though perhaps that was only because he, Yamazaki, was a stranger, Japanese, and one who asked too many questions.
He looked down the counter, taking in the early-morning profiles of the other customers. Americans. The fact that he was actually here, drinking coffee beside these people, still struck a chord of wonder. How extraordinary. He wrote in his notebook, the pen ticking against the screen.
The apartment is in a tall Victorian house, built of wood and very elaborately painted, in a district where the names of streets honor nineteenth-century American politicians: Clay, Scott, Pierce, Jackson. This morning, Tuesday, leaving the apartment, I noticed, on the side of the topmost newel, indications of a vanished hinge. I suspect that this must once have supported an infant-gate. Going along Scott in search of a cab, I came upon a sodden postcard, face up on the sidewalk. The narrow features of the martyr Shapely, the AIDS saint, blistered with rain. Very melancholy.
They shouldnt oughta said that. About Godzilla, I mean.
Yamazaki found himself blinking up at the earnest face of the girl behind the counter.
Im sorry?
They shouldnt oughta said that. About Godzilla. They shouldnt oughta laughed. We had our earthquakes here, you didnt laugh at us.
7. See you do okay
Hernandez followed Rydell into the kitchen of the house in Mar Vista. He wore a sleeveless powder-blue jumpsuit and a pair of those creepy German shower-sandals, the kind with about a thousand little nubs to massage the soles of your feet. Rydell had never seen him out of uniform before and it was kind of a shock. He had these big old tattoos on his upper arms; roman numerals; gang stuff. His feet were brown and compact and sort of bearlike.