My grandmother Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China, was Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit boy. Army man. Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didnt stick around. My daddy, his son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.
Uh-huh Rydell said, starting the big Ford and checking out the transmission. Saigon was where rich people went on vacation.
Four-wheel drive. Ceramic armor. Goodyear Streetsweepers youd need a serious gun to puncture. There was a cardboard air-freshener, shaped like a pine-tree, hanging in front of the heater-vent.
Now the Lucius part, well, I couldnt tell you.
Mr. Warbaby Rydell said, looking back over his shoulder, where you want me to drive YOU to?
A modem-bleep from the dash.
Freddie, in the plush bucket beside Rydell, whistled. Motherfuck he said, thats nasty.
Rydell swung back to watch as the fax emerged: a fat man, naked on sheets solid with blood. Pools of it, where the brilliance of the photographers strobes lay frozen like faint mirages of the sun.
Whats that under his chin? Rydell asked.
Cuban necktie Freddie said.
No, man Rydells voice up an octave, what is that?
Mans tongue Freddie said, tearing the image from the slit and passing it back to Warbaby.
Rydell heard the fax rattle in his hand.
These people Warbaby said. Terrible.
Yamazaki sat on a low wooden stool, watching Skinner shave. Skinner sat on the edge of his bed, scraping his face pink with a disposable razor, rinsing the blade in a dented aluminum basin that he cradled between his thighs.
The razor is old Yamazaki said. You do not throw it away?
Skinner looked at him, over the plastic razor. Thing is, Scooter, they just dont get any duller, after a while. He lathered and shaved his upper lip, then paused. Yamazaki had been Kawasaki for the first several visits. Now he was Scooter. The pale old eyes regarded him neutrally, hooded under reddish lids. Yamazaki sensed Skinners inward laughter.
I make you laugh?
Not today Skinner said, dropping the razor into the basin of water, suds and gray whiskers recoiling in a display of surface tension. Not like the other day, watching you chase those turds around.
Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinners neighborhood. Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as hed tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next. The hoses swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner had explained, a mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that carried it into the municipal system.
10. The modern dance
Hed made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridges program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinners story of the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key to the bridges existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his physical survey of secondary construction in order to spend as much time as possible in the old mans company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he would send the days accumulation of material to Osaka Universitys Department of Sociology.
Today, climbing to the lift that would carry him to Skinners room, he had met the girl on her way to work, descending, her shoulder through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.
Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminousin effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girls bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
He found her attractive, Skinners girl, in an odd, foreign way, with her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark hair.
Dreamin, Scooter? Skinner set the basin aside, his hands trembling slightly, and settled his shoulders against musty-looking pillows. The white-painted plywood wall creaked faintly.
No, Skinner-san. But you promised you would tell me about the first night, when you decided to take the bridge His tone was mild, his words deliberately chosen to irritate, to spur his subject to speech. He activated the notebooks recording function.
We didnt decide anything. I told you that
But somehow it happened.
Shit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, thats over.
But you have said that the people were ready.
But not for anything. Thats what you cant seem to get, can you? Like the bridge was here, but Im not saying it was waiting. See the difference?
I think
You think shit. The notebook sometimes had trouble with Skinners idioms. In addition, he tended to slur. An expert system in Osaka had suggested he might have sustained a degree of neural damage, perhaps as the result of using street drugs, or of one or more minor strokes. But Yamazaki believed Skinner had simply been too long in proximity to whatever strange attractor had permitted the bridge to become what it had become. Nobody Skinner said, speaking slowly and deliberately at first, as if for emphasis, was using this bridge for anything. After the Little Grande came through, understand?
Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Skinners translated speech scroll down the notebook.
Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tunnel on Treasure caved in. Always been unstable there First they were gonna rebuild, they said, bottom up, but they flat-out didnt have the money. So they put chain link, razor-wire, concrete up at both ends. Then the Germans came in, maybe two years later, sold em on nanomech, how to build the new tunnel. Be cheap, carry cars and a mag-lev. And nobody believed how fast they could do it, once they got it legislated past the Greens. Sure, those Green biotech lobbies, they made em actually grow the sections out in Nevada. Like pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled em out here under bulk-lifters and sank em in the Bay. Hooked em up. Little tiny machines crawling around in there, hard as diamonds; tied it all together tight, and bam, theres your tunnel. Bridge just sat there.
Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to lose the thread, as he so often had beforeoften, Yamazaki suspected, deliberately.
This one woman, she kept saying plant the whole thing with ivy, Virginia creeper Somebody else, they said tear it down before another quake did it for em. But there it was. In the cities, lot of people, no place to go. Cardboard towns in the park, if you were lucky, and theyd brought those drip-pipes down from Portland, put em around the buildings. Leaks enough water on the ground, you dont want to lay there. Thats a mean town, Portland. Invented that there He coughed. But that one night, people just came. All kinds of stories, after, how it happened. Pissing down rain, too. No bodys idea of riot weather.
Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.