Tessa took the four steps down to the beach, and Chevette heard the sand squeak under her shoes. It was that quiet. She shivered. Tessa crouched, checking under the deck. Where was he?
And they never saw him, not there and not then, as they trudged through the sand, past old Barbara’s deck, where the wide windows were all blanked with quilted foil and sun-faded cardboard. Barbara was an owner from before the Spill, and not often seen. Tessa had tried to cultivate her, wanted her in her documentary, an interstitial community of one, become a hermit in her house, holed up amid sharehouses. Chevette wondered if Barbara was watching them go, past her house and around between it and the next, back to where Tessa’s van waited, almost cubical, its paintwork scoured with windblown sand.
All this more dreamlike somehow with each step she took, and now Tessa was unlocking the van, after checking through the window with a flashlight to see he wasn’t waiting there, and when Chevette climbed
up the passenger side and settled in the creaking seat, blanket laced over ripped plastic with bungee cord, she knew that she ‘was going.
Somewhere.
And that was okay with her. 39 8. THE HOLE DRIFT.
Laney is in drift. That is how he does it. It is a matter, he knows, of letting go. He admits the random. The danger of admitting the random is that the random may admit the Hole. The Hole is that which Laney’s being is constructed around. The Hole is absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information.
Mainly.-lately-information.
Information. This flow. This. . . corrosion.
Drift.
ONCE, before he’d come to Tokyo, Laney woke in the bedroom of his suite in the Chateau.
It was dark, only a shush of tires up from Sunset; muffled drumming of a helicopter, hunting the hills behind.
And the Hole right there, beside him in the lonely queen-size expanse of his bed.
The Hole, up close and personal. 40 9. SWEEP SECOND pRIGHT pyramids of fruit, beneath buzzing neon. • He watches as the boy drains a second liter of the pulped drink. swallowing the entire contents of the tall plastic cup in an unbroken stream, with no apparent effort.
“You should not drink cold things so quickly.” The boy looks at him. There is nothing between the boy’s gaze and his being: no mask. No personality. He is not, apparently, deaf, because he has understood the suggestion of the cold drink. But there is no evi= dence, as yet, that he is capable of speech. “Do you speak Spanish?” This in the language of Madrid, unspoken for many years. The boy places the empty cup beside the first one and looks at the man There is no fear in him ‘The men who attacked me they were your friends~ Raising an eyebrow Nothing at all ‘How old are yo& Older, the man guesses, than his emotional age. Touches of razored stubble at the corners of his upper lip Brown eyes clear and placid The boy looks at the two empty plastic cups on the worn steel Counter. He looks up at the man. ‘Anoth& You wish to drink another~ The boy nods. The man signals to the Italian behind the counter He turns back ~: to the boy.
Do you have a name?” Nothing Nothing moves in the brown eyes The boy regards him as calmly as might some placid dog. The silver pulping machine chugs briefly amid the stacked fruit Shaved ice whirs into the pulp. The Italian transfers the drink to a plastiC cup and places it before the boy The boy looks at it 41 The man shifts on the creaking metal stool, his long coat draped like resting wings. Beneath his arm, carefully cleaned now, the knife in its magnetic sheath swings free, sleeping. The boy raises the cup, opens his mouth, and pours the thick sludge of ice and fruit pulp down his throat. Defective, the man thinks. Syndromes of the city’s tragic womb. The signal of life distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of fortune. Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao: darkness within darkness. The boy places the empty cup beside the other two. The man straightens his legs, stands, buttoning his coat. The boy reaches out. Two fingers touch the watch the man wears on his left wrist. He opens his mouth as if to speak.