“Where I am,” the man says to the gray neutral ceiling, “there is no pack.”
“Oh, there’s a pack all right. Bright young things guaranteeing executive outcomes. Brochures. They have brochures. And lines to read between. What were you doing when I called?”
“Dreaming,” the man says.
“I wouldn’t have imagined, somehow, that you dream. Was it a good dream?”
The man considers the perfect blankness of the gray ceiling. Remembered geometry of facial bone threatens to form there. He closes his eyes. “I was dreaming of hell,” he says.
“How was it?”
“An elevator, descending.”
“Christ,” says the voice, “this poetry is unlike you.” Another silence follows.
The man sits up. Feels the smooth, dark polished wood, cool through his black socks. He begins to perform a series of very specific
excercises that involve a minimum of visible movement. There is stiff-ness in his shoulders. At some distance he hears a car go past, tires on wet pavement.
“I’m not very far from you at the moment,” the man says, breaking the silence. “I’m in San Francisco.” Now it is the man’s turn for silence. He continues his exercises, remembering the Cuban beach, decades ago, on which he was first – – – taught this sequence and its variations. His teacher that day the master
of a school of Argentine knife-fighting most authoritatively declared nonexistent by responsible scholars of the martial arts.
“How long has it been,” the voice asks, “since we’ve spoken, faceto-face?”
“Some years,” says the man. 135 “I think I need to see you now. Something extraordinary is on the verge of happening.”
“Really,” says the man, and no one sees his brief and wolfish smile, “are you about to become contented?”
A laugh, beamed down from the secret streets of that subminiature cityscape in geosynchronous orbit. “Not that extraordinary, no. But some very basic state is on the brink of change, and we are near its locus.”
“We? We have no current involvement.”
“Physically Geographically. It’s happening here.”
The man moves into the final sequence of the exercise, remembering flies on the instructor’s face during that initial demonstration.
“Why did you go to the bridge last night?”
“I needed to think,” the man says and stands.
“Nothing drew you there?”
Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost in Market Street. The smell of cigarettes in her hair. Her winter lips chill against his, opening into warmth. “Nothing,” he says, hands closing on nothing.
“It’s time for us to meet,” the voice says.
Hands opening. Releasing nothing. 136 – – 32. LOWER COMPANIONS
THE back of the van collected a quarter-inch of water before the rain quit. “Cardboard,” Chevette told Tessa.
“Cardboard?”
“We’ll find some, dry. Boxes. Open ’em out, put down a couple of layers. Be dry enough.”
Tessa clicked her flashlight on and had another look. “We’re going to sleep in that puddle?”
“It’s interstitial,” Chevette told her.
Tessa turned the light off, swung around. “Look,” she said, pointing with the flashlight, “at least it isn’t pissing down now. Let’s go back to
the bridge. Find a pub, something to eat, we’ll worry about this later.” Chevette said that would be fine, just as long as Tessa didn’t bring
God’s Little Toy, or in any other way record the rest of the evening, and Tessa agreed to that.
They left the van parked there, and walked back along the Embarcadero, past razor wire and barricades that sealed (ineffectually,
Chevette knew) the ruined piers. There were dealers in the shadows there, and before they’d gotten to the bridge they were offered speed, plug, weed, opium, and dancer. Chevette explained that these dealers weren’t sufficiently competitive to take and hold positions farther along,
nearer the bridge. Those were the coveted spots, and the dealers along the Embarcadero were either moving toward or away from that particular arena.
“How do they compete?” Tessa asked. “Do they fight?”
“No,” said Chevette, “it’s the market, right? The ones with good shit, good prices, and they turn up, well, the users want to see them. Somebody came with bad shit, bad prices, the users drive ’em off. But you can see them change, when you live here; see ’em every day, most of that stuff, if they’re using themselves, it’ll take ’em down. Wind up back down here, then you just don’t see ’em.”