‘Skinner-san?’ The notebook ready. ‘I saw a procession today. Bodies being taken from the bridgt~. The dead from the Storm.’ 237 ‘Can’t keep ’em out here. Can’t throw ’em in the water. City sticks on that. We pass ’em over for cremation. Some people, they don’t hold with fire, they bury ’em over on Treasure. Kind of people live out on Treasure, you kind of wonder if that makes much sense.’ ‘In the procession there were many references to Shapely, to his story.’ Skinner nodded over his little television. ‘Children masked as J. D. Shapely, two black men painted as white doctors, Shapely’s portrait…’ Skinner grunted. Then, distantly: ‘While since I saw one of those.’ ‘And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ Skinner nodded. Yamazaki activated the notebook’s transcription function.
Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of him in everybody now. Couldn’t see the point at my age and anyway I never held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn’t have plenty of chances. You’re too young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like, watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just romping on us. But slow, slow, slowmotion thing. Those retroviruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old kind, and died of it, how we’d lived in this funny little pocket of time when a lot of people got to feel like a piece of ass wasn’t going to kill anybody, flot even a woman. See, they always had to worry anyway, every time it’s a chance, get knocked up 238 and maybe die in childbirth, die getting rid of it, or anyway your life’s not gonna be the same. But in that pocket, there, there were pills for that, whatnot, shots for the other things, even the ones had killed people all over hell, before. That was a time, Scooter. So here this thing comes along, changes it back. And we’re sliding up on woo, shit’s changing all over, got civil wars in Europe already and this AIDS thing just kicking along. You know they tried to say it was the gays, said it was the CIA, said it was the U.S. Army in some fort in Maryland. Said it was people cornholing green monkeys. I swear to God. You know what it was? People. Just too goddamn many of ’em, Scooter. Flying all the fuck over everywhere and walking around back in there. Bet your ass somebody’s gonna pick up a bug or two. Every place on the damn planet just a couple of hours from any other place. So here’s poor fucking Shapely comes along, he’s got this mutant strain won’t kill you. Won’t do shit to you at all, ‘cept it eats the old kind for breakfast. And I don’t buy any of that bullshit he was Jesus, Scooter. Didn’t think Jesus was, either.
‘Any coffee left?’ ‘I will pump stove.’ ‘Put a little drop of Three-in-One in that hole by the piston-arm, Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.’ She didn’t see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something, coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can’t watch it happening. Then she got down on her hands and her knees and started crawling. Because she couldn’t just stand there and wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see her black pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was this smell from when he’d shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet burning, too, because she could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and sort of melted. Now she could hear him yelling, somewhere outside, hoarse and hollow and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR in the world, how they’d sold Hunnis Millbank, now they’d sell Sunflower. If she heard it right. ‘Down by the door, here. Driver side.’ It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open. ‘He left the keys in here,’ she said. ‘Think he’s gone down there where the Dream Walls franchise used to be.’ ‘What if he comes back?’ 240 31 Driver side ‘Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?’ She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell’s head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up? ‘Why don’t you lie down flat on the floor back there …’ His voice from the driver’s seat. ‘Lie down?’ ‘Minimum silhouette.’ ‘Huh?’ ‘He’s going to start shooting. When I do this-‘ Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm. Rydell must’ve gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission. She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming. Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV’s probably weren’t meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill. ‘Well fuck,’ she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they’d had to keep explaining to her how’d she’d come down on her head, and each time they did, she’d forget. * 2.41 She was back in Skinner’s room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin. Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat. Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner’s bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on. ‘He’s right,’ Chevette’s mother said. ‘I~’Iom?’