“You’re conducting the interview?”
A flurry of blinks. “I’m sorry, no,” the man said. And then, “I am a student of existential sociology.”
“I don’t get it,” Laney said. The two opposite said nothing. Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.
“You’re Australian,” Laney said to the one-eared man.
“Tazzie,” the man corrected. “Sided with the South in the Troubles.”
“Let’s start over,” Laney suggested. “Paragon-Asia Dataflow.’ You them?”
“Persistent bugger.”
“Goes with the territory,” Laney said. “Professionally, I mean.”
“Fair enough.” The man raised his eyebrows, one of which was bisected by a twisted pink cable of scar tissue. “Rez, then. What do you think of him?” “You mean the rock sta~?” Laney asked, after struggling with a basic problem of context.
A nod. The man regarded Laney with utmost gravity.
“From Lo/Rez? The band?” Half Irish, half Chinese. A broken nose, never repaired. Long green eyes.
“What do I think of him?”
In Kathy Torrance’s system of things, the singer had been reserved a special disdain. She had viewed him as a living fossil, an annoying survival from an earlier, less evolved era. He was at once massively and meaninglessly famous, she maintained, just as he was both massively and meaninglessly wealthy. Kathy thought of celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the phlogiston of the ancients, something spread evenly at creation through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specific conditions, around certain individuals and their careers. Rez, in Kathy’s view, had simply lasted far too long. Monstrously long. He was affecting the unity of her theory. He was defying the proper order of the food chain. Perhaps there was nothing big enough to eat him, not even Slitscan. And while Lo/Rez, the band, still extruded product on an annoyingly regular basis, in a variety of media, their singer stubbornly refused to destroy himself, murder someone, become active in politics, admit to an interesting substance-abuse problem or an arcane sexual addiction-indeed to do anything at all worthy of an opening segment on Slitscan. He glimmered, dully perhaps, but steadily, just beyond Kathy Torrance’s reach. Which was, Laney had always assumed, the real reason for her hating him so.
“Well,” Laney said, after some thought, and feeling a peculiar compulsion to attempt a truthful answer, “I remember buying their first album. When it came out.”
“Title?” The one-eared man grew graver still.
“Lo Rez Skyline,” Laney said, grateful for whatever minute synaptic event had allowed the recall. “But I couldn’t tell you how many they’ve put out since.” “Twenty-six, not counting compilations,” said Mr. Yamazaki, straightening his glasses.
Laney felt the pills he’d taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding. The walls of the Trial seemed to grow closer.
“If you aren’t going to tell me what this is about,” he said to the one-eared man, “I’m going back to the hotel. I’m tired.”
“Keith Alan Blackwell,” extending his hand. Laney allowed his own to be taken and briefly shaken. The man’s palm felt like a piece of athletic equipment. “Keithy.’ We’ll have a few drinks and a little chat.”
“First you tell me whether or not you’re from Paragon-Asia,” Laney suggested.
“Firm in question’s a couple of lines of code in a machine in a backroom in Lygon Street,” Blackwell said. “A dummy, but you could say it’s our dummy, if that makes you feel better.”
“I’m not sure it does,” Laney said. “You fly me over to interview for a job, now you’re telling me the company I’m supposed to be interviewing for doesn’t exist.”
“It exists,” said Keith Alan Blackwell. “It’s on the machine in Lygon Street.”
A waitress arrived. She wore a shapeless gray cotton boilersuit and cosmetic bruises.
“Big draft. Kirin. Cold one. What’s yours, Laney?”
“Iced coffee.”
“Coke Lite, please,” said the one who’d introduced himself as Yamazaki.
“Fine,” said the earless Blackwell, glumly, as the waitress vanished into the gloom.
“I’d appreciate it if you could explain to me what we’re doing here,” Laney said. He saw that Yamazaki was scribbling frantically on the screen of a small notebook, the lightpen flashing faintly in the dark. “Are you taking this down?” Laney asked. “Sorry, no. Making note of waitress’ costume.”