He sat on the slippery edge of the nflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartmen. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent vas paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fain) intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. “His reptiI~ fund,” Kathy called it.
He could hold Alison Shires’ historyin his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale imdel of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He’d never met her, or spoken to her, but he’ come tD know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever ha~ or would. Husbands didn’t know their wives this way, or wives ther husbands. Stalkers might aspire to know the objects of their obession this way, but never. could.
Until the night he woke after midiight, head throbbing. Too hot, something wrong with the condiioning again. Florida. The blue shirt he slept in clinging to his back aid shoulders. What would she be doing now? 52 William Gibsm~ Was she staring up, awake, at faint bars of reflecte(l light on the ceiling, listening to Upful Groupvine?
Kathy suspected he might be cracking up. He looked at his hands. They could be anybody’s. lie looked at them as though he’d never seen them before.
He remembered the 5-SB in the orphanage. The taste of it coming while it was still being injected. Rotting metal. The placebo brought no taste at all.
He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door slid aside. A single ancient leaf of lettuce sagged blackly through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty bottle of Evian on another. He held his cupped hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.
Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew he’d seen it. Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-mannered passage through the world of things.
“Hey there,” the fnidge said. “You’ve left me open.” Laney said nothing. –
“Well, do you want the door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic de-frost .
“Be quiet.” His hands felt better. Cooler.
He stood there until his hands were quite cold, then withdrew them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the fnidge taking this opportunity to close itself without further comment.
Twenty minutes later he was on the Metro, headed for Hollywood, a jacket over his sleep-creased Malaysian oxford shirt. Isolated figures on station platforms, whipped sideways by perspective in the wind of the train’s passing.
“We’re not talking conscious decision, here?” Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear. “No,” Laney said, “I (lorit know what I thought I was doing.
“You were trying to save her. The girl.”
“It felt like something snapped. A ruhher hand. It felt like gravity.”
“That’s what it feels like,” Blackwell said, “when you decide.”
Somewhere down the hill from the Sunset Metro exit he passed a man watering his lawn, a rectangle perhaps twice the size of a pooltahie, illuminated by the medicinal glow of a nearby streetlight. Laney saw the water beading on the perfectly even blades of bright green plastic. The plastic lawn was fenced back from the street with welded steel, upright prison bars supporting bright untarnished coils of razor-wire. The man’s house was scarcely larger than his glittering lawn; a survival from a day when this slope to the hills had been covered with bungalows and arbors. There were others like it, tucked between the balconied, carefully varied faces of condos and apartment complexes, tiny properties dating from before the area’s incorporation into the city. There was a hint of oranges in the air, but he couldn’t see them.
The waterer looked up, and Laney saw that he was blind, eyes hidden by the black lozenges of video units coupled directly to the optic nerve. You never knew what they were watching.
Laney went on, letting whatever drew him set his course through these sleeping streets and the occasional scent of a blooming tree. Distant brakes sounded on Santa Monica.