And held each other, up there, into the dawn, sea breeze carrying away the smell of burning.
Now Rydell lies awake, looking at Chevette’s bare shoulder, and thinking nothing much at all although breakfast does begin to come to mind after a while, though he can wait.
“Chevette?” Voice from some tinny little speaker. He looks up to see a silver Mylar balloon straining on a tether, camera eye peering at them.
Chevette stirs. “Tessa?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she says, voice sleepy. “What about you?”
“It’s a feature,” the voice from the balloon says. “Action. Big budget. I’ve got footage you won’t believe.”
“What do you mean it’s a feature?” 270 “I’m signed. They flew up this morning. What are you doing up there?”
“Trying to sleep,” Chevette says and rolls over, pulling the bag over her head.
Rydell lies watching the balloon bob on its tether, until finally he sees it withdrawn.
He sits up and rubs his face. Rolls out of the bag, and stands, stiffly, a naked man with a big patch of silver duct tape across his ribs, wondering how many TV screens he’s making, right now. He hobbles over to the hatch and climbs down into darkness, where he relieves himself against a wall.
“Rydell?”
Rydell starts, getting his ankle wet.
It’s Creedmore, sitting on the floor, knees up, wet-look head between his hands. “Rydell,” Creedmore says, “you got anything to drink?”
“What are you doing up here, Buell?”
“Got in that greenhouse thing down there. Thought there’d be water there. Then I figured my ass would boil like a fucking catfish, so I climbed up here. Sons of bitches.”
“Who?”
“I’m fucked,” Creedmore says, ignoring the question. “Randy’s canceled my contract and the goddamn bridge has burned down. Some debut, huh? Jesus.”
“You could write a song about it, I guess.”
Creedmore looks up at him with utter despair. He swallows. When he speaks, there is no trace of accent: “Are you really from Tennessee?”
“Sure,” Rydell says.
“I wish to fuck I was,” Creedmore says, his voice small, but loud in the hollow of this empty wooden box, sunlight falling through the square hole above, lighting a section of two-by-fours laid long way up to make a solid floor.
“Where you from, Buell?” Rydell asks.
“Son of a bitch,” Creedmore says, the accent returning, “New Jersey.”
271 And then he starts to cry.
Rydell climbs back up and stands on the ladder with just his head out, looking toward San Francisco. Whatever Laney was on about, that end of the world thing, everything changing, it looked like it hadn’t happened.
Rydell looks over at the black mound of sleeping bag and reads it as containing that which he most desires, desires to cherish, and the wind shifts, catching his hair, and when he climbs the rest of the way, back up into sunlight, he still hears Creedmore weeping in the room below. 272 70. COURTESY CALL IN the cab to Transamerica he closes his eyes, seeing the watch he gave the boy, where time arcs in one direction only across a black face, interior time gone rudderless now, unmoored by a stranger’s reconstruction of Lise’s face. The hands of the watch trace a radium orbit, moments back-to-back. He senses some spiral of unleashed possibility in the morning, though not for him.
The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination: salt air, scavenged neon, the sliding cries of gulls. He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.
Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career’s employers have imagined.
In the atrium he describes the purpose of his visit as a courtesy call. He is disarmed, searched, cuffed, and taken, per Harwood’s orders, by his seven captors, into an elevator.
And as its doors close he feels grateful that they are excited, and inexperienced, and have cuffed his hands in front, rather than behind his back.