No way Chevette said
‘You didn t know that~
‘But she s based on somebody right~ Some kind of motion capture deal ‘Nobody Tessa said Nothing Shes the real deal Hundred
• – – percent unreal.”
– – – “Then that’s what people want,” Chevette said, watching Rei Toei
— ~- swan through some kind of retro Asian nightclub, “not ex bicycle messengers from San Francisco.”
No Tessa said you ye got it exactly backwards People don t know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway.”
Chevette looked at Tessa across the two empty Corona bottles. “What are you getting at, Tessa?”
‘The documentary It has to be about you.”
“Forget it.”
“No. I’ve got vision thing working big-time on this. I need you for the focus. I need narrative traction. I need Chevette Washington.”
Chevette was actually starting to feel a little scared. It made her 69 angry. “Don’t you have a grant to do this one particular project you’ve been talking about? These innersitual things-”
“Look,” Tessa said, “if that’s a problem, and I’m not saying it is, it’s my problem. And it’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity. It’s a shot. My shot.”
“Tessa, there is no way you are going to get me to act in your movie. None. You understand?’
“‘Acting’ isn’t in it, Chevette. All you have to do is be yourself. And that will involve finding out who you really are. I am going to make a film about you finding out who you really are.”
“You are not,” said Chevette, getting up and actually bumping into the camera platform, which must have descended to level with her head while they were talking. “Stop that!” Swatting at God’s Little Toy.
The other four customers in Dirty Is God just looking at them. 70 16. SUB-ROUTINES
THAT Hole at the core of Laney’s being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.
Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self.
But what was there, he wonders, before?
Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.
Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality, it seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?
But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the earth’s core, and beyond cardboard walls are walls of concrete, sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.
Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting. There is move-ment, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he
is no longer afraid.
And all of this is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the cough, the fever, but of that underlying dis-ease that he takes to be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.
We -were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.
Something at once noun and verb.
While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of informa 71 tion, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context. A microscopic cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned, he senses, centrally.
Crucially.
And that is why sleep is no longer an option. 72 17. ZODIAC THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long face and the fat
white man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls. Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black plastic pipes above. Falls