intending to leave the bar, and Creedmore and Shoats in it, when he’d picked up his bag, which he’d left them minding.
Now he saw that the woman, that Maryahice, the one from breakfast, had joined them, and that Shoats had found a guitar somewhere,
a scuffed old thing with what looked like masking tape patching a long
– – crack down the front. Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table
to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.
Creedmore was hunched forward, watching, his wet-look streaked-blonde hair gleaming in the bar gloom, and Rydell saw a look there, an
exposed hunger, that made him feel funny, like he was seeing Creedmore want something through the wall of shit he kept up around himself. It made Creedmore seem suddenly very human, and that somehow made him even less attractive.
Now Shoats, absently, produced what looked like the top of an old-fashioned tube of lipstick from his shirt pocket and began to play, using the gold metal tube as a slide. The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out.
The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had
ALl. TOMORROW’S PARTIES gone absolutely silent under the scraping, looping expressions of Shoats’ guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like.
And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby.
How the red light was his mind. 104 25 SUIT
HAVING abandoned sleep, Laney, neither a smoker nor a drinker, has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown glass bottles of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still-popular Japanese remedy that consists of alcohol caffeine aspinn and liquid nicotine He knows somehow (somehow now he knows those things he needs to know) that this, along with periodic belts of a blue hypnotic cough syrup, is the combination he needs to continue.
Heart pounding, eyes wide to incoming data, hands cold and distant, he plunges resolutely on.
He no longer leaves the carton, relying both on Yamazaki (who brings medicines he refuses) and on a neighbor in the cardboard city, a
– – meticulously groomed madman whom he takes to be an acquaintance of the old man, the builder of models, from whom Laney has leased, or otherwise obtained, this space.
Laney doesn’t remember the advent of this mad one, whom he thinks of as the Suit, but that is not something he needs to know.
The Suit is, evidently, a former salaryman. The Suit wears a suit, the one suit, always. It is black, this suit, and was once a very good suit
indeed, and it is evident from its condition that the Suit, in whichever carton he dwells, has a steam iron, lint rollers, surely a needle and thread, and the skill to use them. It is unthinkable, for instance, that this suit’s buttons would be anything less than firmly and symmetrically
attached, or that the Suit’s white shirt, luminous in the halogen of the master model-builder’s carton, would be anything less than perfectly white.
But it is also obvious that the Suit has seen better days, as indeed must be true of any inhabitant of this place. It is obvious, for instance,
that the Suit’s shirt is white because he paints it daily, Laney surmises (though he doesn’t need to know) with a white product intended for the renovation of athletic shoes. The heavy black frames of his glasses are held together with worryingly precise ligatures of black electrical tape, 105 upe cut to narrow custom widths with one of the old man’s X-Acto knives and a miniature steel T-square and then applied with lapidary skill,