Not that long ago, as years were measured, but some kind of lifetime in terms of concept of place. Skinner had shown her pictures, what the bridge looked like before, but she simply can’t imagine that people wouldn’t have lived here. He’d also shown her drawings of older bridges too, bridges with shops and houses on them, and it just made sense to her. How could you have a bridge and not live on it?
She loves it here, admits it now in her heart, but there is also something in her, watching, that feels not a part of. A self-consciousness, as though she herself is making the sort of docu Tessa wanted to make, some inner version of all the product Carson coordinated for Real One. 108 Like she’s back, but she isn’t. Like she’s become something else in the meantime, without noticing, and now she’s watching herself being here.
She found Tessa squatting in front of a narrow shopfront, BAD SECTOR spray-bombed across a plywood facade that looks as though it’s been painted silver with a broom.
Tessa had God’s Little Toy, semi-deflated, on her lap and is fiddling with something near the part that holds the camera. “Ballast,” Tessa said, looking up, “always goes first.” “Here,” Chevette said, holding out a sandwich, “while it’s still warm.” Tessa tucked the Mylar balloon between her knees and accepts the greasy paper packet. “Got any idea where you want to sleep tonight?” Chevette asked, unwrapping her own sandwich. “In the van,” Tessa said, around a mouthful. “Got bags, foam.” “Not where it is,” Chevette told her. “Kinda cannibal, around there.” “Where then?” “If it’s still got wheels, there’s a place over by one of the piers, foot of Folsom, where people park and sleep. Cops know about it, but they go easy; easier for them if people all park in one place, to camp. But it can be hard to get a place.” “This is good,” Tessa said to her sandwich, wiping grease from her lips with the back of her hand. “Bridge chickens. Raise ’em over by Oakland, feed ’em scraps and stuff.” She bit into her sandwich. The bread was a square bun of sourdough white, dusted with flour. She chewed, staring into the window of this Bad Sector place.
Flat square tabs or sheets of plastic, different sizes and colors, baffled her, but then she got it: these were data disks, old magnetic media. And those big, round, flat black plastic things were analogue audio media, a mechanical system. You stuck a needle in a spiral scratch and spun the thing. Biting off more sandwich, she stepped past Tessa for a better look. There were reels of fine steel wire, ragged pinkcylinders of
109 wax with faded paper labe~s, yellowing transparent plastic reels of quarter-inch brown tape.
Looking past the disphy, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of ii in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-ass institutional brige, unless they’d wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they’d opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was ifolded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan. “This is buggered,” sighed Tessa, who’d finished her sandwich and gone back to poking at God’s Little Toy with the driver. She stuck out her hand, offering Chevette the driver. “Give it back to him, okay?”
“Who?” “The sumo guy inside”
Chevette took the little micro-torque tool and went into Bad Sector.
There was a Chinese kid behind the counter who looked like he might weigh in somewhere over two hundred pounds. He had that big pumpkin head the sumo guys had too, but his was recently shaven and he had a soul patch. He had a short-sleeve print shirt on, big tropical flowers, and a conical spike of blue Lucite through the lobe of his left ear. He was standing, behind a counter, in front of a wall covered with dog-eared posters advertising extinct game platforms.
“This your driver, right?”
“She have any luck with it?” He made no move to take it.