Do you have a name?” Nothing Nothing moves in the brown eyes The boy regards him as calmly as might some placid dog. The silver pulping machine chugs briefly amid the stacked fruit Shaved ice whirs into the pulp. The Italian transfers the drink to a plastiC cup and places it before the boy The boy looks at it 41 The man shifts on the creaking metal stool, his long coat draped like resting wings. Beneath his arm, carefully cleaned now, the knife in its magnetic sheath swings free, sleeping. The boy raises the cup, opens his mouth, and pours the thick sludge of ice and fruit pulp down his throat. Defective, the man thinks. Syndromes of the city’s tragic womb. The signal of life distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of fortune. Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao: darkness within darkness. The boy places the empty cup beside the other two. The man straightens his legs, stands, buttoning his coat. The boy reaches out. Two fingers touch the watch the man wears on his left wrist. He opens his mouth as if to speak.
“The time?” Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy’s eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely. The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one’s funeral, and how could it be otherwise? The boy leans forward now, the thing behind his eyes seeing only the watch.
The man thinks of the two he leaves tonight on the bridge. Hunters of sorts, now they will hunt no more. And this one, following them. To pick up scraps.
“You like this?”
Nothing registers. Nothing breaks the concentration, the link between that which has surfaced behind the boy’s eyes and the austere black face of the watch.
The Tao moves.
The man unfastens the steel buckle that secures the strap. He hands the watch to the boy. He does this without thought. He does this 42 with the same unthinking certainty with which, earlier, he killed. He does this because it fits, is fitting; because his life is alignment with the Tao. There is no need to say good-bye.
He leaves the boy lost in contemplation of the black face, the hands. He leaves now. The moment in balance.
43 I 10. AMERICAN ACROPOLIS
RYD ELI managed to get part of the San Francisco grid on the Brazilian glasses coming in, but he still needed Creedmore to tell him how to get to the garage where they were leaving the Hawker-Aichi. Creedmore, when Rydell woke him for that, seemed uncertain as to who Rydell was, but did a fairly good job of covering it up. He did know, after consulting a folded business card he took from the watch pocket of his jeans, exactly where they should go.
It was an old building, in the kind of area where buildings like that were usually converted to residential, but the frequency of razor wire suggested that this was not yet gentrified territory. There were a couple of Universal square badges controlling entry, a firm that mostly did low-level industrial security. They were set up in an office by the gate, watching Real One on a flatscreen propped up on a big steel desk that looked like someone had gone over every square inch of it with a ball peen hammer. Cups of take-out coffee and white foam food containers. It all felt kind of homey to Rydell, who figured they’d be going off shift soon, seven in the morning. Wouldn’t be a bad job, as bad jobs went.
“Delivering a drive-away,” Rydell told them.
There was a deer on the flatscreen. Behind it the familiar shapes of the derelict skyscrapers of downtown Detroit. The Real One logo in the lower right corner gave him the context: one of those nature shows.