she’d crouched before him naked.
“I am Rei Toei,” she said. Her hair was coarse and glossy and roughly but perfectly cut, her mouth wide and generous and not quite smiling, and Rydell put out his hand and watched it pass right through her shoulder, through the pattern of coherent light he knew she must be. “This
is a hologram,” she said, “but I am real.”
“Where are you?” Rydell asked, withdrawing his hand. “I’m here,” she said. “But where are you really?”
“Here. This is not a broadcast hologram. It is generated by the Famous Aspect unit. I am here, with you. Your room is very small. Are you poor?” She crawled past Rydell (he supposed she could’ve crawled through him, if he hadn’t moved aside) to the head of his bed, examining the salt-caked hemisphere of plastic. Rydell could see now that she literally was a source of illumination, though somehow it reminded him of moonlight. “It’s a rented room,” Rydell said. “And I’m not rich.” She looked back at this. “I meant no offense.” 153 “That’s okay,” Rydell said, looking from her to the projector and back. “I mean, a lot of people, they’d think I’m poor.”
“But more would think you rich.”
“I don’t know about that-”
“I do,” she said. “There are, literally, more humans alive at this moment who have measurably less than you do. You have this sleeping place, you have clothing, I see you have eaten. What is your name?”
“Berry Rydell,” he said, feeling a strange shyness. But he thought he at least knew who she was, or was supposed to be. “Look, I recognize you. You’re that Japanese singer, the one who isn’t. . . I mean, the one who- “Doesn’t exist?”
“I didn’t say that. I mean, weren’t you supposed to be married to that Irish guy, Chinese, whatever? In that band?”
“Yes.” She’d stretched out on the bed, on her stomach, hands propping her chin a few inches from the occluded plastic bubble. (Rydell had a flash of that seen from the water below, like the glaucous eye of some behemoth.) “But we did not marry, Berry Rydell.”
“How do you know Laney?” he asked her, hoping to bring it around to some footing that he could stand on as well, whatever that might be.
“Laney and I are friends, Berry Rydell. Do you know where he is?”
“Not exactly,” Rydell said, which was true.
She rolled over, gorgeous and quite literally glowing, in her incongruous mirroring of what he wore, which looked, on her, like the first and purest expression of some irresistible new fashion, and fixed him with a sorrowful stare. He would, in that moment, have happily and willingly locked eyes with her for however long she wanted and have sat there, effectively, forever. “Laney and I have been separated. I do not understand why, but I must trust that it is for our mutual and eventual good. Who gave you the projector, Berry Rydell?” “I don’t know,” Rydell said. “It was shipped here GlobEx, but in Laney’s name. Address in Melbourne, company called Paragon-Asia.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do you know why we are together in San Francisco, Berry Rydell?”
“No,” he said, “do you?” 154 “Laney believes that the world will end soon,” she said, and her smile was luminous.
He couldn’t help but smile hack. “I think we went through that one when the century rolled over.” “Laney says that that was only a date. Laney says that this is the real thing. But I have not spoken with him in weeks, Berry Rydell. I do not know how much closer we are now, to the nodal point.”
155 BOOMZILLA, with a little shit money tonight, debit chip he got off those truck bitches, goes down to Lucky Dragon. That’s where he goes when he gets money, because they got all the shit.
Food he likes there, because it’s not bridge food; food like on TV, out of a package. And everything: shit to look at, the games they got in there. Best place.
Someday he’ll have his shit together right. He’ll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he’ll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody’s ass and nobody fuck with him.