Gets the chip out, walking up to the front, because if he has it in his hand, shows it to the security, security’!1 let him in. Security wants to know you’re a player. Otherwise, you’d steal. Boomzilla understands that.
Tonight is different. Tonight a big white truck in front of Lucky Dragon. Biggest, cleanest truck he’s ever seen. No writing on it, SoCaI plates, couple of securities standing out by it. Boomzilla wonders if this what they bring the new games in? Never seen this before.
So in the doors, holding up his chip, and heads over, like he does, first to the candy.
Boomzilla likes this Jap candy that’s like a little drug lab. You mix these different parts, it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden. When you eat it, it’s just candy, but Boomzilla likes making it.
Gets six of those, pissed there’s no grape, and a couple or two chocos. Spends a good long time by the machine that makes magazines, watching screens, all the different shit you can get put in your magazine. Then back to get his noodles, kind you add water and pull the string.
Back there, deciding between beef and chicken, he sees they’ve unfastened a whole piece of Lucky Dragon wall. Next to GlobEx and the cash machine. I 156 37. A LITTLE SHIT MONEY So he thinks this is what the white truck is about, some new thing to put in there, and he wonders if it’s maybe a game.
White men in white paper suits working on the section of wall. Watches them, then goes back to the front, shows his shit. Checker runs his shit over the window that counts, takes Boomzilla’s chip and debits it, There goes his shit money.
Takes his bag outside and finds a curb to sit on. Pretty soon he’ll start making the first candy. Red one. He looks past the white truck to the screens there, by the front, and he notices white trucks on half the screens. So all over the world now, these white trucks sitting outside Lucky Dragons, so it must mean something new is being put in all of them tonight. Boomzilla unseals the candy and studies the multistage but entirely nonverbal instructions. Gotta get it right. 157 38. VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING FONTAINE’S shop must be this narrow purple one with its high thin window caulked with enough silicone to frost a wedding cake. The whole front of the place had been painted the same flat purple, blistered now by sun and rain, and she had some faint memory of its earlier incarnation as something else, used clothing maybe. They’d put that purple over everything: over the droops and gobs of silicone, over the hardware on the old wooden door with its upper panels replaced with glass.
If this was Fontaine’s place, he hadn’t bothered naming it, but that was like him. And the few things displayed in the window, under the beam of an antique Tensor, were like him as well: a few old-fashioned watches with their dials going rusty, a bone-handled jackknife someone had polished till it shone, and some kind of huge ugly telephone, sheathed in ridged black rubber. Fontaine was crazy about old things, and sometimes, before, he’d bring different pieces over, show them to Skinner.
Sometimes she’d thought he’d just done that to get the old man started, and then Skinner’s own Stories would come out. He hadn’t been much for stories, Skinner, but turning some battered treasure of Fontaine’s in his hands, he’d talk, and Fontaine would sit and listen, and nod sometimes, as though Skinner’s stories confirmed some long-held suspicion.
Made privy to Skinner’s past, Fontaine would then handle the objects himself with a new excitement, asking questions.
Fontaine lived in the world of things, it had seemed to her, the world of the things people made, and probably it was easier for him to approach them, people, through these things. If Skinner couldn’t tell Fontaine a story about something, Fontaine would make up his own story, read function in the shape of something, read use in the way it was worn down. It seemed to comfort him.