~160~LIAMGI~ON SOMETIMES, now, beyond the point of exhaustion, he has started to enter, for what may be seconds but can feel like hours or days, some new mode of being.
It is as though he becomes a single retina, distributed evenly across the inner surface of a sphere. Unblinking, he stares, globally, into that eye, seeing that with which he sees, while from a single invisible iris appear individual, card-like images of Harwood, one after another.
Yamazaki has brought him pillows and fresh sleeping bags, bottles of water, an unused change of clothes. He is vaguely aware of these things, but when he becomes the eye that looks in upon itself, and upon the endless string of images, he has no awareness beyond that interiority, infinite and closed.
And part of him asks himself if this is an artifact of his illness, of the 5-SB, or if this vast and inward-looking eye is not in fact some inner aspect of that single shape comprised of every bit of data in the world?
This last he feels is at least partly confirmed by his repeated experience of the eye everting, turning itself inside out, in Moebius spasm, at which point he finds himself, invariably, staring at that indescribable shape.
But now, when he is the eye, he is starting to be aware of someone eLse watching. Someone else is very interested in those images of Harwood. He feels them register each one.
THE vintage plastic Gunsmith Cats alarm watch pulls him from the flow. He finds it in the dark and turns off the alarm. He wonders where it came from. The old man?
It is time to phone Rydell in San Francisco. He moves his fingers delicately over the disposables on the cardboard shelf, feeling for the used one with ten minutes left, How can that be?
167 40. YELLOW RIBBON REI Toei could make herself very small.
Six inches tall, she sat on Rydell’s pillow, in the salt-frosted plastic dome of his room at the bed-and-breakfast, and he felt like a child.
When she was small, the projection seemed more concentrated; she was brighter, and it made him think of fairies in old anime, those Disney things. She could as easily have had wings, he thought, and fly around, trailing glowing dust if she wanted. But she only sat there, even more perfect at six inches tall, and talked with him.
And when he’d close his eyes, not intending to sleep but only to rest them, he could hear that her voice was actually coming from the projector at the foot of his bed. She was telling him about Rez, the singer she’d wanted to marry, and why that hadn’t worked, but it was difficult to follow. Rez had been very interested in Rez, Rydell gathered, and not much else, and Rei Toei had become more interested in other people (or, he guessed, if you were her, in other things). But he kept slipping out of focus, falling asleep really, and her voice was so beautiful.
Before he’d stretched out here, and she’d shown him how she could get small, he’d pulled the chicken-wire gate into place and spread the curtains that were thumbtacked to it, some kind of faded nubby fabric printed with a pattern of ornate keys and strange, long-necked cats (he thought they were).
He didn’t know how long the sunglasses had been ringing, and it took him several rings to locate his jacket in the dark. He was fully dressed, shoes and all, otherwise, and he knew he’d been deep asleep.
“Hello?” He put the glasses on with his left hand. With his right he reached up and touched the ceiling. It’s paneling gave, slightly, when he did that, so he didn’t do it again.
“Where are you?” It was Laney.
“Bed-and-breakfast,” Rydell told him. With the sunglasses on, it was totally dark. He watched the low spark of his own optic nerve, colors without names. 168 “Did you get the cables?”
“Yeah,” Rydell said. He remembered being harsh with the sumo kid and felt stupid. He’d lost it. That claustro thing he got in crowds sometimes. Tara-MayAllenby had told him that was called agoraphobia, and it meant “fear of the mall,” but it wasn’t actually malls that did it to him. But he couldn’t stand those little under-lip beards either. “Two of them.”