“Laney?”
“Sorry This place-Rez likes it?” 162 William Gibson Past ambient forests of black umbrellas, waiting to cross at an intersection.
“I think he just likes to brood there,” she said.
The Western World occupied the top two floors of an office building that hadn’t quite survived the quake. Yamazaki might have said that it represented a response to trauma and subsequent reconstruction. In the days (some said hours) immediately following the disaster, an impromptu bar and disco had come into being in the former offices of a firm that had brokered shares in golf-club memberships. The building, declared structurally unsound, had been sealed by emergency workers at the ground floor, but it was still possible to enter through the ruined sublevels. Anyone willing to climb eleven flights of mildly fissured concrete stairs found the Western World, a bizarrely atypical (but some said mysteriously crucial) response to the upheaval that had, then, so recently killed eighty-six thousand of the region’s thirty-six million inhabitants. A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya’s idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was the early Western World’s substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyos psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.
But now, Arleigh was explaining, as they climbed the first of those eleven flights of stairs, it was very definitely a commercial op
0 2 163 eration, the damaged building owing its continued survival to the unlicensed penthouse club that was its sole occupant. If in fact it continued to be unlicensed, and she had her doubts about that. “There isn’t a lot of slack here,” she said, climbing, “not for things like that. Everybody knows the Western World’s here, I think there’s a very quiet agreement, somewhere, to allow them to operate the place as though it were still unlicensed. Because that’s what people want to pay for.”
“Who owns the building?” Laney asked, watching Blackwell float up the stairs in front of them, his arms, in the matte black sleeves of the drover’s coat, like sides of beef dressed for a funeral. The stairwell was lit with irregular loops of faintly bioluminescent cable.
“Rumor has it, one of the two groups who can’t quite agree on who owns our hotel.”
“Mafia?”
“Local equivalent, but only very approximately equivalent. Real estate was baroque, here, before the quake; now it’s more like occult.”
Laney, glancing down as they passed one of the glowing loops, noticed, on the treads of the stairs, hardened trickles of something that resembled greenish amber. “There’s stuff on the stairs,” he said.
“Urine,” Arleigh said.
“Urine?”
“Solidified, biologically neutral urine.”
Laney took the next few steps in silence. His calves were starting to ache. Urine?
“The plumbing didn’t work, after the quake,” she said. “They couldn’t use the toilets. People just started going, down the stairs. Pretty horrible, by all accounts, although some people actually get nostalgic about it.”
“It’s solid?”
“There’s a product here, a powder, looks like instant soup. Some kind of enzyme. They sell it mainly to mothers with young kids. The kid has to pee, you can’t get them to a toilet in time, they pee in a pa- 164 William Gibson per cup, an empty juice box. You drop in the contents of a handy, purse-sized sachet of this stuff, zap, it’s a solid. Neutral, odorless, completely hygienic. Pop it in the trash, it’s landfill.”
They passed another loop of light and Laney saw miniature stalactites suspended from the edges of a step. “They used that stuff.
“Lots of it. Constantly. Eventually they had to start sawing off the build-up.