Still, he thinks, he ,weds to be here. If there’s any place in Tokyo Rez’s people won’t find him, this is it. He’s not quite sure how he got here; things got a little fuzzy around the time the syndrome kicked in. Some kind of state change, some global shift in the nature of his perception. Insufficient memory. Things hadn’t stuck.
Now he wonders if in fact he did make some deal with the old man. Maybe he’s already covered this, the rent, whatever. Maybe that’s why
13 I the old man gives him food and bottles of flat mineral water and tolerates the smell of piss. He thinks that might be it, but he isn’t sure.
It’s dark in here, but he sees colors, faint flares and swathes and stipplings, moving. Like the afterimages of the DatAmerica flows are permanent now, retinally ingrained. No light penetrates from the corridor outside-he’s blocked every pinhole with black tape-and the old man’s halogen is off. He assumes the old man sleeps there, but he’s never seen him do it, never heard any sounds that might indicate a transition from model-building to sleep. Maybe the old man sleeps upright on his mat, Gundam in one hand, brush in the other.
Sometimes he can hear music from the adjacent cartons, but it’s faint, as though the neighbors use earphones.
He has no idea how many people live here in this corridor. It looks as though there might be room for six, but he’s seen more, and it may be that they shelter here in shifts. He’s never learned much Japanese, not after eight months, and even if he could understand, he guesses, these people are all crazy, and they’d only talk about the things crazy people talk about.
And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too.
But he isn’t. He knows he isn’t, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn’t crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn’t him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn’t want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he’d always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved.
But the syndrome wasn’t like that. It was separate from him and had nothing to do with anyone or anything he, Laney, was even interested in. When he’d felt it starting, he’d taken it for granted that it would be about her, about Rei Toei, because there he was, close to her, or as close 14 as you could get to anyone who didn’t physically exist. ‘I~hey’d tasked almost every day, Laney and the idoru.
And at first, he considered now, maybe it had been about her, hut then it was as though he’d been following something hack through the data flows, doing it without really thinking about it, the way your hand will find a thread on a garment and start pulling at it, unraveling it.
And what had unraveled was the way he’d thought the world worked. And behind that he’d found Harwood, who was famous, but famous in that way of being famous for being famous. Harwood who they said had elected the president. Harwood the PR genius, who’d inherited Harwood Levine, the most powerful PR firm in the world, and had taken it somewhere seriously else, into a whole other realm of influence, But who’d managed somehow never to become prey to the mechanism of celebrity itself. Which grinds, Laney so well knew, exceedingly fine, Harwood who, maybe, just maybe, ran it all, but somehow managed never to get his toe caught in it. Who managed, somehow, to be famous without seeming to be important, famous without being central to anything. Really, he’d never even gotten much attention, except when he’d split with Maria Paz, and even then it had been the Padanian star who’d made the top of every sequence, with Cody Harwood smiling from a series of sidebars, embedded hypertext lozenges: the beauty and this gentle-looking, secretive, pointedly uncharismatic billionaire.