BURNING CHROME by William Gibson 1986

The Winter Market

It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeter- inmate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun- lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyra- mid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast- wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties. No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour black- out that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mer- cury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. my hand. Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digi- tal. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio record- ings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies transients, I think he called them could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly ex- pensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out. Because that was what they did to her. And that was what she wanted. No accelerometer for Lise.

I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week’s wages to repair. Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin’s place. Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk. I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn’t seen before, rusty spider arms folded at t~1e hearts of dented con- stellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dump- sters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. “Messing around,” he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternodns. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing gar- ments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves ~vith as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris. So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. “I know,” he said. “Some CBC creep phoned eight times.” He sipped something out of a dented cup. “You wanna Wild Turkey sour?” “Why’d they call you?” `Cause my name’s on the back of Kings of Sleep. Dedication.” “I didn’t see it yet.” “She try to call you yet?”

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