“She will.” “Rubin, she’s dead. They cremated her already.” “I know,” he said. “And she’d going to call you.”
Gomi. Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi. By the year 1969 they had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they coordinate the whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific. Rubin watches this on the news and says nothing at all. He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum in all his life. He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chop j,ed down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise, human. I met Lise at one of Rubin’s parties. Rubin had a lot of parties. He never seemed particularly to enjoy them, himself, but they were excellent parties. I lost track, that fall, of the number of times I woke on a slab of foam to the roar of Rubin’s antique espresso mach- ine, a tarnished behemoth topped with a big chrome eagle, the sound outrageous off the corrugated steel walls of the place, but massively comforting, too: There was coffee. Life would go on. First time I saw her: in the Kitchen Zone. You wouldn’t call it a kitchen, exactly, just three fridges and a hot plate and a broken convection oven that had come in with the gomi. First time I saw her: She had the all- beer fridge open, light spilling out, and I caught the cheekbones and the determined set of that mouth, but I also caught the black glint of polycarbon at her wrist, and the bright slick sore the exoskeleton had rubbed there. Too drunk to process, to know what it was, but I did know it wasn’t party time. So I did what people usually did, to Lise, and clicked myself into a different movie. Went for the wine instead, on the counter beside the convection oven. Never looked back. But she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton. I knew what it was, then, as I watched her homing in, too em- barrassed now to duck it, to run, to mumble some ex- cuse and get out. Pinned there, my arm around the waist of a girl I didn’t know, while Lise advanced was advanced, with that mocking grace straight at me now, her eyes burning with wizz, and the girl had wriggled out and away in a quiet social panic, was gone, and Lise stood there in front of me, propped up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic. Looked into those eyes and it was like you could hear her synapses whin- ing, some impossibly high-pitched scream as the wizz opened every circuit in her brain. “Take me home,” she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. “Take me home.” There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I’d never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I’d looked, then looked away, beside Rubin’s all-beer refrigerator. So if that’s the word I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else. I took her home.
I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor. The elevators usually work, and if you sit on the balcony railing and lean out backward, holding on to the corner of the building next door, you can see a little upright slit of sea and mountain. She hadn’t said a word, all the way back from Rubin’s, and I was getting sober enough to feel very uneasy as I unlocked the door and let her in. The first thing she saw was the portable fast-wipe I’d brought home from the Pilot the night before. The exoskeleton carried her across the dusty broadloom with that same walk, like a model down a runway. Away from the crash of the party, I could hear it click softly as it moved her. She stood there, looking down at the fast- wipe. I could see the thing’s ribs when she stood like that, make them out across her back through the scuffed black leather of her jacket. One of those dis- eases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones the all too obvi- ously environmental kind that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoclectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle sys- tem handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high-school lab tape, then hated myself for it. “This is a fast-wipe module,” she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. “What’s it doing here?” “I edit,” I said, closing the door behind me. “Well, now,” and she laughed. “You do. Where?” “On the Island. Place called the Autonomic Pi- lot.” She turned; then, hand on thrust hip, she swung it swung her and the wizz and the hate and some terrible parody of lust stabbed out at me from those washed-out gray eyes. “You wanna make it, editor?” And I felt the whip come down again, but I wasn’t going to take it, not again. So I cold-eyed her from somewhere down in the beer-numb core of my walking, talking, live-limbed, and entirely ordinary body and the words came out of me like spit: “Could you feel it, if I did?” Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never regis- tered. “No,” she said, “but sometimes I like to watch.” * * Rubin stands at the window, two days after her death in Los Angeles, watching snow fall into False Creek. “So you never went to bed with her?” One of his push-me-pull-you’s, little roller-bearing Escher lizards, scoots across the table in front of me, in curl-up mode. “No.” I say, and it’s true. Then I laugh. “But we jacked straight across. That first night.” “You were crazy,” he said, a certain approval in his voice. “It might have killed you. Your heart might have stopped, you might have stopped breathing….” He turns back to the window. “Has she called you yet?”