Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson. The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white sheet of heat lightning that had turned the pale branches of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic negative of themselves: carbon branches against mag- nesium sky. Many of the refugees were armed. Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had main- tained in the face of the Coast’s attempted secession. The towns were built of plywood, cardboard, plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and ter- ritories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a black-market economy. Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search, a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband they had been sent to find. After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a length of brush- wood. In the jacket’s back, lust below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket’s lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water. j-Ie never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine. He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle’s wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away. That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the “lawyers” who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with his promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception? Roebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View.
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust… and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn’t met you yet; you’re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tape ends.
The inducer’s light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know stolen credit cards a burned- out suburb planetary conjunctions of a stranger a tank burning on a highway a flat packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain. Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there? She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.