The Bridge Trilogy Part 111

- -The click seemed to trigger a metastatic surge of bit rot, every bland

texture map rewritten in some weirder hand: the red carpet went gray-green, its knap grown strange

and unevenly furry, like something at the

bottom of a month-old cup of coffee, while the walls went from wh.o.r.e

house marble to a moist fish belly pallor the sconce lights glowing dim

- -as drowned corpse candles. Tong's fake-cla.s.sical theme cracked and

hollowed, weird ba.s.s notes rumbling in just above the threshold of the subsonic.

It all took about a second to happen, and it took Rydell maybe another second to get the idea that someone wanted his undivided

attention.

"Rydell." It was one of those voices that they fake up from found -* audio: speech cobbled from wind down skysc.r.a.per canyons, the creak ing of Great Lakes ice tree frogs clanging in the Southern night Rydell

had heard them before. They grated on the nerves, as they were meant to, and conveniently disguised the voice of the speaker. a.s.suming the speaker had a voice in the first place.

"Hey," Rydell said, "I was just trying to click out."

A virtual screen appeared in front of him, a round-cornered rectangle whose dimensions were meant to invoke the cultural paradigm of twentieth-century video screens. On it, an oddly angled, monochromatic view of some vast shadowy s.p.a.ce, dimly lit from above. Nothing there. Impression of decay, great age.

"I have important information for you." The vowel in you suggested a siren dopplering past, then gone.

"Well," said Rydell, "if your middle name is 'F. X.,'you're sure going to some trouble."

There was a pause, Rydell staring at the dead, blank s.p.a.ce depicted or recorded on the screen. He was waiting for something to move there; probably that was the point of it, that nothing did.

"You'd better take this information very seriously, Mr. Rydell."

"I'm serious as cancer," Rydell said. "Shoot."

"Use the ATM at the Lucky Dragon, near the entrance to the bridge. Then present your identification at the GlobEx franchise at the rear of the store."

"Why?"

"They're holding something for you."

"Tong," Rydell said, "is that you?"

But there was no answer. The screen vanished, and the corridor was as it had been.

Rydell reached up and disconnected the rented cable from the Brazilian gla.s.ses.

Blinked.

A coffee place near Union Square, the kind that had potted plants and hotdesks. An early office crowd was starting to line up for sandwiches.

He got up, folded the gla.s.ses, tucked them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and picked up his bag.

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19. INTERSt.i.tIAL.

CHEVETTE moves past the colorless flame of a chestnut vendor's charcoal fire, powdery gray burning itself down in the inverted, V-nosed hood of some ancient car.

She sees another fire, in memory: c.o.ke glow of a smith's forge, driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside her the old man held the drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly into a compact ma.s.s and fastened with a twist of rusty wire. To be taken in the smith's tongs and placed within the forge. To be beaten, finally, incandescent, into a billet of their strangely grained Damascus, ghosts of those links emerging as the blade is forged, quenched, shaped, and polished on the wheel.

Where did that knife go? she wonders.

She'd watched the maker craft and braise a hilt of bra.s.s, rivet slabs of laminated circuit board and shape them on a belt grinder. The rigid, brittle-looking board, layers of fabric trapped in green phenolic resin, was everywhere on the bridge, a common currency of landfills-. Each sheet mapped with dull metallic patterns suggesting cities, streets. When they came from the scavengers they were studded with components, easily stripped with a torch, melting the gray solder. The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue of the second age of electronics. And Skinner would tell her that these boards were immortal, inert as stone, proof against moisture and ultraviolet and every form of decay; that they were destined to litter the planet, hence it was good to reuse them, work them when possible into the fabric of things, a resource when something needed to be durable.

She knows she needs to be alone now, so she's left Tessa on the lower level, collecting visual

texture with G.o.d's Little Toy. Chevette can't hear any more about how Tessa's film has to be more personal, about her, Chevette, and Tessa hasn't been able to shut up about that,

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or take no for an answer. Chevette remembers Bunny Malatesta, her dispatcher when she rode here, how he'd say "and what part of 'no' is it that you don't understand?" But Bunny could deliver lines like that as though he were a force of nature, and Chevette knows she can't, that she lacks Bunny's gravity, the sheer crunch required to get it across.

So she's taken an escalator, one she doesn't remember, to the upper level, and is making her way, without really thinking about it, to the foot of their tower, the wet light having turned to a thin and gusting rain, blowing through the bridge's tattered secondhand superstructure. People are hauling their laundry in, where they've hung it, draped on lines, and there's a general pre-storm bustle that she knows will fade if the weather changes.

And so far, she thinks, she's not seen a single face she knows from before, and no one has greeted her, and she finds herself imagining the bridge's entire population replaced in her absence. No, there went the bookstall woman, the one with the ivory chopsticks thrust into her dyed black bun, and she recognizes the Korean boy with the bad leg, rumbling his father's soup wagon along as though it should have brakes.

The tower she'd ascended each day to Skinner's plywood shack is bundled in subsidiary construction, its iron buried at the core of an organic complex of s.p.a.ces appropriated for specific activities. Behind taut, wind-shivered sheets of milky plastic, the unearthly light of a hydroponics operation casts outsize leaf shadows. She hears the snarl o~ an electric saw from the tiny workshop of a furniture-maker, whose a.s.sistant sits patiently, rubbing wax into a small bench collaged from paint-flecked oak scavenged from the sh.e.l.ls of older houses. Someone else is making jam, the big copper kettle heated by a propane ring.

Perfect for Tessa, she thinks: the bridge people maintaining their interstices. Doing their little things. But Chevette has seen them drunk. Has seen the drugged and the mad dive to their deaths in the gray and unforgiving chop. Has seen men fight to the death with knives. Has seen a mother, dumbstruck, walking with a strangled child in her arms, at dawn. The bridge is no tourist's fantasy. The bridge is real, and to live here exacts its own price.

It is a world within the world, and, if there be such places between

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the things of the world, places built in the gaps, then surely there are things there, and places between them, and things in those places too.

And Tessa doesn't know this, and it is not Chevette's place to tell her.

She ducks past a loose flap of plastic, into moist warmth and the spectrum of grow lamps. A reek of chemicals. Black water pumped amid pale roots. These are medicinal plants, she supposes, but probably not

- -drugs in the street sense. Those are grown nearer Oakland, in a sector

somehow allotted for that, and on warm days there the fug of resin hangs

- -narcotic in the air, bringing an almost perceptible buzz, faint alteration of perception and the will.