Virtual Light

“This is not a nice party.”

Settling the wide shoulders of Ski

She finds herself stuck near the door to the bathroom where she’d seen the icers, but it’s closed now. A bunch of French people are talking French and laughing and waving their hands around, but Chevette can hear somebody vomiting in there. “Coming through” she says to a man with a bowtie and a gray crewcut, and just pushes past him, spilling part of his drink. He says something after her in French.

She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth. Or maybe the wine’s gotten to her, a little, because drinking isn’t something she does much, and now she doesn’t like the taste of it in the back of her throat.

And suddenly there’s her drunk, her Euro with his unlit cigar, sweaty brow too close to the dull-eyed, vaguely worried face of one of the Tenderloin girls. He’s got her backed into a corner. And everyone’s jammed so tight, this close to the door and the corridor and freedom, that Chevette finds herself pressed up against his back for a second, not that that interrupts whatever infinitely dreary shit he’s laying down for the girl, no, though he does jam his elbow, hard, back into Chevette’s ribs to get himself more space.

And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather.

Then it’s in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, she’s out the door, and the asshole hasn’t even noticed.

In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now she’s starting to feel scared.

Walk.

Past the party’s build-up of trays, dirty glasses, plates.

Remembering the security grunts in the lobby.

The thing stuck down her pants.

Down a corridor that opens off this one, she sees the doors of a service elevator spread wide now and welcoming. A Central Asian kid with a paint-splattered steel cart stacked up with flat rectangles that are television screens. He gives her a careful look as she edges in beside him. His face is all cheekbones, bright hooded eyes, his hair shaved up high in one of those near-vertical dos all these guys favor. He has a security badge clipped to the front of his clean gray workshirt and a VirtuFax slung around his neck on a red nylon cord.

“Basement” Chevette says.

His fax buzzes. He raises it, pushes the button, peers into the eyepiece. The thing in her bike-pants starts to feel huge. Then he drops the fax back to his chest, blinks at her, and pushes a button marked B-6. The doors rumble shut and Chevette closes her eyes.

She leans back against the big quilted pads hung on the walls and wishes she were up in Ski

The elevator stops at four for no reason at all. Nobody there when the door opens. Chevette wants to press B-6 again but she makes herself wait for the kid with the fax to do it. He does.

And B-6 is not the garage she so thoroughly wants now, but this maze of hundred-year-old concrete tu

A century’s-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but she’s trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like she’s making a delivery.

She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.

But her bike is there, on B-1, behind a column of nicked concrete.

“Back off” it says when she’s five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.

Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes Chevette’s thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There’s a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she’s up and off it.

It’s never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there.

4. Career opportunities

Rydell’s roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.

Monday morning, when Rydell told him he’d quit his job with IntenSecure, Kevin offered to try to find him something in sales, in the beach-culture line.

“You got an okay build, basically” Kevin said, looking at Rydell’s bare chest and shoulders. Rydell was still wearing the orange trunks he’d worn when he’d gone to see Hernandez. He’d borrowed them from Kevin. He’d just taken his cast off, deflating it and crumpling it into the five-gallon plastic paint bucket that served as a wastebasket. The bucket had a big self-adhesive daisy on the side. “You could work out a little more regularly. And maybe get some tats. Tribal black-work.”

“Kevin, I don’t know how to surf, wind-surf, anything. Hardly been in the ocean in my life. Couple of times down Tampa Bay.” It was about ten in the morning. Kevin had the day off work.

“Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give ’em an experience, too” Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. “Then you sell them a new outfit.”

“But I don’t have a tan.”

Kevin was the approximate color and sheen of a pair of mid-brown Cole-Haan loafers that Rydell’s aunt had given him for his fifteenth birthday. This had nothing to do with either genetics or exposure to unfiltered sunlight, but was the result of regular injections and a complicated regimen of pills and lotions.

“Well” Kevin admitted, “you would need a tan.”

Rydell knew that Kevin didn’t wind-surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved, and Rydell had no doubt that Kevin could provide every bit of information a prospective buyer might desire. And that all-important experience; with his cordovan tan, gym-tuned physique, and that bone through his nose, he got a lot of attention. Mainly from women, though it didn’t actually seem to do that much for him.

What Kevin sold, primarily, was clothing. Expensive kind that supposedly kept the UV and the pollutants in the water off you. He had two whole cartons full of the stuff, stacked in their room’s one closet. Rydell, who currently didn’t have much in the way of a wardrobe, was welcome to paw through there and borrow whatever took his fancy. Which wasn’t a lot, as it turned out, because wind-surfing gear tended to be Day-Glo, black nanopore, or mirrorflex. A few of the jazzier items had UV-sensitive JUST BLOW ME logos that appeared on days when the ozone was in particularly shabby shape, as Rydell had discovered the last time he’d gone to the farmers market.