Virtual Light

“I’ll wait” Rydell said.

The farmer didn’t answer. State law said he couldn’t have a gun, just the industrial-strength stu

Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Mille

He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn’t good. So he worked his way deeper into the shop, pretending to check out the merchandise. There was a whole section of these nasty-looking spidery wreath-things, behind glass in faded gilt frames. The wreaths looked to Rydell like they were made of frizzy old hair. There were tiny little baby coffins, all corroded, and one of them had been planted with ivy. There were coffee tables made out of what Rydell supposed were tombstones, old ones, the lettering worn down so faint you couldn’t read it. He paused beside a bedstead welded together from a bunch of those pickani

“Mr. Rydell? May I call you Berry?” Justine Cooper’s jaw was so narrow that it looked like she wouldn’t have room for the ordinary complement of teeth in there. Her hair was cut short, a polished brown helmet. She wore a couple of dark, flowing things that Rydell supposed were meant to conceal the fact that she was built more or less like a stick-insect. She didn’t sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

Rydell saw the fat man walk out, pausing on the sidewalk to deactivate the Range Rover’s defenses.

“Sure.”

“You’re from Knoxville?” He noticed she was breathing deliberately, like she was trying not to hyperventilate.

“That’s right.”

“You don’t have much of an accent.”

“Well, I wish everybody felt that way.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

“Is your family from Knoxville, Mr. Rydell?”

Shit, he thought, go ahead, call me Berry. “My father was, I guess. My mother’s people are from up around Bristol, mostly.”

Justine Cooper’s dark eyes, not showing much white, were looking right at him, but they didn’t seem to be registering anything. He guessed she was somewhere in her forties.

“Ms. Cooper?”

She gave a violent start, as though he’d goosed her.

“Ms. Cooper, what are those wreath-sort-of-things in those old frames there?” Pointing at them.

“Memorial wreaths. Southwestern Virginia, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.”

Good, Rydell thought, get her talking about the stock. He walked over to the framed wreaths for a closer look. “Looks like hair” he said.

“It is” she said. “What else would it be?”

“Human hair?”

“Of course.”

“You mean like dead people’s hair?” He saw now the minute braiding, the hair twisted up into tiny flowerlike knots. It was lusterless and no particular color.

“Mr. Rydell, I’m afraid that I may have wasted your time.” She moved tentatively in his direction. “When I spoke with you on the phone, I was under the impression that you might be, well, much more of the South…”

“How do you mean, Ms. Cooper?”

“What we offer people here is a certain vision, Mr. Rydell. A certain darkness as well. A Gothic quality.”

Damn. That talking head in the agency display had been playing this shit back word for word.

“I don’t suppose you’ve read Faulkner?” She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face.

There it was again. “Nope.”

“No, I didn’t think so. I’m hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.”

Rydell blinked.

“But you don’t convey that to me. I’m sorry.” It looked like the invisible cobweb had come hack.

Rydell looked at the rentacop, but he didn’t seem to be listening to any of this. Hell, he seemed to he asleep.

“Lady” Rydell said carefully, “I think you’re crazier than a sack full of assholes.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “There” she said.

“There what?”

“Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.”

Rydell had to think about that. He found himself looking at the jockey-boy bed. “Don’t you ever get any black people in here, complaining about stuff like this?”

“On the contrary” she said, a new edge in her tone, “we do quite a good business with the more affluent residents of South Central. They, at least, have a sense of irony. I suppose they have to.”

Now he’d have to walk to whatever the nearest station was, take the subway home, and tell Kevin Tarkovsky he hadn’t been Southern enough.

The rentacop was letting him out.

“Where exactly you from, Ms. Cooper?” he asked her.

“New Hampshire” she said.

He was on the sidewalk, the door closing behind him.

“Fucking Yankees” he said to the Porsche roadster. It was what his father would have said, but he had a hard time now co

One of those big articulated German cargo-rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried chicken.

The courier’s dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run, mountains the color of concrete. They are burying the orphans on a hillside. Plastic coffins, pale blue. Clouds in the sky. The priest’s tall hat. They do not see the first shell coming in from the concrete mountains. It punches a hole in everything: the hillside, the sky, a blue coffin, the woman’s face.

A sound too vast to be any sound at all, but through it, somehow, they hear, arriving only now, the distant festive pop-popping of the mortars, tidy little clouds of smoke rising on the gray mountainside.

He comes upright, alone in the wide bed, trying to scream, and the words are in a language he no longer allows himself to speak.

His head throbs. He drinks flat water from the stainless carafe on the nightstand. The room sways, blurs, comes back into focus. He forces himself from the bed, pads naked to the tall, old-fashioned windows. Fumbles the heavy drapes aside. San Francisco. Dawn like tarnished silver. It is Tuesday. Not Mexico.

In the white bathroom, wincing in the sudden light, scrubbing cold water into his numb face. The dream recedes, but leaves a residue. He shivers, cold tile unpleasant beneath his bare feet. The whores at the party. This Harwood. Decadent. The courier disapproves of decadence. His work brings him into contact with real wealth, genuine power. He meets people of substance. Harwood is wealth without substance. He puts out the bathroom light and gingerly returns to his bed, favoring the ache in his head.