Virtual Light

Rattle of the spatula as Ski

“Katharine Hepburn” Ski

She pulled them off. “Huh?”

“Big glasses like that.”

She picked up the lighter he kept beside the Coleman, clicked it, held the flame behind one lens. Nothing.

“What’re they for, welding?” He put her share of the eggs in an aluminum mess-tray stamped 1951. Set it down beside a fork and her mug of black coffee.

She put the glasses on the table. “Can’t see through ’em. Just black.” She pulled up the backless maple chair and sat, picking up the fork. She ate her eggs. Ski

“Huh?”

“How they made sunglasses in the ol’ Soviet. Had two factories for sunglasses, one of ’em always made ’em like that. Kept right on puttin’ ’em out in the stores, nobody’d buy ’em, buy the ones from the other factory. How the place packed it in.”

“The factory made the black glasses?”

“Soviet Union.”

“They stupid, or what?”

“Not that simple… Where’d you get ’em?”

She looked at her coffee. “Found ’em.” She picked it up and drank.

“You working, today?” He pulled himself up, stuffed the front of his shirt down into his jeans, the rusted buckle on his old leather belt held with twisted paper clips.

“Noon to five.” She picked up the glasses, turning them. They weighed too much for how big they were.

“Gotta get somebody up here, check the fuel cell…”

“Fontaine?”

He didn’t answer. She bedded the glasses in black suede, closed the case, got up, took the dishes to the wash-basin. Looked back at the case on the table.

She’d better toss them, she thought.

Rydell took a CalAir tilt-rotor out of Burbank into Tuesday’s early evening. The guy in San Francisco had paid for it from the other end; said call him Freddie. No seatback fun on CalAir, and the passengers definitely down-scale. Babies crying. Had a window seat. Down there the spread of lights through the faint glaze of some previous passenger’s hair-oil: the Valley. Turquoise voids of a few surviving pools, lit subsurface. A dull ache in his arm.

He closed his eyes. Saw his father at the kitchen sink of his mobile home in Florida, washing out a glass. At that precise moment the death no doubt already growing in him, established fact, some line crossed. Talking about his brother, Rydell’s uncle, three years younger and five years dead, who’d once sent Rydell a t-shirt from Africa. Army stamps on the bubblepack envelope. One of those old-timey bombers, B-52, and WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS.

“Is that the Coast Highway, do you think?”

Opened his eyes to the lady leaning across him to peer through the film of hair-oil. Like Mrs. Armbruster in fifth grade; older than his father would be now.

“I don’t know” Rydell said. “Might be. All just looks like streets to me. I mean” he added, “I’m not from here.”

She smiled at him, settling back into the grip of the narrow seat. Completely like Mrs. Armbruster. Same weird combination of tweed, oxford-cloth, Santa Fe blanket coat. These old ladies with their bouncy thick-soled shoes.

9. When diplomacy fails

None of us are.” Reaching out to pat his khaki knee. “Not these days.” Kevin had said it was okay to keep the pants.

“Uh-huh” Rydell said, his hand feeling desperately for the recliner button, the little dimpled steel circle waiting to tilt him back into the semblance of sleep. He closed his eyes.

“I’m on my way to San Francisco to assist in my late husband’s transfer to a smaller cryogenic unit” she said. “One that offers individual storage modules. The trade magazines call them ‘boutique operations,’ grotesque as that may seem.”

Rydell found the button and discovered that CalAir’s seats allowed a maximum recline of ten centimeters.

“He’s been in cryo, oh, nine years now, but I’ve never liked to think of his brain tumbling around in there like that. Wrapped in foil. Don’t they always make you think of baked potatoes?”

Rydell’s eyes opened. He tried to think of something to say.

“Or like te

Rydell concentrated on the seatback in front of him. A plastic blank. Gray. Not even a phone.

“These smaller places can’t promise anything new in the way of an eventual awakening, of course. But it seems to me that there’s an added degree of dignity. I think of it as dignity, in any case.”

Rydell glanced sideways. Found his gaze caught in hers: hazel eyes, mazed there in the finest web of wrinkles.

“And I certainly won’t be there if he’s ever thawed, or, well, whatever they might eventually intend to do with them. I don’t believe in it. We argued about it constantly. I thought of all those billions dead, the a

Rydell opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Myself, I’m a card-carrying member of Cease Upon the Midnight.”

Rydell wasn’t sure what ‘card-carrying’ meant, but Cease Upon the Midnight was mutual self-help euthanasia, and illegal in Te

“Excuse me, ma’am” Rydell said, “but I’ve got to try to catch a little sleep here.”

“You go right ahead, young man. You do look rather tired.”

Rydell closed his eyes, put his head back, and stayed that way until he felt the rotors tilting over into descent-mode.

“Tommy Lee Jones” the black man said. His hair was shaped like an upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it. Sort of like a Shriner’s fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall and his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide. The shirt was lemon-yellow and printed with life-size handguns, in full color, all different kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy blue shorts that came to way below his knees, Raiders socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the size of five-dollar coins.

“You got the wrong guy” Rydell said.

“No, man, you look like him.”

“Like who?”

“Tommy Lee Jones.”

“Who?”

“Was an actor, man.” For a second Rydell thought this guy had to be with Reverend Fallon. Even had those shades, like Sublett’s contacts. “You Rydell. Ran you on Separated at Birth.”

“You Freddie?” Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You sca

This Freddie extended a very soft hand and Rydell shook it. “You got luggage?” Freddie asked.