Virtual Light

As she’d gotten stronger, and her new hair grew in, she’d started ranging farther from the room on top of the tower. Not into either city, at first, though she’d walked over to Oakland a couple of times, over the cantilever, and looked out at it. Things felt different over there, though she was never sure why. But where she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all wrapped in it, all the people hanging and hustling and doing what they did, and the way the whole thing grew a little, changed a little, every day. There wasn’t anything like that, not that she knew of, not up in Oregon.

At first she didn’t even know that it made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever had left her a little crazy, but one day she’d decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she’d have to get used to it.

But it turned out you could be sort of happy and restless at the same time, so she started keeping back a little of Ski

The Haight sort of creeped her out, too, even though there were stretches that felt almost like you were on the bridge, nobody normal in sight and people doing things right out in public, like the cops were never going to come at all. But she wasn’t ever scared, on the bridge, maybe because there were always people around she knew, people who lived there and knew Ski

One day on Haight she saw this shop called Colored People and she couldn’t figure out what it sold. There was a curtain behind the window and a few things set out in front of that: cactus in pots, big rusty hunks of metal, and a bunch of these little steel things, polished and bright. Rings and things. Little rods with round balls on the ends. They were hung on the needles of the cactus and spread out on the rusted metal. She decided she’d open the door and just look in, because she’d seen a couple of people going in and out and knew it wasn’t locked. A big fat guy in white coveralls, with his head all shaved, coming out, whistling, and these two tall women, black-haired, like handsome crows, all dressed in black, going in. She just wondered what it was.

She stuck her head in there. There was a woman with short red hair behind a counter, and every wall covered with these bright cartoony pictures, colors that made your eyes jump, all snakes and dragons and everything. So many pictures it was hard to take it in, so it wasn’t until the woman said come on, don’t just block the door, and Chevette had come in, that she saw this woman wore a sleeveless fla

Now Chevette had seen tattoos in the Juvenile Center, and on the street before that, but those were the kind you did yourself, with ink and needles, thread and an old ballpoint. She walked over and took a good long look at the colors exploding between the woman’s breasts—which, though she was maybe thirty, weren’t as big as Chevette’s—and there was an octopus there, a rose, bolts of blue lightning, all of it tangling together, no untouched skin at all.

“You want something” the woman said, “or you just looking?”

Chevette blinked. “No” she heard herself say, “but I was sort of wondering what those little metal things are, in the window.”

The woman swung a big black book around on the counter, like a school binder except its covers were chrome-studded black leather. Flipped it open and Chevette was looking at this guy’s thing, a big one, just hanging there. There were two little steel balls on either side of its wedge-shaped head.

Chevette just sort of grunted.

“Call that an amphalang” the woman said. She started flipping through the album. “Barbells” she said. “Septum spike. Labret stud. That’s a chunk ring. This one’s called a milkchurn. These are bomb weights. Surgical steel, niobium, white gold, fourteen-carat.” She flipped it back to the jim with the bolt, sideways through the end of it. Maybe it was a trick, Chevette thought, a trick picture.

“That’s gotta hurt” Chevette said.

“Not as much as you’d think” this big deep voice, “and then it starts to feel jus’ good…”

Chevette looked up at this black guy, his big white grin, all those teeth, a micropore filtration-mask pulled down under his chin, and that was how she’d met Samuel Saladin DuPree.

Two days later she saw him again in Union Square, hanging with a bunch of bike messengers. She’d already put messengers down as something to watch for in the city. They had clothes and hair like nobody else, and bikes with neon and light-up wheels, handlebars carved up and over like scorpion-tails. Helmets with little radios built in. Either they were going somewhere fast or they were just goofing, hanging, drinking coffee.

He was standing there with his legs over either side of the cross-tube of his bike, eating half a sandwich. Music was coming out of the black-flecked pink frame, mostly bass, and he was sort of bopping to it. She edged up to get a better look at the bike, how it was made, the intricacy of its brakes and shifters pulling her straight in. Beauty.

“Dang” he said, around a mouthful of sandwich, “dang, my am-phalang. Where did you get those shoes?”

They were Ski

“Here.” He handed her the other half of his sandwich. “I’m full already.”

“Your bike” she said, taking the sandwich.

“What about it?”

“It’s… it’s…”

“Like it?”

“Uh-huh!”

He gri

“I like the wheels” Chevette said.

“Well” he said, “that’s just flash. Lets some motherfucker see you ’fore he runs you over, y’know?”

Chevette touched the handlebars. Felt that music.

“Eat that sandwich” he said. “Look like you need it.”

She did, and she did, and that was how they got to talking.

Shouldering their bikes up the plywood stairs, Chevette telling him about the Japanese girl, how she fell out of that elevator. How she, Chevette, wouldn’t even have been at that party if she hadn’t been standing right there, right then. Sammy grunting, his Fluoro-Rimz gone dead opal now they weren’t turning.

“Who was it throwing this do, Chev? You think to ask anybody that?”

Remembering that Maria. “Cody. Said it was Cody’s party…”

Sammy Sal stopped, his brows lifting. “Huh. Cody Harwood?”

She shrugged, the paper bike next to weightless on her shoulder. “Du

“You know who that is?”

“No.” Reaching the platform, putting the bike down to wheel it.

“That’s some serious money. Advertising. Harwood Levine, but that was his father.”