Virtual Light

She hadn’t eaten that ravioli and she hadn’t eaten any since and she knew she never would.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she’d moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, ’til she’d wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty. And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.

“You okay?” Nigel’s greasy hair in his eyes, the red ball in his hand, a cocktail toothpick with a spray of amber cellophane stuck in the corner of his mouth.

For a long time she’d wondered if maybe the fever hadn’t burned it out, hadn’t accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she’d gotten used to the bridge, to Ski

Now that was broken.

“ ’Vette?”

That jumper she’d seen, a girl, hauled up and over the side of a Zodiac with a pale plastic hook, white and limp, water ru

Chevette bent over and threw up, managing to get most of it into an open, empty paint can, its lip thickly scabbed with the gray primer that Nigel used to even out his dodgier mends.

“Hey, hey” Nigel dancing around her, unwilling in his shy bearish way to touch her, his big hands hovering, anxious that she was sick and worried she’d puke over his work, something that might ultimately require the in-depth, never-before-attempted act of cleaning out, rather than up, his narrow nest. “Water? Want water?” Offering her the old coffee can he kept there to quench hot metal. Oily flux afloat atop it like gas beside a dock, and she nearly heaved again, but sat down instead.

Sammy Sal dead, maybe Ski

“Chev?”

He’d put the coffee can down and was offering her an open can of beer instead. She waved it aside, coughing.

Nigel shifted, foot to foot, then turned and peered through the triangular shard of lucite that served as his one window. It was vibrating with the wind. “Stormin’” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. “Stormin’ down rain.”

Ru

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took the beer from Nigel. Took a sip. It was warm. She handed it back to him. He took the toothpick from his mouth, started to raise the can for a swallow, thought better of it, put it down beside his welding-torch.

“Somethin’s wrong” he said. “I can tell.”

She massaged her wrists. Twin rings of rash coming up, pink and moist, where the plastic had gripped her. Picked up the ceramic knife and closed it automatically.

“Yeah” she said, “yeah something’s wrong…”

“What’s wrong, Chevette?” He shook hair out of his eyes like a worried dog, fingers ru

“No” she said, not really hearing him.

“Steel’s what you want for a messenger bike. Weight. Big basket up front. Not cardboard with some crazy aramid shit wrapped around it, weighs about as much as a sandwich. What if you hit a b-bus? Bang into the back of it? You got more m-mass than the b-bike, you flip over and c-crack open crack your…” His hands twisting, trying more accurately to frame the physics of the accident he was seeing. Chevette looked up and saw that he was trembling.

“Nigel” she said, standing up, “somebody just put that thing on me for a joke, understand?”

“It moved” he said. “I saw it.”

“Well, not a fu

Nigel shook his hair back into his eyes, shy and pleased. “You had that knife. Cuts good.” Then he frowned. “You need a steel knife…”

“I know” she said. “I gotta go now…” Bending to pick up the paint can. “I’ll toss this. Sorry.”

“It’s a storm” Nigel said. “Don’t go out in a storm.”

“I’ve got to” she said. “I’ll be okay.” Thinking how he’d kill Nigel, too, if he found her here. Hurt him. Scare him.

“I cut them off.” Holding up the red ball.

“Get rid of that” she said.

“Why?”

“Look at this rash.”

Nigel dropped the ball like it was poison. It bounced out of sight. He wiped his fingers down the filthy front of his t-shirt.

“Nigel, you got a screwdriver you’ll give me? A flathead?”

“Mine are all worn down…” The white animals ru

“I want one that’s all worn down.”

The right hand pounced, came up with its prize, blackhandled and slightly bent.

“That’s the one” she said, zipping up Ski

“I know” she said, standing there with a paint can with vomit in it in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. “I know you do.”

Baffled by the patchwork of plastic that roofed the upper deck, the rain was following waste-lines and power-cables, emerging overhead at crazy angles, in random cascades, miniature Niagaras rushing off corrugated iron and plywood. From the entrance to Nigel’s workshop, Chevette watched an awning collapse, gallons of silver water splashing all at once from what had been a taut concavity, a bulging canvas bathtub that gave way with a sharp crack, instantly becoming several yards of flapping, sodden cloth. Nothing here was ever pla