Virtual Light

“Its purpose, Ski

“Makes a round hole bigger. Keeps it round, too, you use it right. Sheet-metal, mostly, but it’ll do plastic, synthetics. Anything thin, fairly rigid. Short of glass.”

“You have many tools, Ski

“Never learned how to really use ’em, though.”

30. Carnival of souls

But you built this room?”

“You ever watch a real carpenter work, Scooter?”

“Once, yes” Yamazaki said, remembering a demonstration at a festival, the black blades flying, the smell of cut cedar. He remembered the look of the lumber, creamy and flawless. A tea-house was being erected, to stand for the duration of the festival. “Wood is very scarce in Tokyo, Ski

“Not that easy to come by here” Ski

“This is by consensus?”

“Just common sense…” Ski

A procession was making its way toward San Francisco, along the upper deck, and Yamazaki instantly regretted having left his notebook in Ski

In the narrow, enclosed space, it was impossible to view the procession as anything other than a succession of participants, in their ones and twos, but it was a procession nonetheless, and clearly funereal, perhaps memorial, in its purpose. First came children, seven by his hasty count, one behind the other, in ragged, ash-dusted clothing. Each child wore a mask of painted plaster, clearly intended to represent Shapely. But there was nothing funereal in their progress; several were skipping, delighted with the attention they were receiving.

Yamazaki, on his way to purchase hot soup, had halted between a bookseller’s wagon and a stall hung with caged birds. He felt awkward there, very much out of place, with the unaccustomed shape of the insulated canister under his arm. If this was a funeral, perhaps there was some required gesture, some attitude he might be expected to assume? He glanced at the bookseller, a tall woman in a greasy sheepskin vest, her gray hair bound back into a knot transfixed by two pink plastic chopsticks.

Her stock, which consisted primarily of yellowing paperbacks in various stages of disintegration, each in a clear plastic bag, was stacked before her on her wagon. She had been crying her wares, when she saw the children masked as Shapely; she’d been calling out strange phrases that he supposed were titles: “Valley of the dolls, blood meridian, chainsaw savvy …” Yamazaki, struck by the queer American poetry, had been on the verge of asking after Chainsaw Savvy. Then she’d fallen silent, and he too had seen the children.

But there was nothing in her ma

The keeper of the bird stall, a pale man with a carefully groomed black mustache, was scratching his stomach, his expression mild and blank.

After the children came five dancers in the skeleton-suits of La Noche de Muerte, though Yamazaki saw that several of the masks were only half-masks, micropore respirators molded to resemble the gri

Then two tall figures, black men in an ugly beige face-paint, costumed as surgeons, in pale green gowns and long gloves of scarlet latex. Were they the doctors, predominantly white, who had failed to rescue so many, prior to Shapely’s advent, or did they somehow represent the Brazilian biomedical firms who had so successfully and lucratively overseen Shapely’s transformation, the illiterate prostitute become the splendid source? And after them, the first of the bodies, wrapped and bound in layers of milky plastic, each one tiding a two-wheeled cart of the kind manufactured here to transport baggage or bulk foodstuffs. The carts, temporarily equipped with narrow pallets of plywood, were steered along, front and back, by men and women of no special costume or demeanor, though Yamazaki noted that they looked neither to the right nor left, and seemed to make no eye-contact with the onlookers.

“There’s Nigel” the bookseller said, “and probably built the cart they’re taking him off on.”

“These are the victims of the storm?” Yarnazaki ventured.

“Not Nigel” the woman said, narrowing her eyes as she saw that he was a stranger. “Not with those holes in him…”

Seven in all, each to its cart, and then a man and a woman, in identical paper coveralls, carrying between them a laminated lithograph of Shapely, one of those saccharine portraits, large of eye and hollow of cheek, that invariably left Yamazaki feeling slightly queasy.

But then a small, red, capering figure. A tailless, hornless devil, perhaps, dancing with an enormous gun, an ancient AK-47, its bolt long gone, the curved magazine carved from wood, and all of it dipped, once, into red enamel, worn now by hands, by processions.

And Yamazaki knew, without asking, that the red dancer represented the way of Shapely’s going, like some terrible base stupidity waiting at the core of things.

“Ski

“Can’t keep ’em out here. Can’t throw ’em in the water. City sticks on that. We pass ’em over for cremation. Some people, they don’t hold with fire, they bury ’em over on Treasure. Kind of people live out on Treasure, you kind of wonder if that makes much sense.”

“In the procession there were many references to Shapely, to his story.”

Ski

“Children masked as J.D. Shapely, two black men painted as white doctors, Shapely’s portrait…”

Ski

“And at the end, a small figure, red. Dancing. With an assault rifle.”

“Uh-huh.” Ski

Yamazaki activated the notebook’s transcription function.

Me, you know, I never even got it. Off him, I mean. That piece of him in everybody now. Couldn’t see the point at my age and anyway I never held with medicine. Happened I never got the other kind either, not that I didn’t have plenty of chances. You’re too young to remember how it felt, though. Oh, I know, I know you all think you live in all the times at once, everything recorded for you, it’s all there to play back. Digital. That’s all that is, though: playback. You still don’t remember what it felt like, watching them pile up like that. Not here so much, bad as it was, but Thailand, Africa, Brazil. Jesus, Scooter. That thing was just romping on us. But slow, slow, slowmotion thing. Those retroviruses are. One man told me once, and he had the old kind, and died of it, how we’d lived in this fu