Virtual Light

“Any coffee left?”

“I will pump stove.”

“Put a little drop of Three-in-One in that hole by the piston-arm, Scooter. Leather gasket in there. Keeps it soft.”

She didn’t see that first bullet, but it must have hit a wire or something, coming through, because the lights came on. She did see the second one, or anyway the hole it blew in the leather-grain plastic. Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can’t watch it happening.

Then she got down on her hands and her knees and started crawling. Because she couldn’t just stand there and wait for the next one. When she got up by the door, she could see her black pants crumpled up on the floor there, beside a set of keys on a gray, leather-grain plastic tab. There was this smell from when he’d shot the gun into the floor. Maybe from the carpet burning, too, because she could see that the edges of the holes were scorched and sort of melted.

Now she could hear him yelling, somewhere outside, hoarse and hollow and chased by echoes. Held her breath. Yelling how they (who?) did the best PR in the world, how they’d sold Hu

“Down by the door, here. Driver side.”

It was Rydell, the door on that side standing open.

“He left the keys in here” she said.

“Think he’s gone down there where the Dream Walls franchise used to be.”

“What if he comes back?”

31. Driver side

Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?”

She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell’s head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up?

“Why don’t you lie down flat on the floor back there…” His voice from the driver’s seat.

“Lie down?”

“Minimum silhouette.”

“Huh?”

“He’s going to start shooting. When I do this—” Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm.

Rydell must’ve gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission.

She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.

Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV’s probably weren’t meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.

“Well fuck” she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they’d had to keep explaining to her how’d she’d come down on her head, and each time they did, she’d forget.

She was back in Ski

Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.

Ski

“He’s right” Chevette’s mother said.

“I-I am?”

“About history, how they change it.”

“Mom, you—”

“Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn’t any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.”

Chevette started to cry.

“Chevette-Marie” her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, “you’ve gone and hurt your head.”

“How well you say you know this guy?” she asked.

Rydell’s SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he’d had time and a broom, he’d have swept it all out. As it was, he’d had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, otherwise Highway Patrol would’ve seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. “I worked with him in L.A.” he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.

“I was just wondering if he’ll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.”

“Didn’t know her” Rydell said, “I met her, on the plane. If Sublett’s some kind of plant, then the whole world’s a plot.” He shrugged. “Then I could start worrying about you, say.” As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.

Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’s head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a.zz to the screen, it looked like.