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Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal. Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.
In the instant of putting Gunhead through the Schonbrunn’s locked-and-armed Benedict Canyon gate, Rydell had experienced a fleeting awareness of something very high, very pure, and quite clinically empty; the doing of the thing, the not-thinking; that weird adrenal exultation and the losing of every more troublesome aspect of self.
“What the fuck’s wrong with him?” asked one of the cops. “He’s got allergies,” Rydell said through gritted teeth; they’d cuffed his hands behind his back and it hurt like hell. “You gotta get him to Emergency.” Sublett opened his eyes, or tried to. “Berry …” Rydell remembered the name of the movie he’d seen on television. “Miracle Mile,” he said. Sublett squinted up at him. “Never seen it,” Sublett said, and fainted.
Rydell knew that Kevin didn’t wind surf, and never had, but that he did bring home disks from the shop and play them on a goggle-set, going over the various moves involved,
“She isn’t here,” Yamazaki said, his hand on Skinner’s shoulder. “Don’t you remember?” “Hasn’t been,” Skinner said. “Twenty, thirty years. Motherfucker. Time.”
How she felt, now, was just the way she’d felt that day she’d come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there but a can of ravioli in a pot on the stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it. 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.
How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them. Took a mother’s leaving for you to know she’d ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everything, like weather. And Skinner and the Coleman stove and the oil she had to drop into the little hole to keep its leather gasket soft so the pump would work. You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up.
“How come the stuff in those glasses has everybody’s tail in a twist, anyway?” “They’re going to rebuild San Francisco. From the ground up, basically. Like they’re doing to Tokyo. They’ll start by layering a grid of seventeen complexes into the existing infrastructure. Eighty-story office/residential, retail/residence in the base. Completely self-sufficient. Variable-pitch parabolic reflectors, steam-generators. New buildings, man; they’ll eat their own sewage.” “Who’ll eat sewage?” “The buildings. They’re going to grow them, Rydell. Like they’re doing now in Tokyo. Like the maglev tunnel.”
“I don’t get it.” “You never will. But the people who know where to buy, the people who’ve seen where the footprints of the towers fall, they will, Rydell. They’ll get it all.”
She poured milk on her cornflakes. It was the kind you mixed up from powder. Had that thin chalky look. The only kind Sublett’s mother had. Sublett was allergic to milk.
Got her up here. I could still do that. Why? Hell. Because. See people dying, you just walk by like it was television?
When they’d got to L.A. and got a room in a motel, Chevette had been kind of excited, because she’d always wanted to do that. Because her mother had always seemed to have real good times when she went to motels.
Had this weird calm like somebody who knew for sure he was going to die; like he’d sort of made peace with it, except he’d still get upset about his allergies.
His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he’d come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.
