Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

by William Gibson

The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

Which was how he wound up going to bed with a lawyer—one who smelled like a million dollars, talked dirty, slid all around, and wore underwear from Milan, which was in Italy.

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.

Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn’t always quite entirely to be trusted.

Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

Rydell’s roommate, Kevin Tarkovsky, wore a bone through his nose and worked in a wind-surfing boutique called Just Blow Me.

“Fucking Yankees,” he said to the Porsche roadster. It was what his father would have said, but he had a hard time now connecting it to anything.

He couldn’t imagine what Hernandez was doing here, but then he’d never have imagined that Hernandez drove a white Daihatsu Sneaker with an animated hologram of a waterfall on the hood.

You looked at that minister’s face and you felt like he’d seen every sad-ass thing there was, so maybe you could even believe what he was saying.

When the fever broke and rolled away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out to there and over the rim of sickness, her hair fell out in dry clumps, stuck to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.

One night they were listening to a country station out of Georgia and “Me And Jesus’ll Whup Your Heathen Ass” came on, this hardshell Pentecostal Metal thing about abortion and ayatollahs and all the rest of it.

And here he could see Freddie with his butt propped against the front fender of the Patriot, bobbing his head to something on earphones, the lyrics or whatever sliding around the edges of his sneakers, animated in red LEDs.

“Jesus,” said Chevette Washington, like somebody talking in their sleep, “what are you doing?” He didn’t know, but hadn’t he just gone and done it?