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Kid Afrika came cruising into Dog Solitude on the last day in November, his vintage Dodge chauffeured by a white girl named Cherry Chesterfield.
He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.
She was accompanied, on these walks, by an armed remote, a tiny Dornier helicopter that rose from its unseen rooftop nest when she stepped down from the deck. It could hover almost silently, and was programmed to avoid her line of sight. There was something wistful about the way it followed her, as though it were an expensive but unappreciated Christmas gift.
He dreamed about Kid Afrika, about the Kid’s car, and in his dreams the two blurred together and Kid’s teeth were little chrome skulls.
She’d seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, crosshatched with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens, you couldn’t see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image.
There was a voice somewhere, an angry child’s voice stringing obscenities together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it.
“No. I heard stories, though. Some great stories. A tug pilot claimed there were feral children living in a mothballed Japanese drug factory. There’s a whole new apocrypha out there, really—ghost ships, lost cities.… There’s a pathos to it, when you think about it. I mean, every bit of it’s locked into orbit. All of it manmade, known, owned, mapped. Like watching myths take root in a parking lot. But I suppose people need that, don’t they?”
It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn’t, except their clothes fit right and you knew they’d bought them new.
Gerald’s office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water.
Gomi. Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century’s systematic dumping.
London’s relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko’s eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build.
“You know where Case is, Finn? Maybe she’s after him.…” “Case got out of it. Rolled up a few good scores after you split, then he kicked it in the head and quit clean. You did the same, maybe you wouldn’t be freezing your buns off in an alley, right? Last I heard, he had four kids.…”
Finn, Sally called it, and it was evident that this Finn had been a friend or associate of hers. But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?
Tick had gotten to his feet and was gingerly massaging his arm. “Christ,” he said, “I was sure she’d dislocated it for me.…” “She did,” Colin said, “but she was so angry when she left that she forgot to save that part of the configuration.”
