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He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.
There was a smell in the house; it had always been there. It belonged to time and the salt air and the entropic nature of expensive houses built too close to the sea.
The choice of bedrooms was instinctive. The master bedroom was mined with the triggers of old pain. The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from receptor sites in her brain.
Kumiko stared as Sally drew her past arrays of Coronation plate and jowled Churchill teapots. “This is gomi,” Kumiko ventured, when they paused at an intersection. Rubbish. In Tokyo, worn and useless things were landfill. Sally grinned wolfishly. “This is England. Gomi’s a major natural resource. Gomi and talent. What I’m looking for now. Talent.”
She knew Eddy’s sure things: hadn’t Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the beaches were beautiful and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot for a little working vacation that had already stretched into the longest month Mona could remember. Well, it was fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only beaches that weren’t private were polluted, dead fish rolling belly-up in the shallows.
About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to come by and cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the bleach smell was the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable cocktail, all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street.
From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant, like he’d warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he’d cut the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking its white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture’s coming.
Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn’t there? And if that something was something, then wasn’t that part of the universe too?
And books, old books with covers made of cloth glued over cardboard. Slick hadn’t ever known how heavy books were. They had a sad smell, old books.
“It’s not the Ritz,” he said, “but we’ll try to make you comfortable.” Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.
He’d blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious wilson. Either he didn’t want to be reminded or else there were people here who’d remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked about the place, same way he’d talk about anybody who told him his scams wouldn’t work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision.
“Next time you should try the cream,” he said. “Couldn’t get it after the war. Rain blew in from Germany and the cows weren’t right.”
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.
“They dealt. ’Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me.…” “How were they weird?” “Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ’n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?” “What?” “They’re right.”
In a restaurant she might even be able to get a cop, because now she figured she knew what the deal was. Snuff. Lanette had told her about that. How there were men who’d pay to have girls fixed up to look like other people, then kill them. Had to be rich, really rich.
He sighed. “Missy worries too much. You’re free now. Enjoy it.” “I do hear voices, Porphyre.” “Don’t we all, missy?” “No,” she said, “not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?” He smirked. “I’m not African.” “But when you were a child …” “When I was a child,” Porphyre said, “I was white.” “Oh …” He laughed. “Religions, missy?”
And had Sally learned what she’d wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking goodbyes.
But where could she hide? she asked. She had very little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien. Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. “For the price of a ticket.” The bulgy silver shapes of the trains. The soft old seats in gray and green. And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement …
At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko’s father’s study. “Old men,” she’d said, “they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true sleep.”
Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture.
“She has Angela Mitchell with her. She’s gone to find the thing that all that comes from. Where we were. A place called New Jersey.”
“Yes, I know.” She turned to Bobby. “Well? You promised you’d tell me the why of When It Changed.” The Finn laughed, a very strange sound. “Ain’t a why, lady. More like it’s a what. Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that’s the what, and the what’s the why.”
