Idoru (2 page)

“So I'll remember,” the man said, reading Laney's eyes.

“Remember what?”

“Not to forget. Sit down.”

Laney sat on something only vaguely chairlike, an attenuated construction of black alloy rods and laminated Hexcel. The table was round and approximately the size of a steering wheel. A votive flame licked the air, behind blue glass. The Japanese man with the plaid shirt and metal-framed glasses blinked furiously. Laney watched the large man settle himself, another slender chair-thing lost alarmingly beneath a sumo-sized bulk that appeared to be composed entirely of muscle.

“Done with the jet lag, are we?”

“I took pills.” Remembering the SST's silence, its lack of apparent motion.

“Pills,” the man said. “Hotel adequate?”

“Yes,” Laney said. “Ready for the interview.”

“Well then,” vigorously rubbing his face with heavily scarred hands. He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him for the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took in the man's outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended to fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no particular color in the darkness of the Trial. Open from collar to breastbone. Straining against abnormal mass. Exposed flesh tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their variety of shape and texture. “Well, then?”

Laney looked up from the scars. “I'm here for a job interview.”

“Are you?”

“Are you the interviewer?”

“‘Interviewer’?” The ambiguous grimace revealing an obvious dental prosthesis.

Laney turned to the Japanese in the round glasses. “Colin Laney.”

“Shinya Yamazaki,” the man said, extending his hand. They shook. “We spoke on the telephone.”

“You're conducting the interview?”

A flurry of blinks. “I'm sorry, no,” the man said. And then, “I am a student of existential sociology.”

“I don't get it,” Laney said. The two opposite said nothing. Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.

“You're Australian,” Laney said to the one-eared man.

“Tazzie,” the man corrected. “Sided with the South in the Troubles.”

“Let's start over,” Laney suggested. “‘Paragon-Asia Dataflow.’ You them?”

“Persistent bugger.”

“Goes with the territory,” Laney said. “Professionally, I mean.”

“Fair enough.” The man raised his eyebrows, one of which was bisected by a twisted pink cable of scar tissue. “Rez, then. What do you think of
him?
”

“You mean the rock star?” Laney asked, after struggling with a basic problem of context.

A nod. The man regarded Laney with utmost gravity.

“From Lo/Rez? The band?” Half Irish, half Chinese. A broken nose, never repaired. Long green eyes.

“What do I
think
of him?”

In Kathy Torrance's system of things, the singer had been reserved a special disdain. She had viewed him as a living fossil, an annoying survival from an earlier, less evolved era. He was at once massively and meaninglessly famous, she maintained, just as he was both massively and meaninglessly wealthy. Kathy thought of celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the phlogiston of the ancients, something spread evenly at creation through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specific conditions, around certain individuals and their careers. Rez, in Kathy's view, had simply lasted far too long. Monstrously long. He was affecting the unity of her theory. He was defying the proper order of the food chain. Perhaps there was nothing big enough to eat him, not even Slitscan. And while Lo/Rez, the band, still extruded product on an annoyingly regular basis, in a variety of media, their singer stubbornly refused to destroy himself, murder someone, become active in politics, admit to an interesting substance-abuse problem or an arcane sexual addiction—indeed to do anything at all worthy of an opening segment on Slitscan. He glimmered, dully perhaps, but steadily, just beyond Kathy Torrance's reach. Which was, Laney had always assumed, the real reason for her hating him so.

“Well,” Laney said, after some thought, and feeling a peculiar compulsion to attempt a truthful answer, “I remember buying their first album. When it came out.”

“Title?” The one-eared man grew graver still.

“‘Lo Rez Skyline,’” Laney said, grateful for whatever minute synaptic event had allowed the recall. “But I couldn't tell you how many they've put out since.”

“Twenty-six, not counting compilations,” said Mr. Yamazaki, straightening his glasses.

Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding. The walls of the Trial seemed to grow closer.

“If you aren't going to tell me what this is about,” he said to the one-eared man, “I'm going back to the hotel. I'm tired.”

“Keith Alan Blackwell,” extending his hand. Laney allowed his own to be taken and briefly shaken. The man's palm felt like a piece of athletic equipment. “‘Keithy.’ We'll have a few drinks and a little chat.”

“First you tell me whether or not you're from Paragon-Asia,” Laney suggested.

“Firm in question's a couple of lines of code in a machine in a backroom in Lygon Street,” Blackwell said. “A dummy, but you could say it's
our
dummy, if that makes you feel better.”

“I'm not sure it does,” Laney said. “You fly me over to interview for a job, now you're telling me the company I'm supposed to be interviewing for doesn't exist.”

“It
exists
,” said Keith Alan Blackwell. “It's on the machine in Lygon Street.”

A waitress arrived. She wore a shapeless gray cotton boilersuit and cosmetic bruises.

“Big draft. Kirin. Cold one. What's yours, Laney?”

“Iced coffee.”

“Coke Lite, please,” said the one who'd introduced himself as Yamazaki.

“Fine,” said the earless Blackwell, glumly, as the waitress vanished into the gloom.

“I'd appreciate it if you could explain to me what we're doing here,” Laney said. He saw that Yamazaki was scribbling frantically on the screen of a small notebook, the lightpen flashing faintly in the dark. “Are you taking this down?” Laney asked.

“Sorry, no. Making note of waitress' costume.”

“Why?” Laney asked.

“Sorry,” said Yamazaki, saving what he'd written and turning off the notebook. He tucked the pen carefully into a recess on the side. “I am a student of such things. It is my habit to record ephemera of popular culture. Her costume raises the question: does it merely reflect the theme of this club, or does it represent some deeper response to trauma of earthquake and subsequent reconstruction?”

2. Lo Rez Skyline

They met in a jungle clearing.

Kelsey had done the vegetation: big bright Rousseau leaves, cartoon orchids flecked with her idea of tropical colors (which reminded Chia of that mall chain that sold “organic” cosmetic products in shades utterly unknown to nature). Zona, the only one telepresent who'd ever seen anything like a real jungle, had done the audio, providing birdcalls, invisible but realistically dopplering bugs, and the odd vegetational rustle artfully suggesting not snakes but some shy furry thing, soft-pawed and curious.

The light, such as there was, filtered down through high, green canopies, entirely too Disneyesque for Chia—though there was no real need for “light” in a place that consisted of nothing else.

Zona, her blue Aztec death's-head burning bodiless, ghosts of her blue hands flickering like strobe-lit doves: “Clearly, this dickless whore, the disembodied, has contrived to ensnare his soul.” Stylized lightning zig-zags rose around the crown of the neon skull in deliberate emphasis.

Chia wondered what she'd really said. Was “dickless whore” an artifact of instantaneous on-line translation, or was that really something you could or would say in Mexican?

“Waiting hard con-firm from Tokyo chapter,” Kelsey reminded them. Kelsey's father was a Houston tax lawyer, something of his particular species of biz-speak tending to enter his daughter around meeting time; also a certain ability to
wait
that Chia found irritating, particularly as manifested by a saucer-eyed nymph-figure out of some old
anime
. Which Chia was double damn sure Kelsey would
not
look like realtime, were they ever to meet that way. (Chia herself was presenting currently as an only slightly tweaked, she felt, version of how the mirror told her she actually looked. Less nose, maybe. Lips a little fuller. But that was it. Almost.)

“Exactly,” Zona said, miniature stone calendars whirling angrily in her eye-holes. “We
wait
. While
he
moves ever closer to his fate. We wait. If my girls and I were to wait like this, the Rats would sweep us from the avenues.” Zona was, she claimed, the leader of a knife-packing
chilanga
girl gang. Not the meanest in Mexico City, maybe, but serious enough about turf and tribute. Chia wasn't sure she believed it, but it made for some interesting attitude in meetings.

“Really?” Kelsey drew her nymph-self up with elvin dignity, batting
manga
-doe lashes in disbelief. “In
that
case, Zona Rosa, why don't you just get yourself over to
Tokyo
and find out what's really going
on?
I mean, did Rez
say
that, that he was going to marry her, or what? And while you're at it, find out whether she
exists
or not, okay?”

The calendars stopped on a dime.

The blue hands vanished.

The skull seemed to recede some infinite distance yet remain perfectly in focus, clear in every textural detail.

Old trick, Chia thought. Stalling.

“You know that I cannot do that,” Zona said. “I have responsibilities here. Maria Conchita, the Rat warlord, has stated that—”

“As if
we
care, right?” Kelsey launched herself straight up, her nymphness a pale blur against the rising tangle of green, until she hovered just below the canopy, a beam of sunlight flattering one impossible cheekbone. “Zona Rosa's full of shit!” she bellowed, not at all nymphlike.

“Don't fight,” Chia said. “This is
important
. Please.”

Kelsey descended, instantly. “Then
you
go,” she said.

“Me?”

“You,” Kelsey said.

“I can't,” Chia said. “To Tokyo? How could I?”

“In an airplane.”

“We don't have your kind of money, Kelsey.”

“You've got a passport. We know you do. Your mother had to get one for you when she was doing the custody thing. And we know that you are, to put it delicately, ‘between schools,’ yes?”

“Yes—”

“Then what's the prob?”

“Your father's a big tax lawyer!”

“I know,” Kelsey said. “And he flies back and forth, all over the world, making money. But you know what else he earns, Chia?”

“What?”

“Frequent-flyer points.
Big-ass
frequent-flyer points. On Air Magellan.”

“Interesting,” said the Aztec skull.

“Tokyo,” said the mean nymph.

Shit, Chia thought.

The wall opposite Chia's bed was decorated with a six-by-six laser blowup of the cover of
Lo Rez Skyline
, their first album. Not the one you got if you bought it today, but the original, the group shot they'd done for that crucial first release on the indie Dog Soup label. She'd pulled the file off the club's site the week she'd joined, found a place near the Market that could print it out that big. It was still her favorite, and not just, as her mother too frequently suggested, because they all still looked so young. Her mother didn't like that the members of Lo/Rez were nearly as old as she was. Why wasn't Chia into music by people her own age?

—Please, mother, who?

—That Chrome Koran, say.

—Gag, mother.

Chia suspected that her mother's perception of time differed from her own in radical and mysterious ways. Not just in the way that a month, to Chia's mother, was not a very long time, but in the way that her mother's “now” was such a narrow and literal thing. News-governed, Chia believed. Cable-fed. A present honed to whatever very instant of a helicopter traffic report.

Chia's “now” was digital, effortlessly elastic, instant recall supported by global systems she'd never have to bother comprehending.

Lo Rez Skyline
had been released, if you could call it that, a week (well, six days) before Chia had been born. She estimated that no hard copies would have reached Seattle in time for her nativity, but she liked to believe there had been listeners here even then, PacRim visionaries netting new sounds from indies as obscure, even, as East Teipei's Dog Soup. Surely the opening chords of “Positron Premonition” had shoved molecules of actual Seattle air, somewhere, in somebody's basement room, at the fateful moment of her birth. She knew that, somehow, just as she knew that “Stuck Pixel,” barely even a song, just Lo noodling around on some pawnshop guitar, must have been playing
somewhere
when her mother, who'd spoken very little English at that point, chose Chia's name from something cycling past on the Shopping Channel, the phonetic caress of those syllables striking her there in Postnatal Recovery as some optimally gentle combination of sounds Italian and English; her baby, red-haired even then, subsequently christened Chia Pet McKenzie (somewhat, Chia later gathered, to the amazement of her absent Canadian father).

These thoughts arriving in the pre-alarm dark, just before the infrared winkie on her alarm clock stuttered silently to the halogen gallery-spot, telling it to illuminate Lo/Rez in all their Dog Soup glory. Rez with his shirt open (but entirely ironically) and Lo with his grin and a prototype mustache that hadn't quite grown in.

Hi, guys. Fumbling for her remote. Zapping infrared into the shadows. Zap: Espressomatic. Zap: cubic space heater.

Beneath her pillow the unfamiliar shape of her passport, like a vintage game cartridge, hard navy blue plastic, textured like leatherette, with its stamped gold seal and eagle. The Air Magellan tickets in their limp beige plastic folder from the travel agent in the mall.