Yarn (9 page)

I undid the front of my slacks. My hard root was covered with a layer as thin as paint-the blue flowered patterned sensi-silk of my Mr. Troy. Grasping her coat, I moved myself toward her buttonhole.

SEATTLEHAMA: SKIVVÉ BATTLES IN THE FOUNDATION WAR

Each morning I would head to the cuisine court down the hallway for cups of double-concentration java and ice curry doughnuts for breakfast. At noon I picked up whitened fish rolls, hairy pork sticks, and juice pizzas. The rest of my days were filled with cleaning the lint trays, carrying boxes, and unpacking crates of liqui-yarn. I asked Kira about tools, about yarn, about her skivvé. Her answers were in warTalk so I didn't learn much, but for a while I was glad to be safe.

Worm Jacket and Giraffe came by daily to chat and see what she was up to. Once after Kira left them to attend to a customer, I stepped beside the two men.

"How do you find out if someone died?" I whispered.

Worm Jacket peered at me oddly. "Who?"

"Someone I met a while ago."

"Good luck getting real news in Seattlehama!" scoffed Giraffe.

"If it's not on a coupon," quipped Worm Jacket. "I could check for you. Who died?"

I recalled drap-de-Berry's frozen scream. "I was just asking."

"Was it another saleswarrior?" asked Giraffe.

"It was just something I saw in a hallway a while ago."

"They don't tolerate offenders." Giraffe leaned in. "I'm sure it was fixed."

Worm Jacket asked. "What happened?"

Shrugging as if it were nothing, I told him, "I thought someone was hurt."

In the mornings, Kira did most of her knitting. Once she was done, she would warTalk with customers, and then head out to lunch with clients or meetings with investortroopers. During those times, when the front door was locked, I began to sneak into the design room to first look at, then touch, and finally test the heat crimpers, the water-shears, the button extruder, the ribbon maker, the seam braider, the elasti-matic. And then after several weeks, when Kira headed to Melancholy Mouse Burger with a creditwarrior for what I figured would be a long lunch, I stepped before the Stanton-Bell.

Basically I was not to touch
anything
, but at least a dozen times she had expressly and explicitly forbidden the Stanton-Bell in particular. "Refrain from even depositing the dead follicle, the dead platelet of skin even
near
this glorious sister." But it was too tempting. I had watched Kira knit a hundred times and was sure I knew exactly how it worked. I wanted nothing but to try.

The thing looked like the offspring of some upper-body aerobic exercise machine with steps for one's feet and two long handles for controlling the floating knitting heads. After taking a deep breath, I stepped on and gripped the handles. For a minute, I just stood there and imagined. My heart was racing. My palms were wet. I told myself to get off, get out of the design, and get back to my duties.

I didn't. Instead, I reached forward to the round green button and switched it on. It emitted a slow hum, a faint, but powerful vibration, and the magnetic knit heads quivered like the mouthparts of some chrome insect.

My heart beat in my fingertips as I pressed the right handle forward. It moved. The knit heads spun in air and created a thin row of knit. I was doing it! I wanted to laugh out loud. I pushed the handle again and it made another row. Slowly circling the left handle, I began to form a wide loop.

An inch. Two inches. Five inches. This is what I had been born to do. I spun the handle again and again and again.

I had enough for the sides of a skivvé and was approaching the crotch. I didn't really like nor even understand their men's fantasy skivvé, so instead of making one of Kira's, I made a simple pair of shorts that I might want to wear. In less than five minutes I was done. I turned off the power and stepped off the foot pedals. I had made something! I had created a garment. I began to giggle like my mind was rotted. But just as I was about to take it from the knitting heads, the door design opened.

Kira dropped a plasticott bag and rushed at me. "Traitor to the heart of yarn! Retreat your soul. The smoke of disgrace. The undying knots of agony!" Her warTalk came so fast and angry, I couldn't keep up.

"No!" I said, holding up my hands. "I just tried. I didn't break it."

She whipped out her knitting needles and jabbed them at my throat. "The scars of injury have spoken," she said. "Corporate Operations Officer is your title and duty. The Stanton-Bell is jewelry. Do not rest even the heat and soil of your fingers upon it! I will have to have it cleaned and reset!"

Her needles stabbed me. I touched my neck and found blood.

Spinning around, she yanked the shorts I had knit from the hooks. "This… this… sorry rag of loops! Where did it come from?"

Ashamed and embarrassed now, I didn't answer.

She bellowed. "Travel to me now, musician Ginn! Travel with the quick!"

Ginn, the water-guitarist, pushed the door open and peered in with a look of annoyance. "What?"

Kira held up my skivvé. "What is this aberration of crotch? You will not grime and foul the equipment. There is an earth and wind between the vibrating rings on your blunt club and the harmony of the men's fantasy skivvé."

"Cut me!" Ginn scoffed. "I didn't touch your dick tube machine." She let the door slam. A moment later an angry grinding of water-guitar filled the salesfloor.

Slowly Kira turned toward me. Her eyes were disbelieving. "Make harmonies of reason and elucidation. Do it now! From where did this come?"

When I swallowed, the scratch on my neck stung. "I just turned it on… I was just trying it… I'm sorry… I just wanted to make something."

Her eyes were wide and incredulous. "You are a spot! You are a spyglass and an undercover! You are not the prisoner you claim! What house are you from? What mysteries have you stolen? What covert ideas have you slipped?"

I shook my head. "I'm from the slubs."

"Then how?" she screamed. "Prisoner explain: How did you tangle the yarn with such grace and insight?" Her lips were trembling.

I was confused. Did she like what I'd made? "I just got on and did it."

"Training on a craft knitter such as the lofty Stanton-Bell is three long years. And with that stretch comes no assurance of artistry, refinement, or clarity. I have knit for seven years. I am worthy, but no master." She came within an inch of my face. The muscles at her temples tensed, as she seemed to chew unhappily while she looked me over as one might a machine for defects or a sample of knit for pulls. In a flash she held her pins at my face again. "You now will convey the warm luxuries of truth." She enunciated each word as if releasing an emerald or ruby. "Or I will knit your larynx closed."

"I don't know… I saw you do it… You just turn one handle to make it go and pull the other to change the… number of hooks… and…" Her eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch. "I don't understand why it's hard."

Her nostrils flared and her cheeks flushed. "It is a skill and a dexterity, and the number of knotted skivvé I have sung on the Stanton only to abandon as rag would fill the hallway before the flagship." In a flash she had jammed her knitting needles in my nostrils. She hadn't stabbed me, but I could smell the sharp metal. "You were never a prisoner! What be you? Speak before I bobble your brain!"

"I am from the slubs! I was born in Stelikom." Beads of sweat bloomed in my hair and down my back. She was going to kill me. She was just as rot as every other saleswarrior! "I started fixing B-shirts. I sewed the neck holes because they weren't cut right. And I… used to dream about grids and lines. I didn't know what they were… I mean I didn't know it was cloth until I came to Seattlehama. That's why I collected yarn."

"Then what proof have you, purported slubber prisoner!"

Withor still had my papers! Without them I was nothing. "That's the truth," I told her. The points of her knitting needles felt like they were stabbing my sinuses.

"Show me something!"

"I don't have anything."

"Nothing?" She yanked the needles from my nose. "You have nothing?"

I rubbed my nose. I was bleeding, but not badly. "I guess not."

She laughed at me. "Then you are nothing. You do not exist. I don't know if I should stitch you closed or toss you from these towers from the ends of my needles." When she waved the things in an angry figure eight, they swished like swords through the air.

I thought of the one thing I did have. It didn't prove anything, and I didn't want her to take it, but I said, "I have yarn."

She glared at me. "What yarn?"

"I got it from my dad in the slubs. I don't even know where he got it. But it's all I have."

"The dust and smoke of lies! Everything from you is sweaty fiction! You are no prisoner. You are no spyglass. You are a nothing. I should bind you off."

I held up my hands. "I have it with me."

"Show it now."

I started to undo the closure on the front of my slacks.

"Move with sloth!"

The yarn I pulled from its hiding place inside the seam was thick and dark, and frayed at both ends. Holding it in my palm, I showed her.

Kira stared at me for several moments. I thought she was angry, that she considered it a joke of some sort and might even take it and snip it into a hundred little pieces before she did the same to my throat. But with her mouth puckered into a knot, she snatched the thing from me, turned, and dropped it onto the observation tray of a large magnitron. A second later she was studying the thing as I had done several times at Withor's office when he was out.

She muttered something that sounded like
Bunny
.

RYDER'S BUILDING

I had given the parking and maintenance attendants instructions to replace the Chang-P's tires, recharge the motors, put in new parachutes, and wash and detail it inside and out. Once the work was settled upon, I jogged two blocks down to Empire Square as a few raindrops, from what seemed like just one malicious cloud, dotted the intricate white and black tiles. Circling around a row of shrubs, iron tables, and benches, a crowd clasping their coffee bags and conversation hats were beginning to scurry for cover. I ducked my head and entered the lobby of the Iron Building.

The Iron was one of the smaller auxiliary buildings at Fashion Plaza and housed lesser mill companies, a few artisanal notions manufacturers, jobbers, and a dozen designers on the decline. Although I hadn't been inside it before, the black sand and sapwood lobby was similar to the others in the complex, if somewhat more shabby. To the left was a store that sold samples. On the right a line of hawkers, dressed in various costumes and representational fabrics, kick-started their smiles when I appeared and began their pitches, trying to press upon me their logoed trinkets and absurd promises of luxury, resiliency, economy, forecasted trends, and even minor acts of fashion sex. Ignoring them, I headed straight for the stairs.

The hallway was dim, the dark floor tiles covered with a thick archeology of yellowed wax and hopelessness. Here and there on the wall hung faded posters of weaving machines and yarn texturizers, each machine accompanied with women in big vests, revealing oiled skin in elf bikinis, and those night hats from a dozen years ago. Most of the doors were covered with ad-heads who smiled and began to describe the services or goods within. I passed them all and came, at last, to the far end of the hallway. In wiggling red letters that spelled out
Ryder-Textile Jobber,
a female ad-head with livid green hair smiled forcefully. As soon as she saw me, her black eyes met mine and she began speaking with the speed of a jet engine.

"This is the day the ocean speaks to you… that the dreams from sixty-thousand leagues beneath the surface, where memory is still memory and love is what it is supposed to be…"

To my right, I saw a men's room. While the ad-head blathered on, I ducked inside. The ancient walls were fake-citron wood, the floor black mesh. Two emerald commodes sat stiffly within. The heavily perfumed air gave me an instant headache. Above the single crystal sink, where six faucets dripped a slow polyphony, the mirror was warped and, depending on where I stood, alternately made my eyes and ears grow closer or farther apart.

I splashed my face with handfuls of overheated water and then raised my head to my soggy reflection. The mirror's distortion reflected some of my restlessness seeded in my harrowing experience on the Loop, but below that I could see the muddied turmoil of my thoughts about Dad, Vada, and myself.

Vada's appearance at my studio-now just hours ago-had, like a tornado, torn apart the intricate balances, arrangement, and denials of my life.

We had only spent part of a year together, but in my youthful fervor her assurance, her abilities, her contradictions, her mysteries, her love of costume had fascinated and consumed me. I was still so unformed and lacked confidence then. Perhaps that was why I had thrown myself into her request with such fever. I wanted to show her that I had changed. I didn't just have an elaborate showroom, design studio, and a successful business, but had matured in probably exactly the way she had wished for me years ago.

Staring into that fun house mirror, I told myself that the more logical and practical reason why I was doing this was to repay her. She had saved my life. She had rescued and put me back together. This was my chance to save her, if only for a quiet death. That idea-one I hadn't yet fully mulled-pleased me in a way I rarely allowed.

The truth was, of course, that as a tailor I was a maker of men. They came to me, frayed, unsure, and crooked, and it was my work that not just mended, protected, and reshaped their body, but also restructured who they were from the outside in. I could give them confidence, even if they didn't think they had any. I could give them authority, even when they deserved none. My suits could speak for them, if only they kept their mouths closed. And as such I saw myself as a mentor, teacher, friend, and sometimes a father to my clients. I enjoyed the restorative and formational power of the fabric arts, working without the bloody hacks of a surgeon, the elastic vagaries of a philosopher, or the sweaty labors of a coach.