youâre hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle â
â and static takes loveâs body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isnât there. And the tape ends.
The inducerâs light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole heâll never know â stolen credit cards â a burned out suburb â planetary conjunctions of a stranger â a tank burning on a highway âa flat packet of drugs âa switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: Weâre each otherâs fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape â is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was theblack face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.
The Belonging Kind
John Shirley and William Gibson
It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimboâs, or Sad Jackâs, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where heâd first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smokeâ¦she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.
Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.
He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It was called the Backdoor because you entered through a narrow back alley. The alleyâs walls crawled with graffiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
He wasnât very good at conversation with strangers, not at parties and not in bars.
He was fine at the community college where he lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with the head of his department about sequencing and options in conversational openings. But he could never talk to strangers inbars or at parties. He didnât go to many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
Coretti didnât know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didnât look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadnât liked her saying that, because it was true.
He hadnât ever had a girl like the one who sat with her back arched slightly in the undersea light that splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light was screwed into the lenses of the bartenderâs glasses, wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the green of young corn, like a husk stripped away, showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that
â and static takes loveâs body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isnât there. And the tape ends.
The inducerâs light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole heâll never know â stolen credit cards â a burned out suburb â planetary conjunctions of a stranger â a tank burning on a highway âa flat packet of drugs âa switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: Weâre each otherâs fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape â is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was theblack face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.
The Belonging Kind
John Shirley and William Gibson
It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimboâs, or Sad Jackâs, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where heâd first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smokeâ¦she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.
Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful telescope, small and clear and very far away.
He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It was called the Backdoor because you entered through a narrow back alley. The alleyâs walls crawled with graffiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
He wasnât very good at conversation with strangers, not at parties and not in bars.
He was fine at the community college where he lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with the head of his department about sequencing and options in conversational openings. But he could never talk to strangers inbars or at parties. He didnât go to many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
Coretti didnât know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didnât look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadnât liked her saying that, because it was true.
He hadnât ever had a girl like the one who sat with her back arched slightly in the undersea light that splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light was screwed into the lenses of the bartenderâs glasses, wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the green of young corn, like a husk stripped away, showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that
Similar Books
