she either found a new supplier or negotiated a compromise in material or workmanship.
Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other people didn't have, she said. Or that other people didn't like? That too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the people who manufactured the components. Best of all, she told him, she liked the feeling of bringing something new into the world, of watching the sketches from Moscow finally become objects on the floor of the former cannery.
It's there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not it's good.
Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.
He put his hand over hers.
And touch it, and know whether or not it's good .
Just before dawn, the editor of lamps asleep in his bed, he watched the curve of the bay from the suite's balcony, the moon a milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.
In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.
Birds were waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.
Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laney's recuperation. He looked rested, she said.
He took to the seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting that another leave might prove permanent. She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.
The nodal point was different now, though he had no language to describe the change. He sifted the countless fragments that had clustered around Alison Shires in his absence, feeling for the source of his earlier conviction. He called up the music she'd accessed while he'd been in Mexico, playing each song in the order of her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-affirming; she'd moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine, whose relentlessly positive product was the musical equivalent of the Good News Channel.
Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her credit-provider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she'd purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher's intimacy with the subject could lead to loss of perspective. “It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We're a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”
The floor of Laney's apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at the deep end, on an inflatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shopping Channel. There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.
He sat on the slippery edge of the inflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartment. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent was paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fairly intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. “His reptile fund,” Kathy called it.
He could hold Alison Shires' history in his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he'd come to know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever had or would. Husbands didn't know their wives this way, or wives their husbands. Stalkers
Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other people didn't have, she said. Or that other people didn't like? That too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the people who manufactured the components. Best of all, she told him, she liked the feeling of bringing something new into the world, of watching the sketches from Moscow finally become objects on the floor of the former cannery.
It's there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not it's good.
Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.
He put his hand over hers.
And touch it, and know whether or not it's good .
Just before dawn, the editor of lamps asleep in his bed, he watched the curve of the bay from the suite's balcony, the moon a milky thing, translucent, nearly gone.
In the night, in the Federal District, somewhere east of here, there had been rocket attacks and rumors of chemical agents, the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.
Birds were waking in the trees around him, a sound he knew from Gainesville, from the orphanage and other mornings there.
Kathy Torrance announced herself satisfied with Laney's recuperation. He looked rested, she said.
He took to the seas of DatAmerica without comment, suspecting that another leave might prove permanent. She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.
The nodal point was different now, though he had no language to describe the change. He sifted the countless fragments that had clustered around Alison Shires in his absence, feeling for the source of his earlier conviction. He called up the music she'd accessed while he'd been in Mexico, playing each song in the order of her selection. He found her choices had grown more life-affirming; she'd moved to a new provider, Upful Groupvine, whose relentlessly positive product was the musical equivalent of the Good News Channel.
Cross-indexing her charges against the records of her credit-provider and its client retailers, he produced a list of everything she'd purchased in the past week. Six-pack, blades, Tokkai carton opener. Did she own a Tokkai carton opener? But then he remembered Kathy's advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher's intimacy with the subject could lead to loss of perspective. “It's often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We're a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”
The floor of Laney's apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage. He slept at the deep end, on an inflatable guest bed he'd ordered from the Shopping Channel. There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling, but he was seldom there during daylight hours.
He sat on the slippery edge of the inflatable, picturing Alison Shires in her Fountain Avenue apartment. Larger than this, he knew, but not by much. Windows. Her rent was paid, Slitscan had finally determined, by her married actor. Via a fairly intricate series of blinds, but paid nonetheless. “His reptile fund,” Kathy called it.
He could hold Alison Shires' history in his mind like a single object, like the perfectly detailed scale model of something ordinary but miraculous, made luminous by the intensity of his focus. He'd never met her, or spoken to her, but he'd come to know her, he supposed, in more ways than anyone ever had or would. Husbands didn't know their wives this way, or wives their husbands. Stalkers
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