The Bridge Trilogy Part 109

"'Acting' isn't in it, Chevette. All you have to do is be yourself. And that will involve finding out who you really are. I am going to make a film about you finding out who you really are."

"You are not," said Chevette, getting up and actually b.u.mping into the camera platform, which must have descended to level with her head while they were talking. "Stop that!" Swatting at G.o.d's Little Toy.

The other four customers in Dirty Is G.o.d just looking at them.

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16. SUB-ROUTINES.

THAT Hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.

Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self.

But what was there, he wonders, before?

Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.

Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality, it seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?

But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the earth's core, and beyond cardboard walls are walls of concrete, sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country, j.a.pan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the s.h.i.+fting of continent-wide plates.

Somewhere within Laney, something else is s.h.i.+fting. There is move-ment, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he

is no longer afraid.

And all of this is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the cough, the fever, but of that underlying dis-ease that he takes to be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.

We -were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.

Something at once noun and verb.

While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of informa

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tion, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context. A microscopic cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned, he senses, centrally.

Crucially.

And that is why sleep is no longer an option.

72.

17. ZODIAC.

THEY take Silencio, naked, the black man with the long face and the fat

white man with the red beard, into a room with wet wooden walls. Leave him. Hot rain falls from holes in the black plastic pipes above. Falls

harder, stings.

They have taken his clothes and shoes away in a plastic bag, and now the fat man returns, gives him soap. He knows soap. He remembers the warm rain falling from a pipe in los projectos but this is better, and he is alone in the tall wooden room.

V Silencio with his belly full, soaping himself repeatedly, because that is what they want.

He rubs the soap into his hair.

He closes his eyes against the burning of the soap and sees the watches arrayed beneath greenish, randomly abraded gla.s.s, like fish from some warmer season frozen hard in lake ice. Bright highlights off steel and gold.

He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended: the multifold fact of these potent objects, their endless differentiation, their individual specificities. Infinite variety arising from the expression of dial,

* hands, numerals, hour markers.. . He likes the warm rain but he needs desperately to return, to see more, to hear the words.

He has become the words, what they mean.

Breguette hands. Tapestry dial. Bombay lugs. Original stem. Signed.

The rain slows, stops. The fat man, who wears plastic sandals, brings Silencio a thick dry cloth.

The fat man peers at him. "Watches, you say he likes?" the fat man asks the black man. "Yes," the black man says, "he seems to like watches."

The bearded man drapes the towel around Silencio's shoulders. "Does he know how to tell time?"

"I don't know," says the black man.

"Well," says the fat man, stepping back, "he doesn't know how to

use a towel."

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Silencio feels confused, ashamed. He looks down.

"Leave him alone, Andy," the black man says. "Get me those clothes I brought."

THE black man's name: Fontaine. Like a word in the language of los projectos, a meaning about water. The warm rain in the wooden room.

Now Fontaine leads him through the upper level, where some people call out, selling fruit, past others selling old things spread on blankets, to where a thin dark man stands waiting beside a plastic crate. The crate is upturned, its bottom padded with foam and ragged silver tape, and this man wears a striped cloth thing with pockets down his front, and in the pockets are scissors, and things like the thing Raton liked to run endlessly through his hair, when he had balanced the black perfectly with the white.

Silencio is wearing the clothes Fontaine has given him: they are large, loose, not his own, but they smell good. Fontaine has given him shoes made of white cloth. Too white. They hurt his eyes.

The soap and the warm rain have made Silencio's hair strange as well, and now Fontaine tells Silencio to sit upon the crate, this man will cut his hair.

Silencio sits, trembling, as the thin dark man flicks at his hair with one of the Raton-things from his pockets, making small noises behind his teeth.