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Authors: William Gibson
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of the accident Cayce sees a bright yellow motorcycle on its side, front forks twisted strangely. The whirling blue light is mounted on a slender mast, rising from a larger, obviously official motorcycle parked nearby, and she sees that this is an emergency medical response vehicle, an entirely mirror-world concept, able to edge through the densest traffic to an accident site.
The bike medic, in a Belstaff jacket with huge reflective stripes, is kneeling above the fallen rider, whose helmet is on the pavement beside him and whose neck is immobilized in a foam collar. The medic is giving the man oxygen with a mask and bottle, and now Cayce realizes she can hear the insistent hooting, from somewhere behind, of a mirror-world ambulance. And for an instant she sees that unconscious, unmarked face, its lower half obscured by the transparent mask, the evening’s rain falling on closed eyes. And knows that this stranger may now inhabit the most liminal place of all, poised perhaps on the brink of nonexistence, or about to enter some existence unimagined.
She cannot see what hit him, or what he might have hit. Or else the street itself had risen up, to smite him. It is not only those things we most fear that do that, she reminds herself.
“ IT was a match factory,” Stonestreet says, having greeted her and ushered her into two stories of lofted open plan, dark gleaming hardwood stretching to a wall of glass that opens on a full-length balcony. Candlelight. “We’re looking for something else.” He’s wearing a black cotton dress shirt, its French cuffs unlinked and flapping. The at-home version of that new but slept-in look, she supposes. “It’s not Tribeca.”
No, it’s not, she thinks, neither in square footage nor in volumes of space.
“Hub’s on the deck. Just arrived. Drink?”
“ ‘Hub’?”
“Been in Houston.” Stonestreet winks.
“Bet it would be ‘Hube’ if they had their druthers.” Hube Bigend. Lombard.
Cayce’s dislike of Bigend is indeed personal, albeit secondhand, a friend having been involved with the man in New York, back in, as the kids had recently quit saying, the day. Margot, the friend, from Melbourne, had always referred to him as “a Lombard,” which Cayce had at first thought might be a reference somehow to his Belgian-ness, until learning, upon finally asking, that it was Margot’s acronym for “Loads of money but a real dickhead.” As things had progressed between them, mere Lombardhood had scarcely covered it.
Stonestreet, at the wet bar sculpted into a corner of the kitchen’s granite island, passes her, at her request, a tall glass of ice and fizzy water, garnished with a twist of lemon.
On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished…. The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing, but with the uneasy hallucinatory suggestion of panic about to break through.
She turns, and sees Bigend through glass leading to a balcony, hands on the rain-slick railing, his back to her, in some sort of raincoat and what seems to be a cowboy hat.
“ HOW do you think we look,” Bigend asks, “to the future?” He looks as though he’s somehow, in spite of the evening’s cunningly vegan cuisine, been infused with live extract of hot beef. He’s florid, glossy, bright-eyed,very likely bushy-tailed as well. The dinner conversation has been mercifully uneventful, with no mention of Dorotea or Blue Ant, and for this Cayce is grateful.
Helena, Stonestreet’s wife, has been lecturing them about the uses, even today, in cosmetics, of reprocessed bovine neurological material, having gotten there via a discussion, over her stuffed eggplant, of
The bike medic, in a Belstaff jacket with huge reflective stripes, is kneeling above the fallen rider, whose helmet is on the pavement beside him and whose neck is immobilized in a foam collar. The medic is giving the man oxygen with a mask and bottle, and now Cayce realizes she can hear the insistent hooting, from somewhere behind, of a mirror-world ambulance. And for an instant she sees that unconscious, unmarked face, its lower half obscured by the transparent mask, the evening’s rain falling on closed eyes. And knows that this stranger may now inhabit the most liminal place of all, poised perhaps on the brink of nonexistence, or about to enter some existence unimagined.
She cannot see what hit him, or what he might have hit. Or else the street itself had risen up, to smite him. It is not only those things we most fear that do that, she reminds herself.
“ IT was a match factory,” Stonestreet says, having greeted her and ushered her into two stories of lofted open plan, dark gleaming hardwood stretching to a wall of glass that opens on a full-length balcony. Candlelight. “We’re looking for something else.” He’s wearing a black cotton dress shirt, its French cuffs unlinked and flapping. The at-home version of that new but slept-in look, she supposes. “It’s not Tribeca.”
No, it’s not, she thinks, neither in square footage nor in volumes of space.
“Hub’s on the deck. Just arrived. Drink?”
“ ‘Hub’?”
“Been in Houston.” Stonestreet winks.
“Bet it would be ‘Hube’ if they had their druthers.” Hube Bigend. Lombard.
Cayce’s dislike of Bigend is indeed personal, albeit secondhand, a friend having been involved with the man in New York, back in, as the kids had recently quit saying, the day. Margot, the friend, from Melbourne, had always referred to him as “a Lombard,” which Cayce had at first thought might be a reference somehow to his Belgian-ness, until learning, upon finally asking, that it was Margot’s acronym for “Loads of money but a real dickhead.” As things had progressed between them, mere Lombardhood had scarcely covered it.
Stonestreet, at the wet bar sculpted into a corner of the kitchen’s granite island, passes her, at her request, a tall glass of ice and fizzy water, garnished with a twist of lemon.
On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished…. The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing, but with the uneasy hallucinatory suggestion of panic about to break through.
She turns, and sees Bigend through glass leading to a balcony, hands on the rain-slick railing, his back to her, in some sort of raincoat and what seems to be a cowboy hat.
“ HOW do you think we look,” Bigend asks, “to the future?” He looks as though he’s somehow, in spite of the evening’s cunningly vegan cuisine, been infused with live extract of hot beef. He’s florid, glossy, bright-eyed,very likely bushy-tailed as well. The dinner conversation has been mercifully uneventful, with no mention of Dorotea or Blue Ant, and for this Cayce is grateful.
Helena, Stonestreet’s wife, has been lecturing them about the uses, even today, in cosmetics, of reprocessed bovine neurological material, having gotten there via a discussion, over her stuffed eggplant, of
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