Big Playground looked safe enough, except for a lone shirtless duster deep in some furious conversation with God. Bobby cut the duster a wide circle; he was shouting and jumping and karate-chopping the air. The duster had dried blood on his bare feet and the remnants of what had probably been a Lobe haircut.
Big Playground was neutral territory, at least in theory, and the Lobes were loosely confederated with the Gothicks; Bobby had fairly solid affiliations with the Gothicks, but retained his indie status. Barrytown was a dicey place to be an indie. At least, he thought, as the dusters angry gibberish faded behind him, the gangs gave you some structure. If you were Gothick and the Kasuals chopped you out, it made sense. Maybe the ultimate reasons behind it were crazy, but there were rules But indies got chopped out by dusters running on brainstem, by roaming predatory loonies from as far away as New Yorklike that Penis Collector character last summer, kept the goods in his pocket in a plastic bag...
Bobby had been trying to chart a way out of this landscape since the day he was born, or anyway it felt that way. Now, as he walked, the cyberspace deck in the pack-pocket banged against his spine. Like it. too, was urging him to get out. Come on, Two-a-Day, he said to the looming Projects, get your ass down outa there and be in Leons when I get there, okay?
Two-a-Day wasnt in Leons.
Nobody was, unless you wanted to count Leon, who was probing the inner mysteries of a wall-screen converter with a bent paper clip.
Why dont you just get a hammer and pound the fucker till it works? Bobby asked. Do you about as much good.
Leon looked up from the converter. He was probably in his forties, but it was hard to say. He seemed to be of no particular race, or, in certain lights, to belong to some race that nobody else belonged to. Lots of hypertrophied facial bone and a mane of curly, nonreflective black hair. His basement pirate club had been a fixture in Bobbys life for the past two years.
Leon stared dully at Bobby with his unnerving eyes, pupils of nacreous gray overlaid with a hint of translucent olive. Leons eyes made Bobby think of oysters and nail polish, two things he didnt particularly like to think about in connection with eyes. The color was like something theyd use to upholster barstools.
I just mean you cant fix shit like that by poking at it, Bobby added uncomfortably. Leon shook his head slowly and went back to his exploration. People paid to get into the place because Leon pirated kino and simstim off cable and ran a lot of stuff that Barrytowners couldnt otherwise afford to access. There was dealing in the back and you could make donations for drinks, mostly clean Ohio hooch cut with some synthetic orange drink Leon scored in industrial quantities.
Say, uh, Leon, Bobby began again, you seen Two-a-Day in here lately?
The horrible eyes came up again and regarded Bobby for entirely too long. No.
Maybe last night?
No.
Night before?
No.
Oh. Okay. Thanks. There was no point in giving Leon a hard time. Lots of reasons not to, actually. Bobby looked around at the wide dim room, at the simstim units and the unlit kino screens. The club was a series of nearly identical rooms in the basement of a semi-residential rack zoned for singles and a sprinkling of light industry. Good soundproofing: You hardly ever heard the music, not from outside. Plenty of nights hed popped out of Leons with a head full of noise and pills, into what seemed a magic vacuum of silence, his ears ringing all the way home across Big Playground.
Now he had an hour, probably, before the first Gothicks started
to arrive. The dealers, mostly black guys from the Projects or whites from the city or some other burb, wouldnt turn up until there was a patch of Gothicks for them to work on. Nothing made a dealer look worse than just sitting there, waiting, because that would mean you werent getting any action, and there was no way a genuinely hot dealer would be hanging out in Leons just for the pleasure of it. It was all hotdog shit, in Leons, weekenders with cheap decks who watched Japanese icebreaker kinos.
But Two-a-Day wasnt like that, he told himself, on his way up the concrete stairs. Two-a-Day was on his way. Out of the Projects, out of Barrytown, out of Leons. On his way to the City. To Paris, maybe, or Chiba The Ono-Sendai bumped against his spine. He remembered that Two-a-Days icebreaker cassette was still in it. He didnt want to have to explain that to anyone. He passed a news kiosk. A yello fax of the New York edition of the Asahi Shimbun was reeling past a plastic window in the mirrored siding, some government going down in Africa, Russian stuff from Mars...
It was that time of day when you could see things very clear, see every little thing so far down the streets, fresh green just starting from the black branches of the trees in their holes in the concrete, and the flash of steel on a girls boot a block away, like looking through a special kind of water that made seeing easier, even though it was nearly dark. He turned and stared up at the Projects. Whole floors there were forever unlit, either derelict or the windows blacked out. What did they do in there? Maybe hed ask Two-a-Day sometime.