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theme-parked."
Chevette followed, not knowing what it was exactly that she felt.
THEY ate lunch in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.
Chevette didn't remember it from before, but places changed
V names on the bridge. They changed size and shape too. You'd get these
strange mergers, a hair place and an oyster bar deciding to become a bigger
place that cut hair and sold oysters. Sometimes it worked: one of the
longest-running places on the San Francisco end was an old-style, manual
tattoo parlor that served breakfast. You could sit there over a plate of eggs
and bacon and watch somebody get needled with some kind of hand-drawn flash.
But Dirty Is God was just Mexican food and Japanese music, a pretty
straightforward proposition. Tessa got the huevos rancheros and
- - Chevette got a chicken quesadilla. They both had a Corona, and Tessa
parked the camera platform up near the tented plastic ceiling. Nobody noticed
it up there apparently, so Tessa could do documentary while she ate.
Tessa ate a lot. She said it was her metabolism: one of those people who never
gains any weight regardless of how much she ate, but she needed to do it to
keep her energy up. Tessa put away her huevos before Chevette was halfway
through her quesadilla. She drained her glass
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bottle of Corona and started fiddling with the wedge of lime, squeezing it,
working it into the neck.
"Carson," Tessa said. "You worried about him?"
"What about him?"
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"He's an abusive ex, is what about him. That was his car back in Malibu,
wasn't it?"
"I think so," Chevette said.
"You think so? You aren't sure?"
"Look," Chevette said, "it was early in the morning. It was all pretty
strange. It wasn't my idea to come up here, you know? It was your idea. You
want to make your movie."
The lime popped down into the empty Corona bottle, and Tessa looked at it as
though she'd just lost a private wager. "You know what I like about you? I
mean one of the things I like about you?"
"What?" Chevette asked.
"You aren't middle class. You just aren't. You move in with this guy, he
starts hitting you, what do you do?"
"Move out."
"That's right. You move out. You don't take a meeting with your lawyers."
"I don't have any lawyers," Chevette said.
"I know. That's what I mean."
"I don't like lawyers," Chevette said.
"Of course you don't. And you don't have any reflex to litigation."
"Litigation?"
"He beat you up. He's got eight hundred square feet of strata-title loft. He's
got a job. He beats you up, you don't automatically order a surgical strike;
you're not middle class."
"I just don't want anything to do with him."
"That's what I mean. You're from Oregon, right?"
"More or less," Chevette said.
"You ever think of acting?" Tessa inverted the bottle. The squashed lime wedge
fell down into the neck. A few drops of beer fell on the scratched black
plastic of the table. Tessa inserted the little finger of her right hand and
tried to snag the lime wedge.
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"No."
"Camera loves you. You've got a body makes boys chew carpet." 'Get off
Chevette said
Why do you think they were putting those party shots of you up on the website
back in Malibu?"
'Because they were drunk Chevette said Because they don t have anything better
to do Because they re media students
Tessa hooked the lime wedge what was left of it out of the bottle "Right on
all three she said but the main reasons your looks
Behind Tessa on one of Dirty Is Gods recycled wall screens a very beautiful
Japanese girl had appeared Look at her Chevette said "That s looks, right~
Tessa looked over her shoulder That s Rei Toei she said 'So she s beautiful
She is
"Chevette," Tessa said, "she doesn't exist. There's no live girl there at all.
She's code.
Software."
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No way Chevette said
'You didn t know that~
'But she s based on somebody right~ Some kind of motion capture deal
'Nobody Tessa said Nothing Shes the real deal Hundred
" - - percent unreal."
- - - "Then that's what people want," Chevette said, watching Rei Toei
-- ~- swan through some kind of retro Asian nightclub, "not ex bicycle
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messengers from San
Francisco."
No Tessa said you ye got it exactly backwards People don t know what they
want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object.
Traditionally, anyway."
Chevette looked at Tessa across the two empty Corona bottles. "What are you
getting at, Tessa?"
'The documentary It has to be about you."
"Forget it."
"No. I've got vision thing working big-time on this. I need you for the focus.
I need narrative traction. I need Chevette Washington."
Chevette was actually starting to feel a little scared. It made her
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angry. "Don't you have a grant to do this one particular project you've been
talking about? These innersitual things-"
"Look," Tessa said, "if that's a problem, and I'm not saying it is, it's my
problem. And it's not a problem, it's an opportunity. It's a shot. My shot."
"Tessa, there is no way you are going to get me to act in your movie. None.
You understand?'
"'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 bumping into the camera
platform, which must have descended to level with her head while they were
talking. "Stop that!" Swatting at God's
Little Toy.
The other four customers in Dirty Is God 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]