Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw towns seldom found anything. But after each search a few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had come too close to the contraband thay had been sent to find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods were the only safe passage through the army cordons. His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon, skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry cloud, then settled again, igoring him. She had a leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He began to search the creek bed for a lenght of brushwood.
In the jacket's back, just below her left shoulder blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had been red once, but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood. With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went looking for water.
He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefuly wrapped in plastic and surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch hornhandled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.
He drove the knive hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the 'lawyers' who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with its promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?
- Rosebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View.
Fast forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.
Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...
- and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn't met you yet; you're hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, the horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle -
- and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn't there. And the tape ends.
The inducer's light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recalling the tousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram that has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he'll never know - stolen credit cards - a burned out suburb - planetary conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a flat packet of drugs - a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer now, or mor real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-induce, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean.