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 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?

'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.

'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 looks right.

Tessa looked over her shoulder 'That's Rei Toei. She said 'she's beautiful. Tessa said, 'she doesn't exist. There's no live girl there at all. She's code. Software.

'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. She's 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 messengers from San Francisco.

'No. Tessa said, 'you've 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 angry. 'Don't you have a grant to do this one particular project you've been talking about? These interstitial 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.

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, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.

Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting. There is movement, 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 disease 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 information, 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.

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.

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 glass, 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.