struggling with the Croakers. A shot went off through the roof. Jonny pulled back hard on the stick, trying to forestall the crash. The hovercar banked steeply, scraping down belly-first through the trees in Union Bank Plaza.
Across the street, amidst a jumble of rotting patio furniture, sat the mirrored bulk of the Bonaventure Hotel. Jonny looked up just in time to watch his own reflection crash into the building across the street.
NINE
A light crusting of salt on his lips. The smell of damp cement and fish.
Los Angeles closed over him like the wing of a bird, distorted like the image of a diamond caught in the concave surface of a parabolic mirror. Distended, the city shattered; it could not hold. All the gleaming office towers and prisons, all the cars and guns, the junkies and the dealers, the dead and the dying came raining down on him from the back of a wounded sky. And everybody seemed to know his name but him.
It occurred to Jonny that for someone who basically just wanted to be left alone, he was spending an awful lot of time waking up in bandages.
That he was alive at all was less a surprise to him than a burden. He kept wondering if there was some reason for it, some purpose other than for other people's amusement. The back of his head felt as if it had been pried open with a can opener and filled with dry ice. He laughed at something (not entirely sure what), found the edge of the bed with his hand and sat up.
The smell of fish was stronger. There was a chittering, like the voices of dolphins, rooms away. No light, though. He felt bandages on his face, multiple layers of gauze and surgical tape. Scars on his cheeks. He had surgery. Below the line of the dressing, he touched his lips. They were swollen, his front teeth loose. His nose was probably broken, too. Still, it could have been worse, he thought. His eyes ached.
His eyes.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice was screaming. His own: like the roar of turbines, like metal twisting on metal.
Eyes.
The world tilted then, burdened by the weight of a single word.
'Blind,' he said. It barely registered. He found he could hold it back, if he tried, could examine the word from a distance, scan the contours and convolusions of it, while never quite allowing it to take on conscious meaning. But the weight of it was such that he could not keep it away indefinitely; it fell, bringing memory crashing down on him like the windshield of the hovercar. He was blind.
I am blind.
'Jonny?' It was a man's voice. Amplified. 'Stay there. Don't get up,' it said.
Below his bare feet, the floor was cold. He felt damp concrete, limp strands of kelp and a few steps later, the rusted grillwork of a floor drain. He could hear the ocean, very close by. Something skittered across his right foot. A tiny crab. He felt others move away each time he brought his foot down. A wall. He needed a wall, something substantial to hold onto. He started back to where he thought the bed was, then stopped. Unsure. He turned in a circle, shouting, his head thrown back, his hands reflexive claws tearing at the gauze. When it was all gone he was still standing there, panting.
No light at all.
'Jonny, don't move.'
He started at the sound, took a step- and was falling. A hand closed on his shoulder and right arm, pulling him back. He lay on the floor, his hands to his f ace, the dampness seeping through his pant legs.
I' told you to stay put. You almost walked into ten meters of empty air just then.' The voice was familiar.
'Hey Groucho,' Jonny said. 'Guess what. I'm blind.'
'I already knew. You didn't have to go to all this trouble to prove it to me,' he said. The anarchist hauled him to his feet and walked him back to the bed, a distance Jonny judged to be no more than fifteen meters.
'Christ, I'm a fuckin' veg,' said Jonny.
'Don't be stupid,' said the anarchist. Jonny felt the distribution of weight on the bed change as Groucho sat down. 'You have your hands; you have your mind. We sealed off what was left of your optic nerves. There wasn't much more we could do.'
'Great,' asked Jonny. 'What about implants?'
'I don't know. We could probably rig something to give you some kind of vision. Eventually,' Groucho said. 'Splice some nerve cells from somewhere else in your body into your optic nerve tissue and see if we can generate something to rebuild with. I'm not sure. The trouble is, we're limited in what we can even attempt out here in the hinterlands. We lost a lot of our equipment when the Committee came down on us.' Jonny felt him move. Some kind of gesture. 'Sorry, man.'
Jonny nodded. 'Yeah. So where are we?'
'A fish farm. It's been out of business for years. That's what you almost fell into, one of the drained feeding tanks. Before it was a farm, the place used to be a marine mammal center. There are pens outside where the dolphins still come looking for a free lunch. I'm afraid we've been encouraging them,' he said. 'They're beautiful animals.'
'Gee whiz, tell me all about it,' said Jonny. He took a deep breath and swallowed. 'Listen, I gotta know. Do I–I mean, what do I-?'
'Your face is fine,' said Groucho. 'You may even consider it an improvement. Although you have enough plastic and metal in your skull now to qualify as a small appliance.'
Jonny shook his head. He tried to conjure up the image of Groucho sitting next to him on the bed. The bed itself was easy.
Running his fingers around the edge, he felt bare metal and soft rubberized bumpers, locked wheels beneath. A specimen cart, he thought, covered with a foam sleeping mat. However, Groucho's face eluded him. Jonny could never recall people's faces unless he was looking right at them. He tried to picture the room. Bare concrete, enameled tanks with chrome ladders leading to the bottom, drains in the floor Forget it.
It was a shopping list, not a picture. He could imagine himself (also faceless), Groucho and the bed, but beyond that was a void, terra incognita. Nothing existed that was farther away than the end of his arm. 'Get used to it, asshole,' he mumbled.
'What?'
'So what happens now?'
'We go back to plan one,' said Groucho. 'The Croakers have friends in Mexico. We should be able to get you down to Ensenada in a couple of days, then over to the mainland. It's going to be a while before we can do anything about your eyes.'
'Don't shit me, okay?' said Jonny. 'If my optic nerves are as gone as you say, then we're just blowing wind talking about nerve splices. Realistically, we're really talking about a skull-plug run through a digitizer and some kind of micro-video rig. You, or any of your people, got the chops to fix that up?'
'No. You've got to go to New Hope or some government clinic for that kind of work.'
'Well, there you are,' said Jonny flatly. The bed moved as Groucho got up. Jonny studied the overlapping echoes of the anarchist's footsteps as he moved around the room, counting the number of beats between each heel click, imagining that this might give him some sense of the room's layout or size. It did not. There were other sounds: the white noise of surf, dolphins, the clicking of crabs across the floor, all equally distant and unreal, as if, in the absence of any visual stimulus, his brain were busily manufacturing sensations for itself. 'Maya, man. Sometimes I think this is all just smoke and mirrors.'
'I thought that was acknowledged,' said Groucho. The anarchist's voice came from across the room, a little off to his left.
'It used to make me crazy,' Jonny said. 'I roshis told me that this was all an illusion. Well man, if this is all