Count Zero by William Gibson Read Free Book Online

hanging out in Leon’s just for the pleasure of it. It was allhotdog shit, in Leon’s, weekenders with cheap decks who watched Japanese icebreaker kinos . . .
    But Two-a-Day wasn’t 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 Leon’s. On his way to the City. To Paris, maybe, or Chiba. The Ono-Sendai bumped against his spine. He remembered that Two-a-Day’s icebreaker cassette was still in it. He didn’t 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 girl’s 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 he’d ask Two-a-Day sometime.
    He checked the time on the kiosk’s Coke clock. His mother would be back from Boston by now, had to be, or else she’d miss one of her favorite soaps. New hole in her head. She was crazy anyway, nothing wrong with the socket she’d had since before he was born, but she’d been whining for years about static and resolution and sensory bleedover, so she’d finally swung the credit to go to Boston for some cheapass replacement. Kind of place where you don’t even get an appointment for an operation. Walk in and they just slap it in your head. . . . He knew her, yeah, how she’d come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, she’d drool a little. About every twenty minutes she’d manage to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
    She’d always been that way, as long as he could remember, gradually sliding deeper into her half-dozen synthetic lives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear about all his life. He still harbored creepy feelings that some of the characters she talked about were relatives of his, richand beautiful aunts and uncles who might turn up one day if only he weren’t such a little shit. Maybe, he thought now, it had been true, in a way; she’d jacked that shit straight through the pregnancy, because she’d told him she had, so he, fetus Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta. But he didn’t like to think about being curled up in Marsha Newmark’s belly. It made him feel sweaty and kind of sick.
    Marsha-momma. Only in the past year or so had Bobby come to understand the world well enough—as he now saw it—to wonder exactly how she still managed to make her way in it, marginal as that way had become, with her bottle and the socket ghosts to keep her company. Sometimes, when she was in a certain mood and had had the right number of nips, she still tried to tell him stories about his father. He’d known since age four that these were bullshit, because the details changed from time to time, but for years he’d allowed himself a certain pleasure in them anyway.
    He found a loading bay a few blocks west of Leon’s, screened from the street by a freshly painted blue dumpster, the new paint gleaming over pocked, dented steel. There was a single halogen tube slung above the bay. He found a comfortable ledge of concrete and sat down there, careful not to jar the Ono-Sendai. Sometimes you just had to wait. That was one of