Gibson William - Pattern Recognition

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 940.87KB 511 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PATTERN RECOGNITION

WILLIAM GIBSON

1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden

Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian

rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides,

brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian

demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none

really an option now.

Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is as devoid of edible

content as its designers' display windows in Camden High

Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-

yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply.

Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton

containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets

of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that

its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is

London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her

mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some

ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that

brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the

Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and

must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the

nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and

less interesting?

Numb here in the semi-dark, in Damien's bedroom, beneath a

silvery thing the color of oven mitts, probably never intended

by its makers to actually be slept under. She'd been too tired to

find a blanket. The sheets between her skin and the weight of

this industrial coverlet are silky some luxurious thread count,

and they smell faintly of, she guesses,

Damien. Not badly, though. Actually it's not unpleasant; any

physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point.

Damien is a friend.

Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some

carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and

stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have

been very good at what they've done, neither seeming to have

the least idea of why.

Google Damien and you will find a director of music videos and

commercials. Google Cayce and you will find "coolhunter," and

if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a

"sensitive" of some kind, a dowser in the world of global

marketing.

Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a

morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the

marketplace.

Damien's in Russia now, avoiding renovation and claiming to be

shooting a documentary. Whatever faintly lived-in feel the

place now has, Cayce knows, is the work of a production

assistant.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep.

Gropes for her clothes. A small boy's black Fruit Of The Loom T-

shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover

purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England

prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501's, every

trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have

been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in

the Village, a week ago.

The switch on Damien's Italian floor lamp feels alien: a

different click, designed to hold back a different voltage, foreign

British electricity.

Standing now, stepping into her jeans, she straightens,

shivering.

Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged,

for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in

America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone

handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers

of paperbacks look like Australian money.

Pupils contracted painfully against sun-bright halogen, she

squints into an actual mirror, canted against a gray wall,

awaiting hanging, wherein she sees a black-legged, disjointed

puppet, sleep-hair poking up like a toilet brush. She grimaces at

it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who'd insisted on

comparing her to Helmut Newton's nude portrait of Jane Birkin.

In the kitchen she runs tap water through a German filter, into

an Italian electric kettle. Fiddles with switches, one on the

kettle, one on the plug, one on the socket. Blankly surveys the

canary expanse of laminated cabinetry while it boils. Bag of

some imported Californian tea substitute in a large white mug.

Pouring boiling water.

In the flat's main room, she finds that Damien's faithful Cube is

on, but sleeping, the night-light glow of its static switches

pulsing gently. Damien's ambivalence toward design showing

here: He won't allow decorators through the door unless they

basically agree to not do that which they do, yet he holds on to

this Mac for the way you can turn it upside down and remove

its innards with a magic little aluminum handle. Like the sex of

one of the robot girls in his video, now that she thinks of it.

She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and

clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale

wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types

Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid

contamination, will never bookmark.

The front page opens, familiar as a friend's living room. A

frame-grab from #48serves as backdrop, dim and almost

monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the

sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. She only

knows Tarkovsky from stills, really, though she did once fall

asleep during a screening of The Stalker, going under on an

endless pan, the camera aimed straight down, in close-up, at a

puddle on a ruined mosaic floor. But she is not one of those

who think that much will be gained by analysis of the maker's

imagined influences. The cult of the footage is rife with

subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut,

Peckinpah… The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are

still waiting for the guns to be drawn.

She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of

the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking

for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new

footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she

does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter.

French footageheads have been unable to match it, in spite of

countless hours recording pans across approximately similar

scenery.

She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home

from an Amtrak vacation, California, but when she opens his

post she sees that he's only saying hello, literally.

She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.

Hi Parkaboy. nt

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has

become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a

familiar cafe that exists somehow outside of geography and

beyond time zones.

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some

much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now

there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing

exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds

not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a

pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at adistance of about

fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the

thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at

counter-purposes, deter her.

The Cube sighs softly and makes subliminal sounds with its

drive, like a vintage sports car downshifting on a distant

freeway. She tries a sip of tea substitute, but it's still too hot. A

gray and indeterminate light is starting to suffuse the room in

which she sits, revealing such Damieni-ana as has survived the

recent remake.

Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two

of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-

test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien's

videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them

so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful,

she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi

kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn half-light,

their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old

marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he'd had them

molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.

Hotmail downloads four messages, none of which she feels like

opening. Her mother, three spam. The penis enlarger is still

after her, twice, and Increase Your Breast Size Dramatically.

Deletes spam. Sips the tea substitute. Watches the gray light

becoming more like day.

Eventually she goes into Damien's newly renovated bathroom.

Feels she could shower down in it prior to visiting a sterile

NASA probe, or step out of some Chernobyl scenario to have her

lead suit removed by rubber-gowned Soviet technicians, who'd

then scrub her with long-handled brushes. The fixtures in the

shower can be adjusted with elbows, preserving the sterility of

scrubbed hands.

She pulls off her sweater and T-shirt and, using hands, not

elbows, starts the shower and adjusts the temperature.

FOUR hours later she's on a reformer in a Pilates studio in an

upscale al-ley called Neal's Yard, the car and driver from Blue

Ant waiting out on whatever street it is. The reformer is a very

long, very low, vaguely ominous and Weimar-looking piece of

spring-loaded furniture. On which she now reclines, doing v-

position against the foot rail at the end. The padded platform

she rests on wheels back and forth along tracks of angle-iron

within the frame, springs twanging softly. Ten of these, ten toes,

ten from the heels… In New York she does this at a fitness

center frequented by dance professionals, but here in Neal's

Yard, this morning, she seems to be the sole client. The place is

only recently opened, apparently, and perhaps this sort of thing

is not yet so popular here. There is that mirror-world ingestion

of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as

though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of

honeymoon phase with cocaine. Heroin, she's read, is cheaper

here than it's ever been, the market still glutted by the initial

dumping of Afghani opium supplies.

Done with her toes, she changes to heels, craning her neck to be

certain her feet are correctly aligned. She likes Pilates because it

isn't, in the way she thinks of yoga, meditative. You have to

keep your eyes open, here, and pay attention.

That concentration counters the anxiety she feels now, the pre-

job jitters she hasn't experienced in a while.

She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of

permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic

than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed

itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising

ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-

carbon-based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and

ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian

who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and

truffled chocolates.

The only thing Cayce enjoys about Bigend is that he seems to

have no sense at all that his name might seem ridiculous to

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

1PATTERNRECOGNITIONbyWILLIAMGIBSON1.THEWEBSITEOFDREADFULNIGHTFivehours'NewYorkjetlagandCaycePollardwakesinCamdenTowntothedireandever-circlingwolvesofdisruptedcircadianrhythm.Itisthatflatandspectralnon-hour,awashinlimbictides,brainstemstirringfitfully,flashinginappropriatereptiliandemandsforsex,food,...

展开>> 收起<<

Gibson William - Pattern Recognition.pdf

共511页,预览103页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Gibson William - Pattern Recognition

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: