“Nope. She was a movie star from south of here.”
Town paused. “Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone,” he suggested, helpfully.
“Maybe.” Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him.
“You should be back in prison,” said Mr. Town. “You should be on fucking death row.”
“I didn’t kill your associates,” said Shadow. “But I’ll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I’ve never forgotten.”
“And that is?”
“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don’t knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don’t.”
The driver stood by the Humvee. “G’night, gentlemen,” he said as they passed.
“Night,” said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, “I personally don’t give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mister World says. It’s easier that way.”
Shadow walked down the corridor to room 9.
He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, “Sorry. I thought this was my room.”
“It is,” said Media. “I was waiting for you.” He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly.
“I’ll find another room.”
“I won’t be here for long,” she said. “I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an offer.”
“Okay. Make the offer.”
“Relax,” she said. There was a smile in her voice. “You have such a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesday’s dead. You don’t owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team.”
Shadow said nothing.
“We can make you famous, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that happen. We can make you the next Beatles.”
“I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucy’s tits,” said Shadow. “If that was you.”
“Ah,” she said.
“I need my room back. Good night.”
“And then of course,” she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, “we can turn it all around. We can make it bad for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitler . . . how would you like that?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m kind of tired,” said Shadow. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave now.”
“I offered you the world,” she said. “When you’re dying in a gutter, you remember that.”
“I’ll make a point of it,” he said.
After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought about—Laura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents’ convention in Anaheim—always morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbie’s cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time.
You’re not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I’m not sure that you’re alive, either.
There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. “Those hamburgers,” he said. “They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald’s. I didn’t think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald’s.”
“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you’re here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”
The fat kid was shivering. “No. You’re already dead meat,” he said. “You—you’re a fucking illuminated Gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m . . . I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic . . .” He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy.