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Rubin's place.
Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what
the Japanese call a sensei.
What he's the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of
cast-off goods our century floats on.
Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.
I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I
hadn't seen before, rusty spider arms folded at t~1e hearts of dented con-
stellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dump-
sters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an
artist. "Messing around," he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as
some extension of boyhood's perfectly bored backyard afternodns. He wanders
through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water
side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations,
like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger
processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I've seen Rubin program his
constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing gar-
ments by a given season's hot designer; others attend to more obscure
missions, and a few seem constructed
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themselves ~vith as much attendant noise as possible. He's like a child,
Rubin; he's also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.
So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. "I know,"
he said. "Some CBC creep phoned eight times." He sipped something out of a
dented cup. "You wanna Wild Turkey sour?"
"Why'd they call you?"
`Cause my name's on the back of Kings of Sleep.
Dedication."
"I didn't see it yet."
"She try to call you yet?"
"She will."
"Rubin, she's dead. They cremated her already."
"I know," he said. "And she'd going to call you."
Gomi.
Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The
Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so
they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi. By the year 1969 they
had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened
it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per
day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they coordinate the
whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific. Rubin watches this on
the news and says nothing at all.
He has nothing to say about gomi. It's his medium, the air he breathes,
something he's swum in all his life.
He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chop j,ed down from an
ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag
half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design
scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He
brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise,
human.
I met Lise at one of Rubin's parties. Rubin had a lot of parties. He never
seemed particularly to enjoy them, himself, but they were excellent parties. I
lost track, that fall, of the number of times I woke on a slab of foam to the
roar of Rubin's antique espresso mach-
ine, a tarnished behemoth topped with a big chrome eagle, the sound outrageous
off the corrugated steel walls of the place, but massively comforting, too:
There was coffee. Life would go on.
First time I saw her: in the Kitchen Zone. You wouldn't call it a kitchen,
exactly, just three fridges and a hot plate and a broken convection oven that
had come in with the gomi. First time I saw her: She had the all-
beer fridge open, light spilling out, and I caught the cheekbones and the
determined set of that mouth, but I
also caught the black glint of polycarbon at her wrist, and the bright slick
sore the exoskeleton had rubbed there. Too drunk to process, to know what it
was, but I
did know it wasn't party time. So I did what people usually did, to Lise, and
clicked myself into a different movie. Went for the wine instead, on the
counter beside the convection oven. Never looked back.
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But she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the
bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton. I
knew what it was, then, as I watched her homing in, too em-
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barrassed now to duck it, to run, to mumble some ex-
cuse and get out. Pinned there, my arm around the waist of a girl I didn't
know, while Lise advanced was advanced, with that mocking grace straight at
me now, her eyes burning with wizz, and the girl had wriggled out and away in
a quiet social panic, was gone, and Lise stood there in front of me, propped
up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic. Looked into those eyes and it was
like you could hear her synapses whin-
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