“Who are you?” asked Shadow.
“Okay,” she said. “Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray: I’m the boob tube. I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”
“You’re the television? Or someone in the television?”
“The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.”
“What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.
“Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.” She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old / Love Lucy wink.
“You’re a god?” said Shadow.
Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. “You could say that,” she said.
“Sam says hi,” said Shadow.
“What? Who’s Sam? What are you talking about?”
Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many’people have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me.”
The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucji looked concerned, her lips pursed. “I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I’d never do that, honey. No, I want to offer you a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Working for me. I heard about the trouble you had with the Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient, no-nonsense, effective. Who’d’ve thought you had it in you? They are really pissed.”
“Really?”
“They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I’m going to make. I want you in my camp.” She stood up, walked toward the camera. “Look at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. We’re shopping malls—your friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, we’re on-line malls, while your friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a cart. NQ—they aren’t even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers. We are now and tomorrow. Your friends aren’t even yesterday anymore.”
It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”
She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the technical boy? Look, he’s a good kid. He’s one of us. He’s just not good with people he doesn’t know. When you’re working for us, you’ll see how amazing he is.”
“And if I don’t want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy?”
There was a knock on the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Ricky’s voice could be heard offstage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin’ her so long, they was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy’s cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you, I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they’re giving you, I can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile. “You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”
The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.
He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them better than then: opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty, and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak in cliches.
And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.
Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town that was home to the runner-up of the state women’s under 16s three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn’t all that was holding it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash. He was surprised to discover that the car was, when clean—against all reason—white, and pretty much free of rust. He drove on.