文档介绍：WILLIAM GIBSON
ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES
1. CARDBOARD CITY
THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid
hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single
organism into the stations airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook
clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately
essful marine species.
Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping bags, ruthless
briefcases, Yamazaki and his small burden of information go down into the neon
depths. Toward this tributary of relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel
escalators.
Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with
dust-furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against
the far wall, derelict shipping cartons huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters
constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts, and in that moment all the
oceanic clatter muting feet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of
mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed in
Chanel micropore, rolls over his toes with an expensive three-wheeled stroller.
Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki glimpses the infant passenger through
flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a video display winking
as its mother trundles determinedly away.
Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He
wonders briefly what the muters will think, to see him enter the
carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the height of his chest, longer than the
others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged white corrugate serving as
its door.
Perhaps they will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never seen
anyone enter or exit one of these tidy hovels. It is as though their inhabitants are
rendered invisible