Ricky Bellamy is shot in the head by a vigilante at the corner of Geneva and Mission in San Francisco. He’s declared brain-dead and hooked up to life support, but ten months later he emerges from his coma. The bullet stays lodged in his head—inoperable, the doctors say—but with it comes what Ricky calls “visions, a third eye.”
Peter Plate's Dirty in Cashmere follows Ricky through the recent past of San Francisco, a city dealing with the fall-out from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, after which massive contamination spread across the Pacific Ocean to California. He’s set adrift in a world in which Life—the street name of an experimental radiation vaccine—is the currency by which both criminal enterprises and survival are won. As he squats in abandoned houses and brands himself as an “oracle” who can see the future, Ricky wonders whether there isn’t a bigger picture out there, one that maybe he can’t focus on or perhaps one that someone’s hiding from him. And as his skills as an oracle are called upon by more powerful forces, it becomes clear that the one thing Ricky wants most to predict is the city’s future—the mirror of his own destiny.
Collected in
Speculative Fiction for All
PETER PLATE taught himself to write fiction while squatting in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many books, including the novels Police and Thieves, Angels of Catastrophe, Elegy Written on a Crowded Street, Soon the Rest Will Fall, and Dirty in Cashmere, all published by Seven Stories Press. In 2004 Plate was named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco, where he lives.
