Pattern Recognition

  Case takes it. CAYCE POLLARD EXP. Platinum Visa customized with the hieratic Blue Ant, which of course is a Heinzi creation, robotic and Egyptianate. Pamela Mainwaring hands her an expensive German roller-point. Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily, at the rear of her ethical universe.

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” Pamela says. “Have a brilliant trip, best of luck, and call or e-mail me if you need anything. Absolutely anything.” She shakes Cayce’s hand firmly. “I can show myself out, thanks.”

  And then she’s gone, Cayce closing and locking the door behind her. She goes back to the table and picks up the cell phone. She sees that it’s on. After a few tries she manages to turn it off. She puts it back in the case, which she closes and pushes to the rear of the table.

  Takes a deep breath, another, then does a Pilates spine curl, rolling down vertebra by vertebra into a sort of upright fetal crouch. Comes up out of it as smoothly and slowly as she can.

  Damien’s phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Voytek.”

  “I need your help with something, Voytek. I’d like you to keep a set of keys, and give them to a friend of mine if he turns up. I’ll give you twenty pounds.”

  “Is not needed to pay, Casey.”

  “It’s a donation to your ZX 81 project. I have a new job and I’m on an expense account,” she says, thinking she’s lying but then realizing she isn’t, necessarily. “Can you meet me in two hours, where we had breakfast?”

  “Yes?”

  “Good. See you.” Hangs up.

  And wonders, for the first time, and indeed for the first time in her life, whether the phone is tapped. Could that be what got the Asian Sluts invader in here in the first place? Dorotea’s an industrial espionage bitch, or has been, so it probably isn’t entirely unlikely. They do things like that. Bugs. Spy Shop stuff. She mentally reviews her calls since Asian Sluts. The only one of any substance, asking Helena about Trans, she’d made from a phone in Camden High Street. Now this one to Voytek, but unless a listener knew where she’d run into him at breakfast . . . But then couldn’t they trace his number, wherever that is?

  She goes into the room where she keeps her luggage and begins the pretravel yoga of folding and packing CPUs, which somehow tells her body that she will soon be free of reliance on this particular perimeter.

  Completing these tasks, she lies down on the gray duvet and falls asleep, willing herself to wake in an hour, in time to meet Voytek at the bistro in Aberdeen Street. And knows that she will.

  And dreams, though she seldom dreams, or seldom recalls them, that she is alone in the back of a black cab, in London, the transience of late summer leaves accentuating the age of the city, the depth of its history, the simple stubborn vastness of it. Facades of tall houses, poker-faced and unyielding. She shivers, though the night is warm, the air in the cab close, and the image from Damien’s e-mail comes to her, wet gray pyramids of bone rising beside excavations in a Russian swamp. What was that, to do that to the dead, to history? She hears picks ringing, drunken laughter, and she is in the cab, feeling ill, and in the pine forest, the summer swamp, witness she knows to some cannibalization beyond expression, some eating of the dead, and she remembers telling Bigend that the past is mutable too, as mutable as the future, but now she must tell him that it shouldn’t be dug up, ravaged, thrown away. She must tell him, but cannot speak, even though she now sees that it is Bigend who is driving this cab, wearing his cowboy hat, and even if she speaks, if she manages to break this thing that so painfully shackles speech, he is separated from her voice by a partition of glass or plastic, entirely bent on driving, driving she knows not where.

  And wakes to the rapid beating of her heart.

  Gets up, to splash cold water on her face and ascend the steep narrow stairwell to where she’s hidden the second set of keys.

  And she will be careful, in the street, on her way to meet Voytek. She has never before determined to try to discover whether or not she might be being followed, but now she does, and will.

  Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine.

  There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

  13.

  LITTLE BOAT

  Her seat on the upper deck of this British Airways 747 subsides into a bed that makes her think of a little boat, a coracle of Hexcel and teak-finish laminate. She’s nearest the nose, no other seating units in her line of sight.

  The cabin is like some optimally comfy cube-farm, a cluster of automated, supremely ergonomic workstation enclosures. It feels as though, with just a little more engineering, they could simultaneously tube-feed you and tidily exhaust the resulting wastes.

  However many hours in the air now, her watch tucked ritually out of sight, dinner served, lights dimmed, she imagines her soul bobbing stupidly, somewhere back over the concrete of Heathrow, its invisible tether spooling steadily out of her. As does a certain degree of fear, she notes, now that she knows they must be far out over an ocean, where no human agents threaten. For most of her life, flying, she’d felt most vulnerable right here, suspended in a void, above trackless water, but now her conscious flying-fears are about things that might be arranged to happen over populous human settlements, fears of ground-to-air, of scripted CNN moments.

  But commercial aircraft have also been problematic for Cayce in another way, with their endless claustrophobic repetition of the carrier’s logo. BA has never been particularly difficult, but Virgin, with its multipronged product-associations, is completely impossible.

  Her biggest problem with BA now, she reminds herself, is a more ordinary one: no movies she’d even consider watching in the armrest DVD, she’s under a personally enforced video news ban in effect now for some time, she’s neglected to bring anything to read, and sleep refuses to come. With London receding and Tokyo still largely unimagined, unremembered, she sits up cross-legged in the center of her narrow little bed and knuckles her eyes, feeling like a bedridden child, just well enough to be utterly restless.

  Then she remembers Bigend’s iBook, with its bright new Heathrow security sticker.

  She hauls the nylon case up from the floor and opens it. She’d spent twenty minutes, the night before, poking around on the desktop, but now for the first time she notices an ummarked CD-ROM that proves, on insertion, to be a searchable database of all of F:F:F. Whoever does these things for Bigend has also provided, on the hard drive, a complete collection of the footage and her three favorite edits, one of them by Filmy and Maurice.

  Still sitting cross-legged, she makes a Stickie: COPY CD FOR IVY.

  Ivy’s wanted a searchable database of the forum almost since the forum began, because the free software that allows her to keep the site up isn’t searchable, and she hasn’t had anyone willing or able to do the compiling. Posters have bookmarked their favorite threads, and swap them, but there’s been no way to trace a particular topic or theme through the site’s evolution.

  Or, rather, now there is.

  Cayce has no idea how many pages of posts have accumulated since the site’s first day. She’s never gone back and looked at that, at the Ur-site, the early days, but now she enters and searches CayceP.

  On the contrary, as I was saying yesterday . . .

  Ah. Not her first post. At first she hadn’t even been CayceP. Reenters Cayce.

  Hi. How many segments, in all? Just downloaded the one where he’s on the rooftop. Has anyone been able to do anything with those chimney-pots (is that what you call them?)?

  She’d added the P later, because there had briefly been another Cayce, surname, a Marvin, in Wichita, who’d also pronounced it Case, not Casey.

  She feels somewhat the way she might if she had uncovered her high-school yearbook.

  Here’s Parkaboy’s first post:

  Well suck me raw with a breast-pump! Thought I was the only one out here obsessing about the
peculiar beauties of this particularly spotty stretch of anomalous cinematic prairie. Anybody into cowboy poetry as well? Because, let me assure you, I’m not.

  This had been prior to La Anarchia’s arrival, after three days of which Parkaboy had made the first of his many noisy departures from the site.

  She fiddles with the matte alloy buttons on her armrest, converting her bed into a lounger. It feels good when it moves: powerful motors devoted to her comfort. She settles back in her black sweats (having declined the offer of a BA romper suit) and pulls the tartan blanket across her legs, iBook on her stomach. Adjusts the snaky fiber-optic reading lamp, with its head like a policeman’s flashlight.

  Exits the CD-ROM and clicks on Filmy and Maurice’s edit.

  It opens on that rooftop, against the oddly shaped chimneys. He is there. Walks to the low parapet. Looks out toward a city that never resolves. A framegrab on what he sees would reveal only a faint arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines. No focus. Definitely a skyline but not enough information to provide any sort of identification. Rule out Manhattan, others; there are lists arguing the places it cannot, might not be.

  Maurice cuts to that segment that consists entirely of long shots, the girl in the formal park.

  Sometimes, when she watches a good edit, and this is one of the best, it’s as though it’s all new; she sinks into it with joy and anticipation, and when the edit ends, she’s shocked. That’s it. All there is. How can that be?

  This is one of those times. It ends.

  She falls asleep, iBook on her lap.

  When she wakes, the cabin is darker, and she needs to pee.

  Grateful that she isn’t wearing a BA romper, she shuts the iBook down, stows it away, unbuckles her seat belt, puts on BA slippers, and makes her way back toward the toilets.

  Passing, as she does, what can only be the sleeping form of Billy Prion, snoring lightly, his still-unparalyzed mouth slightly open. He has his tartan blanket arranged around his shoulders like an old man in a bath chair, his face slack and inert. She blinks, trying to convince herself that this cannot be the former lead singer of BSE, but it quite clearly is, all in what looks to be last season’s Agnes B Homme.

  In the coracle nearest Prion sleeps a blindfolded blonde, a pair of modest nipple rings clearly visible in outline through the taut black fabric of her top.

  This, Cayce decides, further confirming her identification of Prion, is the singer from the former Velcro Kitty, the one the music press had supposed he was no longer with.

  She forces herself to shuffle on, in her navy vinyl slippers, to the almost-spacious safety of a first-class toilet, with its fresh flowers and Molton Brown face stuff, where she locks the door and sits, unable to put this together: Prion, at whose gallery Voytek hopes to show his ZX 81 project, is on her flight to Tokyo. Why? If it’s that small a world, it starts to smell funny.

  Watching that intensely blue fluid pressure-swirl down as she flushes.

  Returning to her seat, she sees the nipple-ringed singer awake, seated upright, blindfold discarded, studying a glossy fashion magazine under a tightly focused fiber-optic beam. Prion is still snoring.

  Back in her own little boat, she accepts a lukewarm white washcloth from the flight attendant’s tongs.

  Why are they here, on this flight, Prion and the Velcro Kitty girl?

  She remembers her father’s views on paranoia.

  Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

  Is Prion’s presence on this plane a frank anomaly?

  Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn’t, can’t, understand. That had always been Win’s first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

  But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

  The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia.

  The damp white cloth has grown cold in her hand.

  She places it on the armrest and closes her eyes.

  14.

  THE GAIJIN FACE OF BIKKLE

  Electric twilight now, and some different flavor of hydrocarbons to greet her as she exits Shinjuku Station, wheeling her black carry-on behind her.

  She’s taken the JR Express in from Narita, knowing that this avoids bumper-to-bumper rush-hour freeway-creep and one of the world’s dullest bus rides. Pamela Mainwaring’s car would have been equally slow, and would have meant contact with Blue Ant personnel, something she hopes to keep to a bare minimum.

  Having lost sight of Prion and his girlfriend shortly after deplaning, she hopes they’re now stuck in the traffic she’s managed to miss, whatever their purpose in coming here might be.

  Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs, she sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan “NO REASON!” This vanishes, replaced by a news clip, dark-skinned men in bright robes. She blinks, imagining the towers burning there, framed amid image-flash and whirl.

  The air is warm and slightly dank.

  She hails a taxi, its rear door popping open for her in that mysterious Japanese way. She swings her carry-on onto the backseat and climbs in after it, settling herself on the spotless white cotton seat cover and almost forgetting not to pull the door shut after her.

  The white-gloved driver closes it with the lever under his seat, then turns.

  “Park Hyatt Tokyo.”

  He nods.

  They edge out into the dense, slow, remarkably quiet traffic.

  She takes out her new phone and turns it on. The screen comes up in kanji. Almost immediately, it rings.

  “Yes?”

  “Cayce Pollard, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Welcome to Tokyo, Cayce. Jennifer Brossard, Blue Ant.” American. “Where are you?”

  “Shinjuku, on my way to the hotel.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “Sleep, I think.” It’s more complicated than that, of course, soul-delay coming in from some novel angle here. She can’t remember how she’d dealt with jet lag when she was last here, but that was ten years ago. Dancing and quite a lot of drinking, possibly. She’d been that much younger, and that had been in the heyday of the Bubble.

  “You have our number.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Alone again, suddenly, in the crepuscular calm of a Tokyo taxi.

  She looks out the window, reluctantly admitting more of the alien but half-familiar marketing culture, the countless cues and clues proving too much for her now. She closes her eyes.

  More white gloves at the Park Hyatt, her carry-on lifted out and placed atop a luggage cart, then draped with a sort of bulky silken fishnet, its edges weighted, a ritual gesture that puzzles her: some survival from a grander age of European hotels?

  White gloves in the vast Hitachi elevator, pressing the button for the lobby. Eerily smooth ascent, the speed of it pulling blood from her head, past floors unmarked and uncounted, then the door opens silently on a large grove of live bamboo, growing from a rectangular pool the size of a squash court.

  Through registration, imprinting the Blue Ant card, signing, then up, that many more floors again, perhaps fifty in all.

  To this room, very large, with its large black furniture, where the bellman briefly shows her various amenitie
s, then bows and is gone, no tip expected.

  She blinks. A James Bond set, Brosnan rather than Connery.

  She uses the remote as demonstrated, drapes drawing quietly aside to reveal a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn’t see elsewhere, as if you’d need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. Logos of corporations she doesn’t even recognize: a strange luxury, and in itself almost worth the trip. She remembers this now from previous visits, and also the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here: Whole seas of Burberry plaid have no effect on her, nor Mont Blanc nor even Gucci. Maybe this time it will even have started to work for Prada.

  She thumbs the drapes closed and sets about the unpacking and hanging up and putting away of CPUs. When she’s finished, there is no sign that the room is occupied, save for her black East German envelope and the black iBook bag, both resting now on the ecru expanse of the enormous bed.

  She examines the instructions for the room’s Internet connection, gets out the iBook and goes to hotmail.

  Parkaboy, with two attachments.

  She’d e-mailed him from Damien’s telling him she was on her way here, but not under whose auspices. Parkaboy is one of the few F:F:Fers who she’s certain would know exactly who Bigend is and what Blue Ant is about.

  She’d asked him for his and Musashi’s best advice on how to go about contacting Taki and obtaining the mystery number. This will almost certainly be that.

  It’s titled KEIKO. She opens it.

  How’d you manage Tokyo? But never mind, because the ’Sash and I have been burning the midnight oil for you in the meantime. Well, mostly the ’Sash, cuz he’s the one had to find us a Keiko. Cept she’s not a Keiko but a Judy . . .