The new logo will be this firm’s pivot into the new century, and Cayce, with her marketable allergy, has been brought over to do in person the thing that she does best. That seems odd to her, or if not odd, archaic. Why not teleconference? There may be so much at stake, she supposes, that security is an issue, but it’s been a while now since business has required her to leave New York.
Whatever, Dorotea’s looking serious about it. Serious as cancer. On the table in front of her, perhaps a millimeter too carefully aligned, is an elegant gray cardboard envelope, fifteen inches on a side, bearing the austere yet whimsical logo of Heinzi & Pfaff. It is closed with one of those expensively archaic fasteners consisting of a length of cord and two small brown cardboard buttons.
Cayce looks away from Dorotea and the envelope, noting that a great many Nineties pounds had once been lavished on this third-floor meeting room, with its convexly curving walls of wood suggesting the first-class lounge of a transatlantic zeppelin. She notices threaded anchors exposed on the pale veneer of the convex wall, where once had been displayed the logo of whichever agency previously occupied the place, and early warning signs of Blue Ant renovation are visible as well: scaffolding erected in a hallway, where someone has been examining ductwork, and rolls of new carpeting stacked like plastic-wrapped logs from a polyester forest.
Dorotea may have attempted to out-minimalize her this morning, Cayce decides. If so, it hasn’t worked. Dorotea’s black dress, for all its apparent simplicity, is still trying to say several things at once, probably in at least three languages. Cayce has hung her Buzz Rickson’s over the back of her chair, and now she catches Dorotea looking at it.
The Rickson’s is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket, as purely functional and iconic a garment as the previous century produced. Dorotea’s slow burn is being accelerated, Cayce suspects, by her perception that Cayce’s MA-1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson’s having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion.
Cayce knows, for instance, that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally the result of sewing with pre-war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. The makers of the Rickson’s have exaggerated this, but only very slightly, and done a hundred other things, tiny things, as well, so that their product has become, in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates. It is easily the most expensive garment Cayce owns, and would be virtually impossible to replace.
“You don’t mind?” Stonestreet producing a pack of cigarettes called Silk Cut, which Cayce, never a smoker, thinks of as somehow being the British equivalent of the Japanese Mild Seven. Two default brands of creatives.
“No,” says Cayce. “Please do.”
There is actually an ashtray on the table, a small one, round and perfectly white. As archaic a fixture in America, in the context of a business meeting, as would be one of those flat and filigreed absinthe trowels. (But in London, she knew, you might encounter those as well, though she’d not yet seen one at a meeting.) “Dorotea?” Offering the pack, but not to Cayce. Dorotea declining. Stonestreet puts a filter tip between his tidily mobile lips and takes out a box of matches that Cayce assumes were acquired in some restaurant the night before. The matchbox looks very nearly as expensive as Dorotea’s gray envelope. He lights up. “Sorry we had to haul you over for this, Cayce,” he says. The spent match makes a tiny ceramic sound when he drops it into the ashtray.
“It’s what I do, Bernard,” Cayce says.
“You look tired,” says Dorotea.
“Four hours difference.” Smiling with only the corners of her mouth.
“Have you tried those pills from New Zealand?” Stonestreet asks. Cayce remembers that his American wife, once the ingénue in a short-lived X-Files clone, is the creator of an apparently successful line of vaguely homeopathic beauty products.
“Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug.”
“Well?” Dorotea looks pointedly at the H&P envelope.
Stonestreet blows a stream of smoke. “Well yes, I suppose we should.”
They both look at Cayce. Cayce looks Dorotea in the eye. “Ready when you are.”
Dorotea unwinds the cord from beneath the cardboard button nearest Cayce. Lifts the flap. Reaches in with thumb and forefinger.
There is a silence.
“Well then,” Stonestreet says, and stubs out his Silk Cut.
Dorotea removes an eleven-inch square of art board from the envelope. Holding it at the upper corners, between the tips of perfectly manicured forefingers, she displays it to Cayce.
There is a drawing there, a sort of scribble in thick black Japanese brush, a medium she knows to be the in-house hallmark of Herr Heinzi himself. To Cayce, it most resembles a syncopated sperm, as rendered by the American underground cartoonist Rick Griffin, circa 1967. She knows immediately that it does not, by the opaque standards of her inner radar, work. She has no way of knowing how she knows.
Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?
“No,” she says.
Stonestreet sighs. Not a deep sigh. Dorotea returns the drawing to its envelope but doesn’t bother to reseal it.
Cayce’s contract for a consultation of this sort specifies that she absolutely not be asked to critique anything, or provide creative input of any sort. She is only there to serve as a very specialized piece of human litmus paper.
Dorotea takes one of Stonestreet’s cigarettes and lights it, dropping the wooden match on the table beside the ashtray. “How was the winter, then, in New York?”
“Cold,” Cayce says.
“And sad? It is still sad?”
Cayce says nothing.
“You are available to stay here,” Dorotea asks, “while we go back to the drawing board?”
Cayce wonders if Dorotea knows the cliché. “I’m here for two weeks,” she says. “Flat-sitting for a friend.”
“A vacation, then.”
“Not if I’m working on this.”
Dorotea says nothing.
“It must be difficult,” Stonestreet says, between steepled, freckled fingers, his red thatch rising above them like flames from a burning cathedral, “when you don’t like something. Emotionally, I mean.”
Cayce watches Dorotea rise and, carrying her Silk Cut, cross to a sideboard, where she pours Perrier into a tumbler.
“It isn’t about liking anything, Bernard,” Cayce says, turning back to Stonestreet, “it’s like that roll of carpet, there; it’s either blue or it’s not. Whether or not it’s blue isn’t something I have an emotional investment in.”
She feels bad energy brush past her as Dorotea returns to her seat.
Dorotea puts her water down beside the H&P envelope and does a rather inexpert job of stubbing out her cigarette. “I will speak with Heinzi this afternoon. I would call him now but I know that he is in Stockholm, meeting with Volvo.”
The air seems very thick with smoke now and Cayce feels like coughing.
“There’s no rush, Dorotea,” Stonestreet says, and Cayce hopes that this means that there really, really is.
CHARLIE Don’t Surf is full, the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness. The white walls are decorated with enormous prints of close-up black-and-white photographs of ’Nam-era Zippo lighters, engraved with crudely drawn American military symbols, still cruder sexual motifs, and stenciled slogans. These remind Cayce of photographs of tombstones in Confederate graveyards, except for the graphic content
and the nature of the slogans, and the ’Nam theme suggests to her that the place has been here for a while.
IF I HAD A FARM IN HELL AND A HOUSE IN VIETNAM I’D SELL THEM BOTH
The lighters in the photographs are so worn, so dented and sweat-corroded, that Cayce may well be the first diner to ever have deciphered these actual texts.
BURY ME FACE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS
“His surname actually is ‘Heinzi,’ you know,” Stonestreet is saying, pouring a second glass of the Californian cabernet that Cayce, though she knows better, is drinking. “It only sounds like a nickname. Any given names, though, have long since gone south.”
“Ibiza,” Cayce suggests.
“Er?”
“Sorry, Bernard, I’m tired.”
“Those pills. From New Zealand.”
THERE IS NO GRAVITY THE WORLD SUCKS
“I’ll be fine.” A sip of wine.
“She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”
“Dorotea?”
Stonestreet rolls his eyes, which are a peculiar brown, inflected as with Mercurochrome; something iridescent, greenly copper-tinged.
173 AIRBORNE
She asks after the American wife. Stonestreet dutifully recounts the launch of a cucumber-based mask, the thin end of a fresh wedge of product, touching on the politics involved in retail placement. Lunch arrives. Cayce concentrates on tiny fried spring rolls, setting herself for auto-nod and periodically but sympathetically raised eyebrows, grateful that he’s carrying the conversational ball. She’s way down deep in that trough now, with the half-glass of cabernet starting to exert its own lateral influence, and she knows that her best course here is to make nice, get some food in her stomach, and be gone.
But the Zippo tombstones, with their existential elegies, tug at her.
PHU CAT
Restaurant art that diners actually notice is a dubious idea, particularly to one with Cayce’s peculiar, visceral, but still somewhat undefined sensitivities.
“So when it looked as though Harvey Knickers weren’t going to come aboard . . .”
Nod, raise eyebrows, chew spring roll. This is working. She covers her glass when he starts to pour her more wine.
And so she makes it easily enough through lunch with Bernard Stonestreet, blipped occasionally by these emblematic place-names from the Zippo graveyard (CU CHI, QUI NHON) lining the walls, and at last he has paid and they are standing up to leave.
Reaching for her Rickson’s, where she’d hung it on the back of her chair, she sees a round, freshly made hole, left shoulder, rear, the size of the lit tip of a cigarette. Its edges are minutely beaded, brown, with melted nylon. Through this is visible a gray interlining, no doubt to some particular Cold War mil-spec pored over by the jacket’s otaku makers.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” Cayce says, “nothing.” Putting on her ruined Rickson’s.
Near the door, on their way out, she numbly registers a shallow Lucite cabinet displaying an array of those actual Vietnam Zippos, perhaps a dozen of them, and automatically leans closer.
SHIT ON MY DICK OR BLOOD ON MY BLADE
Which is very much her attitude toward Dorotea, right now, though she doubts she’ll be able to do anything about it, and will only turn the anger against herself.
3.
THE ATTACHMENT
She’s gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten sick.
Should have known better.
How she responds to labels.
Down into menswear, unrealistically hoping that if anyone might have a Buzz Rickson’s it would be Harvey Nichols, their ornate Victorian pile rising like a coral reef opposite Knightsbridge station. Somewhere on the ground floor, in cosmetics, they even have Helena Stonestreet’s cucumber mask, Bernard having explained to her how he’d demonstrated his considerable powers of suasion on the HN buyers.
But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it’s all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing. Less warning aura than usual. Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball. When it happens to Cayce, it’s her psyche.
Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she’d thought she was safe now. They’d said he’d peaked, in New York. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would have been drawn. It’s something to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it’s pure reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil.
A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head.
My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.
She needs out of this logo-maze, desperately. But the escalator to the street exit will dump her back into Knightsbridge, seeming somehow now more of the same, and she remembers that the street runs down, and always her energy with it, to Sloane Square, another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. Laura Ashley, down there, and that can get ugly.
Remembering the fifth floor, here: a sort of Californian market, Dean & Deluca lite, with a restaurant, a separate and weirdly modular robotic sushi operation humming oddly in its midst, and a bar where they served excellent coffee.
Caffeine she’s held in reserve today, a silver bullet against serotonin-lack and big weird feelings. She can go there. There is a lift. Yes, a lift: a closet-sized elevator, small but perfectly formed. She will find it, and use it. Now.
She does. It arrives, miraculously empty, and she steps in, pressing 5. “I’m feeling rather excited,” a woman says, breathily, as the door closes, though Cayce knows she’s alone in this upright coffin of mirror and brushed steel. Fortunately she’s been this way before, and knows that these disembodied voices are there for the amusement of the shopper. “Mmmmm,” purrs the male of the species. The only equivalent audio environment she can recall was in the restroom of an upscale hamburger joint on Rodeo Drive, years ago: an inexplicable soundtrack of buzzing insects. Flies, it had sounded like, though surely that couldn’t have been the intent.
Whatever else these designer ghosts say, she blocks it out, the lift ascending miraculously, without intermediate stops, to the fifth floor.
Cayce pops out into a pale light slanting in through much glass. Fewer lunching shoppers than she remembers. But no clothing on this floor, save on people’s backs and in their glossy carrier bags. The swelling can subside, here.
She pauses by a meat counter, eyeing roasts illuminated like newly minted media faces, and probably of a biologic purity she herself could never hope to attain: animals raised on a diet more stringent than the one propounded in interviews by Stonestreet’s wife.
At the bar, a few Euromales of the dark-suited sort stand smoking their eternal cigarettes.
She bellies up, catching the barman’s eye.
“Time Out?” he inquires, frowning slightly. Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.
“I’m sorry?”
“Time Out. The weekly. You were on a panel. ICA.”
Institute for Contemporary Arts, last time she’d been here. With a woman from a provincial university, lecturer in the taxonomy of trademarking. Rain falling thinly on the Mall. The audience
smelling of damp wool and cigarettes. She’d accepted because she could stay a few days with Damien. He’d bought the house where he’d rented for several years, fruit of a series of Scandinavian car commercials. She’d forgotten the blurb in Time Out, one of those coolhunter things.
“You follow the footage.” His eyes narrowing within their brackets of black Italian plastic.
Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century.
“Were you there?” Cayce asks, jostled out of herself by this abrupt violation of context. She is not by any means a celebrity; being recognized by strangers isn’t part of her ordinary experience. But the footage has a way of cutting across boundaries, transgressing the accustomed order of things.
“My friend was there.” He looks down and runs a spotless white cloth across the bar top. Gnawed cuticle and too large a ring. “He told me that he’d run into you later, on a site. You were arguing with someone about The Chinese Envoy.” He looks back up. “You can’t seriously believe it’s him.”
Him being Kim Hee Park, the young Korean auteur responsible for the film in question, an interminable art-house favorite some people compare with the footage, others going so far as to suggest that Kim Park is in fact the maker of the footage. Suggesting this to Cayce is akin to asking the Pope if he’s soft on that Cathar heresy.
“No,” she says, firmly. “Of course not.”
“New segment.” Quick, under his breath.
“When?”
“This morning. Forty-eight seconds. It’s them.”
It’s as though they are in a bubble now, Cayce and the barman. No sound penetrates. “Do they speak?” she asks.
“No.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“No. Someone messaged me, on my mobile.”