The black woman, seeing her notice the little still, had nodded, recognizing a fellow follower, and Cayce had been rescued from inner darkness by this suggestion of just how many people might be following the footage, and just how oddly invisible a phenomenon that was.
There are many more, now, in spite of a general and in her opinion entirely welcome lack of attention from the major media. Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks. It comes in mothlike, under radar evolved to detect things with massive airframes: a species of ghost, or “black guest” perhaps (as Damien had once explained hackers and their more autonomous creations are known in China).
Shows dealing with lifestyles and popular culture, or with minor mysteries made to seem major, have aired the story, along with dubiously assembled sequences of fragments, but these elicited no viewer response whatever (except on F:F:F, of course, where the assemblages are ripped to shreds amid lengthy and passionate protestations of just how clueless it is to put, say, #23 before #58). Footageheads seem to propagate primarily by word of mouth, or, as with Cayce, by virtue of random exposure, either to a fragment of video or to a single still frame.
Cayce’s first footage had been waiting for her as she’d emerged from the flooded all-genders toilet at a NoLiTa gallery party, that previous November. Wondering what she could do to sterilize the soles of her shoes, and reminding herself never to touch them again, she’d noticed two people huddled on either side of a third, a turtlenecked man with a portable DVD player, held before him in the way that crèche figures of the Three Kings hold their gifts.
And passing these three she’d seen a face there, on the screen of his ciborium. She’d stopped without thinking and done that stupid duck dance, trying to better align retina to pixel.
“What is that?” she’d asked. A sideways look from a girl with hooded eyes, a sharp and avian nose, round steel labret stud gleaming from beneath her lower lip. “Footage,” this one had said, and for Cayce it had started there.
She’d left the gallery with the URL for a site that offered all of the footage accumulated to that point.
Ahead, now, in the wet evening light, a twirling blue pulse, as of something meant to warn of whirlpools, vortices . . .
They are in some larger thoroughfare, multi-lane traffic verging on gridlock. The Blue Ant car slowing, halting, locked in from behind, then edging forward.
As they pass the scene of the accident Cayce sees a bright yellow motorcycle on its side, front forks twisted strangely. The whirling blue light is mounted on a slender mast, rising from a larger, obviously official motorcycle parked nearby, and she sees that this is an emergency medical response vehicle, an entirely mirror-world concept, able to edge through the densest traffic to an accident site.
The bike medic, in a Belstaff jacket with huge reflective stripes, is kneeling above the fallen rider, whose helmet is on the pavement beside him and whose neck is immobilized in a foam collar. The medic is giving the man oxygen with a mask and bottle, and now Cayce realizes she can hear the insistent hooting, from somewhere behind, of a mirror-world ambulance. And for an instant she sees that unconscious, unmarked face its lower half obscured by the transparent mask, the evening’s rain falling on closed eyes. And knows that this stranger may now inhabit the most liminal place of all, poised perhaps on the brink of nonexistence, or about to enter some existence unimagined.
She cannot see what hit him, or what he might have hit. Or else the street itself had risen up, to smite him. It is not only those things we most fear that do that, she reminds herself.
“IT was a match factory,” Stonestreet says, having greeted her and ushered her into two stories of lofted open plan, dark gleaming hardwood stretching to a wall of glass that opens on a full-length balcony. Candlelight. “We’re looking for something else.” He’s wearing a black cotton dress shirt, its French cuffs unlinked and flapping. The at-home version of that new but slept-in look, she supposes. “It’s not Tribeca.”
No, it’s not, she thinks, neither in square footage nor in volumes of space.
“Hub’s on the deck. Just arrived. Drink?”
“ ‘Hub’?”
“Been in Houston.” Stonestreet winks.
“Bet it would be ‘Hube’ if they had their druthers.” Hube Bigend. Lombard.
Cayce’s dislike of Bigend is indeed personal, albeit secondhand, a friend having been involved with the man in New York, back in, as the kids had recently quit saying, the day. Margot, the friend, from Melbourne, had always referred to him as “a Lombard,” which Cayce had at first thought might be a reference somehow to his Belgian-ness, until learning, upon finally asking, that it was Margot’s acronym for “Loads of money but a real dickhead.” As things had progressed between them, mere Lombardhood had scarcely covered it.
Stonestreet, at the wet bar sculpted into a corner of the kitchen’s granite island, passes her, at her request, a tall glass of ice and fizzy water, garnished with a twist of lemon.
On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished. . . . The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing, but with the uneasy hallucinatory suggestion of panic about to break through.
She turns, and sees Bigend through glass leading to a balcony, hands on the rain-slick railing, his back to her, in some sort of raincoat and what seems to be a cowboy hat.
“HOW do you think we look,” Bigend asks, “to the future?” He looks as though he’s somehow, in spite of the evening’s cunningly vegan cuisine, been infused with live extract of hot beef. He’s florid, glossy, bright-eyed, very likely bushy-tailed as well. The dinner conversation has been mercifully uneventful, with no mention of Dorotea or Blue Ant, and for this Cayce is grateful.
Helena, Stonestreet’s wife, has been lecturing them about the uses, even today, in cosmetics, of reprocessed bovine neurological material, having gotten there via a discussion, over her stuffed eggplant, of spongiform encephalopathy as the price of forcing herbivores into an apocalyptically unnatural cannibalism.
Bigend has a way of injecting these questions into conversations that he’s grown tired of. Caltrops thrown down on the conversational highway; you can swerve or you can hit them, blow your tires, hope you’ll keep going on the rims. He’s been doing it through dinner and their predinner drinks, and Cayce assumes he does it because he’s the boss, and perhaps because he really does bore easily. It’s like watching someone restlessly change channels, no more mercy to it than that.
“They won’t think of us,” Cayce says, choosing straight into it. “Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.”
“I think they’ll hate us,” says Helena, only her gorgeous eyes visible now above her nightmares of BSE and a spongiform future. She looks, for just that instant, as though she’s still in character as the emotionally conflicted deprogrammer of abductees on Ark/Hive 7’s lone season, Cayce having once watched a single episode in order to see a friend’s actor boyfriend in a walk-on as a morgue attendant.
“Souls,” repeats Bigend, evidently not having heard Helena, his blue eyes widening for Cayce’s benefit. He has less accent of any kind than she can recall having heard before in any speaker of English. It’s unnerving. It makes him sound somehow directionless, like a loudspeaker in a departure lounge, though it has nothing to do with volume. “Souls?”
Cayce looks at him and carefully chews a mouthful of stuffed eggplant.
“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were
the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
Cayce blinks.
“Do we have a past, then?” Stonestreet asks.
“History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,” Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. “Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.”
“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
“You sound oracular.” White teeth.
“I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.” What she’s actually doing here is channeling Parkaboy from memory, a thread with Filmy and Maurice, arguing over whether or not the footage is intended to convey any particular sense of period, or whether the apparently careful lack of period markers might suggest some attitude, on the maker’s part, to time and history, and if so, what?
Now it’s Bigend’s turn to chew, silently, looking at her very seriously.
HE drives a maroon Hummer with Belgian plates, wheel on the left. Not the full-on uber-vehicle like a Jeep with glandular problems, but some newer, smaller version that still manages to look no kinder, no gentler. It’s almost as uncomfortable as the bigger ones, though the seats are upholstered with glove-soft skin. What she’d liked, all she’d liked, about the big ones had been the huge transmission hump, broad as a horse’s back, separating driver from passenger, but of course their affect had changed entirely, once the actual original Humvee had become a fixture on the streets of New York.
Never her idea of a date vehicle, your old-school civvie Hummer, and this little one has her closer to Bigend, who’s placed his chocolate-brown Stetson on the down-scaled hump between them. Mirror-world traffic has her foot foolishly working a phantom brake, as though she, seated on the British driver’s side, should be doing the driving. She clutches her East German envelope, in her lap, and tries not to do that.
Bigend’s made it plain that he won’t think of her taking a cab (though neither, apparently, would he think of resummoning the Blue Ant car and its natty driver) nor will he countenance her suggestion of the tender mercies of the Bow Street tube. Trains do not arrive at Camden Town, this time on a Saturday, he explains; they only depart, the better to thin the ranks of the Children’s Crusade. She remembers now that she knew this, vaguely, herself, though imagining the logistics of it, now, after a glass or two too many of Stonestreet’s wine, defeats her. How can trains depart without first having arrived?
The rain is done, the air clear as glass.
She spots a cluster of signage denoting things Smithfield as they whip through a roundabout, and thinks that they are near the market.
“We’ll have a drink,” Hubertus Bigend says, “in Clerkenwell.”
7.
THE PROPOSITION
He parks the Hummer on a well-lit thoroughfare in what is apparently Clerkenwell, nothing much to distinguish any very individual ’hoodness to Cayce. Street level is routine London retail and services, but the buildings themselves have the look of retrofitted residency, possibly of a more Tribeca-like sort than Stonestreet’s match factory.
He opens the glove compartment and removes a rectangular sheet of thick glossy plastic that unfolds to approximately the size of a mirror-world license plate. She sees “EU” there, a British lion, and what seems to be a license number, as he places this, open and face-up, on the dash.
“Permission to park,” he explains, and when she gets out she sees that they are parked against a double-lined, yellow-painted curb. Exactly how well connected is Bigend, here? she wonders.
Putting on his dark brown Stetson, he clicks his key, and the Hummer’s lights flash, go dark, flash again, and a brief, truncated lowing issues forth as the vehicle comes to full alert. She wonders if it gets touched a lot, looking like a giant’s Matchbox toy. Whether it allows that.
Then walking with him toward what is obviously their destination, a bar-restaurant retrofitted to look as little as possible like a pub, and whose lighting reminds her, as they approach its windows and the thump of bass, of the color of spent flashbulbs, fried steel wool through smoked glass.
“Bernard has always said you were very good.” His voice reminds her of touring a museum with those earphones on. Strangely compelling.
“Thank you.” As they enter the place, her eye-blink take on the crowd is about white powder, the old-fashioned kind.
But yes, she remembers these too-bright smiles, eyes flashing flat as glass.
Bigend obtains a table instantly, something she assumes not everyone could do under the circumstances, and she recalls that her friend in New York had initially cited this as one of the counterbalances to his Lombardhood: no waiting. Cayce assumes this is not because he’s known here, but because of some attitudinal tattoo, something people can read. He’s wearing a cowboy hat, a fawn waterproof of archaic hunting cut, gray flannels, and a pair of Tony Lama boots—so they probably aren’t reacting to a fashion message.
A waitress takes their orders, Cayce’s a Holsten Pils, Bigend’s a kir. Cayce looks at him across two feet of circular table and a tiny oil lamp with a floating wick. He removes his hat, looking in that instant quite suddenly and remarkably Belgian, as though the Stetson should be a fedora of some kind.
Their drinks arrive, and he pays with a crisp twenty-pound note extracted from a broad wallet stuffed mainly with unreal-looking high-denomination euros.
The waitress pours Cayce’s beer and Bigend leaves the change on the table.
“Are you tired?” he asks.
“Jet lag.” Automatically returning Bigend’s toast, lager clinking kir.
“It shrinks the frontal lobes. Physically. Did you know that? Clearly visible on a scan.”
Cayce swallows some beer, winces. “No,” she says, “it’s because the soul travels more slowly, and arrives late.”
“You mentioned souls earlier.”
“Did I?” She can’t remember.
“Yes. Do you believe in them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” He sips. “You don’t get along with Dorotea?”
“Who told you that?”
“Bernard felt you didn’t. She can be very difficult.”
Cayce is suddenly aware of her East German plastic envelope, where it rests beneath the table, across her thighs; its weight unaccustomed, uneven, because she’s tucked her solid little bit of robot girl knuckleduster in there, against she knows not what possibility.
“Can she?”
“Of course. If she feels that you are about to have something she has long coveted.” Bigend’s teeth seem to have multiplied, or metastasized perhaps. His lips, wet with the kir, are very red in this light. He shakes his dark forelock away from his eyes. She is on full sexual alert now, Bigend’s ambiguity having finally gotten to her. Is this all about that, then? Does Dorotea see her as a sexual competitor? Is she in the sights of Bigend’s desire, which she knows, from her friend Margot’s stories in New York, to be at once constant and ever-shifting?
“I don’t think I follow you, Hubertus.”
“The London office. She thinks I am going to hire you to run the London office.”
“That’s absurd.” And it is, huge relief, as Cayce is not someone you hire to run an agency in London. Not someone you hire to run any
thing. She is hyper-specialized, a freelancer, someone contracted to do a very specific job. She has seldom had a salary. She is entirely a creature of fees, adamantly short-term, no managerial skills whatever. But mainly she’s relieved if it isn’t sexual. Or at least that he seems to have indicated that it isn’t. She feels herself held by those eyes, against all conscious will. Progressively locked into something.
Bigend’s hand comes up with his glass, and he finishes his kir. “She knows that I’m very interested in you. She wants to work for Blue Ant, and she covets Bernard’s position. She’s been angling to leave H and P since well before they made her our liaison.”
“I can’t see it,” Cayce says, meaning replacing Stonestreet with Dorotea. “She’s not exactly a people person.” An insane bitch, actually. Burner of jackets and burglar of apartments.
“No, of course not. She’d be a complete disaster. And I’ve been delighted with Bernard since the day I hired him. Dorotea may be one of those people who aren’t going to make it through.”
“Through what?”
“This business of ours is narrowing. Like many others. There will be fewer genuine players. It’s no longer enough to simply look the part and cultivate an attitude.”
Cayce has imagined something like this herself, and indeed has been wondering whether she’s likely to make it through the narrowing, into whatever waits on the other side.
“You’re smart enough,” he says. “You can’t doubt it.”
She’ll take a page from his book, then. Caltrop time. “Why are you rebranding the world’s second-largest manufacturer of athletic shoes? Was it your idea or theirs?”
“I don’t work that way. The client and I engage in a dialogue. A path emerges. It isn’t about the imposition of creative will.” He’s looking at her very seriously now, and to her embarrassment she feels herself shiver. She hopes he didn’t notice. If Bigend can convince himself that he doesn’t impose his will on others, he must be capable of convincing himself of anything. “It’s about contingency. I help the client go where things are already going. Do you want to know the most interesting thing about Dorotea?”