Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.
The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent, installing or deleting applications as he saw fit. It was also prone to something Sleight called “kernel panic,” which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with.
Lately, though, Milgrim didn’t panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself. Milgrim preferred to regard that by-product obliquely, in brief sidelong glances, else it somehow stop being produced. The biggest thing he was doing, in terms of the by-product of reduced anxiety, the therapist had explained, was to no longer take benzos on as constant a basis as possible.
He no longer took them at all, apparently, having undergone a very gradual withdrawal at the clinic. He wasn’t sure when he’d actually stopped having any, as the unmarked capsules had made it impossible to know. And he’d taken lots of capsules, many of them containing food supplements of various kinds, the clinic having some obscure naturopathic basis which he’d put down to basic Swissness. Though in other ways the treatment had been quite aggressive, involving everything from repeated massive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a “paradoxical antagonist.” This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure he somehow associated with the colors in 1950s American advertising illustrations. Perky.
He missed his cognitive therapist. He’d been delighted to be able to speak Russian with such a beautifully educated woman. Somehow he couldn’t imagine having transacted all of that in English.
He’d stayed eight months, in the clinic, longer than any of the other clients. All of whom, when opportunity had afforded, had quietly asked the name of his firm. Milgrim had replied variously, at first, though always naming some iconic brand from his youth: Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak. Their eyes had widened, hearing this. Toward the end of this stay, he’d switched to Enron. Their eyes had narrowed. This had partly been the result of his therapist’s having ordered him to use the internet to familiarize himself with the events of the previous decade. He had, as she’d quite rightly pointed out, missed all of that.
>>>
He dreams this in the tall white room, its floor of limed oak. Tall windows. Beyond them, snow is falling. The world outside is utterly quiet, depthless. The light is without direction.
“Where did you learn your Russian, Mr. Milgrim?”
“Columbia. The university.”
Her white face. Black hair matte, center-parted, drawn back tight.
“You described your previous situation as one of literal captivity. This was after Columbia?”
“Yes.”
“How do you see your current situation as differing from that?”
“Do I see it as captivity?”
“Yes.”
“Not in the same way.”
“Do you understand why they would be willing to pay the very considerable fees required to keep you here?”
“No. Do you?”
“Not at all. Do you understand the nature of doctor-patient confidentiality, in my profession?”
“You aren’t supposed to tell anyone what I tell you?”
“Exactly. Do you imagine I would?”
“I don’t know.”
“I would not. When I agreed to come here, to work with you, I made that absolutely clear. I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim. I am not here for them.”
“That’s good.”
“But because I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim, I am also concerned for you. It is as though you are being born. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“You were incomplete when they brought you here. You are somewhat less incomplete now, but your recovery is necessarily a complexly organic process. If you are very fortunate, it will continue for the rest of your life. ‘Recovery’ is perhaps a deceptive word for this. You are recovering some aspects of yourself, certainly, but the more important things are things you’ve never previously possessed. Primary aspects of development. You have been stunted, in certain ways. Now you have been given an opportunity to grow.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Good, yes. Comfortable? Not always.”
>>>
At Heathrow there was a tall black man, head immaculately shaven, holding a clipboard against his chest. On it, in medium-nib red Sharpie, someone had written “mILgRIm.”
“Milgrim,” Milgrim said.
“Urine test,” the man said. “This way.”
Refusing to submit to random testing would have been a deal-breaker. They’d been very clear about that, from the start. He would have minded it less if they’d managed to collect the samples at less awkward times, but he supposed that was the point.
The man removed Milgrim’s red name from his clipboard as he led him into an obviously preselected public restroom, crumpling it and thrusting it into his black overcoat.
“This way,” walking briskly down a row of those seriously private British toilet-caves. Not cubicles, or stalls, but actual narrow little closets, with real doors. This was usually the first cultural difference Milgrim noticed here. Englishmen must experience American public toilets as remarkably semicommunal, he guessed. The man gestured him into a vacant toilet-room, glanced back the way they’d come, then quickly stepped in, closing the door behind him, locked it, and handed Milgrim a plastic sandwich bag containing a blue-topped sample bottle. Milgrim propped the red cardboard tube, carefully, in a corner.
They had to watch, Milgrim knew. Otherwise, you might switch containers, palm off someone else’s clean urine. Or even use, he’d read in New York tabloids, a special prosthetic penis.
Milgrim removed the bottle from the bag, tore off the paper seal, removed the blue lid, and filled it, the phrase “without further ceremony” coming to mind. He capped it, placed it in the bag, and passed it over, in such a way that the man wouldn’t have to experience the warmth of his fresh urine. He’d gotten quite good at this. The man dropped it into a small brown paper bag, which he folded and stuffed into his coat pocket. Milgrim turned and finished urinating, as the man unlocked the door and stepped out.
When Milgrim emerged, the man was washing his hands, fluorescent lights reflecting off the impressive dome of his skull.
“How’s the weather?” Milgrim asked, soaping his own hands from a touch-free dispenser, the cardboard tube resting on the water-flecked faux-granite counter.
“Raining,” said the man, drying his hands.
When Milgrim had washed and dried his own hands, he used the damp paper towels to wipe the bottom plastic cap of his tube.
“Where are we going?”
“Soho,” the man said.
Milgrim followed him out, his overnight bag slung over one shoulder, the tube tucked under the opposite arm.
Then he remembered the Neo.
When he turned it on, it began to ring.
5. THIN ON THE GROUND
And when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a v
ampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack.
Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who looked like extras from that Cronenberg film.
She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.”
By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band.
Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.
But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly.
“Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag, yellow, unmarked.
“Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk, its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply stapled, held the two handles together. PAMELA MAINWARING, BLUE ANT.
She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy paper.
A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powdery-looking.
No exterior signage. The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts. On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places. Centered directly beneath this, sewn under the bottom edge of the leather patch, was a small folded tab of white woven ribbon, machine-embroidered with three crisp, round black dots, arranged in a triangle. Indicating size?
Her gaze was drawn back to the brand of the hound, with its almost featureless kewpie head.
>>>
“Twenty-ounce,” the handsomely graying professor of denim pronounced, the Gabriel Hounds jacket spread before her on a foot-thick slab of polished hardwood, atop what Hollis guessed had been the cast-iron legs of a factory lathe. “Slubby.”
“Slubby?”
Running her hand lightly over the jacket’s sleeve. “This roughness. In the weave.”
“Is this Japanese denim?”
The woman raised her eyebrows. She was dressed, today, in a tweed that looked as if the brambles had been left in, khaki laundered so often as to be of no particular color, oxford cloth so coarse it seemed handloomed, and at least two tattered paisley cravats of peculiar but differing widths. “Americans forget how to make denim like this. Maybe loomed in Japan. Maybe not. Where did you find it?”
“It belongs to a friend.”
“You like it?”
“I haven’t tried it on.”
“No?” The woman moved behind Hollis, helping her remove her coat. She picked up the jacket and helped Hollis into it.
Hollis saw herself in the mirror. Straightened. Smiled. “That’s not bad,” she said. She turned up the collar. “I haven’t worn one of these for at least twenty years.”
“Fit is very good,” the woman said. She touched Hollis’s back with both hands, just below her shoulders. “By-swing shoulders. Inside, elastic ribbons, pull it into shape. This detail is from HD Lee mechanic jacket, early Fifties.”
“If the fabric is Japanese, would it have to have been made in Japan?”
“Possible. Build-quality, detailing, are best, but … Japan? Tunisia? Even California.”
“You don’t know where I could find another like it? Or more of this brand?” She didn’t, somehow, want to name it.
Their eyes met, in the mirror. “You know ‘secret brand’? You understand?”
“I think so,” she said, doubtfully.
“This is very secret brand,” the woman said. “I cannot help you.”
“But you have,” Hollis said, “thank you,” suddenly wanting to be out of the beautifully spare little shop, the musky pong of indigo, “thank you very much.” She pulled her coat on, over the Gabriel Hounds jacket. “Thank you. Goodbye.”
Outside, in Upper James Street, a boy was hurrying past, a hemisphere of thin black wool pulled down level with his eyes. All black, save for his white, blotchily unshaven face and the pavement-smudged white sole-edges of his black shoes.
“Clammy,” she said, reflexively, as he passed her.
“Fucking hell,” hissed Clammy, in his recently and somewhat oddly acquired West Hollywood American, and shuddered, as if from some sudden massive release of coiled tension. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for denim,” she said, then had to point back at the shop, having no idea what it was called, discovering simultaneously that it apparently had no sign. “Gabriel Hounds. They don’t have any.”
Clammy’s eyebrows might have gone up, beneath his black beanie.
“Like this,” she said, tugging at the unbuttoned denim jacket beneath her coat.
His eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that?”
“A friend.”
“Next to fucking impossible to find,” pronounced Clammy, gravely. As if suddenly taking her, to her amazement and for the first time, seriously.
“Time for a coffee?”
Clammy shivered. “I’m fucking ill,” he said, and sniffled noisily. “Had to get out of the studio.”
“Herbal tea. And something I have for your immune system.”
“Were you Reg’s girl, in the band? My mate says you were.”
“Never,” she said, firmly. “Neither symbolically nor biblically.”
Blank.
“They always think the singer must be fucking the guitarist,” she clarified.
Clammy smirked, through his cold. “Tabloids said that about me ’n’ Arfur.”
“Exactly,” she said. “A Canadian-made, ginseng-based patent medicine. Herbal tea chaser. Can’t hurt.”
Clammy, snuffling, nodded his consent.
>>>
She hoped he really did have a virus. Otherwise, he was in the early onset of heroin withdrawal. But probably a cold, plus the very considerable stress inherent in working in the studio with Inchmale.
She’d gotten him to swallow five capsules of Cold-FX, taking three herself as a prophylactic measure. It usually didn’t seem to do anything, once symptoms were advanced, but the promise of it had gotten him around the corner and into the Starbucks on Golden Square, and she hoped he was prone to the placebo effect. She was herself, according to Inchmale, who was an adamant and outspoken Cold-FX denier. “You have to keep taking them,” she said to Clammy, placing the white plastic bottle beside his steaming paper cup of chamomile. “Ignore the instructions. Take three, three times a day.”
He shrugged. “Where’d you say you got the Hounds?”
“It belongs to someone I know.”
“Where’d they get it, then?”
“I don’t know. Someone told me it was a ‘secret brand.’ ”
“Not when you know,” he said. “Just very hard to find. Thin on the fucking ground, your Gabriel Hounds.”
“Is he starting to talk about rerecording the bed tracks?” She guessed that if she tried to change the subject, he might resist, and she could go along with that, not seem too interested.
Clammy shivered. Nodded.
“Has he talked about doing it in Tucson?”
Clammy frowned, forehead masked behind black cashmere. “Last night.” He peered out, through plate glass, at Golden Square, deserted in the rain.
“There’s a place there,” she said. “One of his secrets. Do it. If he wants to go back later for the overdubs, do it.”
“So why’s he breaking my balls now, remixing?”
“It’s his process,” she said.
Clammy rolled his eyes, to heaven or his black cap, then back to her. “You ask your friend where they got the Hounds?”
“Not yet,” she said.
He turned on his stool, swung his leg out from beneath the counter. “Hounds,” he said. The jeans he wore were black, very narrow. “Twenty-ounce,” he said. “Brutal heavy.”
“Slubby?”
“You blind?”
“Where did you find them?”
“Melbourne. Girl I met, knew where and when.”
“A store?”
“Never in shops,” he said. “Except secondhand, and that’s not likely.”
“I tried Google,” she said. “A Mary Stewart book, a band, CD by someone else …”
“Go further, on Google, and there’s eBay,” he said.
“Hounds on eBay?”
“All fake. Almost all. Chinese fakes.”
Zero History Page 4
