She looks back at the door.
Someone has a key. Two keys, she remembers, for this door, and possibly a third for the street door.
Damien must have a new girlfriend, someone he hasn’t mentioned. Or else an old one, someone who’s retained the keys. Or a cleaner perhaps, someone who forgot something and returned for it while Cayce was out.
Then she remembers that the keys are new, the locks having been changed after completion of the renovation, causing hers to have had to be FedExed to New York on the eve of her departure. This by Damien’s assistant, the one who’d come in to put the place back together. And she remembers this woman on the phone with her in New York, concerned because the keys she’d just sent off were the only set she had, and apologizing that Damien currently had no housecleaner.
She goes into the bedroom and examines her things. Nothing seems to have been disturbed. She remembers an eerily young Sean Connery, in that first James Bond film, using fine clear Scottish spit to paste one of his gorgeous black hairs across the gap between the jamb and the door of his hotel room. Off to the casino, he will know, upon returning, whether or not his space has been violated.
Too late for that.
She goes into the other room and looks at the Cube, which has gone back to sleep, and at the roll of tape on the carpet. The room is clean and simple, semiotically neutral, Damien having charged his decorators, on threat of dismissal, with the absolute avoidance of shelter magazine chic of any kind.
What else is there, here, that might retain information?
The telephone.
On the table beside the computer.
It is an unusually simple mirror-world telephone, none of the usual bells or whistles. It doesn’t even have call-display, Damien viewing such things as time-sinks and needless recomplications.
It does, however, have a redial button.
She picks up the handset and looks at it, as though expecting it to speak.
She presses the redial button. Listens to a sequence of mirror-world rings. She is waiting for the voice mail at Blue Ant to pick up, or perhaps a weekend receptionist, because she hasn’t used this phone since calling them, Friday morning, to confirm that her car was on the way.
“Lasciate un messaggio, risponderò appena possibile.”
A woman’s voice, brisk and impatient.
Tone.
She almost screams. Hangs frantically up.
Leave a message. I will reply as soon as I can.
Dorotea.
6.
THE MATCH FACTORY
“First priority,” Cayce tells Damien’s flat, hearing her father’s voice, “secure the perimeter.”
Win Pollard, twenty-five years an evaluator and improver of physical security for American embassies worldwide, had retired to develop and patent humane crowd-control barriers for rock concerts. His idea of a bedtime story had been the quiet, systematic, and intricately detailed recitation of how he’d finally secured the sewer connections at the Moscow embassy.
She looks at the white-painted door and guesses it to be made of oak. Like so many things Victorian, far more solidly built than it ever needed to be. Hinges are on the inside, as they should be, and this means that it swings inward, toward a blank section of wall. She judges the distance between door and wall, then looks at the table.
She gets the yellow tape she’d noticed earlier from beneath the sink, using it to measure the length of the table, then the distance between the closed and chained door and the wall. Eight centimeters to spare, and with the table in position, lengthwise, between door and wall, it will require either a fire ax or explosives to get into the flat.
She transfers the telephone, cable modem, keyboard, speakers and Studio Display monitor to the carpet, without disconnecting them or shutting the Cube down. The screen wakes when she does this and she sees Asian Sluts still there, same position. When she moves the Cube itself, her hand accidentally covers its static switch. It powers off. She touches the spot to reboot and turns to the table, the top of which lifts easily off the two trestles. It’s heavy and solid, but Cayce is one of those slight-looking women who combine considerable wiry strength with low body weight. This had made her, in college, a much better rock climber than her psychologist boyfriend, to his ongoing and increasing annoyance. She would invariably reach the top first, never intentionally, and always by a more challenging route.
She props the tabletop against the wall, beside the door, and goes back for the trestles. Returning with them, one in either hand, she positions them, then picks up the tabletop and lowers it, careful not to scuff Damien’s freshly painted wall. Unchains and unlocks the door, opening it the eight centimeters the table now allows. This proves to be not even enough to produce a gap to peer through. Perimeter secured, she closes the door, relocking and chaining it.
She sees that the Cube is showing her that it wasn’t properly shut down, so she kneels beside it and clicks that that’s okay. When she gets to the desktop, she reopens the browser and looks at the memory again, seeing that Asian Sluts still hasn’t moved itself.
Seeing it there, this time, causes her a residual hair-prickle, but she gets past that by forcing herself to open it. To her considerable and unexpected relief, it turns out not to be snuff or torture or even anything singularly nasty. What these women deserve, evidently, is active attention from erect penises. These being, in that way of visual porn for men, weirdly disembodied, as though one were to imagine they had arrived at the brink of a particular orifice through no individual human agency whatever. When she exits, she has to click her way past an opportunistic swarm of linked sites, and some of these, in split-second glances, look considerably worse than Asian Sluts.
Now, in browser memory, F:F:F is followed twice by Asian Sluts, as if to prove a point.
She’s trying to remember what would have come after securing the perimeter, in Win’s bedtime stories. Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get on with ordinary business. Maintain morale. How many times has she turned to that, in the past year or so?
Hard to know what that would consist of, here and now, but then she thinks of F:F:F and the frenzy of posts the new footage will have generated. She’ll make a pot of tea-sub, cut up an orange, sit cross-legged on Damien’s carpet, and see what’s going on. Then she’ll decide what she should do about Asian Sluts and Dorotea Benedetti.
Not the first time she’s used F:F:F that way. She wonders, really, if she ever uses it any other way. It is the gift of “OT,” Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.
In the kitchen, boiling water, she drifts back to her father’s bedtime descriptions of that perimeter-containment job in Moscow.
She’d always secretly wanted the KGB spy devices to make it through, because she’d only ever been able to envision them as tiny clockwork brass submarines, as intricate in their way as Fabergé eggs. She’d imagined them evading each of Win’s snares, one by one, and surfacing in the bowls of staff toilets, tiny gears buzzing. But this had made her feel guilty, because it was Win’s job, and his passion, to keep them from doing that. And she’d never been able to imagine exactly what it was they were there to do, or what they’d need to do next in order to get on with it.
Damien’s kettle starts to whistle. She takes it off the burner and fills the pot.
Settled in picnic mode before the Cube, she opens F:F:F and sees that the posts have indeed been flying. But also, to a certain extent, that the shit has been hitting the fan.
Parkaboy and Mama Anarchia are flaming one another again.
Parkaboy is de facto spokesperson for the Progressives, those who assume that the footage consists of fragments of a work in progress, something unfinished and still being generated by its maker.
The Completists, on the other hand, a relative but articulate minority, are convinced that the footage is comprised of snippets from a finished work, one whose maker
chooses to expose it piecemeal and in nonsequential order. Mama Anarchia is the consummate Completist.
The implications of this, for some F:F:F regulars, border on the theological, but it’s fairly simple for Cayce: If the footage consists of clips from a finished film, of whatever length, every footagehead, for whatever reason, is being toyed with, unmercifully teased, in one of the most annoying fashions ever devised.
The Ur-footageheads who discovered and connected the earliest known fragments had of course to entertain the Completist possibility. When there were five fragments, or a dozen, it seemed more easily possible that these might be parts of some relatively short work, perhaps a student effort, however weirdly polished and strangely compelling. But as the number of downloads grew, and the mystery of their common origin deepened, many chose to believe that they were being shown these bits of a work in progress, and possibly in the order in which they were being completed. And, whether you held that the footage was mainly live action or largely computer-generated, the evident production values had come increasingly to argue against the idea of a student effort, or indeed of anything amateur in the usual sense. The footage was simply too remarkable.
It had been Parkaboy, shortly after Ivy had started the site from her Seoul apartment, who had first raised the possibility of what he called “the Garage Kubrick.” This was not a concept that argued from either a Completist or Progressive position, necessarily, with Mama Anarchia herself quite contentedly using the term today, even though she knows that it originated with Parkaboy. It is simply a part of the discourse, and a central one: that it is possible that this footage is generated single-handedly by some technologically empowered solo auteur, some guerilla creator out there alone in the night of the Internet. That it might be being generated via some sort of CGI, actors, sets and all, and entirely at the virtual hand of some secretive and perhaps unknown genius, has become a widespread obsession with a large faction of Progressives, and with many Completists as well, though the Completists necessarily put that in past tense.
But here is Parkaboy railing on about Mama Anarchia’s tendency to quote Baudrillard and the other Frenchmen who annoy him so deeply, and Cayce automatically hits Respond and gives him her boilerplate oil-upon-the-waters copy:
This always happens when we forget that this site is only here because Ivy is willing to expend the time and energy to keep it here, and neither Ivy nor most of the rest of us enjoy it when you or anyone else starts yelling. Ivy is our host, we should try to keep this a pleasant place for her, and we shouldn’t take it too much for granted that F:F:F will always be here.
She clicks on Post and watches her name and message title appear under his:
CayceP and Keep your shirt on.
Because Parkaboy is her friend, she can get away with this where someone else couldn’t. She has become a sort of ritual referee charged specifically with flagging down Parkaboy whenever he goes off on anyone, as he’s definitely inclined to do. Ivy can whip him into shape pronto, but Ivy is a policewoman in Seoul, works long shifts, and can’t always be on the site to moderate.
She automatically clicks Reload, and his response is already there:
Where are you? nt.
London. Working. nt.
And all of this is hugely comforting. Psychological prophylaxis, evidently.
The phone rings, beside the Cube, mirror-world rings she finds unnerving at the best of times. She hesitates, then answers.
“Hello?”
“Cayce dear. It’s Bernard.” Stonestreet. “Helena and I were wondering if you’d be up for a little dinner.”
“Thank you, Bernard.” Looking at the trestle table blocking the door. “But I’m feeling unwell.”
“Jet lag. You can try Helena’s little pills.”
“It’s kind of you, Bernard, but—”
“Hubertus will be here. He’ll be horribly disappointed if he doesn’t have a chance to see you.”
“Aren’t we meeting Monday?”
“He’s in New York tomorrow evening. Can’t be here for our meeting. Say you’ll come.”
This is one of those conversations in which Cayce feels that the British have evolved passive-aggressive leverage in much the way they’ve evolved irony. She has no way of securing the perimeter, here, once she leaves the flat, but this Blue Ant contract represents a good quarter of her anticipated year’s gross.
“PMS, Bernard. Not to put it too delicately.”
“Then you absolutely have to come. Helena has something completely marvelous, for that.”
“Have you tried it?”
“Tried what?”
She gives up. Company, of almost any kind, seems not entirely a bad idea. “Where are you?”
“Docklands. Seven. It’s casual. I’ll send a car. Delighted you can come. Bye.” Stonestreet rings off with an abruptness Cayce suspects has required some learning in New York. There is ordinarily a singsong, almost tender cadence to the mirror-world termination of telephone conversations, a call-and-response of farewell she’s never mastered.
Psychological prophylaxis is shot to hell.
Three minutes later, having Googled “North London locksmith,” she’s on the phone with a man at something called Judge Advocate Locks.
“You don’t work on Saturdays,” she opens, hopefully.
“Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.”
“But you wouldn’t be able to get here before this evening, would you?”
“Where are you?”
She tells him.
“Fifteen minutes,” he says.
“You don’t take Visa.”
“We do.”
As she hangs up, she realizes that she’s lost Dorotea’s number by making this call. Not that she would necessarily have been able to extract it from the phone, but it was the closest thing she had to evidence of the entire episode, other than Asian Sluts on the browser memory. She presses Redial, just to check, and gets the man at Judge Advocate. “Sorry,” she says, “hit Redial by mistake.”
“Fourteen minutes,” he says, defensive now, and the truck arrives in more like twelve.
An hour later, Damien’s door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol. The Cube is back on the table in its accustomed place. She didn’t change the lock on the street door because she doesn’t know Damien’s tenants, or even how many there are.
Dinner with Bigend. She groans, and goes to change.
THE car and driver from Blue Ant are waiting when she exits the street door, the two new keys on a black shoestring around her neck. She’s hidden the set of spares behind one of Damien’s mixing consoles in the upstairs room.
Evening now, a light rain just beginning to fall.
She thinks of it thinning the Children’s Crusade still further, under the giant Fimo boots and aeroplanes and the streetlamps mounted with surveillance cameras.
Settled in the car’s rear seat, she asks the driver, a slender and immaculate African, for the name of the station nearest their destination.
“Bow Road,” he says, but she doesn’t know it.
She looks at the back of his meticulously shorn head, at the niobium stud in the upper curve of his right ear, then out at passing shop fronts and restaurants.
Stonestreet’s “casual” will translate as relatively dressy, by her standards, so she’s opted for the CPU Damien calls Skirt Thing, a long, narrow, anonymously made tube of black jersey, with only the most minimal hemming at either end. Tight but comfortable, rides the hips well, infinitely adjustable in terms of length. Under this, black hose; over it, a black DKNY cardigan un-Dikini-ed with a pair of nail scissors. New-old-stock pumps from a vintage place in Paris.
And finds herself thinking wistfully of racketing along in the Metro, and of the impossibly great way Parisian women have of wearing scarves. She decides that this is either another sign of serotonin normalization, daydreaming of a
nother place, or a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge reaction to Asian Sluts on the browser.
This increasingly massive and entirely unresolved issue she now has with Dorotea, someone she’d scarcely known existed. She’s searched her memory for any way in which she might previously have earned this woman’s enmity, but has found nothing.
She is not much in the business of making enemies, although the quieter side of her profession, the sort of yea-or-nay evaluation Blue Ant is currently paying her for, can be problematic. A nay can cost a company a contract, or an employee (once, an entire department) a job. The rest of it, the actual running to earth of street fashion, the occasional lectures to intent platoons of executives, generates remarkably little ill will.
A red double-decker grinds past, registering less as mirror-world than as some Disney prop for Londonland.
On a wall she spies freshly shingled copies of a still from the new fragment. It is the kiss. Already.
In New York, once, on an uptown train in rush hour, during the anthrax scares, as she’d mentally recited the duck mantra, she’d found herself looking at a still no bigger than a business card, frame-grabbed and safety-pinned, from a fragment she’d not yet seen, on the green polyester uniform blazer of a weary-looking black woman. Cayce had been using the mantra to ward off a recurring fantasy: that they would drop light bulbs full of the very purest stuff on the subway tracks, where, as she too well remembered Win once having told her, it would take only a few hours, as the Army had evidently proven in experiments in the 1960s, to drift from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street.
Pattern Recognition Page 5
