“Thank you,” she said, picking it up. It wasn’t very heavy. She turned, heading back toward the elevators.
And saw Laura Hyde, aka Heidi, once the Curfew’s drummer, waiting beside the cross-shaped settee. If nothing else, some quietly methodical part of her noted, this proved that that really had been who she’d thought she’d seen driving past Virgin Records, so much earlier in the evening. “Heidi?” Though there could be no doubt.
“Laura,” Hyde corrected. She wore what Hollis took to be Girbaud, a sort ofBladerunner soccer-mom look, probably less out of place in this lobby than many things would be. Her dark hair seemed to have been cut to suit that, though Hollis would’ve been at a loss to explain how.
“How are you, Laura?”
“Bagged. Inchmale got my cell number from a friend in New York. Former friend.” As if that number for Inchmale had put paid to that. “He called to tell me you were here.”
“I’m sorry…”
“Oh, it isn’t you. Really. Laurence is screening dailies two blocks from here. If I weren’t here, I’d be there.”
“He’s producing?”
“Directing.”
“Congratulations. I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I.”
Hollis hesitated.
“Not what I signed on for.” Her wide, full-lipped mouth went perfectly straight, never a good sign with her. “On the other hand, it may not last long.”
Did she mean her husband’s directing, or her marriage? Hollis had never been able to read the drummer very well. Neither had anyone else, according to Inchmale, who maintained that that was why the drumming was necessary, one species of primate signal that could always be seen to work.
“Would you like a drink, or…” Hollis turned, with the carton pressed against her chest, clutching her improvised purse in her left hand, and saw that the lobby bar had been transformed, stripped of its votive candles and candelabra and reset for a Japanese breakfast, or in any case a breakfast with black chopsticks, one not yet being served. Profoundly disinclined to invite Heidi up to her room, she allowed herself to keep moving in the direction of the endlessly elongated marble table.
“No drink,” Heidi said, settling that. “What the fuck’s that about?” Pointing toward the rear of the space, past the closed and locked bar, its exterior modeled after an enormous rubber-wheeled road case.
Hollis had noticed the instruments before, when she’d checked in. A single conga drum, a set of bongos, and an acoustic guitar and electric bass, these last two hung on cheap chrome stands. These were used instruments, even well used, but she doubted they ever were used, now, or certainly not very often.
Heidi kept walking, her drummer’s shoulders rolling smoothly beneath the matte indigo of her Girbaud blazer. Hollis remembered her biceps in a sleeveless shirt, as the Curfew had taken a stage. She followed her.
“What is this bullshit?” Glaring first at the instruments, then at Hollis. “We’re supposed to think Clapton’ll drop by? We’re supposed to think they want us to jam after we’ve had our sushi?”
Heidi’s distaste for trickiness in decor, Hollis knew, was actually an extension of her dislike of art in general. The daughter of an Air Force technician, she was the only woman Hollis had ever known who enjoyed welding, but only for the purpose of repairing something essential that was actually broken.
Hollis looked at the no-name wooden guitar. “Hootenanny time. I think they’re referencing pre-Beatles Venice. Beach.”
“‘Referencing.’ Laurence says he’s referencing Hitchcock.” She made it sound sexually transmissible.
Hollis hadn’t met Laurence yet, and neither expected nor wanted to, and hadn’t seen Heidi since shortly after the Curfew’s cessation. Heidi’s unexpected appearance here, and now this close-up look at Starck’s Boy Scouts of America beatnik jazz tableau, were bringing up all the pain of Jimmy for her. It was as if she expected him to be there, as if he should be there, as if he actually were there, just out of focus, or around some corner. Hadn’t spiritualists arranged instruments this way, in their séance parlors? Though of these four, the electric bass, Jimmy’s instrument, was the only one you couldn’t just pick up and play, were you determined to. No cord, no amp, no speaker. What had happened to Jimmy’s Pignose, she wondered.
“He came to see me, a week before he died,” Heidi said, causing Hollis to start. “He’d been to that place outside of Tucson, done the twenty-eight days. Said he was going to meetings.”
“That was here?”
“Yeah. Laurence and I were just hooking up. I didn’t introduce them. He didn’t feel right, Jimmy. To me, I mean.” That aspect of Heidi that Hollis was always surprised to remember she was fond of looked out for an instant, from behind her brusqueness, something childlike and startled, then vanished. “You were in New York, when he died?”
“Yes. But not upstate. I was in the city, but I had no idea he’d come back. I hadn’t seen him for almost a year.”
“He owed you money.”
Hollis looked at her. “Yes. He did. I’d almost forgotten that.”
“He told me about it, borrowing that five thousand from you, in Paris, at the end of the tour.”
“He always told me he intended to pay it back, but I didn’t see how that was likely to happen.”
“I haven’t known how to get in touch with you,” Heidi said, hands in the pockets of her blazer. “I supposed you’d turn up eventually. Now here you are. I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner.”
“Get what?”
Heidi drew a frayed white letter-sized envelope from her blazer pocket and handed it to her. “Fifty hundreds. Just the way he gave them to me.”
Hollis saw her own initials in faint red ballpoint, upper-left corner. Her breath caught. She forced herself to sigh. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put the envelope atop the carton and looked over it at Heidi. “Thanks. Thanks for keeping it for me.”
“It was important to him. I didn’t feel like anything else he was talking about really was. The place in Arizona, the recovery program, some offer he’d had to produce, in Japan…But he wanted to be sure you got your money back, and I guess that giving it to me was one way to do that. For one thing”—she narrowed her eyes—“once he’d told me he owed you, he knew I wouldn’t give it back to him to spend on smack.”
Inchmale said that the Curfew had been built on the literal sonic foundation of Heidi’s stubbornness and militant lack of imagination, but that knowing that had never made it any easier to get along with her, and that that had been true from the very start. Hollis had always thought she’d agreed with that, but just now it seemed more viscerally true than she’d ever felt it to be, before.
“I’m out of here,” Heidi said, giving Hollis’s shoulder a quick squeeze, a really exceptional display of warmth, for her.
“Goodbye…Laura.”
Watching her march back across the lobby, past the cruciform settee and out of sight.
23. TWO MOORS
Brown left Milgrim in the Korean’s laundry for a very long time. Eventually a younger Korean, perhaps the proprietor’s son, arrived with a brown-bagged Chinese meal, which he presented to Milgrim with no comment. Milgrim cleared a space among the magazines on the plywood coffee table and unpacked his lunch. Plain rice, boneless chicken nuggets in red dye no. 3, fluorescent-green vegetable segments, finely sliced brown mystery meat. Milgrim preferred the plastic fork to the chopsticks. If you were in prison, he encouraged himself, you’d find this food a treat. Unless you were in a Chinese prison, some less-cooperative part of himself suggested, but he worked his way through it all, methodically. With Brown, it was best to eat what you could when the opportunity presented itself.
As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. There was nothing that wasn’t God, and indeed how could there be? M
ilgrim had never been one for metaphysics, but now the combination of his captivity, medication on demand, and this text was starting to reveal the pleasure to be had from metaphysical contemplation. Particularly if you were contemplating these Free Spirit guys, who seemed to have been a combination of Charlie Manson and Hannibal Lecter.
And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with the Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn’t yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case might be—rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he’d ever heard of. Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn’t have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would’ve hated it. What good would it be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists, each one convinced that he or she was directly manifesting the Holy Spirit?
But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.
The rattle of the door distracted him from these thoughts. He looked up from the remains of his lunch and witnessed the entrance of an extremely large black man, very tall and very wide, who wore a stout thigh-length black leather coat, double-breasted and belted, and a black wool watch cap, pulled low around his ears. The watch cap put Milgrim in mind of the knitted woolen headgear Crusaders wore beneath their helmets, and that in turn made the leather barnstormer resemble a sort of elongated cuirass. A black knight stepping into the laundry from the early evening cold.
Milgrim wasn’t sure that there had actually been black knights, but couldn’t a Moor have converted, some African giant, and been made a knight in the service of Christ? Compared to that Free Spirit, it seemed the likeliest of scenarios.
Now the black knight had stepped up to the Korean’s counter, and was asking him if he could clean furs. The Korean couldn’t, he said, and the knight nodded, accepting that. The knight looked over and met Milgrim’s gaze. Milgrim nodded too, unsure why.
The knight left. Through the window, Milgrim saw him join a second and remarkably similar black man, in yet another black, double-breasted, belted leather coat. They turned south, down Lafayette, in their matching black wool skullcaps, and instantly were gone.
As Milgrim tidied away his empty foam bowl and his foil dishes, he experienced a nagging sensation of having failed to pay adequate attention to something. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what that might have been.
It had been a very long day.
24. POPPIES
Votive candles had been lit in her darkened room. Beside the luminous cottons of the all-white bed, the water pitcher had been filled. She put the carton, dead Jimmy Carlyle’s envelope of hundred-dollar bills, and her makeshift evening purse on the long-legged marble-topped table in the kitchenette.
She used the small unsharpened blade in the handle of the kitchenette’s corkscrew to slit the transparent tape sealing the carton.
There was a note, in an oddly Sumerian-looking script, on a rectangle of plain gray card, resting on a fold of bubble wrap. “You need your own. Press On. H.”
She set that aside and lifted the fold of bubble wrap. Something black and matte silver. She drew out what she took to be a more aggressively styled version of the wireless helmet she’d used to view the squid at Bobby Chombo’s. Through the cutaway shell, she saw the same few simple touch pads. She turned the thing over, looking for a manufacturer’s logo, but found none. She did findMADE IN CHINA in minute bas-relief, but then most things were.
She tried it on, intending to do no more than glance at herself in a candlelit mirror, but she must have touched one of the control surfaces. “A locative installation, in your room,” Odile said, sounding as if she were inches from Hollis’s ear. She found herself atop the turned-down bed, clutching Bigend’s headgear, so unexpected had this been. “Monet’s poppies. Rotch.” Rotch? “The poppies and whatever background, they are equiluminant.”
And there they were, quivering slightly, reddish orange, arrayed as a field that filled her room, level with the height of the bed.
She moved her head from side to side, scanning the effect. “This becomes part of a series. The artist’s Argenteuil series. Rotch.” There it was again. “She fill spaces everywhere with Monet’s poppies. Call me when you have received this. We must talk, also about Chombo.” She pronounced it “Shombo.”
“Odile?” But it had been a recording. Still crouching on the bed, she sat down and ran her left hand through the poppies she knew weren’t there. She almost thought she could feel them. She swung her legs over the side and found the floor, poppies around her knees. Wading through them, toward the layered drapes, she felt momentarily as though they floated atop captive, unmoving water. The artist might not have intended that, she thought.
Reaching the window, she held the drapes aside with her forearm and peered down at Sunset, half expecting to discover that Alberto had littered the street with dead celebrities, more tableaux of fame and misadventure, but there was nothing evident.
She took it off, returned to the table through the sudden absence of poppies, and touched various surfaces inside until a green LED went off. As she was putting it back in the carton, she noticed something else, amid the bubble wrap.
She pulled out a molded vinyl figurine of the Blue Ant ant. She stood it on the marble tabletop, picked up the evening’s purse, and took that into the bathroom. While she ran a tub of hot on top of the day’s allotment of shower gel, she emptied the purse and transferred its usual contents back into it.
She tested the water, undressed, and got into the tub, settling herself on her back.
She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.
She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.
The water was deep enough that it rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis.
Odile’s poppies. She remembered Alberto’s description of how he sculpted and skinned-up a new celebrity misadventure. She guessed Odile’s poppies were another, simpler kind of skin. They could be anything, really.
She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.
25. SUNSET PARK
Vianca sat cross-legged on Tito’s floor with his Sony plasma screen across her knees. Wearing a disposable hairnet and white knit cotton gloves, she was going over the Sony with an Armor All wipe. When she’d wiped it completely down, it would go back into its factory packaging, which in turn would be wiped.
Tito, in his own hairnet and gloves, sat
opposite her, wiping the keys of his Casio. A carton of cleaning supplies had been waiting for them in the hall, beside a new and expensive-looking vacuum cleaner Vianca said was German. Nothing came out of this vacuum but air, she said, so there would be no stray hairs or other traces left behind. Tito had helped his cousin Eusebio with exactly this procedure, though Eusebio had mainly had books, each of which had needed, according to protocol, to be flipped through for forgotten insertions, then wiped. The reasons for Eusebio’s departure had never been made clear to him. That too was protocol.
He looked up at the symmetrically spaced holes in the wall, where the Sony had been mounted. “Do you know where Eusebio is?”
Vianca raised her eyes from her wiping, eyes narrowing beneath the white paper band of the hairnet. “Doctores,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Doctores. In the Federal District. A neighborhood. Or maybe not.” She shrugged, and went back to wiping.
Tito hoped he wouldn’t have to go to Mexico, to Mexico City. He had not left the United States since being brought here, and he had no desire to. These days, returning here might be more difficult still. There were family members in Los Angeles. That would be his choice, not that he would have one. “We used to practice systema, Eusebio and I,” he said, turning the Casio over and continuing to wipe.
“He was my first boyfriend,” Vianca said, which seemed impossible until he remembered that she wasn’t really a teenager.
“You don’t know where he is?”
She shrugged. “Guessing, Doctores. But better not to be sure.”
“How do they decide, where you go?”
She put her wipe down, on top of the Armor All container, and picked up a foam packing segment. It fit perfectly over one end of the Sony. “It depends on who they think might be looking for you.” She picked up the segment for the other end.
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