“Playing it by ear. There’s a chance he knows, you know.”
“How?”
“How is academic. It’s possible. Who gave you the cell you’re using?”
He’s right. “And you thought he might give something away?”
“I thought I’d take the chance.”
“I don’t like it. It makes me complicit, and you didn’t give me the opportunity to decide whether or not I wanted to be.”
“Sorry.” She doesn’t think he is. “I need that jpeg,” he tells her. “E-mail it to me.”
“Is that safe?” she asks.
“Taki’s e-mailed it to your friend, and your friend e-mailed it to you. If anyone is keeping track of us that way, they already have it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Count angels on pinheads, with a friend of mine.”
“Seriously.”
“Improvise. Poke at it. Show it to a couple of people smarter than I am.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t like the way she winds up doing what he tells her to do. “Your address in the iBook?”
“No. This one. Chu-dot-B, at . . .” She writes it down. “What’s that domain?”
“My former company. All that’s left of it.”
“Okay. I’ll send it. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Sending the jpeg to Boone requires getting out the iBook and cabling it to the phone. She does this on automatic pilot, apparently remembering how to do it correctly, because her message to chu.b sends immediately.
Automatically, she checks her mail. Another from her mother, this one with unfamiliar-looking attachments.
Without really thinking about it, she opens Cynthia’s latest.
These four ambient segments were accidentally recorded by a CCNY anthropology student making a verbal survey of missing-person posters and other signs near the Houston and Varrick barricade on September 25th. We’ve found this particular tape to be remarkably rich in EVP, and have recovered several dozen messages by a variety of methods.
“He took a duck in the face,” Cayce says, closing her eyes. Eventually she has to open them.
Four of them, I believe, are from your father. I know that you aren’t a believer, but it seems to me that Win is addressing you, dear, and not me (he quite clearly, twice, says “Cayce”) and that there’s some urgency to whatever it might be that he’s trying to tell you.
Messages of this sort do not yield very easily to conventional studio techniques; those on the other side are best able to modulate those aspects of a recording that we ordinarily think of as “noise,” so improvement of the signal to noise ratio amounts to the erasure of the message. However, if you use headphones, and concentrate, you will be able to hear your father say the following:
File #1: Grocery store . . . [??] The tower of light . . . [life?]
File #2: Cayce . . . One hundred and . . . [start of your address?]
File #3 Cold here . . . Korea . . . [core error?] Ignored . . .
File #4 Cayce, the bone . . . In the head, Cayce . . . [headcase, someone here suggested, but frankly it isn’t an expression your father would have used]
I know this isn’t your reality but I’ve long since come to accept that. It doesn’t matter. It’s mine, though, and that’s why I’m here at ROTW, doing what I can to help with this work. Your father is trying to tell you something. Frankly, at this point, I wish he would tell us exactly when, and how, and most importantly exactly where he crossed over, as we’d then have a shot at some DNA and proof that he is in fact gone. The legal aspects of his disappearance are not progressing, although I’ve changed lawyers and had them obtain a writ of . . .
Cayce looks at her hand, which has closed Cynthia’s message as if of its own accord.
It isn’t that her mother is mad (Cayce doesn’t believe that) or that her mother believes in this stuff (though she does, utterly) or even the banal, inchoate, utterly baffling nature of the supposed messages (she’s used to that, when EVP are quoted) but that it leaves Win somehow doubly undead.
To have someone disappear in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, with no proven destination in the vicinity of the WTC, not even a known reason why they might have gone there, is proving to be an ongoing nightmare of its own peculiar sort. They had only been alerted to the fact of Win’s disappearance on the nineteenth, ordinary police procedures having been disrupted, and Win’s credit card company having been slow to provide next-of-kin information. Cayce herself had dealt alone with all of the initial phases of the hunt for her father, Cynthia having stayed in Maui, afraid to fly, until well after commercial flights had resumed. On the nineteenth, Win’s face had joined the others, so many of them, that Cayce had been living with daily in the aftermath, and very likely his had been among those the CCNY anthropology student had been surveying when (in Cynthia’s universe) Win had whispered through the membrane from whatever Other Side it was that Cynthia and her cronies in Hawaii imagined for him. Cayce herself had put up several, carefully sheathed in plastic, near the barricade at Houston and Varrick, having run them off at the Kinko’s nearest her apartment uptown. Win, deeply and perhaps professionally camera-shy, had left remarkably few full-face images, and the best she’d been able to do had been one that her friends had sometimes mistaken for the younger William S. Burroughs.
Still more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she’d made the stations of some unthinkable cross.
She had, while producing her own posters, watched the faces of other people’s dead, emerging from adjacent copiers at Kinko’s, to be mounted in the yearbook of the city’s loss. She had never, while putting hers up, seen one face pasted over another, and that fact, finally, had allowed her to cry, hunched on a bench in Union Square, candles burning at the base of a statue of George Washington.
She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington’s statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.
And then she had walked home, all the way, to her silent cave with its blue-painted floors, and had trashed the software that had allowed her to watch CNN on her computer. She hadn’t really watched television since, and never, if she could help it, the news.
But Cayce’s missing person, it had developed, was missing in some additional and specially problematic way.
Where was her father? He had left the Mayflower and hadn’t returned, and that was all that anyone seemed to know. On the advice of her mother’s lawyers, she had hired private investigators, who had interviewed cabdrivers, but the city seemed to have acquired a very specific amnesia with regard to Wingrove Pollard, a man gone so thoroughly and quietly missing that it might be impossible to prove him dead.
The dead, her mother had forever been fond of saying, remember. Remember what? Cayce had never wanted to ask.
“Are you awake?” Damien’s stubbled head appearing at the top of the stairs. “We’re going out to the Brasserie. You’re welcome.”
“No,” she says, “I’m going to sleep.” And desperately hopes it’s true.
22.
TARN
Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface. To lie there in the dark, heart thumping, eyes wide.
By the light in her watch she sees that she’s been asleep for no more than forty-five minutes.
The flat below is silent. She remembers they’ve gone to the Brasserie, a restaurant in Camden High Street, Damien’s favorite.
She gets up, pulls on jeans and sweater, and hobbles barefoot down the narrow stair, moving as she imagines she might move if she lived to be eighty. This is beyon
d soul-delay metaphors, now; it’s into physical collapse.
Glancing into Damien’s bedroom, she sees that Marina’s luggage is the Louis Vuitton stuff with the repeating monograms, the real and loathsome thing, to which she is intensely allergic. Two very new suitcases are open, spilling what she takes to be black Prada exclusively. On the twisted sheets, the silver oven-mitt comforter tossed aside on the floor, she sees a crumpled military garment in a camouflage pattern that she seems to recall is called tarn—information garnered during her time in the skateboard-clothing industry. She knows most of the patterns, and even that the most beautiful is South African, smoky mauve-toned Expressionist streaks suggesting a sunset landscape of great and alien beauty. Is tarn German camouflage, or Russian? English? She can’t remember. It means something else as well. A Poe word. Dead lakes?
In the bathroom she avoids looking at herself altogether, fearing what might seem to be revealed at this level of serotonin-lack. Showers quickly, towels, puts her clothes back on, spreads the used towel neatly on the rack (Marina is clearly a pig) and wrinkles her nose at the number of expensive cosmetic products spread around Damien’s sink. But here, she discovers, spotting a bit of non-beauty packaging, is a bottle of fine California melatonin, a prescription drug in the UK but not in America. She helps herself to half a dozen of the large beige gelatin capsules, washing them down with weirdly flavored London tap water, and creeps back upstairs, desperately pretending that she’s someone very tired (which she supposes she is) who is about to fall deeply and soundly asleep (which she very much doubts she will).
But she does, to her subsequent amazement: a shallow but mercifully uninhabited sleep, though with a certain sense of sound and fury walled off behind the neurological dryer lint of the melatonin.
SHE opens her eyes and sees Damien’s head there again, at the top of the stairs. He’s wearing that tarn jacket, buttoned to the neck. “Sorry. Just checking. Didn’t mean to wake you,” he says, almost a whisper.
She looks at her watch. It’s seven in the morning. “No,” she says, “this is good. I’m awake.”
“Marina’s not. She’ll sleep in. If we’re quiet, we can go out without waking her, have coffee and a talk.”
“Five minutes.”
His head disappears.
Flecktarn. That’s what it’s called. Like chocolate chips sprinkled on confetti the color of last autumn’s leaves.
YOU pay more, here, to sit with your coffee. Take-away is less expensive. They probably do that in Tokyo, too, but she hadn’t noticed.
It’s raining, and Damien’s worn a black hooded sweatshirt under his flecktarn. He keeps the hood up, here, seated in the back of this Starbucks clone, and she’s glad of that, as his stubbled scalp disorients her. She’s always known him as someone with a shoulder-brushing, center-parted shoe-gazer anti-haircut.
It feels like old times, to sit here with him, diagonally opposite Camden Town station, wearing damp clothing and nursing large multi-shot lattes.
“What about your father?” he asks, brown eyes peering from beneath the black cotton cowl.
“No sign. My mother’s in Hawaii, picking up messages from him on dead-air sections of audiotape, so she’s convinced he’s gone.” This sounds odd even to her, but how do you say these things?
“Fucking hell,” he says, with such evident and simple sympathy that she feels like hugging him. “That must be horrible.”
She nods. Sips from the tall paper cup. “Problems with the insurance, but that’s probably just a matter of time.”
“But you think he’s dead?”
“I’ve never doubted it, really. I don’t know why.” She looks out from this brightly lit urban cave, past the queue of customers and the sounds of steam, to the strangers passing steadily in the rain.
“And you’re over here working for Blue Ant?” He’s shot several commercials for them. A Bigend favorite, she’s heard. “And in Tokyo?”
She turns back to him. “They wanted me here to tell them whether or not a new logo worked.” She names the company and he nods. “Then it all went sideways.”
“Can’t say you sound happy about the kind of sideways.”
“No. You haven’t asked me why I changed your locks.”
“I wondered.”
“Visitor. Uninvited. I wasn’t there.”
“Someone broke in?”
“Nothing broken, that I could see. But the door was locked when they got in. Any chance anyone else had a key?”
“No. I’d been careful with that. Had them changed just as the reno was completed.”
“And there’s a chance your computer’s been compromised somehow.” Thinking of Boone checking her iBook.
“A lot of good that will do anyone. Any idea who it was?” More curious than angry. In fact not angry at all. She’d known he wouldn’t be. People fascinate him, in some peculiarly abstract way: the things they do, though not so much why they do them.
She tells him about Dorotea and the Rickson’s and Asian Sluts. The changing of the locks. Then her second encounter with Dorotea. The Michelin Man in the meeting, and then the doll on the doorknob.
“Wait a minute. You don’t talk about that, really, do you?”
“No.”
“Who knows, then?”
“Well—you, a very few other close friends, three or four ex-boyfriends I regret having told, a psychiatrist, and two psychologists.”
“And why were you in Tokyo?”
“Bigend. He’s after the maker of the footage.”
She watches him take that one in. He’s one of those people apparently immune to the lure of the footage; in his case, she knows, it has to do with his being his own maker, with his own obsessive need to generate his own footage. “Does he say why?”
“Not exactly, but he’s convinced that it’s big, in some entirely new way, and he wants to get in on the ground floor.”
“So you’re working for Blue Ant, on that?”
“No. Bigend describes it as a partnership. With him. And an American computer security consultant named Boone Chu.”
“Boonchoo?”
“Boone as in Daniel. C-h-u.”
“And you’re getting somewhere with it?”
“Irritated, mainly, though if I weren’t so jet-lagged I’d have room for serious paranoia.” She quickly outlines her experience in Japan, not going into detail about Parkaboy or Taki, just a thumbnail of the supposed Italians, and Boone.
“You nutted him?”
“No, I smashed him in the face with my forehead.”
“No, that’s what we call that, here. Or used to, I think. Amazing. Never imagined you’d have it in you.”
“Neither did I.” Around them, people with damp, loosely furled umbrellas are chatting and sipping coffee. Over them, now, she hears an amazing Glaswegan accent order a quadruple-shot latte. Damien hears it too, and grins.
“What about you?” she asks. “You’re obviously fully engaged in project, more than somewhat with producer.”
“Sometimes I think it would be easier if I could sleep with her father instead. He’s an old New Russian. Made it looting his own economy, basically, but there’s no long-term future in that. Russia’s had a GNP on par with Holland, but that’s changing. The new New Russians are into transparency: companies that actually have books, pay taxes. They’ve figured out that you can make even more money, that way. It’s no accident that Putin always describes himself as a lawyer. He is. But Marina’s dad is old school, and that’s what we need in this particular situation. Square it with the people who actually control the land we’re digging on, keep the local militia away.” He raises one hand, fingers crossed. Raises his cup with the other, to sip.
“Fergal said you were back for re-funding?”
“Done. We met with the moneymen at the Brasserie.”
“You don’t want old New Russian funding?”
“Very last thing I want. I think we’ve got another three weeks, shooting.”
; “You aren’t worried, getting hooked up with the don’s daughter?”
“He’s not mafia,” Damien says, very seriously, though she’d meant it only jokingly. “A lesser oligarch. We’re okay, Boris and I. I think he’s glad to have her out of his hair, actually.”
“Then you don’t want him to get too used to it, do you?”
“You’re scaring me.” He finishes the last of his latte. “But I’d be more worried if I were you. Working with Hubertus Bigend would be a scary proposition at the least complicated of times.” He stands up, then, and so does she, taking her Luggage Label bag from the back of her chair.
“What’s the rest of your day?”
“We’re on Aeroflot to Saint Petersburg this afternoon. I have to get our freight on, plus the additional cameramen. Plus Marina. It’s a TU 185. Getting Marina on a Russian plane can take some doing. Fergal’s got a very tight rein on budget. I have to come out of this owning the film, and that’s a stretch. What about you?”
“I’m going to a Pilates studio. When’s your flight?”
“Two twenty-five.”
“I’m going to stay out of your way, then. You don’t mind me being there, with people breaking in?”
“Wouldn’t have you anywhere else.”
Outside, under the awning, he puts his hands on her shoulders. “Are you going to be all right? You have a lot going on, all of it very weird.”
“I’ll be okay. It’s great to see you.”
“I know,” hailing a black cab. “I mean yes—it is, both ways!” The cab pulls over, he opens the door for her, gives her a quick kiss on the cheek. She gets in and he closes the door.
“Neal’s Yard,” she says.
23.
DICKHEADS
Leaving Neal’s Yard and the Pilates studio, she tries to become just another lost tourist, though she knows she’ll never be one. Like Magda going out to spread whatever shabby micro-meme her Blue Ant subsidiary requires her to, Cayce knows that she is, and has long been, complicit. Though in what, exactly, is harder to say. Complicit in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror-worlds.