“No spoilers,” Cayce warns, getting a grip.
He refolds the white cloth. A waft of blue Gitane drifts past, from the Euromales. “A drink?” The bubble bursts, admitting sound.
“Espresso, double.” She opens her East German envelope, reaching for heavy mirror-world change.
He’s drawing her espresso from a black machine down the bar. Sound of steam escaping under pressure. The forum will be going crazy, the first posts depending on time zones, history of proliferation, where the segment surfaced. It will prove impossible to trace, either uploaded via a temporary e-mail address, often from a borrowed IP, sometimes via a temporary cell phone number, or through some anonymizer. It will have been discovered by footageheads tirelessly scouring the Net, found somewhere where it’s possible to upload a video file and simply leave it there.
He returns with her coffee in a white cup, on a white saucer, and places it before her on the glossy black counter. Positions a steel basket nearby, its sections containing a variety of colorful British sugars, at least three kinds. Another aspect of the mirror-world: sugar. There is more of it, and not only in things you expect to be sweet.
She’s stacked six of the thick pound coins.
“On the house.”
“Thank you.”
The Euromales are indicating a need for fresh drink. He goes to tend to them. He looks like Michael Stipe on steroids. She takes back four of the coins and nudges the rest into the shadow of the sugar caddy. Smartly downs her double sans sugar and turns to go. Looks back as she’s leaving and he is there, regarding her severely from the depths of black parentheses.
BLACK cab to Camden tube.
Her attack of Tommy-phobia has backed off nicely, but the trough of soul-delay has opened out into horizonless horse latitudes.
She fears she’ll be becalmed before she can lay in supplies. On autonomic pilot in a supermarket in the High Street, filling a basket. Mirror-world fruit. Colombian coffee, ground for a press. Two-percent milk.
In a nearby stationer’s, heavy on art supplies, she buys a roll of matte black gaffer’s tape.
Heading up Parkway toward Damien’s she notices a flyer adhering to a lamppost. In rain-faded monochrome a frame-grab from the footage.
He looks out, as from depths.
Works at Cantor Fitzgerald. Gold wedding band.
PARKABOY’S e-mail is text-free. There is only the attachment.
Seated before Damien’s Cube, with the two-cup French press she bought on Parkway. Fragrant waft of powerful Colombian. She shouldn’t drink this; it will not so much defer sleep as guarantee nightmares, and she knows she’ll wake again in that dread hour, vibrating. But she must be present for the new segment. Sharp.
Always, now, the opening of an attachment containing unseen footage is profoundly liminal. A threshold state.
Parkaboy has labeled his attachment #135. One hundred and thirty four previously known fragments—of what? A work in progress? Something completed years ago, and meted out now, for some reason, in these snippets?
She hasn’t gone to the forum. Spoilers. She wants each new fragment to impact as cleanly as possible.
Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you’ve seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you’ve been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure.
Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
She slowly depresses the plunger.
Pours coffee into a mug.
She’s draped her jacket cape-style round the smooth shoulders of one robotic nymph. Balanced on its stainless pubis, the white torso reclines against the gray wall. Neutral regard. Eyeless serenity.
Five in the evening and she can barely keep her eyes open.
Lifts her cup of black unsweetened coffee. Mouse-clicks.
How many times has she done this?
How long since she gave herself to the dream? Maurice’s expression for the essence of being a footagehead.
Damien’s Studio Display fills with darkness absolute. It is as if she participates in the very birth of cinema, that Lumière moment, the steam locomotive about to emerge from the screen, sending the audience fleeing, out into the Parisian night.
Light and shadow. Lovers’ cheekbones in the prelude to embrace.
Cayce shivers.
So long now, and they have not been seen to touch.
Around them the absolute blackness is alleviated by texture. Concrete?
They are dressed as they have always been dressed, in clothing Cayce has posted on extensively, fascinated by its timelessness, something she knows and understands. The difficulty of that. Hairstyles, too.
He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarine in 1914, or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957. There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic cues, that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful. His black coat is usually read as leather, though it might be dull vinyl, or rubber. He has a way of wearing its collar up.
The girl wears a longer coat, equally dark but seemingly of fabric, its shoulder-padding the subject of hundreds of posts. The architecture of padding in a woman’s coat should yield possible periods, particular decades, but there has been no agreement, only controversy.
She is hatless, which has been taken either as the clearest of signs that this is not a period piece, or simply as an indication that she is a free spirit, untrammeled by even the most basic conventions of her day. Her hair has been the subject of similar scrutiny, but nothing has ever been definitively agreed upon.
The one hundred and thirty-four previously discovered fragments, having been endlessly collated, broken down, reassembled, by whole armies of the most fanatical investigators, have yielded no period and no particular narrative direction.
Zaprudered into surreal dimensions of purest speculation, ghost-narratives have emerged and taken on shadowy but determined lives of their own, but Cayce is familiar with them all, and steers clear.
And here in Damien’s flat, watching their lips meet, she knows that she knows nothing, but wants nothing more than to see the film of which this must be a part. Must be.
Above them, somewhere, something flares, white, casting a claw of Caligarian shadow, and then the screen is black.
She clicks on Replay. Watches it again.
She opens the site and scrolls a full page of posts. Several pages have accumulated in the course of the day, in the wake of the surfacing of #135, but she has no appetite for them now.
It seems beside the point.
A wave comes crashing, sheer exhaustion, against which the Colombian is no defense.
She takes off her clothes, brushes her teeth, limbs wooden with exhaustion and vibrating with caffeine, turns off the lights, and crawls, literally, beneath the stiff silver spread on Damien’s bed.
To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as a final wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.
4.
MATH GRENADES
Somehow she sleeps, or approximates it, through the famously bad hour and into another mirror-world morning.
Waking to an inner flash of metallic migraine light, as if reflected off wings of receding dream.
Extrudes her head turtle-wise from beneath the giant pot-holder and squints at the windows. Daylight. More of her soul has been reeled in, it seems, in the meantime. Apprehending self and mirror-world now in a different modality, accompanied by an unexpected surge of energy that has her out of bed, into the shower, and levering the Italian chromed head to stinging new foci of needle jets. Damien’s reno has involved hot water, lots of it, and for that she is grateful.
It is as though she is inhabited now by something single-minded, purposeful, yet has no idea what it plans, or wants. But she is content, for the moment, to go along for the ride.
Blow-dry. CPUs include the black jeans.
Mirror-world milk (which is different, though she couldn’t
say how) on the Weetabix, with a sliced banana. That other part of her, that other self, moving right along.
Watching as that part seals over the cigarette burn with black gaffer’s tape, the ends tooth-torn, a sort of archaic punk flourish. Pulls on the Rickson’s, checks for keys and money, and descends Damien’s still-unrenovated stairwell, past a tenant’s mountain bike and hip-high bundles of last year’s magazines.
In the sunlit street, all is still; nothing moves save the cinnamon blur of a cat, just there, and gone. She listens. The hum of London, building somewhere.
Feeling inexplicably happy, she sets off down Parkway toward Camden High Street, and finds a Russian in a mini-cab. Not a cab at all, really, just a dusty blue mirror-world Jetta, but he will drive her to Notting Hill, and he looks too old, too scholarly, too disgusted by the very sight of her, to be much trouble.
Once they are out of Camden Town she has little idea of where they are. She has no internalized surface map of this city, only of the underground and of assorted personal footpaths spreading out from its stations.
The stomach-clenching roundabouts are pivots in a maze to be negotiated only by locals and cabdrivers. Restaurants and antique shops rotate past, punctuated regularly by pubs.
Marveling at the luminous shanks of a black-haired man in a very expensive-looking dressing gown, bending toward the morning’s milk and paper in his doorway.
A military vehicle, its silhouette unfamiliar, bulk-browed, tautly laced beneath its tarpaulin. The driver’s beret.
Mirror-world street furniture: bits of urban infrastructure she can’t identify by function. Local equivalents of the mysterious Water Testing Station on her block uptown, which a friend had claimed to contain nothing more than a tap and a cup, for the judging of potability—this having been for Cayce a favorite fantasy of alternative employment, to stroll Manhattan like an itinerant sommelier, addressing one’s palate with the various tap waters of the city. Not that she would have wanted to, particularly, but simply to believe that someone could do this for a living had been somehow comforting.
By the time they arrive at Notting Hill, whatever rogue aspect of personality has been driving this morning’s expedition seems to have decamped, leaving her feeling purposeless and confused. She pays the Russian, gets out on the side opposite Portobello, and descends the stairs to a pedestrian tunnel that smells of Friday-night urine. Overly tall mirror-world lager cans are crushed there like roaches.
Corridor metaphysics. She wants coffee.
But the Starbucks on the other side, up the stairs and around a corner, is not yet open. A boy, inside, wrestles huge plastic trays of cellophaned pastries.
Uncertain what she should do next, she walks on, in the direction of the Saturday market. Seven-thirty, now. She can’t remember when the antiques arcades open, but she knows the road will be jammed by nine. Why has she come here? She never buys antiques.
She’s in a street of what she thinks are called mews houses, little places, scarily cute, still headed toward Portobello and the market, when she sees them: three men, variously jacketed, their collars up, staring gravely into the open trunk of a small and uncharacteristically old mirror-world car. Not so much a mirror-world car as an English car, as no equivalent exists, on Cayce’s side of the Atlantic, to mirror. Vauxhall Wyvern, she thinks, with her compulsive memory for brand names, though she doubts that this is one of those, whatever those might have been. As to why she notices them now, these three, she later will be unable to say.
No one else in the street, and there is something in the gravity they bring to their study of whatever it is they are looking down at. Careful poker masks. The largest, though not the tallest, a black man with a shaven head, is zipped like a sausage into something shiny, black, and only approximately leatherlike. Beside him is a taller, gray-faced man, hunched within the greasy folds of an ancient Barbour waterproof, its waxed cotton gone the sheen and shade of day-old horse dung. The third, younger, is close-cropped and blond, in baggy black skater shorts and a frayed jean jacket. He wears something like a mailman’s pouch, slung across his chest. Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London.
She can’t resist glancing into the trunk.
Grenades.
Black, compact, cylindrical. Six of them, laid out on an old gray sweater amid a jumble of brown cardboard cartons.
“Miss?” The one in shorts.
“Hello?” The gray-faced man, sharply, impatient.
She tells herself to run, but can’t.
“Yes?”
“The Curtas.” The blond one, stepping closer.
“It isn’t her, you idiot. She’s not bloody coming.” The gray one again, with mounting irritation.
The blond one blinks. “You haven’t come about the Curtas?”
“The what?”
“The calculators.”
She can’t resist, then, and steps closer to the car, to see. “What are they?”
“Calculators.” The tight plastic of the black man’s jacket creaking as he bends to pick up one of the grenades. Turning to hand it to her. And then she is holding it: heavy, dense, knurled for gripping. Tabs or flanges that look as though meant to move in these slots. Small round windows showing white numbers. At the top something that looks like the crank on a pepper mill, as executed by a small-arms manufacturer.
“I don’t understand,” she says, and imagines she’ll wake, just then, in Damien’s bed, because it’s all gone that dreamlike now. Automatically seeking a trademark, she turns the thing over. And sees that it is made in Liechtenstein.
Liechtenstein?
“What is it?”
“It is a precision instrument,” the black man says, “performing calculations mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic components. The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five-millimeter camera. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed.” Voice deep and mellifluous. “It is the invention of Curt Herzstark, an Austrian, who developed it while a prisoner in Buchenwald. The camp authorities actually encouraged his work, you see. ‘Intelligence slave,’ his title there. They wished his calculator to be given to the Führer, at the end of the war. But Buchenwald was liberated in 1945 by the Americans. Herzstark had survived.” He gently takes the thing from her. Enormous hands. “He had his drawings.” Large fingers moving surely, gently, clicking the black tabs into a different configuration. He grasps the knurled cylinder in his left, gives the handle at the top a twirl. Smoothly ratcheting a sum from its interior. He raises it to see the resulting figure in a tiny window. “Eight hundred pounds. Excellent condition.” Dropping an eyelid partially, to wait for her response.
“It’s beautiful,” his offer finally giving her a context for this baffling exchange: These men are dealers, come here to do business in these things. “But I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“You’ve had me out for nothing, you silly cunt,” snarls the gray man, snatching the thing from the black one’s hands, but Cayce knows that it’s the black man this is meant for, not her. He looks, just then, like a scary portrait of Samuel Beckett on a book she owned in college. His nails are black-edged and there are deep orangey-brown stains of nicotine on his long fingers. He turns with the calculator and bends over the open trunk, to furiously repack the black, grenade-like machines.
“Hobbs,” the black man says, and sighs, “you lack all patience. She will come. Please wait.”
“Bugger,” says Hobbs, if that’s his name, closing a cardboard box and spreading the old sweater over it with a quick, practiced, weirdly maternal gesture, like a mother adjusting the blanket over a sleeping child. He bangs the lid down and tugs at it, checking to see that it’s closed. “Waste my bloody time . . .” He hauls the driver-side door open with a startling creak.
She glimpses filthy mouse-colored upholstery and an overflowing ashtray that protrudes from the dash like a little drawer.
> “She will come, Hobbs,” the black man protests, but without much force.
The one called Hobbs folds himself into the driver’s seat, yanks the door shut, and glares at them through the dirty side window. The car’s engine starts with an antique, asthmatic shudder, and he puts it into gear, still glaring, and pulls away, toward Portobello. At the next corner, the gray car turns right, and is gone.
“He is a curse to know, that man,” says the black man. “Now she will come, and what am I to tell her?” He turns to Cayce. “You disappointed him. He thought that you were her.”
“Who?”
“The buyer. Agent for a Japanese collector,” the blond boy says to Cayce. “Is not your fault.” He has those straight-across cheekbones she thinks of as Slavic, the open look that comes with them, and the sort of accent that comes with learning English here but not yet too thoroughly. “Ngemi,” indicating the black man, “is only upset.”
“Well then,” Cayce ventures, “goodbye.” And starts toward Portobello. A middle-aged woman opens a green-painted door and steps out in black leather jeans, her large dog on a lead. The appearance of this Notting Hill matron feels to Cayce as though it frees her from a spell. She quickens her stride.
But hears footsteps behind her. And turns to see the blond boy with his flapping pouch, hurrying to catch up.
The black man is nowhere to be seen.
“I walk with you, please,” he says, drawing even with her and smiling, as if delighted to offer her this favor. “My name is Voytek Biroshak.”
“Call me Ishmael,” she says, walking on.
“A girl’s name?” Eager and doglike beside her. Some species of weird nerd innocence that somehow she accepts.
“No. It’s Cayce.”
“Case?”
“Actually,” she finds herself explaining, “it should be pronounced ‘Casey,’ like the last name of the man my mother named me after. But I don’t.”
“Who is Casey?”
“Edgar Cayce, the Sleeping Prophet of Virginia Beach.”
“Why does she, your mother?”