“Because she’s a Virginian eccentric. Actually she’s always refused to talk about it.” Which is true.
“And you are doing here?”
“The market. You?” Still walking.
“Same.”
“Who were those men?”
“Ngemi sells to me ZX 81.”
“Which is?”
“Sinclair ZX 81. Personal computer, circa 1980. In America, was Timex 1000, same.”
“Ngemi’s the big one?”
“Dealing in archaic computer, historic calculator, since 1997. Has shop in Bermondsey.”
“Your partner?”
“No. Arrange to meet.” He lightly slaps the pouch at his side and plastic rattles. “ZX 81.”
“But he was here to sell those calculators?”
“The Curta. Wonderful, yes? Ngemi and Hobbs hope for combined sale, Japanese collector. Difficult, Hobbs. Always.”
“Another dealer?”
“Mathematician. Brilliant sad man. Crazy for Curta, but cannot afford. Buys and sells.”
“Didn’t seem very pleasant.” Cayce puts her facility with entirely left-field conversations down to her career of actual on-the-street cool-hunting, such as it’s been, and as much as she hates to call it that. She’s done a bit, too. She’s been dropped into neighborhoods like Dogtown, which birthed skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding whatever the next thing might be. And she’s learned it’s largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. She’s that good. “What does this ZX 81 look like?”
He stops, rummages in his pouch, and produces a rather tragic-looking rectangle of scuffed black plastic, about the size of a videocassette. It has one of those stick-on keypads that somehow actually work, something Cayce knows from the cable boxes in the sort of motel where guests might be expected to try to steal them.
“That’s a computer?”
“One K of RAM!”
“One?”
They’ve come out into a street called Westbourne Grove now, with a sprinkling of trendy retail, and she can see a crowd down at the intersection with Portobello. “What do you do with them?”
“Is complicated.”
“How many do you have?”
“Many.”
“Why do you like them?”
“Of historical importance to personal computing,” he says seriously, “and to United Kingdom. Why there are so many programmers, here.”
“Why is that?”
But he excuses himself, stepping into a narrow laneway where a battered van is being unloaded. Some quick exchange with a large woman in a turquoise raincoat and he is back, tucking two more of the things into his pouch.
Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek’s opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. “Like hackers in Bulgaria,” he adds, obscurely.
“But if Timex sold it in the United States,” she asks him, “why didn’t we get the programmers?”
“You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers. Also, on launch of product in America, RAM-expansion unit did not ship for three months. People buy computer, take it home, discover it does almost nothing. A disaster.”
Cayce is pretty certain that England wanted Nintendo too, and got it, and probably shouldn’t be looking too eagerly forward to another bumper crop of programmers, if Voytek’s theory holds true. “I need coffee,” she says.
He leads her into a ramshackle arcade at the corner of Portobello and Westbourne Grove. Past small booths where Russians are laying out their stocks of spotty old watches, and down a flight of stairs, to buy her a cup of what turns out to be the “white” coffee of her childhood visits to England, a pre-Starbucks mirror-world beverage resembling weak instant bulked up with condensed milk and industrial-strength sugar. It makes her think of her father, leading her through the London Zoo when she was ten.
They sit on folding wooden chairs that look as though they date from the Blitz, taking tentative sips of their scalding white coffee.
But she sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot-like form perched on the edge of a dealer’s counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within.
The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six.
“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,” she recites, softly.
Voytek blinks. “You say?”
“I’m sorry,” Cayce says.
It is a mantra.
A friend of her father’s, an airline pilot, had told her, in her teens, of a colleague of his who had impacted a duck, on climbout from Sioux City. The windscreen shattered and the inside of the cockpit became a hurricane. The plane landed safely, and the pilot had survived, and returned to flying with shards of glass lodged permanently within his left eye. The story had fascinated Cayce, and eventually she had discovered that this phrase, repeated soon enough, would allay the onset of the panic she invariably felt upon seeing the worst of her triggers. “It’s a verbal tic.”
“Tick?”
“Hard to explain.” She looks in another direction, discovering a stall selling what seem to be Victorian surgical instruments.
The keeper of this stock is a very old man with a high, mottled forehead and dirty-looking white eyebrows, his head sunken buzzard-like between his narrow shoulders. He stands behind a counter topped and fronted with glass, things glittering within it. Most of them seem to be displayed in fitted cases lined with faded velvet. Seeing him as offering a distraction, for both herself and Voytek, else she be asked to explain the duck, Cayce takes her coffee and crosses the aisle, which is floored with splintery planking.
“Could you tell me what this is, please?” she asks, pointing at something at random. He looks at her, at the object indicated, then back at her. “A trepanning set, by Evans of London, circa 1780, in original fishskin case.”
“And this?”
“An early nineteenth-century French lithotomy set with bow drill, by Grangeret. Brass-bound mahogany case.” He regards her steadily with his deep-set, red-rimmed, pinkish eyes, as if sizing her up for a bit of a go with the Grangeret, a spooky-looking contraption broken down to its component parts in their slots of moth-eaten velvet.
“Thank you,” Cayce says, deciding this isn’t really the distraction she needs, right now. She turns to Voytek. “Let’s get some air.” He gets cheerfully up from his seat, shouldering his now-bulging pouch of Sinclairs, and follows her up the stairs and into the street.
Tourists and antiques-fanciers and people-watchers have been steadily arriving from stations in either direction, many of them her countrymen, or Japanese. A crowd dense as a stadium concert is contriving to move in either direction along Portobello, in the street itself, the sidewalks having been taken up by temporary sellers with trestles and card tables, and by the shoppers clustered around them. The sun has come fully and unexpectedly out, and between the sun and the crowd and the residual wonky affect of soul-delay, she feels suddenly dizzy.
“No good now, for finding,” Voytek says, clutching his pouch protectively under his arm. He downs the last of his coffee. “I must be going. Have work.”
“What do you do?
” she asks, mainly to cover her dizziness.
But he only nods toward the pouch. “I must evaluate condition. Have pleasure in meeting you.” He takes something from one of the top front pockets of his jean jacket and hands it to her. It is a scrap of white cardboard with a rubber-stamped e-mail address.
Cayce never has cards, and has always been reluctant to give out particulars. “I don’t have a card,” she says, but on impulse tells him her current hotmail address, sure he’ll forget it. He smiles, goofy and somehow winningly open under his ruler-straight Slavic cheekbones, and turns away into the crowd.
Cayce burns her tongue on her still-scalding coffee. Gets rid of it in an already overflowing bin.
She decides to walk back to that Starbucks near the Notting Hill tube, have a latte made with mirror-world milk, and take the train to Camden.
She’s starting to feel like she’s really here.
“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,” by way this time of an expression of gratitude, and starts back toward Notting Hill station.
5.
WHAT THEY DESERVE
She finds the Children’s Crusade just as she remembers it.
Damien’s expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people, clogging the High Street from below the station up to Camden Lock.
As she comes up out of the rattling, sighing depths of the station, ascending vertiginous escalators with step grids cut from some pale and grimy heartwood that must be virtually indestructible, the pack starts to thicken and make itself known.
On the sidewalk outside, she is abruptly in it, the crowd stretching away up the High Street like some Victorian engraving of a public hanging or race day.
The facades of the modest retail buildings on either side are encrusted with distorted, oversized representations of vintage airplanes, cowboy boots, a vast six-eyelet Dr. Martens. These all have a slightly queasy handmade quality, as though they’ve been modeled from carloads of Fimo by the children of giants.
Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world’s leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home.
Nothing at all like the crowd in Portobello; this one is differently driven, flavored with pheromones and the smoke of clove cigarettes and hashish.
Striking a course for the convenient landmark of the Virgin Megastore, she wonders whether she shouldn’t go with the flow and try to put herself on another sort of professional footing today. There is cool to be hunted, here, and she still has clients in New York willing to pay for a Cayce Pollard report on what the early adaptors in this crush are doing, wearing, or listening to. She decides against it. She’s technically under contract to Blue Ant, and anyway she’s feeling less than motivated. Damien’s flat feels like a better idea, and she can reach it, with a minimum of jostling, via the fruit and vegetable stalls in Aberdeen Street, where she can lay in additional supplies.
This she does, finding fresher produce than the local supermarket offers, and walking home with a transparent pink bag of oranges from either Spain or Morocco.
Damien’s flat has no security system, and she’s glad of that, as setting off someone’s alarm, be it silent or otherwise, is something she’s done in the past and has no desire to do again. Damien’s keys are as big and solid and nearly as nicely finished as the chunky pound coins: one for the street door, two for the door into the flat.
When she reenters the place, she has a moment’s benchmark as to the extent of her ongoing improvement in affect. Most of her soul must already have arrived, she thinks, remembering her predawn horrors; now it’s just Damien’s place, or a recently redecorated version of Damien’s place, and if anything it makes her miss him. If he weren’t off scouting a documentary in Russia, they could ford through the Camden crowd and up Primrose Hill.
Her encounter with Voytek and his friends and their little black calculators from Buchenwald, whatever that might have been, seems like last night’s dream.
She locks the door and crosses to the Cube, which sits there blank-screened, its illuminated static switches pulsing softly. Damien has cable, so his service is never really off, or not supposed to be. It’s time to check in on Fetish:Footage:Forum and see what Parkaboy and Filmy and Mama Anarchia and her other co-obsessives have made of that kiss. There will be much to catch up on, taking it from the top, getting the drift of things.
Parkaboy is her favorite, on F:F:F. They e-mail when the forum really gets going, and sometimes when it’s dead as well. She knows almost nothing about him, other than that he lives in Chicago and, she assumes, is gay. But they know one another’s passion for the footage, their doubts and tentative theories, as well as anyone in the world does.
Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL, she goes to the browser history.
SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE!
FETISH:FOOTAGE:FORUM
She freezes, hand on mouse, looking at this last logged site.
Then she starts to feel it, that literal folkloric prickle in the scalp.
And she can’t, through sheer mental effort, make Asian Sluts and F:F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F:F, but it stays where it is. She sits there, unmoving, peering at the browser history the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.
Damien’s flat is suddenly not a friendly place, not familiar at all. It has become a sealed and airless territory in which very bad things might happen. And it has, she now remembers, a second floor, to which, this trip, she has not yet even ascended.
She looks up at the ceiling.
And finds herself remembering the experience of lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted, beneath a boyfriend named Donny.
Donny had been more problematic than most other Cayce Pollard boyfriends, and she has come to believe that this had all been signaled in the first place by the fact that he was called Donny. Donny was not something, a woman friend had pointed out, that the men they went out with were usually called. Donny was of Irish-Italian extraction, from East Lansing, and had both a drinking problem and no visible means of support. But Donny was also very beautiful, and sometimes very funny, though not always intentionally, and Cayce had gone through a period of finding herself, though she never really planned to, under Donny, and Donny’s big grin, in the none-too-fresh bed in his apartment on Clinton Street, between Rivington and Delancey.
But this final and particular time, watching him phase-shift into what she’d learned to recognize as the run-up to one of his ever-reliable orgasms, she’d for some reason stretched her arms above her head, perhaps even luxuriously, her left hand sliding accidentally under the cockroach-colored veneer of the headboard. Where it encountered something cold and hard and very precisely made. Which she brailled, shortly, into the square butt of an automatic pistol—held there, probably, with tape very similar to the tape she’d used here, this morning, to conceal the hole in her Buzz Rickson’s.
Donny, she knew, was left-handed, and had so positioned this so that he could reach it conveniently as he lay in bed.
Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if boyfriend sleeps with gun, Cayce does not share bed, or bod, with (now abruptly former) boyfriend.
And so she’d lain there, her fingertip against what she assumed was the checkered hardwood of the gun’s grip, and watched Donny take his last ride on that particular pony.
But here, in Camden Town, in Damien’s flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, there is a room. It is the room where she’s slept on previous visits, and she knows that Damien has now converted it to a home studio, where he indulges his passion for mixing.
/> Up there, she wonders, now, mightn’t there be someone?
The someone who somehow got in here in her absence and idly took a look at those Asian sluts? It seems bizarre, and impossible, and yet horribly, if barely, possible. Or is it all too very possible?
She makes herself look around the room again, and notices the roll of black tape on the carpet. It is upright, as though it had rolled there. And remembers, very clearly, placing it, when she’d finished with it, on its side, so that it wouldn’t roll off, on the edge of the trestle table.
Something takes her into the kitchen, then, and she finds herself looking into a drawer containing Damien’s kitchen knives. Which are new, and not much used, and probably quite sharp. And, while she is not uncertain that she could defend herself with one of these if required, the idea of introducing sharp edges into the equation seems not entirely a good one. She tries another drawer and finds a square cardboard box of machine parts, heavy-looking and precise and slightly oily, which she assumes are leftovers from the robot girls. One of these, thick and cylindrical, fits neatly and solidly into her hand, squared-off edges just showing at either end of her closed fist. What you can do with a roll of quarters, she remembers, Donny coming in handy after all.
She takes this with her as she mounts the stairs to Damien’s home recording studio. Which proves to be just that, and unoccupied, with no hiding places whatever. A futon, narrow and new, that would be her bed if Damien were here.
Back down the stairs.
She goes through the space carefully, holding her breath as she opens both of the two closets. Where there is very little at all, Damien being not a clothes person.
She looks into each of the lower cabinets in the renovated kitchen, and in the space beneath the sink. Where no prowler crouches, but the reno crew have left a big yellow metric measuring tape.
She puts the chain on the locked door to the hallway. It is not much of a chain, by New York standards, and she’s lived in New York long enough to put very little trust in chains, regardless. But still.
She examines the windows, all of which are closed, and all but one of which are so thoroughly painted shut that she estimates it would take a carpenter three very expensive hours and a fair number of tools to open one. The one that has been opened, no doubt by that same expensive carpenter, is presently secured by a pair of mirror-world sash bolts, their hidden tongues to be extended and retracted by a sort of key-like wrench or driver, with an oddly shaped head. She has seen these used in London before, and has no idea where Damien keeps his. Since this can only be done from within, and the glass is intact, she rules out the windows as points of entry.