XXX, Damien
PS In case it isn’t clear from above, I am having an absolutely delightful time and couldn’t be happier.
She opens Parkaboy’s.
While everyone else is still trembling over The Kiss, as ever #135 will surely be known, Musashi and I have lit out for the territories. I don’t know whether you are following F:F:F or earning what passes for your living, but everyone is mad for #135, no end in sight, and I suppose you know about CNN?
She doesn’t.
In case you have been in a coma (lucky you) they showed a slightly compressed version yesterday and now every site on the planet is clogged with the clueless, newbies of the most hopeless sort, including ours.
Cayce pauses to do a recompute on her evening with Bigend. If #135 had been on CNN, Bigend knew it, and his not having mentioned it was deliberate, but to what end? Perhaps, she decides, he wants her to discover it after the fact, assuming that heightened global interest will tip her in the direction of his proposition. And she finds, to her annoyance, that it does. The idea of waking to find the identity of the maker revealed on the front page of a paper irks her direly.
In any case, et unpleasant cetera, I took the opportunity to exit F:F:F, made additionally unbearable by the pomo bellowings of fat cow A., and get together netwise with Darryl, to do further work on the result of some kanji-cruising we did while I was in California.
Darryl, AKA Musashi, is a California footagehead fluent in Japanese. The Japanese footage sites, resisting machine translation, are an area that fascinates Parkaboy. With Musashi as translator, Parkaboy has made several forays already, posting the results of his research on F:F:F. Cayce has looked at these sites, but, aside from being incomprehensible, the text, which comes up on non-kanji screens as a frantic-looking slaw of Romanic symbols, reminds her too much of the archaic cartoon convention for swearing; it looks like fizzing, apoplectic rage.
Darryl and I, burrowing deep into back posts on an Osaka-based board of quite singular tediousness, had happened across what seemed to be a reference to #78 having been discovered to be watermarked. (All of this I have archived for you, should you want to follow it step by thrilling step.)
Digital watermarking is something Cayce knows only a little about, but none of the footage she has seen has been watermarked. If it were watermarked, she wonders, what would it be watermarked as, or with?
This segment, I can now tell you in strictest confidence, probably is watermarked, invisibly. Does this mean that the other segments are? We don’t know. It is watermarked steganographically, and there, God help us, is a word to conjure with. This is, let me say, in case you have suffered a stroke or blunt trauma in the meantime, the single greatest scoop since footage first found web. And you heard it here first. From me. And from Musashi as well, though before I let him take his bow we must do something about those T-shirts with the bits of dried food clinging to the front.
Cayce takes a deliberately slow sip of tea-sub, looking away from the screen as she does so. As long and flagrantly weird as her day has been, she senses that what she is about to read will probably be weirder still, and perhaps a lot more lastingly significant. Parkaboy does not joke about these things, and the mystery of the footage itself often feels closer to the core of her life than Bigend, Blue Ant, Dorotea, even her career. She doesn’t understand that, but knows it. It is something she believes she has in common with Parkaboy, and Ivy, and many of the others. It is something about the footage. The feel of it. The mystery. You can’t explain it to someone who isn’t there. They’ll just look at you. But it matters, matters in some unique way.
Steganography is about concealing information by spreading it throughout other information. At present I know little else about it. However, to get on with the narrative of Parkaboy and Musashi in deep kanji-space, we came back to the present, and our own language, with this one glancing and highly cryptic reference—which I at first was convinced might be nothing more than an artifact of Darryl’s translation. I returned to Chicago, then, and Darryl and I, curiosity’s cats, began to lovingly generate a Japanese persona, namely one Keiko, who began to post, in Japanese, on that same Osaka site. Putting her cuteness about a bit. Very friendly. Very pretty, our Keiko. You’d love her. Nothing like genderbait for the nerds, as I’m sure you well know. She posts from Musashi’s ISP but that’s because she’s in San Francisco learning English. Very shortly, we had one Takayuchi eating out of our flowerlike palm. Taki, as he prefers we call him, claims to orbit a certain otaku-coven in Tokyo, a group that knows itself as ‘Mystic,’ though its members never refer to it that way in public, nor indeed refer to it at all. It is these Mystic wonks, according to Taki, who have cracked the watermark on #78. This segment, according to Taki, is marked with a number of some kind, which he claims to have seen, and know. No doubt motivated by lonely fantasies of getting up our deliciously short little plaid skirt, which we have described to him in passing, he now holds out the promise of showing this to us, upon our return to Tokyo. Of course I am delighted that my brilliant self (albeit with the help of my trusty takeout-encrusted kanjiman) has been the first to bring this shattering new knowledge (if it isn’t a tissue of sheerest otaku horseshit) to our virtual shores. La Anarchia will shit herself in lime-green envy, should my (or rather our, Darryl having had his part) discovery become public on F:F:F. But should it? And, indeed, what exactly are we to do next? Taki (who sends Keiko snapshots of himself: mouthbreather) is not about to offer up the Mystic number, should there prove to be one, else his little flower vanish from the screen. He’s easy to fool, in one regard, but annoyingly bright in others. He wants Keiko facetime, and I remain, your frustrated Parkaboy
PS So what to do?
She sits there, thinking about this, and then gets up to double check the door and windows, touching the new keys around her neck.
Goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Her face in the mirror, against the white tiles of the wall behind her. The tiles are square and she looks like something snipped from a magazine and placed on a sheet of graph paper. Not such good work with the scissors.
Images called up by Damien’s e-mail. Heaps of bone. That initial seventeen stories of twisted, impacted girder. Funeral ash. That taste in the back of the throat.
And she is here, in this apartment, recently invaded by some shadowy figure, or figures. Dorotea as corporate spook? The woman in the mirror, lips foamed with toothpaste, shakes her head. Hydrophobia.
Bigend advising her to sleep on it. And she will, she’s certain, though she doesn’t want to.
She removes and folds the silver discomforter, stiff as a new tarpaulin, and replaces it with a duvet in a gray cotton cover, new and unused, that she finds in the closet.
“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.” Her prayer in the dark.
Eyes closed, she finds herself imagining a symbol, something watermarking the lower right-hand corner of her existence. It is there, just beyond some periphery, beyond the physical, beyond vision, and it marks her as . . . what?
9.
TRANS
She wakes to sunshine through Damien’s windows.
Squares of blue sky, decorative bits of cloud.
Stretches her toes beneath the duvet. Then remembers the complications of her current situation.
Determines to get up and out with as little thought as possible. Breakfast.
Avails herself of the surgical shower, jeans and a T-shirt, and goes out, locking up and doing the Bond thing with a fresh hair and mint-flavored spit—sealing Damien’s flat against whatever bad mojo there might be.
Down Parkway and over to little Aberdeen, the market street that runs its single block into Camden. She knows a café here, a French place. Remembering breakfast there with Damien.
Passing record and comics shops, windows papered with flyers (where she half looks for, but does not find, the kiss).
Here it is: faux-French with real French waiting tables. Chu
nnel kids, guest workers.
The first thing she sees, going in, is Voytek, seated at a table with silver-haired Billy Prion, the former lead singer of a band called BSE.
She’s long kept track of certain obscure mirror-world pop figures, not because they interest her in themselves but because their careers can be so compressed, so eerily quantum-brief, like particles whose existence can only be proven, after the fact, by streaks detected on specially sensitized plates at the bottom of disused salt mines.
Billy Prion’s streak is by reason of his having deliberately had the left side of his mouth paralyzed with Botox for the first BSE gigs, and because, when Margot was taking her NYU extension course in disease-as-metaphor, Cayce had suggested she do something with his mouth. Margot, struggling to outline a paper in which Bigend was the disease she needed to find a metaphor for, hadn’t been interested.
Having automatically registered Prion media hits ever since, she knows that BSE had broken up, and that he’d been briefly rumored to be romantically involved with that Finnish girl, the one whose band had been called Velcro Kitty until the trademark lawyers arrived.
As she passes their table, she sees that Voytek has a scrawled tarot of spiral-bound notebooks spread out around the remains of his breakfast, everything executed in red ballpoint. Diagrams, with lots of linked rectangles. From what she sees of Prion’s mouth, the cosmetic toxin seems long since to have worn off. He isn’t smiling, but if he were, it would probably be symmetrical. Voytek is quietly explaining something, his brow wrinkled with concentration.
An irritable-looking girl with red-rimmed eyes and very red lipstick fans a menu in her face, gesturing curtly toward a table farther in the rear. Seated, not bothering with the menu, Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French.
The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellant hairball.
“All right,” says Cayce, under her breath, to the girl’s receding back, “be French.”
But her coffee does arrive, and is excellent, as do her eggs and sausage, very good as well, and when she’s finished she looks up to see Voytek staring at her. Prion is gone.
“Casey,” he says, remembering but getting it wrong.
“That was Billy Prion, wasn’t it?”
“I join you?”
“Please.”
He repacks his spiral-bound notebooks, closing each one and tucking it carefully away into his shoulder pouch, and crosses to her table.
“Is Billy Prion a friend of yours?”
“Owns gallery. I need space to show ZX 81 project.”
“Is it finished?”
“I am still collecting ZX 81.”
“How many do you need?”
“Many. Patronage also.”
“Is Billy in the patronage business as well?”
“No. You work for large corporation? They wish to learn of my project?”
“I’m freelance.”
“But you are here to work?”
“Yes. For an advertising agency.”
He adjusts the pouch on his lap. “Saatchi?”
“No. Voytek, do you know anything about watermarking?”
He nods. “Yes?”
“Steganography?”
“Yes?”
“What might it mean if something, say a segment of digitized video, is watermarked with a number?”
“Is visible?”
“Not ordinarily, I don’t think. Concealed?”
“That is the steganography, the concealment. Multi-digit number?”
“Maybe.”
“Can be code supplied to client by watermarking firm. Firm sells client stego-encrypted watermark and means to conceal. Check web for that number. If client’s image or video has been pirated, that is revealed by search.”
“You mean you could use the watermark to follow the dissemination of a given image or video clip?”
He nods.
“Who does this, the actual watermarking?”
“There are companies.”
“Could a watermark be traced to a particular company, its number?”
“Would not be so good for client security.”
“Would it be possible for someone to detect, or extract, a secret watermark? Without knowing the code, or who placed it there, or even being sure it’s there in the first place?”
Voytek considers. “Difficult, but might be done. Hobbs knows these things.”
“Who’s Hobbs?”
“You meet. Man with Curtas.”
Cayce remembers the mean Beckett face, the filthy fingernails. “Really? Why?”
“Maths. Trinity, Cambridge, then works for United States. NSA. Very difficult.”
“The work?”
“Hobbs.”
THE Children’s Crusade is remounting in force, this sunny morning.
She stands in Aberdeen with Voytek, watching them troop past, looking dusty in this sunlight and medieval, slouching not toward Bethlehem but Camden Lock.
Voytek has put on a pair of shades with small round lenses. They remind Cayce of coins placed on the eyes of a corpse.
“I must meet Magda,” he announces.
“Who is she?”
“Sister. She is selling hats, in Camden Lock. Come.” Voytek pushes off into the current of bodies, clockwise, “Saturday sells in Portobello, the fashion market. Sunday, here.” Cayce follows, thinking, framing questions about watermarking.
The sun on this shuffling press is soothing, and they soon arrive at the lock, carried along by a current of feet responsible for all those billions in athletic-shoe sales.
Voytek has implied that Magda, aside from designing and making hats, does something in advertising herself, although Cayce can’t quite make out what it is.
The market is set back in a maze of Victorian brick.
Warehouses, she supposes, and subterranean stables for the horses that drew the barges down the canals. She isn’t certain she’s ever really gotten to the bottom of the labyrinth, though she’s been here many times. Voytek leads the way, past sheet-hung stalls of dead men’s clothes, film posters, recordings on vinyl, Russian alarm clocks, sundries for smokers of anything but tobacco.
Deeper into the brickwork vaults, away from the sun, illuminated by Lava lamps and fluorescents in nonstandard colors, they find Magda, who aside from those cheekbones looks nothing at all like her brother. Short, pretty, hennaed, laced into a projectile bodice that seems to have been retrofitted from some sort of pressurized flying gear, she is happily packing her goods and preparing to close her stall.
Voytek asks her something in whatever their native tongue is. She answers, laughing.
“She says men from France buy wholesale,” Voytek explains.
“ ‘She speak good English,’ ” Magda says to Cayce. “I’m Magda.”
“Cayce Pollard.” They shake hands.
“Casey is advertising too.”
“Probably not the way I am, but don’t remind me,” says Magda, wrapping another hat in tissue and putting it into a cardboard carton with the rest.
Cayce starts to help. Magda’s hats are hats that Cayce could wear, if she wore hats. Gray or black only, knit, crocheted, or yarn-stitched with a sailor’s needle from thick industrial felt, they are without period or label. “These are nice.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re in advertising? What do you do?”
“Look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up. While I’m at it, I mention a client’s product, of course favorably. I try to attract attention while I’m doing it, but attention of a favorable sort. I haven’t been doing it long, and I don’t think I like it.”
Magda does indeed speak good English, and Cayce wonders at the difference in their fluencies. But says nothing.
Magda laughs. “I really am his sister,” she says, “but our mother brought me here when I was five, thank God.” Putting away the last hat, she closes the carton and hands i
t to Voytek.
“You’re paid to go to clubs and mention products?”
“Firm’s called Trans. Doing very well, apparently. I’m a design student, need something to make ends meet, but it’s getting to be a bit much.” She’s lowering a sheet of tattered transparent plastic to indicate that her makeshift stall is now closed. “But I’ve just sold twenty hats! Time for a drink!”
“YOU’RE in a bar, having a drink,” Magda says, the three of them wedged into one darkly varnished corner of an already raucous Camden pub, drinking lager.