Zero History Part 12

"I'm leaving," said Heidi, and did, men turning to follow her with their eyes as she strode off through the bar.

"She isn't feeling well," said Hollis. "The flight's affected her throat."

"She is a singer?" asked either Eydis or Fridrika.

"A drummer," said the other.

"May I speak with you for a moment, Hubertus?" Hollis turned to the twins. "Please excuse me. Take these seats."

As they settled in the armchairs that Hollis and Heidi had vacated, Hollis stepped closer to Bigend. He'd forgone the blue suit this evening, and wore one in some peculiarly light-absorbing black fabric that somehow looked as though it didn't have a surface. More like an absence, an opening into something else, antimatter paired with mohair. "I hadn't known Heidi was here," he said.

"We're all surprised. But I wanted to tell you that I'm going to Paris tomorrow, to try to speak with someone who may know something about Hounds. I thought I'd take Milgrim."

"You got along?"

"Well enough, considering."

"I'll have Pamela e-mail you in a few minutes. She can handle any reservations."

"Don't bother. I'll keep track of expenses. But I don't want to give up my room here, so I'll keep it and you can cover that."

"I already am," Bigend said, "plus incidentals. Can you tell me anything about Paris?"

"I may have found someone who was involved with whatever the beginning of Hounds was. 'May.' That's all I know. And it may not be true. I'll call you from there. Anyway, you've got company." Smiling in the direction of Eydis and Fridrika, now coiled like slender silvery arctic mammals in their matching armchairs. "Good night."

18. 140

The Neo rang while he was still trying to grasp Twitter. He was registered, now, as GAYDOLPHIN2. No followers, following no one. Whatever that meant. And his updates, whatever those were, were protected.

The harsh faux-mechanical ring tone had attracted the attention of the girl at the desk. He smiled anxiously, apologetically, from his seat on the leather-padded laptop-tethering bench, and answered it, the Neo awkward against his ear. "Yes?"

"Milgrim?"

"Speaking."

"Hollis. How are you?"

"Well," said Milgrim, automatically. "How are you?"

"Wondering if you're up for Paris tomorrow. We'd take an early Eurostar."

"What's that?"

"The train," she said. "Chunnel. It's quicker."

"What for?" Sounding, he thought, like a suspicious child.

"I've found someone we need to try to speak with. She's there tomorrow, and the day after. After that, I don't know."

"Will we be gone long?"

"Overnight, if we're lucky. Seven-thirty out of St. Pancras. I'll arrange for someone from Blue Ant to pick you up at the hotel."

"Does Hubertus know?"

"Yes. I just ran into him."

"All right," he said. "Thank you."

"I'll have the car phone your room."

"Thank you."

Milgrim put the Neo away and went back to webmail and Twitter. He'd just heard from Twitter, asking whether he was willing to have GAYDOLPHIN1 follow him. He was. And now he'd have to tell her about Paris. In bursts of a hundred and forty character s.p.a.ces, apparently.

As he was finishing this, someone called CyndiBrown32 asked whether he was willing to have her follow him.

Remembering Winnie's instructions, he wasn't. He closed Twitter and logged out of webmail. Closed the MacBook.

"Good night, Mr. Milgrim," said the girl at the desk as he went to the elevator.

He felt as though something new and entirely too large was attempting to fit within him. He'd shifted allegiances, or acquired a new one. Or was he simply more afraid of Winnie than he was of Bigend? Or was it that he was afraid of the possibility of the absence of Bigend?

"Inst.i.tutionalized," he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its door closed.

He'd gone from where he'd been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely small, and very hard, to this wider s.p.a.ce, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend, but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.

Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away. Whatever it was.

The door opened on the third-floor hallway.

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he'd arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

"Quit staring," he said to the dressmaker's dummy as he stepped into his room. "I wish I had a book." It had been quite a while since he'd found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertis.e.m.e.nts for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He'd look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

19. PRESENCES PRESENCES

Tossing makeup and toiletries into a bag, she noticed that the Blue Ant figurine wasn't there on the counter, her failed employment-avoidance totem. Moved by the housecleaners in yesterday's tidy, she supposed, but unlike them. She zipped the makeup bag. Checked her hair in the mirror. A voice with a BBC register was flowing smoothly, meaninglessly, from the ornate wall-grid.

Out past the steamy gla.s.s slabs and nickel-plate b.u.mpers of the H. G. Wells shower, multiply towel-draped now.

Glancing around Number Four in hope of finding something she might have forgotten to pack, she saw the three unopened cartons of the British edition of her book. Remembering Milgrim, when she'd first met him, on their walk to the tapas place, expressing interest. Bigend, of course, had brought it up. Milgrim had seemed taken, for a few seconds, with the idea that she'd written a book.

She should take him one, she decided.

She wrestled a ridiculously heavy carton onto the unmade bed and used the foil-ripper on the room's Victorian corkscrew to slit the transparent plastic tape. Releasing a bookstore smell as she opened the carton, but not a good one. Dry, chemical. And there they were, square and individually shrink-wrapped, Presences Presences, by Hollis Henry. She took one off the top, slid it into the side pocket of her roll-aboard.

Then out, through liminal green hallways, lift, and down, to the coffee-smelling foyer, where a tortoise-spectacled young man presented her with a tall white coffee in a crisp white paper cup, lidded with white plastic, and offered her a Cabinet umbrella.

"Is the car here?"

"Yes," he said.

"I won't need an umbrella, thanks."

He carried the roll-aboard out for her and put it in the popped trunk of a black BMW, piloted by the bearded young man who'd admitted her to Blue Ant.

"Jacob," this one said, smiling. He wore a waxed cotton motorcycle jacket. It lent him a sort of post-apocalyptic elan, she thought, this rainy morning. Props should've given him a Sten gun, or some other weapon looking equally like plumbing.

"Of course," she said. "Thank you for picking me up."

"Traffic's not terrible," opening her door for her.

"We're meeting Mr. Milgrim?" As he slid in behind the wheel, she noted his wireless earpiece.

"All sorted. Been picked up. Ready for Paris?"

"I hope so," she said as he pulled away from the curb.

Then Gloucester Place. Had she been walking, she'd have taken Baker Street instead, which she'd dreamed of as a child, and which retained, even at this stage of supposed adulthood, a certain small sharp sense of disappointment. Though perhaps game was afoot in Paris, she thought, and now merely a rather long subway ride from here.

In the traffic of Marylebone Road, stopping and starting, she kept noticing a dispatch rider, armored in samurai plastics, the back of his yellow helmet scarred as if something feline and huge had swatted him and almost missed, his clumsy-looking fibergla.s.s fairing mended with peeling silver tape. He seemed to keep pa.s.sing them, somehow, rolling forward between lanes. She'd never understood how that worked here.

"I hope I can find Milgrim at the station."

"No fear," said Jacob. "They'll bring him to you."

Sky-blue steel-girdered vastness. Towering volume of sound. Pigeons looking unconfused, about their pigeon business. n.o.body did train stations like the Europeans, and the British, she thought, best of all. Faith in infrastructure, coupled with a necessity-driven gift for retrofitting.

One of Bigend's lanky, elegant drivers, hand to earpiece, hove toward her steadily through the crowd, Milgrim in tow like a Sunday rowboat. Gazing around like a child, Milgrim, his face lit with a boy's delight in the blue-girdered drama, the d.i.n.ky Toy grandeur of the great station.

One of the wheels of her roll-aboard began to click as she headed in their direction.

20. AUGMENTED

Milgrim glanced up from the square, glossy pages of Presences: Locative Art in America Presences: Locative Art in America, and saw that Hollis was reading too. Something clothbound, black, no jacket.

They were somewhere under the Channel now, seated in Business Premier, which had wifi and a croissant breakfast. Or not wifi, but something cellular, requiring what she'd called a "dongle," and had plugged into the edge of her MacBook for him. He'd borrowed it earlier, a weirdly thin one called an Air, and gone to Twitter, to see if Winnie had said anything, but she hadn't. "Going through Kent now," he'd written, then erased it. Then he'd tried "Hollis Henry" on Google and found her Wikipedia entry. Which had made for an odd read, as she was seated just opposite him, across the table, though she couldn't see what he was looking at. Though now they were in the tunnel, there was no phone either.

She'd been described, in a retrospective piece written in 2004, as having looked, when she performed, like "a weaponized version of Francoise Hardy." He wasn't sure he could see it, exactly, and he'd also Googled Francoise Hardy to make the direct comparison. Francoise Hardy was more conventionally pretty, he thought, and he wasn't sure what "weaponized" was supposed to mean, in that context. He supposed the writer had been trying to capture something of whatever she'd projected in live performance.

Hollis didn't look like Milgrim's idea of a rock singer, to the extent that he had one. She looked like someone who had a job that allowed you to wear what you wanted to the office. Which she did have, he supposed, with Bigend.

When he was finished with her computer, she'd offered him this copy of the book she'd written. "I'm afraid it's mostly pictures," she'd said, unzipping a side pocket on her black suitcase and pulling out a glossy, shrink-wrapped slab. The cover was a color photograph of tall nude statues of several very slender, small-breasted women, with identical helmet-like haircuts and matching bracelets, rising out of what seemed to be a rather small flower bed. They were made of something like solidified mercury, perfectly mirroring everything around them. The back cover was the same image, but minus the heroically erotic liqui-chrome statuary, which made it possible to read a sign they had concealed: Chateau Marmont.

"That's a memorial to Helmut Newton," she'd said. "He lived there, part of the time."

"The back is 'before'?" Milgrim had asked.

"No," she'd said, "that's what you see, there, unaugmented. The front's what you see augmented. Construct's tied to the GPS grid. To see it, you have to go there, use augmented reality."

"I've never heard of that," Milgrim had said, looking at the back, then the front.

"When I wrote the book, there was no commercial hardware. People were building their own. Now it's all iPhone apps. Lots of work, back then, trying to render the pieces effectively. We had to take high-rez photographs of the site, from as many angles as you can, then marry them to whatever that exact angle on the construct would look like, then choose from those."

"Did you do that yourself?'

"I chose, but Alberto did the photography and the imaging. That Newton memorial is one of his own pieces, but he rendered all of the others." She pushed a strand of hair back from her eye. "Locative art probably started in London, and there's a lot of it, but I haven't seen much of it there. I decided to stick to American artists. Less to bite off, but also because it all has some peculiarly literal sense of place. I thought I had a marginally better chance of understanding it there."

"You must know a lot about art."

"I don't. I stumbled on this stuff. Well, that's not true. Bigend suggested I look at it. Though at the time I had no idea it was him doing the suggesting."

He'd worked the corner of his thumbnail under the shrink-wrap. "Thank you," he'd said, "it looks very interesting."

Now she closed the black book, saw him looking at her. Smiled.