Pattern Recognition (7 page)

It had been Parkaboy, shortly after Ivy had started the site from her Seoul apartment, who had first raised the possibility of what he called “the Garage Kubrick.” This was not a concept that argued from either a Completist or Progressive position, necessarily, with Mama Anarchia herself quite contentedly using the term today, even though she knows that it originated with Parkaboy. It is simply a part of the discourse, and a central one: that it is possible that this footage is generated single-handedly by some technologically empowered solo auteur, some guerilla creator out there alone in the night of the Internet. That it might be being generated via some sort of CGI, actors, sets and all, and entirely at the virtual hand of some secretive and perhaps unknown genius, has become
a widespread obsession with a large faction of Progressives, and with many Completists as well, though the Completists necessarily put that in past tense.

But here is Parkaboy railing on about Mama Anarchia’s tendency to quote Baudrillard and the other Frenchmen who annoy him so deeply, and Cayce automatically hits Respond and gives him her boilerplate oil-upon-the-waters copy:

This always happens when we forget that this site is only here because Ivy is willing to expend the time and energy to keep it here, and neither Ivy nor most of the rest of us enjoy it when you or anyone else starts yelling. Ivy is our host, we should try to keep this a pleasant place for her, and we shouldn’t take it too much for granted that F:F:F will always be here.

She clicks on Post and watches her name and message title appear under his:

CayceP and Keep your shirt on.

Because Parkaboy is her friend, she can get away with this where someone else couldn’t. She has become a sort of ritual referee charged specifically with flagging down Parkaboy whenever he goes off on anyone, as he’s definitely inclined to do. Ivy can whip him into shape pronto, but Ivy is a policewoman in Seoul, works long shifts, and can’t always be on the site to moderate.

She automatically clicks Reload, and his response is already there:

Where are you? nt.

London. Working. nt.

And all of this is hugely comforting. Psychological prophylaxis, evidently.

The phone rings, beside the Cube, mirror-world rings she finds unnerving at the best of times. She hesitates, then answers.

“Hello?”

“Cayce dear. It’s Bernard.” Stonestreet. “Helena and I were wondering if you’d be up for a little dinner.”

“Thank you, Bernard.” Looking at the trestle table blocking the door. “But I’m feeling unwell.”

“Jet lag. You can try Helena’s little pills.”

“It’s kind of you, Bernard, but—”

“Hubertus will be here. He’ll be horribly disappointed if he doesn’t have a chance to see you.”

“Aren’t we meeting Monday?”

“He’s in New York tomorrow evening. Can’t be here for our meeting. Say you’ll come.”

This is one of those conversations in which Cayce feels that the British have evolved passive-aggressive leverage in much the way they’ve evolved irony. She has no way of securing the perimeter, here, once she leaves the flat, but this Blue Ant contract represents a good quarter of her anticipated year’s gross.

“PMS, Bernard. Not to put it too delicately.”

“Then you absolutely have to come. Helena has something completely marvelous, for that.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Tried what?”

She gives up. Company, of almost any kind, seems not entirely a bad idea. “Where are you?”

“Docklands. Seven. It’s casual. I’ll send a car. Delighted you can come. Bye.” Stonestreet rings off with an abruptness Cayce suspects has
required some learning in New York. There is ordinarily a singsong, almost tender cadence to the mirror-world termination of telephone conversations, a call-and-response of farewell she’s never mastered.

Psychological prophylaxis is shot to hell.

Three minutes later, having Googled “North London locksmith,” she’s on the phone with a man at something called Judge Advocate Locks.

“You don’t work on Saturdays,” she opens, hopefully.

“Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.”

“But you wouldn’t be able to get here before this evening, would you?”

“Where are you?”

She tells him.

“Fifteen minutes,” he says.

“You don’t take Visa.”

“We do.”

As she hangs up, she realizes that she’s lost Dorotea’s number by making this call. Not that she would necessarily-have been able to extract it from the phone, but it was the closest thing she had to evidence of the entire episode, other than Asian Sluts on the browser memory. She presses Redial, just to check, and gets the man at Judge Advocate. “Sorry,” she says, “hit Redial by mistake.”

“Fourteen minutes,” he says, defensive now, and the truck arrives in more like twelve.

An hour later, Damien’s door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol. The Cube is back on the table in its accustomed place. She didn’t change the lock on the street door because she doesn’t know Damien’s tenants, or even how many there are.

Dinner with Bigend. She groans, and goes to change.

*  *  *

THE
car and driver from Blue Ant are waiting when she exits the street door, the two new keys on a black shoestring around her neck. She’s hidden the set of spares behind one of Damien’s mixing consoles in the upstairs room.

Evening now, a light rain just beginning to fall.

She thinks of it thinning the Children’s Crusade still further, under the giant Fimo boots and aeroplanes and the streetlamps mounted with surveillance cameras.

Settled in the car’s rear seat, she asks the driver, a slender and immaculate African, for the name of the station nearest their destination.

“Bow Road,” he says, but she doesn’t know it.

She looks at the back of his meticulously shorn head, at the niobium stud in the upper curve of his right ear, then out at passing shop fronts and restaurants.

Stonestreet’s “casual” will translate as relatively dressy, by her standards, so she’s opted for the CPU Damien calls Skirt Thing, a long, narrow, anonymously made tube of black jersey, with only the most minimal hemming at either end. Tight but comfortable, rides the hips well, infinitely adjustable in terms of length. Under this, black hose; over it, a black DKNY cardigan un-Dikini-ed with a pair of nail scissors. New-old-stock pumps from a vintage place in Paris.

And finds herself thinking wistfully of racketing along in the Metro, and of the impossibly great way Parisian women have of wearing scarves. She decides that this is either another sign of serotonin normalization, daydreaming of another place, or a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge reaction to Asian Sluts on the browser.

This increasingly massive and entirely unresolved issue she now has with Dorotea, someone she’d scarcely known existed. She’s searched her
memory for any way in which she might previously have earned this woman’s enmity, but has found nothing.

She is not much in the business of making enemies, although the quieter side of her profession, the sort of yea-or-nay evaluation Blue Ant is currently paying her for, can be problematic. A nay can cost a company a contract, or an employee (once, an entire department) a job. The rest of it, the actual running to earth of street fashion, the occasional lectures to intent platoons of executives, generates remarkably little ill will.

A red double-decker grinds past, registering less as mirror-world than as some Disney prop for Londonland.

On a wall she spies freshly shingled copies of a still from the new fragment. It is the kiss. Already.

In New York, once, on an uptown train in rush hour, during the anthrax scares, as she’d mentally recited the duck mantra, she’d found herself looking at a still no bigger than a business card, frame-grabbed and safety-pinned, from a fragment she’d not yet seen, on the green polyester uniform blazer of a weary-looking black woman. Cayce had been using the mantra to ward off a recurring fantasy: that they would drop light bulbs full of the very purest stuff on the subway tracks, where, as she too well remembered Win once having told her, it would take only a few hours, as the Army had evidently proven in experiments in the 1960s, to drift from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street.

The black woman, seeing her notice the little still, had nodded, recognizing a fellow follower, and Cayce had been rescued from inner darkness by this suggestion of just how many people might be following the footage, and just how oddly invisible a phenomenon that was.

There are many more, now, in spite of a general and in her opinion entirely welcome lack of attention from the major media. Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks. It comes in mothlike, under radar evolved to detect things with massive airframes: a species of ghost, or “black guest” perhaps (as
Damien had once explained hackers and their more autonomous creations are known in China).

Shows dealing with lifestyles and popular culture, or with minor mysteries made to seem major, have aired the story, along with dubiously assembled sequences of fragments, but these elicited no viewer response whatever (except on F:F:F, of course, where the assemblages are ripped to shreds amid lengthy and passionate protestations of just how clueless it is to put, say, #23 before #58). Footageheads seem to propagate primarily by word of mouth, or, as with Cayce, by virtue of random exposure, either to a fragment of video or to a single still frame.

Cayce’s first footage had been waiting for her as she’d emerged from the flooded all-genders toilet at a NoLiTa gallery party, that previous November. Wondering what she could do to sterilize the soles of her shoes, and reminding herself never to touch them again, she’d noticed two people huddled on either side of a third, a turtlenecked man with a portable DVD player, held before him in the way that crèche figures of the Three Kings hold their gifts.

And passing these three she’d seen a face there, on the screen of his ciborium. She’d stopped without thinking and done that stupid duck dance, trying to better align retina to pixel.

“What is that?” she’d asked. A sideways look from a girl with hooded eyes, a sharp and avian nose, round steel labret stud gleaming from beneath her lower lip. “Footage,” this one had said, and for Cayce it had started there.

She’d left the gallery with the URL for a site that offered all of the footage accumulated to that point.

Ahead, now, in the wet evening light, a twirling blue pulse, as of something meant to warn of whirlpools, vortices…

They are in some larger thoroughfare, multi-lane traffic verging on gridlock. The Blue Ant car slowing, halting, locked in from behind, then edging forward.

As they pass the scene of the accident Cayce sees a bright yellow motorcycle on its side, front forks twisted strangely. The whirling blue light is mounted on a slender mast, rising from a larger, obviously official motorcycle parked nearby, and she sees that this is an emergency medical response vehicle, an entirely mirror-world concept, able to edge through the densest traffic to an accident site.

The bike medic, in a Belstaff jacket with huge reflective stripes, is kneeling above the fallen rider, whose helmet is on the pavement beside him and whose neck is immobilized in a foam collar. The medic is giving the man oxygen with a mask and bottle, and now Cayce realizes she can hear the insistent hooting, from somewhere behind, of a mirror-world ambulance. And for an instant she sees that unconscious, unmarked face, its lower half obscured by the transparent mask, the evening’s rain falling on closed eyes. And knows that this stranger may now inhabit the most liminal place of all, poised perhaps on the brink of nonexistence, or about to enter some existence unimagined.

She cannot see what hit him, or what he might have hit. Or else the street itself had risen up, to smite him. It is not only those things we most fear that do that, she reminds herself.

“
IT
was a match factory,” Stonestreet says, having greeted her and ushered her into two stories of lofted open plan, dark gleaming hardwood stretching to a wall of glass that opens on a full-length balcony. Candlelight. “We’re looking for something else.” He’s wearing a black cotton dress shirt, its French cuffs unlinked and flapping. The at-home version of that new but slept-in look, she supposes. “It’s not Tribeca.”

No, it’s not, she thinks, neither in square footage nor in volumes of space.

“Hub’s on the deck. Just arrived. Drink?”

“ ‘Hub’?”

“Been in Houston.” Stonestreet winks.

“Bet it would be ‘Hube’ if they had their druthers.” Hube Bigend. Lombard.

Cayce’s dislike of Bigend is indeed personal, albeit secondhand, a friend having been involved with the man in New York, back in, as the kids had recently quit saying, the day. Margot, the friend, from Melbourne, had always referred to him as “a Lombard,” which Cayce had at first thought might be a reference somehow to his Belgian-ness, until learning, upon finally asking, that it was Margot’s acronym for “Loads of money but a real dickhead.” As things had progressed between them, mere Lombardhood had scarcely covered it.

Stonestreet, at the wet bar sculpted into a corner of the kitchen’s granite island, passes her, at her request, a tall glass of ice and fizzy water, garnished with a twist of lemon.

On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished…. The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing, but with the uneasy hallucinatory suggestion of panic about to break through.

She turns, and sees Bigend through glass leading to a balcony, hands on the rain-slick railing, his back to her, in some sort of raincoat and what seems to be a cowboy hat.