Spook Country (13 page)

T ito and Vianca packaged the contents of his room as ten parcels of varying sizes, each one double-wrapped in contractor-grade black trash bags and sealed with heavy black tape. This left Tito’s mattress, the ironing board, the long-legged chair from Canal Street, and the old iron clothing rack. Vianca, it had been agreed, was taking the ironing board and the chair. The mattress, assumed to contain enough skin flakes and hair for a DNA match, would be on its way to landfill as soon as Tito left the building. Vianca had sealed it in two of the black plastic bags before she’d vacuumed the room. The black bags made a slithering sound, now, when you sat on the mattress, and Tito would have to sleep on it.

Tito touched the Nano again, on its cord around his neck, grateful to have his music.

“We’ve packed the tchainik,” he said, “and the kettle. We can’t make tea.”

“I don’t want to wipe them again.”

“Carlito called Alejandro and I tchainiks,” Tito told her. “It meant we were ignorant but willing to learn. Do you know that way of using ‘tchainik’?”

“No,” Vianca said, looking like a very pretty, very dangerous child, under her white paper hairnet. “I only know it to mean teapot.”

“A hacker’s word, in Russian.”

“Do you ever think that you are forgetting Russian, Tito?” she asked in English.

Before he could answer, someone rapped lightly at the door, in protocol. Vianca came out of her crouch on the mattress with a peculiar grace, at once tight and serpentine, to rap a reply. “Brotherman,” she said, and unlocked the door.

“Hola, viejo,” said Brotherman, nodding to Tito and pulling off a black knit headband that served him as earmuffs. He wore his hair in a vertical mass, touched a peculiar dark orange with peroxide. In Brotherman, Juana said, some African had surfaced in the Cuban, before mingling with the Chinese. Brotherman exaggerated this now, to his own advantage and that of the family. He was completely ambivalent, racially. A chameleon, his Spanish slid deftly between Cuban, Salvadoran, and Chilango, while his black American was often incomprehensible to Tito. He was taller than Tito, and thin, long-faced, the whites of his eyes shot with red. “Llapepi,” he greeted Vianca with a nod, backslanging papilla: teenager.

“Hola, Brotherman. Qué se cuenta?”

“Same old,” said Brotherman, bending to catch and squeeze Tito’s hand. “Man of the hour.”

“I don’t like waiting,” Tito said, and stood, to shake unease from his back and arms. The bare bulb overhead seemed brighter than ever before; Vianca had wiped it clean.

“But I have seen your systema, cousin.” Brotherman raised a white plastic shopping bag. “Carlito sends you shoes.” He passed Tito the bag. The high-topped black shoes still had their white-and-blue Adidas logo tags. Tito sat on the edge of the bagged mattress and removed his boots. He laced the Adidas shoes and pulled them on over medium-weight cotton socks, removed the tags, and carefully tightened the laces before tying them. He stood up, shifting his weight, taking the measure of these new shoes. “GSG9 model,” Brotherman said. “Special police in Germany.”

Tito positioned his feet shoulder-width apart, dropped his Nano inside the neck of his T-shirt, took a breath, and backtucked, the new shoes missing the bare bulb in the ceiling fixture by less than a foot. He landed three feet behind his starting position.

He grinned at Vianca, but she didn’t smile back. “I’ll go out for some food now,” she said. “What would you like?”

“Anything,” said Tito.

“I’ll start loading this,” said Brotherman, toeing the pile of black packages. Vianca passed him a fresh pair of gloves from her jacket pocket.

“I’ll help,” said Tito.

“No,” said Brotherman, pulling on the gloves and wiggling white fingers at Tito. “You twist your ankle, sprain anything, Carlito have our asses.”

“He’s right,” said Vianca, firmly, removing her paper hairnet and replacing it with her baseball cap. “No more tricking. Give me your wallet.”

Tito passed her his wallet.

She removed the two pieces of identification most recently provided by the family. Surname Herrera. Adiós. She left him his money and MetroCard.

He looked from one cousin to the other, then sat back down on the mattress.

T here was something about Rize, Milgrim decided, reclining fully dressed across his New Yorker bedspread, that reminded him of one of the more esoteric effects of eating exceptionally hot Szechuan.

Not just hot, but correctly, expertly seasoned. Hot like when they brought you a plate of lemon slices, to suck on as needed, to partially neutralize the burn. It had been a long time since Milgrim had had food like that. It had been a long time since he’d eaten a meal that had provided any memorable pleasure at all. The Chinese he was most familiar with these days was along the lines of the stepped-on Cantonese they brought him at the laundry on Lafayette, but just now he was recalling that sensation, strangely delightful, of drinking cold water on top of serious pepper-burn—how the water filled your mouth entirely, but somehow without touching it, like a molecule-thick silver membrane of Chinese antimatter, like a spell, some kind of magic insulation.

The Rize was like that, the cold water being the business of being Milgrim, or rather those aspects of being Milgrim, or simply of being, that he found most problematic. Where some less subtle formulation would seek to make the cold water go away, the Rize encouraged him to take it up, into his mouth, in order to savor that silver membrane.

Though his eyes were closed, he knew that Brown had just now come to the connecting door, which stood open.

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together.

“What did you say?”

“Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable.

“The fuck—”

“If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.”

Brown opened his mouth. Closed it.

“It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”

There was a look on Brown’s face that Milgrim hadn’t seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread.

“Good night,” Milgrim heard himself say, still insulated by the silver membrane.

Brown turned, walking silently back into his own room in his stocking feet, the partial pistol in his hand.

Milgrim raised his right arm toward the ceiling, straight up, index finger extended and thumb cocked. He brought the thumb down, firing an imaginary shot, then lowered his arm, having no idea at all what to make of whatever it was that had just happened.

S he drove to Malibu with the Blue Ant helmet in its carton beside her. It was sunny through Beverly Hills, but by the time she reached the sea something monochrome and saline had insinuated itself.

She went to Gladstone’s, took the carton in with her, and stood it on the massive timber bench opposite her own, while she topped up her hyper-healthy hotel breakfast with a small chowder and a large Coke. The light on the beach was like a sinus headache.

Things were different today, she assured herself. She was working for Node, and her expenses would be covered. She had decided to look at it that way, and not think of herself as Bigend’s employee, or Blue Ant’s. There had, after all, been no real change in her formal situation; she was a freelancer, on assignment to Node to write seven thousand words on locative computing and the arts. That was the situation today and she could deal with it. The Bigend version, she was less certain of. Pirates, their boats, CIA maritime units, tramp freighters, the traffic in and hunt for weapons of mass destruction, a shipping container that spoke to Bobby Chombo—she wasn’t certain of any of that.

As she was paying, she remembered Jimmy’s money, back at the Mondrian, locked in the little keypad safe in her room, coded to open on “CARLYLE.” She didn’t know what else to do with it. Inchmale said he could tell her whether any of it was counterfeit. She’d take him up on that, she thought, then go on from there.

The thought of seeing him again woke an old ambivalence. While it had never been true, as the magazines had often had it, that she and Inchmale had been a couple, in any carnal or otherwise ordinary sense, they had nonetheless been married in some profound if sexless way; co-creatives, the live wires of the Curfew, held down and variously together by Jimmy and Heidi. She was grateful, ordinarily, to whatever fates might be, for Inchmale having found the excellent Angelina and Argentina, thereby to be translated, for the most part, out of her world. It was better that way for everyone, though she’d have had a hard time explaining that to anyone other than Inchmale. And Inchmale, never blind to the background radiation of his own singularity, would have been all too ready to agree.

When she got back to the car, she put the carton on the unopened trunk and got the helmet out, fumbling with the unfamiliar controls. She put the thing on, curious as to whether anyone had been locatively creative in the immediate vicinity.

A cartoonishly smooth Statue of Liberty hand, holding a torch a good three stories high, loomed above her, blotting out the hurtful glow of the salt-metal sky. Its wrist, emerging from the Malibu sand, would’ve had roughly the footprint of a basketball court. It was far bigger than the real thing, it was blatant copying to have it emerging from the beach this way, and still it managed to be more melancholy than ridiculous. Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative? Would it mean that the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or ugly or banal as anything one encountered on the web already? Was there any reason to expect it to be any better than that, any worse? The Liberty hand and its torch looked as though they had been cast from the stuff they made beige Tupperware out of. She remembered how Alberto had described his labors in the creation of skins, textures. She remembered the microskirted Aztec princesses on his Volkswagen. She wondered where the wifi for this piece was coming from.

She took the helmet off and put it back in its carton.

Driving back, as the sun gradually found its way out again, she decided to try to find Bobby’s factory, if only to put him on her map in a different way. It shouldn’t be hard. Her body, she was finding, remembered Los Angeles much more thoroughly than her head did.

Eventually she found herself back on Romaine, looking for the turn Alberto had taken. For those white-painted walls. She found it, turned, and saw something big and bright and whiter still, just pulling away. She slowed, pulled over. Watched the long white truck turn, swinging right, out of sight at the far corner. She didn’t know trucks, but she guessed this one was as long as they got without having the back end become a separate trailer. But big enough to move the contents of a two-bedroom house. Unmarked, shiny, white. And gone.

“Shit,” she said, pulling up where Alberto had pulled up. She could see the green-painted metal door they’d entered through. She didn’t like the diagonal of shadow across it now. The sun was high, and that diagonal meant the door was open, three inches or more. For the first time she saw the long, white-painted, horizontally corrugated doors of a loading bay. Back a truck up to that and take out anything you wanted.

She popped the trunk, getting out with her PowerBook over her shoulder and the carton in her arms. She put these in the trunk and closed it, retrieved her purse, clicked the transponder to lock the car, then squared her shoulders and walked over to the green door. As she’d assumed, it was standing open a few inches. On darkness, she decided, tipping her head to squint inside, over her sunglasses.

She dug through the smaller objects at the bottom of her purse, coming up with a flat little LED-light on a key ring whose only keys were for a commercial mailbox she no longer rented, and for a Club to secure a car she no longer owned. She squeezed the light between thumb and forefinger, expecting its battery to be dead, but no, it was working. Feeling stupid, she gave the green door a rap, hurting her knuckles. It was heavy, and didn’t move when knocked on. “Bobby? Hello? It’s Hollis Henry, Bobby…” She put her left hand flat on the door and pushed. It swung smoothly, but very slowly. With the LED in her right hand, she pulled off her sunglasses with the other and stepped into darkness.

The LED did little in terms of increased visibility. She turned it off and stood, waiting for her eyes to accommodate. She began to make out points and small, faint beams in the distance. Flaws in the painting of blacked-out windows, she guessed. “Bobby? It’s Hollis. Where are you?”

She tried the LED again, this time pointing it at the floor. Surprisingly bright, it illuminated a length of one of Bobby’s powdered white gridlines. Broken, she saw, with the partial print of one of his winkle-picker Keds clones. “Whoa,” she said, “Nancy Drew. Bobby? Where are you?”

She brought the LED around in a slow arc, level with her waist, faintly making out a panel of switches. She crossed to them and tried one. Behind her, overhead, several of the big halogens came on.

She turned and saw, not unexpectedly now, the fieldlike floor, empty save for Bobby’s GPS grid drawn in flour, churned and partially erased like chalk on a blackboard, where the table, chairs, and computers had been removed. She moved forward, stepping carefully, trying to avoid the white powder. There seemed to be a variety of prints, and quite a few of Bobby’s—or someone else’s, wearing those same ridiculous shoes, which seemed unlikely. There were beige filter tips, too, smoked down short and mashed flat against the concrete. Without picking one up, she knew that they’d be Marlboro.

She looked up at the lights, then back down at the prints and butts. “Bobby did a runner,” she said, recalling an expression of Inchmale’s.

Someone had removed the Safety Orange outline of Archie the squid.

She went out, avoiding touching the partially open green door. She got her computer out of its case in the trunk, woke it up, and while it booted, removed the Blue Ant helmet from its carton. With her right arm through the skeletal helmet and the PowerBook under her left, she closed the trunk and reentered the building. She opened the PowerBook and checked to see if that wireless network 72fofH00av, the one she’d accessed here before, had gone with Bobby. It had, but she’d expected that. She closed the laptop, tucking it under one arm as she fumbled to power up the helmet and put it on.

Archie was gone.

But the shipping container was still there, something glowing at its center, through wireframe.

She took a step forward and it vanished.

She heard a soft voice behind her, syllables not in English. She started to turn, then remembered to remove the helmet first.

A couple stood in the doorway, backlit by the sun. They were small people. The male held a broad-headed push broom. “Hola,” he said.

“Hello?” Walking toward them. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m just leaving. You can see they’ve left a mess.” Gesturing behind her with the arm she’d again thrust through the helmet.

The man said something in Spanish, gently but questioning, as she stepped past them. “Goodbye,” she said, not looking back.

A careworn silver-gray Econoline was parked beside the rented Passat. She used the transponder as she walked up to the car, quickly opening the door, getting in, helmet on the passenger seat, PowerBook on the floor, key in the ignition, pulling away, the dented rear doors of the Econoline in the mirror now, and then she was accelerating along Romaine.