Pattern Recognition (15 page)

She sighs and closes the fridge.

The street door buzzes. She goes down to let Pamela Mainwaring in, a twenty-something blonde in a black mini and tartan-print tights, a black ballistic nylon briefcase in either hand. Cayce sees a Blue Ant car waiting in the street. Its driver stands beside it, smoking a cigarette, his ear plugged with plastic, conversing with thin air.

Everything about Pamela Mainwaring is fast, efficient, and intimidatingly clear. Not a woman who’d often have to repeat herself. They aren’t even in the apartment yet before she’s gotten Cayce to sign off on a suite in the Park Hyatt, Shinjuku, with a view of the Imperial Palace. “Part of one rooftop, at least,” Pamela says, putting the briefcases down, side by side, on the trestle table.

“That’s a nice yellow,” glancing into the kitchen.

She unzips one case, exposing a laptop and printer.

“I’ll just check this again,” she says, booting up. “You can use the return whenever you like, and on any carrier. But you can also go anywhere you want, anytime. My e-mail and number’s in your laptop here. I do all of Hubertus’s travel, so I’m seven twenty-four.” The screen fills with a dense frieze of flight schedules. “Yes. You’re on.” She takes blank airline tickets from an envelope and feeds them into the rectangular printer. It makes small, energetic buzzing sounds as the tickets emerge from the opposite end. “Minimum two hours check-in.” Adroitly assembling the fresh-minted tickets in a British Airways folder. “We have an iBook for you, loaded, cellular modem. And a phone. It’s good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States. You’ll be met at Narita by someone from Blue Ant Tokyo. The Tokyo office is at your complete disposal. The best translators, drivers, anything you feel you need. Literally anything.”

“I don’t want to be met.”

“Then you won’t.”

“Is Hubertus still in New York, Pamela?”

Pamela consults an Oakley Timebomb, slightly wider than her left
wrist. “Hubertus is on his way to Houston, but he’ll be back in the Mercer tonight. His e-mail and all of his numbers are on your iBook.” She opens the second case, exposing a flat Mac, a gray cell phone large enough to look either passé or unusually powerful, various cables and small gizmos still sealed in the manufacturer’s plastic, and a sheaf of the usual glossy how-to. There’s a Blue Ant envelope on top of the computer. Pamela closes her own computer, zips up the case. Picks up the envelope, tears it open, shakes out a loose credit card. “Sign this, please.”

Cayce takes it.
CAYCE POLLARD EXP
. Platinum Visa customized with the hieratic Blue Ant, which of course is a Heinzi creation, robotic and Egyptianate. Pamela Mainwaring hands her an expensive German roller-point. Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily, at the rear of her ethical universe.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” Pamela says. “Have a brilliant trip, best of luck, and call or e-mail me if you need anything. Absolutely anything.” She shakes Cayce’s hand firmly “I can show myself out, thanks.”

And then she’s gone, Cayce closing and locking the door behind her. She goes back to the table and picks up the cell phone. She sees that it’s on. After a few tries she manages to turn it off. She puts it back in the case, which she closes and pushes to the rear of the table.

Takes a deep breath, another, then does a Pilates spine curl, rolling down vertebra by vertebra into a sort of upright fetal crouch. Comes up out of it as smoothly and slowly as she can.

Damien’s phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Is Voytek.”

“I need your help with something, Voytek. I’d like you to keep a set of keys, and give them to a friend of mine if he turns up. I’ll give you twenty pounds.”

“Is not needed to pay, Casey.”

“Its a donation to your ZX 81 project. I have a new job and I’m on an expense account,” she says, thinking she’s lying but then realizing she isn’t, necessarily. “Can you meet me in two hours, where we had breakfast?”

“Yes?”

“Good. See you.” Hangs up.

And wonders, for the first time, and indeed for the first time in her life, whether the phone is tapped. Could that be what got the Asian Sluts invader in here in the first place? Dorotea’s an industrial espionage bitch, or has been, so it probably isn’t entirely unlikely. They do things like that. Bugs. Spy Shop stuff. She mentally reviews her calls since Asian Sluts. The only one of any substance, asking Helena about Trans, she’d made from a phone in Camden High Street. Now this one to Voytek, but unless a listener knew where she’d run into him at breakfast… But then couldn’t they trace his number, wherever that is?

She goes into the room where she keeps her luggage and begins the pretravel yoga of folding and packing CPUs, which somehow tells her body that she will soon be free of reliance on this particular perimeter.

Completing these tasks, she lies down on the gray duvet and falls asleep, willing herself to wake in an hour, in time to meet Voytek at the bistro in Aberdeen Street. And knows that she will.

And dreams, though she seldom dreams, or seldom recalls them, that she is alone in the back of a black cab, in London, the transience of late summer leaves accentuating the age of the city, the depth of its history, the simple stubborn vastness of it. Facades of tall houses, poker-faced and unyielding. She shivers, though the night is warm, the air in the cab close, and the image from Damien’s e-mail comes to her, wet gray pyramids of bone rising beside excavations in a Russian swamp. What was that, to do that to the dead, to history? She hears picks ringing, drunken laughter, and she is in the cab, feeling ill, and in the pine
forest, the summer swamp, witness she knows to some cannibalization beyond expression, some eating of the dead, and she remembers telling Bigend that the past is mutable too, as mutable as the future, but now she must tell him that it shouldn’t be dug up, ravaged, thrown away. She must tell him, but cannot speak, even though she now sees that it is Bigend who is driving this cab, wearing his cowboy hat, and even if she speaks, if she manages to break this thing that so painfully shackles speech, he is separated from her voice by a partition of glass or plastic, entirely bent on driving, driving she knows not where.

And wakes to the rapid beating of her heart.

Gets up, to splash cold water on her face and ascend the steep narrow stairwell to where she’s hidden the second set of keys.

And she will be careful, in the street, on her way to meet Voytek. She has never before determined to try to discover whether or not she might be being followed, but now she does, and will.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine.

There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

13.
LITTLE BOAT

Her seat on the upper deck of this British Airways 747 subsides into a bed that makes her think of a little boat, a coracle of Hexcel and teak-finish laminate. She’s nearest the nose, no other seating units in her line of sight.

The cabin is like some optimally comfy cube-farm, a cluster of automated, supremely ergonomic workstation enclosures. It feels as though, with just a little more engineering, they could simultaneously tube-feed you and tidily exhaust the resulting wastes.

However many hours in the air now, her watch tucked ritually out of sight, dinner served, lights dimmed, she imagines her soul bobbing stupidly, somewhere back over the concrete of Heathrow, its invisible tether spooling steadily out of her. As does a certain degree of fear, she notes, now that she knows they must be far out over an ocean, where no human agents threaten. For most of her life, flying, she’d felt most vulnerable right here, suspended in a void, above trackless water, but now her conscious flying-fears are about things that might be arranged to happen over populous human settlements, fears of ground-to-air, of scripted CNN moments.

But commercial aircraft have also been problematic for Cayce in another way, with their endless claustrophobic repetition of the carrier’s logo. BA has never been particularly difficult, but Virgin, with its multi-pronged product-associations, is completely impossible.

Her biggest problem with BA now, she reminds herself, is a more ordinary one: no movies she’d even consider watching in the armrest DVD, she’s under a personally enforced video news ban in effect now for
some time, she’s neglected to bring anything to read, and sleep refuses to come. With London receding and Tokyo still largely unimagined, unremembered, she sits up cross-legged in the center of her narrow little bed and knuckles her eyes, feeling like a bedridden child, just well enough to be utterly restless.

Then she remembers Bigend’s iBook, with its bright new Heathrow security sticker.

She hauls the nylon case up from the floor and opens it. She’d spent twenty minutes, the night before, poking around on the desktop, but now for the first time she notices an ummarked CD-ROM that proves, on insertion, to be a searchable database of all of F:F:F. Whoever does these things for Bigend has also provided, on the hard drive, a complete collection of the footage and her three favorite edits, one of them by Filmy and Maurice.

Still sitting cross-legged, she makes a Stickie: COPY CD FOR IVY.

Ivy’s wanted a searchable database of the forum almost since the forum began, because the free software that allows her to keep the site up isn’t searchable, and she hasn’t had anyone willing or able to do the compiling. Posters have bookmarked their favorite threads, and swap them, but there’s been no way to trace a particular topic or theme through the site’s evolution.

Or, rather, now there is.

Cayce has no idea how many pages of posts have accumulated since the site’s first day. She’s never gone back and looked at that, at the Ursite, the early days, but now she enters and searches CayceP.

On the contrary, as I was saying yesterday…

Ah. Not her first post. At first she hadn’t even been CayceP. Reenters Cayce.

Hi. How many segments, in all? Just downloaded the one where he’s on the rooftop. Has anyone been able to do anything with those chimney-pots (is that what you call them?)?

She’d added the P later, because there had briefly been another Cayce, surname, a Marvin, in Wichita, who’d also pronounced it Case, not Casey.

She feels somewhat the way she might if she had uncovered her high-school yearbook.

Here’s Parkaboy’s first post:

Well suck me raw with a breast-pump! Thought I was the only one out here obsessing about the peculiar beauties of this particularly spotty stretch of anomalous cinematic prairie. Anybody into cowboy poetry as well? Because, let me assure you, I’m not.

This had been prior to La Anarchia’s arrival, after three days of which Parkaboy had made the first of his many noisy departures from the site.

She fiddles with the matte alloy buttons on her armrest, converting her bed into a lounger. It feels good when it moves: powerful motors devoted to her comfort. She settles back in her black sweats (having declined the offer of a BA romper suit) and pulls the tartan blanket across her legs, iBook on her stomach. Adjusts the snaky fiber-optic reading lamp, with its head like a policeman’s flashlight.

Exits the CD-ROM and clicks on Filmy and Maurice’s edit.

It opens on that rooftop, against the oddly shaped chimneys. He is there. Walks to the low parapet. Looks out toward a city that never resolves. A framegrab on what he sees would reveal only a faint arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines. No focus. Definitely a skyline but not
enough information to provide any sort of identification. Rule out Manhattan, others; there are lists arguing the places it cannot, might not be.

Maurice cuts to that segment that consists entirely of long shots, the girl in the formal park.

Sometimes, when she watches a good edit, and this is one of the best, it’s as though it’s all new; she sinks into it with joy and anticipation, and when the edit ends, she’s shocked. That’s it. All there is. How can that be?

This is one of those times. It ends.

She falls asleep, iBook on her lap.

When she wakes, the cabin is darker, and she needs to pee.

Grateful that she isn’t wearing a BA romper, she shuts the iBook down, stows it away, unbuckles her seat belt, puts on BA slippers, and makes her way back toward the toilets.

Passing, as she does, what can only be the sleeping form of Billy Prion, snoring lightly, his still-unparalyzed mouth slightly open. He has his tartan blanket arranged around his shoulders like an old man in a bath chair, his face slack and inert. She blinks, trying to convince herself that this cannot be the former lead singer of BSE, but it quite clearly is, all in what looks to be last season’s Agnes B Homme.

In the coracle nearest Prion sleeps a blindfolded blonde, a pair of modest nipple rings clearly visible in outline through the taut black fabric of her top.

This, Cayce decides, further confirming her identification of Prion, is the singer from the former Velcro Kitty, the one the music press had supposed he was no longer with.

She forces herself to shuffle on, in her navy vinyl slippers, to the almost-spacious safety of a first-class toilet, with its fresh flowers and Molton Brown face stuff, where she locks the door and sits, unable to put this together: Prion, at whose gallery Voytek hopes to show his ZX 81
project, is on her flight to Tokyo. Why? If it’s that small a world, it starts to smell funny.

Watching that intensely blue fluid pressure-swirl down as she flushes.

Returning to her seat, she sees the nipple-ringed singer awake, seated upright, blindfold discarded, studying a glossy fashion magazine under a tightly focused fiber-optic beam. Prion is still snoring.

Back in her own little boat, she accepts a lukewarm white washcloth from the flight attendant’s tongs.

Why are they here, on this flight, Prion and the Velcro Kitty girl?

She remembers her father’s views on paranoia.

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.