So Yesterday (17 page)

I had forgotten to hide my bottle jerseys.

"What the hell are those?" Jen asked.

************************************

A confession: I was an Innovator once, but only once.

You probably don't know about bottle jerseys. They're
made from plastic foam, close cousins to those sleeves that keep beer cans
cold. Bottle jerseys fit over the tops of water bottles. They have an athlete's
name and number printed on them and little armholes, like a miniature team uniform.
They're a giveaway at basketball games, handed out to the first five thousand
ticket holders, sponsored by the Bronx Zoo or some candy bar or whatever.

My innovation was this: Instead of putting my bottle
jersey on a water bottle, I stuck it on my hand. The pinky and thumb go out the
armholes, and the middle three fingers come out the top. It looks like a cross
between a wrist cast and a basketball-player hand puppet. I did it a couple of
years ago at a Knicks game, and it shot through Madison Square Garden faster
than Legionnaire's disease through a cruise liner. It was on the street the
next day and cool for about three weeks among kids with a maximum age of
thirteen.

I haven't seen it anywhere since.

It's not much, but it's mine.

************************************

Jen stood very still, regarding the rows of empty
water bottles wearing their jerseys with the pathetic pride of small dogs in
sweaters, organized by team and player position, lacking only tiny basketballs
to form their own tiny league.

"Uh, those are bottle jerseys. It's kind of a
...
collection."

"Where did they come from? Some sort of psycho
marketing scheme?"

"Actually, I bought most of them on eBay. You
can't get them at team stores—for any specific player you have to track down
someone who went to the right game. Not an easy task, I assure you," I
chortled.

"Do you
ever play
ball, Hunter?"

"Well, not since I got cut from my junior high
team. The move from Minnesota revealed certain holes in my game. Like an
inability to score or defend. All that's left of my hoop dreams are the bottle
jerseys." I laughed self-deprecatingly again, as if my deprecation wasn't
already in the bag.

"Oh," Jen said, taking a doubtful closer
look at a water bottle dressed as Latrell Sprewell (Knicks vs. Lakers, 2001-02
season, sponsored by a certain pink-packeted brand of sugar substitute and
currently fetching about thirty-six dollars at auction. Maybe more).

"Kind of like collectible action figures,"
she said, and named a certain science-fiction franchise that had lasted four
films too long.

I woke up my laptop, my heart stuttering with shame.

************************************

First we Googled the name Mwadi Wickersham and got
zilch. No smattering of irrelevant hits or even a "Did you mean
...
?" Just nothing.

It's unsettling when Google doesn't work. Like when my
aunt Macy in Minnesota stops talking, you know some major shit is about to hit
the fan.

But Futura Garamond was stamped all over the Web.

The first search gave us only a trash heap of hits on
font libraries. It turned out that both
Futura
and
Garamond
are the names of classic fonts. Adding a couple of
more terms
{designer, City Blades)
we found Futura Garamond the human being and learned
that as a young designer, he had created typefaces for surfing and skater
magazines, messy alphabets with names like YoMamals Gothic and BooksAreDead
Bold. From font design he'd gone on to lay out the lyrics in countless CD slip
cases, rebrand a major music magazine or two, and join the inevitable
Web-design start-up destined to implode just after the turn of the century.

"Spot the trend?" Jen said as I leaned over
her shoulder, my reading slowed by the new raspberry smell of her hair.

"Uh, yeah, I do."

Futura had been fired from every job he'd ever held,
mostly for making text unreadable. His trademark was radical concepts like
...

"Ow," I moaned after looking over PDFs of a
few Garamond-designed magazine pages.

"I kind of like it," Jen said.

"But it hurts!"

"In a good way. I can see why people keep hiring
him."

True, Futura never starved. He had mastered the art of
getting fired with a splash, always managing to attract his next employers in
the process. The outgoing bosses always looked uncool for trying to rein in his
talents, and the new ones could always count on a more radical image until they
too were forced to fire Futura, usually about when their magazine became
unreadable.

“This guy's got a long list of enemies,'' Jen noted.

"Yeah, plenty of reasons to strike back against
...
well, whoever it is the anti-client's
after."

"I don't see a
Hoi Aristoi
connection, though," she
said.

I dragged the magazine off my bedside table and
checked the first few pages.

"Well, Futura's name isn't anywhere in
here."

"Who
owns Hoi Aristoi?"

I said the name of a certain megacorporation known for
its relentless grip on all media, including scores of newspapers and a certain
faux-news channel.

"Whoa," Jen said, squinting at the screen
after a Google cross-check. "Futura's been fired by at least four
different companies owned by those guys."

"We have a motive."

"And check this out: A couple of years ago he
decided to leave the getting-fired track 'to pursue his own interests.' I wonder
what those included."

I looked over Jen's shoulder again and read about how
Futura Garamond's career had finally come to rest at a small design firm called
Movable Hype, of which he was the sole owner and boss. The fired had become the
firer.

"Check out that address," Jen said.

"Perfect."

Movable Hype's offices were down in Tribeca, about
three blocks from the abandoned building where Mandy had disappeared.

I caught the glint of Jen's smile in the screen's
reflection.

"Motive," she said, "and opportunity as
well."

CHAPTER 25

"THIS
IS THE CRÈME BRÛLÉE DISTRICT."

"Pardon me?"

"My sister identifies neighborhoods by the
dominant dessert served there," Jen said. "We're west of green tea
ice cream and south of tiramisu."

It was true. The first restaurant we passed was a tiny
bistro tucked between an art gallery and a flat-tire fix-it place. Checking the
menu, we saw that they indeed served crème brûlée, which is a small bowl of custard,
the top layer cooked crunchy with a blowtorch. Pyromania is so often the
handmaiden of innovation.

"How is your sister?"

"Less annoyed with me now that the borrowed dress
has passed inspection and been found to have no rips or tears."

I may have flinched.

"Oh, sorry, Hunter. Forgot about your jacket for
a second." She pulled me to a stop. "Listen, given that the whole
disguise thing was my idea, I should go halfway with you on the refund
disaster."

"You don't have to do that, Jen."

"You can't stop me."

I laughed. "Actually, I can. Where are you going
to do, tie me up and pay my credit-card bill?"

"Only half of it."

"Still, that's five hundred bucks." I shook
my head. "Forget it. I'll just make the minimum payment until I come up
with something. Even more motivation to find Mandy. I hear that when people
rescue her, she gets them more work."

"Well," Jen sighed, "it's not like I
have the money anyway. Not after paying Emily's phone and cable. But I'll see
what I can do with that jacket."

"I think it's DOA."

"No, I mean do something
interesting
with it. You might as well get
a jacket out of this. AJen original."

I smiled and took her hand. "I'm already doing
better than that."

She smiled back but stepped away, pulling me into
forward motion again. When we passed a few steps later into the shadow of a
long stretch of scaffolding, she halted, kissing me in the sudden darkness.

It was cool in the shelter of the scaffolding, the
streets of the crème brûlée district almost empty on a summer Saturday
afternoon. A cab passed, rumbling across a patch of cobblestones; no matter how
many times they're paved over, the cars wear the asphalt away, and the ancient
stones emerge again, like curious turtles out of black water.

"French Revolution," I said. My voice was
slightly breathless.

Jen leaned against me. "Go on."

I smiled—she was getting used to my wandering
brain—and pointed at the bumpy surface. "The hoi polloi were pissed off
everywhere back in the old days, but the revolution succeeded only in France,
because the cobblestones in Paris weren't stuck down very well. An angry mob
could take on the king's soldiers just by pulling up the street. Imagine a
hundred peasants lobbing those at you."

"Ouch."

"Exactly," I said. "Your fancy uniform,
your musket, none of it's worth much in a hail of rocks the size of a fist. But
in cities where the cobblestones were stuck down better, the angry mob couldn't
do anything. No revolution."

Jen thought for a few seconds, then gave cobblestones
the Nod. "So the hoi polloi could get rid of the aristocrats just because
of a flaw in the glue, one that was right under their feet."

"Yeah," I said. "All it took was some
Innovator to say, 'Yo, let's pick up these cobblestones and throw them.' And
that was the end of society."

We left the shade, and I looked back up at the aging
building. The scaffolding clung to the front all the way up, six stories of
metal pipes and wooden planks. A faded, decades-old advertisement adorned this
side, the pattern of the brick showing through the crumbling paint. I could see
where another building had once rested against it, nothing left now but a
change in color in the bricks.

"Hunter, do you ever feel like there's some
problem with the glue these days? Like maybe if anyone figured out what to
throw and who to throw it at, everything would fall apart pretty quickly?"

"All the time."

"Me too." We were crossing a worn patch of
Hudson Street, and Jen swung a shoe at the top of a cobblestone. It was solidly
submerged in sunbaked tar and didn't budge. "So, that's the anti-client's
mission, isn't it? Ungluing things? Maybe they've figured out what to
throw."

"Maybe." I shaded my eyes with one hand and
squinted at the next street sign, then at the numbers. Movable Hype was halfway
down the block, in an old and towering iron-frame building. "But more
likely they're just throwing everything they can."

************************************

"Closed on Saturday," I said, stating what
should have been obvious even before we'd bothered to walk over here. No one
had answered our buzz.
 
This was a place
of business, and no matter how crazy Futura Garamond's typesetting aesthetic
might be, he didn't work on Saturdays in summer.

"Good," said Jen,
reaching for the buzzers. This motion gave me a nervous feeling in the bottom
of my stomach.

Through the speaker:
"Yeah?"

In Jen's fake gruff voice:
"Delivery."

Muttered by me: "Not this
again."

From the buzzer:
buzz.

************************************

Movable Hype was on the top floor, and the stairs
wound upward around the old-style elevator, locked up for the weekend at the
bottom of its ten-story cage. Jen soon took a half-floor lead—I could see her
red laces flashing through the ironwork surrounding the elevator shaft. She
took the stairs like someone who lived in a walk-up. (My parents' building was
over the critical six-floor limit, so I was used to riding.)

"Wait up!"

She didn't.

When I arrived on the tenth floor, Jen had already
found the door to Movable Hype at the end of one long hall. "Locked."

"Gee, that's a surprise. What are we going to do,
break it down?"

"Too strong. But check this out."

She led me around a corner to where a set of windows
overlooked a central air shaft. In the old days, rents in New York were based
on the number of windows a place had. So landlords invented buildings with
hollow centers, creating that famous NYC feature: a window that looked out onto
someone else's window about three feet away. Mandy always complained about how
Muffin, her cockroach-eating cat, would jump across the gap to other tenants'
apartments on hot, open-window days, presumably to see if their cockroaches
were any tastier or less cat-shy.

Jen pointed through one of the
windows. Across the corner of the air shaft was another window, perpendicular
to the one we peered through. I could see a few desks and darkened computers.

"Movable Hype," she
said, and unlocked the window.

"Jen..."

The window slid up, and she
hooked a leg out over the hundred-foot drop.

"Jen!"

She reached toward me.
"Hold my hand."

"No way!"

"Would you rather I do
this alone?"

"Uh, no." I realized
this wasn't an idle threat: she was ready to lean across and try the other
window whether I helped or not. I felt a burst of | sympathy for Emily. If this
was Jen at seventeen, what had she been like
I
at ten?

"Look at it this way. It's only a couple of feet
across. If it wasn't for the drop, you wouldn't think twice about it."

"Yes, if it wasn't for the certain-death issue, I
wouldn't think twice about it."

She looked down. "Pretty
certain, yeah. Which is why you're going to hold my hand." She reached out
again, impatiently waving me over. I sighed and grabbed her wrist with both
hands.

"Ow. Too tight."

"Live with it."

Jen just rolled her eyes, then leaned her weight away
from me and out over the shaft. Her other hand reached the Movable Hype window
easily. Her wrist twisted in my hands as she tugged the window sash upward a
few inches; then it stuck.