Zero History (21 page)

He reached for the Neo to check the time. It was no longer there.

He walked on, shortly finding himself in what an enameled wall-sign informed him was the Rue Git-le-Coeur. Narrower, possibly more medieval. A few drops of rain began to fall, the sky having clouded over while he’d been having his tea. He checked reflections for a yellow helmet, though of course a professional might park the bike, leave the helmet behind. Or, more likely, be part of a team. He saw a magical-looking bookshop, stock piled like a mad professor’s study in a film, and swerved, craving the escape into text. But these seemed not only comics, unable to provide his needed hit of words-in-row, but in French as well. Some of the them, he saw, were the French kind, very literary-looking, but just as many seemed to be the ones where everyone looked something like the girl in the tea shop, slender and big-eyed. Still, a bookstore. He had a powerful urge to burrow. Work his way back into the stacks. Pull a few piles over behind him and hope never to be found.

He sighed and hurried on.

When Git-le-Coeur ended, he found a pedestrian light and crossed the heavy traffic of what he now remembered was the Quai des Grands Augustins, then hurried down a tall steep flight of stone steps. Which he also remembered. A sunny day, years before.

There was a narrow walkway directly beside the river. Once on this, one could only be seen from above by someone craning over. He looked up, waiting, anticipating the appearance of a helmet, head, or heads.

He became aware of an engine, on the water. He turned. A dark wooden sailboat with green trim was passing, its mast horizontal, piloted by a woman in shorts, a yellow slicker, and sunglasses, looking very alert at the wheel.

He looked back up at the balustrade. Nothing. The stairs were still vacant as well.

Noticing a shallow recess, he sheltered there from the increasingly insistent rain.

And then a longer, wider boat emerged, from an archway beneath a bridge whose name he no longer remembered. Like the boats that carried tourists, for Parisian children to spit on from the bridges, but this one equipped with a long plasma screen, running almost its full length, and perhaps a dozen feet high. And on this screen, as it passed, he saw the agreeably simian-looking young man Hollis had been talking with at the Salon Du Vintage, his features unmistakable, playing an organ or piano, his deep-set eyes shadowed in stage lighting, part of a band. There was no sound, other than the quiet drumming of the boat’s engine, and then the pixels spasmed, collapsing the image, then unfolding it again, to reveal those two tedious Icelandic blondes, the twins Bigend sometimes mysteriously appeared with. The Dottirs, contorting in sequined sheathes on the rain-wet screen, mouths open as in silent screams.

He set his bag down, carefully, on the paving beneath the archway, and stretched his aching shoulder, watching the Dottirs pass, mysteriously, on the dark water.

When the rain stopped, and still no one had appeared, he shifted the bag to his other shoulder and walked on, toward the bridge. He trudged up a different but equally long stone stair, then recrossed the busy Grands Augustins and reentered the Latin Quarter, headed in the approximate direction he had come.

The cobbles were slick and shining, the street furniture semi-unfamiliar, evening settling rapidly in. And it was here, nearing another randomly angled intersection, that he had the experience.

In a setting, as they had said, of clear reality.

He had always been repulsed by the idea of hallucinogens, psychedelics, deliriants. His idea of a desirable drug had been a one that made things more familiar, more immediately recognizable.

In Basel, they had questioned him closely, during early withdrawal, about hallucinations. Had he been having any? No, he’d said. No … bugs? No bugs, he’d assured them. They’d explained that a possible symptom of his withdrawal might be what they called “hallucinations in a setting of clear reality,” though he’d wondered how they could assume that his reality, at that point, was clear. The bugs, whatever those might have been, had never come, to his considerable relief, but now he saw, however briefly but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross the intersection ahead of him.

Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beak-tip to trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury. A penguin wrapped in fluid mirror, reflecting a bit of neon from the street below. Swimming. Moving as a penguin moves underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of second-story windows. Moving down the center of the street that crossed the one he walked on. So that it was revealed only as it crossed the intersection. Swimming. Propelling itself, in a gracefully determined but efficient fashion, with its quicksilver flippers. Then a bicycle crossed, on the street, going in the opposite direction.

“Did you see that?” Milgrim asked the cyclist, who of course was already gone, and in any case could never have heard him.

S
he did her best to put away the clinging unease, after the conversation with Heidi. Put on hose, the dress she’d brought, shoes, makeup. The bathroom was no more than a sort of alcove, less floor space than the Wellsian shower in Cabinet.

Worrying about Garreth’s safety, she’d wisely told herself when they’d started, was something best not begun, lest it never end. Doing very dangerous things was his avocation. Where he lacked the bits and pieces of income afforded a retired musician, once somewhat popular, he had the old man, looking not unlike the later portraits of Samuel Beckett, eyes of a similarly startling ferocity, possibly mad. The old man, who had supposedly once been something, never specified, in the American intelligence community, was Garreth’s producer-director, in an ongoing sequence of covert performance-art pieces. Financed, she’d been allowed to dimly gather, by other retired members of that community. Some rogue geezerhood, evidently brought into focus by a shared distaste for certain policies and proclivities of the government. She’d never seen him again, after Vancouver, but he’d remained a background presence throughout her time with Garreth, like a radio playing quietly in a nearby room. The most frequent voice on any one of Garreth’s short-lived phones.

The old man would not, Hollis imagined, have approved of their involvement, but the multiskilled Garreth would have been impossible to replace. A man whose idea of fun was to fling himself off skyscrapers in a nylon suit with airfoil membranes sewn between the legs, and arms-to-thighs; a human flying squirrel, amid lethally unforgiving uprights of glass and steel. None of that had been Hollis at all, as Heidi had pointed out at the time. Not her taste, ever. Athletes, soldiers, never. She’d favored artboys, of any stripe, and unfortunately the dodgy hybrids as well, artboy-businessmen, with personalities as demanding as ambitiously crossbred dogs. That was what she’d known, before, and in various generally unhappy ways had understood. Not base-jumping madmen from Bristol, who wore turtlenecks without having to first consider the implications, and quoted the less popular poems of Dylan Thomas in their entirety. Because, he’d said, he couldn’t sing. All while scrawling graffiti on the secret machineries of history. Garreth. Whom, she now obliquely accepted, in the descending bronze elevator-booth, she did truly love. Repacking this swiftly, however, before the jolt announced the Odéon’s lobby.

She was wearing the Hounds, open, over her dress, hoping that its darkness might allow it to pass for a sort of bolero. How many seasons until this kind of mismatching would read, on her, as bag lady, she wondered. That worry would be Bigend’s, she guessed, and his talk of aging bohemians.

Nodding to the man at the desk, who was reading a novel, she popped the jacket’s collar, producing a faint jungle whiff of indigo, which she left to hover in the hotel’s lobby.

Outside, the air had been scrubbed by rain, pavements glittering. Ten to eight, by her iPhone. She could, as either George or Meredith had said, see Les Éditeurs across the way, not this street but the next one over, angled. She walked right, past the fancy little drugstore, then right again, not wanting to be early. This much narrower street, angling sharply back, behind the hotel, was home to an English-language secondhand bookshop, a cocktail bar, a serious-looking sushi restaurant, a bookbinder, and a place that seemed to specialize in Chinese reflexology equipment: sadistic-looking massage devices, instruction manuals, models of bodies and body parts marked with meridians and pressure points. Here, for instance, was a very large china ear, apparently identical to the one in Heidi’s room at Cabinet. She’d known she’d seen one before.

She turned, walked back to the bookbinder’s smaller window. Wondered about its clientele. Who paid whatever this cost, to have old books rebound, to this high a standard of workmanship, exquisite cobbling for ancient thoughts? Bigend might, she supposed, though any bibliophile tendencies of his were well concealed. She’d yet to see a book in any Bigendian environment. He was a creature of screens, of bare expanses of desk or table, empty shelves. He owned, as far as she knew, no art. In some way, she suspected, he regarded it as competition, noise to his signal.

One of the books in the window was shaped like a fan, or like a wedge of gilt-embossed ivory calfskin pie, the apex bitten neatly, concavely off.

The street was completely deserted. She said a silent prayer for Garreth. To what, she didn’t know. Unreliable universe. Or those machineries upon which he painted. Please.

The book-fan regarded her smugly, immaculate, its contents unread perhaps for centuries.

She turned and walked toward Odéon. Crossed it, continuing on toward the restaurant.

Outside of which, some residual celebrity-sense now told her, were paparazzi. She blinked, kept walking. Yes, there were. She knew the body language, that nervy-but-negligent pretending-not-to-care. A sort of rage, born of boredom, waiting. Untouched drinks on the red tablecloths, whatever was cheapest. Phones to ears. A few with sunglasses. They watched her approach.

Instinctively, she waited for the first one to raise a camera. For the sound of machine-driven image-collection. Tightening the muscles in her pelvic floor. Prepared either to flee or look her best.

Yet no one shot her. Though they watched as she came on. She was not the target. Had not been, for years. But temporarily a person of interest now, by virtue of turning up here. Why?

Inside, Les Éditeurs was Deco, but not the chrome and faux-onyx kind. Red leather, the color of Fifties fingernails, midbrown varnished wood, books-by-the-yard, framed black-and-white portraits of French faces she didn’t recognize.

“He didn’t need to send you,” said Rausch, her onetime editor on Bigend’s nonexistent
Node
, the phantom digest of digital culture. “It’s all going very smoothly.”

He was glaring at her over the tops of heavy black frames, glasses that looked as though they had been cranked almost shut around whatever would be left of his field of vision. His black hair looked as though his skull had been flocked.

“No one sent me. What are you doing here?”

“If he didn’t send you, why are you here?”

“I’m meeting someone for dinner. In Paris on Hubertus’s business, but nothing to do with you. Your turn.”

Rausch palmed his forehead, ran fingers exasperatedly back through locks he didn’t have. “Fridrika. The Dottirs. They’re launching the new album this week. She’s here with Bram.” He winced, reflexively.

“Who’s Bram?”

“Bram, from the Stokers. It’s that vampire thing.” He actually looked embarrassed. “Eydis is supposed to have been hot for him, now he’s with Fridrika. In the States,
People’s
taking Fridrika’s side,
Us
is Eydis. Over here, we don’t have that clean a break yet, but we should by tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that tactic kind of ancient?”

Rausch twitched. “Bigend says that’s the point. He says it’s a double-reverse, so corny it’s new. Well, not new, but comforting. Familiar.”

“Is that why he’s always with them? They’re Blue Ant clients?”

“He’s tight with their father,” Rausch said, lowering his voice, “all I know.”

“Who’s their father?” It seemed odd to her that the twins had a father. She’d thought of them as having been decanted from something.

“Big deal in Iceland. Seriously, Hollis, he really didn’t send you?”

“Who decided they’d come here?” She’d spotted one twin’s silver hair across Les Éditeurs, but she’d already forgotten which one Rausch had said was here. Seated at a table with a tall broad-shouldered young man, very pale, one eye concealed by a heavy, dusty-looking flop of black hair.

“I did. It’s not too hip. Looks like they chose it at random. Won’t detract from the narrative.”

“Then unless one of the people I’m having dinner with is a Bigend plant, it’s a coincidence.”

Rausch glowered at her, which actually meant, she knew, that he was frightened. “Really?”

“Really.” Maître d’ hovering now, impatient. “Overton,” Hollis said to him, “table for four.” When she turned back to Rausch, he was gone. She followed the man through the crowded restaurant, to where George and Meredith were seated.

George half rose, doing the air-kiss thing. He was wearing a dark suit, no tie, white shirt. A small triangle of ultradense chest hair, at the open collar, made it look as though he were wearing a black T-shirt. She thought his stubble had lengthened, since she’d last seen him. He smiled ruefully, white teeth seemingly the size and thickness of dominoes. “Sorry about this. I had no idea. I actually chose the place so we could talk, and not be distracted by the food.” He sat back down as the maître d’ held her chair for her.