Zero History (5 page)

“Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He smiled, obviously pleased.

W
ith the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow.

He’d taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing schedules, particularly when you weren’t allowed to know exactly what it was you were taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open.

He’d pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs.

His passport lay against his chest, beneath his shirt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight’s. Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.

Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.

The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent, installing or deleting applications as he saw fit. It was also prone to something Sleight called “kernel panic,” which caused it to freeze and need to be restarted, a condition Milgrim himself had been instantly inclined to identify with.

Lately, though, Milgrim didn’t panic quite as easily. When he did, he seemed to restart of his own accord. It was, his cognitive therapist at the clinic had explained, a by-product of doing other things, rather than something one could train oneself to do in and of itself. Milgrim preferred to regard that by-product obliquely, in brief sidelong glances, else it somehow stop being produced. The biggest thing he was doing, in terms of the by-product of reduced anxiety, the therapist had explained, was to no longer take benzos on as constant a basis as possible.

He no longer took them at all, apparently, having undergone a very gradual withdrawal at the clinic. He wasn’t sure when he’d actually stopped having any, as the unmarked capsules had made it impossible to know. And he’d taken lots of capsules, many of them containing food supplements of various kinds, the clinic having some obscure naturopathic basis which he’d put down to basic Swissness. Though in other ways the treatment had been quite aggressive, involving everything from repeated massive blood transfusions to the use of a substance they called a “paradoxical antagonist.” This latter produced exceptionally peculiar dreams, in which Milgrim was stalked by an actual Paradoxical Antagonist, a shadowy figure he somehow associated with the colors in 1950s American advertising illustrations. Perky.

He missed his cognitive therapist. He’d been delighted to be able to speak Russian with such a beautifully educated woman. Somehow he couldn’t imagine having transacted all of that in English.

He’d stayed eight months, in the clinic, longer than any of the other clients. All of whom, when opportunity had afforded, had quietly asked the name of his firm. Milgrim had replied variously, at first, though always naming some iconic brand from his youth: Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak. Their eyes had widened, hearing this. Toward the end of this stay, he’d switched to Enron. Their eyes had narrowed. This had partly been the result of his therapist’s having ordered him to use the internet to familiarize himself with the events of the previous decade. He had, as she’d quite rightly pointed out, missed all of that.

He dreams this in the tall white room, its floor of limed oak. Tall windows. Beyond them, snow is falling. The world outside is utterly quiet, depthless. The light is without direction
.

“Where did you learn your Russian, Mr. Milgrim?”

“Columbia. The university.”

Her white face. Black hair matte, center-parted, drawn back tight
.

“You described your previous situation as one of literal captivity. This was after Columbia?”

“Yes.”

“How do you see your current situation as differing from that?”

“Do I see it as captivity?”

“Yes.”

“Not in the same way.”

“Do you understand why they would be willing to pay the very considerable fees required to keep you here?”

“No. Do you?”

“Not at all. Do you understand the nature of doctor-patient confidentiality, in my profession?”

“You aren’t supposed to tell anyone what I tell you?”

“Exactly. Do you imagine I would?”

“I don’t know.”

“I would not. When I agreed to come here, to work with you, I made that absolutely clear. I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim. I am not here for them.”

“That’s good.”

“But because I am here for you, Mr. Milgrim, I am also concerned for you. It is as though you are being born. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“You were incomplete when they brought you here. You are somewhat less incomplete now, but your recovery is necessarily a complexly organic process. If you are very fortunate, it will continue for the rest of your life. ‘Recovery’ is perhaps a deceptive word for this. You are recovering some aspects of yourself, certainly, but the more important things are things you’ve never previously possessed. Primary aspects of development. You have been stunted, in certain ways. Now you have been given an opportunity to grow.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“Good, yes. Comfortable? Not always.”

At Heathrow there was a tall black man, head immaculately shaven, holding a clipboard against his chest. On it, in medium-nib red Sharpie, someone had written “mILgRIm.”

“Milgrim,” Milgrim said.

“Urine test,” the man said. “This way.”

Refusing to submit to random testing would have been a deal-breaker. They’d been very clear about that, from the start. He would have minded it less if they’d managed to collect the samples at less awkward times, but he supposed that was the point.

The man removed Milgrim’s red name from his clipboard as he led him into an obviously preselected public restroom, crumpling it and thrusting it into his black overcoat.

“This way,” walking briskly down a row of those seriously private British toilet-caves. Not cubicles, or stalls, but actual narrow little closets, with real doors. This was usually the first cultural difference Milgrim noticed here. Englishmen must experience American public toilets as remarkably semicommunal, he guessed. The man gestured him into a vacant toilet-room, glanced back the way they’d come, then quickly stepped in, closing the door behind him, locked it, and handed Milgrim a plastic sandwich bag containing a blue-topped sample bottle. Milgrim propped the red cardboard tube, carefully, in a corner.

They had to watch, Milgrim knew. Otherwise, you might switch containers, palm off someone else’s clean urine. Or even use, he’d read in New York tabloids, a special prosthetic penis.

Milgrim removed the bottle from the bag, tore off the paper seal, removed the blue lid, and filled it, the phrase “without further ceremony” coming to mind. He capped it, placed it in the bag, and passed it over, in such a way that the man wouldn’t have to experience the warmth of his fresh urine. He’d gotten quite good at this. The man dropped it into a small brown paper bag, which he folded and stuffed into his coat pocket. Milgrim turned and finished urinating, as the man unlocked the door and stepped out.

When Milgrim emerged, the man was washing his hands, fluorescent lights reflecting off the impressive dome of his skull.

“How’s the weather?” Milgrim asked, soaping his own hands from a touch-free dispenser, the cardboard tube resting on the water-flecked faux-granite counter.

“Raining,” said the man, drying his hands.

When Milgrim had washed and dried his own hands, he used the damp paper towels to wipe the bottom plastic cap of his tube.

“Where are we going?”

“Soho,” the man said.

Milgrim followed him out, his overnight bag slung over one shoulder, the tube tucked under the opposite arm.

Then he remembered the Neo.

When he turned it on, it began to ring.

A
nd when she’d watched him, from her chair, the collar of his coat popped like a vampire’s cape, finally descend the stairs to Cabinet’s foyer, dropping further out of sight with each step, she put her head back against slippery brocade and gazed at the spiraled lances of the narwhale tusks, in their ornate rack.

Then she sat up and asked for a white coffee, a cup rather than a pot. The breakfast crowd had mostly gone, leaving only Hollis and a pair of darkly suited Russian men who looked like extras from that Cronenberg film.

She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.”

By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that
The Gabriel Hounds
was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band.

Everything, she knew, had already been the title of a CD, just as everything had already been the name of a band. This was why bands, for the past twenty years or so, had mostly had such unmemorable names, almost as though they’d come to pride themselves on it.

But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” Inchmaleian totally. He’d name the right band the Gabble Ratchets instantly.

“Left for you, Miss Henry.” The Italian girl, holding out a glossy paper carrier bag, yellow, unmarked.

“Thank you.” Hollis put the iPhone down and accepted the bag. It had been stapled shut, she saw, and she envisioned the oversized brass stapler atop the pornographic desk, its business end the head of a turbaned Turk. A pair of identical business cards, multiply stapled, held the two handles together. P
AMELA
M
AINWARING
, B
LUE
A
NT
.

She pulled off the cards and tugged the bag open, staples tearing through the glossy paper.

A very heavy denim shirt. She took it out and spread it across her lap. No, a jacket. The denim darker than the thighs of her Japanese jeans, bordering on black. And it smelled of that indigo, strongly, an earthy jungle scent familiar from the shop where she’d found her jeans. The metal buttons, the rivet kind, were dead black, nonreflective, oddly powdery-looking.

No exterior signage. The label, inside, below the back of the collar, was undyed leather, thick as most belts. On it had been branded not a name but the vague and vaguely disturbing outline of what she took to be a baby-headed dog. The branding iron appeared to have been twisted from a single length of fine wire, then heated, pressed down unevenly into the leather, which was singed in places. Centered directly beneath this, sewn under the bottom edge of the leather patch, was a small folded tab of white woven ribbon, machine-embroidered with three crisp, round black dots, arranged in a triangle. Indicating size?

Her gaze was drawn back to the brand of the hound, with its almost featureless kewpie head.