Zero History (9 page)

Military contracting was essentially recession-proof, according to Bigend, and particularly so in America. That was a part of it, and perhaps even the core of it. Recession-proofing. And Bigend seemed centered on one area of military contracting, the one in which, Milgrim supposed, Blue Ant’s strategic skill set was most applicable. Blue Ant was learning everything it could, and very quickly, about the contracting, design, and manufacture of military clothing. Which seemed, from what Milgrim had seen so far, to be a very lively business.

And Milgrim, for whatever reason or lack of one, was along for the ride. That was what Myrtle Beach had been about.

Volunteer armies, the French girl had said, the one who’d worn the plaid kilt at yesterday’s meeting, in an earlier PowerPoint presentation that Milgrim had found quite interesting, required volunteers, the bulk of them young men. Who might otherwise be, for instance, skateboarding, or at least wearing clothing suggestive of skateboarding. And male streetwear generally, over the past fifty years or so, she said, had been more heavily influenced by the design of military clothing than by anything else. The bulk of the underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the previous midcentury’s military wear, most of it American. The rest of it was work wear, most of that American as well, whose manufacture had coevolved with the manufacture of military clothing, sharing elements of the same design code, and team sportswear.

But now, according to the French girl, that had reversed itself. The military needed clothing that would appeal to those it needed to recruit. Every American service branch, she said, illustrating each with a PowerPoint slide, had its own distinctive pattern of camouflage. The Marine Corps, she said, had made quite a point of patenting theirs (up close, Milgrim had found it too jazzy).

There was a law in America that prohibited the manufacture of American military clothing abroad.

And that was where Bigend, Milgrim knew, hoped to come in. Things that were manufactured in America didn’t necessarily have to be designed there. Outerwear and sporting-goods manufacturers, along with a few specialist uniform manufacturers, competed for contracts to manufacture clothing for the U.S. military, but that clothing had previously been designed
by
the U.S. military. Who now, the French girl had said, somewhat breathlessly, as though she were closing in on a small animal in some forest clearing, clearly lacked the newly requisite design skills to do that. Having invented so much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcentury, they found themselves competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear. They needed help, the French girl had said, her mouse clicks summoning a closing flurry of images, and they knew it.

He sipped his latte, looking out, watching people pass, wondering if he could see the French girl’s thesis proven in the garments of this morning’s pedestrians. If you thought of it as a kind of pervasive subtext, he decided, you could.

“Excuse me. Would you mind if I shared the table?”

Milgrim looked up at this smiling American, ethnically Chinese, in her black sweatshirt, a small plain gold cross, gold-chained, worn atop it, one white plastic barrette visible, as some unsleeping module of addict street-alertness, hardwired to his very core, crisply announced: cop.

He blinked. “Of course. You’re welcome.” Feeling muscles in his thighs bunching, tight, readying themselves for the dash out the door. Malfunction, he told the module. Post-acute withdrawal syndrome. Flashback: His limbic brain was grooved for this, like the tracks of the wheels of Conestoga wagons, worn ankle-deep in sandstone.

She put her sacklike white pleather purse on the table, her plastic-lidded pale blue Caffè Nero cup beside it, pulled out the chair opposite him, and sat. Smiled.

Embroidered in white, on the black sweatshirt, were the crescent moon and palm tree of the South Carolina state flag, a bit larger than one of Ralph Lauren’s polo ponies. Milgrim’s buried module instantly extruded an entire DEW line of arcane cop-sensing apparatus.

Paranoia, his therapist had told him, was too much information. He had that now as the woman dipped into her purse, brought up a matte silver phone, opened it, and furrowed her brow. “Messages,” she said.

Milgrim looking straight into the infinitely deep black pupil that was the phone’s camera. “Uh-oh,” she said, “I see I have to run. Thanks anyway!” And up, purse under her arm, and out into Seven Dials.

Leaving her drink.

Milgrim picked it up. Empty. The white lid smudged with a dark lipstick she hadn’t been wearing.

Through the window he saw her pass an overflowing trash canister, from which she’d likely plucked this cup for her prop. Quickly crossing the intersection, toward Sassoon. Vanishing around a corner.

He stood, straightening his jacket, and walked out, not looking around. Back up Monmouth Street, toward his hotel. As he neared it, he crossed Monmouth diagonally, still moving at a calculatedly casual pace, and entered a sort of brick tunnel that led to Neal’s Yard, a courtyard gotten up as a kind of New Age mini-Disneyland. He bolted through this so quickly that people looked after him. Out into Shorts Garden, another street.

Purposeful pace now, but nothing to attract attention.

All the while aware of his addiction, awakened by the flood of stress chemicals, urgently advising him that something to take the edge off would be a very good idea indeed. It was, some newer part of him thought, amazed, like having a Nazi tank buried in your back yard. Grown over with grass and dandelions, but then you noticed its engine was still idling.

Not today, he told the Nazis in their buried tank, heading for Covent Garden tube station through an encyclopedic anthology of young people’s shoe stores, spring’s sneakers tinted like jelly beans.

Not good, another part of him was saying, not good.

As much as he wished to appear relaxed, the usual crew of beggars, floating in solution on the pavement in front of the station, faded at his approach. They saw something. He had again become as they were.

He saw Covent Garden as if from a great height, the crowd in Long Acre drawing back from him like magnetized iron filings.

Take the stairs, advised the autonomic pilot. He did, head down, never looking back, a unit in the spiral human chain.

Next he’d take the first train to Leicester Square, the shortest journey in the entire system. Then back, without exiting, having assured himself he wasn’t being followed. He knew how to do that, but then there were all these cameras, in their smoked acrylic spheres, like knockoff Courrèges light fixtures. There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ’roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.

Did anyone protect him now?

He took himself through what one did in order to determine that one wasn’t being followed. While he did so, he anticipated his immediate return to this station. Imagined his ascent in the elevator’s dead air, where a dead voice would repeatedly advise him to have his ticket or pass ready.

He would be calmer, then.

Then restart the day, as planned. Go to Hackett in King Street, buy pants and a shirt.

Not good, said the other voice, causing his shoulders to narrow, bone and sinew tightening almost audibly.

Not good.

H
eidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down. Hollis had seen this many times before, touring with the Curfew, and took it to be a survival mechanism, a means of denying the soulless suction of sequential hotel rooms. She’d never actually seen Heidi distribute her things, nest-build. She guessed it was unconscious, accomplished in the course of an instinctive trance, like a dog walking tight circles in grass before it lay down to sleep. She was impressed now, to see how effectively Heidi had created her own space, pushing back whatever it was that Cabinet’s designers had intended the room to express.

“Fuck,” said Heidi, ponderously, apparently having slept, or passed out, in her Israeli army bra. Hollis, who had taken the key with her when she’d left, saw that there was barely a finger of whiskey left in the decanter. Heidi didn’t drink often, but when she did, she did. She lay now under a wrinkled pile of laundry, including, Hollis saw, several magenta linen table napkins and a cheap Mexican beach towel striped like a serape. Apparently Heidi had dumped the contents of the laundry hopper at Chez Fuckstick into one of her bags, departing, then pulled it out here. It was this she’d slept under, not Cabinet’s bedclothes.

“Breakfast?” Hollis began picking up and sorting the things on the bed. There was a large freezer-bag full of small, sharp-looking tools, fine-tipped brushes, tiny tins of paint, bits of white plastic. As if Heidi had adopted a twelve-year-old boy. “What’s this?”

“Therapy,” Heidi croaked, then made a sound like a vulture about to bring up something too putrid to digest, but Hollis had heard it before. She thought she remembered who Heidi had learned it from, a supernaturally pale German keyboardist with prematurely aged tattoos, their outlines blurred like felt pen on toilet paper. She put the bag and its mysterious contents on the dresser and picked up the phone, French, early twentieth century, but covered entirely in garishly reptilian Moroccan beading, like the business end of a hookah in the Grand Bazaar. “Pot of coffee, black, two cups,” she said to the room service voice, “rack of dry toast, large orange juice. Thanks.” She removed an ancient Ramones T-shirt from what was then revealed as a foot-tall white china reflexology model, an ear, complexly mapped in red. She put the T-shirt back, arranging it so that the band’s logo was optimally displayed.

“What about you?” asked Heidi, from beneath her laundry.

“What about me?”

“Men,” said Heidi.

“None,” said Hollis.

“What about the performance artist. Jumped off skyscrapers wearing that flying-squirrel suit. He was okay. Hot, too. Darrell?”

“Garreth,” said Hollis, probably for the first time in over a year, not wanting to.

“Is that why you’re here? He was English.”

“No,” said Hollis. “I mean yes, he was, but that’s not why I’m here.”

“You met him in Canada. Bigend introduce you? I didn’t meet him till later.”

“No,” Hollis said, dreading Heidi’s skill at this other, more painful unpacking. “They never met.”

“You don’t do jocks,” said Heidi.

“He was different,” said Hollis.

“They all are,” said Heidi.

“Was fuckstick?”

“No,” said Heidi. “Not that way. That was me, trying to be different. He was as undifferent as you can get, but he was somebody else’s undifferent. I just had this feeling that I could step into somebody else’s shoes. Put all the tour stuff in boxes. Shop at malls. Drive a car I’d never have thought of driving. Get a fucking break, you know? Time-out.”

“You didn’t seem very happy with it, when I saw you in L.A.”

“He turned out to be a closet creative. I married a tax lawyer. He started trying to produce. Indie stuff. He was starting to mention directing.”

“And he’s in jail now?”

“No bond. We had the FBI in the office. Wearing those jackets with ‘FBI’ on the back. They looked really good. Great look for a small production. But he couldn’t be on the set.”

“But you’re okay, legally?”

“I had Inchmale’s lawyer, in New York. I won’t even lose the share of his legitimate property I’m entitled to as the ex. Should they leave him any, which is unlikely. But seriously, fuck it.”

Breakfast arrived, Hollis taking the tray from the Italian girl at the door, with a wink. Tip her later.

Heidi batted her way out of the laundry pile. Sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on an enormous hockey jersey which Hollis, born without the gene for following team sports, recalled as having belonged to someone quite famous. Heidi definitely did jocks, though only if they were sufficiently crazy. Drumming for the Curfew, she’d had a spectacularly bad string of boxers, however good it might have been for publicity. She’d put one of them out cold with a single punch, at a pre-Oscars party. Very frequently now, Hollis was grateful for having had a pre-YouTube career.

“I never got what he did, Garret,” said Heidi, pouring herself half a cup of coffee, then topping it up with what remained in the whiskey decanter.

“Garreth. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

Heidi shrugged, her shoulders almost lost within the jersey. “You know me. Get this down and I’m good for six months of mineral water. Actually what I need now’s a gym. Serious one. What did he do?”

“I’m not sure I could explain that,” Hollis said, pouring her own coffee. “But I made a very firm agreement never to try.”

“Crook?”

“No,” said Hollis, “though some of what he did involved breaking laws. You know Banksy, the graffiti artist?”

“Yeah?”

“He liked Banksy. Identified with him. They’re both from Bristol.”