This time, Brown didn’t bother to remind Milgrim that there were watchers outside, or that attempting to escape would be both futile and painful. Brown was starting to assume, Milgrim decided, that he, Milgrim, had internalized the watchers (whether they existed or not, and Milgrim now doubted they ever had). This was interesting, Milgrim thought.
Brown didn’t say goodbye. Just turned and headed down the west side of Lafayette.
Milgrim and the Korean owner, a man in his seventies, with an ageless and curiously nonreflective simulacrum of Kim Jong Il’s jet-black haircut, eyed each other neutrally. Milgrim supposed Brown had some arrangement here, as the Korean never asked where Milgrim’s laundry was, or why it was, otherwise, that Milgrim would sit for hours at the westernmost end of a red vinyl settee, either reading his medieval messianism book, thumbing through the Korean’s dead gossip magazines, or just staring into space.
Milgrim unbuttoned the Paul Stuart, but seated himself without removing it. He looked at the thick compost of celebrity features on the coffee table in front of him (did navels count as features?) and noted the issue of Time with the president dressed up like a pilot, on the flight deck of that aircraft carrier. That issue was nearly three years old now, he decided, after some calculation, older than the majority of these gossip mags – which Milgrim did sometimes resort to, if twelfth-century messianism proved inconveniently soporific, as it certainly could. If he nodded out here, he’d learned, the Korean would come over and prod him in the ribs with a rolled-up Us.
At the moment, however, he was ready for William the Goldsmith and the Amaurian ‘Spirituals,’ who were the run-up, so to speak, to his favorite, the heresy of the Free Spirit. He was sliding his hand into his pocket, to retrieve the comfortingly worn volume, when a dark-haired girl in high brown boots and a short white jacket entered. He watched a transaction take place, the Korean giving her a receipt in exchange for two pairs of dark pants. Then, rather than leaving, she took out a phone, started carrying on a conversation in animated Spanish, crossed to the settee, and sat while talking, raking periodically and without much interest through the gossip magazines on the Korean’s plywood coffee table. President Bush in his flight suit went under almost immediately, but she didn’t manage to turn up anything Milgrim hadn’t seen before. Still, it was pleasant to share this vinyl bench with her, and to enjoy the sound of a language he didn’t understand. His seemingly innate fluency in Russian, he’d always assumed, had somehow been paid for with the loss of any ability in the Romance languages.
The girl dropped her phone back into her large purse, stood, smiled absently in his general direction, and walked out.
He was pulling his book from his pocket when he saw her phone lying there on the red vinyl.
He looked over at the Korean, who was reading the Wall Street Journal. Those weird little stipple portraits, at this distance, reminded Milgrim of fingerprints. He looked back at the phone.
His captivity had changed him. Prior to Brown, he would have pocketed the phone automatically. Now that he lived in the woodwork of Brown’s world of surveillance, seemingly random encounters had become suspect. Had that been a real Spanish-speaking beauty, dropping off her office trousers for cleaning, or was she part of Brown’s team? Was it really an accident, that she’d left her phone?
But what if it wasn’t?
With an eye on the Korean, he palmed the phone. It was still warm, a small but vaguely shocking intimacy.
He stood. ‘I need to use the bathroom.’
The Korean looked at him, over his Wall Street Journal.
‘I need to pee.’
Folding his paper, the Korean stood, held aside a curtain made of flowered fabric, and gestured Milgrim through. Milgrim walked quickly past a clutter of industrial ironing equipment and through a narrow beige-painted door with a silk-screened EMPLOYEES ONLY sign.
The walls of the cubicle, inside, were white-painted plywood, reminding Milgrim of the cabins at a summer camp he’d attended in Wisconsin. It smelled powerfully but not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On general principle, Milgrim secured the door with a fragile-looking piece of gold-tone Taiwanese hardware. He put the lid down on the toilet, seated himself, and had a look at the girl’s phone.
It was a Motorola, with call display and camera. A model from a few years before, though as far as he knew they were still selling them. If he’d stolen it for resale, he would have been disappointed. As it was, it had an almost full battery charge and was roaming.
He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.
Below the calendar, on a four-inch-wide ledge formed by a horizontal in the cubicle’s framing, stood a bare tin can, its sides lightly freckled with rust. Milgrim leaned forward and studied its contents: a thin strata of nuts, bolts, two bottle caps, paper clips and thumbtacks, several unidentifiable metal components, corpses of small insects. Everything there that could oxidize was lightly, evenly rusted.
He settled back against the toilet tank and opened the phone. Hispanic full names in the phone book, interspersed with girls’ names that mostly weren’t.
He entered Fish’s number from memory, closed his eyes, and thumbed send.
Fish, short for Fisher, his surname, answered before a third ring. ‘Hello?’
‘Fish. Hi.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Milgrim.’
‘Hey.’ Fish sounded surprised to hear from him, but then Milgrim supposed he would be.
Fish was a fellow benzo user. Aside from that, what they most had in common was Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s dealer. Former dealer, Milgrim corrected himself. Both Milgrim and Fish were long past doctor shopping, and neither was going to get anywhere with New York’s triple-form prescription system. Fish had resources in New Jersey (a writing doctor, Milgrim assumed) but they both depended primarily on Birdwell. Or rather they both had, as Milgrim no longer could. ‘How are you doing, Milgrim?’
Meaning, Do you have any to spare? ‘Just getting by,’ Milgrim said.
‘Oh,’ Fish said. He was always short. He did something in computer animation and had a girlfriend and a baby.
‘Have you seen Dennis, Fish?’
‘Uh, yeah. I have.’
‘How is he?’
‘Well, ah, he’s angry with you. That was what he said.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘He said he’d given you money for something, and it didn’t happen.’
Milgrim sighed. ‘That’s true, but it wasn’t me letting him down. The guy I was going through, you know?’
A baby began to cry, behind Fish’s voice. ‘Yeah. But, you know, I don’t think you want to mess with Dennis, these days. Not that way.’ Fish sounded uncomfortable, and not just because of the crying baby.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well,’ said Fish, ‘you know. It’s his other stuff.’ Dennis’s other stuff was crystal meth, increasingly his main stock-in-trade, and something neither Milgrim nor Fish had the least use for. It did, however, create in Dennis’s other clients a need for powerfully soothing peripheral substances, hence Dennis’s interest in the benzos they both relied on for peace and clarity. ‘I think he’s dipping,’ Fish said. ‘You know. More.’
Milgrim raised his eyebrows to the image of the twin towers. ‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘You know how they get.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Paranoid,’ Fish said. ‘Violent.’
Dennis had once been a student at NYU. Milgrim could certainly imagine him angry, but imagining him violent was a stretch. ‘He collects Star Wars memorabilia,’ Milgrim said. ‘He sits there all night, looking for it on eBay.’
There was a pause. Fish’s baby fell silent too, in eerie-seeming synchrony. ‘He said he’d hire black guys from Brooklyn.’ The baby began to scream again, even harder.
‘Shit,’ said Milgrim, as much to the rusty tin can as to Fish. ‘Do me a favor.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t tell him you heard from me.’
‘Easy,’ said Fish.
‘If I get extra,’ Milgrim lied, ‘I’ll call you.’ He pressed End.
Back out front, he helped the unhappy Puerto Rican girl move the red settee so she could look under it. While she did that, he slid her phone under a hangnailed copy of In Touch, with Jennifer Aniston on the cover.
He was leaning against a dryer, reading about William the Goldsmith, when she found it.
20 Tulpa
Had that woman in the wheelchair had an IV drip-stand in tow, one-handing her way across the intersection, the other hand keeping the chrome-plated upright of the stand erect?
Had she been legless? Hollis couldn’t say, but after the skateboarder with no lower jaw it didn’t seem like that big a deal.
‘Your company’s down here?’ she asked Bigend, as he turned the Maybach into an alleyway that looked as though a Bradley fighting vehicle would be the wise man’s ride of choice.
Past a delirious frozen surge of graffiti, a sort of street-fractal Hokusai wave, and under a lowering lip of coiled razor wire topping chain-link gates.
‘Yes,’ he said, steering onto a concrete ramp rising fifteen feet as it hugged a wall that seemed to her as though it must belong to some city infinitely older than Los Angeles. Babylon, perhaps, its only graffiti cuneiform and discreet, furtive clerkish henscratchings applied to the odd brick.
The Maybach came to a temporary halt on a flat, truck-length platform, facing an articulated metal door. There were bulbous growths of smoked black plastic above this, pods housing cameras and perhaps other things as well. The door, decorated with a black pointillist portrait of Andre the Giant, Orwellian in scale, rose slowly, Andre’s somber, thyroidal gaze giving way to halogen brilliance. Bigend drove forward into a hangar-like space, smaller than Bobby Chombo’s empty factory but still impressive. Half a dozen identical silver sedans were parked there in a row, beside a brand-new yellow forklift and tall, tidy stacks of new gypsum wallboard.
Bigend stopped the car. A ball-capped guard in black uniform shorts and matching short-sleeved shirt regarded them from behind mirrored glasses. A laden, multicompartmented black holster was strapped to his right thigh.
She felt a sudden intense desire to get out of the Maybach, and acted on it.
The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness. The gritty concrete floor, blotched with crumbs of gypsum, felt comforting in contrast. The guard gestured with a remote. She heard segmented steel start to rattle down behind them.
‘This way, please,’ said Bigend, over the clatter of the closing door. He stepped away from the Maybach without bothering to close his door, so she left hers open as well and followed him. She looked back, just as she was catching up with him, and saw it sitting open, its interior a soft, mouthlike cavern of gray lambskin under the high-resolution brilliance of the garage’s lighting.
‘We’re losing the better part of the neighborhood’s edge, as the reclamation continues,’ he said, guiding her around a ten-foot stack of drywall.
‘"Better part"?’
‘Majority of. I’ll miss it, myself. It unsettles visitors. Unsettled is good. Last week we opened a new suite of offices in Beijing. I’m not satisfied, not at all. Three floors in a new building, really nothing we could do with them. But it’s Beijing.’ He shrugged. ‘What choice do we have?’
She didn’t know, so said nothing. He led her up a wide flight of stairs and into what was obviously in the process of becoming a foyer. Another guard, studying CCTV windows on a panel display, ignored them.
They stepped into an elevator, its every surface taped over with white-dusted layers of corrugated cardboard. Bigend lifted a flap of the stuff and touched the controls. They rose two floors and the door opened. He gestured for her to go ahead.
She stepped out onto a scuffed runway of more of the same cardboard, taped across a floor of some smooth gray product. The cardboard ran to a conference table, six chairs on a side. Above this, on the wall beyond, hung Anton Corbijn’s portrait of her, in perfect resolution on a screen perhaps thirty feet on the diagonal.
‘A wonderful image,’ he said, as she looked from it back to him.
‘I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it.’
‘Because the celebrity self is a sort of tulpa,’ he said.
‘A what?’
‘A projected thought-form. A term from Tibetan mysticism. The celebrity self has a life of its own. It can, under the right circumstances, indefinitely survive the death of its subject. That’s what every Elvis sighting is about, literally.’
All of which reminded her very much of how Inchmale looked at these things, though really she believed it too.
‘What happens,’ she asked him, ‘if the celebrity self dies first?’
‘Very little,’ he said. ‘That’s usually the problem. But images of this caliber serve as a hedge against that. And music is the most purely atemporal of media.’
‘"The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past,"’ quoting Inchmale quoting Faulkner. ‘Would you mind changing channels?’
He gestured toward the screen. The Hook appeared in her place, the Soviet cargo helicopter, photographed from below. ‘What do you make of all this?’ The smile flashed like a lighthouse. There were no apparent windows in this room, and at the moment this screen was the sole source of light.
‘You like unsettled?’
‘Yes?’
‘Then you like me.’
‘I do like you. And something would be very wrong if you weren’t. Unsettled.’
She went to the conference table and ran a finger along its black surface, leaving a faint trace in gypsum dust. ‘Is there really a magazine?’
‘Everything,’ said Bigend, ‘is potential.’
‘Everything,’ she said, ‘is potential bullshit.’
‘Think of me as a patron. Please.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that, thanks.’
‘In the early 1920s,’ Bigend said, ‘there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a "recording artist"’ – making the quotes with his hands – ‘took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her’ – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – ‘was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.’
