‘Why do they call it that?’ Brown asked, absently, as the uncomfortably bright beam of his flashlight began a methodical interrogation of the room’s contents.
Milgrim heard the door click shut behind them.
It was uncharacteristic of Brown to ask anything absently, and Milgrim took it to indicate tension. ‘Call it what?’ Milgrim resented having to speak. He wanted to concentrate fully on that instant when the sublingual tablet phase-shifted from being to not-being.
The beam came to rest on one of those director’s-chair barstools, standing beside some kind of janitorial sink.
The place smelled of someone living there, but not unpleasantly.
‘Why do they call it that?’ Brown repeated, with a deliberate and ominous calm. Brown was not the sort of man to willingly voice words or names he found beneath him, either for reasons of their insufficient gravitas or because they were foreign.
‘Volapuk,’ said Milgrim, feeling the Ativan finally do its not-there trick. ‘When they text, they’re keying in a visual approximation of Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. They use our alphabet, and some numerals, but only according to the Cyrillic letters they most closely resemble.’
‘I asked you why they call it that.’
‘Esperanto,’ Milgrim said. ‘That was an artificial language, a scheme for universal communication. Volapuk was another. When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke.’
But Brown was not that sort of man. ‘Fuck that,’ he said flatly, his definitive judgment on Volapuk, on Milgrim, on these IFs he was so interested in. IF was Brown-speak, Milgrim had learned, for Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
‘Hold this.’ Brown passed Milgrim the flashlight, which was made of knurled metal, professionally nonreflective. The pistol Brown wore beneath his parka, largely made of composite resin, was equally nonreflective. It was like shoes and accessories, Milgrim thought; someone does alligator, the next week they’re all doing it. It was the season of this nonreflective noncolor, in Browntown. But a very long season, Milgrim guessed.
Brown was snapping on a pair of green latex surgical gloves he’d taken from a pocket.
Milgrim held the flashlight where Brown wanted it, savoring the perspective being afforded by the Ativan. He’d once dated a woman who liked to say that the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness. Where was Brown’s powerlessness? Milgrim didn’t know, but now he could admire Brown’s surgically gloved hands, like undersea creatures in some fairyland aquatic theater, trained to mimic the hands of a conjurer.
From a pocket, these had produced a small transparent plastic case, and from this they were cleverly extracting a tiny thing, palest blue and silver, colors that Milgrim thought of somehow as Korean. A battery.
Everything needs batteries, Milgrim thought. Even whatever spooky little unit Brown’s cohort was using to grab the IF’s texting, what little there was of it, both incoming and outgoing, out of the air in this room. Milgrim was curious about that, because as far as he knew it shouldn’t be possible, not without actually having a bug in the IF’s phone. And this IF, Brown had said, seldom used the same phone, or account, twice. He bought them and tossed them on a regular basis – which was no more than Birdwell did, now he thought about it.
Milgrim watched as Brown knelt beside a rack of clothing, feeling with gloved hands beneath the wheeled, cast-iron base at one end. Milgrim wanted to check the labels in the IF’s clothes, some shirts and a black jacket, but he had to keep the light on Brown’s hands. APC, maybe, he judged, squinting. He had seen the IF once, when he and Brown had been sitting in a magazine-and-sandwich place on Broadway. The IF had walked past, beyond the steamed window, and had actually looked in. Brown, taken by surprise, had lost it, hissing codes into his headset, and Milgrim hadn’t understood, at first, that this mild-looking little guy with the black leather porkpie turned up at the front was Brown’s IF. He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it. As far as Milgrim knew, Brown’s people had never intercepted any voice.
These people of Brown’s, they worried Milgrim. Many things worried Milgrim, not the least of them Brown, but he had a special mental folder for Brown’s unseen people. There seemed to be too many of them, for one thing. Was Brown a cop? Were whoever did this text-tapping thing for him cops? Milgrim doubted it. Brown’s people had fed written all over their MO, it seemed to Milgrim, but if that were the case, what did that make Brown?
Brown, as if in answer to this unvoiced query, made a soft, worryingly satisfied grunting sound, from where he knelt on the floor. Milgrim watched the green-gloved hand-creatures reemerge, into their limelight, bearing something matte, black, and partially covered in equally matte and black tape. It had a six-inch rattail of matte black wire, with its own bit of tape, and Milgrim guessed that it might be using this old Garment District rack as an additional antenna.
He watched Brown swap in the fresh battery, careful to keep the beam on what Brown was doing, and out of his eyes.
Was Brown a fed of some kind? FBI? DEA? Milgrim had encountered examples of both, enough to know them as very different (and mutually antagonistic) species. He couldn’t imagine Brown as either. These days, though, there must be feds in flavors Milgrim had never even heard of. But something about Brown’s apparent IQ, not terribly high, as Milgrim judged it, and the degree of autonomy he seemed to be manifesting in this operation, whatever it might be, kept niggling at him, right through the hard-bought perspective of the Ativan he needed just to keep standing here without screaming.
He watched Brown replace the bug beneath the rusty base of the old rack, head down, intent on his task.
When Brown stood up, Milgrim saw him knock something dark from the crossbar of the rack. It made no sound when it hit the floor. As Brown took the flashlight and turned, playing it once more over the IF’s belongings, Milgrim reached out and touched a second dark thing that still hung there. Cold wet wool.
Brown’s flashlight’s uncomfortable brilliance found a cheap-looking little vase, made of something nacreous and blue, that stood beside one of the speakers for the IF’s sound system. The amped-up blue-white diode light lent the vessel’s lacquered surface an unreal translucence, as though some process akin to fusion were beginning within it. When the light went out, it was as though Milgrim could still see the vase.
‘Out of here,’ Brown announced.
On the sidewalk outside, walking briskly toward Lafayette, Milgrim decided that Stockholm syndrome was a myth. Going on a few weeks now, and he still wasn’t empathizing with Brown.
Not even a little bit.
4 Into the locative
The Standard had an all-night restaurant off its lobby – a long, glass-fronted operation with wide booths upholstered in matte-black tuck-and-roll, punctuated by the gnarled phalli of half a dozen large San Pedro cacti.
Hollis watched Alberto slide his Pendelton-ed mass along the bench opposite hers. Odile was between Alberto and the window.
‘See-bare-espace,’ Odile pronounced, gnomically, ‘it is everting.’
‘See-bare-espace,’ Odile reaffirmed, ‘everts.’ She made a gesture with her hands that reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid.
‘"Everything"? What is?’
‘Turns itself inside out,’ offered Alberto, by way of clarification. ‘"Cyberspace." Fruit salad and a coffee.’ This last, Hollis realized after an instant’s confusion, addressed to their waitress. Odile ordered café au lait, Hollis a bagel and coffee. The waitress left them.
‘I guess you could say it started on the first of May, 2000,’ Alberto said.
‘What did?’
‘Geohacking. Or the potential thereof. The government announced then that Selective Availability would be turned off, on what had been, until then, strictly a military system. Civilians could access the GPS geocoordinates for the first time.’
Hollis had only vaguely understood from Philip Rausch that what she would be writing about would be various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the Internet, so Alberto’s virtual rendition of the death of River Phoenix had taken her by surprise. Now she had, she was hoping, the opening to her piece. ‘How many of those have you done, Alberto?’ And were they all posthumous, though she didn’t ask that.
‘Nine,’ Alberto said. ‘At the Chateau Marmont’ – he gestured across Sunset – ‘I’ve most recently completed a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton. On the site of his fatal crash, at the foot of the driveway. I’ll show you that after breakfast.’
The waitress returned with their coffees. Hollis watched as a very young, very pale Englishman bought a yellow pack of American Spirit from the man at the till. The boy’s thin beard reminded her of moss around a marble drain. ‘So the people staying at the Marmont,’ she asked, ‘they have no idea, no way of knowing what you’ve done there?’ Just as pedestrians had no way of knowing they stepped through the sleeping River, on his Sunset sidewalk.
‘No,’ said Alberto, ‘none. Not yet.’ He was digging through a canvas carryall on his lap. He produced a cell phone, married with silver tape to some other species of smallish consumer electronics. ‘With these, though…’ he clicked something on one of the conjoined units, opened the phone, and began deftly thumbing its keypad. ‘When this is available as a package…’ He passed it to her. A phone, and something she recognized as a GPS unit, but the latter’s casing had been partially cut away, with what felt like more electronics growing out of it, sealed under the silver tape.
‘What does it do?’
‘Look,’ he said.
She squinted at the small screen. Brought it closer. She saw Alberto’s woolen chest, but confused somehow with ghostly verticals, horizontals, a semitransparent Cubist overlay. Pale crosses? She looked up at him.
‘This isn’t a locative piece,’ he said. ‘It’s not spatially tagged. Try it on the street.’
She swung the duct-taped hybrid toward Sunset, seeing a crisply defined, perfectly level plane of white cruciforms, spaced as on an invisible grid, receding across the boulevard and into virtual distance. Their square white uprights, approximately level with the pavement, seemed to continue, in increasingly faint and somehow subterranean perspective, back under the rise of the Hollywood Hills.
‘American fatalities in Iraq,’ Alberto said. ‘I had it connected to a site, originally, that added crosses as deaths were reported. You can take it anywhere. I have a slide show of grabs from selected locations. I thought about sending it to Baghdad, but people would assume real grabs on the ground in Baghdad were Photoshopped.’ She looked up at him as a black Range Rover drove through the field of crosses, in time to see him shrug.
Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of café au lait. ‘Cartographic attributes of the invisible,’ she said, lowering the bowl. ‘Spatially tagged hypermedia.’ This terminology seemed to increase her fluency by a factor of ten; she scarcely had an accent now. ‘The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these.’ She indicated Alberto’s phone, as if its swollen belly of silver tape were gravid with an entire future.
Hollis nodded, and passed the thing back to Alberto.
Fruit salad and toasted bagel arrived. ‘And you’ve been curating this kind of art, Odile, in Paris?’
‘Everywhere.’
Rausch was right, she decided. There was something to write about here, though she was still a long way from knowing what it was.
‘May I ask you something?’ Alberto had gotten through half of his fruit salad already. A methodical eater. He paused, fork in midair, looking at her.
‘Yes?’
‘How did you know the Curfew was over?’
She looked him in the eye and saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew’s fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today, aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With the increasingly atemporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably serious. She didn’t know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying.
‘We didn’t know, really. It just ended. It stopped happening, at some essential level, though I never knew exactly when that happened. It became painfully apparent. So we packed it in.’
He looked about as satisfied with that as she’d expected him to be, but it was the truth, as far as she knew, and the best she could do for him. She’d never been able to come up with any clearer reason herself, though it certainly wasn’t anything she continued to give much thought. ‘We’d just released that four-song CD, and that was it. We knew. It only took a little while to sink in.’ Hoping that would be that, she began to spread cream cheese on one half of her bagel.
‘That was in New York?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there a particular moment, some particular place, where you’d say the Curfew broke up? Where the band made the decision to stop being a band?’
‘I’d have to think about it,’ she said, knowing that was really not what she should be saying.
‘I’d like to do a piece,’ he said. ‘You, Inchmale, Heidi, Jimmy. Wherever you were. Breaking up.’
Odile had started shifting on the tuck-and-roll, evidently in the dark as to what they were talking about, and not liking it. ‘Eenchmale?’ She frowned.
‘What are we going to see while I’m in town, Odile?’ She smiled at Alberto, hoping she signaled Interview Over. ‘I need your suggestions. I need to arrange time to interview you,’ she said to Odile. ‘And you too, Alberto. Right now, though, I’m exhausted. I need sleep.’
Odile knit her fingers, as well as she could, around the white china bowl. Her nails looked like something with very small teeth had been at them. ‘This evening, we will pick you up. We can visit a dozen pieces, easily.’
