Pattern Recognition

27. THE SHAPE OF THE ENTHUSIAST

Climbing the stairs, she reflects on how she feels no interest now in doing the Bond thing.

No spit-secured hair waiting to be checked. Less a matter of faith in the German locks than a sort of fatalism. Anyone able to get into Katherine McNally's Fifth Avenue office and steal or copy her notes on Cayce's sessions would be able get past those locks, she seems to have decided. But could that really have happened? Had some figure entered, in the dead of night, and crept past the low table in the small reception area, with its three-year-old copies of Time and Cosmopolitan?

She unlocks the door, twice. Opens it, seeing she's forgotten to leave a light on. 'Fuck you,” she calls, to anyone who might be waiting.

Turning on the light. Locking the door behind her, she has a look upstairs.

Cayce Pollard Central Standard indicating that sleep is not yet worth attempting.

She powers up Damien's G4, opens Netscape, and goes to F:F:F, watching the keystrokes required to get there. If Dorotea is telling the truth, her Asian Sluts boy had installed software on this machine that records the user's every keystroke. The recorded sequences can be retrieved from elsewhere, via some sort of back door. Does it give them mouse-clicks as well? She wonders. But how would they know what you were clicking on? Perhaps all they see is keystrokes, or keystrokes and URLs?

F:F:F is starting to look unfamiliar, after her relatively long absence. She doesn't recognize most of the handles of the posters on the current page. She remembers something about a recent television special having generated a wave of newbies. Are these unfamiliar names then? She scans a few threads without opening any posts, judging them by titles alone. Segment 135 is still a hot topic, as is the Brazilian Satanic Footage thing.

She sits back and stares at the screen, hands in her lap (the keyboard spooks her, now) and imagines more shadowy figures, in another room, a sort of Man from U.N.C.L.E. room, seated, staring at a huge screen on which there is nothing but this page of F:F:F, waiting for Cayce to open a post.

She lets them wait, then closes Netscape and powers down.

She no longer has to devote any thought to cabling the iBook to the cell phone. If Boone was right, back in Tokyo, this one isn't passing any keystrokes to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. room. Although, she thinks, entering hotmail, what if they came round while she was out for Greek food, and?…

“Fuck it,” aloud, to Damien's robot girls. She can't live that way. Refuses.

Hotmail has three, for her.

The first is from Boone.

You are not, she thinks, the most eloquent of correspondents. But what, she asks herself, is she expecting? Shakespeare, from a layover at LaGuardia?

Parkaboy next, opening on:

Next up, Ivy, F:F:F's founder and owner, whom she hasn't heard from since she left New York.

Ivy had once sent Cayce a jpeg of her high-rise, with a ten-story “4” painted up the side. Behind it, receding into the distance, you could make out buildings 5 and 6, identical.

Ivy and Cayce have sometimes had to coordinate diplomacy, to prevent the friction between Parkaboy and la Anarchia from polarizing the site, or simply taking up too much space…

She freezes.

Are you in Japan?

Unless Parkaboy has told Ivy about Cayce's trip, which Cayce cannot imagine him doing, under the circumstances, something is very wrong here.

Cayce scowls at the screen. Feels like hurling it at the nearest robot girl. No fair. No fucking fair. She doesn't need this.

But if Mama Anarchia is somehow involved in the recent weirdness, why would she tip her hand this way to Ivy? To send a message to Cayce? Or?

Because Mama made a mistake? Freudian slip: meant to type “London,” not “Tokyo”? The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised is difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither, Cayce knows, and mistakes happen.

She and Mama Anarchia are not friends by any means.

At best they have exchanged a few strained messages. Cayce is too obviously Parkaboy's friend, on the site, and Parkaboy's loathing for Mama Anarchia has been far too vocal, from his scathing assaults on the French philosophers she quotes to deliberately absurd personal attacks (considering he's never met her, and has no idea of what she might look like). This e-mail to Ivy is a fishing expedition of some kind, and a clumsy one. Although Mama Anarchia has no way, that Cayce knows of, to know that she and Ivy are friends, and discuss the site and its more prominent participants in private, and fairly frequently.

Creepy. She takes a deep breath. “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.”

Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a better reality, she clicks hotmail in case another message has arrived in the meantime.

Margot. Her Australian friend in New York, former Bigend girlfriend, currently assigned to visit Cayce's apartment on a frequent basis, pick up mail, check that all is well. Margot lives two blocks closer to Harlem proper, but still within the psychological footprint of Columbia.

Cayce closes her eyes and sees her blue-floored cave, her $1,200-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on 111th, secured when her former roommate, the previous lease holder, had moved back to San Francisco. Home. Who's been there? Not the super, not without a bribe.

How she hates this. How faint and peripheral somehow, these little things, yet how serious. A weight on her life, like trying to sleep under Damien's silver oven mitt.

And suddenly she's dead tired, as if Cayce Pollard Standard Time had clicked forward five hours. Trembling with it, though at the same time she doesn't trust that she'll be able to sleep. Shuts down the iBook, disconnects the cell phone, checks the locks. Looks in the bathroom for more melatonin but of course that's gone to Russia.

She feels like crying, though for no particular reason. Just this invasive weirdness that seems increasingly a part of her world, and she doesn't know why.

She turns off lights, undresses, crawls into bed, grateful for her own foresight in having removed and put away the oven mitt earlier in the day.

And has utterly no memory, subsequently, of any transition to West Broadway, where she stands in the middle of empty, white-coated pavement, a thin inch of fresh snow, in some deep and deeply silent hour of the night, the hour of waking alone, and she is alone, neither pedestrians nor traffic, and no light in any window, nor streetlights, and yet she can see, as though the snow of this Frozen Zone is sufficient illumination. Neither footprints nor tire tracks mar it, and as she turns to look behind she sees no footprints there either, not even her own. To her right the brick face of the SoHo Grand. To her left a bistro where she remembers taking Donny, once. And then, down at the corner, middle distance, she sees him. The black coat that may or may not be leather, its collar turned up. The body language she knows from uncounted viewings of 135 segments of footage.

And she wants to call out, but something in her chest prevents her, and she struggles to take a first step, and then another, imprinting the virgin snow, and then she is running, the unzipped Rickson's flapping beneath her arms like wings, but as she runs toward him, he seems always to recede, and with the awareness of this she is in Chinatown, white streets equally deserted, and she has lost him. Beside a grocery, shuttered. Gasping.

She looks up, then, and sees, borealis-faint but sharp-edged and tall as heaven, twin towers of light. As her head goes back to find their tops a vertigo seizes her: They narrow up into nothing at all, a vanishing point, like railway tracks up into the desert of sky.

“Ask him,” her father says, and she turns to find him, dressed as she's imagined him to have dressed on that morning, his good overcoat open over his business suit, right hand extended, and in it, the black cylinder of a Curta calculator. “The dead can't help you, and the boy's no good.”

Gray eyes framed with thin wires of gold. Become the color of that sky.

“Father…”

And managing to speak, wakes, awash with grief and terror and some sense of a decision made, though she knows not what, nor yet by whom, nor if indeed she ever will.

She has to turn on the light, to be sure that this is Damien's. She wishes Damien were here. She wishes anyone were here.