Pattern Recognition

32. PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE

Ngemi departs by tube from Bond Street Station, leaving her, in suddenly bright sunlight, with no idea where she might be going, or why.

A cab takes her to Kensington High Street, the card from Baranov's curry house zipped into the pocket on the sleeve of the Rickson's, the one originally designed to hold a pack of American cigarettes.

Liminal, she thinks, getting out of the cab by what had been the musty, multileveled cave of Kensington Market, with its vanished mazes of punk and hippy tat. Liminal. Katherine McNally's word for certain states: thresholds, zones of transition. Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless? She pays the driver, through the window, and he drives away.

Oil, Baranov had said?

She walks in the direction of the park. Bright gilt of the Albert Memorial, never quite real to her since they cleaned it. When she'd first seen it, it had been a black thing, funereal, almost sinister. Win had told her that the London he'd first seen had been largely as black as that, a city of soot, more deeply textured perhaps for its lack of color.

She waits at a signal, crosses the High Street.

Her Parco boots crunch gravel as she turns into the Gardens. Cayce Pollard Central Standard might now be approaching its own hour of the wolf, she thinks. Soul too long in a holding pattern.

The park is scribed with reddish gravel, paths wide as rural highways in Tennessee. These bring her to the statue of Peter Pan, bronze rabbits at its base.

She takes off the Luggage Label bag, puts it down, and removes the Rickson's, spreading it on the short-cut grass. She sits on it. A jogger passes, on the gravel.

She unzips the cigarette pocket on the Rickson's sleeve and looks at Baranov's card.

stellanor@armaz.ru. Looking faded in this light, as though Baranov had written it years ago.

She puts it carefully away again, zips up the little pocket. Opens her bag and removes the iBook and phone.

Hotmail. Timing out. Empty.

She opens a blank message, outgoing.

That “you” stops her. Pecks at the delete key, losing “you've been.”

Katherine McNally had had Cayce compose letters, letters which would never, it was understood, be sent, and which in some cases couldn't be, the addressee being dead.

This time, it doesn't stop her.

All through that winter, the mildest she'd known in Manhattan, though in memory the darkest, she'd gone to F:F:F — to give herself to the dream.

She looks up, everything made pale and washed-out by the light. She's forgotten to bring her sunglasses again.

She stops, and looks over at Peter Pan, noticing how the bronze ears of the rabbits at his base are kept polished by the hands of children.

And what?

She reads what she's written. Like most of the letters Katherine had had her write — to her mother, to Win both before and after his disappearance, to various ex's and one former therapist — her letter to the maker ends with question marks. Katherine had thought that the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn't end in question marks. Periods were needed, if not exclamation points, in Katherine's view, and Cayce had never felt particularly successful with either.

Watching her hands continue briefly to type, in best typing-class mode, in privately sarcastic imitation of a woman imagining that she is actually accomplishing something.

Aware in just that instant of how the park distances the sound of London, giving her the sensation of existing at some still point around which all else revolves. As though the broad gravel avenues are leys, terminating at Peter Pan.

The angry child's fingers, typing.

stellanor@armaz.ru

And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.

Touchpadding down menu to Send.

And of course she doesn't.

And watches as it sends.

“I didn't,” she protests to the iBook on the grass, the colors of its screen faint in the sunlight. “I didn't,” she says to Peter Pan.

She couldn't have. She did.

Cross-legged on her jacket, hunched over the iBook.

She doesn't know what it is that she feels.

Automatically, she checks for mail.

Timing out, empty.

A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.

MECHANICALLY consuming a bowl of Thai salad in an all-Asia's restaurant across the street. She hasn't had breakfast today, and maybe this will calm her down.

She doubts it, after what she's done.

Accept that it happened, she tells herself. Table all questions of intentionality.

She almost feels as though something in the park had made her do it. Genius loci, Parkaboy would say. Too much sun. Convergence of lines. (Convergence of something, certainly, she guesses, but in some part of herself she can't access.)

The iBook is open again, on the table in front of her. She's just looked up the name and address of the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain armaz.ru: one A. N. Polakov, in what she takes to be an office building, in Cyprus.

If she smoked, she thinks, she'd be giving Baranov a run for his money. Right now she almost wishes she did.

She looks at her anti-Casio and tries to do time-zone math for Ohio. Remembers that little map that Macs have, but it's too much trouble to remember where to find it.

She'll call Boone. She has to tell him what's happened. She shuts down the iBook and uncables the phone. Something tells her that it means something, that she isn't calling Parkaboy first, but she chooses to ignore that.

Sends the first of the cell numbers he'd loaded for her on the flight from Tokyo.

“Boone?”

A woman giggles. “Who's calling, please?” In the background she hears Boone say, “Give me that.”

Cayce looks at her mug of steaming green tea, remembering the last time she drank green tea, in Hongo, with Boone.

“Cayce Pollard.”

“Boone Chu,” he says, having taken the phone from the woman.

“It's Cayce, Boone.” Remembering the kudzu on the iron roof. Thinking: You said she was in Madrid. “Just checking in.”

Marisa.

Damien has a Marina. Someone will turn up with a Marika soon. “Good,” he says. “News on your end?”

She looks out at traffic passing on the High Street. “No.”

“I may be getting somewhere, here. I'll let you know.”

“Thanks.” Stabbing the button. “I'm sure you are.”

A server, apparently noticing Cayce's expression, looks alarmed. Cayce forces a smile, looks down at her bowl. Puts the phone down with exaggerated calm and picks up her chopsticks. “Fuck,” she says, under her breath, willing herself to continue eating.

How is it that she still sets herself up for these things? she asks herself.

When the noodles and chicken are gone, and the server's brought more tea, feeling a need to do something for herself, and on her own, she phones Bigend's cell.

“Yes?”

“Cayce, Hubertus. Question.”

“Yes?”

“The man from Cyprus. Did Dorotea have a name?”

“Yes. Hold on. Andreas Polakov.”

“Hubertus?”

“Yes?”

“Did you just look that up?”

“Yes.”

“In what?”

“The transcript of the conversation.”

“Did she know you were recording it?”

“Where are you?”

“Don't change the subject.”

“I just did. Do you have any news for me?”

“Not yet.”

“Boone is in Ohio.”

“Yes. I know that. Bye.”

She reconnects the phone to the iBook and boots up again. She needs to tell Parkaboy what she's learned, what she's done.

She checks for incoming.

One.

stellanor@armaz.ru

She chokes on her tea, coughing. Almost upsets it across the keyboard.

Forces herself to open it, just open it, as if it were any other e-mail. As if —

Cayce closes her eyes. When she opens them, the words are still there.

And nothing more.

“Yes,” she says to the iBook, “yes. The work.”

The work.

“CAYCE again, Hubertus. Who do I call for travel?”

“Sylvie Jeppson. At the office. Where are you going?”

“Paris, next Sunday.” She's on her third green tea and they're starting to begrudge her the table.

“Why?”

“I'll explain tomorrow. Thanks. Bye.”

She calls Blue Ant and is put through to Sylvie Jeppson.

“Do I need a visa for Russia?”

“Yes, you do.”

“How long does that take?”

“It depends. If you pay more, they'll do it in an hour. But they tend to leave you sitting in an empty room for an hour beforehand. A sort of Soviet nostalgia thing. But we have an in with their Department of Foreign Affairs.”

“We do?”

“We've done some work for them. Quietly. Where are you?”

“Kensington High Street.”

“That's convenient. Do you have your passport?”

“Yes.”

“Can you meet me in thirty minutes? Five, Kensington Palace Gardens. At Bayswater. Queensway tube's closest. You need three passport-sized photographs.”

“Can you do that?”

“Hubertus wouldn't want you to wait. And I know who to speak to, there. But you'll have to hurry. They don't stay open in the afternoon.”

LEAVING the visa section of the Russian Consulate, the tall, pale, unflappable Sylvie asks, “When do you want to go?”

“Sunday. In the morning. To Paris.”

“That'll be BA, unless you prefer Air France. You wouldn't rather take the train?”

“No, thanks.”

“And when to Russia?”

“I don't know yet. It's really just an outside possibility, at this point, but I wanted to have the visa ready. Thank you for your help.”

“Anything,” says Sylvie, smiling. “I've been told to take extremely good care of you.”

“You have.”

“I'm taking a cab back to Soho. Like a lift?”

Cayce sees two approaching, both vacant.

“No, thanks. I'm going to Camden.”

She lets Sylvie take the first one.

“Aeroflot,” she says, when the driver of the second asks where she's going.

“Piccadilly,” he says.

She phones Voytek.

“Hello?”

“It's Cayce, Voytek.”

“Casey! Hello!”

“I'm going out of town again. I need to give you Damien's keys. Can you come by the flat? Say four-thirty? I'm sorry for the short notice.” She promises herself she'll buy him his scaffolding.

“No problem, Casey!”

“Thanks. See you.”

She'll buy the scaffolding with Bigend's card. But she'll use her own, at Aeroflot.

“I've got your participation mystique right here,” she says, though whether to Parkaboy, London, or the general or specific mysteries of her life today, she doesn't know.

She sees the cabbie glance at her in his mirror.