Pattern Recognition

37. KING

They turn onto a wide street, one that Cayce, from her morning's Moscow Yellow Pages map foray, tentatively identifies as Tverskaya. Her driver, with a phone plugged into his ear now, is wearing cologne.

They stick to Tverskaya, if it is Tverskaya, and stay with the traffic flow. He doesn't use the blue light.

They pass beneath a banner in English: WAXEN FIGURES EXHIBITION. Street-level signage offers snippets of the non-Cyrillic: BUTIQUE, KODAK, a drugstore called PHARMACOM.

As they turn left, she asks “What street is this?”

“Georgievsky,” the driver says, though it might as easily be his name. He turns again, into an alley, and stops.

She starts to tell him that she hadn't meant for him to stop, but he gets out, walks around, opens the door for her. “Come.”

Gray, distempered concrete. Cyrillic skater's tags, their letters bulging in clumsy homage to New York and Los Angeles.

“Please.” He hauls open a large, anciently battered steel door, which reaches the limits of a restraining chain with a dull boom. Within is darkness. “Here.”

“Stella is here?”

“Kino,” he says. Film. Cinema.

Stepping past him, she finds herself in a dim, indeterminate space. When the door crashes shut behind them, the only light is from above. A bare bulb, visible up a forbiddingly steep flight of narrow concrete stairs that seems to have no railing.

“Please.” He gestures toward the stairs.

She sees now that there is a railing, the spidery ghost of one: a single length of half-inch steel. Supported by only two uprights, it droops between them, seemingly lank as rope, and sways when she grips it.

“He took a duck in the face…”

“Up, please.”

“Sorry.” She starts to climb, aware of him behind her.

There is another steel door, narrower, beneath the forty-watt bulb. She opens it.

A kitchen, bathed in red light.

Like the kitchens in the oldest, still-unrenovated tenements of New York, but larger, the stove a squatting pre-Stalinist presence wider than the car that brought her here. Coal-burning, or wood.

Where the tenement kitchen would have offered a central bathtub, there is a shower: a square of raised tile surrounding a slightly lower concrete space for drainage. The ancient galvanized showerhead, looking either agricultural or veterinary in intent, is suspended from a sixteen-foot ceiling gone sepia with decades of smoke and soot. The source of the red glow is a stolen Metro sign, propped against one wall, with a bulb inside.

“You are here,” says Stella, opening a door, light behind her. She says something in Russian to the driver. He nods, stepping back through the door to the stairs and closing it behind him.

“Where's here?”

“Come.” Stella leads her into another room, this one with tall, unwashed windows, looking as though they might originally have been internally shuttered. “The Kremlin,” Stella says, pointing out a view between the nearer buildings, “and the Duma.”

Cayce looks around. The walls, unpainted since Soviet days at least, remind her of the nomiya in Roppongi, decades of nicotine deposited over what may once have been cream. Cracked, uneven. The individual planks of the wooden floor are lost under layers of paint, most recently maroon. There are two very new, very white Ikea desks, with articulated swivel chairs, a pair of PCs, and baskets of papers. On the wall above, a long, complex chart is being maintained across three adjoining white-boards.

“Sergei says it is a production that never ends,” Stella says, seeing Cayce looking not at the view but the chart. “Only the start of the work can be done here, of course.”

“But does it end?” Cayce feels herself blushing, appalled that she's been unable to resist immediately asking so pointed a question.

“You mean, is linear narrative?”

“I had to ask.” She feels as though Parkaboy, Ivy, Filmy, and Maurice, the whole F:F:F crew are in the wings, counting on her.

“I do not know. One day, perhaps, she will start to edit as she edited her student film: to a single frame. Or perhaps one day they speak, the characters. Who knows? Nora? She does not say.”

A young man with bushy ginger hair enters, nods to them, and seats himself before one of the computers.

“Come,” says Stella, moving in the direction he'd come from. “You know this idea, 'squat', like Amsterdam, Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“You have not, in America?”

“Not exactly.”

“This was squat, these rooms. Famous, in eighties. A party here. Seven years. Not once did party end. People come, make the party, more come, some go, make the party, always. Talking of freedom, art, things of the spirit. Nora and I were schoolgirls, first coming here. Our father would be very angry, seeing us here. He did not know.” This room is larger, but filled with a makeshift cube farm, workstations walled off with sheets of unpainted composite board. The screens are dark now, the chairs empty. There's a plastic Garfield atop one monitor, other signs of workplace personalization. She picks up a square of clear acrylic: laser-etched in its core are the Coca-Cola logo, a crude representation of the Twin Towers, and the words “WE REMEMBER.” She quickly puts it down.

“You see it now, you cannot imagine. Once Victor Tsoi sang here, in this room. People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”

'What do you do now, in this room?”

“My sister's work is transferred to production facility.”

“Is she here, now?”

“She is working. Now you will see her.”

“But I couldn't interrupt her —”

“No. She is here, when she is working. You must understand. When she is not working, she is not here.”

The fourth room is at the end of a narrow hallway, its ceiling as high as those in the other rooms, its plaster darkened with the dirt of years of hands, lightening above shoulder-level. The door at its end is smooth and white, insubstantial-looking against the scabrous plaster.

Stella opens it, steps back, softly gestures for Cayce to enter.

At first she thinks this room is windowless, its sole illumination the largest LCD display Cayce has ever seen, but as her eyes adjust she sees that three tall narrow windows, behind the screen, have been painted black. But the part of her that notes this is some basic mammalian module tracking whereabouts and potential exits. All higher attention is locked on the screen, on which is frozen an image from a segment of footage that she knows she has never seen.

He is reaching out, perhaps from the girl's POV, as if to touch her in parting.

A cursor like a bombsight whips across the image, locking on the corner of his mouth. Mouse-click. Zoom. Into image-grain. Some quick adjustment. Clicks. Out of zoom.

The meaning of his expression, and the feeling of the frame, have changed.

So much for Completism, Cayce thinks. The footage is a work in progress.

“This is Nora,” Stella says, stepping softly past Cayce to lay her hands on the shawl-draped shoulders of the figure in the chair before the screen. Nora's right hand pauses. Still resting on the mouse, though Cayce senses this has nothing to do with her sister's touch, or the presence of a stranger.

Cayce still cannot see her face. Her hair, like her sister's, is long and dark, center-parted, its gloss reflecting the glow of the screen.

Now Stella speaks to her sister in Russian, and slowly Nora turns from the screen, the manipulated image illuminating her face in three-quarter profile.

It is Stella's face, but some fault bisects it vertically, not quite evenly. There are no scars, only this skewing of the bone beneath. Nora's skin is smooth as Stella's, and as white.

Cayce looks into the dark eyes. Nora sees her. Then doesn't. Turns back to the screen.

Stella rolls a workstation chair into position. “Sit. Watch her work.” Cayce shakes her head, her eyes stinging with tears.

“Sit,” says Stella, very gently. “You will not disturb her. You have come a long way. You must watch her work.”

HER watch tells her that over three hours have passed, when she leaves Nora's room.

She wonders if she will ever be able to describe her experience there to anyone, even Parkaboy. How she has watched a segment, or the bones of one, being built up from almost nothing. Mere scraps of found video. How once a man had stood on a platform in a station, and turned, and raised his hand, the motion captured, the grainy image somehow finding its way, however much later, to one of Nora's subsidiary screens. To he chosen, today, by the roving, darting cursor. Elements of that man's gesture becoming aspects of the boy in the dark coat, his collar up. The boy whose life, it seems, is bounded by the T-shaped city, the city Nora is mapping through the footage she generates. Her consciousness, Cayce understands, somehow bounded by or bound to the T-shaped fragment in her brain: part of the arming mechanism of the Claymore mine that killed her parents, balanced too deeply, too precariously within her skull, to ever be removed. Something stamped out, once, in its thousands, by an automated press in some armory in America. Perhaps the workers who'd made that part, if they'd thought at all in terms of end-use, had imagined it being used to kill Russians. But that was over now, Win's war and Baranov's, old as the brick compound behind Baranov's caravan: concrete fence posts and the echoing absence of dogs. And somehow this one specific piece of ordnance, adrift perhaps since the days of the Soviets' failed war with the new enemies, had found its way into the hands of Nora's uncle's enemies, and this one small part, only slightly damaged by the explosion of the ruthlessly simple device, had been flung into the very center of Nora's brain. And from it, and from her other wounds, there now emerged, accompanied by the patient and regular clicking of her mouse, the footage.

In the darkened room whose windows would have offered a view of the Kremlin, had they been scraped clean of paint, Cayce had known herself to be in the presence of the splendid source, the headwaters of the digital Nile she and her friends had sought. It is here, in the languid yet precise moves of a woman's pale hand. In the faint click of image-capture. In the eyes only truly present when focused on this screen.

Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.

STELLA finds her in the hallway, her face wet with tears, eyes closed, shoulders braced against plaster as uneven as the bone of Nora's forehead.

She places her hands on Cayce's shoulders. “Now you have seen her work.”

Cayce opens her eyes, nods.

“Come,” says Stella, “your eyes are melted,” and leads her past the workstations, into the crepuscular glow of the kitchen. She soaks a thick pad of gray paper toweling in the stream from an old brass tap and passes it to Cayce, who presses it against her hot eyes. The paper is rough, the water cold. “There are few buildings like this one, now,” Stella says. “The land is far too valuable. Even this, this place from our childhood, which we both loved, our uncle owns. He keeps it from the developers, for us, because Nora finds it comforting. Whatever cost is of no importance to him. He wishes us to be safe, and Nora as comfortable as possible.”

“And you? What do you wish, Stella?”

“I wish the world to know her work. Something you could not know: how it was, here, for artists. Whole universes of blood and imagination, built over lifetimes in rooms like these, never to be seen. To die with their creators, and be swept out. Now Nora, what she does, it joins the sea.” She smiles. “It has brought you to us.”

“Are they your parents, Stella? The couple?”

“Perhaps, when they are young. They resemble them, yes. But if what she is doing tells a story, it seems not to be our parents' story. Not their world. It is another world. It is always another world.”

“Yes,” Cayce agrees, putting down the cold wet mass of paper, “it is. Stella, the people who protect you, on your uncle's behalf, who do you suppose they protect you from?”

“From his enemies. From anyone who might wish to use us to hurt him. You must understand, these precautions are not unusual, for a man like my uncle. It is unusual that Nora is an artist, and her situation, her condition, is unusual, and that I wish her work to be seen, yes, but it is not unusual, here, that we should be protected.”

“But do you understand that they also, perhaps without understanding it, protect you from something else?”

“I do not understand.”

“Your sister's art has become very valuable. You've succeeded, you see. It's a genuine mystery, Nora's art, something hidden at the heart of the world, and more and more people follow it, all over the world.”

“But what is the danger?”

“We have our own rich and powerful men. Any creation that attracts the attention of the world, on an ongoing basis, becomes valuable, if only in terms of potential.”

“To be commercial? My uncle would not allow this degree of attention.”

“It's already valuable. More valuable than you could imagine. The commercial part would simply be branding, franchising. And they're on to it, Stella. Or at least one of them is, and he's very clever. I know because I work for him.”

“You do?”

“Yes, but I've decided that I won't tell him I found you. I won't tell him who you are or where you are, or who Nora is, or anything else I've learned here. I won't be working for him, now. But others will, and they'll find you, and you have to be ready.”

“How, ready?”

“I don't know. I'll try to figure that out.”

“Thank you,” Stella says. “It gives me pleasure, that you have seen my sister work.”

“Thank you.”

They hug, Stella kissing her on the cheek.

“Your driver is waiting.”

“Send him away, please. I need to walk. To feel the city. And I haven't seen the Metro.”

Stella produces a phone from her gray skirt and pushes a key. Says something in Russian.