The Peripheral

4

Lorenzo, Rainey’s cameraperson, with the professional’s deliberate gaze, steady and unhurried, found Daedra through windows overlooking the moby’s uppermost forward deck.

Netherton wouldn’t have admitted it to Rainey, or indeed to anyone, but he did regret the involvement. He’d let himself be swept up, into someone else’s far more durable, more brutally simple concept of self.

He saw her now, or rather Lorenzo did, in her sheepskin flying jacket, sunglasses, nothing more. Noted, wishing he hadn’t, a mons freshly mohawked since he’d last encountered it. The tattoos, he guessed, were stylized representations of the currents that fed and maintained the North Pacific Gyre. Raw and shiny, beneath some silicone-based unguent. Makeup would have calculated that to a nicety.

Part of a window slid aside. Lorenzo stepped out. “I have Wilf Netherton,” Netherton heard him say. Then Lorenzo’s sigil vanished, Daedra’s replacing it.

Her hands came up, clutched the lapels of her open jacket. “Wilf. How are you?”

“Glad to see you,” he said.

She smiled, displaying teeth whose form and placement might well have been decided by committee. She tugged the jacket closer, fists sternum-high. “You’re angry, about the tattoos,” she said.

“We did agree, that you wouldn’t do that.”

“I have to do what I love, Wilf. I wasn’t loving not doing it.”

“I’d be the last to question your process,” he said, channeling intense annoyance into what he hoped would pass for sincerity, if not understanding. It was a peculiar alchemy of his, the ability to do that, though now the hangover was in the way. “Do you remember Annie, the brightest of our neoprimitivist curators?”

Her eyes narrowed. “The cute one?”

“Yes,” he said, though he hadn’t particularly thought so. “We’d a drink together, Annie and I, after that final session at the Connaught, when you’d had to go.”

“What about her?”

“She’d been dumbstruck with admiration, I realized. It all came out, once you were gone. Her devastation at having been too overawed to speak with you, about your art.”

“She’s an artist?”

“Academic. Mad for everything you’ve done, since her early teens. Subscriber to the full set of miniatures, which she literally can’t afford. Listening to her, I understood your career as if for the first time.”

Her head tilted, hair swung. The jacket must have opened as she raised one hand to remove the sunglasses, but Lorenzo wasn’t having any.

Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true. Then he remembered that she couldn’t see him. That she was looking at someone called Lorenzo, on the upper deck of a moby, halfway around the world. “She’d particularly wanted to convey an idea she’d had, as the result of meeting you in person. About a new sense of timing in your work. She sees timing as the key to your maturation as an artist.”

Lorenzo refocused. Suddenly it was as if Netherton were centimeters from her lips. He recalled their peculiarly brisk nonanimal tang.

“Timing?” she asked, flatly.

“I wish I’d recorded her. Impossible to paraphrase.” What had he said previously? “That you’re more secure, now? That you’ve always been brave, fearless really, but that this new confidence is something else again. Something, she put it, so deeply earned. I’d planned on discussing her ideas with you over dinner, that last time, but it didn’t turn out to be that sort of evening.”

Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. “If things had gone differently,” he heard himself say, “I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”

“Why not?”

“Because Annie would tell you that the entrance you’re considering is the result of a retrograde impulse, something dating from the start of your career. Not informed by that new sense of timing.”

She was staring at him, or rather at whoever Lorenzo was. And then she smiled. Reflexive pleasure of the thing behind her eyes.

Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”