The Peripheral

78

Feed from the thing’s cam, in full binocular, reminded him of still images from an era prior to hers, though he couldn’t remember the platform’s name. She looked down at him, over knees draped in pale fabric.

“It’s me,” he said.

“No shit,” she said, reaching out, fingertip becoming enormous, to flick him, the cam platform, whatever it was, backward. To be arrested by whatever it stood on. Briefly showing him a low, artisanal-looking surface he assumed must be the ceiling. A horizontal seam, as if glued paper were starting to peel. Then it righted itself, with an audible whirr.

“Don’t,” he said.

“Know what you look like?” Leaning over her knees.

“No,” he said, though the emulation software’s sigil depicted something spherical, two-wheeled, with a topmost rectangle upright on a thin projection. She reached past him, arm growing huge, and the feed filled with a promotional image of the thing on the sigil, rectangular screen tightly framing an eager child’s face.

“No hot synthetic bods, back here in Frontierland,” she said, “but we got Wheelie Boy. Where are you?”

“In the Gobiwagen.”

“The RV?”

“At my desk,” he said.

“That really your desk?”

“No.”

“Ugly-ass desk. Never was really any Coldiron?”

“There are companies, registered in that name, in your Colombia, your Panama,” he said. “And now in your United States of America. You’re an executive of that one.”

“But not there.”

“No.”

“Just Lev’s hobby? With your fuck-up and Lowbeer’s murder investigation on top of it?”

“To my knowledge.”

“Why are you here?”

“Lowbeer suggested it,” he said. “And I wanted to see. Is it day? Is there a window? Where are we?”

“Night,” she said. “My room. Bright moon.” She reached to the side, turning off a light source. Instantly, she was differently beautiful. Dark eyes larger. Daguerreotype, he remembered. “Turn around,” she said, doing it for him. “I have to put my jeans on.”

Her room, rotating the cam as far as he could, was like the interior of some nomadic yurt. Nondescript furniture, tumuli of clothing, printed matter. This actual moment in the past, decades before his birth. A world he’d imagined, but now, somehow, in its reality, unimaginable. “Have you always lived here?”

She bent, plucked him up, carrying him toward the window, into moonlight. “Sure.”

And then the moon. “I know this is real,” he said, “it must be, but I can’t believe it.”

“I can believe in yours, Wilf. Have to. You should try stretching a little.”

“Before the jackpot,” he said, instantly regretting it.

She turned him around then, away from the moon. Stood staring, moonlit, grave, into his eyes. “What’s that, Wilf, the jackpot?”

Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.