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18. 140

The Neo rang while he was still trying to grasp Twitter. He was registered, now, as GAYDOLPHIN2. No followers, following no one. Whatever that meant. And his updates, whatever those were, were protected.

The harsh faux-mechanical ring tone had attracted the attention of the girl at the desk. He smiled anxiously, apologetically, from his seat on the leather-padded laptop-tethering bench, and answered it, the Neo awkward against his ear. “Yes?”

“Milgrim?”

“Speaking.”

“Hollis. How are you?”

“Well,” said Milgrim, automatically. “How are you?”

“Wondering if you’re up for Paris tomorrow. We’d take an early Eurostar.”

“What’s that?”

“The train,” she said. “Chunnel. It’s quicker.”

“What for?” Sounding, he thought, like a suspicious child.

“I’ve found someone we need to try to speak with. She’s there tomorrow, and the day after. After that, I don’t know.”

“Will we be gone long?”

“Overnight, if we’re lucky. Seven-thirty out of St. Pancras. I’ll arrange for someone from Blue Ant to pick you up at the hotel.”

“Does Hubertus know?”

“Yes. I just ran into him.”

“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll have the car phone your room.”

“Thank you.”

Milgrim put the Neo away and went back to webmail and Twitter. He’d just heard from Twitter, asking whether he was willing to have GAYDOLPHIN1 follow him. He was. And now he’d have to tell her about Paris. In bursts of a hundred and forty character spaces, apparently.

As he was finishing this, someone called CyndiBrown32 asked whether he was willing to have her follow him.

Remembering Winnie’s instructions, he wasn’t. He closed Twitter and logged out of webmail. Closed the MacBook.

“Good night, Mr. Milgrim,” said the girl at the desk as he went to the elevator.

He felt as though something new and entirely too large was attempting to fit within him. He’d shifted allegiances, or acquired a new one. Or was he simply more afraid of Winnie than he was of Bigend? Or was it that he was afraid of the possibility of the absence of Bigend?

“Institutionalized,” he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its door closed.

He’d gone from where he’d been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely small, and very hard, to this wider space, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend, but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.

Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away. Whatever it was.

The door opened on the third-floor hallway.

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he’d arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

“Quit staring,” he said to the dressmaker’s dummy as he stepped into his room. “I wish I had a book.” It had been quite a while since he’d found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He’d look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.