Zero history

“No fear,” said Jacob. “They’ll bring him to you.”

›››

Sky-blue steel-girdered vastness. Towering volume of sound. Pigeons looking unconfused, about their pigeon business. Nobody did train stations like the Europeans, and the British, she thought, best of all. Faith in infrastructure, coupled with a necessity-driven gift for retrofitting.

One of Bigend’s lanky, elegant drivers, hand to earpiece, hove toward her steadily through the crowd, Milgrim in tow like a Sunday rowboat. Gazing around like a child, Milgrim, his face lit with a boy’s delight in the blue-girdered drama, the Dinky Toy grandeur of the great station.

One of the wheels of her roll-aboard began to click as she headed in their direction.

Milgrim glanced up from the square, glossy pages of Presences: Locative Art in America, and saw that Hollis was reading too. Something clothbound, black, no jacket.

They were somewhere under the Channel now, seated in Business Premier, which had wifi and a croissant breakfast. Or not wifi, but something cellular, requiring what she’d called a “dongle,” and had plugged into the edge of her MacBook for him. He’d borrowed it earlier, a weirdly thin one called an Air, and gone to Twitter, to see if Winnie had said anything, but she hadn’t. “Going through Kent now,” he’d written, then erased it. Then he’d tried “Hollis Henry” on Google and found her Wikipedia entry. Which had made for an odd read, as she was seated just opposite him, across the table, though she couldn’t see what he was looking at. Though now they were in the tunnel, there was no phone either.

She’d been described, in a retrospective piece written in 2004, as having looked, when she performed, like “a weaponized version of Francoise Hardy.” He wasn’t sure he could see it, exactly, and he’d also Googled Francoise Hardy to make the direct comparison. Francoise Hardy was more conventionally pretty, he thought, and he wasn’t sure what “weaponized” was supposed to mean, in that context. He supposed the writer had been trying to capture something of whatever she’d projected in live performance.

Hollis didn’t look like Milgrim’s idea of a rock singer, to the extent that he had one. She looked like someone who had a job that allowed you to wear what you wanted to the office. Which she did have, he supposed, with Bigend.

When he was finished with her computer, she’d offered him this copy of the book she’d written. “I’m afraid it’s mostly pictures,” she’d said, unzipping a side pocket on her black suitcase and pulling out a glossy, shrink-wrapped slab. The cover was a color photograph of tall nude statues of several very slender, small-breasted women, with identical helmet-like haircuts and matching bracelets, rising out of what seemed to be a rather small flower bed. They were made of something like solidified mercury, perfectly mirroring everything around them. The back cover was the same image, but minus the heroically erotic liqui-chrome statuary, which made it possible to read a sign they had concealed: Chateau Marmont.

“That’s a memorial to Helmut Newton,” she’d said. “He lived there, part of the time.”

“The back is ‘before’?” Milgrim had asked.

“No,” she’d said, “that’s what you see, there, unaugmented. The front’s what you see augmented. Construct’s tied to the GPS grid. To see it, you have to go there, use augmented reality.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” Milgrim had said, looking at the back, then the front.

“When I wrote the book, there was no commercial hardware. People were building their own. Now it’s all iPhone apps. Lots of work, back then, trying to render the pieces effectively. We had to take high-rez photographs of the site, from as many angles as you can, then marry them to whatever that exact angle on the construct would look like, then choose from those.”

“Did you do that yourself?’

“I chose, but Alberto did the photography and the imaging. That Newton memorial is one of his own pieces, but he rendered all of the others.” She pushed a strand of hair back from her eye. “Locative art probably started in London, and there’s a lot of it, but I haven’t seen much of it there. I decided to stick to American artists. Less to bite off, but also because it all has some peculiarly literal sense of place. I thought I had a marginally better chance of understanding it there.”

“You must know a lot about art.”

“I don’t. I stumbled on this stuff. Well, that’s not true. Bigend suggested I look at it. Though at the time I had no idea it was him doing the suggesting.”

He’d worked the corner of his thumbnail under the shrink-wrap. “Thank you,” he’d said, “it looks very interesting.”

Now she closed the black book, saw him looking at her. Smiled.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Rogue Male. Geoffrey Household. It’s about a man who tried to assassinate Hitler, or someone who’s exactly like Hitler.”

“Is it good?”

“Very good, though it really seems to be about wriggling down into the heart of the British countryside. Third act all seems to take place inside a hedgerow, down a badger hole.”

“I like your book. Like people were able to freeze their dreams, leave them places, and you could go there and see them, if you knew how.”

“Thank you,” she said, putting Rogue Male down on the table, without bothering to mark her place.

“Have you seen them all, yourself?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“River Phoenix, on the sidewalk. It was the first I saw. I never went back. Never saw it again. It made such a powerful impression. I suppose it was really why I decided to try to do a book, that impression.”

Milgrim closed Presences. He put it on the table, opposite Rogue Male. “Who are we going to see in Paris?”

“Meredith Overton. Studied at Cordwainers, shoe design, leather. She lives in Melbourne. Or did. She’s in Paris for the Salon du Vintage, selling something. She’s with a keyboard player named George, who’s in a band called the Bollards. Do you know them?”

“No,” said Milgrim.

“I know another Bollard, plus the man who’s currently producing their music.”

“She knows about Gabriel Hounds?”

“My other Bollard says she knew someone in London, when she was at Cordwainers, who knew someone involved in Hounds getting started.”

“It started in London?”

“I don’t know. Clammy met her in Melbourne. She was wearing Hounds, he wanted Hounds. She knew of Hounds locally. Some would be sold at a sort of art fair. He went with her and bought jeans. Says there was an American man there, selling them.”

“Why do you think she’ll talk to us?”

“I don’t,” she said. “But we can try.”

“Why do people care? Why do you think Bigend does?”

“He thinks someone’s copying some of his weirder marketing strategies,” she said, “improving on them.”

“And you think people want this brand because they can’t have it?”

“In part.”

“Drugs are valuable because you can’t get them without breaking the law,” Milgrim said.

“I thought they were valuable because they worked.”

“They have to work,” said Milgrim, “but the market value is about prohibition. Often they cost next to nothing to make. That’s what it all runs on. They work, you need them, they’re prohibited.”

“How did you get out of that, Milgrim?”

“They changed my blood. Replaced it. And while they were doing that, they were reducing the dose. And there was a paradoxical antagonist.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” said Milgrim. “Another drug. And cognitive therapy.”

“That sounds terrible,” she said.

“I liked the therapy,” Milgrim said. He could feel his passport against his chest, tucked safely into its Faraday pouch.

Rainy French countryside leapt on the carriage’s windows, hurtling, as if a switch had been thrown.