Zero history

28. WHITE PEAR TEA

The cost of wifi was white pear tea.

Milgrim looked at the two-cup glass tea press on the round white table, beyond the matte aluminum rectangle of Hollis’s laptop. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen white pear. Probably because he wasn’t very fond of tea, and because almost everything else here was white. He decided to let it steep awhile longer.

He was alone, in this narrow white shop, with a great deal of tea and a girl in a nicely fitting, crisply starched cotton dress, faintly pinstriped in gray, not unlike a tennis dress. He hadn’t thought of Parisians as tea drinkers, but if this place was any indication, they preferred it in ultrafragile glass pots. Walls lined with shallow white shelves, modernist apothecary jars filled with dried vegetable matter, plus a glittering, halogen-spotted assortment of these pots and presses. Equally minimalist cozies, in thick gray felt. A few green plants. Three small tables, each with two chairs.

From outside, the occasional whine and sputter of passing scooters. The street was almost too narrow for cars. Somewhere in the Latin Quarter, if the cabdriver had understood him.

Now the girl began to give the apothecary jars the once-over with a feather duster. Like performance art, or some highly conceptual species of pornography. The sort of thing that turned out to mainly be about the pinstripes. Or the tea.

He opened the pencil-thin laptop and turned it on.

Hollis’s desktop was a digital representation of interstellar space. Mauve galactic clouds. Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down, Escher-style, to a few pixels. He thought of the art in Hollis’s book, and of the Neo, which he now assumed was on its way to some forbiddingly upscale suburb, or there already, his own small effort in GPS art.

He noted that he felt remarkably calm about that, about what he’d done. The main thing, it seemed, was that he’d done it. It was done. But noting this caused him to start to remember Sleight.

After his cab ride from Galeries Lafayette, to a randomly chosen intersection near here, he’d felt relatively certain that he was off Sleight’s map. Now he considered Hollis’s laptop, wondering if Sleight might not have been at that as well. Though Hollis said she was new in Bigend’s employ, this time at least.

He opened the browser, then his webmail. Could Sleight see him do that? he wondered. His address, the first and only e-mail address he’d had, was a Blue Ant address. He opened Twitter. If he understood this correctly, Sleight might be able to know what he had opened, but would be unable to see what he was doing there. He entered his user name and password.

And Winnie was there. Or had been. “Whr R U?” An hour ago.

“Still Paris. Need to talk.”

He refreshed the browser. No reply.

The girl in the cotton dress, having finished dusting, was looking at him. Reminding him, as he found certain young people did, of one of those otherwise fairly realistic Japanese cartoon characters, the ones with oversized Disney eyes. What was that about? It seemed to be international, whatever it was, though not yet universal. This was the sort of thing he’d gotten used to being able to ask Bigend about. Bigend actively encouraged this, because, he said, he valued Milgrim’s questions. Milgrim had arrived from a decadelong low-grade brownout, and was, according to Bigend, like someone stepping from a lost space capsule. Smooth clay, awaiting the telltale imprint of a new century.

“It is the Mac Air?” the girl asked.

Milgrim had to check the branding, at the bottom of the screen. “Yes,” he said.

“It is very nice.”

“Thank you,” said Milgrim. Self-consciously, he carefully plunged the rod-and-ball atop the tea press, forcing clear fluid through a surgical grade of white nylon mesh. He poured some out, into the even more fragile-looking glass cup. Took a sip. Complexly metallic. Not much like tea. Though perhaps in a good way. “Do you have croissants?”

“Non,” said the girl, “petites madeleines.”

“Please,” said Milgrim, gesturing to his white table.

Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he’d once had to listen to someone’s lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

It was time for his medication. While the girl fetched his madeleines, from the rear of the shop, he took the bubble-pack from his bag and popped the day’s ration of white capsules through the foil at the back of their individual bubbles. Out of long habit, he held them concealed in his palm. He’d replaced the bubble-pack by the time she returned, his three cookies on a square white plate. One plain, one lightly drizzled with something white, another with dark chocolate.

“Thank you,” he said. He dunked the plain one briefly in his tea, perhaps out of some vague, Proust-related superstition, then quickly ate them all, as is. They were very good, and the white-drizzled one was almond. Finished, he washed the capsules from Basel down with white pear tea.

Then he remembered to refresh the browser again.

“R U there?” Two minutes ago.

“Yes. Sorry.”

Refresh.

“Ur phons nt secure”

“Borrowed laptop. Lost phone.” He hesitated. “I think Sleight was tracking me with it.”

Refresh.

“U lost?”

“Got rid of it.”

Refresh.

“Why??”

He had to think about that. “S was telling follower where I was.”

Refresh.

“So??”

“Tired of it.”

Refresh.

“No jack moves OK? B cool”

“Didn’t want him to know where we’re staying.”

Refresh.

“Where R U?”

“Staying,” he completed, aloud, then wrote: “Hotel Odeon, by Odeon Metro.”

Refresh.

“Bak nxt AM?”

“As far as I know.”

Refresh.

“Whts yr partner want??”

“Jeans.”

Refresh.

“LOL! B cool B N touch bye”

“Bye,” said Milgrim, less than impressed with his new federal agent handler. It felt like having a disinterested young mother.

He logged out of Twitter and went to the bookmarks, clicking for the page he’d marked earlier. Foley modeling a zip-front jacket and an old-fashioned porn rectangle. What was that about? He skipped through the site, things starting to come together. Remembering another of the French girl’s PowerPoint presentations, back in Soho. The market’s fetishization of elite special forces, “operators.” She’d cited the Vietnam War as the tipping point for this, and had illustrated her argument with collages of small ads from the back pages of long-extinct Fifties mens’ magazines, True and Argosy: hernia aids, mail-order monkeys huddled in tea cups, courses in lawn mower repair, X-Ray Specs… These ads, she’d said, constituted a core sample of the mass unconscious of the American male, shortly after WWII. Aside from the ubiquitous trusses and truss substitutes (and what, Milgrim had wondered, had accounted for that epidemic of herniation among postwar American men?), this record differed very little from the equivalent record to be found in the back pages of comic books of the same era. While pointing out that anyone, then, could order exactly the same Italian surplus rifle that had later been used to assassinate JFK (for under fifteen dollars, including postage), she’d said that the postwar American male’s valorization of things military could be assumed to have been balanced by recent actual memories of the reality of war, though one that been quite definitively won. Vietnam had changed that, she’d said, as she’d moved into a new set of collages. Vietnam had shifted something in the American male psyche. Milgrim couldn’t remember exactly what that was supposed to have been, but he knew she’d connected it with what he assumed to be the culture that produced websites like this one.

Foley was wearing his black porn rectangle to protect his identity, the assumption on the viewer’s part intended to be that Foley himself was a member of some military elite. She’d actually mentioned that as a marketing technique.

He went back to the image of Foley. Foley wasn’t particularly scary. Milgrim knew a number of kinds of scary, from his decade on the street. The man with the mullet, in the mothballed restaurant outside of Conway, had been quite a special kind of scary. That kind of scary, which he had no name for, was difficult to conceal, and impossible to fake. He’d first seen it in New York, in a young Albanian in the heroin business. Suggestions of a military background, other things. A similar calm, the same utter lack of wasted motion. Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.

He clicked back through the site. Bigend would be interested in this, though probably his team had already shown it to him. It was exactly the sort of thing they were looking at. Noticing neither a brand name nor prices. The site’s URL a string of letters and numbers. Not a site so much as a dummy, a mockup? The “About Us” page blank, also the “Order” page.

A deeper throbbing of exhaust, outside. He looked up to see a black motorcycle pass, slowly, the rider’s yellow helmet turning a smooth sweep of dark plastic visor his way, then forward again, rolling on. Revealing, for an instant, on the helmet’s back, broad, white diagonal scratches in the yellow gel-coat.

Exactly the kind of detail that Bigend would congratulate him for noticing.