Pattern Recognition (12 page)

She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people’s objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, she looks back, out into Damien’s main room, and sees the robot girls, eyeless. No flies on Damien. He’s kept his decorators from decorating, resulting in a semiotic neutrality that Cayce is starting to appreciate more, the longer she stays here. Her own place,
in New York, is a whitewashed cave, scarcely more demonstrative of self, its uneven tenement floors painted a shade of blue she discovered in northern Spain. An ancient tint, arsenic-based. Peasants there had used it for centuries on interior walls, and it was said to keep flies away. Cayce had had it mixed in plastic enamel, sans arsenic, from a Polaroid she’d taken. Like the varnish on the bar in Camden High Street, it sealed the furry splinters of wear. Texture. She likes an acquired texture, evidence of long habitation, but nothing too personal.

The kettle whistles. She makes a single cup of Colombian and takes it back to the Cube. F:F:F is open there, and she flips back and forth between posts, getting a sense of what’s been going on. Not much, aside from ongoing analysis of #135, which is normal, and discussion of this Vatican story from Brazil. Maurice, interestingly, posts to point out that both the story and the alleged papal interest seem to issue from Brazil, and that there has apparently been no independent confirmation from elsewhere. Is it true? he wonders. A hoax?

Cayce frowns. Magda’s story. Shown #135 prior to an evening’s assignment, then given a brief scripting: It is apparently a feature film, of unknown origin, very interesting somehow, intriguing, and has the one she addresses heard of it? And then debriefed, after, for responses, which she says is unique in her experience of the job so far. And where, Cayce had asked, had Magda been sent to spread this? A private club, Covent Garden: media people. She’d been taken in by a member, someone she’d been introduced to after the briefing, and left to work the room on her own.

Trans. Blue Ant. Bigend.

And tomorrow she meets with Stonestreet again. And Dorotea.

10.
JACK MOVES, JANE FACES

She’s down for a jack move.

Thinks this in the Pilates studio in Neal’s Yard, doing the Short Spine Stretch, her bare feet in leather loops that haven’t yet been softened up with use. That’s how new this place is. They should get some mink oil. Her soles are chafing.

She’d never really been sure what Donny had meant when he’d say that; he said it when he was angry, or frustrated, and she’s both. Dorotea dicking with her and she doesn’t do anything about it. She could tell Bernard or Bigend but she doesn’t trust them. She has no idea what’s going on with Bigend, what he’s capable of. The sensible thing to do would be to finish the job, get her money, and write the whole thing off to experience.

But there’d still be Dorotea. Dorotea with the scary connections. Dorotea the mad bitch, just doing these things because she’s decided to hate Cayce, or, maybe, Bigend’s idea, because she thinks Cayce is being lined up to run Blue Ant’s London office. Or maybe she’s in the Bigend girlfriend pool. Anything seems equally possible, but some hard little knot in Cayce’s core keeps heating up, trying for meltdown: the hole in the Buzz Rickson’s, the Asian Sluts invasion, her period’s coming, she’d like to get her hands around Dorotea’s throat and shake her till her fucking brains rattle.

Jack moves. Context, with Donny, seemed to indicate that these were either deliberate but extremely lateral, thus taking the competition or opponent by surprise, or, more likely in Donny’s case, simply crazy, same result. He’d never said what jack move, exactly, in a given situation, he was contemplating, and maybe that was because he didn’t know.
Maybe it had to be improvisational and completely of the moment. East Lansing Zen. Whatever it was supposed to be, she had an idea he’d never managed to do it. In memory now she associates the expression with his only-ever attempt at verbally communicating a sexual preference: “You think maybe you could make more, like, those jane faces?”

Jane faces being, she’d later learned, stripper-speak for, she guessed you’d call them, ritualized expressions conveying a certain ecstatic transport, or at least its potential.

Or was a jack move, she wonders now, simply a cash-related move? Jack in the sense of money? Donny’s jack moves had tended to be invoked in situations of relative economic insecurity. Donny’s ongoing situation being one of that, but to greater or lesser degrees. Resolved most often by asking Cayce for a loan, but only after invoking the jack move. If it meant a money move, she guesses she can’t use the expression, because what she’s tempted to do would just cost her.

What she’s tempted to do, she knows, is crazy. She exhales, watching her straightened legs rise up in the straps to a ninety-degree angle, then inhales as she bends them, holding tension in the straps against the pull of the spring-loaded platform she’s reclining on. Exhales, as they say, for nothing, then inhales as she straightens them horizontally, pulling the springs taut. Repeating this six more times for a total of ten.

She shouldn’t be thinking about anything except getting this right, and that’s partly why she does it. Stops her thinking, if she concentrates sufficiently. She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there. And this morning she has a big one, or several, because she’s due soon for the meeting with Stone-street and Dorotea, to see Heinzi’s latest stab at the logo. To tell them whether it works or not. Per her contract.

She wants to go in there, the hot little knot of rage at her core is telling her, wearing the Buzz Rickson’s with the tape on the shoulder
(which is starting to curl at the edges) so that Dorotea will know that she hasn’t simply neglected to notice the damage. But she won’t say anything. Then, when Dorotea produces the logo-rethink (which Cayce imagines will almost certainly work for her, as Heinzi is nothing if not very good) she’ll wait a beat or two and then shake her head. And Dorotea will know, then, that Cayce is lying, but she won’t be able to do anything about it.

And then Cayce will leave, and go back to Damien’s, and pack her things, go to Heathrow and get on the next business-class flight with her return ticket to New York.

And probably blow the contract, a big one, and have to hustle very hard indeed in New York, finding fresh work, but she’ll be free of Bigend and Dorotea, and Stonestreet too, and all of the weird baggage that seems to come with them. Mirror-world will get put back into its box until the next time, hopefully a vacation, and when Damien is here, and she will never have to worry about Dorotea or Asian Sluts or any of it, ever again.

Except that that would mean that she’d lied to a client firm, and she really doesn’t want to do that, aside from knowing that it’s a ridiculous, infantile plan anyway. She’ll lose the contract, probably do herself grave professional harm, and all for the sake of pissing Dorotea off. And what a pleasure that would be.

Makes no sense, except to the knot.

Now she’s sitting cross-legged, doing Sphinx, springs lightened. Turns her hands palm-up for Beseech. No thinking. You do not get there by thinking about not thinking, but by concentrating on each repetition.

To the gentle twanging of the springs.

SHE’S
made certain the driver gets her to Blue Ant early.

She wants her own little bit of time in the street, her own paper cup
of coffee. Soho on a Monday morning has its own peculiar energy. She wants to tap into that for a few minutes. Buys her coffee now and heads off, away from Blue Ant, trying to fit her pace to the pace of these people on their way to work, with most of whom she feels she has some passing affinity. They earn their living distinguishing degrees and directions of attractiveness, and she envies the youth and determination with which they all seem to be getting to it. Was she ever like that? Not exactly, she thinks. She got her start, out of college, working with the design team of a Seattle-based mountain-bike manufacturer, and had branched out into skatewear, then shoes. Her talents, which Bigend calls her tame pathologies, had carried her along, and gradually she’d let them define the nature of what it was that she did. She’d thought of that as going with the flow, but maybe, she thinks now, it had really been the path of least resistance. What if that flow naturally tended to the path of least resistance? Where does that take you?

“Down the tube,” she says aloud, causing a very good-looking young Asian man, walking parallel with her, to start, and look at her with brief alarm. She smiles in reassurance, but he frowns and walks faster. She slows, to let him get ahead. He’s wearing a black horsehide car coat, its seams scuffed gray, like a piece of vintage luggage, and he’s actually carrying, she now sees, a piece of vintage luggage. A very small suitcase, brown cowhide, that someone has waxed to a russet glow, reminding her of the shoes of the old men in the home in which her grandfather, Win’s dad, had died. She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again. It’s an emotion she first experienced a very long time ago, and she guesses it’s coming up now because she’s on the brink of something, some turning point, and she feels lost.

Even her relationship to the footage is changing. Margot had called the footage Cayce’s hobby, but Cayce has never been a person who had hobbies. Obsessions, yes. Worlds. Places to retreat to. “But it’s no-name,”
Margot had said, of the footage, “that’s why you like it. Isn’t it? Like your trademark thing.” Margot had discovered that most of the products in Cayce’s kitchen were generic, unlabeled, and Cayce had admitted that it wasn’t a matter of economics but of her sensitivity to trademarks. Now she glances ahead to see if the Asian man is still there, but she can’t see him. She checks her Casio-clone.

Time for Blue Ant. Time for Dorotea.

The receptionist sends her up to the third floor again, where she finds Stonestreet in one of his exquisitely slept-in suits, this one gray, red hair sticking up in several new directions. He’s smoking a cigarette and flipping through a document in a pink Blue Ant folder.

“Morning, dear. Lovely seeing you, Saturday. How was your ride home with Hubertus?”

“We went for a drink. In Clerkenwell.”

“That’s the real version of that place we’re in now. Some lovely spaces there. What did he have to say?”

“No shop. We talked about the footage.” Watching him carefully.

“What footage is that?” He looks up, as if concerned that he’s somehow lost the plot.

“On the web. The anonymous film that’s being released in bits and pieces. Do you know the one?”

“Oh. That.” What does he know? “Helena said you called and asked about Trans.”

“Yes.”

“Word-of-mouth meme thing. We don’t really know what it does, yet. Whether it does anything, really. Where did you hear about it?”

“Someone in a pub.”

“Haven’t had anything to do with it myself. Cousin of mine runs it, such as it is. I could arrange for you to meet her.”

“I was just curious, Bernard. Where’s Dorotea?”

“Due any minute, I’d imagine. She can be difficult, can’t she?”

“Hardly know her.” She checks her hair in a mirrored panel and takes a seat without removing her jacket. “Hubertus is in New York?”

“Yes. At the Mercer.”

“I saw him there, once, in the lobby bar. He was talking to Kevin Bacon’s dog.”

“His dog?”

“Kevin Bacon was there with his dog. Hubertus was talking to it.”

“Didn’t know he liked pets.”

“A celebrity dog. But he didn’t seem to be talking to Kevin Bacon.”

“What do you make of him?”

“Kevin Bacon?”

“Hubertus.”

“Are you serious?”

Stonestreet looks up from the faxes. “Moderately.”

“I’m glad I’m contract, Bernard, not salary.”

“Erm,” Stonestreet says, and seems relieved as Dorotea enters in serious Armani business drag, blackly deconstructed. This is, Cayce senses, for Dorotea, virtually an anti-fashion statement. A look that wouldn’t be out of place at an upscale execution. “Good morning,” she says. To Cayce: “You are feeling better, today?”

“Yes, thank you. And yourself?”

“I have been in Frankfurt with Heinzi, of course.” And it’s your fault. “But I think that Heinzi has worked his magic. He has nothing but good things to say about Blue Ant, Bernard. ‘A breath of fresh,’ he calls it.” She looks at Cayce. Blow me.

Cayce smiles back.

Dorotea takes her seat beside Stonestreet, producing another one of those expensive-looking envelopes. “I was in the studio with Heinzi when he did this. It’s such a privilege, to see him work.”

“Show it to me.”

“Of course.” Dorotea takes her time unfastening the envelope. She
reaches inside. Pulls out a square of art board the size of the last one. On it is the Michelin Man, in one of his earliest, most stomach-churningly creepy manifestations, not the inflated-maggot de-shelled Ninja Turtle of the present day, but that weird, jaded, cigar-smoking elder creature suggesting a mummy with elephantiasis. “Bibendum,” says Dorotea, softly.

“The restaurant?” asks Stonestreet, puzzled. “In the Fulham Road?” He’s sitting beside Dorotea and can’t see what’s on the square of board.

Cayce is about to scream.

“Oh,” says Dorotea, “how stupid of me. Another project.”

Bibendum, for Cayce knows that that is his name, goes back into the envelope.

Dorotea produces Heinzi’s revised design, which she shows to Cayce, and then, almost casually, to Stonestreet.

The sixties sperm Dorotea showed on Friday has mutated into a sort of looping comet, a loosened-up, energized version of the manufacturer’s logo of the past decade or so.

Cayce tries to open her mouth, to say something. How did Dorotea know? How does she know?