Pattern Recognition (17 page)

It tastes as though ice cubes have melted in it, she remembers, and instantly wants some.

Billy Prion, then, she thinks as the ad ends, is currently the gaijin
face of Bikkle, his complete lack of recent exposure in the occident evidently posing no problem here at all.

When she figures out how to turn the television off, she leaves the curtains closed, and turns the room’s lights off, one after another, manually.

Still wearing the robe, she curls up between the sheets of the big white bed and prays for the wave to come, and take her for as long as it can.

It comes, but somewhere in it is her father. And the figure on the scooter. Blank expanse of that chromed visor.

15.
SINGULARITY

Win Pollard went missing in New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001. The doorman at the Mayflower flagged an early cab for him, but couldn’t remember a destination. A one-dollar tip from the man in the gray overcoat.

She can think about this now because the Japanese sunlight, with the robotic drapes fully open, seems to come from some different direction entirely.

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father’s absence.

Neither she nor her mother had known that Win was in town, and his reason or reasons for being there remain a mystery. He lived in Tennessee, on a disused farm purchased a decade earlier. He had been working on humane crowd-control barricades for stadium concerts. He was in the process, at the time of his disappearance, of obtaining a number of patents related to this work, and these, should they be granted, would now become part of his estate. The company he’d been working with was on Fifth Avenue, but his contacts there had been unaware of his presence in the city.

He had never been known to stay at the Mayflower, but had arrived there the night before, having made reservations via the web. He had gone immediately to his room, and as far as could be known had remained there. He had ordered a tuna sandwich and a Tuborg from room service. He had made no calls.

Since there was no known reason for his having been in New York, that particular morning, there was no reason to assume that he would
have been in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. But Cynthia, Cayce’s mother, guided by voices, had been certain from the start that he had been a victim. Later, when it was revealed that the CIA had maintained some sort of branch office in one of the smaller, adjacent buildings, she had become convinced that Win had gone there to visit an old friend or former associate.

Cayce herself had been in SoHo that morning, at the time of the impact of the first plane, and had witnessed a micro-event that seemed in retrospect to have announced, however privately and secretly, that the world itself had at that very instant taken a duck in the face.

She had watched a single petal fall, from a dead rose, in the tiny display window of an eccentric Spring Street dealer in antiques.

She was loitering here, prior to a nine-o’clock breakfast meeting at the SoHo Grand, fifteen minutes yet to kill and the weather excellent. Staring blankly and probably rather contentedly at three rusted cast-iron toy banks, each a different height but all representing the Empire State Building. She had just heard a plane, incredibly loud and, shed assumed, low. She thought she’d glimpsed something, over West Broadway, but then it had been gone. They must be making a film.

The dead roses, arranged in an off-white Fiestaware vase, appeared to have been there for several months. They would have been white, when fresh, but now looked like parchment. This was a mysterious window, with a black-painted plywood backdrop revealing nothing of the establishment behind it. She had never been in to see what else was there, but the objects in the window seemed to change in accordance with some peculiar poetry of their own, and she was in the habit, usually, of pausing to look, when she passed this way.

The fall of the petal, and somewhere a crash, taken perhaps as some impact of large trucks, one of those unexplained events in the sonic backdrop of lower Manhattan. Leaving her sole witness to this minute fall.

Perhaps there is a siren then, or sirens, but there are always sirens, in New York.

As she walks toward West Broadway and the hotel, she hears more sirens.

Crossing West Broadway she sees that a crowd is forming. People are stopping, turning to look south. Pointing. Toward smoke, against blue sky.

There is a fire, high up in the World Trade Center.

Walking more quickly now, in the direction of Canal, she passes people kneeling beside a woman who seems to have fainted.

The towers in her line of sight. Anomaly of smoke. Sirens.

Still focused on her meeting with a German outerwear manufacturers star designer, she enters the SoHo Grand and quickly climbs stairs made from something like faux bridge girder. Nine o’clock exactly. There is an odd, sub-aquatic quality to the light in the lobby. She feels as though she is dreaming.

There is a fire in the World Trade Center.

She finds a house phone and asks for her designer. He answers in German, hoarse, excited. He doesn’t seem to remember that they are having breakfast.

“Come please up,” in English. Then: “There has been a plane.” Then something urgent, strangled, in German. He hangs up.

A plan? Change of? He is on the eighth floor. Does he want to have breakfast in his room?

As the elevator doors close behind her, she closes her eyes and sees the dry petal, falling. The loneliness of objects. Their secret lives. Like seeing something move in a Cornell box.

The designer’s door opens as she raises her hand to knock. He is pale, young, unshaven. Glasses with heavy black frames. She sees that he is in his stocking feet, his freshly laundered shirt buttoned in the wrong holes. His fly is open and he is staring at her as though at something
he has never seen before. The television is on, CNN, volume up, and as she steps past him, uninvited but feeling the need to do something, she sees, on the screen beneath the unused leatherette ice bucket, the impact of the second plane.

And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never hear or see described.

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.

It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.

An experience outside of culture.

SHE
finds the right button on the remote and the drapes track open. She crawls out of her white cave, the terry robe hanging wrinkled around her, and goes to the window.

Blue sky. A clearer blue than she remembers in Tokyo. They use unleaded fuel, now.

She looks down into the woods surrounding the Imperial Palace and sees the few visible sections of rooftop that Bigend’s travel girl promised.

There must be paths through those woods, paths of a quite unimaginable charm, which she will never see.

She tries to judge her degree of soul-delay but feels nothing at all.

She is alone here, with only the background hum of air-conditioning.

She reaches for the phone and orders breakfast.

16.
GOING MOBILE

There had been a smell, in the weeks after, like hot oven cleaner, catching at the back of the throat. Had it ever gone entirely away?

She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they’ve been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson’s makers interpret the MA-1.

She pauses, fork halfway from plate, looking toward the closet where she’d hung her jacket the night before.

Blue Ant Tokyo has been charged with helping her in any way it can.

When she’s finished eating, cleaning her plate with the final corner of the last slice of toast, she pours a second cup of coffee and looks up the local Blue Ant number on her laptop. She dials it on her cell and hears someone say, “Mushi mushi,” which makes her smile. She asks for Jennifer Brossard, and tells her, no preface other than hello, that she needs a black MA-1 flying jacket reproduction by Buzz Rickson’s, in the Japanese equivalent of an American men’s size 38.

“Anything else?”

“They’re impossible to find. People order them a year in advance.”

“Is that all you need?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Shall we send it to the hotel?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Bye, then.” Jennifer Brossard clicks off.

Cayce hits End and stares briefly out at blue sky and oddly shaped towers.

Her requests don’t have to make any sense, she gathers, which is interesting.

When the psychosomatic oven cleaner starts to stage a comeback, it’s time to do more things, preferably purposeful things, to unremember. She showers, dresses, e-mails Parkaboy.

Mushi mushi. I hope you’ve gotten Judy out of that elastic bandage. She makes a great Keiko. I’ll have that printed out and personally inscribed, and after that it’s up to you. Got a laptop that goes cellular, though I haven’t figured how to do that yet. But I’m taking it with me today and I will. I’ll be checking my mail, and here’s the number of my cell here, if you need to go to voice.

She checks the number of her phone and types it in.

All I can do now is wait for you to hook me up with Taki.

She’s spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it’s been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd.

She considers opening the latest from her mother, but decides it might be too much, after that waking reverie. It often is.

Downstairs, in the business center, an exquisite girl in something like the Miyake version of an office lady uniform inkjets the Keiko image on a stiff sheet of superglossy eight-and-a-half by eleven.

The image embarrasses Cayce, but the pretty OL exhibits no reaction at all. Emboldened, Cayce has her print out Darryl’s kanji as well, requests a thick black marker, and asks the girl to copy it, inscribing the photograph for her.

“We need it for a shoot,” she lies by way of explanation. Unnecessarily, because the girl considers whatever it says there, calmly judges the available space on the photo, and executes a very lively looking version, complete with exclamation marks. Then she pauses, the marker still poised.

“Yes?” Cayce asks.

“Pardon me, but would be good with Happy Face?”

“Please.”

The girl quickly adds a Happy Face, caps the marker, hands the photograph to Cayce with both hands, and bows.

“Thank you very much.”

“You are welcome.” Bowing again.

Walking past the bamboo grove in the sky-high lobby she catches a glimpse of her hair in a mirrored wall.

Speed-dials Jennifer Brossard.

“It’s Cayce. I need my hair cut.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Got a pen?”

Twenty minutes later, in Shibuya, she’s settling in to a hot-rocks massage that she hasn’t asked for, in a twilit room on the fifteenth floor of a cylindrical building that vaguely resembles part of a Wurlitzer jukebox. None of these women speak English but she’s decided just to go with the program, whatever it is, and count on getting her hair cut at some point in the process.

Which she does, in great and alien luxury, for the better part of four hours, though it proves to involve a kelp wrap, a deep facial, manifold tweezings and pluckings, a manicure, a pedicure, lower-leg wax, and close-call avoidance of a bikini job.

When she tries to pay with the Blue Ant card, they giggle and wave it away. She tries again and one of them points to the card’s Blue Ant
logo. Either Blue Ant has an account, she decides, or they do Blue Ant’s models and this is a freebie.

Walking back out into Shibuya sunlight, she feels simultaneously lighter and less intelligent, as though she’s left more than a few brain cells back there with the other scruff. She’s wearing more makeup than she’d usually apply in a month, but it’s been brushed on by Zen-calm professionals, swaying to some kind of Japanese Enya-equivalent.

The first mirror she sees herself in stops her. Her hair, she has to admit, is really something, some paradoxical state between sleek and tousled. Anime hair, rendered hi-rez.

The rest of the image isn’t working, though. The standard CPUs can’t stand up to this sushi-chef level of cosmetic presentation.

She opens and closes her mouth, afraid to lick her lips. She has their repair kit in with the laptop, probably hundreds of dollars’ worth of that other kind of Mac product, but she knows she’ll never get it on again like this.

But there, just down the block, is one or another branch of Parco, any of which houses enough micro-boutiques to make Fred Segal on Melrose look like an outlet store in Montana.

Less than an hour later she emerges from Parco wearing the tape-patched Rickson’s, a black knit skirt, black cotton sweater, black Fogal tights that she suspects cost half a month’s rent on her place in New York, and a black pair of obscurely retro French suede boots that definitely did. She has the CPUs she was wearing folded into a big Parco carrier bag, and the laptop in a graphite-colored, hip-hugging piece of ergonomic body luggage, with a single wide strap that passes diagonally between her breasts and lends the sweater a little help, that way.

Conversion to CPU status has been conferred with the aid of a seam ripper from the notions section of a branch of Muji, located on the eighth floor, leaving all the labels behind. All but the very small label on
the hip bag, which simply says
LUGGAGE LABEL
. She might even be able to live with that. She’ll have to see.