Pattern Recognition (3 page)

Dorotea puts her water down beside the H&P envelope and does a
rather inexpert job of stubbing out her cigarette. “I will speak with Heinzi this afternoon. I would call him now but I know that he is in Stockholm, meeting with Volvo.”

The air seems very thick with smoke now and Cayce feels like coughing.

“There’s no rush, Dorotea,” Stonestreet says, and Cayce hopes that this means that there really, really is.

CHARLIE
Don’t Surf is full, the food California-inflected Vietnamese fusion with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness. The white walls are decorated with enormous prints of close-up black-and-white photographs of ‘Nam-era Zippo lighters, engraved with crudely drawn American military symbols, still cruder sexual motifs, and stenciled slogans. These remind Cayce of photographs of tombstones in Confederate graveyards, except for the graphic content and the nature of the slogans, and the ’Nam theme suggests to her that the place has been here for a while.

IF I HAD A FARM IN HELL AND A HOUSE IN VIETNAM I’D SELL THEM BOTH

The lighters in the photographs are so worn, so dented and sweat-corroded, that Cayce may well be the first diner to ever have deciphered these actual texts.

BURY ME FACE DOWN SO THE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS

“His surname actually is ‘Heinzi,’ you know,” Stonestreet is saying, pouring a second glass of the Californian cabernet that Cayce, though she knows better, is drinking. “It only sounds like a nickname. Any given names, though, have long since gone south.”

“Ibiza,” Cayce suggests.

“Er?”

“Sorry, Bernard, I’m tired.”

“Those pills. From New Zealand.”

THERE IS NO GRAVITY THE WORLD SUCKS

“I’ll be fine.” A sip of wine.

“She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”

“Dorotea?”

Stonestreet rolls his eyes, which are a peculiar brown, inflected as with Mercurochrome; something iridescent, greenly copper-tinged.

173
AIRBORNE

She asks after the American wife. Stonestreet dutifully recounts the launch of a cucumber-based mask, the thin end of a fresh wedge of product, touching on the politics involved in retail placement. Lunch arrives. Cayce concentrates on tiny fried spring rolls, setting herself for auto-nod and periodically but sympathetically raised eyebrows, grateful that he’s carrying the conversational ball. She’s way down deep in that trough now, with the half-glass of cabernet starting to exert its own lateral influence, and she knows that her best course here is to make nice, get some food in her stomach, and be gone.

But the Zippo tombstones, with their existential elegies, tug at her.

PHU CAT

Restaurant art that diners actually notice is a dubious idea, particularly to one with Cayce’s peculiar, visceral, but still somewhat undefined sensitivities.

“So when it looked as though Harvey Knickers weren’t going to come aboard…”

Nod, raise eyebrows, chew spring roll. This is working. She covers her glass when he starts to pour her more wine.

And so she makes it easily enough through lunch with Bernard Stonestreet, blipped occasionally by these emblematic place-names from the Zippo graveyard (
CU CHI, QUI NHON
) lining the walls, and at last he has paid and they are standing up to leave.

Reaching for her Rickson’s, where she’d hung it on the back of her chair, she sees a round, freshly made hole, left shoulder, rear, the size of
the lit tip of a cigarette. Its edges are minutely beaded, brown, with melted nylon. Through this is visible a gray interlining, no doubt to some particular Cold War mil-spec pored over by the jacket’s otaku makers.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Cayce says, “nothing.” Putting on her ruined Rickson’s.

Near the door, on their way out, she numbly registers a shallow Lucite cabinet displaying an array of those actual Vietnam Zippos, perhaps a dozen of them, and automatically leans closer.

SHIT ON MY DICK OR BLOOD ON MY BLADE

Which is very much her attitude toward Dorotea, right now, though she doubts she’ll be able to do anything about it, and will only turn the anger against herself.

3.
THE ATTACHMENT

She’s gone to Harvey Nichols and gotten sick.

Should have known better.

How she responds to labels.

Down into menswear, unrealistically hoping that if anyone might have a Buzz Rickson’s it would be Harvey Nichols, their ornate Victorian pile rising like a coral reef opposite Knightsbridge station. Somewhere on the ground floor, in cosmetics, they even have Helena Stonestreet’s cucumber mask, Bernard having explained to her how he’d demonstrated his considerable powers of suasion on the HN buyers.

But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it’s all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing. Less warning aura than usual. Some people ingest a single peanut and their head swells like a basketball. When it happens to Cayce, it’s her psyche.

Tommy Hilfiger does it every time, though she’d thought she was safe now. They’d said he’d peaked, in New York. Like Benetton, the name would be around, but the real poison, for her, would have been drawn. It’s something to do with context, here, with not expecting it in London. When it starts, it’s pure reaction, like biting down hard on a piece of foil.

A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head.

My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear
with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.

She needs out of this logo-maze, desperately. But the escalator to the street exit will dump her back into Knightsbridge, seeming somehow now more of the same, and she remembers that the street runs down, and always her energy with it, to Sloane Square, another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. Laura Ashley, down there, and that can get ugly.

Remembering the fifth floor, here: a sort of Californian market, Dean & Deluca lite, with a restaurant, a separate and weirdly modular robotic sushi operation humming oddly in its midst, and a bar where they served excellent coffee.

Caffeine she’s held in reserve today, a silver bullet against serotonin-lack and big weird feelings. She can go there. There is a lift. Yes, a lift: a closet-sized elevator, small but perfectly formed. She will find it, and use it. Now.

She does. It arrives, miraculously empty, and she steps in, pressing 5. “I’m feeling rather excited,” a woman says, breathily, as the door closes, though Cayce knows she’s alone in this upright coffin of mirror and brushed steel. Fortunately she’s been this way before, and knows that these disembodied voices are there for the amusement of the shopper. “Mmmmm,” purrs the male of the species. The only equivalent audio environment she can recall was in the restroom of an upscale hamburger joint on Rodeo Drive, years ago: an inexplicable soundtrack of buzzing insects. Flies, it had sounded like, though surely that couldn’t have been the intent.

Whatever else these designer ghosts say, she blocks it out, the lift ascending miraculously, without intermediate stops, to the fifth floor.

Cayce pops out into a pale light slanting in through much glass. Fewer lunching shoppers than she remembers. But no clothing on this floor, save on people’s backs and in their glossy carrier bags. The swelling can subside, here.

She pauses by a meat counter, eyeing roasts illuminated like newly minted media faces, and probably of a biologic purity she herself could never hope to attain: animals raised on a diet more stringent than the one propounded in interviews by Stonestreet’s wife.

At the bar, a few Euromales of the dark-suited sort stand smoking their eternal cigarettes.

She bellies up, catching the barman’s eye.

“Time Out?”
he inquires, frowning slightly. Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.

“I’m sorry?”

“Time Out.
The weekly. You were on a panel. ICA.”

Institute for Contemporary Arts, last time she’d been here. With a woman from a provincial university, lecturer in the taxonomy of trade-marking. Rain falling thinly on the Mall. The audience smelling of damp wool and cigarettes. She’d accepted because she could stay a few days with Damien. He’d bought the house where he’d rented for several years, fruit of a series of Scandinavian car commercials. She’d forgotten the blurb in
Time Out,
one of those coolhunter things.

“You follow the footage.” His eyes narrowing within their brackets of black Italian plastic.

Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century.

“Were you there?” Cayce asks, jostled out of herself by this abrupt violation of context. She is not by any means a celebrity; being recognized by strangers isn’t part of her ordinary experience. But the footage has a way of cutting across boundaries, transgressing the accustomed order of things.

“My friend was there.” He looks down and runs a spotless white cloth across the bar top. Gnawed cuticle and too large a ring. “He told me that he’d run into you later, on a site. You were arguing with someone about
The Chinese Envoy.”
He looks back up. “You can’t seriously believe it’s him.”

Him being Kim Hee Park, the young Korean auteur responsible for the film in question, an interminable art-house favorite some people compare with the footage, others going so far as to suggest that Kim Park is in fact the maker of the footage. Suggesting this to Cayce is akin to asking the Pope if he’s soft on that Cathar heresy.

“No,” she says, firmly. “Of course not.”

“New segment.” Quick, under his breath.

“When?”

“This morning. Forty-eight seconds. It’s them.”

It’s as though they are in a bubble now, Cayce and the barman. No sound penetrates. “Do they speak?” she asks.

“No.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“No. Someone messaged me, on my mobile.”

“No spoilers,” Cayce warns, getting a grip.

He refolds the white cloth. A waft of blue Gitane drifts past, from the Euromales. “A drink?” The bubble bursts, admitting sound.

“Espresso, double.” She opens her East German envelope, reaching for heavy mirror-world change.

He’s drawing her espresso from a black machine down the bar. Sound of steam escaping under pressure. The forum will be going crazy, the first posts depending on time zones, history of proliferation, where the segment surfaced. It will prove impossible to trace, either uploaded via a temporary e-mail address, often from a borrowed IP, sometimes via a temporary cell phone number, or through some anonymizer. It will have been discovered by footageheads tirelessly scouring the Net, found somewhere where it’s possible to upload a video file and simply leave it there.

He returns with her coffee in a white cup, on a white saucer, and places it before her on the glossy black counter. Positions a steel basket nearby, its sections containing a variety of colorful British sugars, at least three kinds. Another aspect of the mirror-world: sugar. There is more of it, and not only in things you expect to be sweet.

She’s stacked six of the thick pound coins.

“On the house.”

“Thank you.”

The Euromales are indicating a need for fresh drink. He goes to tend to them. He looks like Michael Stipe on steroids. She takes back four of the coins and nudges the rest into the shadow of the sugar caddy. Smartly downs her double sans sugar and turns to go. Looks back as she’s leaving and he is there, regarding her severely from the depths of black parentheses.

BLACK
cab to Camden tube.

Her attack of Tommy-phobia has backed off nicely, but the trough of soul-delay has opened out into horizonless horse latitudes.

She fears she’ll be becalmed before she can lay in supplies. On autonomic pilot in a supermarket in the High Street, filling a basket. Mirror-world fruit. Colombian coffee, ground for a press. Two-percent milk.

In a nearby stationer’s, heavy on art supplies, she buys a roll of matte black gaffer’s tape.

Heading up Parkway toward Damien’s she notices a flyer adhering to a lamppost. In rain-faded monochrome a frame-grab from the footage.

He looks out, as from depths.

Works at Cantor Fitzgerald. Gold wedding band.

PARKABOY’S
e-mail is text-free. There is only the attachment.

Seated before Damien’s Cube, with the two-cup French press she bought on Parkway. Fragrant waft of powerful Colombian. She shouldn’t drink this; it will not so much defer sleep as guarantee nightmares, and she knows she’ll wake again in that dread hour, vibrating. But she must be present for the new segment. Sharp.

Always, now, the opening of an attachment containing unseen footage is profoundly liminal. A threshold state.

Parkaboy has labeled his attachment #135. One hundred and thirty-four previously known fragments—of what? A work in progress? Something completed years ago, and meted out now, for some reason, in these snippets?

She hasn’t gone to the forum. Spoilers. She wants each new fragment to impact as cleanly as possible.

Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you’ve seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films that you’ve been assembling, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure.