Read Pattern Recognition Online
Authors: William Gibson
Cayce Pollard
Watching her hands continue briefly to type, in best typing-class mode, in privately sarcastic imitation of a woman imagining that she is actually accomplishing something.
(CayceP)
Aware in just that instant of how the park distances the sound of London, giving her the sensation of existing at some still point around which all else revolves. As though the broad gravel avenues are leys, terminating at Peter Pan.
The angry child’s fingers, typing.
And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.
Touchpadding down menu to Send.
And of course she doesn’t.
And watches as it sends.
“I didn’t,” she protests to the iBook on the grass, the colors of its screen faint in the sunlight. “I didn’t,” she says to Peter Pan.
She couldn’t have. She did.
Cross-legged on her jacket, hunched over the iBook.
She doesn’t know what it is that she feels.
Automatically, she checks for mail.
Timing out, empty.
A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.
MECHANICALLY
consuming a bowl of Thai salad in an all-Asia’s restaurant across the street. She hasn’t had breakfast today, and maybe this will calm her down.
She doubts it, after what she’s done.
Accept that it happened, she tells herself. Table all questions of intentionality.
She almost feels as though something in the park had made her do it. Genius loci, Parkaboy would say. Too much sun. Convergence of
lines. (Convergence of something, certainly, she guesses, but in some part of herself she can’t access.)
The iBook is open again, on the table in front of her. She’s just looked up the name and address of the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain
armaz.ru
: one A. N. Polakov, in what she takes to be an office building, in Cyprus.
If she smoked, she thinks, she’d be giving Baranov a run for his money. Right now she almost wishes she did.
She looks at her anti-Casio and tries to do time-zone math for Ohio. Remembers that little map that Macs have, but it’s too much trouble to remember where to find it.
She’ll call Boone. She has to tell him what’s happened. She shuts down the iBook and uncables the phone. Something tells her that it means something, that she isn’t calling Parkaboy first, but she chooses to ignore that.
Sends the first of the cell numbers he’d loaded for her on the flight from Tokyo.
“Boone?”
A woman giggles. “Who’s calling, please?” In the background she hears Boone say, “Give me that.”
Cayce looks at her mug of steaming green tea, remembering the last time she drank green tea, in Hongo, with Boone.
“Cayce Pollard.”
“Boone Chu,” he says, having taken the phone from the woman.
“It’s Cayce, Boone.” Remembering the kudzu on the iron roof. Thinking: You said she was in Madrid. “Just checking in.”
Marisa.
Damien has a Marina. Someone will turn up with a Marika soon.
“Good,” he says. “News on your end?”
She looks out at traffic passing on the High Street. “No.”
“I may be getting somewhere, here. I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.” Stabbing the button. “I’m sure you are.”
A server, apparently noticing Cayce’s expression, looks alarmed. Cayce forces a smile, looks down at her bowl. Puts the phone down with exaggerated calm and picks up her chopsticks. “Fuck,” she says, under her breath, willing herself to continue eating.
How is it that she still sets herself up for these things? she asks herself.
When the noodles and chicken are gone, and the server’s brought more tea, feeling a need to do something for herself, and on her own, she phones Bigend’s cell.
“Yes?”
“Cayce, Hubertus. Question.”
“Yes?”
“The man from Cyprus. Did Dorotea have a name?”
“Yes. Hold on. Andreas Polakov.”
“Hubertus?”
“Yes?”
“Did you just look that up?”
“Yes.”
“In what?”
“The transcript of the conversation.”
“Did she know you were recording it?”
“Where are you?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I just did. Do you have any news for me?”
“Not yet.”
“Boone is in Ohio.”
“Yes. I know that. Bye.”
She reconnects the phone to the iBook and boots up again. She needs to tell Parkaboy what she’s learned, what she’s done.
She checks for incoming.
One.
She chokes on her tea, coughing. Almost upsets it across the keyboard.
Forces herself to open it, just open it, as if it were any other e-mail. As if—
Hello! This is very strange mail.
Cayce closes her eyes. When she opens them, the words are still there.
I am in Moscow. I also have lost my father in a bomb. My mother too. How do you have this address? Who are these people you are telling me? Segments, you mean the parts of the work?
And nothing more.
“Yes,” she says to the iBook, “yes. The work.”
The work.
“
CAYCE
again, Hubertus. Who do I call for travel?”
“Sylvie Jeppson. At the office. Where are you going?”
“Paris, next Sunday.” She’s on her third green tea and they’re starting to begrudge her the table.
“Why?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow. Thanks. Bye.”
She calls Blue Ant and is put through to Sylvie Jeppson.
“Do I need a visa for Russia?”
“Yes, you do.”
“How long does that take?”
“It depends. If you pay more, they’ll do it in an hour. But they tend
to leave you sitting in an empty room for an hour beforehand. A sort of Soviet nostalgia thing. But we have an in with their Department of Foreign Affairs.”
“We do?”
“We’ve done some work for them. Quietly. Where are you?”
“Kensington High Street.”
“That’s convenient. Do you have your passport?”
“Yes.”
“Can you meet me in thirty minutes? Five, Kensington Palace Gardens. At Bayswater. Queensway tube’s closest. You need three passport-sized photographs.”
“Can you do that?”
“Hubertus wouldn’t want you to wait. And I know who to speak to, there. But you’ll have to hurry. They don’t stay open in the afternoon.”
LEAVING
the visa section of the Russian Consulate, the tall, pale, unflappable Sylvie asks, “When do you want to go?”
“Sunday. In the morning. To Paris.”
“That’ll be ΒA, unless you prefer Air France. You wouldn’t rather take the train?”
“No, thanks.”
“And when to Russia?”
“I don’t know yet. It’s really just an outside possibility, at this point, but I wanted to have the visa ready. Thank you for your help.”
“Anything,” says Sylvie, smiling. “I’ve been told to take extremely good care of you.”
“You have.”
“I’m taking a cab back to Soho. Like a lift?”
Cayce sees two approaching, both vacant.
“No, thanks. I’m going to Camden.”
She lets Sylvie take the first one.
“Aeroflot,” she says, when the driver of the second asks where she’s going.
“Piccadilly,” he says.
She phones Voytek.
“Hello?”
“It’s Cayce, Voytek.”
“Casey! Hello!”
“I’m going out of town again. I need to give you Damien’s keys. Can you come by the flat? Say four-thirty? I’m sorry for the short notice.” She promises herself she’ll buy him his scaffolding.
“No problem, Casey!”
“Thanks. See you.”
She’ll buy the scaffolding with Bigend’s card. But she’ll use her own, at Aeroflot.
“I’ve got your participation mystique right here,” she says, though whether to Parkaboy, London, or the general or specific mysteries of her life today, she doesn’t know.
She sees the cabbie glance at her in his mirror.
33.
BOT
Aeroflot flight SU244, departing Heathrow at ten-thirty in the evening, proves to be a Boeing 737, not the Tupolev she’d been hoping for. She’s never been to Russia before, and thinks of it primarily in the light of childhood stories of Win’s; the world beyond the perimeters of the world he’d been dedicated to protecting; a world of toilet-navigating spy devices and ceaseless duplicity. In her childhood’s Russia it’s always snowing. Men wear dark furry hats.
She wonders, finding her aisle seat in coach, whether Aeroflot had had to compete to retain the hammer and sickle as its logo, and how exclusive that is. Massive recognition factor. It’s a winged version, rendered with considerable delicacy, and she finds it curiously difficult to date: a sort of Victorian Futurist look. She has a neutral reaction to it, she finds, which is a great relief.
National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany’s, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil (though she certainly has that) as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well. Heinzi would have done just fine, back then, but she doubts that even he could have managed a better job of it.
Swastikas, and particularly the fact that there had been that custom type-slug for “SS,” induce a violent reaction, akin to her Tommy-phobia but in an even worse direction. She’d once worked for a month in Austria, where these symbols are not suppressed by law, as they are in Germany,
and had learned to cross the street if she realized she was approaching the window of an antique shop.
The national symbols of her homeland don’t trigger her, or so far haven’t. And over the past year, in New York, she’s been deeply grateful for this. An allergy to flags or eagles would have reduced her to shut-in status: a species of semiotic agoraphobia.
She stows her Rickson’s in the overhead bin, takes her seat, and slides the bag with the iBook beneath the seat in front of her. The legroom isn’t bad, and thinking this she experiences a kind of pseudo-nostalgia for Win’s version of Aeroflot: vicious flight attendants flinging stale sandwiches at you, and small plastic bags provided in which to place pens, a thoughtful precaution against frequent depressurizations. He’d told her that Poland, from the air, looked like Kansas as farmed by elves; the patchwork fields so much smaller, the land as flat and vast.
Soon they are taxiing toward takeoff, the seats beside her empty, and it strikes her that, through luck, and for little more than she’d paid earlier for express service on a visa, she’ll have almost as much space and privacy as she’d had to and from Tokyo.
Magda, who’d turned up in Voytek’s stead to get the keys, knows where she’s going, and her mother, on whom she’s finally taken mercy with an e-mail, and Parkaboy. These three know she’s going, but someone else, she doesn’t know who, knows she’s coming.
The Boeing’s turbines shift pitch.
Hi Mom,
I hope you’ll forgive my silence, or anyway not take it personally. I’ve completed the job I came here for, and have been hired by the man who runs/owns the company to do something more directly on his behalf—cultural investigation, not to sound so mysterious about it, around some new ideas about film distribution and how films can be structured. Sounds dull but actually I’ve been completely fascinated by it, which is largely why you haven’t heard from me. Also, I think it’s been good for me to get out of New York and stop thinking so much about Dad, which may also be why I haven’t been writing. I know we’ve agreed to disagree about the EVP thing, but those clips you sent really creep me out. Can’t think of a more honest way to put it. But, for all of that, I dreamed of him recently and he seemed to give me a very specific piece of advice, which I acted on, and which proved correct, so maybe there’s a point where we don’t entirely disagree on that stuff. I don’t know. I just know that I’m finally coming to terms with the idea that he really is gone, and the insurance stuff and the pension and all of that just feels like red tape. I wish that was over but sometimes I wonder if it ever will be. Anyway, I’m also writing to say that I’m headed for Moscow tonight, on that same business I mentioned. It’s strange to finally be going to the place that Dad was always going off to when I was a kid. It’s never seemed like a real place, to me, more a fairy tale; wherever it was that he’d come back from with those painted wooden eggs and his stories. I remember him telling me that it was just a matter of keeping them more or less in check until the food riots started, and when it all just changed, no food riots, I remember I reminded him of that. He said they’d been done in by the Beatles, so the food riots hadn’t had to happen. The Beatles and losing their own Vietnam. Have to go now, I’m in departure at Heathrow. I’m glad you’re at Rose of the World because I know you like those people. Thanks for keeping in touch and I’ll try to do a better job of that myself. Love, Cayce
I never really imagined writing to tell you this, but I may have found him. Actually I may have had an e-mail from him, to which I am about to reply. I’m at Heathrow, waiting to get on the red-eye to Moscow, arr 5:30 A.M. tomorrow. That’s where he says he is. I found somebody who was able to do something with that number of Taki’s, don’t ask me how (actually much better we don’t know) and got me an email address. I did something weird. Sitting in a park and started writing him a letter, not one I was ever going to send. Kind of like writing a letter to God, except I had the address, and I put it in and then I guess I sent it. I didn’t mean to, or even, actually, see myself do it, but it sent. Less than half an hour, reply came. Said he was in Moscow. Look, I know you want to know EVERYTHING but there’s not much else, not much content in the reply, and I don’t want to copy you on that, not this way. Actually the way I got that address has left me feeling that none of what we do here is ever really private, and the last thing I want, right now, is to attract any attention. So bear with me, Parkaboy; hang in; more will be revealed. Maybe even all. Whatever, there’s a chance I’ll know more tomorrow, and then I’ll call you. Need to info-dump bigtime. Am I excited? I guess so; it’s funny but I can’t even tell. It’s like I don’t know whether to scream or shit.