Pattern Recognition (36 page)

“Sergei says it is a production that never ends,” Stella says, seeing Cayce looking not at the view but the chart. “Only the start of the work can be done here, of course.”

“But does it end?” Cayce feels herself blushing, appalled that she’s been unable to resist immediately asking so pointed a question.

“You mean, is linear narrative?”

“I had to ask.” She feels as though Parkaboy, Ivy, Filmy, and Maurice, the whole F:F:F crew are in the wings, counting on her.

“I do not know. One day, perhaps, she will start to edit as she edited her student film: to a single frame. Or perhaps one day they speak, the characters. Who knows? Nora? She does not say.”

A young man with bushy ginger hair enters, nods to them, and seats himself before one of the computers.

“Come,” says Stella, moving in the direction he’d come from. “You know this idea, ‘squat,’ like Amsterdam, Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“You have not, in America?”

“Not exactly.”

“This was squat, these rooms. Famous, in eighties. A party here. Seven years. Not once did party end. People come, make the party, more come, some go, make the party, always. Talking of freedom, art, things of the spirit. Nora and I were schoolgirls, first coming here. Our father would be very angry, seeing us here. He did not know.” This room is larger, but filled with a makeshift cube farm, workstations walled off with sheets of unpainted composite board. The screens are dark now, the chairs empty. There’s a plastic Garfield atop one monitor, other signs of workplace personalization. She picks up a square of clear acrylic: laser-etched in its core are the Coca-Cola logo, a crude representation of
the Twin Towers, and the words “WE REMEMBER.” She quickly puts it down.

“You see it now, you cannot imagine. Once Victor Tsoi sang here, in this room. People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”

“What do you do now, in this room?”

“My sister’s work is transferred to production facility.”

“Is she here, now?”

“She is working. Now you will see her.”

“But I couldn’t interrupt her—”

“No. She is here, when she is working. You must understand. When she is not working, she is not here.”

The fourth room is at the end of a narrow hallway, its ceiling as high as those in the other rooms, its plaster darkened with the dirt of years of hands, lightening above shoulder-level. The door at its end is smooth and white, insubstantial-looking against the scabrous plaster.

Stella opens it, steps back, softly gestures for Cayce to enter.

At first she thinks this room is windowless, its sole illumination the largest LCD display Cayce has ever seen, but as her eyes adjust she sees that three tall narrow windows, behind the screen, have been painted black. But the part of her that notes this is some basic mammalian module tracking whereabouts and potential exits: All higher attention is locked on the screen, on which is frozen an image from a segment of footage that she knows she has never seen.

He is reaching out, perhaps from the girls POV, as if to touch her in parting.

A cursor like a bombsight whips across the image, locking on the
corner of his mouth. Mouse-click. Zoom. Into image-grain. Some quick adjustment. Clicks. Out of zoom.

The meaning of his expression, and the feeling of the frame, have changed.

So much for Completism, Cayce thinks. The footage is a work in progress.

“This is Nora,” Stella says, stepping softly past Cayce to lay her hands on the shawl-draped shoulders of the figure in the chair before the screen. Nora s right hand pauses. Still resting on the mouse, though Cayce senses this has nothing to do with her sisters touch, or the presence of a stranger.

Cayce still cannot see her face. Her hair, like her sister’s, is long and dark, center-parted, its gloss reflecting the glow of the screen.

Now Stella speaks to her sister in Russian, and slowly Nora turns from the screen, the manipulated image illuminating her face in three-quarter profile.

It is Stella’s face, but some fault bisects it vertically, not quite evenly. There are no scars, only this skewing of the bone beneath. Nora’s skin is smooth as Stella’s, and as white.

Cayce looks into the dark eyes. Nora sees her. Then doesn’t. Turns back to the screen.

Stella rolls a workstation chair into position. “Sit. Watch her work.” Cayce shakes her head, her eyes stinging with tears.

“Sit,” says Stella, very gently. “You will not disturb her. You have come a long way. You must watch her work.”

HER
watch tells her that over three hours have passed, when she leaves Nora’s room.

She wonders if she will ever be able to describe her experience there to anyone, even Parkaboy. How she has watched a segment, or the bones
of one, being built up from almost nothing. Mere scraps of found video. How once a man had stood on a platform in a station, and turned, and raised his hand, the motion captured, the grainy image somehow finding its way, however much later, to one of Nora’s subsidiary screens. To be chosen, today, by the roving, darting cursor. Elements of that man’s gesture becoming aspects of the boy in the dark coat, his collar up. The boy whose life, it seems, is bounded by the T-shaped city, the city Nora is mapping through the footage she generates. Her consciousness, Cayce understands, somehow bounded by or bound to the T-shaped fragment in her brain: part of the arming mechanism of the Claymore mine that killed her parents, balanced too deeply, too precariously within her skull, to ever be removed. Something stamped out, once, in its thousands, by an automated press in some armory in America. Perhaps the workers who’d made that part, if they’d thought at all in terms of end-use, had imagined it being used to kill Russians. But that was over now, Win’s war and Baranov’s, old as the brick compound behind Baranov’s caravan: concrete fence posts and the echoing absence of dogs. And somehow this one specific piece of ordnance, adrift perhaps since the days of the Soviets’ failed war with the new enemies, had found its way into the hands of Nora’s uncle’s enemies, and this one small part, only slightly damaged by the explosion of the ruthlessly simple device, had been flung into the very center of Nora’s brain. And from it, and from her other wounds, there now emerged, accompanied by the patient and regular clicking of her mouse, the footage.

In the darkened room whose windows would have offered a view of the Kremlin, had they been scraped clean of paint, Cayce had known herself to be in the presence of the splendid source, the headwaters of the digital Nile she and her friends had sought. It is here, in the languid yet precise moves of a woman’s pale hand. In the faint click of image-capture. In the eyes only truly present when focused on this screen.

Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.

*  *  *

STELLA
finds her in the hallway, her face wet with tears, eyes closed, shoulders braced against plaster as uneven as the bone of Nora’s forehead.

She places her hands on Cayce’s shoulders. “Now you have seen her work.”

Cayce opens her eyes, nods.

“Come,” says Stella, “your eyes are melted,” and leads her past the workstations, into the crepuscular glow of the kitchen. She soaks a thick pad of gray paper toweling in the stream from an old brass tap and passes it to Cayce, who presses it against her hot eyes. The paper is rough, the water cold. “There are few buildings like this one, now,” Stella says. “The land is far too valuable. Even this, this place from our childhood, which we both loved, our uncle owns. He keeps it from the developers, for us, because Nora finds it comforting. Whatever cost is of no importance to him. He wishes us to be safe, and Nora as comfortable as possible.”

“And you? What do you wish, Stella?”

“I wish the world to know her work. Something you could not know: how it was, here, for artists. Whole universes of blood and imagination, built over lifetimes in rooms like these, never to be seen. To die with their creators, and be swept out. Now Nora, what she does, it joins the sea.” She smiles. “It has brought you to us.”

“Are they your parents, Stella? The couple?”

“Perhaps, when they are young. They resemble them, yes. But if what she is doing tells a story, it seems not to be our parents’ story. Not their world. It is another world. It is always another world.”

“Yes,” Cayce agrees, putting down the cold wet mass of paper, “it is. Stella, the people who protect you, on your uncle’s behalf, who do you suppose they protect you from?”

“From his enemies. From anyone who might wish to use us to hurt
him. You must understand, these precautions are not unusual, for a man like my uncle. It is unusual that Nora is an artist, and her situation, her condition, is unusual, and that I wish her work to be seen, yes, but it is not unusual, here, that we should be protected.”

“But do you understand that they also, perhaps without understanding it, protect you from something else?”

“I do not understand.”

“Your sister’s art has become very valuable. You’ve succeeded, you see. Its a genuine mystery, Nora’s art, something hidden at the heart of the world, and more and more people follow it, all over the world.”

“But what is the danger?”

“We have our own rich and powerful men. Any creation that attracts the attention of the world, on an ongoing basis, becomes valuable, if only in terms of potential.”

“To be commercial? My uncle would not allow this degree of attention.”

“It’s already valuable. More valuable than you could imagine. The commercial part would simply be branding, franchising. And they’re on to it, Stella. Or at least one of them is, and he’s very clever. I know because I work for him.”

“You do?”

“Yes, but I’ve decided that I won’t tell him I found you. I won’t tell him who you are or where you are, or who Nora is, or anything else I’ve learned here. I won’t be working for him, now. But others will, and they’ll find you, and you have to be ready.”

“How, ready?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try to figure that out.”

“Thank you,” Stella says. “It gives me pleasure, that you have seen my sister work.”

“Thank you.”

They hug, Stella kissing her on the cheek.

“Your driver is waiting.”

“Send him away, please. I need to walk. To feel the city. And I haven’t seen the Metro.”

Stella produces a phone from her gray skirt and pushes a key. Says something in Russian.

38.
PUPPENKOPF

She finds herself on crowded Arbat.

Leaving the squat behind Georgievsky, she’d drifted, unmoored by her experience of the creation. That segment with the beach pan, she now knows, is mapped on the one jagged edge of the T-arm, unthinkable intimacy

Through one street and the next, until she’d come upon the red M of a Metro station.

Descending, she’d purchased, with too large a bill and some difficulty, tokens of what appeared to be luminous plastic, the color of glow-in-the-dark toy skeletons, each with its own iconic M.

One of these had been sufficient for her voyage, whose directions and stations she now would never know.

She’d given herself to the dream, in this case to the eerie Stalinist grandeurs of Moscow’s underground, which had fascinated her father.

That sense she’d had, of some things here being grotesquely large, had doubled, underground, the lavishness of the stations exceeding even her childhood fantasies. Gilt bronze, peach marble shot with aquamarine, engine-chased Cartier lusters applied to the supporting columns of what seemed more like subterranean ballrooms than subway platforms, their chandeliers blazing, as if the wealth of what Win had called the final empire of the nineteenth century had come pouring in, all through the deepest, darkest thirties, to line these basilicas of public transport.

So overwhelming, so exceedingly peculiar in its impact, that it actually succeeded in distracting her, knocking her at least partially out of whatever it was that she’d been feeling as she’d descended those steep
stairs to the clanging steel door, and out into a brightness that both startled and hurt.

She has no idea where she’d gone, riding for at least two hours, changing trains on impulse, taking madly majestic stairs and escalators at random. Until, finally, she’d emerged, here, to find herself on Arbat, broad and crowded, which her but-it’s-really-like module keeps trying to tell her is really like Oxford Street, though, really, it isn’t at all.

Thirsty, she enters a vaguely Italian-looking (the match-up module, failing again) establishment offering soft drinks and Internet access, and buys a bottle of water and half an hour, to check her mail.

The keyboard is Cyrillic; she keeps accidentally hitting a key that toggles it back from English-emulation, and then being unable to find it again, but she manages to retrieve a message from Parkaboy.

I like to think I’m as blasé as the next pretentious asshole, but your travel agent in London is, I’ve gotta say, the business. As in: I’m in Charles de Gaulle, in some kind of Air France cocoon hand-stitched from Hermès bridle-leather, watching CNN in French and waiting to get on their next flight to Moscow. Trouble is, no fault of Sylvie’s, something’s upfucked the bomb-sniffers here and even we of the uber-class have to wait until planes can fly. So they’ve put all five of us in here with what I sort of hate to admit is the best cold buffet I’ve ever tasted, and they keep opening champagne. I may not have mentioned it before but since the recent unpleasantness I’ve been one of those people not too happy at the thought of flying; why I took that train to visit Darryl. However, with the rush of events and the sheer level of cosseting, I haven’t until now been very aware of actually doing any. America sort of ended at check-in. And when they get the sniffers sorted here, I’m your way fast, though I may need to be taught to feed and wash myself again. You can help by arranging a supply of those little hot towels. Thanks again.