Pattern Recognition (6 page)

She looks up at the ceiling.

And finds herself remembering the experience of lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted, beneath a boyfriend named Donny.

Donny had been more problematic than most other Cayce Pollard boyfriends, and she has come to believe that this had all been signaled in the first place by the fact that he was called Donny. Donny was not
something, a woman friend had pointed out, that the men they went out with were usually called. Donny was of Irish-Italian extraction, from East Lansing, and had both a drinking problem and no visible means of support. But Donny was also very beautiful, and sometimes very funny, though not always intentionally, and Cayce had gone through a period of finding herself, though she never really planned to, under Donny, and Donny’s big grin, in the none-too-fresh bed in his apartment on Clinton Street, between Rivington and Delancey.

But this final and particular time, watching him phase-shift into what she’d learned to recognize as the run-up to one of his ever-reliable orgasms, she’d for some reason stretched her arms above her head, perhaps even luxuriously, her left hand sliding accidentally under the cockroach-colored veneer of the headboard. Where it encountered something cold and hard and very precisely made. Which she brailled, shortly, into the square butt of an automatic pistol—held there, probably, with tape very similar to the tape she’d used here, this morning, to conceal the hole in her Buzz Rickson’s.

Donny, she knew, was left-handed, and had so positioned this so that he could reach it conveniently as he lay in bed.

Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if boyfriend sleeps with gun, Cayce does not share bed, or bod, with (now abruptly former) boyfriend.

And so she’d lain there, her fingertip against what she assumed was the checkered hardwood of the gun’s grip, and watched Donny take his last ride on that particular pony.

But here, in Camden Town, in Damien’s flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, there is a room. It is the room where she’s slept on previous visits, and she knows that Damien has now converted it to a home studio, where he indulges his passion for mixing.

Up there, she wonders, now, mightn’t there be someone?

The someone who somehow got in here in her absence and idly took
a look at those Asian sluts? It seems bizarre, and impossible, and yet horribly, if barely, possible. Or is it all too very possible?

She makes herself look around the room again, and notices the roll of black tape on the carpet. It is upright, as though it had rolled there. And remembers, very clearly, placing it, when she’d finished with it, on its side, so that it wouldn’t roll off, on the edge of the trestle table.

Something takes her into the kitchen, then, and she finds herself looking into a drawer containing Damien’s kitchen knives. Which are new, and not much used, and probably quite sharp. And, while she is not uncertain that she could defend herself with one of these if required, the idea of introducing sharp edges into the equation seems not entirely a good one. She tries another drawer and finds a square cardboard box of machine parts, heavy-looking and precise and slightly oily, which she assumes are leftovers from the robot girls. One of these, thick and cylindrical, fits neatly and solidly into her hand, squared-off edges just showing at either end of her closed fist. What you can do with a roll of quarters, she remembers, Donny coming in handy after all.

She takes this with her as she mounts the stairs to Damien’s home recording studio. Which proves to be just that, and unoccupied, with no hiding places whatever. A futon, narrow and new, that would be her bed if Damien were here.

Back down the stairs.

She goes through the space carefully, holding her breath as she opens both of the two closets. Where there is very little at all, Damien being not a clothes person.

She looks into each of the lower cabinets in the renovated kitchen, and in the space beneath the sink. Where no prowler crouches, but the reno crew have left a big yellow metric measuring tape.

She puts the chain on the locked door to the hallway. It is not much of a chain, by New York standards, and she’s lived in New York long enough to put very little trust in chains, regardless. But still.

She examines the windows, all of which are closed, and all but one of which are so thoroughly painted shut that she estimates it would take a carpenter three very expensive hours and a fair number of tools to open one. The one that has been opened, no doubt by that same expensive carpenter, is presently secured by a pair of mirror-world sash bolts, their hidden tongues to be extended and retracted by a sort of key-like wrench or driver, with an oddly shaped head. She has seen these used in London before, and has no idea where Damien keeps his. Since this can only be done from within, and the glass is intact, she rules out the windows as points of entry.

She looks back at the door.

Someone has a key. Two keys, she remembers, for this door, and possibly a third for the street door.

Damien must have a new girlfriend, someone he hasn’t mentioned. Or else an old one, someone who’s retained the keys. Or a cleaner perhaps, someone who forgot something and returned for it while Cayce was out.

Then she remembers that the keys are new, the locks having been changed after completion of the renovation, causing hers to have had to be FedExed to New York on the eve of her departure. This by Damien’s assistant, the one who’d come in to put the place back together. And she remembers this woman on the phone with her in New York, concerned because the keys she’d just sent off were the only set she had, and apologizing that Damien currently had no housecleaner.

She goes into the bedroom and examines her things. Nothing seems to have been disturbed. She remembers an eerily young Sean Connery, in that first James Bond film, using fine clear Scottish spit to paste one of his gorgeous black hairs across the gap between the jamb and the door of his hotel room. Off to the casino, he will know, upon returning, whether or not his space has been violated.

Too late for that.

She goes into the other room and looks at the Cube, which has gone back to sleep, and at the roll of tape on the carpet. The room is clean and simple, semiotically neutral, Damien having charged his decorators, on threat of dismissal, with the absolute avoidance of shelter magazine chic of any kind.

What else is there, here, that might retain information?

The telephone.

On the table beside the computer.

It is an unusually simple mirror-world telephone, none of the usual bells or whistles. It doesn’t even have call-display, Damien viewing such things as time-sinks and needless recomplications.

It does, however, have a redial button.

She picks up the handset and looks at it, as though expecting it to speak.

She presses the redial button. Listens to a sequence of mirror-world rings. She is waiting for the voice mail at Blue Ant to pick up, or perhaps a weekend receptionist, because she hasn’t used this phone since calling them, Friday morning, to confirm that her car was on the way.

“
Lasciate un messaggio, risponderò appena possibile.
”

A woman’s voice, brisk and impatient.

Tone.

She almost screams. Hangs frantically up.

Leave a message. I will reply as soon as I can.

Dorotea.

6.
THE MATCH FACTORY

“First priority,” Cayce tells Damien’s flat, hearing her father’s voice, “secure the perimeter.”

Win Pollard, twenty-five years an evaluator and improver of physical security for American embassies worldwide, had retired to develop and patent humane crowd-control barriers for rock concerts. His idea of a bedtime story had been the quiet, systematic, and intricately detailed recitation of how he’d finally secured the sewer connections at the Moscow embassy.

She looks at the white-painted door and guesses it to be made of oak. Like so many things Victorian, far more solidly built than it ever needed to be. Hinges are on the inside, as they should be, and this means that it swings inward, toward a blank section of wall. She judges the distance between door and wall, then looks at the table.

She gets the yellow tape she’d noticed earlier from beneath the sink, using it to measure the length of the table, then the distance between the closed and chained door and the wall. Eight centimeters to spare, and with the table in position, lengthwise, between door and wall, it will require either a fire ax or explosives to get into the flat.

She transfers the telephone, cable modem, keyboard, speakers and Studio Display monitor to the carpet, without disconnecting them or shutting the Cube down. The screen wakes when she does this and she sees Asian Sluts still there, same position. When she moves the Cube itself, her hand accidentally covers its static switch. It powers off. She touches the spot to reboot and turns to the table, the top of which lifts easily off the two trestles. It’s heavy and solid, but Cayce is one of those
slight-looking women who combine considerable wiry strength with low body weight. This had made her, in college, a much better rock climber than her psychologist boyfriend, to his ongoing and increasing annoyance. She would invariably reach the top first, never intentionally, and always by a more challenging route.

She props the tabletop against the wall, beside the door, and goes back for the trestles. Returning with them, one in either hand, she positions them, then picks up the tabletop and lowers it, careful not to scuff Damien’s freshly painted wall. Unchains and unlocks the door, opening it the eight centimeters the table now allows. This proves to be not even enough to produce a gap to peer through. Perimeter secured, she closes the door, relocking and chaining it.

She sees that the Cube is showing her that it wasn’t properly shut down, so she kneels beside it and clicks that that’s okay. When she gets to the desktop, she reopens the browser and looks at the memory again, seeing that Asian Sluts still hasn’t moved itself.

Seeing it there, this time, causes her a residual hair-prickle, but she gets past that by forcing herself to open it. To her considerable and unexpected relief, it turns out not to be snuff or torture or even anything singularly nasty. What these women deserve, evidently, is active attention from erect penises. These being, in that way of visual porn for men, weirdly disembodied, as though one were to imagine they had arrived at the brink of a particular orifice through no individual human agency whatever. When she exits, she has to click her way past an opportunistic swarm of linked sites, and some of these, in split-second glances, look considerably worse than Asian Sluts.

Now, in browser memory, F:F:F is followed twice by Asian Sluts, as if to prove a point.

She’s trying to remember what would have come after securing the perimeter, in Win’s bedtime stories. Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get on
with ordinary business. Maintain morale. How many times has she turned to that, in the past year or so?

Hard to know what that would consist of, here and now, but then she thinks of F:F:F and the frenzy of posts the new footage will have generated. She’ll make a pot of tea-sub, cut up an orange, sit cross-legged on Damien’s carpet, and see what’s going on. Then she’ll decide what she should do about Asian Sluts and Dorotea Benedetti.

Not the first time she’s used F:F:F that way. She wonders, really, if she ever uses it any other way. It is the gift of “OΤ,” Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.

In the kitchen, boiling water, she drifts back to her father’s bedtime descriptions of that perimeter-containment job in Moscow.

She’d always secretly wanted the KGB spy devices to make it through, because she’d only ever been able to envision them as tiny clockwork brass submarines, as intricate in their way as Fabergé eggs. She’d imagined them evading each of Win’s snares, one by one, and surfacing in the bowls of staff toilets, tiny gears buzzing. But this had made her feel guilty, because it was Win’s job, and his passion, to keep them from doing that. And she’d never been able to imagine exactly what it was they were there to do, or what they’d need to do next in order to get on with it.

Damien’s kettle starts to whistle.

Settled in picnic mode before the Cube, she opens F:F:F and sees that the posts have indeed been flying. But also, to a certain extent, that the shit has been hitting the fan.

Parkaboy and Mama Anarchia are flaming one another again.

Parkaboy is de facto spokesperson for the Progressives, those who assume that the footage consists of fragments of a work in progress, something unfinished and still being generated by its maker.

The Completists, on the other hand, a relative but articulate minority, are convinced that the footage is comprised of snippets from a finished
work, one whose maker chooses to expose it piecemeal and in nonsequential order. Mama Anarchia is the consummate Completist.

The implications of this, for some F:F:F regulars, border on the theological, but it’s fairly simple for Cayce: If the footage consists of clips from a finished film, of whatever length, every footagehead, for whatever reason, is being toyed with, unmercifully teased, in one of the most annoying fashions ever devised.

The Ur-footageheads who discovered and connected the earliest known fragments had of course to entertain the Completist possibility. When there were five fragments, or a dozen, it seemed more easily possible that these might be parts of some relatively short work, perhaps a student effort, however weirdly polished and strangely compelling. But as the number of downloads grew, and the mystery of their common origin deepened, many chose to believe that they were being shown these bits of a work in progress, and possibly in the order in which they were being completed. And, whether you held that the footage was mainly live action or largely computer-generated, the evident production values had come increasingly to argue against the idea of a student effort, or indeed of anything amateur in the usual sense. The footage was simply too remarkable.