“I know,” says Voytek, defensively.
“No! I mean you’re in a bar, having a drink, and someone beside you starts a conversation. Someone you might fancy the look of. All very pleasant, and then you’re chatting along, and she, or he, we have men as well, mentions this great new streetwear label, or this brilliant little film they’ve just seen. Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention. And do you know what you do? This is what I can’t bloody stand about it: Do you know what you do?”
“No,” Cayce says.
“You say you like it too! You lie! At first I thought it was only men who’d do that, but women do it as well! They lie!”
Cayce has heard about this kind of advertising, in New York, but has never run across anyone who’s actually been involved in it. “And then they take it away with them,” she suggests, “this favorable mention, associated with an attractive member of the opposite sex. One who’s shown some slight degree of interest in them, whom they’ve lied to in an attempt to favorably impress.”
“But they buy jeans,” Voytek demands, “see movie? No!”
“Exactly,” Cayce says, “but that’s why it works. They don’t buy the product: They recycle the information. They use it to try to impress the next person they meet.”
“Efficient way to disseminate information? I don’t think.”
“But it is,” Cayce insists. “The model’s viral. ‘Deep niche.’ The venues would be carefully selected—”
“Bloody brilliantly! That’s the thing, I’m every night to these bleeding-edge places, cab fare, cash for drinks and food.” She takes a long pull on her half pint. “But it’s starting to do something to me. I’ll be out on my own, with friends, say, not working, and I’ll meet someone, and we’ll be talking, and they’ll mention something.”
“And?”
“Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops.” She looks at Cayce. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I’m devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I’m starting to distrust the most casual exchange.” Magda looks glum. “What sort of advertising do you do?”
“I consult on design.” Then, because this is not exactly the stuff of interesting conversation: “And I hunt ‘cool,’ although I don’t like to describe it that way. Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion.”
Magda’s eyebrows go up. “And you like my hats?”
“I really like your hats, Magda. I’d wear them, if I wore hats.”
Magda nods, excited now.
“But the ‘cool’ part—and I don’t know why that archaic usage has stuck, by the way—isn’t an inherent quality. It’s like a tree falling, in the forest.”
“It cannot hear,” declares Voytek, solemnly.
“What I mean is, no customers, no cool. It’s about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.”
“And then?”
“I point a commodifier at it.”
“And?”
“It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed.” She takes a sip of lager. Looks around the pub. The crew in here aren’t from the Children’s Crusade. She guesses they are the folks who live nearby, probably back behind this side of the street, a neighborhood less gentrified than Damien’s. The wood of the bar is worn the way old boats can be worn, virtually to splinters, held together by a thousand coats of coffin-colored varnish.
“So,” Magda says, “I am being used to establish a pattern? To fake that? To bypass a part of the process.”
“Yes,” Cayce says.
“Then why are they trying to do it with bloody video clips from the Internet? This couple kissing in a doorway? Is it a product? They won’t even tell us.”
And Cayce can only stare.
“HELENA. It’s Cayce. Thank you for dinner. It was lovely.”
“How was Hubertus? Bernard thought he might have the hots for you, to put it bluntly.”
“Bluntness appreciated, Helena, but I don’t think that’s the case. We had a drink. I’d never really had a one-on-one with him before.”
“He’s brilliant, isn’t he?” Something in her tone. A sort of resignation?
“Yes. Is Bernard there, Helena? Hate to disturb him, but I have a question about work.”
“Sorry, but he’s out. Take a message?”
“Do you know if there’s a branch, a subsidiary of some kind, of Blue Ant, called Trans? As in—lation? Or—gressive?”
Silence. “Yes. There is. Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard’s, oddly. In lawn care.”
“Pardon?” A place name?
“The cousin. Lawn care. Lawn products. But Laura heads Trans, I do know that. One of Hubertus’s pet projects.”
“Thanks, Helena. Have to run.”
“Bye, dear.”
“Bye.”
Cayce removes her card from the pay phone and hangs up, the receiver being immediately taken by a dreadlocked Crusader waiting on the sidewalk behind her.
The sunlight seems not so pleasant now. She’s made her excuses, come out here, bought a phone card, waited in line. And now it seems that Magda is indeed employed, by a sub-unit of Blue Ant, to encourage interest in the footage. What is Bigend doing?
She fords the stream of the Crusade, making it to the opposite bank and heading back down toward Parkway. The street-wide flood of kids seems strangely removed, as though they themselves are footage.
A suggestion of autumn is in the light, now, and she wonders where she’ll be this winter. Will she be here? In New York? She doesn’t know. What is that, to be over thirty and not know where you’ll be in a month or two?
She reaches a point where the Crusade flows around a stationary, drinking knot of Camden’s resident, revenant alcoholics. They are why Damien had been able to afford to rent here, years before he’d made any money or bought his house. Somewhere nearby is a Victorian doss house, a vast red brick pile of a hostel for the homeless, purpose-built and hideous, and its inhabitants, however individually transitory, have congregated in the High Street since the day it first opened. Damien had shown it to her one full-moon night, out walking. It stood as a bulwark against gentrification, he’d explained. The re-purposers, the creators of loft spaces, saw the inhabitants, these units dedicated to the steady-state consumption of fortified lagers and sugary ciders, and turned back. And these defenders stand now, drinking, amid the Children’s Crusade, rocks in a river of youth.
A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren’t on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he’d seen.
In Aberdeen the market men are locking green-painted shutters across their stalls, closing early, and the place where she’d had breakfast is in full bistro swing, a spill of laughing, drinking children out across the pavement.
She walks on, feeling not foreign but alien, made so by this latest advent of something that seems to be infecting everything. Hubertus, and Trans . . .
You’re not exactly bouncing them back to me, are you? What are you doing over there, anyway? Do you know that the Pope is a footagehead? Well, maybe not the Pope himself, but there’s someone in the Vatican running the segments. Turns out that down Brazil way, where folks don’t distinguish much between TV, the Net, and other stuff anyway, there is some kind of cult around the footage. Or not so much around it as desirous of burning it, since these illiterate but massively video-consumptive folk believe that it is none other than the Devil himself who is our auteur. Very strange, and there has apparently been a statement issued, to these Brazilians, from Rome, to the effect that it is the Vatican’s business to say which works are the works of Satan, nobody else’s, that the matter of the footage is being taken under consideration,
and in the meantime don’t mess with the franchise. I wish I’d thought of it myself, just to irritate la Anarchia.
She closes Parkaboy’s latest, gets up now and goes into the yellow kitchen. Puts the kettle on. Coffee or tea? “I hate the domestication,” Donny had confided, once, insofar as he was capable.
She wonders if an absent friend’s flat in London is perhaps preferable to her own, back in New York, as carefully cleansed of extraneous objects as she can keep it, and why? Does she hate the domestication? She has fewer things in her apartment than anyone, her friend Margot says.
She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people’s objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, she looks back, out into Damien’s main room, and sees the robot girls, eyeless. No flies on Damien. He’s kept his decorators from decorating, resulting in a semiotic neutrality that Cayce is starting to appreciate more, the longer she stays here. Her own place, in New York, is a whitewashed cave, scarcely more demonstrative of self, its uneven tenement floors painted a shade of blue she discovered in northern Spain. An ancient tint, arsenic-based. Peasants there had used it for centuries on interior walls, and it was said to keep flies away. Cayce had had it mixed in plastic enamel, sans arsenic, from a Polaroid she’d taken. Like the varnish on the bar in Camden High Street, it sealed the furry splinters of wear. Texture. She likes an acquired texture, evidence of long habitation, but nothing too personal.
The kettle whistles. She makes a single cup of Colombian and takes it back to the Cube. F:F:F is open there, and she flips back and forth between posts, getting a sense of what’s been going on. Not much, aside from ongoing analysis of #135, which is normal, and discussion of this Vatican story from Brazil. Maurice, interestingly, posts to point out that both the story and the alleged papal interest seem to issue from Brazil, and that there has apparently been no independent confirmation from elsewhere. Is it true? he wonders. A hoax?
Cayce frowns. Magda’s story. Shown #135 prior to an evening’s assignment, then given a brief scripting: It is apparently a feature film, of unknown origin, very interesting somehow, intriguing, and has the one she addresses heard of it? And then debriefed, after, for responses, which she says is unique in her experience of the job so far. And where, Cayce had asked, had Magda been sent to spread this? A private club, Covent Garden: media people. She’d been taken in by a member, someone she’d been introduced to after the briefing, and left to work the room on her own.
Trans. Blue Ant. Bigend.
And tomorrow she meets with Stonestreet again. And Dorotea.
10.
JACK MOVES, JANE FACES
She’s down for a jack move.
Thinks this in the Pilates studio in Neal’s Yard, doing the Short Spine Stretch, her bare feet in leather loops that haven’t yet been softened up with use. That’s how new this place is. They should get some mink oil. Her soles are chaffing.
She’d never really been sure what Donny had meant when he’d say that; he said it when he was angry, or frustrated, and she’s both. Dorotea dicking with her and she doesn’t do anything about it. She could tell Bernard or Bigend but she doesn’t trust them. She has no idea what’s going on with Bigend, what he’s capable of. The sensible thing to do would be to finish the job, get her money, and write the whole thing off to experience.
But there’d still be Dorotea. Dorotea with the scary connections. Dorotea the mad bitch, just doing these things because she’s decided to hate Cayce, or, maybe, Bigend’s idea, because she thinks Cayce is being lined up to run Blue Ant’s London office. Or maybe she’s in the Bigend girlfriend pool. Anything seems equally possible, but some hard little knot in Cayce’s core keeps heating up, trying for meltdown: the hole in the Buzz Rickson’s, the Asian Sluts invasion, her period’s coming, she’d like to get her hands around Dorotea’s throat and shake her till her fucking brains rattle.
Jack moves. Context, with Donny, seemed to indicate that these were either deliberate but extremely lateral, thus taking the competition or opponent by surprise, or, more likely in Donny’s case, simply crazy, same result. He’d never said what jack move, exactly, in a given situation, he was contemplating, and maybe that was because he didn’t know. Maybe it had to be improvisational and completely of the moment. East Lansing Zen. Whatever it was supposed to be, she had an idea he’d never managed to do it. In memory now she associates the expression with his only-ever attempt at verbally communicating a sexual preference: “You think maybe you could make more, like, those jane faces?”
Jane faces being, she’d later learned, stripper-speak for, she guessed you’d call them, ritualized expressions conveying a certain ecstatic transport, or at least its potential.
Or was a jack move, she wonders now, simply a cash-related move? Jack in the sense of money? Donny’s jack moves had tended to be invoked in situations of relative economic insecurity. Donny’s ongoing situation being one of that, but to greater or lesser degrees. Resolved most often by asking Cayce for a loan, but only after invoking the jack move. If it meant a money move, she guesses she can’t use the expression, because what she’s tempted to do would just cost her.
What she’s tempted to do, she knows, is crazy. She exhales, watching her straightened legs rise up in the straps to a ninety-degree angle, then inhales as she bends them, holding tension in the straps against the pull of the spring-loaded platform she’s reclining on. Exhales, as they say, for nothing, then inhales as she straightens them horizontally, pulling the springs taut. Repeating this six more times for a total of ten.
She shouldn’t be thinking about anything except getting this right, and that’s partly why she does it. Stops her thinking, if she concentrates sufficiently. She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there. And this morning she has a big one, or several, because she’s due soon for the meeting with Stonestreet and Dorotea, to see Heinzi’s latest stab at the logo. To tell them whether it works or not. Per her contract.
She wants to go in there, the hot little knot of rage at her core is telling her, wearing the Buzz Rickson’s with the tape on the shoulder (which is starting to curl at the edges) so that Dorotea will know that she hasn’t simply neglected to notice the damage. But she won’t say anything. Then, when Dorotea produces the logo-rethink (which Cayce imagines will almost certainly work for her, as Heinzi is nothing if not very good) she’ll wait a beat or two and then shake her head. And Dorotea will know, then, that Cayce is lying, but she won’t be able to do anything about it.
And then Cayce will leave, and go back to Damien’s, and pack her things, go to Heathrow and get on the next business-class flight with her return ticket to New York.
And probably blow the contract, a big one, and have to hustle very hard indeed in New York, finding fresh work, but she’ll be free of Bigend and Dorotea, and Stonestreet too, and all of the weird baggage that seems to come with them. Mirror-world will get put back into its box until the next time, hopefully a vacation, and when Damien is here, and she will never have to worry about Dorotea or Asian Sluts or any of it, ever again.
Except that that would mean that she’d lied to a client firm, and she really doesn’t want to do that, aside from knowing that it’s a ridiculous, infantile plan anyway. She’ll lose the contract, probably do herself grave professional harm, and all for the sake of pissing Dorotea off. And what a pleasure that would be.
Makes no sense, except to the knot.
Now she’s sitting cross-legged, doing Sphinx, springs lightened. Turns her hands palm-up for Beseech. No thinking. You do not get there by thinking about not thinking, but by concentrating on each repetition.
To the gentle twanging of the springs.
SHE’S made certain the driver gets her to Blue Ant early.
She wants her own little bit of time in the street, her own paper cup of coffee. Soho on a Monday morning has its own peculiar energy. She wants to tap into that for a few minutes. Buys her coffee now and heads off, away from Blue Ant, trying to fit her pace to the pace of these people on their way to work, with most of whom she feels she has some passing affinity. They earn their living distinguishing degrees and directions of attractiveness, and she envies the youth and determination with which they all seem to be getting to it. Was she ever like that? Not exactly, she thinks. She got her start, out of college, working with the design team of a Seattle-based mountain-bike manufacturer, and had branched out into skatewear, then shoes. Her talents, which Bigend calls her tame pathologies, had carried her along, and gradually she’d let them define the nature of what it was that she did. She’d thought of that as going with the flow, but maybe, she thinks now, it had really been the path of least resistance. What if that flow naturally tended to the path of least resistance? Where does that take you?
“Down the tube,” she says aloud, causing a very good-looking young Asian man, walking parallel with her, to start, and look at her with brief alarm. She smiles in reassurance, but he frowns and walks faster. She slows, to let him get ahead. He’s wearing a black horsehide car coat, its seams scuffed gray, like a piece of vintage luggage, and he’s actually carrying, she now sees, a piece of vintage luggage. A very small suitcase, brown cowhide, that someone has waxed to a russet glow, reminding her of the shoes of the old men in the home in which her grandfather, Win’s dad, had died. She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again. It’s an emotion she first experienced a very long time ago, and she guesses it’s coming up now because she’s on the brink of something, some turning point, and she feels lost.
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