The Blue Ant Visa, ready in her hand, is withdrawn from the Rickson’s pocket and placed on the rectangular blotter-like suede pad atop Greenaway’s counter. He peers at it, obviously puzzled by the Egyptianate ant, but then, she guesses, makes out the name of the issuing bank. “I see. And your credit is adequate, for the price of the piece, plus VAT?”
“That’s a very insulting question,” says Ngemi, levelly, but Greenaway ignores him, watching Cayce.
“Yes, Mr. Greenaway, but I suggest you check, now, with the issuer.” Actually she isn’t entirely sure, but vaguely remembers Bigend mentioning that she is authorized to buy automobiles but not aircraft. Whatever other faults Bigend has, she doubts he’s prone to exaggeration.
Greenaway is looking at them, now, as though they were in the process of robbing him at gunpoint, assuming that that process would cause him neither fear nor anxiety, just a sort of irritated amazement at their effrontery. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “We’ll find out during the authorization process.”
“May we see it now, please?” Ngemi places his fingtips on the counter, as if laying claim to something.
Greenaway reaches beneath it, coming up with a gray cardboard box. It is square, perhaps six inches on a side, and has two U-shaped wire fasteners that protrude through slots at the edges of the lid. It is probably much older than she is. Greenaway pauses, and she imagines him counting, silently. Then he lifts the lid away and puts it to the side.
The calculator is cushioned in funereal gray tissue paper. Greenaway reaches into the box, draws it carefully out, and places it on the suede pad.
It looks, to Cayce, very similar to the ones she’d seen in Baranov’s trunk, though perhaps less finely finished.
Ngemi has produced a loupe, and screws it carefully into his left eye. He leans forward, creaking, and gives the Curta his full and cyclopean attention. She can hear his breath, now, and the ticking of the dozens of clocks all around her, which before she’d not been aware of.
“Um,” says Ngemi, and more deeply, “Um.” Sounds she imagines are quite unconscious. He seems in that moment to be very far away, and she feels alone.
He straightens, removing the loupe. Blinks. “I will need to handle it. I will need to perform an operation.”
“You’re entirely certain you’re serious about this? You wouldn’t simply be winding me up, you two, would you?”
“No, sir,” says Ngemi, “we are serious.”
“Then go ahead.”
Ngemi picks up the calculator, first turning it over. On its round base Cayce glimpses “IV,” stamped into metal. Righting it, his fingers slide over it, moving those studs or flanges in their slots or tracks. He pauses, closes his eyes as if listening, and works the little pepper-mill crank at the top. It makes a slithering sound, if a mechanism can be said to slither.
Ngemi opens his eyes, looks at the numbers that have appeared in small circular windows. He looks from them to Greenaway. “Yes,” he says.
Cayce indicates the Blue Ant card. “We’ll take it, Mr. Greenaway.”
A block from L. GREENAWAY, Ngemi carrying the boxed calculator against his stomach as though it contained the ashes of a relative, Baranov is waiting, a half-inhaled cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. “That’s it?”
“Yes,” says Ngemi.
“Authentic.”
“Of course.”
Baranov takes the box.
“These are interesting as well.” Ngemi unzips his black coat and withdraws a brown envelope. “Documentation of provenance.”
Baranov tucks the box beneath his arm and takes the envelope. He hands Cayce a business card.
The Light of India Curry House. Poole.
She turns it over. Rust-colored fountain pen. Neat italics.
[email protected]
The eyes behind the round lenses fix Cayce with contempt, dismissal. “Baltic oil, is it? Thought you might be a bit more interesting than that.”
He flicks his cigarette down and walks on, in the direction they’ve just come, the Curta prototype beneath his arm and the brown envelope in his hand.
“Do you mind my asking,” Ngemi says, “what he meant?”
“No,” she says, looking from the dung-colored back of Baranov’s retreating jacket to the rust-colored e-mail address, “but I don’t know.”
“This is what you wanted?”
“It must be,” she says. “I suppose it must be.”
32.
PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE
Ngemi departs by tube from Bond Street Station, leaving her, in suddenly bright sunlight, with no idea where she might be going, or why.
A cab takes her to Kensington High Street, the card from Baranov’s curry house zipped into the pocket on the sleeve of the Rickson’s, the one originally designed to hold a pack of American cigarettes.
Liminal, she thinks, getting out of the cab by what had been the musty, multileveled cave of Kensington Market, with its vanished mazes of punk and hippy tat. Liminal. Katherine McNally’s word for certain states: thresholds, zones of transition. Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless? She pays the driver, through the window, and he drives away.
Oil, Baranov had said?
She walks in the direction of the park. Bright gilt of the Albert Memorial, never quite real to her since they cleaned it. When she’d first seen it, it had been a black thing, funereal, almost sinister. Win had told her that the London he’d first seen had been largely as black as that, a city of soot, more deeply textured perhaps for its lack of color.
She waits at a signal, crosses the High Street.
Her Parco boots crunch gravel as she turns into the Gardens. Cayce Pollard Central Standard might now be approaching its own hour of the wolf, she thinks. Soul too long in a holding pattern.
The park is scribed with reddish gravel, paths wide as rural highways in Tennessee. These bring her to the statue of Peter Pan, bronze rabbits at its base.
She takes off the Luggage Label bag, puts it down, and removes the Rickson’s, spreading it on the short-cut grass. She sits on it. A jogger passes, on the gravel.
She unzips the cigarette pocket on the Rickson’s sleeve and looks at Baranov’s card.
[email protected]. Looking faded in this light, as though Baranov had written it years ago.
She puts it carefully away again, zips up the little pocket. Opens her bag and removes the iBook and phone.
Hotmail. Timing out. Empty.
She opens a blank message, outgoing.
My name is Cayce Pollard. I’m sitting on the grass in a park in London. It’s sunny and warm. I’m 32 years old. My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven’t been able to prove he was killed in the attack. I began to follow the footage you’ve been
That “you” stops her. Pecks at the delete key, losing “you’ve been.”
Katherine McNally had had Cayce compose letters, letters which would never, it was understood, be sent, and which in some cases couldn’t be, the addressee being dead.
Someone showed me one segment and I looked for more. I found a site where people discussed it, and I began to post there, asking questions. I can’t tell you
This time, it doesn’t stop her.
why, but it became very important to me, to all of us there. Parkaboy and Ivy and Maurice and Filmy, all the others too. We went there whenever we could, to be with other people who understood. We looked for more footage. Some people stayed out surfing, weeks at a time, never posting until someone discovered a new segment.
All through that winter, the mildest she’d known in Manhattan, though in memory the darkest, she’d gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.
We don’t know what you’re doing, or why. Parkaboy thinks you’re dreaming. Dreaming for us. Sometimes he sounds as though he thinks you’re dreaming us. He has this whole edged-out participation mystique: how we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever yo
u’re doing, that we become part of it. Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us. He says it’s like Coleridge, and De Quincey. He says it’s shamanic. That we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the screen, but really, some of us anyway, we’re adventurers. We’re out there, seeking, taking risks. In hope, he says, of bringing back wonders. Trouble is, lately, I’ve been living that.
She looks up, everything made pale and washed-out by the light. She’s forgotten to bring her sunglasses again.
I’ve been out there, out here, seeking. Taking risks. Not sure exactly why. Scared. Turns out there are some very not-nice people, out here. Though I guess that was never news.
She stops, and looks over at Peter Pan, noticing how the bronze ears of the rabbits at his base are kept polished by the hands of children.
Do you know we’re all here, waiting for the next segment? Wandering up and down the web all night, looking for where you’ve left it for us? We are. Well, not me personally, lately, but that’s because I seem to have followed Parkaboy’s advice and started trying to find another way to hack in. And I guess I have—we have—because we’ve found those codes embedded in the footage, that map of the island or city or whatever it is, and we know that you, or someone, could use those to track the spread of a given segment, to judge the extent of dissemination. And through finding those codes, the numbers woven into the fabric, I’ve been able to get to this e-mail address, and now I’m sitting in this park, beside the statue of Peter Pan, writing to you, and
And what?
What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?
Are you there? The way I’m here?
She reads what she’s written. Like most of the letters Katherine had had her write—to her mother, to Win both before and after his disappearance, to various ex’s and one former therapist—her letter to the maker ends with question marks. Katherine had thought that the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn’t end in question marks. Periods were needed, if not exclamation points, in Katherine’s view, and Cayce had never felt particularly successful with either.
Sincerely yours, 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.
[email protected]
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. [email protected]
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 expain tomorrow. Thank
s. 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 BA, 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?”
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