“He said, ‘Sonia tells me you desire entrée and will take extraordinary steps to get it,’ and though his voice was cold I sat on his knee and held my face inches from his but he said, ‘No. Not that. Not just that. It’s actually much more than that. I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.’
“He said he needed my memories, that he’d use them to make me a new kind of star. I’d have to get surgery so they could put in an implant to harvest them. He said that it was dangerous, that some of the patients didn’t last long, but if I wanted to risk it he’d open every door for me. He said some of the implants helped you remember things, but mine wouldn’t, because he wanted me to be normal.”
“How was a memory implant going to make you a new kind of star?” Kern asks, because she seems to have lost her flow.
“He told me not to worry about it. I didn’t want to press him, but I thought maybe it was some way for an audience to feel what I felt directly.” Kern imagines strangers watching his own thoughts, their reactions veering between boredom and disgust. “I didn’t mind so much,” she says. “It’d just be another way of acting. Acting is always like being totally naked, if you do it right.”
“So what was your answer?” asks Kern.
“I said yes. Of course I said yes. Are you sure you want to hear this? I don’t have anyone else to talk to and I’m afraid I’m rambling on.”
“No. Talk. Please,” says Kern, eyes closed, drifting.
“His assistant was with him on the yacht. She was also his girlfriend, or at least wished she was. I knew she loathed me like only an older, plainer woman can loathe a younger, prettier rival, and that she resented being a cliché, but what scared me was her pity.
“That night he took me up to his beach house in Malibu. I never said goodbye to Sonia. Later I heard she’d died. On the drive up the coast I had to tell myself to be careful about hope.
“His house was down a canyon, right on the beach, miles from anything, made of a sequence of interlinking glass boxes. One of the boxes was his bedroom, the damp sand layered knee-high against the glass. He asked me to undress and walk around, like I was there alone, but first I wanted him to turn off all the house cameras.
“‘Is there no trust?’ he asked, but like he thought it was funny, and I said I’d be happy to walk home in the dark. So he did it, and in fact he didn’t really seem to care—the whole thing felt like it was just a gesture, his way of closing the deal.
“I woke in the middle of the night. The bedside table was covered with books, paper ones, and pill bottles, which I thought would be the usual prescription downers but they had these long chemical names and didn’t seem to be from a pharmacy. I googled him from the bathroom—Cromwell was his name—and found out that he was rich, which I could see, and that he was old, which I couldn’t, because he looked about forty-five. I got back into bed and watched the waves shatter on the glass and felt like my real life was beginning.
“I woke again before dawn and he offered me a car but I was restless so I wanted to walk. Nothing out there but land and sea, and the sun was still behind the mountains. My sandals were impractical so I went barefoot. The asphalt was cold at first but then the sun warmed it. I came to a charging station on the Pacific Coast Highway and the attendant wouldn’t look me in the eye when he sold me my morning coffee—I can only imagine the story he put me in, with my little dress and sweaty back and dirty feet. I went on down the highway, drinking my coffee, until my phone found a signal.
“They had to do the surgery offshore. A legal technicality, said Hiro, my chaperone, on the way to LAX.
“I’d never been in a plane before, much less a private one. The hospital was on an island in Japan, one of the ones that used to be Indonesia.
“The surgeon was kind. He took me aside and asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this, tried to tell me the odds I’d leave the table alive, and the probability of later complications, and I wavered, but I hadn’t seen any other chances so I said I was certain. After that he was detached, like I’d gone from being a person to an object of study.
“I’d expected the anesthesia to be like nothing but the surgeon said there’d be dreams, the ‘subjectivity of the implant meshing with the cortical tissue,’ and while I was under I remembered driving down through the hills toward the city, how the valley was a sea of light scarred by LAX and the freeways.”
“Did Cromwell keep his word?” asks Kern, wanting it to be a fairy tale, though it’s obvious it ended badly.
“In his way. There were screen tests, always on closed stages, where the soundproofing was so perfect you could hear your heart beat. The directors, who were never on-site, gave orders through the speakers like the voice of god, but nothing panned out, though I gave it everything I had. Hiro said to be patient, and meanwhile I had a lot of clothes and money.
“The loneliness was worse, which was almost unbelievable, and some nights I took a limo and went out looking for beautiful boys on the streets. They were always so happy when I told them to get in, though they usually looked like they couldn’t believe it was happening.
“Sometimes Hiro would come by with a laptop and a data cable and plug it into the socket just under my ear. I asked him why it couldn’t be wireless and he said that wireless wasn’t ever totally secure. I hated it—it was like my soul was draining away, though it felt like nothing, but I didn’t say anything, and would’ve tolerated more.
“Hiro was actually very nice to me, though I think he’s psychotic. I was seeing this guy for a while, Johann, who’d been a boxer in Germany, and was getting work as an action lead. One night in the Four Seasons he drank too much and started getting mean, but just when I was starting to actually get worried, Hiro let himself into our suite, casually, like he’d come to change the sheets. Johann was steroid-big and got right in his face and started screaming but Hiro just giggled, like literally giggled, and when he went for Johann he was so relaxed it was actually unsettling. He broke all the bones in Johann’s face with a highball glass—he was conscientious about it, double-checking to make sure he hadn’t missed any. I never saw Johann after that, and later I heard that Hiro had worked for the cartels before joining the private sector, that there’d been a price on his head for years.
“They’d said the implant wouldn’t affect my memory but they must have been wrong, because everything from the moment I got it is a lot clearer. But they must have gotten what they needed because one day I woke up in this goddamned house, and so far I haven’t seen anyone but my surgeon.”
“Why would they do that?” asks Kern.
“He gave me these jobs, at first, the surgeon. Hardware installation, mostly, and I had to do them all through the phone, the one you have now, but there must have been something going on behind the scenes, because now Hiro’s trying to get it back. At first I was expecting him to kick down the door any minute but now it seems like I’m on my own.”
“Do you have internet?”
“There’s nothing, no connectivity except the link to your phone.”
Kern holds up the phone, wondering why it would be her only portal onto the world. A winking red light probably means low battery. “I should recharge,” says Kern. He fishes the multipack out of his carryall, tears it open with his teeth, finds the charger. He runs his fingers over the phone, looking for the power socket, finds both that and what feels like a standard ethernet port.
In the little light he looks at the snarl of cables and connectors left in the multipack; among them is an ethernet cable.
“What are you doing?” asks the ghost.
“Maybe we can get you wired,” says Kern, plugging the ethernet cable into the wall jack, then into the jack in the phone. Little green lights on the phone start flashing.
“There you go,” he says, eyes closing, clutching the phone, using his carryall for a pillow. “Now you’re connected.”
The ghost says nothing.
29
Bad Pattern
Out on the we
t street, still drunk, her loneliness is near to burning a hole in her. The lights from Fantôme glow on the pavement, then vanish, like she’d stayed on a stage after the show was over, but she still doesn’t want to go back to a hotel room. The bistro across the street is locking its doors but there are still the bars, though in them she knows she’ll find nothing worth having unless she wants to spend the night drinking hard, and of course she could see if she still has the long-disused, entirely academic art of getting men to buy her drinks. The hook-up sites come to mind, promising the fear and the exhilaration of some stranger’s eager hands, but that’s not it, is never really it, and then she remembers that Cromwell wants to see her.
She checks mail on her phone—there are a few coaxing messages from Maya—So have you got any time tonight? Anytime tonight? reads the subject header of the most recent, and in the body is the address of Maison Dernière, apparently in an office tower downtown. She hesitates, wondering if it’s a setup, but there’s a clear-cut paper trail so it has to be benign. What better time to take a meeting, she thinks, so she emails Maya, who checks her phone compulsively, and Cromwell’s secretary—she assumes his apparat is unsleeping—that she’s on her way.
* * *
As the elevator rises she runs a search on Maison Dernière and finds that it doesn’t exist. She stares blankly at her phone, then tries the search but again there are no websites, no reviews, in fact no references at all, and her fear rises as the floors flicker by and she wonders if this is how a call girl feels when a trick starts going bad. There’s no emergency stop button so she jabs at the buttons for the other floors but they won’t illuminate, which makes the elevator car a prison, and she wishes she’d made a habit of carrying a gun, or stayed sober. It occurs to her to call Maya, who has private security firms on speed dial, or just call Parthenon directly, but what’s going to happen will have happened before they could arrive.
It might be a misunderstanding, and it might be perfectly benign, but one thing that’s certain is that Cromwell hasn’t been forthright, so she turns on her implant’s wireless, is instantly aware of the constellations of the thousands of nearby machines. She scans through them and finds the elevator and sees that its software hasn’t been updated in years—infrastructure, she’s noticed, is often lost in the shuffle. She tells it lies like bad patterns whispered in its ear, and it’s soon persuaded that she’s a long overdue maintenance program sent by the manufacturer and by the time the elevator starts to slow it’s entirely hers and she’s never been happier about committing a felony.
She sees the elevator’s internal state and that it’s one second from stopping and opening its doors—she could keep them closed, or drop the car into free fall, but now that she has an exit she wants to see what’s going to happen and even more than that she wants to push back. There’s an SFPD weapons platform drifting high over downtown, and it’s bad heat if she gets caught but it would sure give her the whip hand, so she tries for it anyway. She’s briefly lost in the labyrinth of its security and it’s too complicated for the time she has, but there, better, is an electrical transformer down in the building’s basements, installed thirty years ago and its software not updated since. She brushes past its quaint, almost amusing defenses and sees how she could overload it in moments, which would blow the grid, blacking out the building, and possibly the block, and maybe start a fire, a card she’ll hold in reserve.
She tenses as the doors open to reveal a girl radiant with youth and even in her tension Irina is moved by her beauty. The girl is dressed as though for a first date that matters but her smile fades as she sees Irina’s face and in a blurry accent asks, “Is everything all right?” with such simplicity and evident concern that Irina thaws a little and realizes that she looks like she’s ready for murder.
“Is this the Maison Dernière?” Irina asks but the girl only peers at her, in fact at her lips, eyebrows slightly raised, because she’s deaf, of course, and then the girl smiles hesitantly and turns away, beckoning for her to follow.
The cramped corridor seems to have been carved out of what once was office space, though the unmarred hardwood floors and white plastered walls are so new she can smell the paint and the varnish, and then they round a corner and there’s track lighting focused on landscape paintings in alcoves that she recognizes as Hockneys, and it’s hardly worth the trouble of leaning in to confirm that they’re originals, and it’s all starting to read as a secret aerie dedicated to quiet happiness, which makes Cromwell start to seem like a sensible sort of person.
They come to a small foyer floored in black stone; there are cooking smells and a distant clattering of pots and pans. The girl guides her to an inset silver basin into which water sluices from a faucet that must have been harvested from a rustic French estate of the most estimable provenance and authenticity. The girl takes her hands and tries to wash and massage them, as though it were a spa day, but Irina pulls away, kindly, and does it herself.
The girl takes her out onto a wide balcony that looks down on most of city and there’s Cromwell, alone at the one table, absorbed in his phone.
The girl pulls out the other chair for her and slips away as Cromwell looks up and says, “My director of security says the SFPD have reported an attempt to hack one of their weapons drones. The attack lasted less than a second, but nearly succeeded. They think it was a team of professional thieves, possibly cartel, certainly highly prepared. Strangely, they think the attack came from somewhere in this building, though the evidence is inconclusive, which is … just as well.” He looks up at her, deadpan, his archness all but imperceptible, and in the candlelight he looks unearthly, as though he’s made of fire, and she realizes she can barely hear the noises of the city.
There’s a bottle of wine in an ice bucket and as Cromwell lifts it she sees the faded, spidery handwriting on the label. As she lifts her wineglass to receive the pour her hand jerks too high because the glass is lighter than she’d expected, in fact it weighs almost nothing at all, as though it were crystallized air—it must be one of the wildly expensive, very fragile glasses that are only a few molecules thick, which she’s heard of but never before touched, and she imagines a future in which that jerk is the mark of the parvenu handling good stemware for the very first time. Cromwell says, “It’s surprising, isn’t it? My first time I practically put a brandy snifter through the ceiling.” There’s a pause that seems more awkward than she’d have expected in a man of his years and experience and then with an air of forced bonhomie he says, “This wine was laid down on Francois Mitterrand’s estate in the year of his death. He’s said to have enjoyed playing vintner, so this bottle may have been handled by the great man himself. To be honest, I can’t tell one wine from another but it’s a kind of way of consuming history.”
She sips the cold pale fluid and wonders how much her little swallow cost. “What interests you about Mitterand?” she says, who is, for her, one dead French president among many.
“The manner of his death,” he says, his poise snapping back. “When he knew his life was ending he went to Egypt to visit the tombs of the pharaohs, with whom he identified. His last meal was ortolans, a royal meal, a songbird one eats with a napkin draped over head and plate, lest God see. He lived for another three days but ate nothing more.”
“What’s so great about that?”
“It suggests a composed resistance to the brute facts of mortality.”
“I thought this was a restaurant, when I came here,” she says, her anger cooling. “But I looked it up and it didn’t exist.”
“Ah. Of course. I’m so sorry—I should have clarified. The Dernière is actually more like a private club with a membership of one. Only a very few people know about it, and none are the kind to put it on a blog. To call it a restaurant is a kind of inside joke. There is a menu, of course, but the chefs will make you whatever you want. I had hoped that you’d be pleased—for what little it’s worth, heads of state have hinted that they wished to dine here, and been s
hunted off to Chez Panisse.” His urbanity is fully restored now, but his apparent warmth feels like a performance intended to conceal a watchfulness and a deep interior chill. She wonders what drives him, and what, if anything, he loves—she’s seen nothing to suggest a family, and he lacks the hard dullness that marks men who live for money. Maybe Magda is his center, she thinks, remembering how his posture changed when she was near him.
She says, “At first I thought that the name meant ‘latest house,’ like a house that was chic.”
He studies her for a moment, then says, “A natural misreading, but not the worst one. In the wrong context, the name could be read as a cruel joke, the last house as in the last house one would ever see, an invitation into charnel. I’m told there are such places. But, no, it’s not like that at all. The name just means that this is, in some thematic way, the last place in the West the sun touches, or where the Western world ends. In fact, I very much hope you’ll enjoy yourself here, and won’t find it necessary to bring out the big guns, so to speak.”
She realizes she’s staring and that it’s unsettling him. He picks up his glass and puts it down again, then says, “And I don’t know just how to put this, but I meant to say … I recognize that all of this is shit. I mean, it’s nice, and I’m grateful, and so on, but I know it has no real value. Well, except for the Hockneys. It’s just that there are people who take care of this for me, and it’s just as easy to allow it to happen. I don’t want you to think I’m some hedge-fund philistine who preens himself on having just the right wineglasses.”
“So what can I do for you?” she says. “It must be important, as you’re paying quadruple-time. But maybe one of your people will take care of that for you?”
She’s pleased to see him wince. He says, “I’d hoped that we could talk, and perhaps become more than strangers,” and refills her glass though she’d scarcely been aware she’d been drinking.
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