Spook Country (3 page)

T he Standard had an all-night restaurant off its lobby—a long, glass-fronted operation with wide booths upholstered in matte-black tuck-and-roll, punctuated by the gnarled phalli of half a dozen large San Pedro cacti.

Hollis watched Alberto slide his Pendelton-ed mass along the bench opposite hers. Odile was between Alberto and the window.

“See-bare-espace,” Odile pronounced, gnomically, “it is everting.”

“‘Everything’? What is?”

“See-bare-espace,” Odile reaffirmed, “everts.” She made a gesture with her hands that reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid.

“Turns itself inside out,” offered Alberto, by way of clarification. “‘Cyberspace.’ Fruit salad and a coffee.” This last, Hollis realized after an instant’s confusion, addressed to their waitress. Odile ordered café au lait, Hollis a bagel and coffee. The waitress left them.

“I guess you could say it started on the first of May, 2000,” Alberto said.

“What did?”

“Geohacking. Or the potential thereof. The government announced then that Selective Availability would be turned off, on what had been, until then, strictly a military system. Civilians could access the GPS geocoordinates for the first time.”

Hollis had only vaguely understood from Philip Rausch that what she would be writing about would be various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the Internet, so Alberto’s virtual rendition of the death of River Phoenix had taken her by surprise. Now she had, she was hoping, the opening to her piece. “How many of those have you done, Alberto?” And were they all posthumous, though she didn’t ask that.

“Nine,” Alberto said. “At the Chateau Marmont”—he gestured across Sunset—“I’ve most recently completed a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton. On the site of his fatal crash, at the foot of the driveway. I’ll show you that after breakfast.”

The waitress returned with their coffees. Hollis watched as a very young, very pale Englishman bought a yellow pack of American Spirit from the man at the till. The boy’s thin beard reminded her of moss around a marble drain. “So the people staying at the Marmont,” she asked, “they have no idea, no way of knowing what you’ve done there?” Just as pedestrians had no way of knowing they stepped through the sleeping River, on his Sunset sidewalk.

“No,” said Alberto, “none. Not yet.” He was digging through a canvas carryall on his lap. He produced a cell phone, married with silver tape to some other species of smallish consumer electronics. “With these, though…” he clicked something on one of the conjoined units, opened the phone, and began deftly thumbing its keypad. “When this is available as a package…” He passed it to her. A phone, and something she recognized as a GPS unit, but the latter’s casing had been partially cut away, with what felt like more electronics growing out of it, sealed under the silver tape.

“What does it do?”

“Look,” he said.

She squinted at the small screen. Brought it closer. She saw Alberto’s woolen chest, but confused somehow with ghostly verticals, horizontals, a semitransparent Cubist overlay. Pale crosses? She looked up at him.

“This isn’t a locative piece,” he said. “It’s not spatially tagged. Try it on the street.”

She swung the duct-taped hybrid toward Sunset, seeing a crisply defined, perfectly level plane of white cruciforms, spaced as on an invisible grid, receding across the boulevard and into virtual distance. Their square white uprights, approximately level with the pavement, seemed to continue, in increasingly faint and somehow subterranean perspective, back under the rise of the Hollywood Hills.

“American fatalities in Iraq,” Alberto said. “I had it connected to a site, originally, that added crosses as deaths were reported. You can take it anywhere. I have a slide show of grabs from selected locations. I thought about sending it to Baghdad, but people would assume real grabs on the ground in Baghdad were Photoshopped.” She looked up at him as a black Range Rover drove through the field of crosses, in time to see him shrug.

Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of café au lait. “Cartographic attributes of the invisible,” she said, lowering the bowl. “Spatially tagged hypermedia.” This terminology seemed to increase her fluency by a factor of ten; she scarcely had an accent now. “The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these.” She indicated Alberto’s phone, as if its swollen belly of silver tape were gravid with an entire future.

Hollis nodded, and passed the thing back to Alberto.

Fruit salad and toasted bagel arrived. “And you’ve been curating this kind of art, Odile, in Paris?”

“Everywhere.”

Rausch was right, she decided. There was something to write about here, though she was still a long way from knowing what it was.

“May I ask you something?” Alberto had gotten through half of his fruit salad already. A methodical eater. He paused, fork in midair, looking at her.

“Yes?”

“How did you know the Curfew was over?”

She looked him in the eye and saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew’s fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today, aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With the increasingly atemporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably serious. She didn’t know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying.

“We didn’t know, really. It just ended. It stopped happening, at some essential level, though I never knew exactly when that happened. It became painfully apparent. So we packed it in.”

He looked about as satisfied with that as she’d expected him to be, but it was the truth, as far as she knew, and the best she could do for him. She’d never been able to come up with any clearer reason herself, though it certainly wasn’t anything she continued to give much thought. “We’d just released that four-song CD, and that was it. We knew. It only took a little while to sink in.” Hoping that would be that, she began to spread cream cheese on one half of her bagel.

“That was in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a particular moment, some particular place, where you’d say the Curfew broke up? Where the band made the decision to stop being a band?”

“I’d have to think about it,” she said, knowing that was really not what she should be saying.

“I’d like to do a piece,” he said. “You, Inchmale, Heidi, Jimmy. Wherever you were. Breaking up.”

Odile had started shifting on the tuck-and-roll, evidently in the dark as to what they were talking about, and not liking it. “Eenchmale?” She frowned.

“What are we going to see while I’m in town, Odile?” She smiled at Alberto, hoping she signaled Interview Over. “I need your suggestions. I need to arrange time to interview you,” she said to Odile. “And you too, Alberto. Right now, though, I’m exhausted. I need sleep.”

Odile knit her fingers, as well as she could, around the white china bowl. Her nails looked like something with very small teeth had been at them. “This evening, we will pick you up. We can visit a dozen pieces, easily.”

“Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack,” suggested Alberto. “It’s down the street.”

She looked at the crowded, oversized, frantically ornate letters inked in jailhouse indigo down both his arms, and wondered what they spelled. “But he didn’t die then, did he?”

“It’s in Virgin,” he said. “By the world music.”

AFTER THEY’D HAD a look at Alberto’s memorial to Helmut Newton, which involved a lot of vaguely Deco-styled monochrome nudity in honor of its subject’s body of work, she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget.

Sunglasses. She’d forgotten to bring any.

She looked down at the sidewalk’s freckling of blackened gum. At the brown, beige, and fibrous debris of the storm. And felt that luminous instant pass, as it always must.

C oming back from the Sunrise Market on Broome, just before they closed, Tito stopped to look in the windows of Yohji Yamamoto, on Grand Street.

A few minutes after ten. Grand was completely deserted. Tito looked each way. Not even the yellow of a cab moving in either distance. Then he looked back at the asymmetrical lapels of a sort of cape or buttoned wrap. He saw his own reflection there, dark eyes and dark clothing. In one hand a plastic Sunrise bag, with its nearly weightless burden of instant Japanese noodles in white foam bowls. Alejandro teased him about these, saying he might as well be eating the white bowls, but Tito liked them. Japan was a planet of benign mystery, source of games and anime and plasma TV.

Yohji Yamamoto’s asymmetrical lapels, though, were not a mystery. This was fashion, and he thought he understood it.

What he sometimes struggled with was some understanding that might begin to hold both the costly austerity of the window he stared into now and the equally but differently austere storefronts he remembered from Havana.

There had been no glass in those windows. Behind each crudely articulated metal grating, at night, a single fluorescent tube had cast a submarine light. And nothing on offer, regardless of daytime function: only carefully swept floors and blotched plaster.

He watched his reflection shrug softly, in Yamamoto’s window. He walked on, glad of his thick dry socks.

Where would Alejandro be now? he wondered. Perhaps in the nameless Eighth Avenue bar he favored, below Times Square, its neon announcing TAVERN and nothing more. Alejandro made his gallery contacts meet him there; he enjoyed taking curators and dealers into that reddish twilight, amid sleepy Puerto Rican transvestites and a few hustlers taking their breaks from Port Authority. Tito disliked the place. It seemed to occupy its own reptilian delta of time, a dead-end continuum of watered drinks and low-level anxiety.

COMING INTO HIS ROOM, he saw that one of the socks he’d washed earlier had fallen from where he’d left it to dry, on the wheeled rack. He replaced it.

M ilgrim was enjoying the superior brightness of the nitrogen-filled optics in Brown’s Austrian-made monocular well enough, but not the smell of Brown’s chewing gum or his proximity in the back of the chilly surveillance van.

The van had been parked on Lafayette, where one of Brown’s people had left it for them. Brown had run a red light to get up here and into position, after his earphone had told him that the IF was headed this way, but now the IF was staring into the window of Yohji Yamamoto, unmoving.

“What’s he doing?” Brown took the monocular back. It matched his gun and his flashlight, that same not-color of grayish green.

Milgrim leaned forward, to get a better unassisted view through his spy-hole. The Econoline had half a dozen of these sawn through its sides, each one covered by a screwed-on, moveable scrap of black-painted plastic. These coincided, on the graffiti-tagged exterior, with solid black areas of the various tags. Assuming those were all genuine tags, Milgrim wondered, collected by leaving the van on the street, would the van’s disguise still fool a tagger? How old were those tags? Were they the urban equivalent of using out-of-season vegetation for camouflage? “He’s looking in a window,” Milgrim said, pointlessly and knowing it. “Are you going to follow him home now?”

“No,” said Brown. “He could notice the truck.”

Milgrim had no idea how many people Brown had had watching the IF stock up on Japanese groceries, while they’d entered his place and changed the bug’s battery. This world of people following and watching other people was new to Milgrim, though he supposed he’d always assumed that it was there, somewhere. You saw it in movies and read about it, but you didn’t think about having to breathe someone else’s condensed breath in the back of a cold van.

Now it was Brown’s turn to lean forward, pressing the monocular’s resilient lip against the van’s cold, sweating skin, for a closer view of the IF. Milgrim wondered idly, almost luxuriously, what it might be like to pick something up, just then, and hit Brown in the head with it. He actually glanced around the back of the van, to see what might be available, but there was nothing but the upended plastic milk crates they both squatted on, and a folded tarp.

Brown, as if reading Milgrim’s thoughts, turned suddenly from the eyepiece of the monocular, glaring.

Milgrim blinked, hoping to convey mildness and harmlessness. Which shouldn’t be that hard, as he hadn’t hit anyone in the head since elementary school, and wasn’t likely to now. Though he’d never been held captive before, he reminded himself.

“Eventually he’ll send or receive something from that room,” Brown said, “and when he does, you’ll translate it.”

Milgrim nodded dutifully.

THEY CHECKED INTO the New Yorker, on Eighth Avenue. Adjoining rooms, fourteenth floor. The New Yorker seemed to be on Brown’s list. This was their fifth or sixth time here. Most of Milgrim’s room was taken up by its double bed, which faced a television mounted in a particleboard cabinet. The pixels in the cabinet’s wood-grain veneer were too large, Milgrim thought, as he took off his stolen overcoat and sat on the edge of the bed. That was something he’d started to notice, how you only got the high-resolution stuff in your better places.

Brown came in and did his trick with the two little boxes, one on the door, one on the doorframe. They were that same shade of gray, like the gun and the flashlight and the monocular. He’d do the same with his own door, and all of this, as far as Milgrim knew, so that he, Milgrim, wouldn’t decide to leave while Brown was sleeping. Milgrim had no idea what the boxes did, but Brown had said not to touch the doors when they were up. Milgrim hadn’t.

Brown tossed what Milgrim took to be a four-pack bubble-card of Ativan down on Milgrim’s flowered bedspread and returned to his own room. Milgrim heard Brown’s television come on. He knew that music, now: Fox News.

He glanced toward the bubble-pack. It wasn’t the boxes on the doors that would keep him here.

He picked it up. “RIZE,” it said, there, and “5MG,” and what looked like, yes, Japanese writing. Or the way Japanese looks when they dress it up for packaging.

“Hello?” The connecting door was still open, between their rooms. The sound of Brown’s fingers, on his armored laptop, stopped.

“What?”

“What is this stuff?”

“Your medication,” said Brown.

“It says ‘Rize,’ and there’s Japanese writing on it. It’s not Ativan.”

“It’s the same fucking thing,” Brown said, his delivery slowing threateningly. “Same DEA Schedule fucking Four narcotic.”

Milgrim looked at the bubble-card.

“Now shut the fuck up.”

He heard Brown begin to type again.

He sat back down on the bed. Rize? His first impulse was to phone his man in the East Village. He looked at the phone, knowing that that wasn’t on. His second was to ask Brown if he could borrow his laptop, so that he could Google this stuff. The DEA had a page with all the Schedule Four products, foreign brands too. But then, he thought, if Brown was really a fed, he might even be getting this stuff from the DEA. And borrowing Brown’s laptop, he knew, was no more on than using the phone to call Dennis Birdwell.

And he owed Birdwell money, under awkward circumstances. There was that.

He put the bubble-pack on the corner of the nearest bedside table, aligning its sides with the edges, both of which had black arcs where previous guests had let cigarettes burn down. The shape of the burns reminded him of McDonald’s arches. He wondered if Brown was going to order sandwiches soon.

Rize.