Spook Country (6 page)

M ilgrim dreamed he was naked in Brown’s room, while Brown lay sleeping.

It wasn’t ordinary nakedness, because it involved an occult aura of preternaturally intense awareness, as though the wearer were a vampire in an Anne Rice novel, or a novice cocaine user.

Brown lay beneath New Yorker sheets and one of those beige hotel blankets that sandwich a sheet of plastic foam between layers of polyester moleskin. Milgrim regarded him with something he recognized as akin to pity. Brown’s lips were parted slightly, the upper one quivering slightly with each exhalation.

There was no light at all, in Brown’s room, save for the red standby-indicator on the television, but Milgrim’s aural dream-self saw, in some other frequency entirely, the furniture and objects in Brown’s room presented like screens of carry-on baggage. He saw Brown’s pistol and flashlight, beneath Brown’s pillow, and a rounded rectangle, beside them, that he took to be a large folding knife (no doubt in that same greenish gray). There was something vaguely touching about Brown sleeping with these favorite things so close to hand, something childlike.

He found that he was imagining himself as Tom Sawyer, Brown as Huckleberry Finn, and these rooms in the New Yorker, and in the other hotels they kept returning to, as their raft, with Manhattan as their chilly Mississippi, down which they floated—when he suddenly noticed that there, on the particleboard cabinet, identical to his own, that housed Brown’s television, was a bag. A paper bag. A crumpled paper bag. Within it, revealed by the potent aural vision that was his in his nakedness, and which perhaps made all other things naked, were the unmistakable oblongs of pharmaceutical bubble-packs.

Lots of them. Really quite a number of them. Quite a supply, really. Perhaps a week’s worth, if one were frugal.

He craned forward, as if drawn by magnets embedded in the bones of his face—and found himself, having experienced no transition whatever, back in his own airless, overheated room, no longer supernaturally naked but clad in a pair of black cotton briefs that could have done with changing, and with his nose and forehead pressed against the cold glass of his window. Fourteen floors below, Eighth Avenue was virtually empty, save for the yellow rectangle of a passing cab.

His cheeks were wet with tears. He touched them, shivering.

S he stood beneath Archie’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles. Something about Victorian girls in their underwear had just passed, and she wondered if that was part of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film which Inchmale had been fond of sampling on DVD for preshow inspiration. Someone had cooked a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery for Bobby, and she hadn’t noticed it loop yet. It just kept coming.

And standing under it, head conveniently stuck in the wireless helmet, let her pretend she wasn’t hearing Bobby hissing irritably at Alberto for having brought her here.

It seemed almost to jump, now, with a flowering rush of silent explosions, bombs blasting against black night. She reached up to steady the helmet, tipping her head back at a particularly bright burst of flame, and accidentally encountered a control surface mounted to the left of the visor, over her cheekbone. The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin vanished.

Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car or two in, and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed familiar and banal. Within it, too, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, becoming difficult to read.

She was turning, to ask Bobby what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over.

This left them frozen there, the helmet between them. Bobby’s blue eyes loomed owl-wide behind diagonal blondness, reminding her powerfully of one particular photograph of Kurt Cobain. Then Alberto took the helmet from them both. “Bobby,” he said, “you’ve really got to calm down. This is important. She’s writing an article about locative art. For Node.”

“Node?”

“Node.”

“The fuck is Node?”

“Magazine. Like Wired. Except it’s English.”

“Or Belgian,” she offered. “Or something.”

Bobby looked at them as though they, not he, were crazy.

Alberto tapped the control-surface she’d touched accidentally. She saw an LED go out. He carried the unit to the nearer of the two tables and set it down.

“The squid’s wonderful, Bobby,” she told him. “I’m glad I saw it. I’ll go now. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Fuck it,” Bobby said, heaving a sigh of resignation. He crossed to the other table, rummaged through a scattering of small loose objects, and came up with a pack of Marlboro and a pale-blue Bic. They watched as he lit up, then closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Opening his eyes, he threw his head back and exhaled, the blue smoke rising toward the faceted fixtures. After another hit on the cigarette, he looked at them over it, frowning. “Fucks with me,” he said. “I cannot believe how seriously it fucks with me. That was nine hours. Nine. Fucking. Hours.”

“You should try the patch,” Alberto suggested. He turned to Hollis. “You used to smoke,” he said to her, “when you were in the Curfew.”

“I quit,” she said.

“Did you use the patch?” Bobby drew on his Marlboro again.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of how?”

“Inchmale read the original accounts of the English discovering tobacco in Virginia. The tribes they ran into weren’t smoking it, not the way we do.”

“What were they doing?” Bobby’s eyes looked considerably less crazy now, from beneath the thatch.

“Part of it was what we’d call passive smoking, but deliberate. They’d go into a tent and burn a lot of tobacco leaves. But the other thing they were doing was poultices.”

“Polt—?” He lowered what was left of the Marlboro.

“Nicotine’s absorbed very quickly through the skin. Inchmale would stick a bunch of damp, pulverized tobacco leaf on you, under duct tape—”

“And you quit, that way?” Alberto’s eyes were wide.

“Not exactly. It’s dangerous. We found out later that you could just drop dead, doing that. Like if you could absorb all the nicotine from a single cigarette, that would be more than a lethal dose. But it was so unpleasant, after a time or two it seemed to work like some kind of aversion therapy.” She smiled at Bobby.

“Maybe I’ll try that,” he said, and flicked ash on the floor. “Where is he?”

“Argentina,” she said.

“Is he playing?”

“Gigging a little.”

“Recording?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And you’re doing journalism now?”

“I’ve always written a little,” she said. “Where’s your toilet?”

“Far corner.” Bobby pointed, away from where she’d seen Archie and the other thing.

As she crossed the floor in the direction indicated, she eyed the grid drawn in what looked like flour. The lines weren’t perfectly straight, but close enough. She was careful not to step on or scuff any.

The toilet was a three-staller with a stainless-steel urinal, newer than the building. She locked the door, hung her bag from the hook inside the first stall, and hauled out her PowerBook. While it booted up, she got settled. There was, as she’d been fairly certain there would be, wifi. Would she like to join the wireless network 72fofH00av? She would, and did, wondering why an agoraphobic isolationist techie like Bobby wouldn’t bother to WEP his wifi, but then she was always surprised at how many people left them open.

She had mail, from Inchmale. She opened it.

Angelina reiterates her concern about your being, however indirectly or only potentially, employed by le Bigend, which she points out is more correctly pronounced “bay-jend,” sort of, but seldom is, she says, even by him. More urgently, perhaps, she emailed her good friend Mari at Dazed, and has it back, on very good authority, that your Node must be closely held indeed, as nobody there has ever heard of it. Keeping a magazine moderately secret until you publish would be fairly odd, but your Node no-shows where any mag should show, even if it were being kept under relative wraps.

XOX "male

Another layer added to her general cognitive dissonance, she thought, as she washed her hands. In the mirror, her Mondrian haircut still worked. She put the PowerBook to sleep, and back into her bag.

Having recrossed the wonky grid of flour, she found Alberto and Bobby sitting at one of the tables in Aeron chairs. These had the down-at-heels look that came of having been purchased for some subsequently failed start-up, seized by deputies, auctioned, resold. There were holes in the carbon-gray see-through mesh, where lit cigarettes had touched the taut material.

Strata of blue smoke drifted under the bright lights, reminding her of stadium shows.

Bobby’s knees were drawn up to his chin, the nonexistent heels of his Kedsclone winkle-pickers caught in the gray mesh of the Aeron’s seat. In the litter on the table he’d turned the chair away from, she made out Red Bull cans, oversized waterproof marking pens, and a candy-like scattering of what she rather reluctantly recognized as white Lego bricks.

“Why white?” She picked one up as she took her own Aeron, twirling on it to face Bobby. “Are these the brown M&Ms of locative computer art?”

“Was it the brown ones they wanted,” asked Alberto from behind her, “or was it the brown ones they didn’t want?”

Bobby ignored him. “More like duct tape. They’re handy if you need to patch electronics together and don’t want to scratch-build a chassis. If you stick to one color, it’s less confusing visually, and the white’s easiest on the eye, and easiest to photograph components against.”

She let the Lego roll back into the palm of her hand. “But you can buy them that way, a bag of just white ones?”

“Special order.”

“Alberto says you’re like a producer. You agree?”

Bobby studied her from behind the forelock. “In some very vague, over-generalized way? Sort of.”

“How did you get into this?”

“I was working on commercial GPS technology. I’d gotten into that because I’d thought I wanted to be an astronomer, and I’d gotten fascinated with satellites. The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

“But this one’s military to begin with.”

“Sure,” he said, “but maybe maps were, too. The grid’s that basic. Too basic for most people to get a handle on.”

“Someone told me that cyberspace was ‘everting.’ That was how she put it.”

“Sure. And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here.” He pushed his hair aside and let both blue eyes drill into her.

“Archie, over there”—she gestured in the direction of empty space—“you’re going to hang him over a street in Tokyo.”

He nodded.

“But you could do that and still leave him here, couldn’t you? You could assign him to two physical locations. You could assign him to any number of locations, couldn’t you?”

He smiled.

“And who’d know he was here, then?”

“Right now, if you hadn’t been told it was here, there’d be no way for you to find it, unless you had its URL and its GPS coordinates, and if you have those, you know it’s here. You know something’s here, anyway. That’s changing, though, because there are an increasing number of sites to post this sort of work on. If you’re logged into one of those, have an interface device”—he pointed to the helmet—“a laptop and wifi, you’re cruising.”

She thought about it. “But each one of those sites, or servers, or…portals…?”

He nodded. “Each one shows you a different world. Alberto’s shows me River Phoenix dead on a sidewalk. Somebody else’s shows me, I don’t know, only good things. Only kittens, say. The world we walk around in would be channels.”

She cocked her head at him. “Channels?”

“Yes. And given what broadcast television wound up being, that doesn’t sound so good. But think about blogs, how each one is actually trying to describe reality.”

“They are?”

“In theory.”

“Okay.”

“But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog.”

She looked at him. “Thanks.” She put the piece of white Lego down on the table, beside the origami-beautiful packaging from someone’s new iPod. There were the instructions and warranty papers, still heat-sealed in their vinyl bag. A thin white cable, factory-coiled, in another, smaller bag. A bright-yellow rectangle, larger than the Lego. She picked this up, letting her fingers do the thinking. “Then why aren’t more people doing it? How’s it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?” The yellow rectangle was made of die-cast hollow metal, covered with glossy paint. Part of a toy.

“We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and grinned at her.

“In Bobbyland,” she said.

“You got it.”

She turned the yellow thing over, saw MADE IN CHINA in tiny bas-relief capitals. Part of a toy truck. The box on the trailer. Container. It was a toy shipping container.

And that was what the rectangular volume of wireframe had represented, full scale. A shipping container.

She put the miniature down beside the white Lego, without looking at either.