18. 140

The Neo rang while he was still trying to grasp Twitter. He was registered, now, as GAYDOLPHIN2. No followers, following no one. Whatever that meant. And his updates, whatever those were, were protected.

The harsh faux-mechanical ring tone had attracted the attention of the girl at the desk. He smiled anxiously, apologetically, from his seat on the leather-padded laptop-tethering bench, and answered it, the Neo awkward against his ear. “Yes?”

“Milgrim?”

“Speaking.”

“Hollis. How are you?”

“Well,” said Milgrim, automatically. “How are you?”

“Wondering if you’re up for Paris tomorrow. We’d take an early Eurostar.”

“What’s that?”

“The train,” she said. “Chunnel. It’s quicker.”

“What for?” Sounding, he thought, like a suspicious child.

“I’ve found someone we need to try to speak with. She’s there tomorrow, and the day after. After that, I don’t know.”

“Will we be gone long?”

“Overnight, if we’re lucky. Seven-thirty out of St. Pancras. I’ll arrange for someone from Blue Ant to pick you up at the hotel.”

“Does Hubertus know?”

“Yes. I just ran into him.”

“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

“I’ll have the car phone your room.”

“Thank you.”

Milgrim put the Neo away and went back to webmail and Twitter. He’d just heard from Twitter, asking whether he was willing to have GAYDOLPHIN1 follow him. He was. And now he’d have to tell her about Paris. In bursts of a hundred and forty character spaces, apparently.

As he was finishing this, someone called CyndiBrown32 asked whether he was willing to have her follow him.

Remembering Winnie’s instructions, he wasn’t. He closed Twitter and logged out of webmail. Closed the MacBook.

“Good night, Mr. Milgrim,” said the girl at the desk as he went to the elevator.

He felt as though something new and entirely too large was attempting to fit within him. He’d shifted allegiances, or acquired a new one. Or was he simply more afraid of Winnie than he was of Bigend? Or was it that he was afraid of the possibility of the absence of Bigend?

“Institutionalized,” he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its door closed.

He’d gone from where he’d been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely small, and very hard, to this wider space, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend, but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.

Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away. Whatever it was.

The door opened on the third-floor hallway.

Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.

When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he’d arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.

“Quit staring,” he said to the dressmaker’s dummy as he stepped into his room. “I wish I had a book.” It had been quite a while since he’d found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.

He’d look for a book in Paris.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

19. PRESENCES

Tossing makeup and toiletries into a bag, she noticed that the Blue Ant figurine wasn’t there on the counter, her failed employment-avoidance totem. Moved by the housecleaners in yesterday’s tidy, she supposed, but unlike them. She zipped the makeup bag. Checked her hair in the mirror. A voice with a BBC register was flowing smoothly, meaninglessly, from the ornate wall-grid.

Out past the steamy glass slabs and nickel-plate bumpers of the H. G. Wells shower, multiply towel-draped now.

Glancing around Number Four in hope of finding something she might have forgotten to pack, she saw the three unopened cartons of the British edition of her book. Remembering Milgrim, when she’d first met him, on their walk to the tapas place, expressing interest. Bigend, of course, had brought it up. Milgrim had seemed taken, for a few seconds, with the idea that she’d written a book.

She should take him one, she decided.

She wrestled a ridiculously heavy carton onto the unmade bed and used the foil-ripper on the room’s Victorian corkscrew to slit the transparent plastic tape. Releasing a bookstore smell as she opened the carton, but not a good one. Dry, chemical. And there they were, square and individually shrink-wrapped, Presences, by Hollis Henry. She took one off the top, slid it into the side pocket of her roll-aboard.

Then out, through liminal green hallways, lift, and down, to the coffee-smelling foyer, where a tortoise-spectacled young man presented her with a tall white coffee in a crisp white paper cup, lidded with white plastic, and offered her a Cabinet umbrella.

“Is the car here?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I won’t need an umbrella, thanks.”

He carried the roll-aboard out for her and put it in the popped trunk of a black BMW, piloted by the bearded young man who’d admitted her to Blue Ant.

“Jacob,” this one said, smiling. He wore a waxed cotton motorcycle jacket. It lent him a sort of post-apocalyptic elan, she thought, this rainy morning. Props should’ve given him a Sten gun, or some other weapon looking equally like plumbing.

“Of course,” she said. “Thank you for picking me up.”

“Traffic’s not terrible,” opening her door for her.

“We’re meeting Mr. Milgrim?” As he slid in behind the wheel, she noted his wireless earpiece.

“All sorted. Been picked up. Ready for Paris?”

“I hope so,” she said as he pulled away from the curb.

Then Gloucester Place. Had she been walking, she’d have taken Baker Street instead, which she’d dreamed of as a child, and which retained, even at this stage of supposed adulthood, a certain small sharp sense of disappointment. Though perhaps game was afoot in Paris, she thought, and now merely a rather long subway ride from here.

In the traffic of Marylebone Road, stopping and starting, she kept noticing a dispatch rider, armored in samurai plastics, the back of his yellow helmet scarred as if something feline and huge had swatted him and almost missed, his clumsy-looking fiberglass fairing mended with peeling silver tape. He seemed to keep passing them, somehow, rolling forward between lanes. She’d never understood how that worked here.

“I hope I can find Milgrim at the station.”