It had been Parkaboy, shortly after Ivy had started the site from her Seoul apartment, who had first raised the possibility of what he called the Garage Kubrick." This was not a concept that argued from either a Completist or Progressive position, necessarily, with Mama Anarchia herself quite contentedly using the term today, even though she knows that it originated with Parkaboy. It is simply a part of the discourse, and a central one: that it is possible that this footage is generated single-handedly by some technologically empowered solo auteur, some guerilla creator out there alone in the night of the Internet. That it might be being generated via some sort of CGI, actors, sets and all, and entirely at the virtual hand of some secretive and perhaps unknown genius, has be-come a widespread obsession with a large faction of Progressives, and with many Completists as well, though the Completists necessarily put that in past tense.
But here is Parkaboy railing on about Mama Anarchia's tendency to quote Baudrillard and the other Frenchmen who annoy him so deeply, and Cayce automatically hits Respond and gives him her boilerplate oil-upon-the-waters copy:
This always happens when we forget that this site is only here because Ivy is willing to expend the time and energy to keep it here, and neither Ivy nor most of the rest of us enjoy it when you or anyone else starts yelling. Ivy is our host, we should try to keep this a pleasant place for her, and we shouldn't take it too much for granted that F:F:F will always be here.
She clicks on Post and watches her name and message title appear under his:
CayceP and Keep your shirt on.
Because Parkaboy is her friend, she can get away with this where someone else couldn't. She has become a sort of ritual referee charged specifically with flagging down Parkaboy whenever he goes off on anyone, as he's definitely inclined to do. Ivy can whip him into shape pronto, but Ivy is a policewoman in Seoul, works long shifts, and can't always be on the site to moderate.
She automatically clicks Reload, and his response is already there:
Where are you? nt. London. Working, nt.
And all of this is hugely comforting. Psychological prophylaxis, evidently.
The phone rings, beside the Cube, mirror-world rings she finds unnerving at the best of times. She hesitates, then answers.
"Hello?"
"Cayce dear. It's Bernard." Stonestreet. "Helena and I were wondering if you'd be up for a little dinner."
"Thank you, Bernard." Looking at the trestle table blocking the door. "But I'm feeling unwell."
"Jet lag. You can try Helena's little pills." -
"It's kind of you, Bernard, but—"
"Hubertus will be here. He'll be horribly disappointed if he doesn't have a chance to see you."
"Aren't we meeting Monday?"
"He's in New York tomorrow evening. Can't be here for our meeting. Say you'll come."
This is one of those conversations in which Cayce feels that the British have evolved passive-aggressive leverage in much the way they've evolved irony. She has no way of securing the perimeter, here, once she leaves the flat, but this Blue Ant contract represents a good quarter of her anticipated year's gross.
"PMS, Bernard. Not to put it too delicately."
Then you absolutely have to come. Helena has something com-pletely marvelous, for that."
"Have you tried it?"
"Tried what?"
She gives up. Company, of almost any kind, seems not entirely a bad idea. "Where are you?"
Docklands. Seven. It's casual. I'll send a car. Delighted you can come. Bye." Stonestreet rings off with an abruptness Cayce suspects has required some learning in New York. There is ordinarily a singsong, almost tender cadence to the mirror-world termination of telephone conversations, a call-and-response of farewell she's never mastered.
Psychological prophylaxis is shot to hell.
Three minutes later, having Googled "North London locksmith," she's on the phone with a man at something called Judge Advocate Locks.
"You don't work on Saturdays," she opens, hopefully.
"Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day."
"But you wouldn't be able to get here before this evening, would you?"
"Where are you?"
She tells him.
"Fifteen minutes," he says.
"You don't take Visa."
"We do."
As she hangs up, she realizes that she's lost Dorotea's number by making this call. Not that she would necessarily have been able to extract it from the phone, but it was the closest thing she had to evidence of the entire episode, other than Asian Sluts on the browser memory. She presses Redial, just to check, and gets the man at Judge Advocate. "Sorry," she says, "hit Redial by mistake."
"Fourteen minutes," he says, defensive now, and the truck arrives in more like twelve.
An hour later, Damien's door has two entirely new and very expensive German locks, with keys that look like something you might find if you took apart a very up-to-date automatic pistol. The Cube is back on the table in its accustomed place. She didn't change the lock on the street door because she doesn't know Damien's tenants, or even how many there are.
Dinner with Bigend. She groans, and goes to change.
THE car and driver from Blue Ant are waiting when she exits the street door, the two new keys on a black shoestring around her neck. She's hidden the set of spares behind one of Damien's mixing consoles in the upstairs room.
Evening now, a light rain just beginning to fall.
She thinks of it thinning the Children's Crusade still further, under the giant Fimo boots and aeroplanes and the streetlamps mounted with surveillance cameras.
Settled in the car's rear seat, she asks the driver, a slender and immaculate African, for the name of the station nearest their destination.
"Bow Road," he says, but she doesn't know it.
She looks at the back of his meticulously shorn head, at the niobium stud in the upper curve of his right ear, then out at passing shop fronts and restaurants.
Stonestreet's "casual" will translate as relatively dressy, by her standards, so she's opted for the CPU Damien calls Skirt Thing, a long, narrow, anonymously made tube of black jersey, with only the most minimal hemming at either end. Tight but comfortable, rides the hips well, infinitely adjustable in terms of length. Under this, black hose; over it, a black DKNY cardigan un-Dikini-ed with a pair of nail scissors. New-old-stock pumps from a vintage place in Paris.
And finds herself thinking wistfully of racketing along in the Metro, and of the impossibly great way Parisian women have of wearing scarves, she decides that this is either another sign of serotonin normalization, daydreaming of another place, or a get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge reaction to Asian Sluts on the browser.
This increasingly massive and entirely unresolved issue she now has with Dorotea, someone she'd scarcely known existed. She's searched her memory for any way in which she might previously have earned this woman's enmity, but has found nothing.
She is not much in the business of making enemies, although the quieter side of her profession, the sort of yea-or-nay evaluation Blue Ant is currently paying her for, can be problematic. A nay can cost a company a contract, or an employee (once, an entire department) a job. The rest of it, the actual running to earth of street fashion, the occasional lectures to intent platoons of executives, generates remarkably little ill will.
A red double-decker grinds past, registering less as mirror-world than as some Disney prop for Londonland.
On a wall she spies freshly shingled copies of a still from the new fragment. It is the kiss. Already.
In New York, once, on an uptown train in rush hour, during the anthrax scares, as she'd mentally recited the duck mantra, she'd found herself looking at a still no bigger than a business card, frame-grabbed and safety-pinned, from a fragment she'd not yet seen, on the green polyester uniform blazer of a weary-looking black woman. Cayce had been using the mantra to ward off a recurring fantasy: that they would drop light bulbs full of the very purest stuff on the subway tracks, where, as she too well remembered Win once having told her, it would take only a few hours, as the Army had evidently proven in experiments in the 1960s, to drift from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street.