"And?"
"Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops." She looks at Cayce. "Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so."
"I'm devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I'm starting to distrust the most casual exchange." Magda looks glum. "What sort of advertising do you do?"
"I consult on design." Then, because this is not exactly the stuff of interesting conversation: "And I hunt 'cool,' although I don't like to describe it that way. Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion."
Magda's eyebrows go up. "And you like my hats?"
"I really like your hats, Magda. I'd wear them, if I wore hats."
Magda nods, excited now.
"But the 'cool' part—and I don't know why that archaic usage has stuck, by the way—isn't an inherent quality. It's like a tree falling, in the forest."
"It cannot hear," declares Voytek, solemnly.
"What I mean is, no customers, no cool. It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does."
"And then?"
"I point a commodifier at it."
"And?"
"It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed." She takes a sip of lager. Looks around the pub. The crew in here aren't from the Children's Crusade. She guesses they are the folks who live nearby, probably back behind this side of the street, a neighborhood less gentrified than Damien's. The wood of the bar is worn the way old boats can be worn, virtually to splinters, held together by a thousand coats of coffin-colored varnish.
"So," Magda says, "I am being used to establish a pattern? To fake that? To bypass a part of the process."
"Yes," Cayce says.
"Then why are they trying to do it with bloody video clips from the Internet? This couple kissing in a doorway? Is it a product? They won't even tell us."
And Cayce can only stare.
"HELENA. It's Cayce. Thank you for dinner. It was lovely."
"How was Hubertus? Bernard thought he might have the hots for you, to put it bluntly."
"Bluntness appreciated, Helena, but I don't think that's the case. We had a drink. I'd never really had a one-on-one with him before."
"He's brilliant, isn't he?" Something in her tone. A sort of resignation?
"Yes. Is Bernard there, Helena? Hate to disturb him, but I have a question about work."
"Sorry, but he's out. Take a message?"
"Do you know if there's a branch, a subsidiary of some kind, of Blue Ant, called Trans? As in—lation? Or—gressive?"
Silence. "Yes. There is. Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard's, oddly. In lawn care."
"Pardon?" A place name?
"The cousin. Lawn care. Lawn products. But Laura heads Trans, I do know that. One of Hubertus's pet projects."
"Thanks, Helena. Have to run."
"Bye, dear."
"Bye."
Cayce removes her card from the pay phone and hangs up, the receiver being immediately taken by a dreadlocked Crusader waiting on the sidewalk behind her.
The sunlight seems not so pleasant now. She's made her excuses, come out here, bought a phone card, waited in line. And now it seems that Magda is indeed employed, by a sub-unit of Blue Ant, to encourage interest in the footage. What is Bigend doing?
She fords the stream of the Crusade, making it to the opposite bank and heading back down toward Parkway. The street-wide flood of kids seems strangely removed, as though they themselves are footage.
A suggestion of autumn is in the light, now, and she wonders where she'll be this winter. Will she be here? In New York? She doesn't know. What is that, to be over thirty and not know where you'll be in a month or two?
She reaches a point where the Crusade flows around a stationary, drinking knot of Camden's resident, revenant alcoholics. They are why Damien had been able to afford to rent here, years before he'd made any money or bought his house. Somewhere nearby is a Victorian doss house, a vast red brick pile of a hostel for the homeless, purpose-built and hideous, and its inhabitants, however individually transitory, have congregated in the High Street since the day it first opened. Damien had shown it to her one full-moon night, out walking. It stood as a bulwark against gentrification, he'd explained. The re-purposers, the creators of loft spaces, saw the inhabitants, these units dedicated to the steady-state consumption of fortified lagers and sugary ciders, and turned back. And these defenders stand now, drinking, amid the Children's Crusade, rocks in a river of youth.
A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren't on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he'd seen.
In Aberdeen the market men are locking green-painted shutters across their stalls, closing early, and the place where she'd had breakfast is in full bistro swing, a spill of laughing, drinking children out across the pavement.
She walks on, feeling not foreign but alien, made so by this latest advent of something that seems to be infecting everything. Hubertus, and Trans…
You're not exactly bouncing them back to me, are you? What are you doing over there, anyway? Do you know that the Pope is a footage-head? Well, maybe not the Pope himself, but there's someone in the Vatican running the segments. Turns out that down Brazil way, where folks don't distinguish much between TV, the Net, and other stuff anyway, there is some kind of cult around the footage. Or not so much around it as desirous of burning it, since these illiterate but massively video-consumptive folk believe that it is none other than the Devil himself who is our auteur. Very strange, and there has apparentlybeen a statement issued, to these Brazilians, from Rome, to the effect that it is the Vatican's business to say which works are the works of
Satan, nobody else's, that the matter of the footage is being taken under consideration, and in the meantime don't mess with the franchise. I wish I'd thought of it myself, just to irritate la Anarchia.
She closes Parkaboy's latest, gets up now and goes into the yellow kitchen. Puts the kettle on. Coffee or tea? "I hate the domestication," Donny had confided, once, insofar as he was capable.
She wonders if an absent friend's flat in London is perhaps preferable to her own, back in New York, as carefully cleansed of extraneous objects as she can keep it, and why? Does she hate the domestication? She has fewer things in her apartment than anyone, her friend Mar-got says.
She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, she looks back, out into Damien's main room, and sees the robot girls, eyeless. No flies on Damien. He's kept his decorators from decorating, resulting in a semiotic neutrality that Cayce is starting to appreciate more, the longer she stays here. Her own place, in New York, is a whitewashed cave, scarcely more demonstrative of self, its uneven tenement floors painted a shade of blue she discovered in northern Spain. An ancient tint, arsenic-based. Peasants there had used it for centuries on interior walls, and it was said to keep flies away. Cayce had had it mixed in plastic enamel, sans arsenic, from a Polaroid she'd taken. Like the varnish on the bar in Camden High Street, it sealed the furry splinters of wear. Texture. She likes an acquired texture, evidence of long habitation, but nothing too personal.
The kettle whistles. She makes a single cup of Colombian and takes it back to the Cube. F:F:F is open there, and she flips back and forth between posts, getting a sense of what's been going on. Not much, aside from ongoing analysis of #135, which is normal, and discussion of this Vatican story from Brazil. Maurice, interestingly, posts to point out that both the story and the alleged papal interest seem to issue from Brazil, and that there has apparently been no independent confirmation from elsewhere. Is it true? he wonders. A hoax?