"Authentic."
"Of course."
Baranov takes the box.
"These are interesting as well." Ngemi unzips his black coat'and withdraws a brown envelope. "Documentation of provenance."
Baranov tucks the box beneath his arm and takes the envelope, He hands Cayce a business card.
The Light of India Curry House. Poole.
She turns it over. Rust-colored fountain pen. Neat italics.
The eyes behind the round lenses fix Cayce with contempt, dismissal. "Baltic oil, is it? Thought you might be a bit more interesting than that."
He flicks his cigarette down and walks on, in the direction they've just come, the Curta prototype beneath his arm and the brown envelope in his hand.
"Do you mind my asking," Ngemi says, "what he meant?"
"No," she says, looking from the dung-colored back of Baranov's retreating jacket to the rust-colored e-mail address, "but I don't know."
"This is what you wanted?"
"It must be," she says. "I suppose it must be."
32. PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE
- /
Ngemi departs by tube from Bond Street Station, leaving her, in suddenly bright sunlight, with no idea where she might be going, or why.
A cab takes her to Kensington High Street, the card from Baranov's curry house zipped into the pocket on the sleeve of the Rickson's, the one originally designed to hold a pack of American cigarettes.
Liminal, she thinks, getting out of the cab by what had been the musty, multileveled cave of Kensington Market, with its vanished mazes of punk and hippy tat. Liminal. Katherine McNally's word for certain states: thresholds, zones of transition. Does she feel liminal, now, or simply directionless? She pays the driver, through the window, and he drives away.
Oil, Baranov had said?
She walks in the direction of the park. Bright gilt of the Albert Memorial, never quite real to her since they cleaned it. When she'd first seen it, it had been a black thing, funereal, almost sinister. Win had told her that the London he'd first seen had been largely as black as that, a city of soot, more deeply textured perhaps for its lack of color.
She waits at a signal, crosses the High Street.
Her Parco boots crunch gravel as she turns into the Gardens. Cayce Pollard Central Standard might now be approaching its own hour of the wolf, she thinks. Soul too long in a holding pattern.
The park is scribed with reddish gravel, paths wide as rural highways in Tennessee. These bring her to the statue of Peter Pan, bronze rabbits at its base. .
She takes off the Luggage Label bag, puts it down, and removes the Rickson's, spreading it on the short-cut grass. She sits on it. A jogger passes, on the gravel.
She unzips the cigarette pocket on the Rickson's sleeve and looks at Baranov's card.
[email protected]. Looking faded in this light, as though Baranov had written it years ago.
She puts it carefully away again, zips up the little pocket. Opens her bag and removes the iBook and phone.
Hotmail. Timing out. Empty.
She opens a blank message, outgoing.
My name is Cayce Pollard. I'm sitting on the grass in a park in London. It's sunny and warm. I'm 32 years old. My father disappeared on September 11, 2001, in New York, but we haven't been able to prove he was killed in the attack. I began to follow the footage you've been
That "you" stops her. Pecks at the delete key, losing "you've been." Katherine McNally had had Cayce compose letters, letters which would never, it was understood, be sent, and which in some cases couldn't be, the addressee being dead.
Someone showed me one segment and I looked for more. I found a site where people discussed it, and I began to post there, asking questions. I can't tell you
This time, it doesn't stop her.
why, but it became very important to me, to all of us there. Parkaboy and Ivy and Maurice and Filmy, all the others too. We went there whenever we could, to be with other people who understood. We looked for more footage. Some people stayed out surfing, weeks at a time, never posting until someone discovered a new segment.
All through that winter, the mildest she'd known in Manhattan, though in memory the darkest, she'd gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.
We don't know what you're doing, or why. Parkaboy thinks you're dreaming. Dreaming for us. Sometimes he sounds as though he thinks you're dreaming us. He has this whole edged-out participation mystique: how we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you're doing, that we become part of it. Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us. He says it's like Coleridge, and De Quincey. He says it's shamanic. That we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the screen, but really, some of us anyway, we're adventurers. We're out there, seeking, taking risks. In hope, he says, of bringing back wonders. Trouble is, lately, I've been living that.
She looks up, everything made pale and washed-out by the light. She's forgotten to bring her sunglasses again.
I've been out there, out here, seeking. Taking risks. Not sure exactly why. Scared. Turns out there are some very not-nice people, out here. Though I guess that was never news.
She stops, and looks over at Peter Pan, noticing how the bronze ears of the rabbits at his base are kept polished by the hands of children.
Do you know we are all here, waiting for the next segment? Wandering up and down the web all night, looking for where you've left it for us? We are. Well, not me personally, lately, but that's because I seem to have followed Parkaboy's advice and started trying to find another way to hack in. And I guess I have—we have—because we've found those codes embedded in the footage, that map of the island or city or whatever it is, and we know that you, or someone, could use those to track the spread of a given segment, to judge the extent of dissemination. And through finding those codes, the numbers woven into the fabric, I've been able to get to this e-mail address, and now I'm sitting in this park, beside the statue of Peter Pan, writing to you, and
And what?
What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?
Are you there? The way I'm here?
She reads what she's written. Like most of the letters Katherine had had her write—to her mother, to Win both before and after his disappearance, to various ex's and one former therapist—her letter to the maker ends with question marks. Katherine had thought that the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn't end in question marks. Periods were needed, if not exclamation points, in Katherine's view, and Cayce had never felt particularly successful with either.
Sincerely yours, Cayce Pollard
Watching her hands continue briefly to type, in best typing-class mode, in privately sarcastic imitation of a woman imagining that she is actually accomplishing something.
(CayceP)
Aware in just that instant of how the park distances the sound of London, giving her the sensation of existing at some still point around which all else revolves. As though the broad gravel avenues are leys, terminating at Peter Pan.
The angry child's fingers, typing.
And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.
Touchpadding down menu to Send.
And of course she doesn't.
And watches as it sends.
"I didn't," she protests to the iBook on the grass, the colors of its screen faint in the sunlight. "I didn't," she says to Peter Pan.
She couldn't have. She did.
Cross-legged on her jacket, hunched over the iBook.
She doesn't know what it is that she feels.