Pattern Recognition

Parkaboy is her favorite, on F:F:F. They e-mail when the forum really gets going, and sometimes when it's dead as well. She knows almost nothing about him, other than that he lives in Chicago and, she assumes, is gay. But they know one another's passion for the footage, their doubts and tentative theories, as well as anyone in the world does.

Rather than retype the unbookmarked forum URL, she goes to the browser history.

SEE ASIAN SLUTS GET WHAT THEY DESERVE!

FETISH:FOOTAGE:FORUM

She freezes, hand on mouse, looking at this last logged site.

Then she starts to feel it, that literal folkloric prickle in the scalp.

And she can't, through sheer mental effort, make Asian Sluts and F:F:F reverse their order on the screen. She desperately wants Asian Sluts to be below F:F:F, but it stays where it is. She sits there, unmov-ing, peering at the browser history the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.

Damien's flat is suddenly not a friendly place, not familiar at all. It has become a sealed and airless territory in which very bad things might happen. And it has, she now remembers, a second floor, to which, this trip, she has not yet even ascended.

She looks up at the ceiling.

And finds herself remembering the experience of lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted, beneath a boyfriend named Do

Do

But this final and particular time, watching him phase-shift into what she'd learned to recognize as the run-up to one of his ever-reliable orgasms, she'd for some reason stretched her arms above her head, perhaps even luxuriously, her left hand sliding accidentally under the cockroach-colored veneer of the headboard. Where it encountered something cold and hard and very precisely made. Which she brailled, shortly, into the square butt of an automatic pistol—held there, probably, with tape very similar to the tape she'd used here, this morning, to conceal the hole in her Buzz Rickson's.

Do

Some very basic computational module instantly had completed the simplest of equations: if boyfriend sleeps with gun, Cayce does not share bed, or bod, with (now abruptly former) boyfriend.

And so she'd lain there, her fingertip against what she assumed was the checkered hardwood of the gun's grip, and watched Do

But here, in Camden Town, in Damien's flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, there is a room. It is the room where she's slept on previous visits, and she knows that Damien has now converted it to a home studio, where he indulges his passion for mixing.

Up there, she wonders, now, mightn't there be someone?

The someone who somehow got in here in her absence and idly took a look at those Asian sluts? It seems bizarre, and impossible, and yet horribly, if barely, possible. Or is it all too very possible?

She makes herself look around the room again, and notices the roll of black tape on the carpet. It is upright, as though it had rolled there. And remembers, very clearly, placing it, when she'd finished with it, on its side, so that it wouldn't roll off, on the edge of the trestle table.

Something takes her into the kitchen, then, and she finds herself looking into a drawer containing Damien's kitchen knives. Which are new, and not much used, and probably quite sharp. And, while she is not uncertain that she could defend herself with one of these if required, the idea of introducing sharp edges into the equation seems not entirely a good one. She tries another drawer and finds a square cardboard box of machine parts, heavy-looking and precise and slightly oily, which she assumes are leftovers from the robot girls. One of these, thick and cylindrical, fits neatly and solidly into her hand, squared-off edges just showing at either end of her closed fist. What you can do with a roll of quarters, she remembers, Do

She takes this with her as she mounts the stairs to Damien's home recording studio. Which proves to be just that, and unoccupied, with no hiding places whatever. A futon, narrow and new, that would be her bed if Damien were here.

Back down the stairs.

She goes through the space carefully, holding her breath as she opens both of the two closets. Where there is very little at all, Damien being not a clothes person.

She looks into each of the lower cabinets in the renovated kitchen, and in the space beneath the sink. Where no prowler crouches, but the reno crew have left a big yellow metric measuring tape.

She puts the chain on the locked door to the hallway. It is not much of a chain, by New York standards, and she's lived in New York long enough to put very little trust in chains, regardless. But still.

She examines the windows, all of which are closed, and all but one of which are so thoroughly painted shut that she estimates it would take a carpenter three very expensive hours and a fair number of tools to open one. The one that has been opened, no doubt by that same expensive carpenter, is presently secured by a pair of mirror-world sash bolts, their hidden tongues to be extended and retracted by a sort of key-like wrench or driver, with an oddly shaped head. She has seen these used in London before, and has no idea where Damien keeps his. Since this can only be done from within, and the glass is intact, she rules out the windows as points of entry.

She looks back at the door.

Someone has a key. Two keys, she remembers, for this door, and possibly a third for the street door.

Damien must have a new girlfriend, someone he hasn't mentioned. Or else an old one, someone who's retained the keys. Or a cleaner perhaps, someone who forgot something and returned for it while Cayce was out.

Then she remembers that the keys are new, the locks having been changed after completion of the renovation, causing hers to have had to be FedExed to New York on the eve of her departure. This by Damien's assistant, the one who'd come in to put the place back together. And she remembers this woman on the phone with her in New York, concerned because the keys she'd just sent off were the only set she had, and apologizing that Damien currently had no housecleaner.

She goes into the bedroom and examines her things. Nothing seems to have been disturbed. She remembers an eerily young Sean Co

Too late for that.

She goes into the other room and looks at the Cube, which has gone back to sleep, and at the roll of tape on the carpet. The room is clean and simple, semiotically neutral, Damien having charged his decorators, on threat of dismissal, with the absolute avoidance of shelter magazine chic of any kind.