Spook Country

He sighed, settling through the warmly rippling amniotic soup of his state.

This was good. This was very good. If only he could take it with him.

11. BOBBYLAND

East on La Brea, Alberto steered the Aztec-lacquered VW, Hollis beside him. “Bobby’s agoraphobic,” he told her, waiting at a light behind a black Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo with heavily tinted glass. “He doesn’t like going out. But he doesn’t like sleeping in the same spot twice, so that’s hard.”

“Was he always like that?” The Cherokee pulled away, ahead, and Alberto followed. She wanted to keep him talking.

“I’ve known him for the past two years, and I couldn’t tell you.”

“Does he have a reputation, in the community, for what he does?” Leaving “community” unlabeled, in hope he’d fill a blank or two for her.

“He’s the best. He was the chief troubleshooter for a company in Oregon that designed professional navigation gear, some military stuff. Says they were very i

“But he’s down here now helping you put your art together?”

“Enabling. If it weren’t for Bobby, I couldn’t get my stuff up on the grid. Same for the rest of the artists I know here.”

“What about the people who’re doing this in New York, or Tulsa? It’s not just an L.A. thing, is it?”

“Global. It’s global.”

“So who does it for them, what Bobby does?”

“Some of the New York work, Bobby’s involved with that. Linda Morse, she does the bison in Nolita? Bobby. There are people doing it in New York, London, wherever. But Bobby’s ours, here…”

“Is he like…a producer?” Trusting that he’d know she meant music, not film.

He glanced over at her. “Exactly, although I’m not sure I’d want to be quoted.”

“Off the record.”

“He’s like a producer. If someone else were doing what Bobby’s doing for me, my work would be different. Would reach the audience differently.”

“Then would you say that an artist, working in your medium, who had Bobby’s full skill set, would be…”

“A better artist?”

“Yeah.”

“Not necessarily. The analogy with recording music holds true. How much of it is the strength of the material, of the artist, and how much the skill and sensibility of the producer?”

“Tell me about his sensibility.”

“Bobby’s a tech guy, and a kind of mimetic literalist, without knowing it.”

Bobby, she gathered, wasn’t going to be afforded too much aesthetic influence here, however enabling he might be.

“He wants it to look ‘real,’ and he doesn’t have to tie himself in knots over what ‘real’ means. So he gets a kind of punch into the work…”

“Like your River?”

“The main thing is, if I didn’t have Bobby, I couldn’t do any interior pieces. Even some of the exterior installations work better if he triangulates off cell towers. The Fitzgerald piece, he’s actually using Virgin’s RFID system.” He looked worried. “He won’t like it, if I bring you.”

“If you’d asked him, he would’ve said no.”

“That’s right.”

She checked a street sign as they crossed an intersection; they were on Romaine now, in a long stretch of low, nondescript, mostly older-looking industrial buildings. There was very little signage, the rule here seeming to be a tidy anonymity. There would be film vault companies, she guessed, effects houses, even the odd recording studio. The textures were homely, nostalgic: brick, whitewashed concrete blocks, painted-over steel-mullioned windows and skylights, wooden power poles supporting massive arrays of transformers. It looked like the world of American light industry as depicted in a 1950s civics text. Apparently deserted now, though she doubted it would be much busier by day.

Alberto turned off Romaine, pulled over, parked, reached back to get his laptop-and-helmet outfit. “With any luck we’ll be able to view some new work,” he said.

Out of the car, her PowerBook slung over her shoulder in its bag, she followed him toward a featureless, largely windowless structure of white-painted concrete. He stopped beside a green-painted sheet-metal door, handed her the interface device, and pressed a button, set into concrete, that looked like a design-apport from the Standard.

“Look up there,” he said, pointing at nothing in particular, above and to the right of the door. She did, assuming there was a camera, though she couldn’t see it. “Bobby,” he said, “I know you don’t like visitors, let alone uninvited ones, but I think you’ll want to make an exception for Hollis Henry.” He paused, like a showman. “Check it out. It’s her.”

Hollis was about to smile in the direction of the invisible camera, then pretended instead that she was being photographed for a Curfew rerelease. She’d had a trademark semi-frown, in those days. If she invoked the era and sort of relaxed into it, that expression might emerge by default.

“Alberto…Shit…What are you doing?” The voice was tiny, directionless, devoid of gender.

“I’ve got Hollis Henry from the Curfew out here, Bobby.”

“Alberto…”

The tiny voice seemed at a loss for words. “I’m sorry,” she protested, handing the visor rig back to Alberto. “I don’t want to intrude on you. But Alberto’s been showing me his art, explaining how important you are to what he’s doing, and I—”

The green door rattled, opening inward a few inches. A blond forelock and one blue eye edged past it. This should’ve looked ridiculous, childish, but she found it frightening. “Hollis Henry,” he said, his voice no longer tiny, gender restored. The rest of Bobby’s head appeared. He had, as indeed had Inchmale, the true and archaic rock nose. The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance.

Bobby Chombo hadn’t much in the way of a chin, though, so perhaps it all was balance for that.

“Bobby,” she said, thrusting out her hand for his. She shook a cool soft hand that felt as though it wanted, though quietly, to be anywhere else at all.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” he said, opening the door a few more inches. She stepped around it, around his unease, and past him.

And found herself at the edge of an unexpectedly large space. She thought of Olympic pools and indoor te

But what was being built here, while possibly very large, was not available to the naked eye. The gray floor had been marked out in what she guessed were two-meter grid squares, loosely drawn in some white powder delivered by one of those spreaders they use on athletic fields. She could see one of these, in fact, a forest-green uniwheeled hopper, propped against the far wall. This grid didn’t seem to be perfectly aligned with whatever grid system the city and this building were aligned with, and she made a note to ask about that. In the illuminated area stood two twenty-foot folding tables, gray, attended by a scattering of Aeron chairs and by carts loaded with PCs. It looked to her like workspace for two dozen people, though there didn’t seem to be anyone here but this big-nosed Bobby.