Spook Country

She turned back to him. He was wearing an electrically green Lacoste golf shirt, narrow white jeans, and a pair of rubber-soled black canvas sneakers with peculiarly long, sharply pointed toes. He might be thirty, she decided, but not much older. She thought he looked as though his clothes were cleaner than he was; there was still a vertical crease down either side of the front of the knit cotton shirt, the white jeans were spotless, but Bobby himself looked in need of a shower. “Sorry to turn up una

“Hollis Henry.” He had his hands in the front pockets of the white jeans. It looked as though it took work, getting hands into those pockets.

“Yes, I am,” she said.

“Why’d you bring her here, Alberto?” Bobby wasn’t happy.

“I knew you’d want to meet her.” Alberto walked over to one of the gray tables and put down his laptop and visor rig.

Beyond the table, something like the shape a child draws to represent a rocket ship had been roughly outlined on the floor in Safety Orange gaffer tape. If she was guessing the size of the grid squares correctly, the pointed shape was a good fifteen meters long. Within it, the white gridlines had been rubbed out.

“Have you got Archie up?” Alberto was looking in the direction of the orange tape outline. “They animate the new skins yet?”

Bobby pulled his hands from the pockets of his jeans and rubbed his face. “I can’t believe you did this. Turned up here with her.”

“It’s Hollis Henry. How cool is that?”

“I’ll leave,” she said.

Bobby lowered his hands, tossed his forelock, and rolled his eyes to heaven. “Archie’s up. Maps are on.”

“Hollis,” said Alberto, “check it.” He was holding what she took to be a VR visor of Bobby’s, one that looked nothing like anything you’d find at a garage sale. “Wireless.” She walked over to him, took it from him, and put it on. “You’re going to love this,” he assured her. “Bobby?”

“On my one. Three…Two…”

“Meet Archie,” said Alberto.

Ten feet above the orange tape outline, the glossy, grayish-white form of a giant squid appeared, about ninety feet in total length, its tentacles undulating gracefully. “Architeuthis,” Bobby said. Its one visible eye was the size of an SUV tire. “Skins,” Bobby said.

The squid’s every surface flooded with light, subcutaneous pixels sliding past in distorted video imagery, stylized kanji, wide eyes of anime characters. It was gorgeous, ridiculous. She laughed, delighted.

“It’s for a Tokyo department store,” Alberto said. “Over a street, in Shinjuku. In the middle of all that neon.”

“They’re already using this, for advertising?” She walked toward Archie, then under him. The wireless visor made a difference in the experience.

“I have a show there, in November,” said Alberto.

Yeah, she thought, looking up at the endless rush of imagery along Archie’s distal surface, River would fly, in Tokyo.

12. THE SOURCE

M ilgrim dreamed he was naked in Brown’s room, while Brown lay sleeping.

It wasn’t ordinary nakedness, because it involved an occult aura of preternaturally intense awareness, as though the wearer were a vampire in an A

Brown lay beneath New Yorker sheets and one of those beige hotel blankets that sandwich a sheet of plastic foam between layers of polyester moleskin. Milgrim regarded him with something he recognized as akin to pity. Brown’s lips were parted slightly, the upper one quivering slightly with each exhalation.

There was no light at all, in Brown’s room, save for the red standby-indicator on the television, but Milgrim’s aural dream-self saw, in some other frequency entirely, the furniture and objects in Brown’s room presented like screens of carry-on baggage. He saw Brown’s pistol and flashlight, beneath Brown’s pillow, and a rounded rectangle, beside them, that he took to be a large folding knife (no doubt in that same greenish gray). There was something vaguely touching about Brown sleeping with these favorite things so close to hand, something childlike.

He found that he was imagining himself as Tom Sawyer, Brown as Huckleberry Fi

Lots of them. Really quite a number of them. Quite a supply, really. Perhaps a week’s worth, if one were frugal.

He craned forward, as if drawn by magnets embedded in the bones of his face—and found himself, having experienced no transition whatever, back in his own airless, overheated room, no longer supernaturally naked but clad in a pair of black cotton briefs that could have done with changing, and with his nose and forehead pressed against the cold glass of his window. Fourteen floors below, Eighth Avenue was virtually empty, save for the yellow rectangle of a passing cab.

His cheeks were wet with tears. He touched them, shivering.

13. BOXES

S he stood beneath Archie’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles. Something about Victorian girls in their underwear had just passed, and she wondered if that was part of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film which Inchmale had been fond of sampling on DVD for preshow inspiration. Someone had cooked a beautifully lumpy porridge of imagery for Bobby, and she hadn’t noticed it loop yet. It just kept coming.

And standing under it, head conveniently stuck in the wireless helmet, let her pretend she wasn’t hearing Bobby hissing irritably at Alberto for having brought her here.

It seemed almost to jump, now, with a flowering rush of silent explosions, bombs blasting against black night. She reached up to steady the helmet, tipping her head back at a particularly bright burst of flame, and accidentally encountered a control surface mounted to the left of the visor, over her cheekbone. The Shinjuku squid and its swarming skin vanished.

Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car or two in, and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed familiar and banal. Within it, too, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, becoming difficult to read.

She was turning, to ask Bobby what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over.

This left them frozen there, the helmet between them. Bobby’s blue eyes loomed owl-wide behind diagonal blondness, reminding her powerfully of one particular photograph of Kurt Cobain. Then Alberto took the helmet from them both. “Bobby,” he said, “you’ve really got to calm down. This is important. She’s writing an article about locative art. For Node.”

“Node?”

“Node.”

“The fuck is Node?”

“Magazine. Like Wired. Except it’s English.”

“Or Belgian,” she offered. “Or something.”

Bobby looked at them as though they, not he, were crazy.

Alberto tapped the control-surface she’d touched accidentally. She saw an LED go out. He carried the unit to the nearer of the two tables and set it down.

“The squid’s wonderful, Bobby,” she told him. “I’m glad I saw it. I’ll go now. Sorry to have disturbed you.”