Spook Country

“Fuck it,” Bobby said, heaving a sigh of resignation. He crossed to the other table, rummaged through a scattering of small loose objects, and came up with a pack of Marlboro and a pale-blue Bic. They watched as he lit up, then closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Opening his eyes, he threw his head back and exhaled, the blue smoke rising toward the faceted fixtures. After another hit on the cigarette, he looked at them over it, frowning. “Fucks with me,” he said. “I ca

“You should try the patch,” Alberto suggested. He turned to Hollis. “You used to smoke,” he said to her, “when you were in the Curfew.”

“I quit,” she said.

“Did you use the patch?” Bobby drew on his Marlboro again.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of how?”

“Inchmale read the original accounts of the English discovering tobacco in Virginia. The tribes they ran into weren’t smoking it, not the way we do.”

“What were they doing?” Bobby’s eyes looked considerably less crazy now, from beneath the thatch.

“Part of it was what we’d call passive smoking, but deliberate. They’d go into a tent and burn a lot of tobacco leaves. But the other thing they were doing was poultices.”

“Polt—?” He lowered what was left of the Marlboro.

“Nicotine’s absorbed very quickly through the skin. Inchmale would stick a bunch of damp, pulverized tobacco leaf on you, under duct tape—”

“And you quit, that way?” Alberto’s eyes were wide.

“Not exactly. It’s dangerous. We found out later that you could just drop dead, doing that. Like if you could absorb all the nicotine from a single cigarette, that would be more than a lethal dose. But it was so unpleasant, after a time or two it seemed to work like some kind of aversion therapy.” She smiled at Bobby.

“Maybe I’ll try that,” he said, and flicked ash on the floor. “Where is he?”

“Argentina,” she said.

“Is he playing?”

“Gigging a little.”

“Recording?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And you’re doing journalism now?”

“I’ve always written a little,” she said. “Where’s your toilet?”

“Far corner.” Bobby pointed, away from where she’d seen Archie and the other thing.

As she crossed the floor in the direction indicated, she eyed the grid drawn in what looked like flour. The lines weren’t perfectly straight, but close enough. She was careful not to step on or scuff any.

The toilet was a three-staller with a stainless-steel urinal, newer than the building. She locked the door, hung her bag from the hook inside the first stall, and hauled out her PowerBook. While it booted up, she got settled. There was, as she’d been fairly certain there would be, wifi. Would she like to join the wireless network 72fofH00av? She would, and did, wondering why an agoraphobic isolationist techie like Bobby wouldn’t bother to WEP his wifi, but then she was always surprised at how many people left them open.

She had mail, from Inchmale. She opened it.

Angelina reiterates her concern about your being, however indirectly or only potentially, employed by le Bigend, which she points out is more correctly pronounced “bay-jend,” sort of, but seldom is, she says, even by him. More urgently, perhaps, she emailed her good friend Mari at Dazed, and has it back, on very good authority, that your Node must be closely held indeed, as nobody there has ever heard of it. Keeping a magazine moderately secret until you publish would be fairly odd, but your Node no-shows where any mag should show, even if it were being kept under relative wraps.

XOX "male

Another layer added to her general cognitive dissonance, she thought, as she washed her hands. In the mirror, her Mondrian haircut still worked. She put the PowerBook to sleep, and back into her bag.

Having recrossed the wonky grid of flour, she found Alberto and Bobby sitting at one of the tables in Aeron chairs. These had the down-at-heels look that came of having been purchased for some subsequently failed start-up, seized by deputies, auctioned, resold. There were holes in the carbon-gray see-through mesh, where lit cigarettes had touched the taut material.

Strata of blue smoke drifted under the bright lights, reminding her of stadium shows.

Bobby’s knees were drawn up to his chin, the nonexistent heels of his Kedsclone winkle-pickers caught in the gray mesh of the Aeron’s seat. In the litter on the table he’d turned the chair away from, she made out Red Bull cans, oversized waterproof marking pens, and a candy-like scattering of what she rather reluctantly recognized as white Lego bricks.

“Why white?” She picked one up as she took her own Aeron, twirling on it to face Bobby. “Are these the brown M&Ms of locative computer art?”

“Was it the brown ones they wanted,” asked Alberto from behind her, “or was it the brown ones they didn’t want?”

Bobby ignored him. “More like duct tape. They’re handy if you need to patch electronics together and don’t want to scratch-build a chassis. If you stick to one color, it’s less confusing visually, and the white’s easiest on the eye, and easiest to photograph components against.”

She let the Lego roll back into the palm of her hand. “But you can buy them that way, a bag of just white ones?”

“Special order.”

“Alberto says you’re like a producer. You agree?”

Bobby studied her from behind the forelock. “In some very vague, over-generalized way? Sort of.”

“How did you get into this?”

“I was working on commercial GPS technology. I’d gotten into that because I’d thought I wanted to be an astronomer, and I’d gotten fascinated with satellites. The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

“But this one’s military to begin with.”

“Sure,” he said, “but maybe maps were, too. The grid’s that basic. Too basic for most people to get a handle on.”

“Someone told me that cyberspace was ‘everting.’ That was how she put it.”

“Sure. And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here.” He pushed his hair aside and let both blue eyes drill into her.

“Archie, over there”—she gestured in the direction of empty space—“you’re going to hang him over a street in Tokyo.”

He nodded.

“But you could do that and still leave him here, couldn’t you? You could assign him to two physical locations. You could assign him to any number of locations, couldn’t you?”

He smiled.

“And who’d know he was here, then?”

“Right now, if you hadn’t been told it was here, there’d be no way for you to find it, unless you had its URL and its GPS coordinates, and if you have those, you know it’s here. You know something’s here, anyway. That’s changing, though, because there are an increasing number of sites to post this sort of work on. If you’re logged into one of those, have an interface device”—he pointed to the helmet—“a laptop and wifi, you’re cruising.”

She thought about it. “But each one of those sites, or servers, or…portals…?”

He nodded. “Each one shows you a different world. Alberto’s shows me River Phoenix dead on a sidewalk. Somebody else’s shows me, I don’t know, only good things. Only kittens, say. The world we walk around in would be cha

She cocked her head at him. “Cha

“Yes. And given what broadcast television wound up being, that doesn’t sound so good. But think about blogs, how each one is actually trying to describe reality.”