Spook Country

“They are?”

“In theory.”

“Okay.”

“But when you look at blogs, where you’re most likely to find the real info is in the links. It’s contextual, and not only who the blog’s linked to, but who’s linked to the blog.”

She looked at him. “Thanks.” She put the piece of white Lego down on the table, beside the origami-beautiful packaging from someone’s new iPod. There were the instructions and warranty papers, still heat-sealed in their vinyl bag. A thin white cable, factory-coiled, in another, smaller bag. A bright-yellow rectangle, larger than the Lego. She picked this up, letting her fingers do the thinking. “Then why aren’t more people doing it? How’s it different from virtual reality? Remember when we were all going to be doing that?” The yellow rectangle was made of die-cast hollow metal, covered with glossy paint. Part of a toy.

“We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and gri

“In Bobbyland,” she said.

“You got it.”

She turned the yellow thing over, saw MADE IN CHINA in tiny bas-relief capitals. Part of a toy truck. The box on the trailer. Container. It was a toy shipping container.

And that was what the rectangular volume of wireframe had represented, full scale. A shipping container.

She put the miniature down beside the white Lego, without looking at either.

14. JUANA

H e remembered her apartment in San Isidro, near the big train station. Exposed wires crossed the high walls like vines, bare bulbs suspended, pots and pans on sturdy hooks. Her altar there was a maze of objects, charged with meaning. Vials of foul water, the half-assembled plastic kit of a Soviet bomber, a soldier’s felt shoulder patch in purple and yellow, old bottles with bubbles trapped within their glass, air from days gone a hundred years or more. These things comprised a mesh, Juana said, about which the deities were more easily manifest. Our Lady of Guadalupe had looked down upon it all, from her painting on the wall.

That altar, like the one here in her Spanish Harlem apartment, had been dedicated primarily to He Who Opens The Way, and to Ochun, their paired energies never quite in balance, never entirely resting.

The slaves had been forbidden the worship of their home gods, so they had joined the Catholic Church and celebrated them as saints. Each deity had a second, a Catholic face, like the god Babalaye, who was Lazarus, raised by Christ from the dead. Babalaye’s dance was the Dance of the Walking Dead. In San Isidro, deep in the long evenings, he had seen Juana smoke cigars, and dance, possessed.

Now he was here with her, these years later, early in the morning, seated before her New York altar, as tidily dusted as the rest of her apartment. Those who didn’t know would only think it a shelf, but Tito saw that her oldest bottles were there, the ones with ancient weather trapped in their cores.

He had just finished describing the old man.

Juana no longer smoked cigars. Nor danced, he supposed, though he wouldn’t bet on it. She reached forward and from a small plate on her altar took four pieces of coconut meat. She passed the fingers of her other hand across the floor, before kissing the fingertips and their wholly symbolic dust. She closed her eyes, praying briefly in the language that Tito could not understand. She asked a question in that language, her tone firm, shook the coconut pieces in her cupped hands, and tossed them down. She sat, elbows on her knees, considering them.

“All have fallen meat to heaven. It speaks of justice.” She collected them and threw them again. Two up, two down. She nodded. “Confirmation.”

“Of what?”

“I asked what comes with this man who troubles you. He troubles me as well.” She tossed the four shards of coconut into a tin Dodgers wastebasket. “The orishas may sometimes serve us as oracles,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean they’ll tell us much, or even that they’ll know what will happen.”

He moved to assist her, when she rose, but she brushed his hands away. She wore a dull-gray dress with a zippered front, like a uniform, and a matching kerchief, or babushka, beneath which she was largely bald. Her eyes were dark amber, their whites yellowed like ivory. “I will make your breakfast now.”

“Thank you.” It would have been useless to decline, though he had no desire to do that. She shuffled slowly toward her kitchen in gray slippers that seemed to match her institutional dress.

“Do you remember your father’s place at Alamar?” Over her shoulder from the kitchen.

“The buildings looked like plastic bricks.”

“Yes,” she said, “they wanted it as much like Smolensk as possible. I thought it perverse of your father, to live there. He had his choice, after all, and so few did.”

He stood, the better to watch her old hands patiently slice and butter the bread for the toaster oven, fill the tiny stovetop aluminum espresso maker with water and coffee, put milk in a steel jug.

“He had choices, your father. More perhaps than had your grandfather.” She looked back, meeting his eyes.

“Why was that?”

“Your grandfather was very powerful, in Cuba, though secretly, while the Russians stood to remain. Your father was a powerful man’s first son, his favorite. But your grandfather had known, of course, that the Russians would be going, that things would change. When they left, in 1991, he anticipated the ‘special period,’ the shortages and deprivation, anticipated Castro reaching for the very symbol of his archenemies, the American’s dollar, and of course he anticipated his own subsequent loss of power. I will tell you a secret, though, about your grandfather.”

“Yes?”

“He was a Communist.” She laughed, a startlingly girlish sound in the tiny kitchen, as though someone else might be there. “More a Communist than a santero. He believed. All the ways things failed, and in the ways we knew, that the ordinary people could not know, and still, in his way, he believed. He, like myself, had been to Russia. He, like myself, had had eyes to see. Still, he believed.” She shrugged, smiling. “I think that it allowed him some extra degree of leverage, some special grasp, on those to whom we, through him, had become fastened. They had always sensed that about him, that he might believe. Not in the tragic, clownish fashion of the East Germans, but with something like i

“Why do you say that he had fewer choices?”

“The head of a large family has duties. And we had already become a different sort of family, a firma, as we are today. He put his family before his desire for a more perfect state. If it had been him, alone, I believe he would have stayed. Perhaps he would be alive today. Your father’s death, of course, strongly affected his decision to bring us here. Sit.” She brought a yellow tray to the small table, with the tostada on a white saucer, and a large white cup of café con leche.

“This man, he enabled Grandfather to bring us here?”

“In a sense.”

“What does that mean?”

“Too many questions.”

He smiled up at her. “Is he CIA?”

She glowered at him from beneath the gray kerchief. The pale tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth, then vanished. “Was your grandfather DGI?”