Spook Country

“Excuse me?”

“À votre santé,” corrected Odile, dabbing at her nose with a frayed wad of tissue. Odile was the least chic Frenchwoman Hollis could recall having met, though in a kind of haute-nerd Euro way that only made her more a

“Alberto Corrales,” he said.

“Alberto,” she said, allowing her hand to be engulfed in his other, empty hand, dry as wood. “Hollis Henry.”

“The Curfew,” Alberto said, his smile widening.

The fan thing, she thought, amazed as ever, and just as suddenly ill at ease.

“This dirt, in the air,” Odile protested, “it is disgusting. Please let us go now, to view the piece.”

“Right,” said Hollis, grateful for the distraction.

“This way,” Alberto said, neatly lobbing his empty can into a white Standard waste container with Milanese pretensions. The wind, she noticed, had died as if on cue.

She glanced into the lobby. The reception desk was deserted, the bikini-girl terrarium empty and unlit. Then she followed Alberto and the irritably snuffling Odile to Alberto’s car, a classic Volks Beetle gleaming under multiple coats of low-rider lacquer. She saw a volcano flowing with incandescent lava, big-busted Latinas in mini-loincloths and feathered Aztec headdresses, the polychrome coils of a winged serpent. Alberto was into some kind of ethnic culture jamming, she decided, unless VWs had entered the pantheon since she’d last looked at this stuff.

He opened the passenger-side door and held the seat up while Odile slid into the back. Where there seemed already to be equipment of some kind. Then he gestured for Hollis to take the passenger seat, almost a bow.

She blinked at the sublimely matter-of-fact semiotics of the old VW’s dashboard. The car smelled of some ethnic air-freshener. That too was part of a language, she guessed, like the paintjob, but someone like Alberto might deliberately be using exactly the wrong freshener.

He pulled out onto Sunset and executed a tidy U-turn. They headed back in the direction of the Mondrian, over asphalt thinly littered with the desiccated biomass of palms.

“I’ve been a fan for years,” Alberto said.

“Alberto is concerned with history as internalized space,” contributed Odile, from a little too close behind Hollis’s head. “He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma. Always, from trauma.”

“Trauma,” Hollis repeated involuntarily, as they passed the Pink Dot. “Stop at the Dot, please, Alberto. I need cigarettes.”

“Ollis,” said Odile, accusingly, “you tell me you are not smoke.”

“I just started,” Hollis said.

“But we are here,” said Alberto, taking a left at Larrabee and parking.

“Where’s here?” Hollis asked, cracking the door and preparing, perhaps, to run.

Alberto looked grave, but not particularly crazy. “I’ll get my equipment. I’d like you to experience the piece, first. Then, if you like, we can discuss it.”

He got out. Hollis did too. Larrabee sloped steeply down, toward the illuminated flats of the city, so steeply that she found it uncomfortable to stand. Alberto helped Odile from the backseat. She propped herself against the Volks and screwed her hands into the front of her sweatshirt. “I am cold,” she complained.

And it was cooler now, Hollis noticed, without the warm blast of the wind. She looked up at a graceless pink hotel that loomed over them, while Alberto, draped in his Pendleton, rummaged in the back of the car. He came up with a battered aluminum camera case, crisscrossed with black gaffer tape.

A long silver car glided silently past on Sunset, as they followed Alberto up the steep sidewalk.

“What’s here, Alberto? What are we here to see?” Hollis demanded, as they reached the corner. He knelt and opened the case. The interior was padded with blocks of foam. He extracted something that she at first mistook for a welder’s protective mask. “Put this on.” He handed it to her.

A padded headband, with a sort of visor. “Virtual reality?” She hadn’t heard the term spoken aloud in years, she thought, as she pronounced it.

“The hardware lags behind,” he said. “At least the kind I can afford.” He took a laptop from the case and opened it, powering it up.

Hollis put the visor on. She could see through it, though only dimly. She looked toward the corner of Clark and Sunset, making out the marquee of the Whiskey. Alberto reached out and gently fumbled with a cable, at the side of the visor.

“This way,” he said, leading her along the sidewalk to a low, windowless, black-painted façade. She squinted up at the sign. The Viper Room.

“Now,” he said, and she heard him tap the laptop’s keyboard. Something shivered, in her field of vision. “Look. Look here.”

She turned, following his gesture, and saw a slender, dark-haired body, facedown on the sidewalk.

“Alloween night, 1993,” said Odile.

Hollis approached the body. That wasn’t there. But was. Alberto was following her with the laptop, careful of the cable. She felt as if he were holding his breath. She was holding hers.

The boy seemed birdlike, in death, the arch of his cheekbone, as she bent forward, casting its own small shadow. His hair was very dark. He wore dark, pin-striped trousers and a dark shirt. “Who?” she asked, finding her breath.

“River Phoenix,” said Alberto, quietly.

She looked up, toward the marquee of the Whiskey, then down again, struck by the fragility of the white neck. “River Phoenix was blond,” she said.

“He’d dyed it,” Alberto said. “Dyed it for a role.”

2. ANTS IN THE WATER

T he old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

If Tito were to see one of those a

Each time the old man, expressionless and looking elsewhere, pocketed another iPod, Tito noticed the dull gold of his wristwatch, its dial and hands almost lost behind the worn plastic crystal. A dead man’s watch, like the ones jumbled in battered cigar boxes at the flea market.

His clothes were like a dead man’s as well, cut from fabrics Tito imagined exuding their own chill, a cold distinct from the end of this uneven New York winter. The cold of unclaimed luggage, of institutional corridors, of steel lockers scoured to bare metal.

But surely this was costume, the protocol of appearance. The old man could not be genuinely poor and do business with Tito’s uncles. Sensing an immense patience, and power, Tito imagined that this old man, for reasons of his own, disguised himself as a revenant from lower Manhattan’s past.

Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity.

And now, across a steaming tureen of duck soup, in this second-floor restaurant overlooking Canal Street, Tito found himself unable to explain this to Alejandro, his cousin. In his room, earlier, he had been layering sounds, attempting to express in music these feelings the old man woke in him. He doubted he would ever play that file for Alejandro.