Spook Country

He watched Brown replace the bug beneath the rusty base of the old rack, head down, intent on his task.

When Brown stood up, Milgrim saw him knock something dark from the crossbar of the rack. It made no sound when it hit the floor. As Brown took the flashlight and turned, playing it once more over the IF’s belongings, Milgrim reached out and touched a second dark thing that still hung there. Cold wet wool.

Brown’s flashlight’s uncomfortable brilliance found a cheap-looking little vase, made of something nacreous and blue, that stood beside one of the speakers for the IF’s sound system. The amped-up blue-white diode light lent the vessel’s lacquered surface an unreal translucence, as though some process akin to fusion were begi

“Out of here,” Brown a

On the sidewalk outside, walking briskly toward Lafayette, Milgrim decided that Stockholm syndrome was a myth. Going on a few weeks now, and he still wasn’t empathizing with Brown.

Not even a little bit.

4. INTO THE LOCATIVE

T he Standard had an all-night restaurant off its lobby—a long, glass-fronted operation with wide booths upholstered in matte-black tuck-and-roll, punctuated by the gnarled phalli of half a dozen large San Pedro cacti.

Hollis watched Alberto slide his Pendelton-ed mass along the bench opposite hers. Odile was between Alberto and the window.

“See-bare-espace,” Odile pronounced, gnomically, “it is everting.”

“‘Everything’? What is?”

“See-bare-espace,” Odile reaffirmed, “everts.” She made a gesture with her hands that reminded Hollis, in some dimly unsettling way, of the crocheted model uterus her Family Life Education teacher had used as an instructional aid.

“Turns itself inside out,” offered Alberto, by way of clarification. “‘Cyberspace.’ Fruit salad and a coffee.” This last, Hollis realized after an instant’s confusion, addressed to their waitress. Odile ordered café au lait, Hollis a bagel and coffee. The waitress left them.

“I guess you could say it started on the first of May, 2000,” Alberto said.

“What did?”

“Geohacking. Or the potential thereof. The government a

Hollis had only vaguely understood from Philip Rausch that what she would be writing about would be various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the Internet, so Alberto’s virtual rendition of the death of River Phoenix had taken her by surprise. Now she had, she was hoping, the opening to her piece. “How many of those have you done, Alberto?” And were they all posthumous, though she didn’t ask that.

“Nine,” Alberto said. “At the Chateau Marmont”—he gestured across Sunset—“I’ve most recently completed a virtual shrine to Helmut Newton. On the site of his fatal crash, at the foot of the driveway. I’ll show you that after breakfast.”

The waitress returned with their coffees. Hollis watched as a very young, very pale Englishman bought a yellow pack of American Spirit from the man at the till. The boy’s thin beard reminded her of moss around a marble drain. “So the people staying at the Marmont,” she asked, “they have no idea, no way of knowing what you’ve done there?” Just as pedestrians had no way of knowing they stepped through the sleeping River, on his Sunset sidewalk.

“No,” said Alberto, “none. Not yet.” He was digging through a canvas carryall on his lap. He produced a cell phone, married with silver tape to some other species of smallish consumer electronics. “With these, though…” he clicked something on one of the conjoined units, opened the phone, and began deftly thumbing its keypad. “When this is available as a package…” He passed it to her. A phone, and something she recognized as a GPS unit, but the latter’s casing had been partially cut away, with what felt like more electronics growing out of it, sealed under the silver tape.

“What does it do?”

“Look,” he said.

She squinted at the small screen. Brought it closer. She saw Alberto’s woolen chest, but confused somehow with ghostly verticals, horizontals, a semitransparent Cubist overlay. Pale crosses? She looked up at him.

“This isn’t a locative piece,” he said. “It’s not spatially tagged. Try it on the street.”

She swung the duct-taped hybrid toward Sunset, seeing a crisply defined, perfectly level plane of white cruciforms, spaced as on an invisible grid, receding across the boulevard and into virtual distance. Their square white uprights, approximately level with the pavement, seemed to continue, in increasingly faint and somehow subterranean perspective, back under the rise of the Hollywood Hills.

“American fatalities in Iraq,” Alberto said. “I had it co

Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of café au lait. “Cartographic attributes of the invisible,” she said, lowering the bowl. “Spatially tagged hypermedia.” This terminology seemed to increase her fluency by a factor of ten; she scarcely had an accent now. “The artist a

Hollis nodded, and passed the thing back to Alberto.

Fruit salad and toasted bagel arrived. “And you’ve been curating this kind of art, Odile, in Paris?”

“Everywhere.”

Rausch was right, she decided. There was something to write about here, though she was still a long way from knowing what it was.

“May I ask you something?” Alberto had gotten through half of his fruit salad already. A methodical eater. He paused, fork in midair, looking at her.

“Yes?”

“How did you know the Curfew was over?”

She looked him in the eye and saw deep otaku focus. Of course that tended to be the case, if anyone recognized her as the singer in an early-nineties cult unit. The Curfew’s fans were virtually the only people who knew the band had existed, today, aside from radio programmers, pop historians, critics, and collectors. With the increasingly atemporal nature of music, though, the band had continued to acquire new fans. Those it did acquire, like Alberto, were often formidably serious. She didn’t know how old he might have been, when the Curfew had broken up, but that might as well have been yesterday, as far as his fanboy module was concerned. Still having her own fangirl module quite centrally in place, for a wide variety of performers, she understood, and thus felt a responsibility to provide him with an honest answer, however unsatisfying.

“We didn’t know, really. It just ended. It stopped happening, at some essential level, though I never knew exactly when that happened. It became painfully apparent. So we packed it in.”

He looked about as satisfied with that as she’d expected him to be, but it was the truth, as far as she knew, and the best she could do for him. She’d never been able to come up with any clearer reason herself, though it certainly wasn’t anything she continued to give much thought. “We’d just released that four-song CD, and that was it. We knew. It only took a little while to sink in.” Hoping that would be that, she began to spread cream cheese on one half of her bagel.