The stuff in Julia's apartment, however… even the way the rooms were laid out… it was… Well, words failed him.
He hadn't noticed it at first, when they'd spilled in through the door, hands all over each other, clothing already half-undone. They'd made love standing up, half-undressed, right inside the entry hall; then she'd hauled him straight into a bedroom and onto the mattress, which he hadn't left for a long time.
Jules had disappeared to get a bottle of champagne at one point, but otherwise neither of them had ventured out of the room until much later in the evening.
After the third time, when it was going to take him a little while to recover, he'd begun to notice the bedroom in the light of the candles she'd lit.
The bed looked Japanese, like a futon, they called it, if he remembered right. It had no headboard to speak of. A big rectangle of padded leather seemed to be fixed to the wall behind the pillows.
And the wall itself was inset at random places with boxes or something, in which Julia had set up books or little pieces of art. He noticed that some of them were faintly backlit, adding a soft glow to the light of candles that were burning on tiny white shelves that protruded from the other walls just as randomly as the insets. There was no other furniture to speak of, just two fuzzy cubes, covered in what looked like polar bear pelt. He wondered where she kept her clothes.
"They did a great job, don't you think?" she said as they stood in the living room-or what he assumed was the living room-just before midnight.
"Where'd all the space come from?" he asked. "I've never seen such a big parlor before."
Julia smiled at him with that almost-pitying look she got sometimes. He suspected it was because he'd used the word parlor.
"Well, this used to be a three-bedroom apartment," she explained. "But I had them knock out a bunch of walls, and now it's one bedroom with a massive open living area which flows from the kitchen down there, through the dining and entertainment space, into my chill-out zone, here."
Dan sort of understood what she meant, but only because they were standing in the "chill-out zone," a strange, sunken, carpeted half-moon heaped with piles of weird Arabian-looking cushions. It seemed like the sort of place Fatty Arbuckle could get himself into a lot of trouble.
A data slate hung on the wall like a picture, and he guessed the area would serve as a sort of mini movie theater. Thirty or more data sticks sat in tiny slots, on top of another small white ledge that grew straight out of the wall by the slate.
"I thought nobody was allowed to own that sort of technology without a government permit," said Dan.
"Settle down, Eliot Ness," she said. "That's my personal slate. Only government-issue property is covered by the legislation. We were deploying for three months, so I brought quite a few personal items with me."
She moved through the sunken lounge to pluck a data stick off the tiny shelf.
"Twenty-five years of The Simpsons," she said, clearly thrilled with whatever that meant. "Every episode of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives. Before I left the Clinton, I downloaded terabytes of shit from the library. I've got movies, TV, music, games, books, magazines, the whole nine yards. I'm telling you, Dan, I can live here now. It's just like my place at home. I even had the library run me up a couple of print-on-demand books for the shelf, some old favorites, just so I can see them when I come through the door. I can't tell you how much that means to me."
Those must have been the books he saw in her bedroom earlier. He noticed others now, tucked in recesses spotted around the massive room.
The long, rectangular "space," as she referred to it, seemed to get harder and colder as it receded toward the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. That space was arranged around a long central bench that appeared to have been fashioned out of railway sleepers and stainless steel. He couldn't be sure until he got down there, but it looked as if she'd had all her carpet and linoleum removed and left bare wooden boards and concrete in their place.
"It's polished concrete," she said enthusiastically when he asked. "Fucking cool, isn't it? And it's well within the very limited abilities of your local builders, thank God."
"It's, uh… I've never…"
"I know. You've never seen anything like it. You wouldn't have. I had a hell of a time finding a designer who could understand what I wanted," she said, beginning to pace around and whip herself into a frenzy. It made Dan wonder if she'd found a new supply of combat drugs. She spoke faster and faster, but with an enthusiasm he'd never seen her display for anything before.
It was actually kind of cute. She was like a teenager, for a change.
"I had a couple of copies of Monument and Wallpaper," she said, picking up a magazine from what was probably a coffee table and passing it to him. "I bought them at the airport in Bangkok, back in my time, before I flew down to Darwin to join the Clinton. And that was all I had to work with. But I read about this totally outrageous gay guy in The New Yorker, you know, your New Yorker, and this graphic designer-he was just about to pack his bags and head out your way, to the Zone-but I grabbed him before I flew out last time, showed him the magazines and he, like, totally got it. He agreed to manage the renovation. We were using these Italian builders who got run out of Florence by the fascists. And anyway, I'm stoked. It's just like being home."
She threw her arms around him, and Dan could tell she was as happy as he'd ever known her to be. She was almost jumping with pleasure.
"It's a great-looking pad, Jules-Is that the right word?"
"If this was nineteen sixty-two, and I was Gidget, then yeah. But go on, keep telling me how great it is."
Dan made a show of flicking through the Wallpaper magazine, which wasn't about wallpaper at all, as far as he could tell. He could see where the designer had picked up some ideas and recreated them in Julia's apartment.
"That's like what you've got, right?" he said, pointing out a review of a restaurant, which seemed to have only one table, a long bench, like in a mess hall.
"Close enough," she said, squeezing him again. "Do you like it?"
"I think so," he said. "It looks, I dunno, like a house at the World's Fair. The view looks good."
"It's got a great fucking view!" she cried, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to the window. They were at least nine floors up in a corner apartment, and when he looked out, ribbons of light and moving traffic stretched away beneath them. He hadn't been paying attention in the limo, but the building had to be somewhere on the extreme eastern side of Manhattan, overlooking the river, which cut through the scenery outside like a black ribbon of negative space. He'd been to New York a couple of times before and was pretty sure he could see Brooklyn and Queens and Long Island. From the corner window, a wide sliver of Manhattan proper was visible, including a small dark wedge of Central Park, then the West Side and what he guessed was the Hudson River.
"This must have cost a mint, baby," Dan said, and he regretted it instantly. Had he broken some weird twenty-first-century taboo, implying that she couldn't afford to pay for her own home?
But Julia was surprisingly matter-of-fact in her answer. "Well, I sold some of my stuff. You know, silly little things like an old calculator, and a digital translator, and this ancient fucking iPod that'd been in my backpack for a decade. And I got a fucking packet for them."