She sat at a barstool, which whirled beneath her. The world went black for a moment and spun like a carousel. The dull realization struck her that she hadn’t eaten all day. It had never once occurred to her to eat.
The bar was deserted. A bartender emerged from a staff door behind the bar. It was five in the morning, but maybe the doordog had tipped him off. The bartender strode over, a picture of solicitous concern. He was handsome and dapper and an infinitely better human being than she was. The hotel had very nice staffers, Roman people in their forties, kids who made it their business to serve the rich. “Signorina?”
“I need a drink,” Maya groaned.
The bartender smiled gallantly. “A long night, signorina? An unlucky night? May I suggest a triacylglycerol frappé?”
“Great. Make that a double. And don’t spare the saturated fats.”
He brought her a tall frappé and a squat little clear protein chaser and a fluted bowl of Roman finger snacks. The first cold mouthful hit her such a metabolic shock that she almost passed out. But then it warmed inside her and began to seep into her famished bloodstream.
By the time the frappé was half gone, the panic had left her. She was able to sit up straight on the barstool. She stopped trembling, and kicked off her shoes. The bartender wandered tactfully to the end of the bar and engaged in some menu-pecking ritual with a partially disassembled house robot.
She opened her backpack and fetched out her compact and looked at her face and shuddered. She scraped the worst of the damage off with a cream-wipe and touched fresh lipstick on.
A Roman in elegant evening dress wandered into the bar from the direction of the house casino. He tapped on the bar with the edge of a poker chip and ordered caffeine macchiato. She could tell from the brittle look on his powdered and aquiline face that the tables had been cruel to him tonight.
The Roman took his demitasse, sat on a barstool two seats away, and glanced at her in the mirror behind the bar. Then he turned and looked at her directly. He looked at her legs, her bare arms, her bare feet. He judged her bustline and approved wholeheartedly. He deeply and sincerely admired the intimate contact of her hips with the barstool. It was a gaze of direct and total male sexual interest. A look that could not have cared less that her mind was a shredded mess of anguish. A warm and scratchy look that wrapped around her flesh like a Mediterranean sun.
He shot two inches of cream-colored tailored cuff and put his elbow on the bar and propped his sleek dark head on his hand. Then he smiled.
“Ciao,” she said.
“Ciao bella.”
“You speak English?”
He shook his head mournfully and made a little moue of disappointment.
“Never mind then,” she said, and beckoned with one finger. “This is your lucky night, handsome.”
5
Novak found her a place in Praha. She got a job cat-sitting. There wasn’t any money in it, but the cats were lonely.
The place belonged to a former actress named Olga Jeskova. Miss Jeskova had appeared in several of Novak’s early virtualities, among other thespian efforts. She had salted her money away in Czech real estate speculation, and now, seventy years later, she was quite well-to-do. Miss Jeskova usually spent Praha’s foggy winters somewhere in the chic and sunny Sinai, doing unlikely medical spa things.
Miss Jeskova’s Praha flat was on the fifteenth floor of a seventy-story high-rise in the edge-city ring. It was a twenty-minute tube ride to the Old Town, but that was a small price to pay for the space and the luxury. The actress’s cats were two white furry Persians. The cats seemed to have been integrated in some biocybernetic fashion into the texture of the flat. The predominant note in the flat was white fur: white fur bed, white fur toilet, white fur massage lounger, white fur hassock, white fur net terminal. At night two very odd devices like walking nutcrackers came out and groomed everything with their teeth.
On April 20, Maya took her equipment and went to Emil’s flat. Emil was up and working. He answered the door in his mud-smeared apron.
“Ciao Emil,” Maya said.
“Ciao,” Emil said, and smiled guardedly.
“I’m the photographer,” she told him.
“Oh. How nice.” Emil opened his door.
There was a girl in the apartment. She had waist-length hair and a black cowboy hat and a fur-trimmed coat and slacks. She was eating a goulash. She was Nipponese. She was lovely.
“I’m the photographer,” Maya said. “I’m here to document Emil’s latest work.”
The girl nodded. “I am Hitomi.”
“Ciao Hitomi, jmenuji se Maya.”
“He is forgetful,” said Hitomi, apologetically. “We weren’t expecting. You want some goulash?”
“No thank you,” Maya said. “Hitomi, do you photograph?”
“Oh no,” said Hitomi emphatically, “I do wanderjahr from Nippon, we hate cameras.”
Maya cleared the worktable, set out a rippling sheet of chameleon photoplastic, and set up her tripod. White against white would work best for the china. Diagonal lighting to reveal the hollowed shape of cups and saucers. The pots and urns were all about shape and tactility. She had been thinking about this project every day. She had mapped it all out in her head.
She was beginning to appreciate the lovely qualities of optic fibercord. You could do almost anything with optic fibercord, tune it to any color in the spectrum, bend it into any shape, and it would glow in any brightness along any section of its length. Soft, even shadows. Or strong, sculptural shadows. The deep shadows of backlighting. Or you could kick it way up and get very contrasty.
Novak said that if you exposed for the shadows the rest would come by itself. Novak said that all mystery was in the shadows. Novak said that he had truly never mastered shadows in ninety years. Novak said a great many things and she listened as she’d never listened to anyone before. She went home at night and took notes and fed the actress’s cats and thought and dreamed photography for days and days.
“It’s good you know your job so well,” said Emil cordially. “I haven’t looked at some of these pieces in … oh, such a long time.”
“Don’t let me take you from your work, Emil.”
“Oh no my dear, it’s a pleasure.” Emil fetched equipment and moved the pots a bit and was very helpful.
She would have liked to take the raw shots back to the cats’ apartment and touch them up with her wand, but the wand was terribly addictive. Once you got down to pixel level there was no end to all that gripping and blurring and twisting and mixing.… Knowing when to stop, what to omit, was every bit as important as any postproduction craftwork. Elegance was restraint. So she printed the photos out on the spot on Novak’s borrowed scroller. Then she blew a bit of dust from the photo album and slipped the photos neatly into place.
“These are fine,” Emil said sincerely. “I’d never seen such justice done to my work. I think you should sign these.”
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary.”
“It was so good of you to come. What do I owe you?”
“No charge, Emil, it’s just apprentice work. I was glad to have the experience.”
“No one so determined should be called a mere apprentice,” said Emil gallantly. “I hope you’ll come again. Have we worked together before? It seems to me that I know you.”
“It does? You do?”
Hitomi sidled over rhythmically and slipped her slender arm over Emil’s shoulders.
“It wasn’t you,” Emil said, leafing through his album. “Your photos are much better than these others.”