As he was finishing this, someone called CyndiBrown32 asked whether he was willing to have her follow him.
Remembering Winnie’s instructions, he wasn’t. He closed Twitter and logged out of webmail. Closed the MacBook.
“Good night, Mr. Milgrim,” said the girl at the desk as he went to the elevator.
He felt as though something new and entirely too large was attempting to fit within him. He’d shifted allegiances, or acquired a new one. Or was he simply more afraid of Winnie than he was of Bigend? Or was it that he was afraid of the possibility of the absence of Bigend?
“Institutionalized,” he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its door closed.
He’d gone from where he’d been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely small, and very hard, to this wider space, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend, but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.
Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away. Whatever it was.
The door opened on the third-floor hallway.
Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.
When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been, in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he’d arranged to be absent much of the time. As much of the time as possible.
“Quit staring,” he said to the dressmaker’s dummy as he stepped into his room. “I wish I had a book.” It had been quite a while since he’d found anything to read for pleasure. Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.
He’d look for a book in Paris.
Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.
19. PRESENCES
Tossing makeup and toiletries into a bag, she noticed that the Blue Ant figurine wasn’t there on the counter, her failed employment-avoidance totem. Moved by the housecleaners in yesterday’s tidy, she supposed, but unlike them. She zipped the makeup bag. Checked her hair in the mirror. A voice with a BBC register was flowing smoothly, meaninglessly, from the ornate wall-grid.
Out past the steamy glass slabs and nickel-plate bumpers of the H. G. Wells shower, multiply towel-draped now.
Glancing around Number Four in hope of finding something she might have forgotten to pack, she saw the three unopened cartons of the British edition of her book. Remembering Milgrim, when she’d first met him, on their walk to the tapas place, expressing interest. Bigend, of course, had brought it up. Milgrim had seemed taken, for a few seconds, with the idea that she’d written a book.
She should take him one, she decided.
She wrestled a ridiculously heavy carton onto the unmade bed and used the foil-ripper on the room’s Victorian corkscrew to slit the transparent plastic tape. Releasing a bookstore smell as she opened the carton, but not a good one. Dry, chemical. And there they were, square and individually shrink-wrapped, Presences, by Hollis Henry. She took one off the top, slid it into the side pocket of her roll-aboard.
Then out, through liminal green hallways, lift, and down, to the coffee-smelling foyer, where a tortoise-spectacled young man presented her with a tall white coffee in a crisp white paper cup, lidded with white plastic, and offered her a Cabinet umbrella.
“Is the car here?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I won’t need an umbrella, thanks.”
He carried the roll-aboard out for her and put it in the popped trunk of a black BMW, piloted by the bearded young man who’d admitted her to Blue Ant.
“Jacob,” this one said, smiling. He wore a waxed cotton motorcycle jacket. It lent him a sort of post-apocalyptic elan, she thought, this rainy morning. Props should’ve given him a Sten gun, or some other weapon looking equally like plumbing.
“Of course,” she said. “Thank you for picking me up.”
“Traffic’s not terrible,” opening her door for her.
“We’re meeting Mr. Milgrim?” As he slid in behind the wheel, she noted his wireless earpiece.
“All sorted. Been picked up. Ready for Paris?”
“I hope so,” she said as he pulled away from the curb.
Then Gloucester Place. Had she been walking, she’d have taken Baker Street instead, which she’d dreamed of as a child, and which retained, even at this stage of supposed adulthood, a certain small sharp sense of disappointment. Though perhaps game was afoot in Paris, she thought, and now merely a rather long subway ride from here.
In the traffic of Marylebone Road, stopping and starting, she kept noticing a dispatch rider, armored in samurai plastics, the back of his yellow helmet scarred as if something feline and huge had swatted him and almost missed, his clumsy-looking fiberglass fairing mended with peeling silver tape. He seemed to keep passing them, somehow, rolling forward between lanes. She’d never understood how that worked here.
“I hope I can find Milgrim at the station.”
“No fear,” said Jacob. “They’ll bring him to you.”
›››
Sky-blue steel-girdered vastness. Towering volume of sound. Pigeons looking unconfused, about their pigeon business. Nobody did train stations like the Europeans, and the British, she thought, best of all. Faith in infrastructure, coupled with a necessity-driven gift for retrofitting.
One of Bigend’s lanky, elegant drivers, hand to earpiece, hove toward her steadily through the crowd, Milgrim in tow like a Sunday rowboat. Gazing around like a child, Milgrim, his face lit with a boy’s delight in the blue-girdered drama, the Dinky Toy grandeur of the great station.
One of the wheels of her roll-aboard began to click as she headed in their direction.
Milgrim glanced up from the square, glossy pages of Presences: Locative Art in America, and saw that Hollis was reading too. Something clothbound, black, no jacket.
They were somewhere under the Channel now, seated in Business Premier, which had wifi and a croissant breakfast. Or not wifi, but something cellular, requiring what she’d called a “dongle,” and had plugged into the edge of her MacBook for him. He’d borrowed it earlier, a weirdly thin one called an Air, and gone to Twitter, to see if Winnie had said anything, but she hadn’t. “Going through Kent now,” he’d written, then erased it. Then he’d tried “Hollis Henry” on Google and found her Wikipedia entry. Which had made for an odd read, as she was seated just opposite him, across the table, though she couldn’t see what he was looking at. Though now they were in the tunnel, there was no phone either.
She’d been described, in a retrospective piece written in 2004, as having looked, when she performed, like “a weaponized version of Francoise Hardy.” He wasn’t sure he could see it, exactly, and he’d also Googled Francoise Hardy to make the direct comparison. Francoise Hardy was more conventionally pretty, he thought, and he wasn’t sure what “weaponized” was supposed to mean, in that context. He supposed the writer had been trying to capture something of whatever she’d projected in live performance.
Hollis didn’t look like Milgrim’s idea of a rock singer, to the extent that he had one. She looked like someone who had a job that allowed you to wear what you wanted to the office. Which she did have, he supposed, with Bigend.