Goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face. Her face in the mirror, against the white tiles of the wall behind her. The tiles are square and she looks like something snipped from a magazine and placed on a sheet of graph paper. Not such good work with the scissors.
Images called up by Damien's e-mail. Heaps of bone. That initial seventeen stories of twisted, impacted girder. Funeral ash. That taste in the back of the throat.
And she is here, in this apartment, recently invaded by some shadowy figure, or figures. Dorotea as corporate spook? The woman in the mirror, lips foamed with toothpaste, shakes her head. Hydrophobia.
Bigend advising her to sleep on it. And she will, she's certain, though she doesn't want to.
She removes and folds the silver discomforter, stiff as a new tarpau-lin, and replaces it with a duvet in a gray cotton cover, new and unused, that she finds in the closet.
"He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots." Her prayer in the dark.
Eyes closed, she finds herself imagining a symbol, something watermarking the lower right-hand corner of her existence. It is there, just beyond some periphery, beyond the physical, beyond vision, and it marks her as…
- /
She wakes to sunshine through Damien's windows.
Squares of blue sky, decorative bits of cloud.
Stretches her toes beneath the duvet. Then remembers the complications of her current situation.
Determines to get up and out with as little thought as possible. Breakfast.
Avails herself of the surgical shower, jeans and a T-shirt, and goes out, locking up and doing the Bond thing with a fresh hair and mint-flavored spit—sealing Damien's flat against whatever bad mojo there might be.
Down Parkway and over to little Aberdeen, the market street that runs its single block into Camden. She knows a cafe here, a French place. Remembering breakfast there with Damien.
Passing record and comics shops, windows papered with flyers (where she half looks for, but does not find, the kiss).
Here it is: faux-French with real French waiting tables. Chunnel kids, guest workers.
The first thing she sees, going in, is Voytek, seated at a table with silver-haired Billy Prion, the former lead singer of a band called BSE.
She's long kept track of certain obscure mirror-world pop figures, not because they interest her in themselves but because their careers can be so compressed, so eerily quantum-brief, like particles whose existence can only be proven, after the fact, by streaks detected on specially sensitized plates at the bottom of disused salt mines.
Billy Prion's streak is by reason of his having deliberately had the left side of his mouth paralyzed with Botox for the first BSE gigs, and because, when Margot was taking her NYU extension course in disease-as-metaphor, Cayce had suggested she do something with his mouth. Mar-got, struggling to outline a paper in which Bigend was the disease she needed to find a metaphor for, hadn't been interested.
Having automatically registered Prion media hits ever since, she knows that BSE had broken up, and that he'd been briefly rumored to be romantically involved with that Finnish girl, the one whose band had been called Velcro Kitty until the trademark lawyers arrived.
As she passes their table, she sees that Voytek has a scrawled tarot of spiral-bound notebooks spread out around the remains of his breakfast, everything executed in red ballpoint. Diagrams, with lots of linked rectangles. From what she sees of Prion's mouth, the cosmetic toxin seems long since to have worn off. He isn't smiling, but if he were, it would probably be symmetrical. Voytek is quietly explaining something, his brow wrinkled with concentration.
An irritable-looking girl with red-rimmed eyes and very red lipstick fans a menu in her face, gesturing curtly toward a table farther in the rear. Seated, not bothering with the menu, Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French.
The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up
"All right," says Cayce, under her breath, to the girl's receding back, "be French."
But her coffee does arrive, and is excellent, as do her eggs and sausage, very good as well, and when she's finished she looks up to see Voytek staring at her. Prion is gone.
"Casey," he says, remembering but getting it wrong.
"That was Billy Prion, wasn't it?"
"I join you?"
"Please."
He repacks his spiral-bound notebooks, closing each one and tuck-ing it carefully away into his shoulder pouch, and crosses to her table. "Is Billy Prion a friend of yours?"
"Owns gallery. I need space to show ZX 81 project."
"Is it finished?"
"I am still collecting ZX 81."
"How many do you need?"
"Many. Patronage also."
"Is Billy in the patronage business as well?"
"No. You work for large corporation? They wish to learn of nay project?"
"I'm freelance."
"But you are here to work?"
"Yes. For an advertising agency."
He adjusts the pouch on his lap. "Saatchi?"
