And then Cayce will leave, and go back to Damien's, and pack her things, go to Heathrow and get on the next business-class flight with her return ticket to New York.
And probably blow the contract, a big one, and have to hustle very hard indeed in New York, finding fresh work, but she'll be free of Bigend and Dorotea, and Stonestreet too, and all of the weird baggage that seems to come with them. Mirror-world will get put back into its box until the next time, hopefully a vacation, and when Damien is here, and she will never have to worry about Dorotea or Asian Sluts or any of it, ever again.
Except that that would mean that she'd lied to a client firm, and she really doesn't want to do that, aside from knowing that it's a ridiculous, infantile plan anyway. She'll lose the contract, probably do herself grave professional harm, and all for the sake of pissing Dorotea off. And what a pleasure that would be.
Makes no sense, except to the knot.
Now she's sitting cross-legged, doing Sphinx, springs lightened. Turns her hands palm-up for Beseech. No thinking. You do not get there by thinking about not thinking, but by concentrating on each repetition.
To the gentle twanging of the springs.
SHE'S made certain the driver gets her to Blue Ant early.
She wants her own little bit of time in the street, her own paper cup of coffee. Soho on a Monday morning has its own peculiar energy. She wants to tap into that for a few minutes. Buys her coffee now and heads off, away from Blue Ant, trying to fit her pace to the pace of these people on their way to work, with most of whom she feels she has some passing affinity. They earn their living distinguishing degrees and directions of attractiveness, and she envies the youth and determination with which they all seem to be getting to it. Was she ever like that:1 Not exactly, she thinks. She got her start, out of college, working with the design team of a Seattle-based mountain-bike manufacturer, and had branched out into skatewear, then shoes. Her talents, which Bigend calls her tame pathologies, had carried her along, and gradually she'd let them define the nature of what it was that she did. She'd thought of that as going with the flow, but maybe, she thinks now, it had really been the path of least resistance. What if that flow naturally tended to the path of least resistance? Where does that take you?
"Down the tube," she says aloud, causing a very good-looking young Asian man, walking parallel with her, to start, and look at her with brief alarm. She smiles in reassurance, but he frowns and walks faster. She slows, to let him get ahead. He's wearing a black horsehide car coat, its seams scuffed gray, like a piece of vintage luggage, and he's actually carrying, she now sees, a piece of vintage luggage. A very small suitcase, brown cowhide, that someone has waxed to
Even her relationship to the footage is changing. Margot had called the footage Cayce's hobby, but Cayce has never been a person who had hobbies. Obsessions, yes. Worlds. Places to retreat to. "But it's no-name."
Margot had said, of the footage, "that's why you like it. Isn't it? Like your trademark thing." Margot had discovered that most of the products in Cayce's kitchen were generic, unlabeled, and Cayce had admitted that it wasn't a matter of economics but of her sensitivity to trademarks. Now she glances ahead to see if the Asian man is still there, but she can't see him. She checks her Casio-clone.
Time for Blue Ant. Time for Dorotea.
The receptionist sends her up to the third floor again, where she finds Stonestreet in one of his exquisitely slept-in suits, this one gray, red hair sticking up in several new directions. He's smoking a cigarette and flipping through a document in a pink Blue Ant folder.
"Morning, dear. Lovely seeing you, Saturday. How was your ride home with Hubertus?"
"We went for a drink. In Clerkenwell."
"That's the real version of that place we're in now. Some lovely spaces there. What did he have to say?"
"No shop. We talked about the footage." Watching him carefully.
"What footage is that?" He looks up, as if concerned that he's somehow lost the plot.
"On the web. The anonymous film that's being released in bits and pieces. Do you know the one?"
"Oh. That." What does he know? "Helena said you called and asked about Trans."
"Yes."
"Word-of-mouth meme thing. We don't really know what it does, yet. Whether it does anything, really. Where did you hear about it?"
"Someone in a pub."
