why, but it became very important to me, to all of us there. Parkaboy and Ivy and Maurice and Filmy, all the others too. We went there whenever we could, to be with other people who understood. We looked for more footage. Some people stayed out surfing, weeks at a time, never posting until someone discovered a new segment.
All through that winter, the mildest she'd known in Manhattan, though in memory the darkest, she'd gone to F:F:F—to give herself to the dream.
We don't know what you're doing, or why. Parkaboy thinks you're dreaming. Dreaming for us. Sometimes he sounds as though he thinks you're dreaming us. He has this whole edged-out participation mystique: how we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you're doing, that we become part of it. Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us. He says it's like Coleridge, and De Quincey. He says it's shamanic. That we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the screen, but really, some of us anyway, we're adventurers. We're out there, seeking, taking risks. In hope, he says, of bringing back wonders. Trouble is, lately, I've been living that.
She looks up, everything made pale and washed-out by the light. She's forgotten to bring her sunglasses again.
I've been out there, out here, seeking. Taking risks. Not sure exactly why. Scared. Turns out there are some very not-nice people, out here. Though I guess that was never news.
She stops, and looks over at Peter Pan, noticing how the bronze ears of the rabbits at his base are kept polished by the hands of children.
Do you know we are all here, waiting for the next segment? Wandering up and down the web all night, looking for where you've left it for us? We are. Well, not me personally, lately, but that's because I seem to have followed Parkaboy's advice and started trying to find another way to hack in. And I guess I have—we have—because we've found those codes embedded in the footage, that map of the island or city or whatever it is, and we know that you, or someone, could use those to track the spread of a given segment, to judge the extent of dissemination. And through finding those codes, the numbers woven into the fabric, I've been able to get to this e-mail address, and now I'm sitting in this park, beside the statue of Peter Pan, writing to you, and
And what?
What I want to ask you is
Who are you?
Where are you?
Are you dreaming?
Are you there? The way I'm here?
She reads what she's written. Like most of the letters Katherine had had her write—to her mother, to Win both before and after his disappearance, to various ex's and one former therapist—her letter to the maker ends with question marks. Katherine had thought that the letters Cayce most needed to write wouldn't end in question marks. Periods were needed, if not exclamation points, in Katherine's view, and Cayce had never felt particularly successful with either.
Sincerely yours, Cayce Pollard
Watching her hands continue briefly to type, in best typing-class mode, in privately sarcastic imitation of a woman imagining that she is actually accomplishing something.
(CayceP)
Aware in just that instant of how the park distances the sound of London, giving her the sensation of existing at some still point around which all else revolves. As though the broad gravel avenues are leys, terminating at Peter Pan.
The angry child's fingers, typing.
And that in the address window, as though she would actually send it.
Touchpadding down menu to Send.
And of course she doesn't.
And watches as it sends.
"I didn't," she protests to the iBook on the grass, the colors of its screen faint in the sunlight. "I didn't," she says to Peter Pan.
She couldn't have. She did.
Cross-legged on her jacket, hunched over the iBook.
She doesn't know what it is that she feels.
Automatically, she checks for mail.
Timing out, empty.
A woman jogs past, crunching gravel, breathing like a piston.
MECHANICALLY consuming a bowl of Thai salad in an all-Asia's restaurant across the street. She hasn't had breakfast today, and maybe this will calm her down.
She doubts it, after what she's done.
Accept that it happened, she tells herself. Table all questions of in-tentionality.
She almost feels as though something in the park had made her do it. Genius loci, Parkaboy would say. Too much sun. Convergence of lines. (Convergence of something, certainly, she guesses, but in some part of herself she can't access.)
The iBook is open again, on the table in front of her. She's just looked up the name and address of the person responsible (whatever that might mean) for the domain armaz.ru: one A. N. Polakov, in what she takes to be an office building, in Cyprus.
If she smoked, she thinks, she'd be giving Baranov a run for his money. Right now she almost wishes she did.
