William Gibson - Spook Country

At the moment, however, he was ready for William the Goldsmith and the Amaurian “Spirituals,” who were the run-up, so to speak, to his favorite, the heresy of the Free Spirit. He was sliding his hand into his pocket, to retrieve the comfortingly worn volume, when a dark-haired girl in high brown boots and a short white jacket entered. He watched a transaction take place, the Korean giving her a receipt in exchange for two pairs of dark pants. Then, rather than leaving, she took out a phone, started carrying on a conversation in animated Spanish, crossed to the settee, and sat while talking, raking periodically and without much interest through the gossip magazines on the Korean’s plywood coffee table. President Bush in his flight suit went under almost immediately, but she didn’t manage to turn up anything Milgrim hadn’t seen before. Still, it was pleasant to share this vinyl bench with her, and to enjoy the sound of a language he didn’t understand. His seemingly innate fluency in Russian, he’d always assumed, had somehow been paid for with the loss of any ability in the Romance languages.

The girl dropped her phone back into her large purse, stood, smiled absently in his general direction, and walked out.

He was pulling his book from his pocket when he saw her phone lying there on the red vinyl.

He looked over at the Korean, who was reading the Wall Street Journal. Those weird little stipple portraits, at this distance, reminded Milgrim of fingerprints. He looked back at the phone.

His captivity had changed him. Prior to Brown, he would have pocketed the phone automatically. Now that he lived in the woodwork of Brown’s world of surveillance, seemingly random encounters had become suspect. Had that been a real Spanish-speaking beauty, dropping off her office trousers for cleaning, or was she part of Brown’s team? Was it really an accident, that she’d left her phone?

But what if it wasn’t?

With an eye on the Korean, he palmed the phone. It was still warm, a small but vaguely shocking intimacy.

He stood. “I need to use the bathroom.”

The Korean looked at him, over his Wall Street Journal.

“I need to pee.”

Folding his paper, the Korean stood, held aside a curtain made of flowered fabric, and gestured Milgrim through. Milgrim walked quickly past a clutter of industrial ironing equipment and through a narrow beige-painted door with a silk-screened EMPLOYEES ONLY sign.

The walls of the cubicle, inside, were white-painted plywood, reminding Milgrim of the cabins at a summer camp he’d attended in Wisconsin. It smelled powerfully but not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On general principle, Milgrim secured the door with a fragile-looking piece of gold-tone Taiwanese hardware. He put the lid down on the toilet, seated himself, and had a look at the girl’s phone.

It was a Motorola, with call display and camera. A model from a few years before, though as far as he knew they were still selling them. If he’d stolen it for resale, he would have been disappointed. As it was, it had an almost full battery charge and was roaming.

He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.

Below the calendar, on a four-inch-wide ledge formed by a horizontal in the cubicle’s framing, stood a bare tin can, its sides lightly freckled with rust. Milgrim leaned forward and studied its contents: a thin strata of nuts, bolts, two bottle caps, paper clips and thumbtacks, several unidentifiable metal components, corpses of small insects. Everything there that could oxidize was lightly, evenly rusted.

He settled back against the toilet tank and opened the phone. Hispanic full names in the phone book, interspersed with girls’ names that mostly weren’t.

He entered Fish’s number from memory, closed his eyes, and thumbed send.

Fish, short for Fisher, his surname, answered before a third ring. “Hello?”

“Fish. Hi.”

“Who’s this?”

“Milgrim.”

“Hey.” Fish sounded surprised to hear from him, but then Milgrim supposed he would be.

Fish was a fellow benzo user. Aside from that, what they most had in common was Dennis Birdwell, Milgrim’s dealer. Former dealer, Milgrim corrected himself. Both Milgrim and Fish were long past doctor shopping, and neither was going to get anywhere with New York’s triple-form prescription system. Fish had resources in New Jersey (a writing doctor, Milgrim assumed) but they both depended primarily on Birdwell. Or rather they both had, as Milgrim no longer could. “How are you doing, Milgrim?”

Meaning, Do you have any to spare? “Just getting by,” Milgrim said.

“Oh,” Fish said. He was always short. He did something in computer animation and had a girlfriend and a baby.

“Have you seen Dennis, Fish?”

“Uh, yeah. I have.”

“How is he?”

“Well, ah, he’s angry with you. That was what he said.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said he’d given you money for something, and it didn’t happen.”

Milgrim sighed. “That’s true, but it wasn’t me letting him down. The guy I was going through, you know?”

A baby began to cry, behind Fish’s voice. “Yeah. But, you know, I don’t think you want to mess with Dennis, these days. Not that way.” Fish sounded uncomfortable, and not just because of the crying baby.

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” said Fish, “you know. It’s his other stuff.” Dennis’s other stuff was crystal meth, increasingly his main stock-in-trade, and something neither Milgrim nor Fish had the least use for. It did, however, create in Dennis’s other clients a need for powerfully soothing peripheral substances, hence Dennis’s interest in the benzos they both relied on for peace and clarity. “I think he’s dipping,” Fish said. “You know. More.”

Milgrim raised his eyebrows to the image of the twin towers. “Sorry to hear that.”

“You know how they get.”

“How do you mean?”

“Paranoid,” Fish said. “Violent.”

Dennis had once been a student at NYU. Milgrim could certainly imagine him angry, but imagining him violent was a stretch. “He collects Star Wars memorabilia,” Milgrim said. “He sits there all night, looking for it on eBay.”

There was a pause. Fish’s baby fell silent too, in eerie-seeming synchrony. “He said he’d hire black guys from Brooklyn.” The baby began to scream again, even harder.

“Shit,” said Milgrim, as much to the rusty tin can as to Fish. “Do me a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t tell him you heard from me.”

“Easy,” said Fish.

“If I get extra,” Milgrim lied, “I’ll call you.” He pressed End.

Back out front, he helped the unhappy Puerto Rican girl move the red settee so she could look under it. While she did that, he slid her phone under a hangnailed copy of In Touch, with Jennifer Aniston on the cover.

He was leaning against a dryer, reading about William the Goldsmith, when she found it.

H ad that woman in the wheelchair had an IV drip-stand in tow, one-handing her way across the intersection, the other hand keeping the chrome-plated upright of the stand erect?

Had she been legless? Hollis couldn’t say, but after the skateboarder with no lower jaw it didn’t seem like that big a deal.