William Gibson - Spook Country

“May I speak with Hubertus?”

“Sorry,” said Pamela, “he’s in a meeting in Sacramento. He’ll ring you when he can.”

“Thanks,” Hollis said.

She looked at the helmet Bigend had sent her. She supposed she’d better take it with her, in case there was locative art in Vancouver. It didn’t seem like something you could safely check through, though, and it was going to be awkward for carry-on.

Before she started packing she called her own mother, in Puerto Vallarta. Her parents wintered there now, but they were a week from coming back to their place in Evanston. She tried to explain what she was doing in Los Angeles, but she wasn’t sure her mother got it. Still very sharp, but increasingly less interested in things she wasn’t already familiar with. She said that Hollis’s father was fine, except for having contracted, in his late seventies, a fierce and uncharacteristic interest in politics. Which her mother didn’t like, she said, because it only made him angry. “He says it’s because it’s never been this bad,” her mother said, “but I tell him it’s only because he never paid it this much attention before. And it’s the Internet. People used to have to wait for the paper, or for the news on television. Now it’s like a tap running. He sits down with that thing at any time of the day or night, and starts reading. I tell him it’s not like there’s anything he can do about any of it anyway.”

“It gives him something to think about. You know it’s good for people your age to have interests.”

“You aren’t the one who has to listen to him.”

“Give him my love, and I’ll check on you soon. Either from Canada or when I’m back.”

“Was it Toronto?”

“Vancouver. I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, dear.”

She went to the window, looked down at the traffic on Sunset. Her parents had never been very comfortable with her singing career. Her mother, in particular, had treated it as though it were some sort of nuisance disease, something nonfatal that nonetheless interfered with your life in serious ways, preventing you having a real job, and for which there was no particular cure, other than simply letting it run its course and hoping for the best. Her mother had seemed to regard any income from singing as a kind of disability pay, something you received for having to put up with the condition. Which hadn’t really been that far off Hollis’s own attitude to art and money, though unlike her mother she knew that you could have the condition yet never qualify for any compensation whatever. If being the kind of singer and writer she’d been had ever proven absolutely too difficult, she was fairly certain, she’d simply have stopped doing it. And perhaps that was really what had happened. The sudden arc of her career, the arc of the Curfew, had taken her completely by surprise. Inchmale had been one of those people who’d apparently known since birth exactly what he was supposed to do. It had been different for him, although maybe the plateau, after the arc up, hadn’t been that different. Neither of them had really wanted to see what an arc down might look like, she thought. With Jimmy’s addiction as a punctuation point, a blank, heroin-colored milestone driven into whatever that plateau had been made of, and with the band stalled creatively, they’d all opted to drop it. She and Inchmale had tried to go on to other things. As had Heidi-Laura, she supposed. Jimmy had just died. Inchmale seemed to have managed it best. She hadn’t gotten that positive a feeling about Heidi’s life, seeing her this time, but then Heidi was as difficult to read as any human Hollis had ever known.

The maids, she discovered, had actually saved and folded the bubble wrap that had come in the box from Blue Ant. It was on the shelf in the closet. Instant tip-upgrade. She put the wrapping, the box, and the helmet on the tall kitchenette table.

Doing this, she noticed the Blue Ant figurine that had come with it, standing on one of the coffee tables. She’d leave that, of course. She looked back at it, and knew she couldn’t. This was some part of her that had never grown up, she felt. A grown-up would not be compelled to take this anthropomorphic piece of molded vinyl along when she left the room, but she knew she would. And she didn’t even like things like that. She wouldn’t leave it, though. She walked over and picked it up. She’d take it along and give it to someone, preferably a child. Less because she had any feeling for the thing, which was after all only a piece of marketing plastic, than because she herself wouldn’t have wanted to be left behind in a hotel room.

But she decided not to take it carry-on. She didn’t want the TSA people publicly hauling it out of the box with the helmet. She tossed it into the Barneys bag that held her dressier clothes.

ODILE WAS UNHAPPY that they weren’t going to a hotel, in Vancouver. She liked North American hotels, she said. She liked the Mondrian more than the Standard. The idea of a borrowed flat disappointed her.

“I think it might be really something, from what they said,” Hollis told her. “And nobody lives there.”

They were in the back of a Town Car Hollis had arranged with the hotel, billed to her room. When she’d returned the Jetta, the boy who’d almost recognized her hadn’t been there. They were nearing LAX now, she knew; through smoked windows, she could see those weird bobbing oil-well things on a hillside. They’d been there since she’d first come here. As far as she knew, they never stopped moving. She checked the time on her phone. Almost six.

“I called my mother,” Hollis said. “I did it because you mentioned yours.”

“Where is she, your mother?”

“Puerto Vallarta. They go there in the winter.”

“She is well?”

“She complains about my father. He’s older. I think he’s okay, but she thinks he’s obsessed with American politics. She says it makes him too angry.”

“If this were my country,” Odile said, wrinkling her nose, “I would not be angry.”

“No?” Hollis asked.

“I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything.”

“There’s that,” said Hollis, remembering dead Jimmy, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to give them the pleasure.”

“Who?” asked Odile, sitting up, suddenly interested. “Who would I pleasure?”

T ito woke as the Cessna’s wheels touched down. Sunlight through the windows. Grabbing the back of the couch. They sped along on the ground, the pitch of the engines changing. The plane slowed. Eventually, its propellers stopped. He sat up in the sudden silence, blinking out at flat fields, rows of low green.

“Here long enough for a stretch and a pee,” said the pilot, getting out of his seat. He passed Tito on his way back through the cabin. He unfastened the door, and leaned out, swinging it open. “Hey, Carl,” he called, grinning, to someone Tito couldn’t see, “thanks for coming out.” Someone propped the top of an ordinary aluminum ladder against the bottom of the door, and the pilot climbed down it, moving slowly, deliberately.

“Stretch your legs,” Garreth said to Tito, getting out of his chair. Tito sat up, watching as Garreth started down the ladder. Tito rubbed his eyes and stood.

He climbed down to the packed earth of a straight road running in either direction through the flat green fields. The pilot and a man in blue coveralls and a straw cowboy hat were unrolling a black rubber hose from a reel on the back of a small tanker truck. He looked back and saw the old man descending the ladder.

Garreth produced a bottle of mineral water, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste. He began to brush his teeth, pausing to spit white foam on the ground. He rinsed his mouth from the bottle of water. “Got a toothbrush?”