V otive candles had been lit in her darkened room. Beside the luminous cottons of the all-white bed, the water pitcher had been filled. She put the carton, dead Jimmy Carlyle’s envelope of hundred-dollar bills, and her makeshift evening purse on the long-legged marble-topped table in the kitchenette.
She used the small unsharpened blade in the handle of the kitchenette’s corkscrew to slit the transparent tape sealing the carton.
There was a note, in an oddly Sumerian-looking script, on a rectangle of plain gray card, resting on a fold of bubble wrap. “You need your own. Press On. H.”
She set that aside and lifted the fold of bubble wrap. Something black and matte silver. She drew out what she took to be a more aggressively styled version of the wireless helmet she’d used to view the squid at Bobby Chombo’s. Through the cutaway shell, she saw the same few simple touch pads. She turned the thing over, looking for a manufacturer’s logo, but found none. She did find MADE IN CHINA in minute bas-relief, but then most things were.
She tried it on, intending to do no more than glance at herself in a candlelit mirror, but she must have touched one of the control surfaces. “A locative installation, in your room,” Odile said, sounding as if she were inches from Hollis’s ear. She found herself atop the turned-down bed, clutching Bigend’s headgear, so unexpected had this been. “Monet’s poppies. Rotch.” Rotch? “The poppies and whatever background, they are equiluminant.”
And there they were, quivering slightly, reddish orange, arrayed as a field that filled her room, level with the height of the bed.
She moved her head from side to side, scanning the effect. “This becomes part of a series. The artist’s Argenteuil series. Rotch.” There it was again. “She fill spaces everywhere with Monet’s poppies. Call me when you have received this. We must talk, also about Chombo.” She pronounced it “Shombo.”
“Odile?” But it had been a recording. Still crouching on the bed, she sat down and ran her left hand through the poppies she knew weren’t there. She almost thought she could feel them. She swung her legs over the side and found the floor, poppies around her knees. Wading through them, toward the layered drapes, she felt momentarily as though they floated atop captive, unmoving water. The artist might not have intended that, she thought.
Reaching the window, she held the drapes aside with her forearm and peered down at Sunset, half expecting to discover that Alberto had littered the street with dead celebrities, more tableaux of fame and misadventure, but there was nothing evident.
She took it off, returned to the table through the sudden absence of poppies, and touched various surfaces inside until a green LED went off. As she was putting it back in the carton, she noticed something else, amid the bubble wrap.
She pulled out a molded vinyl figurine of the Blue Ant ant. She stood it on the marble tabletop, picked up the evening’s purse, and took that into the bathroom. While she ran a tub of hot on top of the day’s allotment of shower gel, she emptied the purse and transferred its usual contents back into it.
She tested the water, undressed, and got into the tub, settling herself on her back.
She was no longer certain why Jimmy had needed to borrow that much money in Paris, why she’d been willing to part with it, or how it was that she’d been able to lay her hands on cash.
She’d given it to him in francs. It had been that long ago.
The water was deep enough that it rose along the sides of her face as she settled the back of her head against the bottom of the tub. A child-sized island of face above water. Isla de Hollis.
Odile’s poppies. She remembered Alberto’s description of how he sculpted and skinned-up a new celebrity misadventure. She guessed Odile’s poppies were another, simpler kind of skin. They could be anything, really.
She raised her sunken head partially out of the water and began to work shampoo into her hair. “Jimmy,” she said, “you really piss me off. The world is already weirder and stupider than you could ever have guessed.” She lowered her shampooed hair back into the water. The bathroom kept on filling with the absence of her dead friend, and she’d started to cry before she could start to rinse.