30. FOOTPRINT

S he drove to Malibu with the Blue Ant helmet in its carton beside her. It was sunny through Beverly Hills, but by the time she reached the sea something monochrome and saline had insinuated itself.

She went to Gladstone’s, took the carton in with her, and stood it on the massive timber bench opposite her own, while she topped up her hyper-healthy hotel breakfast with a small chowder and a large Coke. The light on the beach was like a sinus headache.

Things were different today, she assured herself. She was working for Node, and her expenses would be covered. She had decided to look at it that way, and not think of herself as Bigend’s employee, or Blue Ant’s. There had, after all, been no real change in her formal situation; she was a freelancer, on assignment to Node to write seven thousand words on locative computing and the arts. That was the situation today and she could deal with it. The Bigend version, she was less certain of. Pirates, their boats, CIA maritime units, tramp freighters, the traffic in and hunt for weapons of mass destruction, a shipping container that spoke to Bobby Chombo—she wasn’t certain of any of that.

As she was paying, she remembered Jimmy’s money, back at the Mondrian, locked in the little keypad safe in her room, coded to open on “CARLYLE.” She didn’t know what else to do with it. Inchmale said he could tell her whether any of it was counterfeit. She’d take him up on that, she thought, then go on from there.

The thought of seeing him again woke an old ambivalence. While it had never been true, as the magazines had often had it, that she and Inchmale had been a couple, in any carnal or otherwise ordinary sense, they had nonetheless been married in some profound if sexless way; co-creatives, the live wires of the Curfew, held down and variously together by Jimmy and Heidi. She was grateful, ordinarily, to whatever fates might be, for Inchmale having found the excellent Angelina and Argentina, thereby to be translated, for the most part, out of her world. It was better that way for everyone, though she’d have had a hard time explaining that to anyone other than Inchmale. And Inchmale, never blind to the background radiation of his own singularity, would have been all too ready to agree.

When she got back to the car, she put the carton on the unopened trunk and got the helmet out, fumbling with the unfamiliar controls. She put the thing on, curious as to whether anyone had been locatively creative in the immediate vicinity.

A cartoonishly smooth Statue of Liberty hand, holding a torch a good three stories high, loomed above her, blotting out the hurtful glow of the salt-metal sky. Its wrist, emerging from the Malibu sand, would’ve had roughly the footprint of a basketball court. It was far bigger than the real thing, it was blatant copying to have it emerging from the beach this way, and still it managed to be more melancholy than ridiculous. Would it all be like this, in Alberto’s new world of the locative? Would it mean that the untagged, unscripted world would gradually fill with virtual things, as beautiful or ugly or banal as anything one encountered on the web already? Was there any reason to expect it to be any better than that, any worse? The Liberty hand and its torch looked as though they had been cast from the stuff they made beige Tupperware out of. She remembered how Alberto had described his labors in the creation of skins, textures. She remembered the microskirted Aztec princesses on his Volkswagen. She wondered where the wifi for this piece was coming from.

She took the helmet off and put it back in its carton.

Driving back, as the sun gradually found its way out again, she decided to try to find Bobby’s factory, if only to put him on her map in a different way. It shouldn’t be hard. Her body, she was finding, remembered Los Angeles much more thoroughly than her head did.

Eventually she found herself back on Romaine, looking for the turn Alberto had taken. For those white-painted walls. She found it, turned, and saw something big and bright and whiter still, just pulling away. She slowed, pulled over. Watched the long white truck turn, swinging right, out of sight at the far corner. She didn’t know trucks, but she guessed this one was as long as they got without having the back end become a separate trailer. But big enough to move the contents of a two-bedroom house. Unmarked, shiny, white. And gone.

“Shit,” she said, pulling up where Alberto had pulled up. She could see the green-painted metal door they’d entered through. She didn’t like the diagonal of shadow across it now. The sun was high, and that diagonal meant the door was open, three inches or more. For the first time she saw the long, white-painted, horizontally corrugated doors of a loading bay. Back a truck up to that and take out anything you wanted.

She popped the trunk, getting out with her PowerBook over her shoulder and the carton in her arms. She put these in the trunk and closed it, retrieved her purse, clicked the transponder to lock the car, then squared her shoulders and walked over to the green door. As she’d assumed, it was standing open a few inches. On darkness, she decided, tipping her head to squint inside, over her sunglasses.

She dug through the smaller objects at the bottom of her purse, coming up with a flat little LED-light on a key ring whose only keys were for a commercial mailbox she no longer rented, and for a Club to secure a car she no longer owned. She squeezed the light between thumb and forefinger, expecting its battery to be dead, but no, it was working. Feeling stupid, she gave the green door a rap, hurting her knuckles. It was heavy, and didn’t move when knocked on. “Bobby? Hello? It’s Hollis Henry, Bobby…” She put her left hand flat on the door and pushed. It swung smoothly, but very slowly. With the LED in her right hand, she pulled off her sunglasses with the other and stepped into darkness.

The LED did little in terms of increased visibility. She turned it off and stood, waiting for her eyes to accommodate. She began to make out points and small, faint beams in the distance. Flaws in the painting of blacked-out windows, she guessed. “Bobby? It’s Hollis. Where are you?”

She tried the LED again, this time pointing it at the floor. Surprisingly bright, it illuminated a length of one of Bobby’s powdered white gridlines. Broken, she saw, with the partial print of one of his winkle-picker Keds clones. “Whoa,” she said, “Nancy Drew. Bobby? Where are you?”

She brought the LED around in a slow arc, level with her waist, faintly making out a panel of switches. She crossed to them and tried one. Behind her, overhead, several of the big halogens came on.

She turned and saw, not unexpectedly now, the fieldlike floor, empty save for Bobby’s GPS grid drawn in flour, churned and partially erased like chalk on a blackboard, where the table, chairs, and computers had been removed. She moved forward, stepping carefully, trying to avoid the white powder. There seemed to be a variety of prints, and quite a few of Bobby’s—or someone else’s, wearing those same ridiculous shoes, which seemed unlikely. There were beige filter tips, too, smoked down short and mashed flat against the concrete. Without picking one up, she knew that they’d be Marlboro.

She looked up at the lights, then back down at the prints and butts. “Bobby did a runner,” she said, recalling an expression of Inchmale’s.

Someone had removed the Safety Orange outline of Archie the squid.

She went out, avoiding touching the partially open green door. She got her computer out of its case in the trunk, woke it up, and while it booted, removed the Blue Ant helmet from its carton. With her right arm through the skeletal helmet and the PowerBook under her left, she closed the trunk and reentered the building. She opened the PowerBook and checked to see if that wireless network 72fofH00av, the one she’d accessed here before, had gone with Bobby. It had, but she’d expected that. She closed the laptop, tucking it under one arm as she fumbled to power up the helmet and put it on.

Archie was gone.

But the shipping container was still there, something glowing at its center, through wireframe.

She took a step forward and it vanished.

She heard a soft voice behind her, syllables not in English. She started to turn, then remembered to remove the helmet first.

A couple stood in the doorway, backlit by the sun. They were small people. The male held a broad-headed push broom. “Hola,” he said.

“Hello?” Walking toward them. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m just leaving. You can see they’ve left a mess.” Gesturing behind her with the arm she’d again thrust through the helmet.

The man said something in Spanish, gently but questioning, as she stepped past them. “Goodbye,” she said, not looking back.

A careworn silver-gray Econoline was parked beside the rented Passat. She used the transponder as she walked up to the car, quickly opening the door, getting in, helmet on the passenger seat, PowerBook on the floor, key in the ignition, pulling away, the dented rear doors of the Econoline in the mirror now, and then she was accelerating along Romaine.

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