S he lay very still, on her back, the sheet forming a cool dark tunnel, and gave her body explicit permission to relax. This made her remember doing the same thing in an overhead berth on a tour bus, but with a sleeping bag instead of sheets, and foam earplugs instead of asking the desk to hold her calls, and setting the ring on her cell to silent.
Inchmale had called it womb-return, but she knew it was the opposite, really; not so much the calm of not yet having been born, but the stillness of already having died. She didn’t want to feel like a fetus, but like the recumbent figure carved atop a sarcophagus, cool stone. When she’d explained that to Jimmy Carlyle, once, he’d cheerfully told her that was pretty much exactly what he was after with heroin. Something about that exchange had left her very glad she’d never been much attracted to drugs, other than garden-variety cigarettes.
But anything that shook her sufficiently, really hard, could get her into tube mode, preferably in a darkened room. The departures of serious boyfriends had done it, as had the end of the Curfew, her initial major losses when the dot-com bubble had popped (the fact of those holdings having been residue of a serious boyfriend, if you wanted to look at it that way) had done it, and her subsequent (and she supposed possibly final, the way things were headed) major financial loss had done it as well, when her friend Jardine’s ambitious shot at an indie music emporium in Brooklyn had not so unexpectedly failed. Investment in that had initially seemed like a sort of hobby move, something fun and open-ended and potentially even profitable, that she could afford to take a chance on, given the dot-coms had briefly made her worth some single-digit number of millions, at least on paper. Inchmale, of course, had lobbied for her to dump the start-up stocks at what she now knew had been their white-hot and utterly evanescent peak. Inchmale, being Inchmale, had by then already dumped his own, which had driven acquaintances crazy, as they’d all believed he was throwing away the future. Inchmale had told them that some futures needed throwing away, badly. And Inchmale, of course, had never sunk a quarter of his net worth into founding a large, aggressively indie, bricks-and-mortar retail establishment. Selling music on the full variety of what were, after all, Inchmale had insisted, dead platforms.
Now, she knew, she’d been returned to the tunnel by that sudden stab of weird fear, in Starbucks; fear that Bigend had gotten her into something that might be at once hugely and esoterically dangerous. Or, she thought, if you looked at it as process, by the cumulative strangeness of what she’d encountered since she’d accepted the assignment from Node. If indeed Node existed. Bigend seemed to be saying that Node only existed to whatever extent he might ultimately need it to.
What she needed, she knew, however belatedly, was a second career. Helping Hubertus Bigend exercise his curiosity wasn’t going to be it, and neither, she knew absolutely, was anything else Blue Ant might offer her. She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write. During the Curfew’s heyday, she’d frequently suspected that she was one of very few singers who spent a certain part of every interview wishing she were on the other side of the microphone. Not that she wanted to be interviewing musicians. She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them. When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. If she could do that and pay the grocery bills, the ASCAP check could pay the rent, and she’d see where that could go.
She had, during the Curfew days, written a few pieces for Rolling Stone, a few more for Spin. With Inchmale, she’d written the first in-depth history of the Mopars, their mutual favorite sixties garage band, though they hadn’t been able to find anyone willing to pay them to publish it. In the end, though, it had run in Jardine’s record store’s in-house magazine, its publication one of the few things she’d gotten out of that particular investment.
Inchmale, she guessed, was sitting up in business class, headed for New York, reading the Economist, a magazine he read exclusively on airplanes, swearing that on arrival he promptly and invariably forgot every word.
She sighed. Let go, she told herself, though she had no idea of what.
Alberto’s virtual monument to Helmut Newton appeared, in her mind’s eye. Silver-nitrate girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.
“Let go,” she said, aloud, and fell asleep.
NO BORDERS of glare edged the multiple layers of drapes, when she woke. Already evening. She lay there in her sheet-tube, no longer needing it in the same way. The edge of her anxiety had receded, not quite past the horizon but sufficient to have restored her curiosity.
Where was Bobby Chombo, now? Had he been hauled off, along with his equipment, by the Department of (as Inchmale called it) Homemade Security? Charged (or not) with dicking around with some scheme to smuggle weapons of mass destruction? Something about the quietly deep peculiarity of those two cleaners led her to think not. Rather, she thought, he’d done a runner, but with considerable help. Some crew had come in, loaded his gear into that white truck, and hauled him off, elsewhere. He might be no more than a few blocks from the first place, for all she knew. But if he’d cut himself off from Alberto, and the rest of that art scene, what were her chances of finding him again?
Somewhere, she thought, looking up at the almost invisible whiteness of the darkened room’s ceiling, there was, supposedly, the container. A long, rectangular box of…were they made of steel? Yes, she decided, steel. She had had carnal knowledge of an Irish architect in one, on his rural property in Derry. He’d converted it into a studio. Oversized portholes cut with a torch, glass framed in with plywood. Definitely steel. His had been insulated originally for refrigeration, she remembered him telling her; the simpler ones too chilly, prone to condensation of human breath.
She’d never really thought about them, before. You glimpsed them from freeways, sometimes, stacked tightly as Odile’s robotic Lego. An aspect of contemporary reality so common as to remain unconsidered, unquestioned. Almost everything, she supposed, traveled in them now. Not raw materials, like coal or grain, but manufactured things. She remembered news items about them being lost at sea, in storms. Breaking open. Thousands of Chinese rubber duckies bobbing gaily along the great currents. Or sneakers. Something about hundreds of left sneakers washing up on the beach, the rights having been shipped separately to prevent pilferage. And someone else, on a yacht in the harbor at Cannes, telling scary transatlantic sailing stories; how they don’t sink immediately, containers gone over the side, and the silent, invisible threat they then pose to sailors.
She seemed to have cycled through most of the fear she’d felt, before. Curiosity hadn’t replaced it entirely, but she had to admit she was curious. One of the scary things about Bigend, she supposed, was that with him you stood an actual chance of finding some things out. And then where would you be? Were there things that were, in themselves, deeply problematic to learn? Definitely, though it would depend on who knew you knew them, she decided.
But then the small dry sound of an envelope being slid under the door, familiar from her life on tour, suddenly triggered, as it always had, the atavistic mammalian fear of nest invasion.
She turned on a light.
The envelope, when she retrieved it from the carpet, contained a color printout, on unexceptional paper, of a photograph of the white truck, parked beside the loading bay of Bobby Chombo’s rented factory.
She turned it over, finding, inscribed in Bigend’s vaguely cuneiform hand: “I’m in the lobby. Let’s talk. H.”
Curiosity. Time she satisfied some. And time, she knew, to decide whether or not she was willing to go on with this.
She went into the bathroom, to ready herself to meet Bigend again.