And so on. It really wasn’t hard. They wanted to be sold; they just needed a little stroking. I brought out some autographed copies of Daniel’s last novel, and a series of glossy black-and-white self-portraits by Fiona, also signed. I showed them photos, including some amazing nighttime aerial shots, of something no one has seen yet — Alexa’s massive land-art project right there in Arizona, where she’s transforming a series of natural caves with mirrors and colored neon lights. Mal predicts it will be a sensation. I told them I’d be happy to make a phone call if they wanted to take a day off, drive down there, and see it all in progress.
Right there, in the conference room, they called their banker and had him cut a check for the last of the money they had originally agreed to commit to us. Smiles all around; one of them suggested that some champagne be brought in, but they had none on hand, and then they began to argue about the best place to send out for it. I was already leaning forward in my chair, anxious to get back to the Hilton, maybe eat a quick meal at the bar before phoning the airline to try to change my reservation. But before they would let me leave, such was their enthusiasm, they insisted I go down to the second floor, to the Prototype Room as they referred to it, and check out some of the stuff whose reproduction I was now a part of bringing into the world. Their excitement about it was touching in its unabashed geekiness, its disconnection from any concern about the impression they were making. They couldn’t stop smiling.
In the Prototype Room I stood on a sort of round treadmill while a guy in baggy army shorts equipped me with a visored helmet, a sort of breastplate, and two heavy, loose-fitting, elbow-length gloves. Then he gave me a thumbs-up and lowered the visor over my face.
For the next five minutes, I walked through a ruined city, my feet crunching audibly on pulverized stone and broken glass. I could hear the crash as chunks of concrete snapped off of sheared-off buildings and fell into the street. For a while I wondered if I was the only one there; then a voice whispered in my ear, Hey, baby. Pretty wild, huh? I turned my head, my actual head, in its helmet, and was face to face with a lecherous bald man with a goatee. He smiled at me and raised an eyebrow. I hurried away. It doesn’t take long, it may interest you to know, to buy completely into a manufactured reality once your senses apprehend it. A block or so further on, a small child popped out from behind the flaking corner of a facade and threw something at me, a rock or maybe a broken brick. I threw up my hand and felt a distinct sting as it bounced, or seemed to bounce, off the glove. The wind whistled in my ears.
Not much else happened, really: I suppose incident is what the people in the Prototype Room are working on. The rest of my virtual tour of this landscape — based on no real landscape, as far as I could recognize; only a kind of imaginary template of ruin — held one other surprise. At some point, I passed a pool of water in the street, fed by a broken hydrant. I stopped and looked down: and there, shimmering but still distinct, was my reflection. I was a tall, muscular, busty red-haired woman, in torn fatigue pants, with a dirt-smudged face, full lips, and bright green eyes. Across my chest were two bandoliers, and hanging at my side was a gun. I reached down to my hip and touched it.
A few moments later everything went black, except for a small pulsing dot in the upper left corner of my field of vision. The guy in the army shorts lifted my visor, and there in front of me again were the three young executives of Virtech, tense with the effort of modesty.
When I walked out the street door of the office building, night had fallen, and the heat was a little less oppressive. It may sound like a cliché, but in that solitary minute before my taxi arrived, with all the city lights burning steadily against the pure indigo backdrop of the desert sky, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if the whole thing had just started to shimmer, then vanished, revealing to me that I was really standing in a sealed, undecorated room somewhere, far from where I believed myself to be.
HIGH WINDS KEPT us on the ground in Atlanta; it was well after midnight when I got back to Palladio. The house was silent; no light even in Milo’s room. I put down my bag until I could see by the red lights of the security system. Kind of a peaceful moment, actually.
Then I started walking, toward my office, treading on the outside of the steps where they wouldn’t creak (a trick I learned as a kid); past my office; halfway up the stairs between the third and fourth floors, where I stopped. There was an edge of light shining from under the door to Mal and Molly’s bedroom. It was so quiet that I had to wait there motionless for a few minutes just to satisfy myself that they hadn’t heard me. I sat on the step for a while, thinking of I don’t know what — of nothing, really; I might as well have been a part of the house — until at some point I looked over and saw that the light was out. Holding my breath, I rose and started down the stairs again toward my own room, anxious not to make a sound.
* * *
IN MY OFFICE, with Mal, who’d come looking for me just to see what he needed to keep tabs on. Actually, I’d gone looking for him, in his office, around nine, but he wasn’t downstairs yet. Now he was barefoot and holding a huge iced coffee from the kitchen. Another scorching day.
Daniel’s taken a section out of his novel, I said, a section he said he was having trouble with, and he’s turned it into a short story. So now the New Yorker says they’ll take it.
Outstanding, Mal said, yawning. Good for him. I’d love to see it.
Yeah, well, the thing is, we’ve worked all this out policy-wise as far as books go, but what about stuff of ours that appears in magazines? They have their own advertisers. They have their own layout, where ads might appear in the middle of a story, ads that maybe our own clients would consider –
I get it, Mal said, smiling, pleased almost. Things like this, unforeseen things, the kind of things that keep me up at night, tend to give Mal a charge. He loves new territory.
So you’ll –
I’ll talk to everybody. Anything else?
Yeah. I spoke to Jean-Claude.
Mal’s jaw set a little bit. Not that he’s mad at Milo for any reason — on the contrary, the further out into the ether Milo seems to go, the more Mal treats him like a favorite son. But his fame is snowballing to the degree that clients who used to ask hopefully if Jean-Claude had any forthcoming work still unspoken for are now insisting on him and him alone. They’ll wait, they say. Milo or nothing. It irritates Mal no end.
Hey, he said, where’s that thing that was supposed to be in the Times about him?
Next Sunday. Anyway, he finally came to me ready to tell me about his next project.
It’s finished?
No. But there’s a reason he’s telling me about it now. It’s … it’s site-specific.
Where’s the site?
You’ll love this, I said, not sure Mal would love it at all. It’s here. Palladio. That’s the site.
Mal sat back in his chair and thought for a few seconds. He shrugged affectionately. I don’t see any problem with it, he said.
Okay, good, I’ll let him know. It might actually make things easier, logistically, because at this point we’ve got so many people lined up waiting to see it when it’s done. Banana Republic, Xerox, DaimlerChrysler …
Mal yawned again. Sorry, he said. Didn’t get much sleep.