“I can do that—”
“As for you and me,” she says, “book me with Gavril. Have Gavril present my agency with a contract. If I’m going to risk my work with Mook, I’ll need something better to take its place—Gavril will give me that. If the contract comes through, I’ll ping you and let you take me out to dinner. We can talk then, okay? I’ll ping you—”
I don’t want to watch her leave—I want to believe I’ll see her again, that I’ll learn everything from her, so I look out over the water, watching waves crash against the buffers, watching kids run from the white sea spray, laughing. In the AutoCab I leave a message with an administrative assistant at Nirvana, relaying what Kelly had told me to say—that I liked what I saw, that I was interested, that I’d be in touch. I try to call Gavril but he doesn’t answer, so I write him an e-mail with everything that’s happened.
Chicken McNuggets for dinner, watching an old Battlestar Galactica marathon on TV when I pay for a few minutes of sat-connect to check my accounts.
Gavril’s responded to my e-maiclass="underline" Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired—
3, 7—
Kelly has a few things to take care of first. She says she wants to meet in Jackson Square, so I head over in that direction early, to wait in City Lights. Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations, carved into the sidewalk. Ferlinghetti. Chessboard floors and room after room of books on wooden shelves—rare, places like these. Coming here’s like a pilgrimage. Posters of glowering geniuses ring the walls, Ginsberg among them, wild-eyed and ink-stained—Ginsberg, whose work I once memorized and chanted at 2 and 3 a.m. on empty Pittsburgh streets. I was a teenager then, loving the feel of his words in my mouth, loving the shock and lucidity of his imagery. It’s been too long since I’ve felt like that—I pick up a copy of Howl and Other Poems. They stock titles here the streams never promote, titles never on bestseller lists and never with the full weight of marketing departments hyping them on daytime talk shows or blurbing them through bookseller apps—European novelists, dissident writers, established writers I’d lost track of in the past decade, like J. Constantine, Picard, Lucille Hash, all with new volumes, a new edition of the collected works of Bob Dylan and Grace K.’s new translation of Beowulf. I pick these up, buy an armload of books—gouging my Visa for thousands more than this trip is already costing me, but worth it to buy this paper, to hold the weight of these books in my arms. The cashier wonders if I’ve depleted their poetry section and I laugh. “Maybe I have,” I tell her, “maybe—”
Kelly pings, There in fifteen—
A few blocks to the restaurant so I walk, cradling my paper bag of books in both hands so the bottom won’t rip, sweaty and wheezing when I reach her. Kelly’s waiting on the sidewalk, wearing a baby-doll dress she once wore to impersonate Albion in the Archive, elegant in a cloche hat and all that creamy lace.
“I’ve already taken care of the wait,” she says. “I know one of the cooks and he’s saved us a quieter table where we can talk. There’s a coat check room—”
“I’ve got it,” I tell her, readjusting the sack in my arms. “Books—”
“Gavril voiced earlier,” she says. “I was flustered at first, hearing his voice—I admit I thought you were full of shit about Gavril, and I was surprised to actually talk with him. We came to an understanding. He says he’s going to change my life with the work he’s giving me. He says he’ll use me for Anthropologie, fly me out to London with him, but he made it clear that everything depends on how much I can help you. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do for you, but I’ll tell you about my work with Mook, if that’s what you’re interested in. You don’t understand how big of a break this is for me. You should have heard my agent when the contract came through. I’m yours tonight, Dominic. Anything you need is yours—”
“Good,” I tell her. “Let’s start with the food—”
The restaurant’s called Ambergris, a seafood place—intimate booths and smoked glass lit by candlelight. Kelly leads me through. The dress doesn’t cover much of her legs, her patent leather heels add inches to her height and her socials flash her modeling work, flicking vids of runway shows and behind-the-scenes clips of lingerie shoots. I feel everyone’s eyes on us as we pass. Our booth is set off from the others, private—the kind of table that might usually get bad service, but perfect for us tonight. I shove my books beside me. The smell of curry, of citrus, smoked fish. Zhou across the table’s disorienting—Kelly. I have to remind myself that this is Kelly, that her name’s Kelly, that she’s not an illusion in the Adware. She orders rum for us both once we’ve settled in.
“To getting what we want,” she says for a toast. We click glasses and I take the shot, the dark rum vanilla smooth and warming.
“I fell into some trouble back east,” I tell her. “I got mixed up with some powerful men but I have reason to believe that Mook can protect me from them. I have other reasons to find him, too. He took something very valuable from me—”
“Mook rhymes with book,” she says. “Not fluke—”
“You said that ‘Mook’ isn’t his name—what is his name? What’s Mook?”
“Are you a gamer?”
We’re interrupted by a soft swell of music from the tabletop touch menu, a gentle, impatient, reminder—I order mahimahi and Kelly a salad with sushi. Another round of rum.
“Mook finds political allegories in the video games he plays,” she says. “You’ve played first-person shooters, haven’t you? At least know what they are? You’re given a point of view and you murder everything in sight. All those nameless, faceless waves of enemies you murder are called mooks in gamer parlance. He’s adopted the notion of mooks for his theories about the state. He believes that one day the mooks will kill their killers—”
“He’s a communist, then? Mooks are the proletariat, is that it?”
“Anarchy,” she says. “Actually, he’d bristle at any label you applied to his pet theories, but he’s enthralled by the communist mythology, despite himself. He believes in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the dissolution of the state. When you hear him talk about this stuff, you’d think he’s telling you about the End Times—”
“Who is he?”
“A terrorist,” she says. “An artist. I really don’t see how he can help protect you, though—”
“Tell me about an image he uses of a woman walking two other women like they’re dogs. He pulled it from an Agent Provocateur printbook—”
“Oh, sure, he calls that one The Dog Walker. He once told me that image is personal to him, that it’s meant to rub pepper into the eyes of his enemies,” she says. “He articulates his political thought through imagery. He’s underground, off the grid—He once told me that Blum & Poe offered to sign him, offered to make him rich, but he turned them down because he’s against the capitalist ethos. Death’s-Heads, Dog Walkers, Blood Diamonds. He tags everything—some people tear down walls and billboards to collect his stuff. I was at a party following a shoot and the guy, this producer, had the side of a Corvette Mook tagged hanging in his living room. The side of an entire red Corvette just because it was painted with a Meecham death’s-head—”
“Graffiti on walls? Mook’s tech savvy. I’m surprised he sticks with paint for his art—”