Pattern Recognition

And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.

People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.

Lots of Prada, Gucci, but in a Moneyed Bohemian modality too off-the-shelf for London or New York. LA, she realizes: except for two goth girls in black brocade, and a boy gotten up in impeccable High Grunge, it’s Rodeo Drive with an extra helping of cheekbones.

It’s an ofshornaya zona.

On the far shore, a vast cathedral, and on its own little island a statue of quite unthinkable awfulness. Her Lonely Planet tells her it’s Peter the Great, and must be guarded, else local aesthetes blow it up. It looks like a champagne fountain rented from caterers for an old-fashioned working-class wedding.

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

“I had a cousin, back home,” says Ngemi, “who drank an entire electrical appliance business.

“Was he in a better mood, then?” he asks. “He showed me his gun.” “This is England, girl,” Ngemi says. “People don’t have guns.”

“Time is money, but also money is money.”

Fortunately she and Marina are almost immediately separated, conversationally, by Voytek, whose presence here Cayce initially accepts as a function of the Great Whatever of multiply impacted jet lag.

She makes sure the red light is on, on the oversized kettle-analog, wraps herself in last night’s white robe, goes to the window, powers open the drapes, and dimly discovers Tokyo at the bottom of an aquarium of rainy light. Gust-driven moisture shotguns the glass. The lavish lichen of the wooded palace grounds tosses darkly.

Italians who work in Tokyo ad agencies don’t wear Albanian Prada knockoffs.

[She] sees a silver scooter go past, its driver wearing a matching silver helmet with a mirrored visor and what she recognizes as an M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroidered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target.

A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren’t on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he’d seen.

“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”

“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

The rain is done, the air clear as glass.

Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.

“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,” by way this time of an expression of gratitude, and starts back toward Notting Hill station.

A glance to the right and the avalanche lets go. A mountainside of Tommy coming down in her head. My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

She knows immediately that it does not, by the opaque standards of her inner radar, work. She has no way of knowing how she knows.

Cayce looks away from Dorotea and the envelope, noting that a great many Nineties pounds had once been lavished on this third-floor meeting room, with its convexly curving walls of wood suggesting the first-class lounge of a transatlantic zeppelin.

In London his look seems to be about wearing many thousand pounds’ worth of garments that appear to have never been worn before having been slept in, the night before. In New York he prefers to look as though he’s just been detailed by a tight scrum of specialists. Different cultural parameters.

Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.