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She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy’s black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501’s, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.
She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
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. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.
Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
“We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
Bigend looks at her with absolute seriousness. “I don’t count things in money. I count them in excellence.”
Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”
“Where do you live?” “Washington state. I’ve got a cliff on Orcas with a ‘fifty-one Airstream propped up against it on railroad ties. It’s held together with mold, and something that eats aluminum. I was going to build a house, but now I can’t bring myself to spoil the view.” “You’re based there?” “I’m based in this.” He toes the child-sized antique suitcase.
Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.
There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer. But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.
“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.
The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.
She could probably be mistaken, she decides, for the correspondent for some obscure sub-NPR cultural radio operation.
“Thornton Vaseltarp.”
There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, she knew, took for granted was there.
People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit.
