Zero History

“Found a gym. Hacky.”
“Hackney.”
The doors opened and the crowd moved forward, taking Hollis with it.
“Thought it was where they invented the sack.” Disappointed. “Kind of like Silverlake.
Fixed-up. Creatives. But the gym’s old-school. MMA.”
The doors closed behind her, the embrace of the crowd, mildly personal smells, the
roll-aboard against her leg. “What’s that?”
“Mixed martial arts,” said Heidi, as if pleased with a dessert menu.
“Don’t,” advised Hollis. “Remember the boxers.” The train began to move. “Gotta go.”
“Fine,” said Heidi, and was gone.
Six minutes on Line 10 and she was on another platform, Odéon, wheel ticking. Then
telescoping the bag’s handle to carry it up the stairs, into slanting sunlight and the sound
and smell of the traffic on St. Germain, all of this entirely too familiar, as though she’d
never left, and now the fear surfacing, acknowledgement that Heidi was right, that she’d
tricked herself into revisiting the scene of a perfect crime. Dreamlike reactivation of
passion. The smell of his neck. His library of scars, hieroglyphic, waiting to be traced.
“Oh, please,” she said. Snapping out the bag’s handle, trundling it across wheel-eating
cobbles, toward the hotel. Past the candyseller’s wagon. Then the window offering fancy
dress. Satin capes, plague-doctor masks with penile noses. The smart little drugstore at
the angle of two streets, offering hydraulic breast-massage devices and Swiss skin serums
packaged like the latest in vaccines.
Into the hotel, where the man at the desk recognized but didn’t greet her. Discretion
rather than a lack of friendliness. She gave her name, signed in, confirmed that Milgrim’s
room was on her card, received her key on a heavy brass medallion cast with the head of
a lion. Then into the elevator, smaller even than the one at Cabinet but more modern, like
a pale bronze telephone booth. The feeling of being in a telephone booth almost forgotten
now. How things went away.
In the third-floor hallway, massive crooked timbers stood exposed. A maid’s cart with
towels and miniature soaps. Unlocking the door to her room.
Which to her considerable relief was neither of the two she’d stayed in with Garreth,
though the view was virtually identical. A room the size of the bathroom at Cabinet,
smaller perhaps. All dark reds and black and Chinese gold; some weird chinoiserie that
Cabinet’s decorators would have supercharged with busts of Mao and heroic proletarian
posters.
It seemed odd, to not be in Cabinet, and that struck her as a bad sign.
I should find a flat, she said to herself, realizing she had no idea what country she
should find it in, let alone which city. Putting her bag on the bed. Scarcely room to walk,
here, except for a narrow circuit around the bed. Reflexively ducking the determinedly
nondigital television slung in its white-painted bracket from the ceiling. Garreth had cut
his head on one.