Zero History

28. WHITE PEAR TEA
The cost of wifi was white pear tea.
Milgrim looked at the two-cup glass tea press on the round white table, beyond the
matte aluminum rectangle of Hollis’s laptop. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen white pear.
Probably because he wasn’t very fond of tea, and because almost everything else here
was white. He decided to let it steep awhile longer.
He was alone, in this narrow white shop, with a great deal of tea and a girl in a nicely
fitting, crisply starched cotton dress, faintly pinstriped in gray, not unlike a tennis dress.
He hadn’t thought of Parisians as tea drinkers, but if this place was any indication, they
preferred it in ultrafragile glass pots. Walls lined with shallow white shelves, modernist
apothecary jars filled with dried vegetable matter, plus a glittering, halogen-spotted
assortment of these pots and presses. Equally minimalist cozies, in thick gray felt. A few
green plants. Three small tables, each with two chairs.
From outside, the occasional whine and sputter of passing scooters. The street was
almost too narrow for cars. Somewhere in the Latin Quarter, if the cabdriver had
understood him.
Now the girl began to give the apothecary jars the once-over with a feather duster. Like
performance art, or some highly conceptual species of pornography. The sort of thing
that turned out to mainly be about the pinstripes. Or the tea.
He opened the pencil-thin laptop and turned it on.
Hollis’s desktop was a digital representation of interstellar space. Mauve galactic clouds.
Was she interested in astronomy, he wondered, or was this something from Apple? He
imagined the laptop displaying an image of itself instead, and of the tea press, on the
white laminate. And in that imagined screen, another, identical image. Tunneling down,
Escher-style, to a few pixels. He thought of the art in Hollis’s book, and of the Neo, which
he now assumed was on its way to some forbiddingly upscale suburb, or there already,
his own small effort in GPS art.
He noted that he felt remarkably calm about that, about what he’d done. The main
thing, it seemed, was that he’d done it. It was done. But noting this caused him to start to
remember Sleight.
After his cab ride from Galeries Lafayette, to a randomly chosen intersection near here,
he’d felt relatively certain that he was off Sleight’s map. Now he considered Hollis’s
laptop, wondering if Sleight might not have been at that as well. Though Hollis said she
was new in Bigend’s employ, this time at least.
He opened the browser, then his webmail. Could Sleight see him do that? he wondered.
His address, the first and only e-mail address he’d had, was a Blue Ant address. He
opened Twitter. If he understood this correctly, Sleight might be able to know what he