Zero History

“Borrowed laptop. Lost phone.” He hesitated. “I think Sleight was tracking me with it.”
Refresh.
“U lost?”
“Got rid of it.”
Refresh.
“Why??”
He had to think about that. “S was telling follower where I was.”
Refresh.
“So??”
“Tired of it.”
Refresh.
“No jack moves OK? B cool”
“Didn’t want him to know where we’re staying.”
Refresh.
“Where R U?”
“Staying,” he completed, aloud, then wrote: “Hotel Odeon, by Odeon Metro.”
Refresh.
“Bak nxt AM?”
“As far as I know.”
Refresh.
“Whts yr partner want??”
“Jeans.”
Refresh.
“LOL! B cool B N touch bye”
“Bye,” said Milgrim, less than impressed with his new federal agent handler. It felt like
having a disinterested young mother.
He logged out of Twitter and went to the bookmarks, clicking for the page he’d marked
earlier. Foley modeling a zip-front jacket and an old-fashioned porn rectangle. What was
that about? He skipped through the site, things starting to come together. Remembering
another of the French girl’s PowerPoint presentations, back in Soho. The market’s
fetishization of elite special forces, “operators.” She’d cited the Vietnam War as the
tipping point for this, and had illustrated her argument with collages of small ads from the
back pages of long-extinct Fifties mens’ magazines, True and Argosy: hernia aids, mailorder
monkeys huddled in tea cups, courses in lawn mower repair, X-Ray Specs …
These ads, she’d said, constituted a core sample of the mass unconscious of the American
male, shortly after WWII. Aside from the ubiquitous trusses and truss substitutes (and
what, Milgrim had wondered, had accounted for that epidemic of herniation among
postwar American men?), this record differed very little from the equivalent record to be
found in the back pages of comic books of the same era. While pointing out that anyone,
then, could order exactly the same Italian surplus rifle that had later been used to