Zero History

assassinate JFK (for under fifteen dollars, including postage), she’d said that the postwar
American male’s valorization of things military could be assumed to have been balanced
by recent actual memories of the reality of war, though one that been quite definitively
won. Vietnam had changed that, she’d said, as she’d moved into a new set of collages.
Vietnam had shifted something in the American male psyche. Milgrim couldn’t remember
exactly what that was supposed to have been, but he knew she’d connected it with what
he assumed to be the culture that produced websites like this one.
Foley was wearing his black porn rectangle to protect his identity, the assumption on
the viewer’s part intended to be that Foley himself was a member of some military elite.
She’d actually mentioned that as a marketing technique.
He went back to the image of Foley. Foley wasn’t particularly scary. Milgrim knew a
number of kinds of scary, from his decade on the street. The man with the mullet, in the
mothballed restaurant outside of Conway, had been quite a special kind of scary. That
kind of scary, which he had no name for, was difficult to conceal, and impossible to fake.
He’d first seen it in New York, in a young Albanian in the heroin business. Suggestions
of a military background, other things. A similar calm, the same utter lack of wasted
motion. Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might
be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen
the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.
He clicked back through the site. Bigend would be interested in this, though probably
his team had already shown it to him. It was exactly the sort of thing they were looking at.
Noticing neither a brand name nor prices. The site’s URL a string of letters and numbers.
Not a site so much as a dummy, a mockup? The “About Us” page blank, also the “Order”
page.
A deeper throbbing of exhaust, outside. He looked up to see a black motorcycle pass,
slowly, the rider’s yellow helmet turning a smooth sweep of dark plastic visor his way,
then forward again, rolling on. Revealing, for an instant, on the helmet’s back, broad,
white diagonal scratches in the yellow gel-coat.
Exactly the kind of detail that Bigend would congratulate him for noticing.