Zero History

32. POST-ACUTE
The waitress was departing with orders, taking the hardbound menus with her, when a
disturbance broke out at a table on the opposite side of the room.
Raised voices. A tall, broad-shouldered, black-clad young man, pale features grimly set,
suddenly standing, knocking over his chair. Milgrim watched as this one swept for the
door, slamming out of Les Éditeurs. To be met by a tide of electronic flash, flinging up
his arm to protect his eyes or hide his face.
“That didn’t take long,” said George, who was buttering a round of sliced baguette. He
had elegantly hairy hands, like some expensive Austrian stuffed animal. He bit off half of
the buttered bread with his large white teeth.
“All he could stand,” said Meredith, someone whose intelligence protruded through her
beauty, Milgrim felt, like the outline of unforgiving machinery pressing against a taut silk
scarf.
Craning his neck, Milgrim made out one of the Dottirs, silver hair unmistakable, at the
table the young man had deserted. After the liquid metal penguin, this didn’t seem so odd.
He felt as though he were on some kind of roll today. She was collecting her things, he
saw. She checked the dial of her enormous gold wristwatch. “Saw them,” he said, “the
Dottirs. On the river. In a video.” He turned back to George. “I saw you, too.”
“It’s about an album launch,” said George. “They have a new release. We don’t, but
share a label.”
“Who was that who left?”
“Bram,” said Hollis, “the singer from the Stokers.”
“Don’t know him,” said Milgrim, picking up one of the rounds of bread in order to
give his hands something to do.
“You aren’t thirteen,” said Meredith, “are you?”
“No,” agreed Milgrim, putting the slice of bread, whole, into his mouth. Oral, his
therapist called that. She’d said he was very lucky to never have taken up smoking. The
bread was firm, springy. He held it there a moment before he began to chew. Meredith
was staring at him. He looked back at the Brandsdottir table, where someone was holding
whichever Dottir’s chair as she rose.
That person was Rausch, he saw, and almost spat out the bread.
Desperately, he found Hollis’s eye. She winked, the sort of effortless wink that involves
no other features, a wink that Milgrim himself could never have managed, and took a sip
of wine. “George is in a band, Milgrim,” she said, and he knew that she spoke to calm
him. “The Bollards. Reg Inchmale, who was the guitarist in the Curfew with me, is
producing their new album.”
Milgrim, chewing and swallowing the suddenly dry bread, nodded. Took a sip of