Zero History

“I didn’t. I don’t. It wants to happen. I get out of the way. I told Ajay that, he said he
loves me.”
“Does he?” Hollis looked at the dart’s black tip.
“He loves that. How about your boyfriend?”
“Obviously,” Hollis said, “he hasn’t called.”
“Call him again.”
“Doesn’t feel right.” She crossed to the bed, offered Heidi the dart. Heidi took it.
“You fight with him?”
“No. I’d say we drifted apart, but it wasn’t like that. When we were together, it was like
we were both on vacation. On vacation from ourselves, maybe. But he didn’t have a
project. Like an actor between films. And then he did, but it was gradual. Like an
atmosphere. Some kind of fog. He became harder to see. Less present. And I was starting
to work on the book. I took that much more seriously than I would have expected to.”
“I know,” said Heidi, tucking the two darts back into the frogging, beside the third, with
seemingly no regard for where the black needlepoints might go. “I remember going up to
see you in the Marmont. All that stuff laid out on tables. Seeing you were really doing it.”
“It helped me make sense of what I’d been through. Working for Bigend, being with
Garreth … I think there’s a way in which I may be able to look at that book, one day, and
make a different kind of sense out of what happened. Not that there’s anything there
that’s about that. I told that to Reg, last month, and he said it was a palimpsest.”
Heidi said nothing. Canted her head slightly, her black hair a raptor’s wing, swinging a
precise inch, no more.
“But not now,” Hollis said. “I don’t want to look at it now, and it wouldn’t tell me
anything if I did. And leaving him a second message would be like that. I left the first
one. I did what he told me to do, except that I didn’t do it because knowing him had
gotten me in trouble. I did it because I heard he’d been hurt. I’m not not calling him out
of some kind of pride.”
“Magical thinking,” said Heidi. “That’s what Reg would say about that. But hey, he
totally navigates by that shit. We know that.”
The room phone’s sclerotic mechanical cricket chirped. Again. Hollis was lifting the
heavy receiver from the rosewood cube as it rang a third time. “Hello?”
“We need to talk,” said Bigend.
“We just did.”
“I’m sending Aldous for you, with Milgrim.”
“Fine,” said Hollis, deciding she might as well use this as an opportunity to quit. She
hung up.
“Muskrat man,” said Heidi.
“I have to meet him,” Hollis said, “but I’m going to quit.”
“Okay,” said Heidi, rolling back, then over and off the bed, straightening smoothly to
her full height. “Take me.”