Zero History

“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” said Hollis.
“Don’t let him fuck with you,” said Heidi, reaching back to prod Milgrim in the knee,
causing his eyes to snap wide with terror. “He’s full of shit,” she insisted, “they all are.”
Leaving Hollis to wonder, as Aldous pulled the truck over, who they all were. Male
authority figures, she guessed, from having known Heidi. Whatever had once made her
serial liaisons with professional boxers so relentlessly lively, and had required her
separation, as much as had been possible, from label executives.
Aldous pressed various switches on the truck’s dash, with resulting clunks and clanks.
He opened his own door, climbed down, closed it, opened the one beside Hollis, and
helped her down, his hand large and warm. Milgrim scrambled down behind her,
flinching when Aldous heaved the door shut. Heidi, meanwhile, had opened her own
door and jumped down. She was wearing gray-green leather plus-fours and knee-high
black boots whose brogue-style uppers were soled with sections of tank tread, more loot
from the ongoing punitive demolition of fuckstick’s remaining credit cards.
Hollis looked up at the building they were parked in front of. It resembled a European
countertop appliance from the Nineties, something by Cuisinart or Krups, metallic gray
plastic, its corners blandly rounded. Aldous pressed something on a black key-fob,
causing the truck to clunk multiply and give an almost visible shiver of heightened
awareness.
They followed him to the building’s entrance, where his equally tall but less-charming
colleague, whose name Hollis had never gotten, waited inside.
“I hope he doesn’t want a urine sample,” Milgrim seemed to say, inexplicably, though
she opted to pretend she hadn’t heard him.
They were passed through the door, then, from one Jamaican to another, the door
locked behind them, and led out into the center of the Cuisinart Building’s determined but
rather miniature atrium. Hollis, having some vague idea of what City real estate was
worth, supposed they must have agonized over this empty, purely American volume of
space, every square centimeter of which, otherwise, might have been filled with usable,
windowless office-hive. As it was, it rose a mere five floors, wrapped at each level with a
walk-around interior balcony of the same metallic-looking plastic, or plastic-looking
metal, that sheathed the exterior. Like a model, to only partial scale, of some hotel in the
Atlanta core.
Bigend, in his trench coat, stood at its center, holding an iPhone with both hands, arms
extended, squinting, thumbs moving slightly.
“I need to speak with Hollis and Milgrim,” Bigend said to Heidi, offering her the
iPhone, “but you’ll enjoy this. The controls are highly intuitive. The video-feed, of
course, is from its nose-camera. Start with the manta, then try the penguin.” He pointed,
up. They all looked up. Near the atrium’s uniformly glowing, paneled ceiling hung a
penguin and a manta ray. The penguin, silvery, looked only approximately like a penguin,