Zero History

plastic lock on the draw cord, loosened it, and worked the densely compacted contents
out. The sleeping bag, when he unfurled it, was very light, very thin, stretchy, and of that
same iridescence, purplish-black. He unzipped it and spread it on the bed. He picked up
the bottle of water and carried it to the desk, where he retrieved his bag from the floor,
putting it beside the bottle. Taking Bigend’s chair, he sat down, opened the bag, and
pulled out his crumpled cotton jacket. He looked down at the tweed lapels of his new
one, surprised to see them. The shirt cuffs were too strange, but then, you couldn’t see
them under a jacket. Laying his old jacket aside, he brought out the Mac Air, its power
cord and U.K. adaptor plug, and Hollis’s red dongle.
British electricity was some brutal other breed, their plugs three-pronged, massive, wall
sockets often equipped with their own little switches, a particularly ominous belt-andsuspenders
touch. “Faggot above a load,” he said, plugging the power unit into the socket
nearest the desk and flipping the socket switch.
He Googled “Tanky & Tojo,” shortly discovering that Jun, Junya Marukawa, had his
own shop in Tokyo, that Tanky & Tojo were getting lots of web coverage, and that a
SoHo branch would be opening next year on Lafayette. There was no mention of
Hubertus Bigend at all. Jun’s style, evidently, was one Japanese take on something at least
one writer called “transgressive trad.”
Then he went to Twitter, logged in, saw that there was nothing new from Winnie, and
started composing his message to her in his head while he got rid of the three strange girls
with numbers instead of surnames, the ones who wanted to follow him.