Zero History

61. FACIAL RECOGNITION
They’d had a shower with H. G. Wells and Frank, Garreth’s bandaged leg, tucked
through something that looked like an inhumanly capacious and open-ended condom.
Toweling him off, she’d seen a bit more of Frank, “Frankenstein.” Much evidence of
heroic surgery, so-called. As many stitches as a patchwork quilt, and indeed she
suspected literally patchwork, the back of his other calf tidily scarred where they’d taken
skin to graft. And within Frank, if Garreth wasn’t simply taking the piss, a good bit of
newfangled rattan bone. Frank’s musculature was considerably reduced, though Garreth
had hopes for that. Hopes generally, she’d been glad to see, and hard sensitive hands
sliding all over her.
Now he lay on the Piblokto Madness bed, in Cabinet’s not-velour robe, Frank encased
in a slippery-looking, black, Velcro-fastened wrapper through which a machine the size
and nostalgic shape of a portable typewriter case pumped extremely cold water, very
quickly. Heidi had used something similar, on their final tour, to help with the wrist and
hand pain drumming had started to cause her. Garreth’s had arrived an hour before, by
courier, a gift from the old man.
He was talking with the old man now; very much, she thought, as to a wife in a long
marriage. They could convey a great deal in a very few words, and had their own slang,
in-group jokes of seemingly infinite depth, a species of twin-talk. He wore a headset,
cabled to his no-name black laptop, on the embroidered velour beside him, their
conversation being conducted, she assumed, through one or another of the darknets they
frequented. These were, she gathered, private internets, unlicensed and unpoliced, and
Garreth had once remarked that, as with dark matter and the universe, the darknets were
probably the bulk of the thing, were there any way to accurately measure them.
She didn’t listen. Stayed in the warm, steamy bathroom, drying her hair.
When she came out, he was staring up at the round bottom of the birdcage.
“Are you still talking?”
“No.” He removed the headset.
“Are you all right?”
“He’s done. Folded.”
“What do you mean?” She went to him.
“He had something he’d never told me about. Grailware. He’s giving it to me. For this.
Means it’s over. Done.”
“What’s over?”
“The business. His mad career. If it weren’t, he’d not have given me this.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Invisibility. A sigil.”