Zero History

decorated with white fish. There was no white Ikea desk here, no decrease in the shop’s
simple elegance at all. It was a smaller space, but as cleanly uncluttered, with the same
sanded, unstained floor, the same candles. A woman was seated on one of two old, paintscarred,
mismatched wooden kitchen chairs, stroking the screen of an iPhone. She looked
up, smiled, stood. “Hello, Hollis. I—”
Hollis raised her hand. “Don’t tell me.”
The woman raised her eyebrows. Her hair was dark brown, glossy in candlelight, nicely
cut, but mussed.
“Deniability,” Hollis said. “I could figure it out, from what Meredith told me. Or I could
just ask Reg. But if you don’t tell me, and I don’t do either of those things, I can continue
to tell Hubertus that I don’t know your name.” She looked around, saw that Bo was gone.
She turned back to the woman. “I’m not good at lying.”
“Neither am I. Good at hiding, not at lying. Please, sit down. Would you like some
wine? We have some.”
Hollis took the other chair. “No, thank you.”
She was wearing jeans that Hollis took to be the ones she’d seen on the table. That
same absolute black. A blue shirt, rumpled and untucked. A very worn pair of black
Converse sneakers, their rubber sides abraded and discolored.
“I don’t understand why you’d want to see me,” Hollis said. “Under the circumstances.”
The woman smiled. “I was a huge fan of the Curfew, by the way, though that’s not it.”
She sat. Glanced down at the iPhone’s glowing screen, then looked at Hollis. “I think it
was my sense of once having been where you are.”
“Which is … ?”
“I worked for Bigend myself. Identical arrangement, from what Mere tells me. There
was something he wanted, the missing piece of a puzzle, and he talked me into finding it
for him.”
“Did you?”
“I did. Though it wasn’t at all what he’d imagined. Eventually he did do something,
repurposing aspects of what I’d helped him learn. Something ghastly, in marketing. I
used to be in marketing myself, but then I wasn’t, after him.”
“What did you do, in marketing?”
“I had a very peculiar and specific talent, which I didn’t understand, never have
understood, which now is gone. Though that hasn’t been a bad thing, the gone part. It
stemmed from a sort of allergy I’d had, since childhood.”
“To what?”
“Advertising,” the woman said. “Logos, in particular. Corporate mascot figures. I still
dislike those, actually, but not much more than some people dislike clowns, or mimes.
Any concentrated graphic representation of corporate identity.”
“But don’t you have your own now?”
The woman looked down at her iPhone, stroked the screen. “I do, yes. Forgive me for