Zero History

77. GREEN SCREEN
The broken wheel on her roll-aboard woke, like some ominous precision measuring
device, as she pulled it along the corridor to the rear lobby. She’d gone to say goodbye to
the ferret, though she doubted she’d ever be able to explain that to anyone. Garreth might
understand, who had his own odd ways with fear. She saw the empty scooter-chair,
abandoned beside the glass slab door, where Robert now stood.
“Congratulations, Miss Henry,” he said, inexplicably and rather tenderly, as he opened
and held the door for her. Unwilling, after more definitely having noted a multiplication
of identical follies in the watercolors upstairs, plus her moment just now with the ferret,
to risk further liminality, she thanked him, smiling, and clicked swiftly on, out beneath a
porte cochere she supposed had been built for actual coaches, and on toward the back of
the tall Slow Foods van, drawn up near it. Tall, the van, a big one, and newly painted a
rich aubergine, lettered and trimmed in a dull bronze, as if the Queen herself were vegan,
if vegan was what Slow Food was about, and fond of Aubrey Beardsley.
“Hello,” said the driver, brunette under her Foleyesque cap, and prettily Norwegian.
Both a professional truck driver and an actress. Hollis knew all this because she’d
overheard Garreth hiring her, via some third party, and hadn’t realized until now that this
was what that had been about. “There are two zippered panels, inside these doors,” the
driver said, indicating the back of the truck. “I’ll open the first for you, then close it, then
you’ll open and close the second. It’s to make sure no light escapes. Clear?” The girl
smiled, and Hollis found herself smiling back. Aside from driving, Hollis knew, she was
there to engage the authorities, should there be any trouble with where they were parked
later. Now the girl opened one of the van’s rear doors, revealing a taut wall of black
canvas, like something in a conjuring trick, and climbed three very sturdy-looking folding
aluminum steps, where she raised a tall vertical zip. “Give me your bag.” Hollis passed it
up. The driver put it through the slit, climbed down. Hollis went up the steps, through the
slit, the zip’s plastic teeth odd against her wrist, then turned and pulled the zipper most of
the way down. The girl pulled it the rest of the way, leaving Hollis in absolute darkness.
Behind her, the other zip went up, admitting startlingly bright light. She turned and saw
Garreth, and behind him Pep, wearing what she instantly knew must be the ugly T-shirt.
“I didn’t think it would literally be that ugly,” she said, stepping through the second zip.
It was. Pep, in black cyclist’s pants, wore the largest, ugliest T-shirt she’d ever seen, in
a thin, cheap-looking cotton the color of ostomy devices, that same imaginary Caucasian
flesh-tone. There were huge features screened across it in dull black halftone,
asymmetrical eyes at breast height, a grim mouth at crotch-level. Later she’d be unable to
say exactly what had been so ugly about it, except that it was somehow beyond punk,
beyond art, and fundamentally, somehow, an affront. Diagonals at the edges continued