Zero History

wrong on a computer screen, but then Milgrim realized that that was the suit he was
wearing, in a weirdly electric cobalt blue.
“If you don’t mind,” Pamela said, taking the red cardboard tube and handing it on to
Milgrim’s favorite in Bigend’s clothing design team, a French girl, today in a plaid kilt
and cashmere pullover. “And the photographs?”
“In my bag,” Milgrim said.
While his bag was placed on the table and opened, motorized shades tracked silently
shut across the window behind Bigend. Overhead, fixtures came on, illuminating the
table, where Milgrim’s tracings were being carefully unfurled. He’d remembered to leave
his camera atop his clothes, and now it was being passed from hand to hand, up the table.
“Your medication,” said Pamela, handing him a fresh bubble-pack.
“Now, then,” said Bigend, rising, “be seated.”
Milgrim took the chair to the right of Pamela’s. They were extremely fine workstation
chairs, either Swiss or Italian, and he had to restrain himself from fiddling with the
various knobs and levers projecting from beneath the seat.
“I see the Bundeswehr NATO pattern,” someone said. “The legs are pure 501.”
“But not the box,” said the girl in kilt and cashmere. The box, he had learned, was
everything, in a pair of jeans, above the top of the leg. “The two small pleats are absent,
the rise lower.”
“The photographs,” said Bigend, from behind her chair. A plasma screen, above the
window he’d been sitting in front of, flared turquoise, around coppery coyote brown, the
Formica counter in Edge City Family Restaurant making itself known in this darkened
room in central London.
“Knee pads,” said a young man, American. “Absent. No pockets for them.”
“We hear they have a new pad-retention system,” said the French girl, with a surgeon’s
seriousness. “But I don’t see that here.”
They watched, then, silently, while Milgrim’s photographs cycled.
“How tactical are they?” asked Bigend as the first photograph reappeared. “Are we
looking at a prototype for a Department of Defense contract?”
A silence. Then: “Streetwear.” The French girl, much more confident than the others.
“If these are for the military, it isn’t the American military.”
“He said they needed gussets,” said Milgrim.
“What?” asked Bigend, softly.
“He said they were too tight in the thighs. For rappelling.”
“Really,” said Bigend. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
Milgrim allowed himself a first careful sip of his coffee.