Zero History

her least favorite Curfew songs. She’d pretended not to notice. “In the lobby,” he’d said
to the phone.
“Have you been with Blue Ant long?” she’d asked.
“Two years now. I actually worked on your commercial. We were gutted when it fell
through. Do you know Damien?” She didn’t. “The director. Gutted, absolutely.” But then
Bigend had appeared, in his very blue suit, shoulder-draped in the bivouac-tent yardage
of the trench coat, and accompanied by Pamela Mainwaring and a nondescript but
unshaven man in a thin cotton sportscoat and wrinkled slacks, a black nylon bag slung
over his shoulder. “This is Milgrim,” Bigend had said, then “Hollis Henry” to the man,
who’d said “Hello,” but scarcely anything since.
“What kinds of animals?” she asked him now, in a still more naked bid to derail
Bigend’s narrative.
Milgrim winced. “Dogs,” he said, quickly, as though surprised in some guilty pleasure.
“You like dogs?” She was sure that Bigend had been paying whatever lowlife had been
wielding that herf gun, though he’d never come right out and tell you that, unless he had
some specific reason to.
“I met a very nice dog in Basel,” Milgrim said, “at …” A micro-expression of anxiety.
“At a friend’s.”
“Your friend’s dog?”
“Yes,” said Milgrim, nodding once, tightly, before taking a sip of his Coke. “You could
have used a spark coil generator instead,” he said to Bigend, blinking, “made from a VCR
tuner. They’re smaller.”
“Who told you that?” asked Bigend, suddenly differently focused.
“A … roommate?” Milgrim extended an index finger, to touch his stack of tiny,
elongated white china tapas dishes, as if needing to assure himself that they were there.
“He worried about things like that. Out loud. They made him angry.” He looked
apologetically at Hollis.
“I see,” said Bigend, although Hollis certainly didn’t.
Now Milgrim took a pharmacist’s folded white bubble-pack from an inside jacket
pocket, flattened it, and frowned with concentration. All of the pills, Hollis saw, were
white as well, white capsules, though of differing sizes. He carefully pushed three of them
through the foil backing, put them in his mouth, and washed them down with a swig of
Coke.
“You must be exhausted, Milgrim,” said Pamela, seated beside Hollis. “You’re on east
coast time.”
“Not too bad,” Milgrim said, putting the bubble-pack away. There was a curious lack of
definition to his features, Hollis thought, something adolescent, though she guessed he
was in his thirties. He struck her as unused to inhabiting his own face, somehow. As
amazed to find himself who he was as to find himself here in Frith Street, eating oysters
and calamari and dry shaved ham.