Zero History

interesting, required volunteers, the bulk of them young men. Who might otherwise be,
for instance, skateboarding, or at least wearing clothing suggestive of skateboarding. And
male streetwear generally, over the past fifty years or so, she said, had been more heavily
influenced by the design of military clothing than by anything else. The bulk of the
underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the
previous midcentury’s military wear, most of it American. The rest of it was work wear,
most of that American as well, whose manufacture had coevolved with the manufacture
of military clothing, sharing elements of the same design code, and team sportswear.
But now, according to the French girl, that had reversed itself. The military needed
clothing that would appeal to those it needed to recruit. Every American service branch,
she said, illustrating each with a PowerPoint slide, had its own distinctive pattern of
camouflage. The Marine Corps, she said, had made quite a point of patenting theirs (up
close, Milgrim had found it too jazzy).
There was a law in America that prohibited the manufacture of American military
clothing abroad.
And that was where Bigend, Milgrim knew, hoped to come in. Things that were
manufactured in America didn’t necessarily have to be designed there. Outerwear and
sporting-goods manufacturers, along with a few specialist uniform manufacturers,
competed for contracts to manufacture clothing for the U.S. military, but that clothing had
previously been designed by the U.S. military. Who now, the French girl had said,
somewhat breathlessly, as though she were closing in on a small animal in some forest
clearing, clearly lacked the newly requisite design skills to do that. Having invented so
much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcentury, they found themselves
competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear. They needed help,
the French girl had said, her mouse clicks summoning a closing flurry of images, and
they knew it.
He sipped his latte, looking out, watching people pass, wondering if he could see the
French girl’s thesis proven in the garments of this morning’s pedestrians. If you thought
of it as a kind of pervasive subtext, he decided, you could.
“Excuse me. Would you mind if I shared the table?”
Milgrim looked up at this smiling American, ethnically Chinese, in her black sweatshirt,
a small plain gold cross, gold-chained, worn atop it, one white plastic barrette visible, as
some unsleeping module of addict street-alertness, hardwired to his very core, crisply
announced: cop.
He blinked. “Of course. You’re welcome.” Feeling muscles in his thighs bunching,
tight, readying themselves for the dash out the door. Malfunction, he told the module.
Post-acute withdrawal syndrome. Flashback: His limbic brain was grooved for this, like
the tracks of the wheels of Conestoga wagons, worn ankle-deep in sandstone.
She put her sacklike white pleather purse on the table, her plastic-lidded pale blue Caffè
Nero cup beside it, pulled out the chair opposite him, and sat. Smiled.