Zero History

Bigend?
“Institutionalized,” he said to the brushed stainless interior of the Hitachi elevator as its
door closed.
He’d gone from where he’d been before, somewhere he thought of as being extremely
small, and very hard, to this wider space, to his not-quite-job running errands for Bigend,
but suddenly that seemed not so wide. This succession of rooms, in hotels he never
chose. Simple missions, involving travel. Urine tests. Always another bubble-pack.
Reminded of his medication, he calculated. He had enough for two nights away.
Whatever it was.
The door opened on the third-floor hallway.
Take your medicine. Clean your teeth. Pack for Paris.
When had he last been in Paris? It felt as though he never had. Someone else had been,
in his early twenties. That mysterious previous iteration his therapist in Basel had been so
relentlessly interested in. A younger, hypothetical self. Before things had started to go not
so well, then worse, then much worse, though by then he’d arranged to be absent much
of the time. As much of the time as possible.
“Quit staring,” he said to the dressmaker’s dummy as he stepped into his room. “I wish
I had a book.” It had been quite a while since he’d found anything to read for pleasure.
Nothing since the start of his recovery, really. There were a few expensively bound and
weirdly neutered bookazines here, rearranged daily by the housekeepers, but he knew
from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy,
wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.
He’d look for a book in Paris.
Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.