Zero History

20. AUGMENTED
Milgrim glanced up from the square, glossy pages of Presences: Locative Art in
America, and saw that Hollis was reading too. Something clothbound, black, no jacket.
They were somewhere under the Channel now, seated in Business Premier, which had
wifi and a croissant breakfast. Or not wifi, but something cellular, requiring what she’d
called a “dongle,” and had plugged into the edge of her MacBook for him. He’d borrowed
it earlier, a weirdly thin one called an Air, and gone to Twitter, to see if Winnie had said
anything, but she hadn’t. “Going through Kent now,” he’d written, then erased it. Then
he’d tried “Hollis Henry” on Google and found her Wikipedia entry. Which had made for
an odd read, as she was seated just opposite him, across the table, though she couldn’t see
what he was looking at. Though now they were in the tunnel, there was no phone either.
She’d been described, in a retrospective piece written in 2004, as having looked, when
she performed, like “a weaponized version of Françoise Hardy.” He wasn’t sure he could
see it, exactly, and he’d also Googled Françoise Hardy to make the direct comparison.
Françoise Hardy was more conventionally pretty, he thought, and he wasn’t sure what
“weaponized” was supposed to mean, in that context. He supposed the writer had been
trying to capture something of whatever she’d projected in live performance.
Hollis didn’t look like Milgrim’s idea of a rock singer, to the extent that he had one. She
looked like someone who had a job that allowed you to wear what you wanted to the
office. Which she did have, he supposed, with Bigend.
When he was finished with her computer, she’d offered him this copy of the book
she’d written. “I’m afraid it’s mostly pictures,” she’d said, unzipping a side pocket on her
black suitcase and pulling out a glossy, shrink-wrapped slab. The cover was a color
photograph of tall nude statues of several very slender, small-breasted women, with
identical helmet-like haircuts and matching bracelets, rising out of what seemed to be a
rather small flower bed. They were made of something like solidified mercury, perfectly
mirroring everything around them. The back cover was the same image, but minus the
heroically erotic liqui-chrome statuary, which made it possible to read a sign they had
concealed: Château Marmont.
“That’s a memorial to Helmut Newton,” she’d said. “He lived there, part of the time.”
“The back is ‘before’?” Milgrim had asked.
“No,” she’d said, “that’s what you see, there, unaugmented. The front’s what you see
augmented. Construct’s tied to the GPS grid. To see it, you have to go there, use
augmented reality.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Milgrim had said, looking at the back, then the front.
“When I wrote the book, there was no commercial hardware. People were building
their own. Now it’s all iPhone apps. Lots of work, back then, trying to render the pieces