William Gibson signed my copy of Pattern Recognition last week.
Not the one I gave Eve Sussman, after watching her machines compile White on White, but one I think I carried through 2003, a new arrival to New York.
Wondering now, did I read it in the bare film office over on 9th ave, a room with a phone and an iBook? Or maybe at the Mayflower or the Maritime. Or somewhere earlier; it’s lost to me whether it was once a signal flare or a sigil. A map of where I was or where I’d be going.
So ten years later, I start the first pages again on the F train, becoming tangled just after the newly minted “To Max Fenton, Best Wm Gibson” in words that have waited in place. And which, once home, go right back on the shelf. Home, in the glow of a giant screen bought second-hand, Pirate Bay has a .mobi which I calibre into an EPUB which I drop onto the ajax’d Readmill home page and moments later it appears on my phone and my tablet, both.
It’s 2002 again; the winter we drowned in dancing. The spring we joined the East Village. I’d filed the logos off all my things before I turned the first page. I’d photocopied the face of a model a thousand times, her advertising eyes returned to the loving gaze of mercy. Bagels in Washington Square, spotting Harold always being Harold. Casting myself into the movie of the city.
And in this other April that is now, avoiding footage of explosions, I’m surfing a mystery a second time. Having just been in London, the station names mean something now. The soul-delay. I am thirty-two, as Cayce will always be, then. Doubling back this Friday morning, I cannot remember what she will find. I am reading over her shoulder to find once more the source of the work. The name of its author.
