Pattern Recognition Read Online Free PDF Page A

of which this must be a part. Must be.
    Above them, somewhere, something flares, white, casting a claw of Caligarian shadow, and then the screen is black.
    She clicks on Replay. Watches it again.
    She opens the site and scrolls a full page of posts. Several pages have accumulated in the course of the day, in the wake of the surfacing of #135, but she has no appetite for them now.
    It seems beside the point.
    A wave comes crashing, sheer exhaustion, against which the Colombian is no defense.
    She takes off her clothes, brushes her teeth, limbs wooden with exhaustion and vibrating with caffeine, turns off the lights, and crawls, literally, beneath the stiff silver spread on Damien’s bed.
    To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as a final wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.

4.

MATH GRENADES
    Somehow she sleeps, or approximates it, through the famously bad hour and into another mirror-world morning.
    Waking to an inner flash of metallic migraine light, as if reflected off wings of receding dream.
    Extrudes her head turtle-wise from beneath the giant pot-holder and squints at the windows. Daylight. More of her soul has been reeled in, it seems, in the meantime. Apprehending self and mirror-world now in a different modality, accompanied by an unexpected surge of energy that has her out of bed, into the shower, and levering the Italian chromed head to stinging new foci of needle jets. Damien’s reno has involved hot water, lots of it, and for that she is grateful.
    It is as though she is inhabited now by something single-minded, purposeful, yet has no idea what it plans, or wants. But she is content, for the moment, to go along for the ride.
    Blow-dry. CPUs include the black jeans.
    Mirror-world milk (which is different, though she couldn’t say how) on the Weetabix, with a sliced banana. That other part of her, that other self, moving right along.
    Watching as that part seals over the cigarette burn with black gaffer’s tape, the ends tooth-torn, a sort of archaic punk flourish. Pulls on the Rickson’s, checks for keys and money, and descends Damien’s still-unrenovated stairwell, past a tenant’s mountain bike and hip-high bundles of last year’s magazines.
    In the sunlit street, all is still; nothing moves save the cinnamon blurof a cat, just there, and gone. She listens. The hum of London, building somewhere.
    Feeling inexplicably happy, she sets off down Parkway toward Camden High Street, and finds a Russian in a mini-cab. Not a cab at all, really, just a dusty blue mirror-world Jetta, but he will drive her to Notting Hill, and he looks too old, too scholarly, too disgusted by the very sight of her, to be much trouble.
    Once they are out of Camden Town she has little idea of where they are. She has no internalized surface map of this city, only of the underground and of assorted personal footpaths spreading out from its stations.
    The stomach-clenching roundabouts are pivots in a maze to be negotiated only by locals and cabdrivers. Restaurants and antique shops rotate past, punctuated regularly by pubs.
    Marveling at the luminous shanks of a black-haired man in a very expensive-looking dressing gown, bending toward the morning’s milk and paper in his doorway.
    A military vehicle, its silhouette unfamiliar, bulk-browed, tautly laced beneath its tarpaulin. The driver’s beret.
    Mirror-world street furniture: bits of urban infrastructure she can’t identify by function. Local equivalents of the mysterious Water Testing Station on her block uptown, which a friend had claimed to contain nothing more than a tap and a cup, for the judging of potability—this having been for Cayce a favorite fantasy of alternative employment, to stroll Manhattan like an itinerant sommelier, addressing one’s palate with the various tap waters of the city. Not that she would have wanted to, particularly, but simply to believe that someone could do this for a living had