Zero History Read Online Free PDF Page A

him tired, or jet-lagged. He seemed to exist in his own personal time zone.
    He finished before she did, wiping the white plate clean with a final half-triangle of golden Cabinet toast.
    “Brand vision transmission,” he said.
    “Yes?” She raised an eyebrow.
    “Narrative. Consumers don’t buy products, so much as narratives.”
    “That’s old,” she said. “It must be, because I’ve heard it before.” She took a sip of cooled coffee.
    “To some extent, an idea like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Designers are taught to invent characters, with narratives, who they then design products for, or around. Standard procedure. There are similar procedures in branding generally, in the invention of new products, new companies, of all kinds.”
    “So it works?”
    “Oh, it works,” he said, “but because it does, it’s become de facto. Once you have a way in which things are done, the edge migrates. Goes elsewhere.”
    “Where?”
    “That’s where you come in,” he said.
    “I do not.”
    He smiled. He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.
    “You have bacon in your teeth,” she said, though he didn’t.
    Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard. Lowering it, he grimaced widely.
    She pretended to peer. “I
think
you got it,” she said, doubtfully. “And I’m not interested in your proposition.”
    “You’re a bohemian,” he said, folding the napkin and putting it on the tray, beside his plate.
    “What does that mean?”
    “You’ve scarcely ever held a salaried position. You’re freelance. Have always been freelance. You’ve accumulated no real property.”
    “Not entirely through want of trying.”
    “No,” he said, “but when you do try, your heart’s scarcely in it. I’m a bohemian myself.”
    “Hubertus, you’re easily the richest person I’ve ever met.” This was, she knew as she said it, not literally true, but anyone she’d met who might have been wealthier than Bigend had tended to be comparatively dull. He was easily the most problematic rich person she’d yet encountered.
    “It’s a by-product,” he said, carefully. “And one of the things it’s a by-product
of
is my fundamental disinterest in wealth.”
    And, really, she knew that she believed him, at least about that. It was true, and it did things to his capacity for risk-taking. It was what made him, she knew from experience, so peculiarly dangerous to be around.
    “My mother was a bohemian,” he said.
    “Phaedra,” she remembered, somehow.
    “I made her old age as comfortable as possible. That isn’t always the case, with bohemians.”
    “That was good of you.”
    “Reg is quite the model of the successful bohemian, isn’t he?”
    “I suppose he is.”
    “He’s always working on something, Reg. Always. Always something new.” He looked at her, across the heavy silver pots. “Are you?”
    And he had her, then, she knew. Looking somehow straight into her. “No,” she said, there being nothing else really to say.
    “You should be,” he said. “The secret, of course, is that it doesn’t really matter what it is. Whatever you do, because you are an artist, will bring you to the next thing of your own. That’s what happened the last time, isn’t it? You wrote your book.”
    “But you were lying to me,” she said. “You pretended you had a magazine, and that I was writing for it.”
    “I did, potentially, have a magazine. I had staff.”
    “One person!”
    “Two,” he said, “counting you.”
    “I can’t work that way,” she told him. “I won’t.”
    “It won’t be that way. This is entirely less … speculative.”
    “Wasn’t the NSA or someone tapping your phone, reading your e-mail?”
    “But now we know that they were doing that to everyone.” He loosened his pale golden tie. “We didn’t, then.”
    “You did,” she said. “You’d guessed. Or found out.”
    “Someone,” he said, “is developing what may