Pattern Recognition

What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.

Electric twilight now, and some different flavor of hydrocarbons to greet her as she exits Shinjuku Station, wheeling her black carry-on behind her.

Cayce assumes this is not because he’s known here, but because of some attitudinal tattoo, something people can read.

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”

Bigend has a way of injecting these questions into conversations that he’s grown tired of. Caltrops thrown down on the conversational highway; you can swerve or you can hit them, blow your tires, hope you’ll keep going on the rims. He’s been doing it through dinner and their predinner drinks, and Cayce assumes he does it because he’s the boss, and perhaps because he really does bore easily. It’s like watching someone restlessly change channels, no more mercy to it than that.

Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world’s leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home.

Waking to an inner flash of metallic migraine light, as if reflected off wings of receding dream.

Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.

She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.

"It's more the way it is now than it's ever been," Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower's that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.