Designated Targets

He slipped an arm around her slim waist as they passed into the cold night air, drawing more looks—some offended, some envious. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, telling you I’d be here before I knew I had the leave. And then you were out of reach anyway. So I figured, what the hell? It’s no fun arriving in town when there’s nobody to meet you.”

“Man, you can say that again. This city still freaks me out. I keep expecting to turn around and see my friends on every corner, but, you know . . .”

She trailed off, the weariness and jet lag—or prop lag, she corrected herself—catching up again.

“I know,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

Then they went home and fucked for three hours without a break.

“This place looks amazing, Jules!”

“It is cool, isn’t it?”

Yes, it was. Dan had never seen anything like it. Not that he’d ever thought much about design and architecture before he met Julia. Even so, he’d never imagined that an apartment could look this way. His idea of how rich folk lived was informed entirely by Hollywood. Their homes were larger; the furniture was plush. But an armchair was an armchair, whether it was a hand-me-down from the welfare, or a big leather chesterfield in the Vanderbilt drawing room.

The stuff in Julia’s apartment, however . . . even the way the rooms were laid out . . . it was . . . Well, words failed him.

He hadn’t noticed it at first, when they’d spilled in through the door, hands all over each other, clothing already half-undone. They’d made love standing up, half-undressed, right inside the entry hall; then she’d hauled him straight into a bedroom and onto the mattress, which he hadn’t left for a long time.

Jules had disappeared to get a bottle of champagne at one point, but otherwise neither of them had ventured out of the room until much later in the evening.

After the third time, when it was going to take him a little while to recover, he’d begun to notice the bedroom in the light of the candles she’d lit.

The bed looked Japanese, like a futon, they called it, if he remembered right. It had no headboard to speak of. A big rectangle of padded leather seemed to be fixed to the wall behind the pillows.

And the wall itself was inset at random places with boxes or something, in which Julia had set up books or little pieces of art. He noticed that some of them were faintly backlit, adding a soft glow to the light of candles that were burning on tiny white shelves that protruded from the other walls just as randomly as the insets. There was no other furniture to speak of, just two fuzzy cubes, covered in what looked like polar bear pelt. He wondered where she kept her clothes.

“They did a great job, don’t you think?” she said as they stood in the living room—or what he assumed was the living room—just before midnight.

“Where’d all the space come from?” he asked. “I’ve never seen such a big parlor before.”

Julia smiled at him with that almost-pitying look she got sometimes. He suspected it was because he’d used the word parlor.

“Well, this used to be a three-bedroom apartment,” she explained. “But I had them knock out a bunch of walls, and now it’s one bedroom with a massive open living area which flows from the kitchen down there, through the dining and entertainment space, into my chill-out zone, here.”

Dan sort of understood what she meant, but only because they were standing in the “chill-out zone,” a strange, sunken, carpeted half-moon heaped with piles of weird Arabian-looking cushions. It seemed like the sort of place Fatty Arbuckle could get himself into a lot of trouble.

A data slate hung on the wall like a picture, and he guessed the area would serve as a sort of mini movie theater. Thirty or more data sticks sat in tiny slots, on top of another small white ledge that grew straight out of the wall by the slate.

“I thought nobody was allowed to own that sort of technology without a government permit,” said Dan.

“Settle down, Eliot Ness,” she said. “That’s my personal slate. Only government-issue property is covered by the legislation. We were deploying for three months, so I brought quite a few personal items with me.”

She moved through the sunken lounge to pluck a data stick off the tiny shelf.

“Twenty-five years of The Simpsons,” she said, clearly thrilled with whatever that meant. “Every episode of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives. Before I left the Clinton, I downloaded terabytes of shit from the library. I’ve got movies, TV, music, games, books, magazines, the whole nine yards. I’m telling you, Dan, I can live here now. It’s just like my place at home. I even had the library run me up a couple of print-on-demand books for the shelf, some old favorites, just so I can see them when I come through the door. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

Those must have been the books he saw in her bedroom earlier. He noticed others now, tucked in recesses spotted around the massive room.