Designated Targets

The long, rectangular “space,” as she referred to it, seemed to get harder and colder as it receded toward the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. That space was arranged around a long central bench that appeared to have been fashioned out of railway sleepers and stainless steel. He couldn’t be sure until he got down there, but it looked as if she’d had all her carpet and linoleum removed and left bare wooden boards and concrete in their place.

“It’s polished concrete,” she said enthusiastically when he asked. “Fucking cool, isn’t it? And it’s well within the very limited abilities of your local builders, thank God.”

“It’s, uh . . . I’ve never . . .”

“I know. You’ve never seen anything like it. You wouldn’t have. I had a hell of a time finding a designer who could understand what I wanted,” she said, beginning to pace around and whip herself into a frenzy. It made Dan wonder if she’d found a new supply of combat drugs. She spoke faster and faster, but with an enthusiasm he’d never seen her display for anything before.

It was actually kind of cute. She was like a teenager, for a change.

“I had a couple of copies of Monument and Wallpaper,” she said, picking up a magazine from what was probably a coffee table and passing it to him. “I bought them at the airport in Bangkok, back in my time, before I flew down to Darwin to join the Clinton. And that was all I had to work with. But I read about this totally outrageous gay guy in The New Yorker, you know, your New Yorker, and this graphic designer—he was just about to pack his bags and head out your way, to the Zone—but I grabbed him before I flew out last time, showed him the magazines and he, like, totally got it. He agreed to manage the renovation. We were using these Italian builders who got run out of Florence by the fascists. And anyway, I’m stoked. It’s just like being home.”

She threw her arms around him, and Dan could tell she was as happy as he’d ever known her to be. She was almost jumping with pleasure.

“It’s a great-looking pad, Jules—Is that the right word?”

“If this was nineteen sixty-two, and I was Gidget, then yeah. But go on, keep telling me how great it is.”

Dan made a show of flicking through the Wallpaper magazine, which wasn’t about wallpaper at all, as far as he could tell. He could see where the designer had picked up some ideas and recreated them in Julia’s apartment.

“That’s like what you’ve got, right?” he said, pointing out a review of a restaurant, which seemed to have only one table, a long bench, like in a mess hall.

“Close enough,” she said, squeezing him again. “Do you like it?”

“I think so,” he said. “It looks, I dunno, like a house at the World’s Fair. The view looks good.”

“It’s got a great fucking view!” she cried, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to the window. They were at least nine floors up in a corner apartment, and when he looked out, ribbons of light and moving traffic stretched away beneath them. He hadn’t been paying attention in the limo, but the building had to be somewhere on the extreme eastern side of Manhattan, overlooking the river, which cut through the scenery outside like a black ribbon of negative space. He’d been to New York a couple of times before and was pretty sure he could see Brooklyn and Queens and Long Island. From the corner window, a wide sliver of Manhattan proper was visible, including a small dark wedge of Central Park, then the West Side and what he guessed was the Hudson River.

“This must have cost a mint, baby,” Dan said, and he regretted it instantly. Had he broken some weird twenty-first-century taboo, implying that she couldn’t afford to pay for her own home?

But Julia was surprisingly matter-of-fact in her answer. “Well, I sold some of my stuff. You know, silly little things like an old calculator, and a digital translator, and this ancient fucking iPod that’d been in my backpack for a decade. And I got a fucking packet for them.”

As she explained how she’d cashed in, Julia grew increasingly animated again, leaving Dan confused. He’d always thought of her as an adventurer, someone for whom ties and commitments were nothing more than dead weight.