Pattern Recognition

The sun blinds her. Non-Moscow air, smelling of summer vegetation. Shading her eyes with her wrist, she walks forward, toward a statue lost in dazzle. Lenin, aerodynamic to the point of featurelessness, molded in white concrete, pointing the proletariat forward like some kind of giant Marxist lawn jockey.

She turns and looks back. She seems to have just walked out of an ugly sixties orange brick community college, topped with a crenellated structure of concrete resembling the crown the Statue of Liberty wears, windows between each upthrust peak.

But she's not sticking around to see any more of it. She sees a dry grassy incline, a beaten, unofficial path, and follows that, into a shallow ravine or gully, drainage of some kind, and out of the building's line of sight.

The crushed yellow grass of the path is dotted with flattened cigarette niters, bottle caps, bits of foil.

She keeps going, until she finds herself in a dusty grotto of bushes, a natural hiding place and evidently a popular one. Bottle and cans, crumpled papers, a desiccated condom slung from a twig like part of the life cycle of some large insect. A bower of love, then, as well.

She crouches, getting her breath, listening for indications of pursuit.

She hears the ordinary sound of a jet, somewhere overhead.

The path leads out the far side and loses itself in a tumble of glacier-rounded rocks, a seasonal streambed. She follows these through thicker, greener vegetation, to where the path appears again, climbing the side of the ravine.

At its top, she sees the fence.

Newer than the building, concrete white and unweathered at the foot of each galvanized pole. Ordinary chain-link, topped with wire. Though the wire, she sees, walking slowly up to it, is barbed, not razor, and two strands only.

She looks back and sees the very tips of the crenellations atop the red brick building.

She extends her finger. Takes a breath. Taps the chain-link as lightly, as quickly as she can. No shock, though she supposes Klaxons may have just been set off, high on the walls of barracks full of bored and waiting men, heavily armed.

She looks at the chain-link and at the toes of her Parco boots. Not a good match. Summers in Tennessee had taught her that nothing climbed chain-link better than cowboy boots. You just stuck the toes straight in and walked right up. The Parco boots have toes that aren't narrow enough, and only lightly cleated soles.

She sits in the dust, unties, tightens, and reties them, takes off the Rickson's and knots its sleeves as tightly around her waist as she can.

Stands, looking up.

Sun at the zenith. She hears an electric bell. Lunch?

She hooks her fingers in the chain-link and goes up, leaning back and using her body weight to help keep the soles of her boots flat against the fence. It's the hard way, but the only way in these shoes. It hurts, but then the fingers of both hands are around the two-inch crosspiece at the top, inches below the lower strand of barbed wire.

She lets go carefully, with her left hand, reaches down, unties the jacket sleeves, and whips the Rickson's up and over, draping it across the upper strand of wire.

She almost loses it, maneuvering to get one leg up and over, but then she has it, straddling the Rickson's, already feeling the tooth of one barb finding its way through layers of lovingly crafted otaku nylon and mil-spec interlining.

Getting the other leg over to this side, the outside, is harder. She makes it an exercise. Smoothness, please. Grace. There is no hurry. (There is, because her wrists are trembling.) Then she has to unhook the Rickson's. She could leave it there but she won't. She tells herself she won't because they'd see where she went over, but really she just won't.

She hears it rip, her feet slip on the chain-link, and she lands on her ass in the dust, the Rickson's in her right hand.

She gets up stiffly, looks at the jacket's shredded back, and puts it on.

SHE stops when the sun tells her she's probably three hours out from the fence.

There's been steadily less vegetation, just more of this dry, reddish soil, no sign of a road, and no water. Her supplies consist of a very nice, hand-turned toothpick from the hotel in Tokyo, and a cellophane-wrapped mint she guesses is from London.

She's starting to wonder whether this might not be Siberia, and to wish she knew more about Siberia, to allow for a more educated guess. The trouble is, it looks more like her idea of the Australian outback, but more barren. She hasn't seen a bird, or bug, or anything at all, aside from crossing a curve of faint tire tracks about an hour back, which she now thinks she probably should have followed.

She sits down in the dust, sucks on her toothpick, and tries not to think about her feet, which hurt like hell.

She's got blisters in there she's trying not to think about, and certainly doesn't want to look at. She decides she'll try tearing up whatever's inside the Rickson's, to wrap her feet with.