physical match for Squeegee Ninja, but also because he was so well documented. Practically every waking moment of his rise from hitchhiking vagabond to epic hero had been chronicled in videos, initially by a New Zealander named Philippa Long, and subsequently, in a more blatantly propagandistic style, by Indian filmmakers who seemed to have more resources to play with. Like symphony orchestras to juice up the sound track.
To Rufus, the more low-key style of Philippa Long conveyed greater credibility, so he learned about her a little bit. She seemed to keep up with her social media feeds pretty regularly. She had moved to Los Angeles in the last few months and was working on an indie film project there. Rufus created an account under the moniker RedASDFJKL and dropped her a line just for the hell of it.
Then he clicked back over to one of the other video sites he’d been using and was a little startled to discover some truly awful cell phone footage of what appeared to be a party in a disco. Not one of your fancy high-end discos but a down-at-heels ballroom outfitted with a few strobe lights and strings of blinky lights strung over the antlers of a stuffed and mounted moose head. The music was what he had, in the last few hours, learned to identify as bhangra: tunes that could compete with the very best that the Western world had to offer in the way of high-energy danceability but that were firmly grounded in the traditions of the Punjab.
But the Internet had at least as many high-quality bhangra videos as it did ones from the Line of Actual Control, so why was this terrible piece of cell phone video at the top of his feed? Some glitch in the algorithm? Some malware on his computer? He clicked the “Why am I seeing this?” button and was earnestly informed that it featured a friend of his. Reviewing the video frame by frame, he saw no friend of his. Centered in the picture was a lovely young woman of South Asian ancestry, dressed to the nines and dancing. No friend of Rufus, sadly. He was about to shrug it off as some arcane malware phishing attack when, in the final few frames, in the background of the picture, off to the right, a big man became visible. He was dancing in a style that recalled those gatka moves that had started Rufus down this path earlier today.
He was all ready to dismiss this as a series of coincidences. Three vaguely similar men. Big Fish: an invalid being rolled around in a wheelchair. The dancing man in this video, which according to metadata had been shot in a small town in southern British Columbia about twenty-four hours before the incident in the T.R. Mick’s. And last but not least, Squeegee Ninja.
Now, though, Rufus came up with a wild surmise, which was that they were all the same person. It was all possible if you were willing to accept the hypothesis that Big Fish’s invalid status was just a cover story. In other words, maybe the algorithm had actually nailed it: seen something no human could have.
Philippa Long had responded to his earlier message with an emoji. On an impulse, Rufus direct-messaged her the video from the bhangra party and asked her whether the man in the background might be Big Fish.
Ten minutes later he was on a video call with her. He was just a grainy cloud of pixels in the darkness of the marble mine, so he carried his laptop outside as they worked their way through the inevitable opening rounds of troubleshooting the video and audio.
Based on her name, which sounded fancy to Rufus, and on her profession as globe-trotting indie filmmaker, and also on a profile photo associated with her social media presence, which showed evidence of intervention by hair and makeup professionals, he had been expecting someone more glamorous and intimidating. But she was very girl-next-door, like she’d just stepped away from milking a goat. Almost unsettlingly open and approachable, but with a cool confidence about her that kept things at arm’s length.
It was still pretty warm in the box canyon before the mine’s entrance, mostly because of stored solar heat now being dumped into the void by the stone walls. But the air itself had cooled down quite a bit and would keep doing so until he’d be obliged to put on a jacket. Thanks to Pina2bo there was still enough light in the western sky to cast warm gentle illumination over everything. Rufus set his laptop on one of two plastic tables they’d set up in the little compound of trailers and equipment. Behind him, Pippa—which was the name Philippa Long went by—would be able to see
a couple of trailers, a campfire straddled by an iron tripod, random sun-bleached lawn furniture, Bildad wandering around in a futile search for grass, and the odd falconer. No eagles were in evidence just now, but the point was that Pippa was seeing a whole different picture than just Rufus sitting alone in a dark abandoned mine. A somewhat misleading picture to be fair, since Rufus, in truth, was a dark abandoned mine kind of guy, but anyway a picture that might lead Pippa toward a cautiously favorable opinion of Rufus. As opposed to just terminating the call and blocking him. He cracked open a beer.