Greta opened her new, executive-style purse and touched a tissue to her nose. “You know, the air is very nice in here.”
Bambakias returned in gray silk trousers and undershirt, shad-owed by a silent young woman, her arms laden with shoes, shirt, and suspenders. “Where’s my hat?” he demanded querulously. “Where’s my cape?”
“These are very interesting chairs,” Greta told him. “Tell me about these chairs.”
“Oh, these chairs of mine never caught on,” Bambakias said, jamming one scrawny arm through the ruffled sleeve of his dress shirt. “For some reason, people just don’t trust computation enough to sit on it.”
“I trust computation,” Greta assured him, and sat. The internal spokes and cables adjusted beneath her weight, with a rapid crescendo of tiny guitar-string shrieks. She settled daintily in midair, a queen on a tensile throne of smart chopsticks and spiderweb. Oscar admired responsive tensegrity structures as much as the next man, but he sat in the second chair with considerably less brio.
“An architect gets the credit for design successes,” Bambakias told her. “The failures you can cover with ivy. But weird decor schemes that just don’t work out — well, those you have to keep inside the office.”
A silent group of krewepeople removed the massage table and replaced it with a folding hospital bed. The Senator sat on the bed’s edge, pulling up his gaunt bare feet like a giant seabird.
“I noticed another set of these armchairs on the way in,” Greta said. “But they were solid.”
“Not ‘solid.’ Rigid. Spray-on veneer.”
“ ‘Less is more,’ ” Greta said.
A spark of interest lit the Senator’s sagging face as his dresser saw to his shoes and socks. “What did you say your name was?”
“Greta,” she told him gently.
“And you’re, what, you’re a psychiatrist?”
“That’s close. I’m a neuroscientist.”
“That’s right. You already told me that, didn’t you.”
Greta turned and gave Oscar a look full of grave comprehension and pity: Since her makeover, Greta’s expressions had a new and shocking clarity — her flickering glance struck Oscar to the heart and lodged like a harpoon.
Oscar leaned forward on his thrumming piano-wire seat, and knotted his hands. “Alcott, Lorena tells me you’re a little upset by developments.”
“ ‘Upset’?” Bambakias said, lifting his chin as the dresser tucked in his ascot. “I wouldn’t say ‘upset.’ I would say ‘realistic.’ ”
“Well… realism is a matter of opinion.”
“I’ve triggered a state and federal crisis. Four hundred and twelve million dollars’ worth of military hardware has been looted by anar-chist bandits and has vanished into the swamps. It’s the worst event of its kind since Fort Sumter in 1861; what’s there to be upset about?”
“But, Al, that was never your intention. You can’t be blamed for those developments.”
“But I was there,” Bambakias insisted. “I was with those people. Yeah… I talked to all of them, I gave them my word of honor… I have the tapes to prove it! Let’s run through all the evidence just one more time. We should see this together. Where’s my sysadmin? Where’s Edgar?”
“Edgar’s in Washington,” the dresser told him quietly.
The Senator’s hollow face tightened drastically. “Do I have to do everything myself?”
“I followed the siege situation,” Oscar said. “I’m very up to speed on developments.”
“But I was there!” Bambakias insisted. “I could have helped. I could have built barricades. I could have brought in generators… But when that gas hit them, they lost their minds. That’s when it all really hit me. This wasn’t a game at all. It was no game. We weren’t players. We’d all gone mad.”
There was an evil silence.
“He spent a lot of time on the net with those Air Force people,” the dresser told them meekly. “He really was almost there with them. Practically.” Suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ll find his hat,” she said, and left with her head hung low.
A lunch trolley arrived, set for two. The chowder was served. Oscar moved his featherweight responsive chair and flicked a linen napkin ostentatiously. “This is not a defeat, Al. It’s just a skir-mish. There’s still plenty of space on the old go board. A Senate term lasts six years.”
“A lot of good that does them. They’re in camps now! Can you believe that our government is that cynical? They’ve left our soldiers in the hands of the man who gassed them!” Bambakias waved a hand at the flickering screen behind him… “I’ve been watching him spin this. Huey. As if he’d rescued them. The son of a bitch is their public savior!”
“Well, it was a very ugly incident, but at least there were no fatalities. We can put that behind us now. Tomorrow’s another day.” Oscar lifted his gleaming soup spoon and creamed off a layer of chow-der. He sipped it pretentiously. It was, as always, superb.
“Hold on,” he told Greta, who had made no move to eat. “This isn’t right.” He sat up. “What’s with your chef, Alcott? Canned chowder?”
Bambakias scowled. “What?”
“This is not your special chowder.”
“Of course it is. Has to be.”
“Try it,” Oscar insisted.
Greta nodded permission, unneeded since the Senator had lunged from his bed and grabbed at her spoon. He sampled the bowl.
“Kind of a coppery undertaste,” Oscar alleged, squinting.
Bambakias had two more spoonfuls. “Nonsense,” he growled. “It’s delicious.”
The two of them ate rapidly, in rabid silence. “I’ll find another chair,” Greta murmured. She rose and left the room.
Bambakias settled into Greta’s vacated chair and crunched half a handful of oyster crackers. His dresser arrived again, and set the Sena-tor’s hat and cape nearby. Bambakias ignored her, bending over his bowl with a painful effort. His hands were badly palsied; he could barely grip his spoon.
“I could sure do with a milk shake right now,” Oscar mused. “You know, like we used to have on the campaign.”
“Good idea,” Bambakias said absently. He lifted his chin, ges-tured with two fingertips, and spoke into apparently empty air. “Vince; two campaign power milk shakes.”
“Did Sosik show you the latest polls, Al? You’ve done a lot better by this episode than you seem to think.”
“No, that’s where you are both totally wrong. I’ve ruined every-thing. I provoked a major crisis before I was even sworn into office. And now that I’m a stinking criminal just like the rest of them, I’ll have no choice — from now on I’ll have to play the game just the way they like it. And the Senate is a sucker’s game.”
“Why do you say that?” Oscar said.
Bambakias swallowed painfully and raised one bony finger.
“There are sixteen political parties in this country. You can’t govern with a political culture that fragmented. And the parties are just the graphic interface for the real chaos underneath. Our education system has collapsed. Our health system is so bad that we have organ-sharing cliques. We’re in a State of Emergency.”
“You’re not telling me anything new here,” Oscar chided. He leaned over and stared enviously into Barnbakias’s chowder. “Are you going to finish that?”
Bambakias hunched over his bowl with a wolfish glare.
“Okay, no problem.” Oscar raised his voice to address the hid-den microphones. “Vincent, hurry up with those shakes! Bring us more chowder. Bring dinner rolls.”
“I don’t want any damn dinner rolls,” Bambakias muttered. His eyes were watering and his face was flushed. “Our wealth disparities are insane,” he mumbled into his soup. “We have a closed currency and a shattered economy. We have major weather disasters. Toxic pol-lution. Plunging birth rates. Soaring death rates. It’s bad. It’s really bad. It’s totally hopeless, it’s all over.”