“Sir, is there anywhere in particular you want to go?”
“No, just keep flying.”
I’m in the XXT7, a top-secret, experimental hyperspeed jet fighter that does about Mach 8. I just had to get away from it all, get up in the azure void of high-altitude airspace for a while, try to get some perspective.
“Well, sir, how about this: I’ll swing west across the Indonesian archipelago, cut northwest across the Bay of Bengal, take her due west over India, Pakistan, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, north over Syria and Turkey, the Black Sea, we’ll follow the Dnieper River from Kiev to Moscow, cut over toward St. Petersburg, cross the Baltic, Sweden, Norway, then swing sharply to the east, transverse the Arctic Ocean, follow the Bering Straits east, cross the Bering Sea, and head south over the Pacific past the eastern coast of Japan toward the Philippines and I can have you back in Malaysia by suppertime.”
I don’t even really hear what the pilot’s saying, so I just nod. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, that’s great.”
Y’know, when I was a teenager, I was told that I’d spend my entire life in and out of institutions, pathologically maladapted, living on society’s fringes … well, it didn’t turn out quite that way, folks. I’m only 36 years old; I’ve achieved international notoriety as a best-selling author, body builder, martial artist; I make more in a year from product endorsements than most people make in a lifetime; I’ve got a multimillion-dollar headquarters with a guard tower, gatehouses, patrol dogs, armed sentries, a vast warren of underground tunnels; I’ve got a gorgeous wife and an entourage of gofers and sycophants … So what’s the problem, right? The problem is that when you reach a level of achievement that few people have ever reached, when you routinely do things that no one else is even capable of imagining never mind attempting, when you are destined for greatness and possess the fortitude and inner focus to fulfill that destiny … you have no real friends, no real family. People look at you with awe, with fear, with lust, with suspicion, with envy … but not with affection. This is just a fact of life for me. It’s just the way it is. So is it paranoia or my fierce instinct for survival that makes me suspect an agent provocateur in our midst? How did Iron Man Wang’s hit squad of horny robo-trash find me so easily that day on the interstate outside of Wenton’s Mill? Why did Rocco Trezza suddenly disappear? Is it pure coincidence that the same DNA-fingerprinting laboratory retained by the attorney for both members of the Ecuadorian Olympic Equestrian Team is also analyzing my armpit hair for Sotheby’s? How did the FBI connect me to the Lincoln’s morning breath heist? Here’s an even better question: Why does the possibility that there’s a traitor in my inner circle excite me so much?
There was a full moon. We took our clothes off and carefully folded them over the branches of a tree that jutted obliquely from the sand dune. We waded out into the sea and started to swim toward Kana Island, where the abandoned insane asylum rose in the white moonlight. She swam effortlessly, smiling, humming jingles.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I said, adjusting the speedometer on my diving watch to see how many knots I could do on my back.
“My name is Patty Amato,” she replied.
“What hotel are you staying at?”
“The Hilton at Sugar Plantation. How about you?”
“I’m at the Green Isle … it’s sort of out-of-town. It’s full of rats, but it’s cheap.”
“The Hilton’s beautiful — really service oriented.”
With that, she arched her back and submerged, curving 180 degrees to the sea floor and then 180 degrees back to the surface at my side.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked, handing me a small cylindrical object that she’d plucked from the bottom.
I studied it for a moment. “It’s called ‘awakura.’ It’s the felt-tipped reproductive organ of a certain bioluminescent crustacean. Do you like sushi?”
“Yeah … why?”
“Well, you can eat that. It’s considered quite a delicacy in Japan. And it’s very expensive. In fact, in Tokyo, the difference between sushi regular and sushi deluxe is usually that the sushi deluxe includes awakura and the sushi regular doesn’t.”
“What about this thing at the end here? Do they eat that?”
“That’s felt. You just spit that out.”
She ate it and spit the end back into the sea.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I said, winking, “it’s a powerful aphrodisiac.”
She looked at me with raised eyebrows and I started to laugh.
“That whole thing was bullshit, wasn’t it … there’s no such thing as awakura. Right?”
I couldn’t stop laughing.
She put me in a hammerlock and held my head underwater.
“Right?” she repeated.
Bubbles of laughter clustered at the surface.
She let me go.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “Friends? C’mon … friends for life?”
She was laughing now herself.
“You’re a fucking dickhead, y’know that? What did I just eat anyway?”
“Can’t say, Patricia … hey, look, we’re almost at the island.”
“Yeah, just a little more. Do you have those pay movies in your room?”
“We don’t even have television sets. I’m telling you, the Green Isle is no-frills.”
“Well, last night there was a really cool movie — it was called Miracle Worker 2200. It’s like a remake of The Miracle Worker, but it takes place in the year 2200 and Anne Sullivan implants all these electronic microprosthetic devices into Helen Keller, like this infrared sensor to pick up hot spots — y’know, heat sources — and this voice synthesizer so that she can sound like anything she wants to — y’know, like a flute or an electric piano or an Australian dingo or anything. Y’know, it’s so amazing when you think about what science can do.”
We had reached the shore … Kana Island. Before it was condemned by the government, its medieval insane asylum was considered a true house of horrors. There were persistent reports of torture, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and bizarre medical experimentation. As we emerged from the water, we observed each other’s nakedness in the moonlight and we embraced.
“Do you get collagen injections or are those your real lips?” I asked her.
“Are you serious?”
For the first time that night, I had the feeling that she thought there was something wrong with me.
We walked up the road to the asylum and entered through its huge gates of rusted iron.
As soon as we got into the building, we could hear the rats, thousands of them, their scampering claws reverberating through the empty wards.
“Let’s go right to the warden’s quarters — they’re on the top floor. Can you walk up twenty flights? Can you walk up twenty flights in an insane asylum … naked?” I asked.
She gave me that look again.