"You can move out if you want to," I said. I was in rare form.
So was she. She reached across the table and shook me by the shoulders. She glared at me.
"I won't take a lot more of that kind of shit," she said, and I nodded, and began to cry.
She let me do it. I think that was probably best. She could have babied me, but I do a pretty good job of that myself.
"How long has this been going on?" she finally said. "Is that why you've stayed in your house for thirty years?''
I shrugged. "I guess it's part of it. When I got back they operated, but it just made it worse."
"Okay. I'm mad at you because you didn't tell me about it, so I didn't know what to do. I want to stay, but you'll have to tell me how. Then I won't be mad anymore."
I could have blown the whole thing right there. I'm amazed I didn't. Through the years I'd developed very good methods for doing things like that. But I pulled through when I saw her face. She really did want to stay. I didn't know why, but it was enough.
"The spoon was a mistake," I said. "If there's time, and if you can do it without risking your fingers, you could jam a piece of cloth in there. Part of a sheet, or something. But nothing hard." I explored my mouth with a finger. "I think I broke a tooth."
"Serves you right," she said. I looked at her, and smiled, then we were both laughing. She came around the table and kissed me, then sat on my knee.
"The biggest danger is drowning. During the first part of the seizure, all my muscles go rigid. That doesn't last long. Then they all start contracting and relaxing at random. It's very strong."
"I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you."
"Don't do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me, and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on." I looked her square in the eye. "I want to emphasize this. Just try to do all those things. If I'm getting too violent, it's better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won't be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit."
I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.
"Sorry, Yank, I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it's totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you could-"
"-gag me with a spoon, I know. Okay, right, I know I was dumb. And that's about it. I might bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek. Don't worry about it. There is one more thing."
She waited, and I wondered how much to tell her. There wasn't a lot she could do, but if I died on her I didn't want her to feel it was her fault.
"Sometimes I have to go to the hospital. Sometimes one seizure will follow another. If that keeps up for too long, I won't breathe, and my brain will die of oxygen starvation."
"That only takes about five minutes," she said, alarmed.
"I know. It's only a problem if I start having them frequently, so we could plan for it if I do. But if I don't come out of one, start having another right on the heels of the first, or if you can't detect any breathing for three or four minutes, you'd better call an ambulance."
"Three or four minutes? You'd be dead before they got here."
"It's that or live in a hospital. I don't like hospitals."
"Neither do I."
The next day she took me for a ride in her Ferrari. I was nervous about it, wondering if she was going to do crazy things. If anything, she was too slow. People behind her kept honking. I could tell she hadn't been driving long from the exaggerated attention she put into every movement.
"A Ferrari is wasted on me, I'm afraid," she confessed at one point. "I never drive it faster than fifty-five."
We went to an interior decorator in Beverly Hills and she bought a low-watt gooseneck lamp at an outrageous price.
I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I suppose I was afraid of having another seizure, though Lisa's new lamp wasn't going to set it off.
Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.
I guess it's a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you.
There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn't even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.
"What got you interested in computers, Lisa?" I asked her.
She didn't move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.
"It's where the power is, Yank." I looked up. She had turned to face me.
"Did you pick it all up since you got to America?"
"I had a head start. I didn't tell you about my Captain, did I?"
"I don't think you did."
"He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school."
She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn't give her one.
"He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy."
Again the wait. This time she smiled.
"He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible."
"I didn't actually ask you about your Captain. I asked why you got interested in computers."
"That's right. You did."
"Is it just a living?"
"It started that way. It's the future, Victor."
"God knows I've read that enough times."
"It's true. It's already here. It's power, if you know how to use it. You've seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don't mean earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge's house didn't exist? Did you think what that means?"
"That he wiped it out of the memory banks."
"That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn't you think? I mean, this country hasn't entirely given up paper.''
"So the county really does have a record of that house."
"No. That page was torn out of the records."
"I don't get it. Kluge never left the house."
"Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the L.A.P.D. files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he'd go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn't bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn't the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn't matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air."
I thought that over for a while. I guess it's true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.
"Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?"
"I erased that disc, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy."
"You're not afraid of getting into trouble over it?"