"Yes. That was a federal crime." He smiled. "Mine, not yours. And I trust you to be discreet about it. Be patient—it'll be all over CNN in a couple of months. Besides, I have plans for you, Ty. One of these days, Perihelion is going to vet candidates for some extremely rugged homesteading. We'll need all kinds of physicians on site. Wouldn't it be great if you could do that, if we could work together?"
I was startled. "I just graduated, Jase. I haven't interned."
"All things in time."
I said, "You don't trust Diane?"
His smile collapsed. "No, frankly. Not anymore. Not these days."
"When will she get here?"
"Before noon tomorrow."
"And what is it you don't want to tell me?"
"She's bringing her boyfriend."
"Is that a problem?"
"You'll see."
NO SINGLE THING ABIDES
I woke up knowing I wasn't ready to see her again. Woke up in E. D. Lawton's plush summerhouse in the Berkshires with the sun shining through filigreed lace blinds thinking, Enough bullshit. I was tired of it. All the self-serving bullshit of the last eight years, up to and including my affair with Candice Boone, who had seen through my own wishful lies sooner than I had. "You're a little bit fixated on these Lawton people," Candice had once said. Tell me about it.
I couldn't honestly say I was still in love with Diane. The connection between us had never been as unambiguous as that. We had both grown in and out of it, like vines weaving through a latticework fence. But at its best it had been a real connection, an emotion almost frightening in its gravity and maturity. Which was why I had been so eager to disguise it. It would have frightened her, too.
I still found myself conducting imaginary conversations with her, usually late at night, offering asides to the starless sky. I was selfish enough to miss her but sane enough to know we had never really been together. I was fully prepared to forget about her.
I just wasn't prepared to see her again.
* * * * *
Downstairs, Jason sat in the kitchen while I fixed myself breakfast. He had propped open the door. Sweet breezes swept the house. I was thinking seriously of throwing my bag into the back of the Hyundai and just driving away. "Tell me about this NK thing," I said.
"Do you read the papers at all?" Jason asked. "Do they keep med students in isolation up at Stony Brook?"
Of course I knew a little bit about NK, mostly what I'd heard on the news or picked up from lunchroom conversation. I knew NK stood for "New Kingdom." I knew it was a Spin-inspired Christian movement—at least nominally Christian, though it had been denounced by mainstream and conservative churches alike. I knew it attracted mainly the young and disaffected. A couple of guys in my freshman class had dropped out of school and into the NK lifestyle, trading shaky academic careers for a less demanding enlightenment.
"It's really just a millenarian movement," Jase said. "Too late for the millennium but right on time for the end of the world."
"A cult, in other words."
"No, not exactly. 'NK' is a catchphrase for the whole Christian Hedonist spectrum, so it's not a cult in itself, though it does include some cultlike groups. There's no single leader. No holy writ, just a bunch of fringe theologians the movement is loosely identified with—C. R. Ratel, Laura Greengage, people like that." I'd seen their books on the drugstore racks. Spin theology with question-mark titles: Have We Witnessed the Second Coming? Can We Survive the End of Time? "And not much agenda, beyond a kind of weekend communalism. But what draws crowds isn't the theology. You ever see footage of those NK rallies, the kind they call an Ekstasis?"
I had, and unlike Jase, who had never been much at home with matters of the flesh, I could understand the appeal. What I had seen was recorded video of a gathering in the Cascades, summer of last year. It had looked like a cross between a Baptist picnic and a Grateful Dead concert. A sunny meadow, wildflowers, ceremonial white robes, a guy with zero-percent body fat blowing a shofar. By nightfall a bonfire was burning briskly and a stage had been set up for musicians. Then the robes began to drop and the dancing started. And a few acts more intimate than dancing.
For all the disgust evinced by the mainstream media it had looked winsomely innocent to me. No preaching, just a few hundred pilgrims smiling into the teeth of extinction and loving their neighbors like they'd like to be loved. The footage had been burned onto hundreds of DVDs and passed from hand to hand in college dorms nationwide, including Stony Brook. There is no sexual act so Edenic that a lonely med student can't whack off to it.
"It's hard to picture Diane being attracted to NK."
"On the contrary. Diane's their target audience. She's scared to death of the Spin and everything it implies about the world. NK is an anodyne for people like her. It turns the thing they're most afraid of into an object of adoration, a door into the Kingdom of Heaven."
"How long has she been involved?"
"Most of a year now. Since she met Simon Townsend."
"Simon's NK?"
"Simon, I'm afraid, is hard-core NK."
"You met this guy?"
"She brought him to the Big House last Christmas. I think she wanted to watch the fireworks. E.D., of course, doesn't approve of Simon. In fact his hostility was pretty obvious." (Here Jason winced at the memory of what must have been one of E. D. Lawton's major tantrums.) "But Diane and Simon did the NK thing—they turned the other cheek. They practically smiled him to death. I mean that literally. He was one gentle, forgiving look away from the coronary ward."
Score one for Simon, I thought. "Is he good for her?"
"He's exactly what she wants. He's the last thing she needs."
* * * * *
They arrived that afternoon, sputtering up the driveway in a fifteen-year-old touring car that appeared to burn more oil than Mike-the-yard-guy's tractor. Diane was driving. She parked and climbed out on the far side of the car, obscured by the luggage rack, while Simon stepped into full view, smiling bashfully.
He was a good-looking guy. Six feet tall or a little over; skinny but not a weakling; a plain, slightly horsey face offset by his unruly golden-blond hair. His smile showed a cleft between his upper front teeth. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his left biceps like a tourniquet; that was an NK emblem, I learned later.
Diane circled the car and stood beside him, both of them grinning up the porch stairs at Jason and me. She was also decked out in high NK fashion: a cornflower-blue floor-sweeper skirt, blue blouse, and a ridiculous black wide-brimmed hat like the kind Amish men wear. But the clothes suited her, or rather they framed her in a pleasing way, suggested rude health and hayseed sensuality. Her face was as alive as an unplucked berry. She shaded her eyes in the sunlight and grinned—at me in particular, I wanted to believe. My god, that smile. Somehow both genuine and mischievous.
I began to feel lost.
Jason's phone trilled. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.
"Gotta take this one," he whispered.
"Don't leave me alone here, Jase."
"I'll be in the kitchen. Right back."
He ducked away just as Simon lofted his big duffel bag onto the wooden planking of the porch and said, "You must be Tyler Dupree!"
He stuck out his hand. I took it. He had a firm grip and a honeyed Southern accent, vowels like polished driftwood, consonants polite as calling cards. He made my name sound positively Cajun, though the family had never been south of Millinocket. Diane bounded up after him, yelled, "Tyler!" and grabbed me in a ferocious embrace. Suddenly her hair was in my face and all I could register was the sunny, salty smell of her.
We backed off to a comfortable arm's length. "Tyler, Tyler," she exclaimed, as if I had turned into something remarkable. "You're looking good after all these years."