And she gave me a long unhappy stare and said, "All this bullshit—"
"It's not bullshit."
"Maybe not, but it's not doing me any good."
"I'm just trying to explain—"
"Fuck, Tyler. Did I ask for an explanation? Take your nightmares and go home. Or else settle down and tell me why you want to leave Seattle. This is about those friends of yours, isn't it?"
I had told her about Jason and Diane. "Mostly Jason."
"The so-called genius."
"Not just so-called. He's in Florida…"
"Doing something for the satellite people, you said."
"Turning Mars into a garden."
"That was in the papers, too. Is it really possible?"
"I have no idea. Jason seems to think so."
"But wouldn't it take a long time?"
"The clocks run faster," I said, "past a certain altitude."
"Uh-huh. So what's he need you for?"
Well, yeah, what? Good question. Excellent question. "They're hiring a physician for the in-house clinic at Perihelion."
"I thought you were just an ordinary GP."
"I am."
"So what makes you qualified to be an astronaut doctor?"
"Absolutely nothing. But Jason—"
"He's doing a favor for ah old buddy? Well, that figures. God bless the rich, huh? Keep it among friends."
I shrugged. Let her think so. No need to share this with Giselle, and Jase hadn't said anything specific…
But when we talked I had formed the impression that Jason wanted me not just as a house doctor but as his personal physician. Because he was having a problem. Some kind of problem he didn't want to share with the Perihelion staff. A problem he wouldn't talk about over the phone.
Giselle had run out of vodka but she rummaged in her purse and came up with a joint concealed in a box of tampons. "The pay is good, I bet." She clicked a plastic lighter and applied the flame to the twist of the joint and inhaled deeply.
"We didn't get into details."
She exhaled. "Such a geek. Maybe that's why you can stand thinking about the Spin all the time. Tyler Dupree, borderline autistic. You are, you know. All the signs. I bet this Jason Lawton is exactly the same. I bet he gets a hard-on every time he says the word 'billion.'"
"Don't underestimate him. He might actually help preserve the human race." If not any particular specimen of it.
"A geek ambition if I ever heard one. And this sister of his, the one you slept with—"
"Once."
"Once. She got religion, right?"
"Right." Got it and still had it, as far as I knew. I hadn't heard from Diane since that night in the Berkshires. Not entirely for lack of trying. A couple of e-mails had gone unanswered. Jase didn't hear much from her either, but according to Carol she was living with Simon somewhere in Utah or Arizona—some western state I'd never visited and couldn't picture—where the dissolution of the New Kingdom movement had stranded them.
"That's not hard to figure out either." Giselle passed the joint. I wasn't totally at ease with pot..But that "geek" remark had stung. I toked deeply, and the effect was exactly what it had been back in residence at Stony Brook: instant aphasia. "It must have been awful for her. The Spin happening, and all she wanted to do was forget about it, which was the last thing you or her family would let her do. I'd get religion too, in her place. I'd be singing in the fucking choir."
I said—belatedly, behind the buzz—"Is the world really so hard to look at?"
Giselle reached out and took back the joint. "From where I stand," she said, "yes. Mostly."
She turned her head, distracted. Thunder rattled the window as if it resented the dry warmth inside. Some serious weather was coming in across the Sound. "Bet it's gonna be one of those winters," she said. "The nasty kind. I wish I had a fireplace in here. Music would help. But I'm too tired to get up."
I went over to her audio rig and cued a download of a Stan Getz album, the saxophone warming the room the way no fireplace could have. She nodded at that: not what she would have picked, but yeah, good… "So he called you and offered you this job."
"Right."
"And you told him you'd take it?"
"I told him I'd think about it."
"Is that what you're doing? Thinking about it?"
She seemed to be implying something, but I didn't know what. "I guess I am."
"I guess you're not. I guess you already know what you're going to do. You know what I guess? I guess you're here to say good-bye."
I said I guessed that was possible.
"So at least come and sit next to me."
I moved to the sofa lethargically. Giselle stretched out and put her feet in my lap. She was wearing men's socks, a slightly ridiculous pair of fuzzy argyles. The cuffs of her jeans rode up her ankles. "For a guy who can look at a gunshot wound without flinching," she said, "you're pretty good at avoiding mirrors."
"What's that mean?"
"Means you're really obviously not finished with Jason and Diane. Her especially."
But it wasn't possible that Diane still mattered to me.
Maybe I wanted to prove that. Maybe mat's why we ended up stumbling together into Giselle's messy bedroom, smoking another joint, falling down on the Barbie-pink bedspread, making love under the rain-blinded windows, holding each other until we fell asleep.
But it wasn't Giselle's face that floated into my mind in the dreamy aftermath, and I woke a couple of hours later thinking: My god, she's right, I'm going to Florida.
* * * * *
In the end it took weeks to arrange, both at Jason's end and at the hospital. During that time I saw Giselle again, but only briefly. She was in the market for a used car and I sold her mine; I didn't want to risk the drive cross-country. (Road robbery on the interstates was up by double digits.) But we didn't mention the intimacy that had come and gone with the rainy weather, an act of slightly drunken kindness on someone's part, most likely hers.
Apart from Giselle there were few people in Seattle I needed to say good-bye to and not much in my apartment I needed to keep, nothing more substantial than some digital files, eminently portable, and a few hundred old discs. The day I left, Giselle helped me stack my luggage in the back of the taxi. "SeaTac," I told the driver, and she waved goodbye—not particularly sadly but at least wistfully—as the cab pulled into traffic.
Giselle was good person and she was leading a perilous life. I never saw her again, but I hope she survived the chaos that came later.
* * * * *
The flight to Orlando was a creaking old Airbus. The cabin upholstery was threadbare, the seatback video screens overdue for replacement. I took my place between a Russian businessman in the window seat and a middle-aged woman on the aisle. The Russian was sullenly indifferent to conversation but the woman wanted to talk: she was a professional medical transcriptionist bound for Tampa for a two-week visit with her daughter and son-in-law. Her name was Sarah, she said, and we talked medical shop while the aircraft lumbered toward cruising altitude.
Vast amounts of federal money had been pumped into the aerospace industry in the five years since the Chinese fireworks display. Very little of it had been devoted to commercial aviation, however, which was why these refurbished Airbuses were still flying. Instead the money had gone into the kind of projects E. D. Lawton was managing from his Washington office and Jason was designing at Perihelion in Florida: Spin investigations, including, lately, the Mars effort. The Clayton administration had shepherded all this spending through a compliant Congress pleased to appear to be doing something tangible about the Spin. It was good for public morale. Better still, no one expected immediate tangible results.