"Right. But she won't be back till morning."
"She sleeps here most nights." He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.
"Yeah, but not tonight. Honest. En, this could be dangerous. These people might be Ibu Ina's enemies, understand?"
But some fierce innate stubbornness had possessed him. As friendly as we had been, En still distrusted me. He trembled a moment, wide-eyed as a lemur, then darted around me and deeper into the moonlit clinic, calling, "Ina! Ina!"
I chased him, switching on lights as I went.
Trying at the same time to think coherently about this. The rude men looking for the clinic could be New Reformasi from Padang, or local cops, or they might be working for Interpol or the State Department or whatever other agency the Chaykin administration chose to swing like a hammer.
And if they were here looking for me, did that mean they had found and interrogated Jala, Ina's ex-husband? Did it mean they had already arrested Diane?
En blundered into a darkened consulting room. His forehead collided with the extended stirrups of an examination table and he fell back on his rump. When I reached him he was crying soundlessly, frightened, tears rolling down his cheeks. The welt above his left eyebrow was angry-looking but not dangerous.
I put my hands on his shoulders. "En, she's not here. Really. She's really, really not here. And I know for a fact she didn't mean for you to stay here in the dark when something bad might happen. She wouldn't do that, would she?"
"Uh," En said, conceding the point.
"So you run home, okay? You run home and stay there. I'll take care of this problem and we'll both see Ibu Ina tomorrow. Does that make sense?"
En attempted to exchange his fear for a judicial look. "I think so," he said, wincing.
I helped him to his feet.
But then there was the sound of gravel crunching under tires in front of the clinic, and we both crouched down again.
* * * * *
We hurried to the reception room, where I peered through the slatted bamboo blinds with En behind me, his small hands knotted into the fabric of my shirt.
The car idled in the moonlight. I didn't recognize the model but judging by the inky shine it looked relatively new. There was a brief flare from the interior darkness that might have been a cigarette lighter. Then a much brighter light, a high-beam spotlight sweeping out from the passenger-side window. It came through the blinds and cast rolling shadows over the hygiene posters on the opposite wall. We ducked our heads. En whimpered.
"Pak Tyler?" he said.
I closed my eyes and discovered it was hard to open them again. Behind my eyelids I saw pinwheels and starbursts. The fever again. A small chorus of interior voices repeated, The fever again, the fever again. Mocking me.
"Pak Tyler!"
This was very bad timing. (Bad timing, bad timing …) "Go to the door, En. The side door."
"Come with me!"
Good advice. I checked the window again. The spotlight had winked out. I stood and led En down the corridor and past the supply cupboards to the side door, which he had left open. The night was deceptively quiet, deceptively inviting; a span of pressed earth, a rice field; the forest, palm trees black in the moonlight and tossing their crowns softly.
The bulk of the clinic was between us and the car. "Run straight for the forest," I said.
"I know the way—"
"Stay away from the road. Hide if you have to."
"I know. Come with me!"
"I can't," I said, meaning it literally. In my present condition the idea of sprinting after a ten-year-old was absurd.
"But—" En said, and I gave him a little push and told him not to waste time.
He ran without looking back, disappearing with almost alarming speed into the shadows, silent, small, admirable. I envied him. In the ensuing quiet I heard a car door open and close.
The moon was three-quarters full, ruddier and more distant than it used to be, presenting a different face than the one I remembered from my childhood. No more Man in the Moon; and that dark ovoid scar across the lunar surface, that new but now ancient mare, was the result of a massive impact that had melted regolith from pole to equator and slowed the moon's gradual spiral away from the Earth.
Behind me, I heard the policemen (I guessed two of them) pounding at the front door, announcing themselves gruffly, rattling the lock.
I thought about running. I believed I could run—not as deftly as En, but successfully—at least as far as the rice field. And hide there, and hope for the best.
But then I thought of the luggage I had left in Ina's back room. Luggage containing not just clothing but notebooks and discs, small slivers of digital memory and incriminating vials of clear liquid.
I turned back. Inside, I latched the door behind me. I walked barefoot and alert, listening for the sound of the policemen. They might be circling the building or they might make another attempt at the front door. The fever was coming on fast, however, and I heard many things, only some of which were likely to be real sounds.
Back in Ina's hidden room the overhead light was still out. I worked by touch and moonlight. I opened one of the two hard-shell suitcases and shoved in a stack of handwritten pages; closed it, latched it, lifted it and staggered. Then I picked up the second case for starboard ballast and discovered I could barely walk.
I nearly tripped over a small plastic object which I recognized as Ina's pager. I stopped, put down the luggage, grabbed the pager and slid it into my shirt pocket. Then I drew a few deep breaths and lifted the cases again; mysteriously, they seemed to have grown even heavier. I tried to tell myself You can do this, but the words were trite and unconvincing and they echoed as if my skull had expanded to the size of a cathedral.
I heard noises from the back door, the one Ina kept closed with an exterior padlock: clinking metal and the groaning of the latch, maybe a crowbar inserted between the hasps of the lock and twisted. And pretty soon, inevitably, the lock would give way and the men from the car would come inside.
I staggered to the third door, En's door, the side door, unlatched it and eased it open in the blind hope that no one was standing outside. No one was. Both intruders (if there were only two of them) were at the back. They whispered as they worked the lock, their voices faintly audible over frog-choruses and the small sound of the wind.
I wasn't sure I could make it to the concealment of the rice field without being seen. Worse, I wasn't sure I could make it without falling down.
But then there was a loud percussive bang as the padlock parted company with the door. The starting gun, I thought. You can do this, I thought. I gathered up my luggage and staggered barefoot into the starry night.
HOSPITALITY
"Have you seen this?" Molly Seagram waved her hand at a magazine on the reception desk as I entered the Perihelion infirmary. Her expression said: Badjuju, evil omens. It was the glossy print edition of a major monthly news magazine, and Jason's picture was on the cover. Tag line: the very private personality BEHIND THE PUBLIC FACE OF THE PERIHELION PROJECT.
"Not good news, I take it?"
She shrugged. "It's not exactly flattering. Take it. Read it. We can talk about it over dinner." I had already promised her dinner. "Oh, and Mrs. Tuckman is prepped and waiting in stall three."
I had asked Molly not to refer to the consulting rooms as "stalls," but it wasn't worth arguing about. I slid the magazine into my mail tray. It was a slow, rainy April morning and Mrs. Tuckman was my only scheduled patient before lunch.
She was the wife of a staff engineer and had been to see me three times in the last month, complaining of anxiety and fatigue. The source of her problem wasn't hard to divine.
Two years had passed since the enclosure of Mars, and rumors of layoffs abounded at Perihelion. Her husband's financial situation was uncertain and her own attempts to find work had foundered. She was going through Xanax at an alarming pace and she wanted more, immediately.