Carlos winced. Then he mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He stepped out of our way, but his nail-gun stare followed us all the way to the door.
In the car, windows open, cool night air flowing in, Rachel grew moody and quiet. She didn’t say anything until we reached the block where she lived, when she asked in a small voice, “I fucked up there, didn’t I?”
“Not sure what you mean by that.”
“Our big evening together. Rachel and Adam. What fun, huh?”
“Maybe just not my idea of a good time.”
“I should have known. Taus are potheads, not drinkers. Taus are a little bit prissy, too. So they say on the Internet. I mean—oh, fuck! Now it sounds like I’m calling you names. I’m sorry!” She leaked a tear. “I just wanted us to have fun.”
I helped her to the door of the low-rise building, helped her get the key into the lock. Helped her down the stairs, though she pulled away and insisted on unlocking the door of the basement apartment herself. The night had gotten chilly, but the air inside was overheated and stale. As soon as I had closed the door she leaned into me, pressed herself against my body, grabbed my hips. The smell of Bacardi and sour sweat swarmed off of her.
“Bet I know what you want,” she said.
Bet you don’t, I thought.
I excused myself for the purpose of using the bathroom. The parade line of brown plastic pill bottles caught my attention again. This time I was less scrupulous about inspecting them. Lithium, Depakine, Risperdol, Seroquel. Some of the prescriptions were old and expired, some were fresh.
She was slumped on the sofa when I came out. I said, “Rachel…”
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But yeah, I think that’s best.”
“Because I fucked up.”
“No. Listen—”
“Just go.”
“Rachel—”
“Do I embarrass you? Well, you embarrass me! Smug candy-ass Tau boy. Get out! I’m tired of you anyway. You know what’s better than your dick? My finger! My little finger! GO!”
* * *
Amanda was waiting in my hotel room when I got back (we shared keys). She said she wanted to see the sketches I had made. I gave them to her. She examined them approvingly. Then she asked me what happened with Rachel. And I tried to explain.
“She was showing you her world,” Amanda said. “Her apartment, her daughter, the ratty bar where she spends her weekends. Even the pill bottles she leaves out where people can see them. She probably wanted to find out whether all that would offend you or whether it would turn you on.”
“It didn’t offend me. I was just worried the wrong people would see us … Why would it turn me on?”
“Tough single mom in a working-class bar where she probably screws half the clientele? Catnip for a natural bottom like you.”
“What?”
“Look at you, you’re so tense you’re practically brittle.” She reached into her purse and fished out her pipe and the tiny, ornate wooden box in which she kept her weed. “We’ll share a little of this, then you can take your clothes off and I can fuck you silly.”
The smoke went directly to my head. I felt an unsatisfied need to explain, but the words were elusive. “It was,” I said, “I mean, I shouldn’t have let her think—”
“Oh, stop. You got the sketches, right?”
“Sure, but—”
“That’s what’s important. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”
CHAPTER 9
My research team hit a snag that week. The cranial sensors used in Affinity testing were a proprietary design, and their specifications had not been among the data Meir Klein had provided. We determined that the closest equivalent was a neural scanning sensor manufactured by a company in Guangzhou called AllMedTest. These were dime-sized devices, incredibly sophisticated, and an array of six or seven would be enough to generate the kind of imaging the test required. But they were expensive, and buying them in quantity would be a major investment.
When I approached Damian about it, he said not to worry: “We have T-Bourse money to invest, and I can’t think of a better use for it.”
“Okay, but the sensors are fairly delicate, which we have to factor into the design. And my tech guys have to know exactly how much processing power they need to build into a portable device. They’re complaining that the flow of information from the theoretical side has slowed way down.”
“They’re right,” Damian said. “The thing is, we’ve come across some anomalies in Klein’s data.”
“Anomalies?”
“Some unsettling implications.”
“Such as?”
He looked unhappy. “We’ll talk about it on the weekend. You, me, Amanda, the two team leaders, plus a security detail. I rented us a place on Pender Island. We’ll be out of harm’s way and we’ll have a couple of days to think it through. Okay?”
It sounded like trouble, and I wanted to know more. But Damian wasn’t ready to talk.
* * *
The ferry from Tsawwassen to Pender Island chugged through a rainstorm that raised whitecaps on Georgia Strait and turned what should have been a postcard view into a gray obscurity. Damian was too moody to make conversation, and Amanda was using the downtime to read through a report from her team leader. I crossed the promenade deck of the ferry and found an empty seat by a rain-slicked window, took out my phone, and returned a call that had come in that morning. The call was from my brother’s home, but it was Jenny Symanski who picked up.
I had talked to Jenny only sporadically since her marriage to Aaron six years ago, not because of any lingering awkwardness between us but because my brother had become the wall over which any communication had to pass. When I spoke to Jenny it was usually at Christmas or Easter, and it was Aaron who handed her the phone and Aaron who took it back when the conversation was finished. If Jenny carried a phone of her own, neither she nor Aaron had given me the number. “Jenny,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”
“No,” she said. “No, it’s fine.”
“Is Aaron around?”
“He’s in DC for the day. A congressional briefing or something.”
The truth was that talking to my family (my tether family) had become a duty, not a pleasure. Lately I had heard more from the house in Schuyler, since my father had entered into negotiations to sell his faltering hardware-store businesses to a national chain. “We’ll be able to retire very comfortably,” Mama Laura had told me, “though I dread what idleness will do to your father.” (Her dread wasn’t entirely hyperbolic: even a long holiday weekend could drive my father into a state of sullen, resentful boredom.)
My brother Aaron was working as an assistant to Mike Menkov, the Republican congressman from the Onenia district, and it seemed like he was making a career of it. He had learned his way around the federal labyrinth and had even drafted a couple of Menkov’s speeches. I knew this because Aaron made a point of mentioning it whenever we talked, and anything he neglected to tell me would be relayed from Schuyler by way of my father. And I always congratulated Aaron when he announced his latest triumph … even though Menkov was a pliant tool of the corporate lobbies and would endorse any noxious idea that seemed likely to boost him up the political ladder. Lately, Aaron himself had been talking about running for office.
But Aaron wasn’t home today, and Jenny had sounded a little uncomfortable telling me so. “Look,” I said, “I can get back to you if this is a bad time. Tell Aaron I returned his call, okay?”
“No, wait. Geddy’s here! That’s why I called earlier. He wants to talk to you. Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay. What’s Geddy doing in Alexandria?”
“Well, it’s a long story. You know he was playing with a band, right?”
Mama Laura had kept me posted on Geddy’s music career. Some natural talent, plus a little formal instruction and Geddy’s capacity for obsessive repetition, had made him a better-than-average reedman. A little over a year ago Geddy had joined a band called The Humbuckers, currently making a minor reputation for itself across the northeastern states. It was a precarious living—barely a living at all—but since the family had long ago concluded that Geddy was probably unemployable, it seemed like a good thing.