“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.
But life on the road had not agreed with Geddy. He had left The Humbuckers after a gig in Syracuse and bought a bus ticket to Alexandria. Two days ago he had shown up on Aaron’s doorstep with an unhappy expression and a duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Shockingly, he had pawned his Mauriat tenor sax, an instrument he had scrimped to buy and which he had insisted on holding in every recent photograph of him I had seen. Asked why he left the band and sold his sax, Geddy would only say, “It didn’t make me happy anymore.”
Jenny texted me this information later; here on the Pender Island ferry, all I knew was that Geddy had expressed a completely uncharacteristic desire to talk on the phone. So I waited while Jenny gave him the handset. “Hello?” he said. It was Geddy in two syllables. Timid but somehow courageous, as if he had forced out the word on a cloud of pure bravado.
“Good to hear your voice,” I said.
“Where are you? It sounds loud.”
“I’m on a ferry in Georgia Strait. That’s the engines you hear.”
“You’re on a boat?”
“Yeah, a boat.”
“Do you still live in Toronto?”
“I do, but I’ll be out west for a few weeks more.”
“Okay.” He was silent a few moments more, and I had learned to respect Geddy’s silences. Eventually he said, “I wish I could visit you.”
“That’s not possible right now, but maybe in a few months. What are you doing at Aaron and Jenny’s place?”
“They agreed to let me stay a while. I don’t really have anywhere to go. I didn’t want to go back to Schuyler.”
He didn’t want to go back to Schuyler because my father would have humiliated him for his failure. Neither of us needed to say this aloud. “Are you okay there?”
“Aaron says I can’t stay forever.” Now he just sounded tired. “I don’t know what to do, Adam.”
“The band didn’t work out, huh?”
“There was a girl. I really liked her. She needed money. So I had to sell my saxophone. She took the money, but…”
“I understand.”
“People are pretty fucking mean sometimes.”
His brief career in the music business had made Geddy more casual about what he would once have called “swear words.” Worse than that was the bitterness in his voice. It was entirely self-directed. Geddy would never despise the woman who had taken his money. Instead, he would despise himself for his own gullibility. And learn nothing from the experience. I suspected Geddy would go on trading luck for love for as long as it took him to give up on love. “If you need a little money to get you through, Geddy, no problem. I can send it care of Aaron and Jenny.”
“No,” he said quickly. “Thanks, Adam. No, I just wanted to hear your voice. It was always…” I imagined him blushing. “You were always pretty good to me.”
Which for some reason made me feel even worse. “Okay, but listen. We’ll get together, I promise. Soon as I clear up some business out here. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good.”
“In the meantime, let Aaron and Jenny pamper you for a while.”
“I can’t really do that. I mean, they’ll let me stay for a few weeks. But I don’t think Aaron is really happy having me here. It’s kind of…” He lowered his voice. “I don’t like this house. It’s big and it’s pretty, but I would hate to live here.” He added, a barely audible whisper, “Jenny has a black eye.”
“A what? What did you say? A black eye?”
“Yes.”
“What, like somebody punched her?”
A maddening pause. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Geddy, what do you mean?”
“Here she is. Here she is!”
“Geddy?”
Jenny came on. “We should keep this short. Aaron will be home any minute.”
“Are you all right?”
“What? Yes, of course I am. Why? What did Geddy say?”
“Nothing.” Or too much. “But he seems a little forlorn.”
“Look … I’ll text you about it, okay?”
“Of course.”
“Great. Well. Thank you for calling back, Adam. That was nice. I know you’re busy.”
“Never too busy to talk to my sister-in-law.”
“Great,” she said. “Good-bye.”
Damian had rented what the owner (a local Tau) called a “chalet” on a rural lot near the ocean on Pender Island. In reality it was a four-bedroom log-walled home with double-glazed windows and a kitchen big enough to feed and accommodate a dozen people.
We were slightly less than a dozen: me, Amanda, Damian, a tech guy from each of our two research teams, plus Gordo MacDonald and four of his security people. Gordo immediately scoped out the house and its surrounding territory and posted his subordinates where they could cover all approaches. “We’ll be inconspicuous,” he said. “We’ll feed ourselves and sleep in shifts. You probably won’t notice us. But if you do need us, all you have to do is holler.”
Which was reassuring, though it was unlikely that anyone had followed us here. The house felt safe. Even better, with the rain falling and the daylight beginning to fade and a fire crackling in the hearth, it felt cozy.
The feeling lasted until Damian told us what he had deduced from Meir Klein’s data.
It was obvious we hadn’t come here for a standard meeting, but Damian wanted to start with a progress report, so that’s what we gave him. My team leader and I summarized the problems we’d run into trying to design a portable Affinity-testing system. With suitable sensors, virtually any handheld digital device could record the results and run the algorithms. But another part of the traditional Affinity screening was a DNA test. Adding a portable nanopore sequencer to the kit would triple the cost to the end user and make the process needlessly complex, so we were looking at workarounds: a simpler filter that would detect only the relevant bases, or a two-part qualification process that would include a blood sample submitted to a registered lab. Amanda’s team leader said it might be possible to eliminate the DNA test altogether, since it mainly functioned as a kind of pre-screening, picking up a few gene sequences that were incompatible with any Affinity. Adding another layer of neurotesting might achieve the same effect.