“I can’t,” he heard himself say.
Happy Joe King’s eyes darkened. “Pardon?”
“I... Mr. King, I can’t. I would. But I just... I just can’t.”
King glanced at Shorty again. He looked at Fielder. He did not look happy. “Forgive me for saying so, Professor, but that’s a dumbfuck answer for a fellow in your position. I don’t mind admitting I didn’t expect such dumbfuckery from you. Shorty?”
“Yup.”
“Did you?”
“I gotta say,” Shorty said, sounding amazed, “no.”
“You don’t understand,” Fielder said quickly. “It’s not... I wouldn’t... I’m just unable. Truly.”
A quiet, awful minute passed.
“It’s the numbers. I don’t know how to explain it.” He looked at King with a feeling of impending doom. “I’m not your man.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Joe King finally said.
“I really am sorry.”
King sat quietly. He swirled his drink. “Are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to reconsider?”
“I don’t... it’s not that...” Fielder sighed. “I have a condition known as Nonspecific Acalculia.”
“Forgive me, but what did you just say?”
“Says he has nonspecific genitalia,” Shorty told him, then narrowed his eyes at Fielder. “You some kinda homo?”
“Acalculia,” Fielder repeated. “It means that I can’t...” He struggled, gave up. What was the use?
Happy Joe King said nothing.
“Mr. King,” Fielder said, “please don’t think the generosity of your offer is lost on me.”
King nodded along, appraising him.
Fielder drew in a breath and forced himself to ask the question he didn’t want Happy Joe King to answer. “What happens under these circumstances? Being the case that I’m unable to accept the... position?”
In reply, Joe King shrugged unimportantly, as if bygones were bygones as far as he was concerned. But he leaned forward to pluck the envelope from Fielder’s apron strings.
“This feels light,” he commented.
Fielder looked quickly to Shorty, who did not return his glance. “But it’s all there. I swear it is. You can count it.”
“I count five hundred.”
“Yes. Five hundred. It’s all there.”
“The installment is eight.”
“But I was told... Shorty said five.” Fielder looked at Shorty again, desperate for aid. Shorty offered none. “Five. It’s all there.”
“Five? Yes,” King said. “Last week, five. This week, eight.”
“But that’s...” Fielder’s stomach did a queasy roll. “I don’t understand.”
“In an accelerated economy such as ours,” King explained, “sometimes lending institutions — and that’s, in a sense, how you can think of me from now on — are forced to raise interest percentages in order to keep expansion in line. It’s a systemic necessity, Professor. Please understand, these are market forces we’re up against. I don’t make the rules.”
Fielder felt himself deflating.
“Shorty?” said King.
“Yup.”
“I’ll need you to explain the matter of penalty fees to Professor Fielder. Bear in mind he has a condition.”
As Shorty opened his door, and Stephen felt the collector’s heavy hand descend on his shoulder, it was as if time stopped, then accelerated. He looked at Shorty, hoping unreasonably for some slim possibility of shelter, finding only hard, dutiful eyes.
Later, on the long but limp-free walk home to his building, Stephen told himself he’d made the only reasonable decision, under the circumstances.
First, there was only sick fear, accompanied by visions of compound fractures, in his very near future.
But several blocks after parting Shorty’s company, a giddiness came upon Fielder. There arose within Stephen’s breast a vague but euphoric tremor; a quick breath escaped him.
And as he walked on — moving between pools of sodium light cast by the streetlamps overhead, narrowing the distance to his apartment stride by lengthening stride — Stephen Fielder began to feel something he hadn’t felt in as long as he could remember.
Lucky.
Maybe it was the delayed adrenaline rush of surviving a dicey situation. Maybe there was nothing like the hand of a professional motivator at your elbow to jolt you out of an unproductive frame of mind.
Fielder didn’t know. He didn’t know if night birds always sang like this in this part of town, or if he’d simply never noticed them before now.
All Stephen Fielder knew was that something important had happened this last half-hour. Something transformative.
Because people lost limbs, for heaven’s sake. He understood that, now. Accidents maimed but did not kill. Careers in roaring environments slowly obliterated the ability to hear; viral infections robbed people of their eyesight. Awful diseases of the nervous and muscular systems impeded, immobilized.
Time and time again over the course of this strange affliction, Stephen had returned to thoughts of his friend with brain cancer. And for the first time, he realized he shouldn’t have been thinking about his dead friend at all.
He should have been thinking about a French magazine editor he’d once read about.
The journalist’s name was Bauby. Jean-Dominique Bauby. In the middle part of his life, Bauby had suffered a massive stroke that left him quadriplegic. And at forty-four — Fielder’s very age — the man had written his own memoirs, nearly two hundred pages worth, by blinking his left eyelid.
Two hundred pages, all dictated in code. Character by character, one blink at time.
People survived. Plenty of people survived unimaginable horrors each and every day. And then they woke up and survived them all over again the day after that. People adapted; they overcame. They developed tools and engineered workarounds. They persevered and recalculated. They plugged in variable after variable until their personal equations finally produced a gain.
Fielder found himself awash in a tide of inspiration by the time he reached his apartment building. He was thinking in terms of visual recognition. How hard could it be to relearn the sight of a numeral? A symbol’s unique lines and curves? He thought in terms of computer aid: spreadsheets, graphing applications, microprocessors with far more raw calculating power than any human mind. He thought of tools he’d once taken for granted. Marvels of human engineering designed for the express purpose of taking the complicated... and making it simple.
So lost in these thoughts was Fielder as he climbed the stairwell to his floor that it took him a moment to register that Rhombus waited for him in the hallway outside his door.
“Rhombie,” he said, leaning down to scratch the dog behind the ears. “How did you get out here?”
Rhombus just looked up at him with soulful brown eyes. Don’t look at me. Ask them.
That was when Fielder noticed that his apartment door stood ajar.
Four men waited for him inside. Two wore suits. One wore a sport jacket with jeans. One had doffed his sport jacket and draped it over the back of the couch, exposing a shoulder holster. Fielder noted the badge clipped to the man’s belt.
“Professor Fielder,” said one of the men in suits. He met Fielder at the door with one hand extended, the other flipping open an ID wallet. “Forgive the intrusion. My name is Special Agent Corrigan.”
Fielder shook the man’s hand robotically. Rhombus hung back, out in the hall.
Agent Corrigan pointed around the apartment. “That’s my partner, Agent Klein. Detective Reese. Detective Carvajal.”
The man in the shirtsleeves and shoulder holster raised his hand.
Fielder looked at them. “What are you doing in my apartment?”
“Professor Fielder,” said Agent Corrigan, “it would seem we’re in a position to help each other.”