“Jo?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Remember when you asked if you could count on me as a friend? For what it’s worth…”
“I know,” she said, coming toward me.
“We’ve been forced onto the same side, but…
She embraced me, pulling my head down onto her shoulder. I breathed in her warm, clean smell, and kissed her neck. She tensed, but I nuzzled her neck, her throat, and she let her head fall back. When I kissed her on the mouth, she kissed me back, fully complicit, and, before long, we were rolling around on the bed. I worked her T-shirt up around her neck and had disengaged the catch of her bra, a hook located under a flare of white lace between the cups, when I realized that, although she was not resisting, neither was she helping out as she had a moment earlier. I slid my hand under the bra, but she remained motionless, reactionless, and I asked what was the matter.
“I can’t cope with this. You’re the first man I’ve been attracted to in a long time. A very long time.” She adopted an injured expression, like the one a child might display on running up against a rule that denied it a treat. “I want to make love with you, but I can’t.”
My hand was still on her breast and desire crowded all coherent thought from my head.
“Say something.” She shifted, turning on her side, and my hand was no longer happy.
“Does this have anything to do with Pellerin?”
“Partly.”
“You’re sleeping with him?”
“No, but I might have to. It may be the only way to control him.”
“Is that how you controlled Donnell?”
“It wasn’t like that! I was in love with him.”
“You loved him.”
“I know it sounds strange, but I was…”
I experienced a flash of anger. “It sounds twisted.”
She froze.
“You ever think,” I said, “you might have a kink for dead guys?”
She held my eyes for a second, then sat up, rehooked her bra and tugged down her T-shirt.
“Maybe I do,” she said. “Maybe I find them a vast improvement.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that. I was just…”
“What did you mean?”
“It was frustration talking.”
“Don’t you think I’m frustrated, too? I could probably find an insult to toss at you if I wanted.”
I could have pointed out that she was the cause of her own frustration, but I’d already dug myself a hole and saw no good reason to pull the dirt down on top of me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I truly am.”
“It’s not important,” she said icily. “I’ve heard it before.”
She flung herself off the bed.
“Jo,” I said despairingly.
“Oh,” she said, stopping in the doorway. “I nearly forgot. Your employer has a message for you. He’ll be arriving in three days. Maybe you’ll find his company less perverse than mine.”
I wasn’t accustomed to viewing myself as an employee, and it took me a hiccup to translate the term “your employer” into the name Billy Pitch. I’d been anticipating his arrival, but the news was a shock nonetheless. My dalliance with Jo, brief and unsatisfying as it was, had placed our time on the island in the context of a courtship, and I needed to reorder my priorities. I knew I had to tell Billy everything—he had likely already heard it and our first conversation would be a test of my loyalty—and I would have to put some distance between Jo and me. You might have thought this would be an easy chore, given the state of the relationship, yet I was down the rabbit hole with her, past the point where longing and desire could be disciplined. Even my most self-involved thoughts were tinged with her colors.
Like advance men for pharaoh, Billy Pitch’s retinue arrived before him. Security people, chef, barber, bed fluffer, and various other functionaries filtered into the compound over the next day and a half. A seaplane brought in Billy the following morning and, after freshening up, accompanied by an enormous bodyguard with the coarse features of an acromegalic giant, he swept into the foyer of the main wing, the most grotesquely decorated room of all, dominated by a fountain transplanted from nineteenth century Italy, with floors covered by pink and purple linoleum and vinyl furniture to match. It had been over a year since I had seen Billy in the flesh, but I had known him for almost a decade and he had always seemed ageless in a measly, unprepossessing way—I was thus pleased to note a pair of bifocals hanging about his neck and that his fringe of hair was turning gray. He wore a garish cabana set that left his bony knees and skinny forearms bare. The outfit looked ridiculous, but amplified his air of insectile menace. He directed a cursory glance toward Pellerin, sitting on a plum-colored sofa, but his gaze lingered on Jo, who stood behind him.
“My, my! Aren’t you the sweet thing?” Billy wagged a forefinger at her. “Who’s she remind me of, Clayton?”
The bodyguard, a mighty android in a blue silk T-shirt and white linen jacket, rumbled that he couldn’t say, but she did look familiar.
“It’ll come to me.” He tipped his head pertly to one side and said to me, “Let’s talk.”
He led me into a room containing a functional modern desk and chairs and one of the ubiquitous flat screens, where I delivered my report. When I had done, he said, “Good job. Very good job.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Do you believe her? You think that boy is a miracle worker? Or you think maybe that girl in there’s gone crazy?”
“It sounds crazy,” I said. “But everything I’ve seen so far backs her up.”
He nodded like he wasn’t so much agreeing with me, but rather was mulling something over. “Let me show you a piece of tape I landed. Part of the Ezawa project at Tulane. The sound’s no good, but the picture speaks volumes.”
He switched on the TV and the tape began to play. The original of the tape had been a piece of film. It had an old-fashioned countdown—10, 9, 8, etc.—and then the tape went white, flickered, and settled into a grainy color shot of an orderly removing electrodes from the chest of man wearing a hospital gown. He appeared to be semi-conscious and was sitting in a wheelchair. Rail-thin, with scraggly dark hair and rawboned hillbilly face. A woman in a nurse’s uniform came into view, her back to the camera, and there was a blurt of sound. The legend “Tucker Mayhew” was briefly superimposed over the picture. Another blurt of sound, the woman speaking to the orderly, who left the room. Then the woman moved behind the wheelchair and I saw it was a younger, less buxom Jo, her make-up so liberally applied as to seem almost grotesque.
Billy asked why the heavy make-up and I replied, “She said they don’t see very well at first. Must be to help with that.”
Jo began to touch the man’s shoulders and neck. Initially he was unresponsive, but soon the touches came to act like shocks on him, though he was still out of it. He twitched and stiffened as if being jabbed with needles. His eyelids fluttered open and his eyes showed green flashes, already brighter than Pellerin’s.
“The part where she’s touching him went on longer,” Billy said. “I had it edited down.”
The man’s eyes opened. Jo left off touching him and moved away. He gaped, glanced around, his face a parody of loss. Jo spoke to him and he located her again. The change in his expression, from woebegone to gratified, was so abrupt as to be laughable. The sound came and went in spurts, and what I could hear was garbled, but I caught enough to know she was teasing out his life story, one he was inventing in order to please her, one that fit the absence in his mind. His eyes tracked her as she performed movements that in their grace and ritual elegance reminded me of Balinese dancers, yet had something as well of the blatant sexuality of bartop strippers you see in clubs on the edge of the Quarter. She passed behind the wheelchair and again touched him on the back of the neck.