“Yeah, but they said they saw it.”
“How would they see it? It’s not in the same universe.”
“Anyway, we’d be in it,” I said.
“Okay, I don’t know. That’s what they said. And they said there was definitely not an infinite number of universes. There aren’t even a lot.”
“So how many are there? Like a handful?”
“Right. A few more ’n a couple.”
“Five or six?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Huh.”
“Still, that’s just my intuition,” she said. “And every once in a while one of them forks and makes two.”
“Fork in the road.”
“Yeah. And then, you know, when something bad happens in one of them, it might not happen in all the others.”
“Hmm. A very pleasant thought.”
“Come on.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s possible.”
“Never mind. Heck.”
“Maybe it’s going to be alien probes,” she said. “Running around the universe blowing up life-sustaining planets out of sheer pity.”
“Humanitaliens.”
“Yeah. Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she said, five times in total. “Damn. We really nearly all died. Sorry, my mind’s-I’m very free-associating.”
“Do you mean with the Madison thing or just the Hippogriff thing?”
“Oh… I was thinking about Madison, but yeah, I also feel bad about those pilots sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Those guys dream about seeing action like that. They’d rather do one minute of real fighting than live to be a thousand.”
“Yeah, I guess you-you’re such a guy, ” she said. “You get stuff like that.”
“One crowded hour of glorious life.”
“Yeah, whatevs.”
I guess I mentioned the Hippogriff Incident in the press release, but just to clarify, we, or Warren Labs, were allegedly responsible for the incineration, on March 21, of two Fuerza Aerea Guatemalteca pilots, by, allegedly, an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. It was an almost-major international incident that had exacerbated tensions between Guatemala and Belize, and even between Guatemala and the U.S. As of today, thanks to nearly sixteen million dollars of lawyering, Marena and the team and I seemed to have gotten away pretty clean, and even Executive Solutions still hadn’t been charged with anything. But the whole thing had made it harder for the Warren Group to rock the boat anywhere in Latin America.
“Look,” I said, “dying isn’t-I mean, they probably didn’t even notice.”
“Why, you know what it’s like?”
“Dying?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s like, nothing.”
“But apart from that.”
“No, I mean, all I was saying was-look, the deal is, despite one’s ingrained denial of it, the fact is that every time you fall asleep, you die. In fact you basically die every time you even just lose your train of thought. And when you die for the last time, for you it won’t be any different, you’ll just forget what you were thinking about and not start up again. I mean, you won’t notice. The illusion of continuance is just pure nonsense.”
“So maybe the world did end and we just didn’t notice.”
“Well, that’s not exactly-”
“Or else the Bush administration covered it up.”
“Well, then we wouldn’t be making that speculation, though.” She didn’t answer, but she did look at me as though she was interested. “Actually, there are a lot of ways the world could end and nobody’d notice.”
“You mean like if it happened too fast?”
“Yeah.”
“How would that work?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, strangelets, earth-core perturbations, remote atom, atomic events from like naked singularities or whatever, um…”
“Well, that’d suck.”
“I don’t know, I don’t think most people wouldn’t even mind.”
“You mean if they didn’t understand what was happening?”
“No, I mean, even in advance, people wouldn’t-I mean, look, half of them are at least wannabe suicidal anyway. They just don’t want to deal with a lot of nooses and razor blades and guns and wreckage and starvation and fire and plague and stuff.” I half noticed that we’d gotten into dangerous conversational territory, but, as so often, I didn’t shut up. “They just don’t want to see that shot of the top of the Empire State Building poking out of the water.”
“Well, maybe. Still, that’s only half of them.”
“And the other half are just too dumb to be suicidal.”
“Okay, but everybody dying is a bigger deal because then nothing means anything.”
“You mean like it does now?”
“Well…”
“I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I mean, mean. You know, mean…”
“So anyway you think that’s just, that’s the boy of it,” she said. “Like, those pilots died happy.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“God, you’re so butch.”
Huh? I thought. “Wow. Thanks,” I said. “I wish I’d known that in high school.”
“And it’s like you don’t even know it. Which makes it that much eroticker.”
I mumbled something so incoherent I couldn’t understand it myself.
“I can’t get over how healthy you look,” she said. “You’re like, ruddy.”
“Rutty?”
“Have you been working out?”
“Oh… I don’t know…” I guess she’s right, actually, I thought. Ever since I’d knocked over that first domino this afternoon-despite the occasional twang of guilt, and even despite some trepanation, I mean, trepidation, or, let’s admit, fear-I’d felt this sort of… I guess, warmth. Hmm. Well, Jed, that’s the evolutionary psychology of it. Chicks always dig guys who’ve killed a few people. Or, evidently, guys who are about to kill a whole lot of people. It gives a dude a glow, like the third month of pregnancy.
Marena flopped mustelinely onto her side. “Okay, questies. What if I started making out with you right now?”
“Uh, well, I’d certainly reciprocate, for sure, I’d-”
“Don’t do me any favors-”
“No, I’m flattered, I mean-”
“Maybe I should get out my toy chest. You should see the thingy I just got.”
“Is it like, an orgasmatron?”
“Kind of. It’ll keep you going for, well, for a while.”
“Going, like, what?”
“Well, not quite climaxing.”
“Darn.”
“Still, that’s on the way.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. In the future, everyone will be able to sustain an orgasm for fifteen minutes.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. The very near future. So get ready.” She raised herself up in kind of upward-facing-dog position, stretched her head out on her long neck, and kissed me. I reciprocated. What if Max Sleeks in? I wondered. Better bar the door, Katie. Well, maybe he’s used to such things. Hot mama.
“Call A-sub-three,” she said. Pause. “Hi. Get me a half hour, okay? Yeah, Happy Rapture. Bye. Sorry.” She got my head in her hands. Whoa. What seemed like a hundred and eight fingernails swarmed over my doubly naked scalp, and I saw as well as felt schools of that silver glitter that fireworks makers call drizzle effects. I try to take my hat off indoors, but it’s a struggle, especially now after my head got shaved for the downloadings, and it was about the most gloves-offly intimate thing she could do, like she was slicing off my pants with bandage scissors. Wow, we’re making out, I thought, like I was back in fifth grade. Now one of her other hands was fumbling with my groin area.
“How about you fuck me like it’s still the end of the world?”
“Uh, mmm,” I said. Okay, I thought, one last time, it’s probably a good idea-but then at the same moment I thought how maybe I couldn’t deal with it, and/or, more importantly, it was feeling like Jed junior wouldn’t be able to deal with it. As they can, he could tell I was afraid of something. Chill out, I thought. No fear. Fear is the woody-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total erectile obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see the path where it has gone past on its path. And I will see that where the fear has gone there will be only a trail of tiny fearprints in the sands of the Erg. And only I will remain, picking grains of erg-sand out of my inner eye, like one whose water is frothy with liban and who has forgotten the ilm of his axolotls, one who Can it, Muad’Jed. Get a grip. I got a grip on her head, but it didn’t help. Marena came up for air.