Fuck you, I should have said. You’re not paying me enough to threaten me.
But I hadn’t, and had sat there instead, frightened and fuming, absorbing the familiar refrain: Just pay your dues. Serve your time. I could be so much more than a mere Monitor. I could rise in the ranks. Other people had. I could be prestigious, respected, like the others.
Remembering the kids beaming through their envy, demanding souvenirs from the Kennedy Space Center and Disneyworld. Mom ruffling my hair, running her thumb over my ear. I’m so proud of you, baby. That’s a good sign, when they start giving you more responsibilities.
Liar, liar, liar, liar. And I’d come back without a tan, too. Just tell them you were listening to talks the whole time, Louis’ assistant had said. A strong implication of: Do I have to think of everything? Can you not lie on your own?A Chambers Labs subsidiary was presenting at the conference in Orlando, I had noticed: Lazuli Software Solutions.
Johnny was everywhere, she was like mold spores in the air, nowhere was free of her. You couldn’t take one breath without drawing her in, having her grow inside you. Making you sick.
A nasty realization had built while I writhed unsleeping on the plane, and it worsened now, as I joined the line of people waiting to get in, shivering in the cool fog. If it really had been Sofia, her dodging the camera suggested she didn’t want to be spotted there. Yet she must have known the ceremony would be filmed—not only that, but broadcast worldwide. Millions, even billions of people must have seen that footage. And she knew that, she would have known that. So why had she gone? What was she up to? And why hadn’t she told her dad?
I hadn’t seen her in person for months, not since my last training trip to Chicago; she’d been distant, even cool, yet somehow had contrived to run into me, with or without her dad, about a dozen times a day. Afterwards, she kept messaging me on ICQ, a half-hour of cautious small talk each time. We were, I thought, in that uneasy space between strangers and friends, but since I’d never really had friends except Johnny (ow—that stab of hate again), I couldn’t tell.
The beams of the lightshow stabbed up through the fog like knives, a guard of honour as I approached the front of the line. Like photos of royal weddings, walking under the bridge of blades. Good thing Louis’s assistant had called to get me a tux: under laughably heavy coats, many trimmed with fur or velvet, most people were in tuxedoes too, or else floor-length dresses in a dark rainbow of hues. I hoped no one would look at my boots.
The lady taking names with her laptop stared up at me far too long. I met her eye, daring her to say something, tell me I didn’t belong there. Go on. You’ll see. The Society is full of these little tricks.
“Nicholas Prasad,” I repeated, leaning down. After she looked at my driver’s license, she gave me a paper wristband and waved me through. I swiped my sleeve over my face, barely dislodging the clammy mix of perspiration and precipitation.
God, why had I agreed to this bullshit? Some vague impulse fueled by who-knew-what, something I hadn’t been able to resist, giving the impression that it was not large but fast-moving, too quick to dodge, about how a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, but was this, in fact, it?
If it was, I decided, what a man had to do was incredibly bad planning.
All the same, what was the worst that could happen? Two girls might be mad at me, and I could call Louis back and confirm that his darling only child was fine. And then home on Monday, with Society-provided memorabilia, mouse ears and rocketships and little bits of gator-shaped tat and glitz. Job safe. Everything fine, and the boat that I had set rocking with my mistake (not to mention ratting out Sofia) would be settled again, safe again.
I walked under a stone arch into a cross-road, thick uneven walls against a clouded sky, feather-soft and without a single star. People milled, murmured, smoked, laughed. There was a strong smell of money; you got it at Johnny’s place sometimes, and always at her mother’s house. Cigars, cryo-treatments, Botox, lip fillers, hair transplants, expensive perfumes and colognes, aromatherapy orthotics, drycleaning chemicals, real leather, jewels kept in storage. I didn’t have that. Would they sniff me out, turn on me? Rented tux, hotel soap. Smell of jetlag. My watch still on Edmonton time.
Metal signposts pointed to PRISONS OF WAR and WAY OUT, mostly obscured now by large laminated sheets that said CHAMBERS REACTOR GALA FEBRUARY 6 2004 with a big reflective arrow.
I liked the tall blocky towers, their windows crisscrossed with lead. The stones were all different colours, like camo-print. It wouldn’t help if you were being invaded, I thought, but maybe the visual effect would screw up the aim of folks with projectile weapons. How old was this place, anyway? Its age pressed down like the weight of a thunderstorm. I have everything you don’t, it seemed to say: mass, history, dignity, culture. And by ‘you’ I thought it meant both me and where I was from. No castles back home. Rightly so, I wanted to explain: the land was swindled or taken at gunpoint from people who neither built nor needed them.
Need has nothing to do with it, I pictured the castle replying, I will be here for thousands of years more, needed or no.
Conversely, I didn’t like the arches, which seemed too heavy to stay up, itching to fall on some tourist. Indoors was a relief despite the stifling heat. Unofficially, I knew, the party filled the entire grounds, and I had seen a few forlorn-looking string quartets and appetizer stations outside in the fog, but in practice, it was cold and grim enough that everyone had crowded into the Great Hall.
The room was half-painted in deep red, half panelled with wood; the stained-glass windows had been strung with small white party lights, bringing their colours to life. Polished armour and dozens of weapons hung on the walls, baroque blades and spikes arranged like fireworks. That was good, actually, very handy. When either Sofia or Johnny started asking the hard questions, I could just run myself through. Die of blood loss before dying of embarrassment. True, the Society would lose its deposit on the tux, but…
Before I really realized what I was looking at, my body jolted minutely, like the electrical shock of a dry winter day. The hall was lined with nooks like restaurant booths, which I figured were off-limits during tourist hours but were now open; and one of these was occupied by Johnny, lit all gold and dark like an old painting under several skinny standing lights. She was being simultaneously photographed and filmed by two people, and interviewed by three others, pivoting back and forth at their conflicting cues and the demands of the lenses.
I parked myself behind a big guy in a white jacket who was offering trays of what Johnny called ‘tiny bits of junk on sticks’ (her nemesis; she always ate before parties). The crowd eddied like one of those fancy aquariums in the mall, deep water of tuxedoes, bright coral of gowns, jewelry like darting fish. Hm. Save up, get a suit like that back home: silky blue or green or violet under the lights, black in the shadows. Couple of iridescent ties. Start going to clubs.
Some people stared despite my tux, but after I snagged a glass of champagne, I abruptly achieved invisibility; their gazes hit and slid off. I held my nose over the cold skinny glass, enjoying the tickle of the popping bubbles.
The lighting left the musicians (six of them—what was that? a hexet? a sextet?) and the high ceiling in darkness. In the center of the room, someone had poised a spotlight on something I couldn’t see through the crowd, glassy-looking, maybe an ice sculpture. Like that one Nobel-watching party we’d gone to at the university, where we had gotten kicked out after she—