“Is that what you’d prefer?”
“Don’t write that down! Am I safe in assuming we’ve long since ended our date? I’m going to try to be smart about this and venture you are from Interior and are, uh, interviewing me for one reason or another.”
“Don’t be silly. I just overheard what you said earlier. And anyway, here comes the bell.”
“You are weird,” he said. “That was weird.”
“Nine-minute dating is weird. Get over it.”
He watched her leave the room, security on either flank.
In the lounge were the bartender and backs. A few guys watching golf highlights. A woman saying it might be nice to watch the minority response to the State of the Union, and another saying: Bohhhring.
Ned grabbed his coat from the stand. He felt for his gloves and was reassured to find them there. Outside the window, he caught sight of one of his dates getting in a car with the security guy of brick. One date and then another, and Lynne bringing up the rear. Well, how do you like that? The silent brick thing was not supposed to work. The Helix said so. Equity theory said so — only people in receipt of a self-disclosure will respond by sharing about themselves at a companionable level of intimacy, which was code for putting out, and yet there was the Brick with half the bar in his pants. Ah, the world was a mystifying place. And being in it was not so much an exercise in humility as disjuncture.
Ned checked his watch. It was only nine. Guess he’d go home and pelt the TV with wasabi peas. Or have a drink like his boss, the Secretary, who would inherit the earth if the Capitol blew up on this night of all others. Somewhere in a safe house mandated by the doomsday caveat to the Succession Act of ’47, the Secretary was sipping Bénédictine and napping through the State of the Union like everyone else. Probably, though, Ned would go home and study the weather. Rawinsonde data from balloons one hundred thousand feet in the air; thunderstorm identification, tracking, analysis, and nowcasting info; Stüve diagrams and the CAPEs of every cloud deck within ten miles. An hour’s worth of study that would help him counter dread of the unknown with his command of the fates. He needed all the help he could get for that moment when he’d find his sister and disclose their kin. He had, after all, seen Star Wars a thousand times.
LUKE: I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.
LEIA: You’re who?
He spotted Anne-Janet on her way out and ran to catch up with her. “Hey,” he said, “if you’re not doing anything right now, maybe we could have a beer or something?” Because, romance or not, it’d be nice to have a friend at work. Share your boredom, and next you know, you’re streaking the Pentagon for kicks.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to get back to the hospital. Mother calls.”
He nodded and felt like he didn’t need the Helix to get this one right. He understood perfectly. We are put on this earth to rue the family that comes apart. Look after you and yours.
Anne-Janet took the long way back, and when she found out her mom was still asleep, she went to the lounge. Most unhappy place ever, the hospital lounge, except maybe the playground after a miscarriage. It was empty but for a coffee station and snack machine with offerings strangely antagonistic to health. Not just candy bars and chips, but the really caloric foods, like Marshmallow Fluff shortbread and maple honey buns. Honey buns in a bag. Anne-Janet bought water and a pack of gum. She sat on a couch frayed at the arms and pecked with holes. Nails burrowed into the fabric while people waited for death.
She retrieved her Helix membership card from her back pocket. She should laminate the thing and yoke it to a string around her neck, just to advertise her need. That or rip it up because, really, those people were lame, the socials were lame, and just because the energies of the lonely tended to mobilize in vigilant and constant pursuit of an end to loneliness, that did not make their aggregate any less lame.
Even so: Nine men, one match. Ned Hammerstein. She’d spent most of her first weeks at Interior trying to find out more about him. But the results were minimal. So either he was this wonderful enigma or the most boring man ever. It didn’t matter which, only that Anne-Janet liked to know in advance what she was getting into. She hated surprises. As a girl, just knowing when her father was coming took the edge off the assault. In time, she hardly cared what he did because she was prepared. On the other hand, nights he showed unexpectedly, she sobbed into the dishrag he thrust in her mouth.
She put the card away and crossed her ankles. Was about to go to her mom’s room when Nurse Lynne plunked down on the couch and said, “There you are. Been looking all over.” She seemed out of breath. And looked as if she’d applied her eyeliner in an earthquake. What kind of nurse had a hand that unsteady?
“Why? How’s my mom?”
“Down for the count. I gave her a sedative.”
“Another one?” And because Anne-Janet was a little afraid of her, she looked at Lynne’s shoes. Not the rubber clogs made famous by that fat Italian chef, but black suede pumps. “I’ve never seen a nurse wear those,” she said.
Lynne outstretched her foot. “Shift’s over. I’m on my way out. Just stopped to check on you.”
“Oh. Well, that’s nice.”
She noticed that Lynne’s calves were tremendous. Water balloons. Amazing.
Lynne scratched one with the tip of her pump. She said, “Your mom tells me you work for the Department of the Interior. What’s that like?
It sounds grand.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I mean it. I’m a nurse, what do I do all day? A man came in this morning, he weighs five hundred pounds. We had to get him from the gurney to a bed. Exciting, right? But you work for the government. You’re doing something that matters.”
Anne-Janet blushed. She had never thought of herself as a woman who did work that mattered. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s sort of grand. I don’t know how up you are on the divvying of responsibilities in government, but my department pretty much runs the show. I mean, the fundamentals. Land, water, energy.”
“Wow. And what’s your part?”
“Research.”
“Yeah? Do you go out into the field or whatever?”
Anne-Janet sat up with zero regard for the crossroads before a giant lie and said, “Yes. I am out there all the time. Oil production, gas lines, reservoirs, coal mines — you wouldn’t believe what would happen to these things if we didn’t step in. People need guidance. They need oversight.”
“It’s great they have you,” said Lynne.
Anne-Janet smiled. She plumed and bluffed and grinned.
“But I’ve been thinking,” said Lynne — and here her face lost that admiring ingenue quality Anne-Janet had quickly come to love—“I’ve been wondering: is it hard working for the government these days? Because of what’s happening?”
“What do you mean?” Though the fact was, even World War III would have registered but faintly on Anne-Janet’s screen. Such was the colonizing tyranny of cancer; you hardly noticed anything else.
“Oh,” Lynne said. She looked disappointed. “So you’re not involved with how to deal with the Helix? The movement’s so big, there are rumors of an Indian land-claim thing going on. Like they want to be self-sufficient. Carve up the states. I hear Thurlow Dan is a secessionist.”
“Uh, yeah,” Anne-Janet said, feeling the need to recoup Lynne’s respect tussle with the need to defend or conceal her patronage of the Helix — she wasn’t sure which. “We’re on top of that,” she said. But also: Carve up the states? What? There were rumors, yes, but they were stupid conservative rumors. The Helix wasn’t militant. It was about reconciliation, and, in Anne-Janet’s exercise of the fundamental option of faith, it was about consigning the pitch of your heart to God and letting him restore what being human fractures to bits every day. So, in fact, the Helix was about the opposite of secession. And Thurlow Dan? He started the thing. Had devoted his life to bringing unity where there was strife. Who knew what this nurse was on about. She was an idiot.