“No such thing,” said Vicki. “And from what I saw in your cell, I’m guessing you know that, too.”
Anne-Janet just shook her head.
Charlotte poked at her temple with her index. “And anyway, hello, since clearly neither me or Vick is new on the pony, we’re gonna get mistaken for cops or something, and then we’ll turn into you, all kidnapped and stuff, only we won’t get treated half as nice and probably we’ll get shot.”
“Also,” Vicki said, because Anne-Janet’s incredulity was annoying, “it’s no stranger than some john hiring me to do it. Only real diff is that sometimes in here you get daughters of sheiks or whatever who want a controlled experience.”
“A controlled experience,” Anne-Janet said, and the lady in her heart — her name was Pollyanna — plucked a rose and died.
The Pro took off her visor and spoke to Anne-Janet. “Okay, you’re all set. If you are amenable to the day’s arrangement, there’s been a cancellation. We can get you in now.”
Anne-Janet stammered. “Oh, no, there’s been a mistake. I didn’t come here for this.”
“What do you mean?” the Pro said, staring at Anne-Janet. If she had a racket in hand, she might well have served out a motivational speech about the game — You don’t choose it, it chooses you — though, in any case, what she did offer amounted to the same thing. She said, “I just read your questionnaire and bio. You know we do revisions, right? We can take you back, re-create the context, and change whatever you didn’t like. So, about your father, not to be rude, but you are so obviously in the right place.”
Anne-Janet’s mouth opened. She looked at the Pro, looked at the hookers.
“Sign here?” the Pro said. And then, to Vicki: “Maybe you both want revisions, too? There’s something here for everyone.”
Charlotte said, “Like virtual reality? Do we get to wear helmets?”
“Okay, this isn’t Blade Runner,” the Pro said. “You just describe everything for us, and we will re-create it down to the last detail.”
“Wow,” Vicki said. “My first time. Bradford King. I was fifteen.”
“You remember his name?” Charlotte said. “Mine could have been any one of five guys. Maybe six — who knows who went first that night.”
Anne-Janet continued to look from one face to another. A revision. How horrible. How New Age and barbaric and disclosing of her most awful moment to a set designer and stagehand.
“Yeah, I remember Bradford,” Vicki said. “We all wanted to call him Brad because Bradford was just so serious, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember trying to call him Brad during sex and him just not being able to cum at all and yelling at me for it.”
“Nerves?”
“Beats me. He was nine. Maybe it was too soon.”
Charlotte reached into her purse, as though looking for her wallet, as though in this wallet might be the 20 K it would take to get relaid by five drunken boys in plaid boxer shorts. “Can you charge this to the Helix House?” she said.
The Pro nodded. “One of our most active accounts.”
“I’m in,” Vicki said. “What the hell. I’ll call him Brad as much as I want.”
“Me too,” Charlotte said. “We’ll see who gets the roofies this time.”
They turned to Anne-Janet, who was just then feeling such a mess of grief balk in her throat, she could not talk. She’d heard it said that a girl whose father wrecks her becomes a woman no man can reach, and so far her experience had borne this out with depressing accuracy. Thing was, she wasn’t just unreachable; she didn’t know how to reach anyone else, either. What she’d just done at the Helix House? It underscored the bottom line: She was heartbroken. All the sentiment that attached itself to the condition was in play, with the caveat that the offending party was her dad and that instead of suffering acutely and with foreknowledge that she’d get over it, she hurt with moderation and diligence. A tide erodes the coast, the glaciers will melt; hers was just a slow assailing of the big things — the heart things — whose demise would change the world. Only not today. Tomorrow either. Who could go on like this? She was lonely beyond what she could endure.
She signed on the dotted line.
“So what do you need?” the Pro asked. “Just so I can get a sense of it.”
“A lock on the door,” Anne-Janet said. “A twin bed, a kid’s room, and a lock on the door.”
“Sure thing,” the Pro said, checking her computer screen. “Only it seems like some people are looking for you. You and three others.”
“That’s okay,” Anne-Janet said. “All I need is a lock. So that when your actor tries to get in, he can’t. After that, anyone who wants to find me won’t have any problem at all.”
Ned Hammerstein, begin on a small scale and end grandly.
Some people had wives and kids and the parents who’d given them life. Other people had a Lear jet forty-five-thousand feet up, a childhood plane, the Bernard, which they’d outfitted for cloud seeding and weather modification. Thus Ned, flying away or flying to, a hegira turned pilgrimage for a twin sister who more than likely would not give a shit to find out he was alive and might even fear the responsibility once she did.
“Cheer up,” his mother said, as if she could know; she had not looked at him in hours. Busy, busy. Touring the cargo bay, ransacking plastic bags for utensils and napkins and cold cuts and fruit. They were just over Colorado Springs, a couple of hours to go.
She held up two canteens, “Coke? OJ?” and looked hopeful. Feed the boy, curb his wrath.
He stretched his legs but didn’t get far. The bay was stuffed with kegs of acetone and silver iodide, dry ice, ammonium nitrate, urea, and some beat-up NEXRAD equipment. He’d painted the plane himself, attempting to render the original cover art of Cat’s Cradle—hands plus string loomed over a cityscape at night — but producing a slop of color that passed for abstraction in some circles but not in most. The wings were fitted with racks and flares that looked like the tines of a comb, and under each wing, giant cigar tubes of acetone — silver iodide — smoke generators — once the standard for seeding an updraft, provided you wanted rain.
Milanos on a paper plate, arranged in a crop circle. He took one to make her happy. For the fifth time, she asked about his health, and whether English Breakfast was okay, because she had Earl Grey in her fanny pack, so if he wanted Earl Grey, just say so. She dropped a spoon, then another while bending for the first, and throughout refused help, saying, apropos of nothing, “Your father’s doing well,” while pointing vaguely at the cockpit. He noticed her hands. The fingers were spindly, the skin thin but loose about the knuckles, and capped with nails corned-beef pink. He noticed the rest. Her cheeks were seasoned brown — liver spots and the bronzer she used to conceal them — and, where once showed the natural crimps of skin from nose to dimples, two ruts trafficked her tears so well, it was like city planning had landed on her face.
“Allergies,” she said, waving him off but accepting a tissue anyway.
“Nice outfit,” he said, and pointed at the TV on which was playing a tape of her giving a press conference the night before, urging the Helix to let her boy go. His mother in California cazh, tea rose ascot and blouse, and his father by her side in a double-breasted jacket. Amazing how their son might be shelving billy clubs in his ass, jailed and terrorized in the omphalos of dissent in America, and still they looked ready to yacht. Assuming they still traveled together, which seemed unlikely, given the spite in her voice every time she said we or us, as though the real resentment here was not so much Ned’s kidnapping as the assault of this crisis on their disunity.