The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  The woman was quite notably blond. Catherine had met Dr. Ophelia Burke only once. But she too had that Nordic colouring. And now the woman was laughing. Catherine could tell from the way her head leaned back and the way those blond coils shook. She could tell from the way Morris looked so pleased, having said just the right thing for the moment.

  Catherine was inside the restaurant’s front door by that point, she realized suddenly, in that shuddering way that she had lately found herself blinking awake in just a slightly different place and posture than she last remembered occupying. It was as if she appeared in her own peripheral vision, seeing herself but not herself, only then to sharply reanimate in her new position. She had stepped from behind the pony wall, from behind the ferns. She had advanced some distance down the aisle between the door and Morris’s table. And Morris, of course, because it was just that kind of waking anxiety dream—another shuddering movement at the edge of her field of view, another sharp realignment of her place in the room—had seen her and raised a hand in greeting, and the woman had turned around to see who he was greeting. And she was not blond at all.

  Morris called to Catherine as she turned and rushed the other way, out the front door, onto the sidewalk. He struggled to his feet, sliding out past the tables, following her. Catherine?

  On the sidewalk there were confused words. Morris reaching out to take her shoulder. She didn’t slap him, though that now seemed insanely near the top of her list of options. But she roughly shook off his hand and fled, humiliated and not even entirely certain why. Catherine running down the hill into the safety of the blackness there. Into the park and across it through the comfort of those silent trees.

  “So that was Morris destabilizing you,” Ximena said, finally. “Trying to push you out.”

  Catherine wouldn’t have expected a therapist to deal in irony. But then, it had been a ridiculous moment.

  Morris, for his part, tried to be easygoing about the strange encounter, though they both knew that it had been strange. The woman was his cousin, he told Catherine, during which phone call she also learned that he’d be staying a few more days. Catherine doubted the cousin story, but she had no doubt about the underlying reason for Morris to be around. That leak had pushed everything into frenetic motion. There had been a huge public response. Morris would know about the latest lab results. He would know they had a three-month mooring window. And Morris being Morris, he wanted to capitalize now. There was an urgency in every conversation that Catherine herself struggled to feel. The Red Pill 2.0 was close, Catherine would allow, but they could not do the full feature testing yet, meaning they were far short of releasing it to beta.

  “Why not?” Morris asked.

  “Because it’s doesn’t work the way it should,” Catherine answered. “It’s not perfect.”

  “Since when did you care about that? Minimum viable product. Ship something. Sell something. Since when do you hesitate? Since when do you second-guess?”

  Tempers flaring in every meeting. Nothing like your vencap partner walking up and down between the desks and computers that he financed to make every other person in the place assume there’s a bull’s eye on your forehead. All the while that hit-counter on the wall that recorded the pre-registrations did not stop reminding them of what they were doing either. The import of it. The profile. The number of eyeballs on them. Fifteen million pre-registrations. Twenty million. Twenty-five, thirty. That was the number of interested parties. That was also the number of people watching and waiting.

  “Do you know what happens at around fifty million firm pre-regs?” Morris asked her, sitting in the chair next to her workstation, kicking his feet up on a second chair he’d pulled over.

  “I give up, Morris,” Catherine said. “What happens?”

  Well, what happened, Morris explained, was that the generated traffic started to matter much more than whatever it was that was generating the traffic.

  “It becomes about the traffic,” Morris said, with a smug smile.

  “I am so not about the traffic,” Catherine said in response. But here came that sinking hollow in her stomach again now. She could forget it, but then it did always return, with a phrase or a glance or a detail askew. Something hovering in the shadows, a shape at the farthest outlying point of peripheral vision, a glimmer there, a force awake in the world, not quite behind her, to one side, standing off at some distance and appraising critically, waiting for her next move as if to counter it. As if to bet against her in some key and incisive way. It made her cautious, that sense of invisible opposition. She saw that quite clearly. She was avoiding making the bet that the universe clearly needed her to lose.

  Around her the Warehouse was buzzing. All that she had built and nurtured, agonized over. All somehow now critically at risk.

  “The full feature test,” Morris said, and his tone with her was quite gentle. “I need a firm date, Catherine.”

  She declined. They were getting there. Month end possibly. But no promises.

  “Well then I think we need to talk,” Morris said. And his words dropped onto the table between them. Catherine thought she felt a breeze, not cool or refreshing, a blast of something drying and very hot.

  “Aren’t we talking now?”

  Something a little more formal. Something in Chicago. And Morris thought it might be a good time for her to figure out flying again, because they needed to do this soon. Next week.

  “We don’t have time for Amtrak,” Morris said. “I’ll let the partners know Thursday. Good?”

  Catherine was slumped in her chair. Partners. Morris knocked on the desk with his knuckles, perhaps for luck. Then he left. And when Kali brought her noodles later, she didn’t touch them. She hardly moved. She sat and thought of Rostock and all that he might mean. Something that had happened to each of them. Something she needed to know.

  “Kali?” she called out across the Warehouse space, dust motes dancing in the last slanting rays of a setting sun.

  Catherine was at her desk, drawer open. Fingers tight around a vial of pills. Ativan, Lorazepam. There were occasions now when she did not even consult the labels. “Kali,” she called out.

  And he was suddenly there. “Here,” he said, voice almost a whisper. “Give me that. Let me help.”

  Perhaps no man had ever done something like that to her before, taken such direct control. Perhaps no man had ever dared. He took the pills from her hand. He returned them to the drawer.

  “Madness,” she whispered now, head in her hands.

  Ximena sat poised with Kleenex she seemed to know would not be required as Catherine remembered the near-disaster of that evening. Kalmar and her, the last ones in the Warehouse. Kali and her chatting at the door. There were things that naturally followed one after another in situations like theirs, things human and chemical and necessary. You didn’t talk about it. So Kali and Catherine, over dinner in Yaletown where he lived, didn’t talk about it either. Just work and family, the food. Crispy calamari studded with toasted black garlic and chilies. A pork loin with miso broth and Hiroshimana greens. There were clicking chopsticks and conversations all around them in the dark room. The light fixtures were orbs, like glowing planets, like a galaxy in which they floated and gently spun. The booths were narrow and private. The sake was acid-sweet, at once fresh and soothing. Kali, she thought, looked oddly different than she’d seen him prior. Less inscrutable, he seemed now open, knowable. A striking man in that silvery light. Leanly muscled with those blue eyes and his full lips, a brooding slouch to his shoulders. He wore a black suit, white shirt with an open collar, evidence of a chain there. A Celtic cross, Catherine decided. Anchor tattoo on the back of one hand, dark beard, somewhat sparse, and flecked with grey despite him being short of thirty. And to notice these details also reminded her that she had not been out with a man, had not had sex since long-ago Liam, who’d dropped out of her life after a few days of bodyboarding in Cabo, never to be heard from again. She might have survived it, but AF801 still
seemed on occasion to have swallowed her whole.

  After dinner, they walked down to the water, where the wind set the rigging of moored sailboats into minute motion, wind chimes in the salty air. And then they were at the front door of his apartment, shining glass, water in the streets. Kalmar there at her shoulder. A light rain was turning the headlights of passing cars into an atmospheric blur. Catherine remembered distinctly catching her own reflection in the window of a passing taxi, a flash glimpse of her face on Kalmar’s shoulder. He was hugging her gently. He was holding her, his hands on her hips. His lips were touching her ear. She realized how much she wanted this to happen, how much she wanted to be back at Kalmar’s place, to see it, be inside it. All the while knowing with equal intensity that it could not happen, how terrible a decision it would be for her. Kalmar leading her through those doors, to the elevator, to that bed in the loft three floors above. Black sheets. Oblivion.

  Impossible. The CEO and the markets director. Kalmar was the guy handling customers. For the lack of anybody else, he was also handling human resources. Morris would have a field day if he found out. He would need no more excuses. So it was thinking of Morris that she pulled away, just as Kalmar was reaching for her again, to draw her close. And out of an amused disgust with herself, with the trap of her own situation, she laughed, as if to dismiss this foolish thing that of course neither of them could actually have been considering seriously.

  She thought the laugh had been a mistake. It was false anyway. But Catherine was known for her moments of sudden certainty, the tendency to cut options mercilessly, to winnow quickly to right answers. That’s how Kalmar saw her in that moment. And he was angry with her. No words. But she saw it flash into his eyes, a hardening there, then a glance away into the traffic that flowed steadily past them, his shoulders hunched, chrome and neon glistening in the rising rain.

  Ximena had listened for a long while at this point. No scribbled notes. No inserted questions. She waited now for several minutes as Catherine sipped her cold coffee and remembered these events.

  “All the men,” she said, finally.

  Catherine seemed to awaken. She sat up straighter.

  “Earlier,” Ximena again, quietly insistent, “you said that all the men in your life seemed to have their separate demands.”

  Catherine nodded.

  “Morris wants his big meeting,” Ximena said.

  Catherine with her face in her hands.

  “And Kalmar…is in love?”

  “Don’t say that,” Catherine said, through her fingers.

  “Okay,” Ximena agreed. “But he wants you in his bed I think, yes? Phil too, maybe?”

  “No,” Catherine said, lifting her head. “Phil is very sane that way.”

  Ximena nodded, unsmiling. “Okay, then. Who else?” Her head was cocked to one side, her gaze steady on the patient. And maybe Catherine should have come clean and acknowledged the last man in this tableau, the one who might in the end be the most demanding of all, the resurrection in her life of one of those sacred invisible few.

  But Catherine knew at once that Ximena was not the person to whom that acknowledgement needed to be made. Here was not the place where Catherine clearly had to be heading, and heading as soon as possible.

  That place, which Catherine saw with the clarity of an ecstatic vision, was Chicago.

  TWO

  I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects. This being you must create.

  —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

  RANDOLPH AND MICHIGAN

  “YES, IN PERSON,” CATHERINE WAS SAYING TO VALERIE. They were on the phone, as had long been their mid-week practice. Wednesday morning, midday. Valerie at home or in her shop. Catherine in her office, her chair swivelled around, looking out the window of the DIYagnosis Warehouse.

  “And when?” her sister asked.

  “Thursday next week.”

  “In Chicago. A guy phones asking you to meet him.”

  “Well that’s where he lives, sister. And not just any guy. We do have this one thing in common.”

  “Right,” Valerie said. “Chicago in mid-November. Take a warm coat.”

  “I will button up,” Catherine said.

  “Isn’t this all maybe a bit creepy?”

  “He didn’t come off creepy at all,” Catherine said. “He sounded pretty ordinary.”

  “This person who just calls. This doctor.”

  “He’s an oncologist, retired. Used to work at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Chicago. He’s legit. He checks out.”

  “Married?” Val said.

  “Widowed. His wife died of breast cancer ten years ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry about that. Doctor who is it?”

  Catherine told her again: Dr. Michael Rostock.

  “Dinner in Chicago with Dr. Rostock,” her sister said. “Thursday, as in a week tomorrow.”

  “And I’m flying there,” Catherine told her.

  “You’re flying.”

  “I’m thinking of flying.”

  Catherine was looking at photos on the corner of her desk. Valerie, Mark. A nephew and a niece. Her entire family at that point.

  “I’m thinking maybe this is the moment I choose to start flying again,” Catherine said. “Chicago is what, four hours? It’s not like France. And of course there will be drugs involved.”

  Val was at home that day, just now in the middle of negotiating some kitchen settlement between the kids. “Honey, you stop that, now. No. No. No.”

  She covered the phone with one hand. Then came back. “Sorry. I’m still thinking. Is this really a good idea for you right now?”

  Catherine paused, hearing that familiar concern again in her sister’s voice. Then she said, simply, “Dr. Rostock told me that he’d learned something about what happened to us.”

  Silence. “So what is it? What happened to you?”

  “Well he didn’t tell me on the phone, which is why we have to get together.”

  Dishes clattering. Something hitting the floor. Someone crying in the background. Catherine told Val she could call back but her sister said no. Then, “You don’t really know this guy.”

  “I don’t think he’s dangerous. He’s older. Quite dignified-looking, in fact.”

  “Dignified,” Val said. “Well great. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.”

  “We’re meeting in a public place!” Catherine said. But she also knew that Valerie wasn’t really talking about personal safety either. Her sister’s concerns about her were by now highly generalized. Two years from a trauma like the one she’d endured was not a long time, in Valerie’s opinion. Catherine should still be in therapy, Val thought. Catherine should be talking about things more openly. She should be letting herself breathe, not holding everything in and charging onwards. And here she was, heading off again in a whole new direction. Catherine could hear the caution in her sister’s voice, even in her sister’s silence.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Catherine said.

  Valerie sighed. “So why doesn’t he fly to Vancouver if it’s so urgent?”

  He suggested that, Catherine explained. Only Catherine had to see Morris, so this worked just as well. “I mean, maybe this is also the moment,” Catherine said. “I talk to Rostock and deal with the past. I sit down with Morris and sort out the future.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “That would be great!” Catherine said. Although she doubted she had grounds to hope for quite that much. She could picture Morris and his partners on the far side of that mahogany table, high views of the lakefront, Grant Park, the ice rink full of skaters. Michigan Avenue winking with Christmas lights.

  “When Morris says partners,” she had asked Phil, having called him late and at home. “Who would he be talking about exactly?”

  Phil sounded sleepy. “Prin
cipals at his firm,” he said. Parmer Ventures was a venture capital fund. As such, there would likely be people other than Morris with money in the pot. Morris played lead and managed the deals. But if anything went sideways, well, then they’d go to the group.

  “Sideways?” Catherine said.

  “Don’t assume anything,” Phil said, yawning. “Happens all the time. You have a product delayed in the pipeline to testing, which is holding up the beta release. So you’re going to have people on the vencap side with questions. You just go down and tell them what’s what.”

  Catherine remained dubious. And Phil seemed to sense it, adding a final note before they hung up. “Morris needs you more than you need him. And Morris is smart enough to know that,” he said. “And yes, no worries. I’ll be there.”

  Maybe Phil was right. Catherine tracked Morris down first thing the next morning. He was at an indoor driving range way up in Evanston on the north side of the city, he told her. She could hear the whack and whine of balls, imagined them heading out over the apple-green, AstroTurf fairway.

  “About this meeting,” she started. “This isn’t you trying to fire me or something.”

  “Catherine, Catherine,” Morris said, voice amused but not unkind. “I might be doing you a favour if I did.”

  “How d’you figure?”

  “You with all your stresses and strains. You need a furlough. But I know your type.”

  “Do you? You sure?”

  “I am sure,” he said. “You are exactly like me as a younger man. And don’t even pretend that offends you. When I first moved to this country I had your hunger, your drive. Never taking a break. Never taking my eye off the prize. I’ve since learned to take a breath once in a while.”

  “He was trying to give you advice,” Valerie told Catherine, when she described the conversation. “I think he may have a point. Why don’t you come with me to Provence next year?”