The Rule of Stephens

by Timothy Taylor

  “DNA analysis. Database architecture. Genetic manipulation code. Add to that a diagnostic ingestible. And all that plugging into an infrastructure with deep ties to the global security sector. That all suggests to me a bigger picture I don’t even want to see. But if you’re targeted by an entity of that kind,” Phil said, pausing. “I’m going to tell you as a friend, as a person who cares about you, let it go. Let Morris win. I don’t know the reasons why this is the right choice for you. I just know that it is.”

  Catherine’s brain was ringing now. Multiple streams of information ticker-taping through. Video and audio tracks, none of them properly synched. Speir in the Warehouse. Kalmar under those looming sculptures, gesturing towards the invasive species that would either displace her, or that she would have to become herself. And a beat track, a beat track that would not go away. Confront and defeat. Confront and defeat.

  Morris in his boardroom with his Western art and his Apple watch, silver hair, plans and more plans in which she was supposed to cooperate by being some tiny spinning cog, aligned and coordinated with his great and invisible purpose. Morris on his biggest payday of all.

  She’d been agitated and nervous, she’d been afraid. All of these emotions seemed to have been flushed through her, forced by pressure from the outside, a pressure driven by the mounting suspicion that natural law had gone awry, that something had soured in the world such that rules were being broken and hidden things were entering the real by doorways that had always previously been closed. Agitation, nerves and fear. Those had been the right feelings for the moments of escalating doubt in which they occurred. But those moments were past. The right feeling for that moment, having just heard what Phil had to tell her, was the angry will to truth. She had to resolve herself and face it. Hawking or King. A lifetime certainty now hung in the balance. And it was time to know.

  “How long do I have?” she asked Phil.

  He lifted his head, looked at her. He was surprised at the question. Surely even if he weren’t acting for her legally and there to constantly remind her, she could remember the day count that late in the game. But he told her. It was Sunday. The deal closed Friday one way or the other.

  “Why?” he asked her, a trace of nervousness in his voice.

  The new body inside her had expanded to fill her completely. She could feel it, taut under her skin. A new entity indeed. A new Catherine Bach. And that new Catherine Bach was angry.

  Morris, she thought. Dr. Rostock. Let’s try this one more time.

  HELENA LEE

  SHE FLEW.

  No alcohol. No prescription meds, though she went back and forth on those. Catherine in the bathroom, getting things together in a hurry, Paxipam in hand, face in the mirror looking sober and strong. She thought about it. Then she thought about tossing the bottle into the trash. Then, immediately: Let’s be serious.

  She packed that and some Zopiclone for sleeping. And the Ativan.

  Then the thought came again, much more forcefully.

  “Be serious,” she said, aloud this time. And she took the time to look at that face in the mirror, consider the story of how that face came to be there, regarding itself with new seriousness, new resolve. And she took those pills out of her kit and did exactly what she had seconds before known that she must do. She dropped the bottles one by one into the trash, death rattle after death rattle. She felt free.

  Clothes into a carry-on open on the bed. A flannel shirt and a wool sweater, jeans and socks and athletic underwear. A fleece because it would be cold. Black gloves and a scarf. No heels required. Catherine watched herself pack. She was grateful to see the return of this more instinctual person. This woman of direction, if not yet certainty. That would follow. It had to.

  Valerie called when the airport taxi was on the way. Catherine hadn’t told her about the trip and felt momentarily guilty. But her sister wasn’t calling to check up on her. Turn on CNN, Valerie said. An expert talking about AF801, second anniversary approaching. They were going to talk about lightning. They were going to mention the fifth man theories and the misfiring Russian space-based laser. They were going to speculate about bird strikes this time around.

  “No matter that we were at 28,000 feet,” Catherine said, sitting in her living room, watching the television with her sister on the line.

  “Birds don’t fly that high?”

  “An Andean condor maybe,” Catherine said. “A bar-headed goose over the Himalayas. Not that I checked or anything.”

  “What about the whooper swan?” Valerie asked. “They just mentioned that one. Here’s a species been seen up to 27,000 feet over Northern Ireland.”

  “It wasn’t a whooper swan,” Catherine said. “I was there.”

  “Okay, forget it,” Valerie said. Then, “You sound different. Are you going somewhere?”

  Chicago, she said. And she was right to anticipate Valerie’s response. Didn’t she think all that was best left alone? Did she even have time for this now?

  Catherine’s eyes drifted to the window. False Creek. A tiny smudge of yellow on the far shore. She tore her eyes off the view. “I have to know,” she said. “I can’t let all this happen without understanding what it means.”

  Valerie was far from convinced. “Rushing off. Not thinking,” she said. “This is really out of character for you.”

  “It is,” Catherine said. “I don’t deny it.”

  “So you go confront Morris?”

  It was partly that. Certain things had to be said. The man had quite possibly been messing with her.

  “And Dr. Rostock?” Valerie said, emotion rising. “A man you were convinced had a brain injury? A man who might be dangerous?”

  A man who had something for her. But Catherine didn’t tell her sister that. Her comments were all valid, only Valerie had not fallen from the sky in such a way that explanations were now finally required.

  They didn’t argue much. And the arguments had a way of burning out as one or the other of them blew a sisterly breath over the flickering flame. Catherine did that now. She said to Valerie, “Do you remember our angel?”

  It took her a second, but Valerie remembered. Up on the mountain, she said. An outline of a wing and a shoulder, an angel in repose, two little feet sticking up.

  “I couldn’t see it for the longest time,” Catherine said to her. “You showed me and I pretended to see it. I never told you that.”

  Valerie was silent now.

  “I wanted to believe that you saw something,” Catherine said. “And eventually I understood that you had all along.”

  Catherine was in the taxi now. Catherine was on her way. That was her shooting out Grant McConachie Way in Richmond, rolling up to departures. That was her breezing through the automatic doors. There she was with a real, printed ticket and a boarding pass. And that was her closing her eyes at takeoff, feeling the surge, the impossible power, that hovering moment of separation.

  But not separation. They were in the air. The ground was dropping beneath them. But she was all in herself and still very much herself. And when she blinked and woke, she realized she’d slept through their entire ascent. The seatbelt signs were off. The cabin was darkened, a granular blue. They were at the top of that long vault from which she had herself once so spectacularly fallen. And she was whole.

  Out the window the world was black and endless, spreading and entire. And she was very much still in herself as passengers made themselves comfortable in the seats around her, as the body of the plane shuddered around them, very much in one piece as the sound and the pressure enveloped her and held her tight.

  —

  She took the Blue Line train in, got herself checked in at her hotel in River North, high view of towers in the Loop, the Hard Rock Café, the La Salle Street Bridge. It was Christmas in the city and there were decorations in the windows of stores and wreaths along the bridge railings. Catherine arrived in the morning, having slept on the plane, feeling energized and focused and unbeatable. She walked to Mor
ris’s office in the grey light, the sky close, the wind swirling around her.

  “Tell him it’s Catherine Bach,” she said to the receptionist, who’d just told her that Morris was out.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Bach, but—”

  “Please tell him it’s me,” Catherine said. “I’ve flown in from Vancouver. Please tell him I flew.”

  “But I’m afraid that won’t change the fact that he’s…”

  Catherine sat in the leather chair next to a towering fern and a wide painting of bison grazing the Montana flatlands. Morris, Morris. Who have you been trying to impress?

  The receptionist did go away, dutifully. And she did return. She started to speak. Catherine could see her raise a hand, to gesture uselessly. But Catherine didn’t lift her head from the copy of The Economist she was pretending to read, cover story on conflict in the Middle East. Men standing under pocked concrete arches, Kalashnikovs dangling, stances wide. Don’t talk to me, Catherine was thinking, eyes on the page. Let the man show himself. Let him get out of his comfortable chair and walk down that hallway and deal with the entity into which Catherine had transformed.

  “You’re the client,” Stephanie Gorman had said. “But are you sure about this?”

  “Write the letter, yes, please,” Catherine had told her.

  Was this a tenuous plan? Gorman didn’t say so. Or she didn’t say so again, having said it already at their first meeting. It was going to be a percentage game, threatening in writing to sue Morris. And going to see him was in any case unwise. It would be better to let Gorman do the communicating, but Catherine was not to be stopped.

  “I’d like to hand it to him,” she told Gorman. “Call it personal satisfaction.”

  But there was something else in play. Morris had toned down the rhetoric since word of the Red Pill 2.0 test. He’d gone quiet, and Catherine wondered why.

  The receptionist was now looking across the room at her. Catherine smiled and returned to her magazine just as the elevator dinged its arrival in the lobby outside those doors, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Morris striding towards the glass.

  He’d come from somewhere. He’d been doing something else. They’d no doubt called him to say that she was waiting here. And Morris had come back straight away to see her. He did indeed have something of a new air about him. Although it wasn’t a quiet feeling exactly. Morris seemed instead to have settled on some course of action that he hadn’t felt it necessary to share. And as he made his way down the corridor ahead of her to the boardroom, asking her if she wanted something to drink, commenting on how good she looked, Catherine reflected on how ably Morris put her off balance. Always a degree more certain than her. Always seeming to know one move farther than her into the future. It was unsettling. It was also annoying.

  Chai arrived. A carafe of water. A plate of Turkish delight, amber cubes dusted with sugar. She didn’t take one. Catherine extracted the letter instead and slid it across the table towards him.

  No wavering of Morris’s even mood. He took the letter with slightly pursed lips. His brow creased in curiosity. But he did not open it because she’d effectively told him the contents already, by showing up, by the things she had by that point already said. He only set the letter to one side, neatly aligning the long edge with the edge of the table. He squared it away and listened to all that she had to say, which was steadily delivered. And when she was done he sat back in his chair, which creaked with his weight. He coughed into a closed fist.

  He said, “Well, this comes as a surprise, certainly. And I can’t say I blame you.”

  Catherine waited. She felt a creeping wariness.

  “You built the company,” he said. “You want to defend it. I get that.”

  Out over his shoulder that familiar tableau, helicopters and birds, geysers of steam and turning ventilator fans. Men on distant rooftops in the icy cold. The city ticked and whirred. It generated its very specific sounds and smells, its frictions and pivotal moments.

  Then Morris said, “Only, Catherine, I’m no longer the right person to sue.”

  Mako Equity had bought him out. DIY was a great business, he said. He still believed in it. “Don’t get me wrong on that. But they named an irresistible price.”

  Catherine was confused. They knew all this already, didn’t they?

  No, Morris said, leaning forward now for emphasis. No, she didn’t. Or she wasn’t understanding the crucial issue. Morris’s share in DIY was held by Parmer Ventures. “And that’s what they just bought,” he said. And here he made a gesture with his hands as if dusting off his palms. No muss, no fuss. I’m out.

  Mako bought Parmer Ventures, the whole fund and all of its assets. And since the shotgun offer originated from Parmer Ventures, Mako now owned that too.

  “You want to sue someone to stop this thing,” Morris had said to her, “go take a run at Mako. And good luck.”

  And here he slid the envelope Catherine had just given him back across the table towards her.

  —

  Catherine was back at her hotel, sky over the lake gone deep blue. Colours up along the avenues. Michigan Avenue was magical with its thousands of winking lights. She’d walked a long time after the meeting, heavy sweater, wool scarf, gloves. Down and along the river, then into the Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza where there was a brass band playing oompah music and stalls selling trinkets and tree ornaments, the smell of pretzels and mustard in the air. She wondered if Rostock and his wife had come here back in their day. She wondered if this was the kind of homey thing that they might have enjoyed during the years before the trauma and the changes. That slow wrong turning.

  She’d followed the crowds and ended up in a shop devoted to German glass Christmas ornaments, a bewildering variety in gaudy colours. A section devoted to barn animals and another to dogs. Birds, insects. Sailboats, mushrooms and Disney figures. There were glass ornaments in the shapes of famous structures and buildings, the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center. She thought about that one, turning the blue frosted glass piece over in her hands, considering whether it was in the poorest of taste or if she perhaps did not remember any longer how ordinary people processed grief by remembering the good. Wasn’t it a mental artifact of the greatest possible good, even seasonal joy, to see those slender towers in their glassy original state, new and unblemished? And this was a drifting line of thinking that she might have followed further had her eye not tracked ahead across the long shelf of baskets, each with its own ornament, and found the section devoted to airplanes.

  A Concorde. A 747.

  An Airbus A380-800 in Air France livery.

  She held the fragile object between trembling fingers. She thought to drop it, to let it smash to the floor. That would in some way be the truthful thing to do. But she set it down gently instead, nestled it among the many duplicates in that basket, each one pristinely whole and living in the lie of what had been before and could not be regained.

  Now she was back in the hotel sipping a glass of pinot noir, staring out to the darkening eastern horizon, a familiar black lake. She thought to phone Valerie, but decided against it. It felt right to go this one alone. Morris was out. That forced her to measure the situation in a different way. After all that posturing and threatening and visiting the Warehouse and strutting around like he was taking charge, high-fiving the bros and generally making an ass of himself, he was now playing the fact that he no longer had an interest in DIY as though that had been his plan all along.

  Go take a run at Mako. And good luck.

  Catherine looked out the hotel window and saw the city there, a smear of lights and a suggestion of shapes. She’d figure it out. She’d know what to do. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow. As soon as she’d seen Dr. Rostock, perhaps all would then be clear. The truth of their connection. The truth of who they both really were.

  —

  Rostock’s apartment was on South Drexel in Hyde Park. The address had come by text just after she�
�d left Phil’s house that past Sunday. She’d sat in the car and messaged him. I’ve booked a flight. I’m coming back to Chicago.

  And before she could pocket the phone, the return text came in. We should speak by phone.

  I’m coming. I need to see you.

  Minutes passed. She did not move. Then it came. Address only. Message when you arrive. She responded herself, right away. Tuesday AM. Will msg. But there was no further reply.

  Rostock’s suite number suggested he was on the top floor. And on the sidewalk out front she let her eyes drift up to find the row of leaded-glass windows there that swept the front of the suite. To the right, a turret, where she imagined him sitting and reading, or writing, or doing whatever it was that now occupied him.

  There was an aluminum box next to a locked gate with apartment numbers and call codes. Catherine pressed the one for Rostock’s suite and heard the faint purr of the buzzer. Once, twice, three times. Then voicemail, though not Rostock’s voice. A woman. We’re out. Please leave a message.

  It surprised her. She’d texted from the airport and given the time of her expected arrival in Hyde Park. After all his earlier efforts to reach her, she’d assumed he’d be here. Plus, Rostock hadn’t mentioned he lived with anyone, although it had been ten years since his wife died, assuming that whole story was true.

  Cars were singing down the boulevard. The wind was up and the bare trees were rattling their branches overhead. It occurred to Catherine that she wasn’t getting anything done just standing there. That she did have a clock ticking, however wearily limited her ability to affect the outcome seemed now to be. Her flight left that same afternoon. She had to do something.

  So she texted again. And this time she didn’t entirely hide the irritation she was feeling. She was in the city. She’d come all that way. And there she was standing in the chill on South Drexel outside his apartment. Did he think he might have a moment to reply?

  It took five minutes before it came in. And when it did—she had her phone set to buzz twice for text notifications, a fuzzed-up heartbeat, an arrhythmic stutter step—she had just decided to head south on the boulevard, not knowing where she was going exactly, just knowing she had to head somewhere. The phone did its hiccup buzz and she started as it seemed to jump slightly in her gloved hand.