The Incrementalists

by Steven Brust

  However much Ray and I have irritated each other—and we’ve done so a lot—at times like this there is no comfort like having a scientific mind at work on the problem.

  I poured another cup of coffee, then turned on my cell phone and checked my voice mail. I had fourteen messages, which was fewer than I’d been afraid of. I listened to them all. One was from the dentist’s office reminding me that I was due for a checkup. Twelve were from members of the group, either panicking or telling me I shouldn’t. The last was from Irina, and it just said, “Call me.”

  I was deciding whether to do so when she walked through the door. She stared at me and said, “I didn’t think you were home.”

  “I assumed that when you barged in.”

  “Nice bathrobe. Where’s your car?”

  “Ren has it.”

  “Where is Ren?”

  “Either back in Phoenix, or in a hotel room in town under an assumed name.”

  “She bolted?”

  I nodded.

  “Any more coffee?”

  I nodded again.

  Irina helped herself, sat down on the stool next to me, and said, “You should have seen this coming.”

  “Good to see you, too, Irina. How’s the sugar spoon?”

  “Don’t be glib. We have a problem here.”

  “Weren’t you seeing someone last year? How did that work out?”

  “Stop it, Phil. We need to decide what to do.”

  “I love your hair this way.”

  “Cartophilus!”

  I put my coffee cup down. “What the fuck do you want from me, Iri?”

  “Christ Jesus, Phil. Ren’s walking around with the brand-new memories of a suicide, and she bolted. You don’t think we need to find her?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s doing what she needs to do. And I’m not going to get in her way. I owe her that much at least.”

  “I do not,” said Irina carefully, “give a good goddamn what you owe her. I’m worried about what it is she thinks she needs to do. Have you any clue what that might be?”

  “Nope,” I said, and drank more coffee.

  “So you’re just going to sit here?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking about playing some poker.”

  Irina used several expressions I hadn’t heard in years, not all of them in English. I waited it out. When she’d run down, I said, “You don’t think Ren can take care of herself?”

  “Right now? With all this going on? I don’t think any of us can take care of ourselves. This is not the time to let a new Second go off on her own.”

  I shrugged. “I think it’s exactly the time. Let her settle, let her deal with some of—”

  “Have you spoken with Ramon?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Do you know what it means that we can’t find Celeste’s last memory?”

  “In general, it means—”

  “Specifically. The ramifications. For Ren and for all of us.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “So?”

  “So what is happening in Ren’s head, Phil?”

  “I imagine it’s the usual integration—”

  “No. It’s not usual when you’ve just gotten the memories of a suicide. Eleanor and Gaston aside, we don’t do that often. And to have Celeste’s last memory go missing in the Garden—what’s it doing to her?”

  I exhaled. “Okay. Point. I’ll call her.”

  She nodded. I pushed Ren’s number and it went right to voice mail. I should have stopped to figure out what sort of message to leave, but I never think of that. I said, “It’s Phil. Celeste’s last memory has gone missing in the Garden. We’re a bit worried about what her memories will be doing to your head. I understand your desire to have some time to think this through, but I’d appreciate a call, just for reassurance.”

  I disconnected. “Satisfied?”

  “Not remotely. But it’s a start.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Give her twelve hours. If we don’t hear from her, we find her.”

  “All right,” I said. “But I’m sure she’s fine.”

  Ren

  I left the valet tag for Phil at the hostess stand of the 24/7 Café at The Palms. She understood completely. So easy to leave with your boyfriend’s ticket in your bag by mistake. If he came by, she’d be sure to explain for me. I crept like a spy down the hall to my own room, rifled through it for the essentials, and left again without letting the door make a noise and without turning on the lights. If Irina was listening at our shared door, she wouldn’t have heard a thing. The doorman just nodded when I asked for “the hotel with the roller coaster” and told the cabbie to drive me to New York, New York, Las Vegas without a hint of irony. I guess he’s had stranger instructions.

  In an authentic New York touch, the guy behind the front desk was cute enough to be an out-of-work actor. I gave him an extra fifteen bucks for a room with a carefully enunciated “beautiful city view,” and didn’t ask which city. I told him my husband would be arriving soon with our bags, and he acted like he believed me. Someone should cast that guy.

  Although all I wanted was to get to my room, close the curtains, and give some serious thought to my ridiculous situation, I was too hungry to concentrate on anything else. But the groutless cobblestones and indoor sidewalk seating were more compressed and wrong in time and locale than I could handle. I walked into the hotel shop and picked up a Twix and Mountain Dew, but I put them back; calm costs more than courage, and you can’t buy a can of perspective anywhere.

  “Welcome to Nine Fine Irishmen. Will you be dining alone this evening?” Phil owed me more than Liam, but Liam was buying.

  I nodded and the hostess led me upstairs, deposited me with a menu, a wine list and the information that the bartender, Elise, would take care of me. I knew she couldn’t, but I said, “Thanks,” and climbed onto a barstool.

  “What can I get you?” Elise was almost my height, but slimmer. Younger too, with sweet, black bangs that almost covered her darkly lined eyebrows.

  “I’m starving and exhausted,” I told her. “I want whatever you can bring me quickly that isn’t deep fried or made out of lettuce.”

  “Salmon all right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “You got it,” she said, and disappeared around the side of the bar. I’d never been particularly attracted to women before, but there was something in her shoulders and back that felt important, an urgency in her hands, even just pouring my water, and something in the set of her jaw that added a new twist of nervous excitement to my strange stew of exhaustion and anxiety.

  Elise pushed the water across the muted wood bar to me. “Want anything else to drink?” she asked.

  “I’d take a glass of wine, if you’ll have one with me,” I said.

  “I don’t do chicks.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, and I couldn’t help noticing what it did for her figure, but I also knew that wasn’t the point. Everything about her—her purple-white skin and the cherry bomb lipstick that didn’t match it, her small, natural breasts and the bra doing unnatural things to them—every detail of her was brilliant and real, held in a hyperfocus that extended just past her body, but no farther.

  “You just looked like you could use one was all,” I explained.

  We can see when people’s lives are at a pivot; Phil had told me: shoulders, hands and jaw. He hadn’t said it was so exciting.

  “Hey, Elise!” A tiny blonde waitress stood on tiptoe at the server’s end of the bar. “Can I get a little dish of cherries for this kid at table nine?”

  Elise turned away from me without a word.

  “Hiya!” the waitress chirruped. “My name’s Candy.”

  I could have guessed that.

  “I’m Ren,” I said trying not to watch Elise get the garnish. The focus wasn’t physical, but it wasn’t only mental either. I pointed my eyes
at Candy.

  “You look bored,” she said, with an overplayed moue on her bubble-pink lips. Elise would do better with that shade of lipstick.

  “Just tired,” I said. “Business travel sucks.”

  “But you get all your food for free, don’t you?” she said. “We just get sodas.”

  Elise put a little glass bowl of the lurid cherries on Candy’s tray. Candy blew her a kiss and trotted off into the warren of snugs and cubbies. Elise rolled her eyes and got down two wineglasses.

  “You here on business?” she asked as she poured.

  “Yeah, but I’m thinking about moving here,” I lied.

  “God.” She pushed a glass towards me and drank from her own. “Man or gig?”

  “What?”

  “Two reasons women move to Vegas: they’re following a man, or they’re chasing the showbiz dream.”

  “Which brought you?”

  “Both,” she said with a snort. “I was a ballet dancer in love with a drummer. We figured if I could just lower myself to showgirl, he’d join the band and we could work together all night.” She drained her glass and repoured.

  “What happened?”

  “We couldn’t get work.”

  “Either of you?”

  “He’s on the light crew for Zumanity.”

  Candy bounced back into the bar carrying a plate almost wider than her shoulders. She delivered it to me at the tall bar, still managing to lean over it enough to serve up two eyefuls of double Ds that looked younger than my salmon. “What are you girls getting all serious about?”

  I looked at her with my mouth full of fish and widened my eyes in the classic “who me?” face. She giggled and marched back to the dining room.

  A drink order came in on Elise’s machine, and I watched her make the cocktails. “Ballet doesn’t translate out here?” I asked.

  “God,” she said. “It’s not just that. There are so many girls at every audition that they hire by how the costumes fit. Tailor the dancer to the outfits, not the other way around. Makes you pretty damn interchangeable. I walked away from a corps de ballet position with San Francisco Ballet. Now I’d kill for a spot on the back line. But I’m all wrong. Nobody wants a dark-haired girl who isn’t ethnic, and I don’t have the tits.”

  “But you’re thinking about getting them?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hands cupped her breasts, squeezed them together, something between disgust and despair on her face.

  “Oh yikes! Sorry!” Candy made a production of stealth-loading the drinks Elise had made onto her tray. “Looks like you ladies are doing a fine job entertaining yourselves!”

  Elise watched Candy bop back out with the loaded tray. “I kinda hate her,” she said.

  “She’s damn perky,” I agreed.

  “I think she’s fucking my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “That slut.”

  Elise grinned and put her elbows on the bar. “Oh my God, you have no idea. The other night we had this eight-top in here, and the one guy kept dropping his bread roll. He’d drop it and she’d get down on her hands and knees and crawl after it.”

  “No,” I said. “I meant your boyfriend. What a slut.”

  Elise stood up and stepped back. Her drink order machine spit out another piece of paper, and I went back to my salmon.

  If I had time to gather the switches, if I had known any of the words or smells, or even her boyfriend’s name, I could have done more. I could have taken the words she was trying on like costumes, words like “dancer” and “failure” and “fidelity” and meddled with what they meant. But everything I remembered about Celeste’s early days as Nelle’s Second, and Nelle’s as Rita’s, and Rita’s as Fred’s, all the way back to Betsy reminded me of how much I didn’t know yet. I hadn’t even been to the Garden.

  I barely noticed Elise carrying the new drinks by. “What the fuck?” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She repeated the trip with two more filled glasses.

  “Okay, seriously. What the fuck?”

  I met her eyes. I shouldn’t have touched this. I wasn’t ready. I was exhausted, and I missed Phil more than I should, but all I could hear was Celeste.

  “Someone called me that,” I said. “Once.”

  “Were you fucking her guy?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

  “Well?”

  “But I have still done things I’m not proud of.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Elise said, the fight ebbing out of her.

  “I’ve been things I only thought I wanted to be.”

  Elise looked at me. She nodded.

  “I don’t want to be a waitress,” Candy whispered.

  Elise held my eyes for a single second before we both turned to stare at the weeping waitress. “This isn’t what I want to be at all,” she said. “I want to be a singer. Or a dancer. I want to go on auditions. And have secret dreams like you.”

  “Candy?” Elise said.

  “And I want to have a boyfriend who loves me and hangs out where I work just to get to see me an extra bit and never even notices other girls.”

  Elise stopped trying to talk.

  “What were you doing when you were Candy’s age?” I asked her.

  “How old are you?” Elise asked.

  “Seventeen,” Candy said.

  “Living with my mom and taking ballet.”

  “Okay.” Candy sniffed back the tears and shook her ponytail. “Daddy said he’d buy me a ticket from anywhere, whenever I wanted. I’m going to call them and ask to come home.”

  “You’re not from here?” Elise put her wineglass down.

  “Your parents let you move to Vegas alone?” I asked.

  Candy sniffled. “They don’t know where I am. I ran away.”

  Elise gave a low whistle. “I never would have come out here on my own.”

  “Okay. I won’t ever come to Vegas alone.”

  “And I finished high school,” Elise said.

  “I’ll finish high school.”

  “And I always practiced safe sex.”

  “I’ll always do safe sex.”

  “And I never fu—” I shook my head at Elise and she cut herself off. “Good luck, sweetheart,” she said.

  “I love you,” Candy said. Then she blew her nose on a cocktail napkin and went back to work.

  “Well, there are roles and models, and role models, I guess,” Elise said with a shrug.

  “Guess so,” I said.

  “I feel like I just made an audition. Role of a lifetime.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, and gave her my corporate MasterCard.

  Elise didn’t charge me for the wine, and when she brought the ticket back, she’d added her phone number to it. “Just in case you do move out here,” she said. “I owe you.”

  I told her she didn’t, but I pocketed her number. I took the elevator to my room missing Phil like he’d been stolen from me. I showered with my own shampoo, but it wasn’t the miracle I remembered, and wrapped myself—hair and body—in fluffy hotel towels. Sitting, still damp on the edge of the big, empty bed, I changed the outgoing message on my cell phone. “Hi,” I said into the little microphone. “This is Ren. Leave a message.” Then, choosing my words carefully I added, “Bonus memo to that special guy in my life, I’ll plan to meet you at the 24/7 Café in The Palms tomorrow at eleven unless I hear otherwise from you.”

  Both Liam and Phil would think I was talking to them. I wondered which one I’d see.

  Phil

  Some memories you don’t have to graze for, they’re just there. It was, I don’t know, about 1956 I think. Celeste and I were living in Chicago, where I’d tapped into a lot of private games. We had an apartment the size of a very small apartment. We took turns cooking, and she complained when I used olive oil instead of butter.

  I was stretched out on the couch, feet up, the Chicago Sun-Times over my face.

  “With all the advances in photography and fil
m, with air travel now commonplace and telephone service for even the hillbillies of West Virginia, could not Irina have chosen an even moderately attractive girl to spike me into? I hate this hair more than I have words for. Twenty years ago, we were bobbing our hair and pinning it with papers. Now it’s tongs or permanent waves. And mine simply will not take a curl. Are you even listening?”

  I removed the paper, sat up, and looked at her.

  “And glasses! Look at me! I’m hideous.”

  Bréch, our three-year-old Samoyed, lifted his head, thumped his tail once, and put his head back down. I’d have liked to do the same.

  “Let me,” I said, “take this in reverse order. In the second place, you are not hideous. You are delightfully attractive. Witness the, ah, ardor of, well, pretty much every night. But in the first place, is that really what you think Irina should have looked for in a recruit? No, no; can’t have that genius with the heart of gold, her hair is too straight.”

  “Your ardor has nothing to do with me, Don Juan. And yes, I think Irina could have looked harder for my recruit. She’s always been selfish, and I don’t think she’s ever liked me. I know coeds aren’t plentiful, and yes, an Incrementalist must be intelligent before all else, but Pretty has a power Smart does not. Could I not gather switches more quickly by batting my lashes than grubbing through microfilm? I can’t very well do the kind of work I need to for the organization if I’m only hireable at the back of the bank. I’m not even pretty enough to be a teller!”

  I made myself stop grinding my teeth, because Celeste always noticed that. I said, “My ardor has everything to do with you. And—” I stopped. “You know what, Celeste? You’ve hit on something. Why is it so bloody important to be pretty, with such a narrow definition of pretty? That’s something we could work on. Plant a few ideas here and there. Meddle with some fashion magazine editors. Hollywood. Pretty is nothing, and needing pretty is shallow. We could work with that. And quit glaring, you are pretty. Very.”

  “You’re talking out both sides of your mouth, dear Janus. You offer your ardor as proof of my beauty, then argue beauty doesn’t matter to you. But I watch you, and your eyes don’t follow the ugly girls at the club.”