Cramer closed his eyes and prayed.
“Greg, it’s Kyle.”
“Kyle, buddy! How the heck are you?”
His eyes were still closed.
“Good. You?”
“Great.”
“Good ... is this a bad time?”
“No. What’s up?”
“Nothing ... well ... something, actually ... I need to talk to you.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s Valentina. She’s ...”
Kyle choked up. Cramer was getting goosebumps now.
“I can’t ... look ... I’d rather not talk on the phone. Could you meet me somewhere?”
“Sure. When?”
“How about tonight? I know it’s short notice.”
“No. No problem. I’m here for you, buddy.”
Cramer took the call off speaker.
“Just tell me what we’re dealing with here. Gloria mentioned a Security matter ...”
Several seconds of silence followed.
“Kyle? You there?”
“Listen, Greg ... I can’t ... I mean ... they’re recording this, aren’t they?”
“What? This call?”
“Yeah.”
“You serious?”
“No?”
“This is Info-Management and Maintenance. Nothing going on down here ...”
Another few seconds of silence followed.
“Still ... I’d rather talk in person.”
“How about Rosie’s? Twenty-one hundred? ”
“Rosie’s ... yeah. I can get there by then.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m on the train.”
“The train?”
“Why? Is that a problem?”
Cramer winced.
“No, no problem. It’s just ... it just doesn’t sound like the train.”
Another excruciating second of silence.
“Let’s talk tonight in person, OK?”
“Sure, no problem, and listen ... Kyle?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever this is, we’ll handle it.”
“Thanks, Greg.”
“Don’t mention it, buddy.”
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Absolutely. You did the right thing.”
Kyle clicked off. Cramer hung up. He sat there a moment, unable to breathe. He closed his eyes and said a quick prayer of gratitude to the One Who Was Many.
Another query came in on his screen.
Withdrawal Symptoms
Approximately forty-three kilometers away, rocketing north through its underground tunnel at three hundred ninety kilometers per hour, the CSR Bombardier Alstom Neumeyer V600 TVR WhisperTrain felt like it was standing still. Whether working or simply relaxing in comfort in your fully-adjustable faux-leather seat, available in First and Business Class coaches, the interiors of which were eerily silent, * you could not detect the slightest vibration, and even on the most precarious of curves there was absolutely zero roll. You could, for example, place a marble on the non-stick surface of your pull-down tray table (assuming, for whatever unfathomable reason, you happened to have a marble with you, and needed to take it our of your pocket), and let it rest there, and stare at it and smile.
The eerily silent Business Class coach of seriously abundant businesspeople featured in the WhisperNet on-board promos apparently felt they needed to do this. One of them, a particularly abundant executive, reached down into his trouser pocket, produced a jade green Cat’s Eye marble, placed it on the surface of his pull-down tray table and sat there and watched it not moving, and smiled. The surrounding businesspeople saw him do this. One by one, they all followed suit. They reached down into their own trouser pockets, or into compartments inside their handbags, and took out marbles and set them down on their silicone-laminated pull-down tray-tables, which in Business Class featured a faux-wood veneer. Then they all sat there, smiling at their marbles, looking superior to other people who were fairly but not yet seriously abundant and so were not riding in the Business Class coaches of V600 TVR WhisperTrains moving at hundreds of kilometers an hour, feeling like they were standing still.
Valentina was one of these people, these fairly but not yet seriously abundant people who, for whatever reasons, found themselves without any marbles, and were thus unable to look superior to those who didn’t but nevertheless could travel at hundreds of kilometers an hour and feel like they were standing still. Which at approximately 1053 o’clock on the morning of officially 27 February (so two weeks prior to Cramer’s fortuitous phone call from Kyle, which of course was recorded) was precisely what Valentina was doing. That, and employing all her powers of concentration and mental discipline to act like a passably normal person and not compulsively masturbate in public. The previous night she had lain awake, with Kyle in bed beside her, snoring, devising an assortment of clever ruses to use that day to pass for normal, most of which, upon awakening, she’d realized she’d completely forgotten. She had, however, remembered to purchase the two adjacent single seats, one a window, the other an aisle, three rows aft of the mid-coach toilets. If all else failed she could reach those toilets in three or four steps, squeeze inside, lock the door, which was on a timer, and compulsively masturbate for up to ten minutes. This wasn’t so much a ruse, really, as much as a kind of failsafe measure. The ruses had all been much more clever. She remembered there being an assortment of them, none of which she could remember at the moment. Except for the one about buying two seats, which she’d already done, so that was good. She sensed that a lot of the other ruses, of which there had definitely been an assortment, had had something to do with avoiding other people, most of whom would want to make conversation, and tell her all about their lives and families, and ask her her name and her husband’s name, and whether she’d seen the latest episode of 15 Minutes, or Blowback, or Quandary, none of which episodes she would have seen, which would seem suspicious to these other people, and would make them nervous, which would make her nervous, which would make her want to compulsively masturbate.
Fortunately, even in her current condition, Valentina was not without resources. Sipping her raspberry tea that morning, with Kyle at the table beside her, scanning, she’d devised a simpler, if guileless strategy, which had worked thus far and to which she was sticking. This strategy consisted of gazing “out” of the “window” at which she was currently sitting, in Economy Class on the Northbound Orange, at Late Winter Landscape (Morning) 40. Out the window (which wasn’t a window) bursts of sunlight were flashing between the ice glazed branches of a stand of birches that were reeling past at a distance of maybe fifteen meters ... or so it seemed. Across the aisle, out the opposite window, a second sun was rising over a distant stretch of desert mesas, turning the sky all red and orange. Valentina was watching this happen in the make-up mirror she was secretly using to check behind her every ten or twelve seconds while never once turning around in her seat. **
A slightly dampened simulated bell-tone sounded three times. Valentina glanced up. The LED creeper that announced the stops read, “Breckenridge Village - 15 minutes.” She slipped the mirror into her purse, nonchalantly adjusted her sunglasses, and went back to gazing “idly” out the “window.” Her All-in-One started bleating frantically. She snatched her purse up, thrust her hand in, felt for it, found it, and dismissed the reminder. It was time to take her Zanoflaxithorinal. She dug around in the bottom of her purse, found her pill bottle, popped the cap, fingered a pill out, palmed it deftly, pretended to take it, closed her pill bottle, and dropped both the pill and bottle into her purse. The depths of her purse, which were always a rat’s nest of lipsticks, pill bottles, mirrors, swipe cards, tissues, brushes, hair-ties, and so on, was littered with pills she had deftly palmed and pretended to take, and had not taken. She needed to gather and dispose of these pills, but she hadn’t decided how to do that safely. Flushing them down the toilet was out. She’d tried that early on, and it had worked, but one day one of the pills wa
shed back and sat there down at the bottom of the bowl just waiting for Kyle to come in and find it, and fish it out, and bring it to her, holding it up in front of her face pinched between his thumb and forefinger, raise his eyebrows in that way she dreaded, and ask her what was going on. Other awkward questions would follow ... like what in the name of the One was she thinking, or had she maybe forgotten what happened to people who went off their medication ?
Seasoned medical professional that she was, Valentina knew what happened to people who went off their medication. Their nervous systems, suddenly deprived of the excessive levels of serotonin, benzodiazepine, and other substances, to which they had all become accustomed, melted down and eventually crashed. This meltdown was usually a gradual process, and was different for each individual patient. The result, however, was always the same, “extended loss of contact with reality,” or full-blown, bug-eyed, raving psychosis. Along the road to shrieking lunacy, these patients experienced any of a number of extremely unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, among them, insomnia, nausea, confusion, dyspnea, tremors, excessive sweating, heart palpitations, hallucinations, and something known as cranial zings, which felt like electric shocks to the brain.
Eight weeks into her first trimester, Valentina was experiencing them all. Fortunately, up to this point in our story, her experience of all these various symptoms (and other symptoms, which we’ll get to shortly) was mostly an interior state of affairs. Again, being a medical professional, she had known they were coming, and had steeled herself for them, and developed various strategies to hide them, most of which seemed to be working, so far. Following her transient psychotic episode (or spiritual awakening, as Valentina saw it) descending into the nether regions of 6262 Lomax Avenue, she’d pulled herself together enough to play the happy, expectant mother for Kyle, the Fosters, Doctor Fraser, the helpful staff at Paxton Wills, her father, her colleagues, random strangers, and everyone else who possibly mattered. Her nausea, insomnia, and even her sweating, which had risen to the level of profuse at times, had been attributed to her early pregnancy, hormonal fluctuations, and such. She’d even learned to grit her teeth and smile through the horrible cranial zings, which felt like lightning was striking her head, but they never lasted all that long. The much more serious problem had been (and continued to be) her hallucinations, or delusions of reference, and her paranoia, which were harder to conceal, and which were steadily worsening.
After the first few days off her meds (she had started flushing them that very day, the day of The Lomax Escalator Vision), it began to seem to Valentina (although she knew it wasn’t real at the time) like all the other Variant-Positives, people over thirty, had disappeared. Well, OK, not quite disappeared ... there were, of course, still Variant-Positives, like Kyle, and Susan Foster, and so on, but there were also, suddenly, hordes of Clears. Droves, legions, multitudes of them ... or maybe they had always been there and she’d simply never noticed them before. In any event, they were everywhere now ... roving in perfect lockstep packs down Pewter Palisades’ manicured Main Street, pouring down the aisles of stores toward her, their perfect hair and nails and skin tone, smiling like electric eels, blue eyes staring out of video screens, adolescent and teenage Clears, married young-professional Clears, pushing their double and triple load prams of cooing, blue-eyed baby Clears, who never cried or soiled themselves, and who looked right through her and saw her sickness ... saw what she was planning to do.
Nights, she sat home flipping channels (i.e., not even bothering to program a stream) ... and there they were, on every channel, staring at her, knowing, judging, speaking in code, emphasizing WORDS ... pretending they were talking to each other in some SHOW that had nothing to do with her, but what they were really talking about was whether she was experiencing PROBLEMS getting a clear and consistent SIGNAL or whether her RECEPTION of this secret SIGNAL was badly DISTORTED and needed ADJUSTMENT in which case they’d be happy to send A REPAIR CREW out to check her EQUIPMENT ...
Kyle was concerned. Which was inconvenient. Or whenever he was home it was. Not that he was home all that often. During the week it was mostly just to sleep a few hours and gulp down breakfast. Bloomberg Virtual Community College had just been acquired by EduSolutions, a market-leading Content Provider, and was undergoing serious restructuring. Entire departments were being marched out into the quad each morning and summarily streamlined. Squads of corporate efficiency consultants were roaming the halls with lists of names of associate professors they wanted delayered. Kyle was helping to point them out. Sometimes he was also helping to keep them as calm as humanly possibly as the squads escorted them down to the gym they had retrofitted for the mass delayerings. All of which was somewhat stressful, and involved a lot of face-time for Kyle, which had made it easier for Valentina to hole up in the house all week, not go to lunch with Susan Foster, not take her pills, and compulsively masturbate.
Sundays were the major problem. Kyle was almost always home, and bent on making up for his absence and lack of attention to Valentina’s needs by following her around the house all day listening to whatever she might have to say with demonstrably intense and unflagging interest. She had made it clear that this was not called for, and that she knew he loved her, and cared, and so on, and was busy at work, which she understood, and she knew he was generally more than happy to listen to whatever she had to say with demonstrably intense and unflagging interest, but she didn’t really have that much to say, and she really wasn’t feeling all that well, which was normal during the first trimester, and was probably just going to take a nap, so why didn’t Kyle just watch some Content.
Which, early on, he had usually done. *** However, as the hot winter weeks oozed by, and Valentina’s symptoms worsened, and an unmistakeable tone of sarcasm gradually crept into her voice (a tone which now apparently accompanied every other thing she said), Kyle had become increasingly concerned. Now, no matter where she went to hide from him, after ten to fifteen minutes, he would appear in whatever room she was in, lean against the door frame and stare at her. This was meant to show concern, and not annoyance or disappointment.
“How are you feeling?” he’d ask her, gravely.
“You asked me twenty minutes ago, Kyle.”
“Sorry, I just …”
“What?”
“Nothing. I thought …”
“What? That I was wrong before ... that I only thought I was feeling nauseated?”
This was meant to drive him away. It never worked.
“Can I get you something?”
“Something like what? ”
“Have you eaten anything?”
“Nauseated, Kyle.”
“Well, have you taken anything?”
“Like what?”
“A pill?”
“I took my pills. You saw me take them.”
“I meant for your stomach.”
“I’m pregnant, Kyle.”
“I know. I know …”
Silence invariably ensued at this point.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just ...”
“Concerned?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I’m worried, OK? You’re sitting in here in the bedroom again.”
“Where am I supposed to be sitting?”
“Nowhere.”
“I’m not supposed to be sitting.”
“No. It’s just ... do you hear what you sound like?”
“Why don’t you tell me what I sound like, again.”
“You sound like …”
Another protracted silence.
“Say it, Kyle. Say it already.”
“Forget it.”
“Say it. I sound like my mother.”
This is how it went most Sundays. Kyle was growing increasingly concerned. Despite her attempts to deflect, evade, avoid, and deny his non-accusations, Valentina did sound like her mother, or like what her mother used to sound like before she took up permanent residence at Breckenridge V
illage, “a Retirement Community.” Her mother didn’t sound like anything currently. She hadn’t uttered one word for years, or otherwise attempted to communicate with anyone. She just kind of sat there and stared out the window.
Valentina understood Kyle’s feelings, his mounting frustration, his disappointment. Here they were, finally pregnant (which she knew Kyle had always secretly assumed was the underlying cause of all her problems), and not only had this not fixed Valentina (which she knew was how he secretly saw it), somehow it had made things worse. He had missed her completely at Paxton Wills that fateful day in late December, the day of her Lomax Escalator Vision. By the time he got there she was locked in the bathroom of a northbound train she had boarded at random. He frantically messaged, and fleeped and tweaked, and buzzed and called, but she did not answer. Naturally, he’d assumed the worst. Once Doctor Fraser had told him the news, he’d breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and assumed Valentina wasn’t answering her phone simply because she needed some space to process the emotional pain he had caused by unavoidably missing their appointment (which he knew was getting to be a pattern, and had already set a reminder to work on). He’d stopped in the lobby and picked up two dozen jumbo thornless long-stemmed roses and a magnum of non-alcoholic champagne. Then he’d hurried home to Marigold Lane, where Valentina was not waiting. She’d staggered in around 2200 looking like she’d been been been caught in a windstorm. She informed him she wasn’t sure where she’d been, walking, thinking, she didn’t know where. He gave her the flowers. She smiled wanly. Things had gone downhill from there.
She’d toughed it out at work through the holidays, maxing out her personal days, white-knuckled her way through the month of January, and had finally taken the standard unpaid maternity leave that everyone got, effective as of 01 February. This had come as a huge relief, to Valentina, as well as her colleagues. In early January she had botched a number of routine liver and colon biopsies, mutilating the tissue samples in ways that were somewhat hard to explain. Moreover, without the Zanoflaxithorinal to level them out, her emotions were raging. Any little thing would set her off. She would be in the middle of zapping dinner, or resecting a cancerous prostate or bladder, and out of nowhere she’d break down sobbing ... or the paranoia would rise up inside her, scaling her spine like a poisonous spider, and she would have to run and hide in the bathroom, often for extremely lengthy periods. Once inside she’d double over and wail and moan and make these faces that looked like she was undergoing an unanesthetized lumbar puncture, which was how the compulsive masturbation had started .
Zone 23 Page 17