After dinner, they went for drinks and wound up in the Latin American Club, right under the mannequin with the merkin. “Oh, look,” Serafina said. “It’s your friend.” He followed her line of sight and spotted Patricia, with an African-American guy in a black velvet coat covered with elaborate piping. After a moment, Laurence recognized the dude she’d been talking to at Rod Birch’s house. Patricia waved at them, and they waved back. Laurence didn’t know whether he and Serafina ought to be intruding on Patricia’s date or whether he wanted her intruding on theirs, and he worried Patricia was going to lecture him about the planet again. But Patricia beckoned them over, and Serafina went.
Patricia’s date was named Kevin, and he was a Monty Python–quoting Anglophile who walked dogs and worked in a café—but his real job was creating a webcomic, which Laurence had read a few times.
“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”
“The comics I read were funny in their own right,” said Laurence. “So you totally screwed up.”
“You are destroying me,” said Kevin.
Patricia was telling Serafina that she’d just quit a terrible catering gig, but now she’d gotten a new job at one of the fancy Mission bakeries, where they were using locally sourced organic grains not just to be fancy, but out of necessity since the Great Midwestern Dustbath. “I love to bake, so this is perfect.”
Serafina liked baking, too, but she was lousy at it. “I made this cake once and it caved in, and I thought my kid brother had stepped on it in the oven. I beat him up for like an hour before I realized I just forgot to put in enough of that stuff.”
“You mean flour,” Patricia said.
“Yeah, flour.” Serafina smiled.
There was a long silence. Kevin cleared his throat like he was going to say something clever, but then he thought better of it.
Laurence still itched all over, thinking about how he’d tried to lecture Serafina about her job at dinner and now she was forced to hang out with his middle-school friend. He needed a patch for this date. Not to mention, he felt some random need to prove to Patricia that he wasn’t a total jerkface.
While they waited for drinks, Laurence tried telling Patricia all about Serafina’s emotional robots—then realized halfway through that talking about Serafina in the third person didn’t make her seem cool, but just made it seem like Laurence thought she couldn’t speak for herself.
“Patricia seemed cool,” Serafina said afterward, as she and Laurence sat in Humphry Slocombe and shared some Secret Breakfast, that weird ice cream with the cornflakes and whiskey in it.
“You didn’t really get to see what’s cool about her.” Laurence scooped some ice cream.
“Obviously I did, since I already said I thought she was cool.”
“It’s weird to see someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and it brings back all sorts of stuff. I was such a loser, you wouldn’t believe.” (When talking about middle school, Laurence had long since learned it was best not even to mention that he believed he’d created artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet, even as a funny story. It just made him sound like an asshat.)
They finished their ice cream. Which, ice cream with whiskey in it might not have been the best idea after three beers at the Latin American. Laurence was seeing a lot of floaters and his head was only getting fuzzier, plus he felt a deep unrest in the pit of his stomach.
“So what’s going on?” Serafina said. “I feel like there was some subtext to this evening that I missed.”
Laurence thought of saying that he didn’t know whether subtext was an emotional state or a mental state or even what the exact difference between the two things might be. But he bit his tongue and said, “I feel as though I’m on probation. I mean, in this relationship.”
“Huh. News to me.” Serafina shrugged. Her eyes widened and her lower lip curled inward as she looked at her boyfriend. Her red highlights glistened under the fluorescent hipster-ice-cream-store lights. She looked so beautiful and so filled with curiosity, Laurence felt a brand-new pang of love for her. He was ready to open himself up to her, something that did not come naturally to him. Her callused and manicured fingers toyed with the unladen ice-cream spoon.
“Have I said or done anything to give you the idea that you’re on probation?” she asked.
Laurence searched his memory for a moment, then shook his head. “I guess I just decided I was. I don’t know why.”
“This is weirding me out. I mean, I feel like our communication has sucked for, I don’t know, a month or so. But maybe it was worse than I knew.” Serafina massaged her own temples, pinching the skin on either side of her eyebrows.
“So … I’m not on probation then?”
“Well…” Serafina stopped mortar-and-pestling her forehead and looked him in the eye. “I guess you are now.”
“Oh.” Well played, Armstead.
18
PATRICIA COULDN’T GET that image out of her head: Laurence dropping out of the sky and waving money around, boasting that he would Save the World by writing off the planet. Even if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, the video clip was all over the net afterward. Patricia shouldn’t be surprised that Laurence had turned into an entitled yuppie. This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? To be admired, to have everybody get his name right. Patricia kept feeling annoyed, until she realized maybe she was jealous. She spent so much energy keeping her good deeds secret, it was hard to watch someone else show off. Lately, the other witches were always on her case about Aggrandizement, no matter how hard she tried to be humble.
Patricia found herself still obsessing about Laurence as she slid on knee-high leather boots and a black babydoll dress with red sparkles and went to an Irish bar in the Financial District to put a curse on someone.
Patricia sucked at walking in spike heels, and kept almost wiping out as she strode inside the stuffy, blaring pub and tried to recognize Garrett Borg from the picture Kawashima had e-mailed her. In person, Garrett looked like a once-hot Alpine ski instructor gone to seed, with very fair hair and a blue double-breasted suit that camouflaged his pudge. He was halfway passed out at the bar, drooling into the Guinness towel but still raising his head to pour more high-end Scotch into his mouth with his free hand every few moments.
In theory, Patricia shouldn’t need to know why she was hitting this guy—Kawashima had ordered it, and that ought to be enough for her. But Kawashima had included some other pictures along with Garrett’s head shot: the coroner’s photos of the teenage girls he’d left buried in an old culvert along the I-90, nearly matching bruise marks on their necks and inner thighs. So Patricia was properly motivated when she slid onto the leather-top stool next to Garrett and whispered in his ear. “I bet you’ll have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. But you know what? I know the best hangover remedy there is. This shit will cure anything.” She made it sound miraculous, but also sexy and illicit. He popped both the pills she gave him without hesitation. Then she helped him into a cab, and he went home to Pacific Heights, to sleep it off. She hadn’t lied: The shit she’d given him would indeed cure anything.
There was zero chance that Patricia would sleep after putting a curse on someone. But she would be careful and would follow Kawashima’s advice to avoid overreaching. She knew why they were so worried about her going off the rails: She could still see Toby’s corpse when she closed her eyes. The janky expression, like Toby was about to sit up and tell a dirty joke.
Patricia had to crouch down to talk to a confused marmalade cat, who needed help finding his way home. (He remembered what his house looked like on the inside, but not on the outside.) Patricia
checked on Jake the krokodil junkie, who seemed stable now, give or take, and then she cruised the St. Mary’s emergency room, looking for people to heal on the down-low. She spent a couple hours trying to compose a letter to the Parks Department on behalf of some gophers whose burrow was being disturbed, pointlessly, by some inept landscaping in Golden Gate Park. It took a lot of concentration to translate from gopher language into bureaucratese.
Right about now, Garrett Borg would be evaporating into a whiskey-scented cloud over his heart-shaped bed.
Patricia ended up at the edge of the Park, on Fulton. Staring at the warm dirt, so full of life, between her pointy toes. She wasn’t pacing herself, after all. She dug in her bag for her phone and peered at the screen. There was nobody for her to call at three in the morning. Even at three in the afternoon, there would have been nobody to call. Maybe Kevin, her ambiguous friend-with-benefits/boyfriend? She was trying not to crowd him. The traffic light at the edge of her vision changed primary colors. It was another hot, itchy night.
An owl landed on a branch nearby, without a sound. “Hello,” Patricia said. The owl blinked at the sound of her voice.
“If I can see you, so can others,” the owl said.
“I’m not trying to hide, exactly,” Patricia said. The owl shrugged with its whole body, like it was Patricia’s funeral, then flew off again because there were some gophers with an imperfect burrow not far away.
Just as Patricia was rallying to pull her butt out of the dirt and go home, someone sat on the low stone wall and blocked her view of the street. A man. She almost hid, but decided not to bother.
It was Laurence, and he was crying into a napkin with a picture of a woman inside a cocktail glass. Patricia almost walked away—Laurence would never even know she’d been there—until her Healer instinct kicked in.
Patricia made as much noise as possible coming up behind Laurence, so as not to sneak up on him. But he still jumped off the wall so hard, he fell and skinned one knee. Patricia helped him up and braced him, then steered him back to the wall where he’d been sitting.
“Oh hey,” Laurence said, making sense of her features. “It’s you.” This was the first time she’d seen the grown-up Laurence act anything but cocky. Hunched over, flushed, he looked more like the Laurence she remembered.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just went for drinks with my coworkers, and I’m kind of a maudlin drunk.” He paused. “But also … I feel like I’m screwing up everything. I’m losing my girlfriend. Serafina. You met her, she’s amazing. And meanwhile, I have all these people expecting me to work miracles, and I can only accomplish so much with asinine stunts like the one you witnessed. My boss—Milton—is counting on me, my supersmart team is counting on me, but most of all, I made a promise to myself. I always thought that if I just had the chance, I could change everything—and it turns out that maybe, I’m just not good enough. So I resort to trying to trick people into thinking I’m a ‘wunderkind,’ to make up for the fact that I can’t actually figure out anything. Jesus.”
Patricia climbed up the slope and over the wall Laurence was sitting on. She had a flashback of the teenaged Laurence telling her that the power to make everyone see an illusory version of yourself would royally suck.
Laurence scooted over, to give Patricia more room on his chunk of wall. “And I was just thinking about my parents. I looked down on them for so long, for being failures. I was kind of horrible to them. And I was just thinking that maybe one day I would understand why they chose to fail, but it would be too late. Or a realization I’d rather not have.”
“My life plan involves never understanding my parents,” Patricia said. “That’s like the cornerstone. You met them, you saw what they were like. I’m dedicated to not being the person they wanted to make me.”
“Yes.” Laurence laughed: a queasy drunk laugh, but still a laugh. “You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“How about you?” Laurence stood up and got oriented, only swaying a tad. “What are you doing out on your own at this hour on a school night?”
“Working.” Patricia stood up too. She was going to get Laurence home in one piece and then crash. “I work long hours.”
“You work alone?” Laurence said.
They straggled down the hill toward the Haight, where there would be taxis cruising for kids leaving the latest Seoul relief fund-raiser.
“I do everything alone,” Patricia said. “I went to this small, claustrophobic school called Eltisley Maze. So I’m still kind of enjoying going solo in a big city where nobody knows who I am. You know? I feel like that’s what being a grown-up ought to be like.”
She got them a cab, which dropped Laurence off first. Laurence shoved a twenty at Patricia on his way out the car door and tripped over his seat belt. She watched him attack his front steps with his shins and felt something like protectiveness. She made the cab wait until he got inside his house.
* * *
THE WHOLE DRIVE to Sacramento, the other witches found ways to lecture Patricia about Aggrandizement. She sat in the back of Kawashima’s Lexus, watching the highway whip past, as Kawashima hectored her about making herself too important and using her power too recklessly. Dorothea chimed in every now and then with one of her jarring untruths, like, “You threw pebbles at my window, but they turned into grenades in midair.” (Dorothea was an old Catholic lady with white-streaked black hair, chunky glasses, and long calico skirts who never, ever told the truth, except maybe in Confessional.)
By the time they arrived, Patricia felt like a monster, and she kept picturing Toby’s frostbitten body, lying in the airship.
The others were doing important witch business in Sacramento, so Patricia had time to wander around in the scorching midday sun and read on her phone about the French blight, the chaos on the Korean peninsula, the new, deadlier Atlantic superstorms. All things she could do nothing about. Then her peripheral vision landed on a homeless man on the sidewalk. He was staring at her, empty Big Gulp cup in one hand. She turned and looked him over: his torn muddy coat and soiled track pants, his disease and malnourishment. His cardboard sign was so tattered and faded, nobody could decipher it. He was covered with a layer of grime, but also cobwebs and even moss. Normally, if she was out on her own, at night in the city, she would heal someone in this condition without a second thought. But Kawashima and Dorothea were nearby, and she never knew what they would consider Aggrandizement. They never gave her clear-cut guidelines. She edged a little closer, struggling with herself. This man needed her help, it couldn’t be wrong to take the initiative. Could it? She looked into his narrow dark eyes, and she could see his damaged pride, and she reached out—
She realized she was looking at the bony, ravaged face of her junior-high-school guidance counselor, Mr. Rose. She was boiling in her own skin. She nearly threw up.
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Rose croaked. “I will not try to kill you. I couldn’t if I tried. You’ve grown much too powerful, and the years have ruined me. But you must know, I was doing the right thing. I saw a vision of things to come. Patricia, you will be at the center of so much pain. You will betray and you will destroy. If you had even any conscience, you would end your own life right now.”
For so long, she’d imagined this moment. When she was out until dawn night after night, she’d been rehearsing for this. Facing this bloody sadist, showing him she could not be terrorized. But she hadn’t expected him to be so helpless, literally showing his belly. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. She didn’t take in what he was saying at first, about how she should kill herself—and then she had to spit on the pavement.
“Nice try,” she said. But her arms and face burned like the worst poison ivy. “Everything
you ever said to me was a lie,” she told the huddled old man on the sidewalk. “That’s all you do.”
“I had assumed a witch with your power levels could tell if I was lying. Please. Please listen.” He looked up, and Patricia was startled to see tears all over his filthy cheeks. “I killed so many people, but I still couldn’t stand to look upon what you and your friends are going to bring about. Have they told you about the Unraveling yet?”
“The what?” Patricia pulled back. “Forget it. I’m not listening to you anymore.”
“You have to listen! Patricia Delfine, I know you better than anyone.” She backed up until she was up against the parking meters, and he rose from his cardboard mat, waving a bandaged finger. He breathed foulness at her. “I spied on you for months when you were a child. I parked outside your house. I listened to all your conversations, night and day. I know everything. I even know about the Tree!”
“What tree?” Patricia swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ask them about the Unraveling. Ask them! See what they tell you.”
“Oh, fuck me.” Kawashima was approaching from the nearby hardware store, plastic bag swinging from one hand. “You have got to be joking. This asshole, again?”
“Theodolphus,” Dorothea said from behind him, looking at the grimy man. She managed to make just his name into the worst insult.
“You know this guy?” Patricia said.
Kawashima ignored her and said to Theodolphus, “You are just the worst, man. You’re like a bad rash. I thought we killed you a long time ago.”
“I have been as good as dead for many years.” Theodolphus Rose drew himself up, as if he was boasting. “But I needed to warn Miss Delfine here. She was my best student, once. When she was a child, I saw a vision of her grown, as she is now. A vision of destruction. I thought she should know.”
“Let me guess,” Kawashima said. “You huffed some vapors and hallucinated. Right? Visions of the future are always bullshit, and I should know, I’m the biggest bullshit artist around. Dorothea, do you want to do the honors?”
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