A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Is that all?”

  “No, it is not all. If you work with us, you work with us. I don’t question my orders. You will not question yours.”

  “Then I won’t work with you. I don’t like having other people imposing their rules on me.”

  Up go his eyebrows. “You’re a teacher, Ms. Nagazy. Seems to me there are lots of rules for teachers. This is scarcely more onerous.” Which is a huge lie.

  I get snippy. “Society’s rules, as you call them, are the expectations of these children’s parents. Which I understand. They’re simple. ‘Protect my kid. Teach him.’ Not complicated, and not confidential. I don’t want to find out halfway through this that I’m helping you rub this guy out or something.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. “Rub him out” is a phrase nobody uses anymore.

  He looks stuffy. “Such a decision would never come through my agency.”

  “So you do kill people.”

  “I do not,” he growls.

  “If Katterfelto dies, I’ll know it’s my fault. No thanks,” I say with finality.

  “I assure you that this is not your concern.”

  “I assure you, it is.” I straighten, and lie with outrage trembling in my voice. “I do not kill people or make myself accessory to killing people. There’s this little thing called right and wrong.” I should shut up, but he’s so determined to put me in my place. “My students’ parents will not be happy if they find out their teacher helped a government agency murder somebody.”

  “It’s not murder if the government does it.”

  “Believe me, from down here among the ants, it looks just like murder. My parents would think it was murder.”

  He bears down. “If they find out any such thing, you’ll be in serious trouble for breaching confidentiality.”

  “I’m already in serious trouble for saying No to you. No thanks.”

  He cracks a smile, and his whole face transforms. “Aw c’mon, Ms. Nagazy, give me a chance. You don’t even know what he’s doing yet.”

  He almost had me. If he had left it at “give me a chance.” Agent Jones is good at persuasion.

  I say, more patiently than before because he really has a nice smile, “Reason number two to say no. If our conversation proceeds much farther, I will know more than you want me to know unless I’m in. You have some set of rules that you think governs me here. And I don’t know what those rules are. And yet, you get to decide when I know so much that I’m automatically in, or else. No.”

  “You’ve watched too many spy movies.”

  “Too many for your good, certainly.”

  He looks human, kind of adorable, and now he’s maneuvered me into liking him and I’m talking too much.

  I stand up. “I have to get back to my kids.”

  I look at him carefully from head to toe, putting scorn in my eyes so that it isn’t obvious that I’m memorizing him, his regulation square jaw and thick neck, his brown eyes and broken nose, his jug ears, his smell of soap and old leather and gun oil and hot man. If he turns up again in my life, say, at my bar, in disguise, I’ll remember him. “Don’t ever approach me again, please.”

  He says, “You know you can’t expect an agent of the government to leave you alone.”

  “You know that in the world of nice people,” I say icily, “among us ignorant little ants down here on the anthill, when a woman tells a man to leave her alone, period, she is now within her rights to call a cop if he bugs her again.”

  “The police won’t protect you from agency interest.”

  “Gotcha. Again.” I throw him a sneer and walk out.

  I feel flustered, but I’m calm on the outside as I teach the next class. My two worst boys are home with the flu, so I don’t have to work past four o’clock.

  So I go visit Ma at the hospital.

  Never have I wished so much that I could ask her to play Mommy for me.

  Chapter Four

  Traffic is insane. The expressway is packed up tight, and the pink smog is so thick I’m afraid to open the windows. I turn on the radio. “Ask Your Shrink,” the soothing rush-hour show, is just ending, leaving me feeling friendless in the murk. By the time I get to the hospital, I’m a wreck. At the sight of my Ma, I just wanna bawl.

  But paranoia holds me back. I’m thinking, Is this room bugged? There’s so many unfamiliar machines in Jilly’s hospital room that a bug the size of a dime would never be noticed.

  “How was school today, honey?” Jilly says. She’s alone, which surprises me.

  “Where’s Tuesday bridge with the gay nurses?” I say.

  “The boys are vacationing in Mexico.” She sighs and casts a glance up at the storks and instruments ranged around her bed. “Wish I could go with them.”

  Take me along, I think, but I don’t say it. Part of the deal is, I’m the responsible one who stays home and works.

  “What’s the matter?” This is my sharp-eyed ma.

  Jilly was a radical in the sixties. She was on J. Edgar Hoover’s list by the time I was seven. She understands living on the fringe, in the shadows. That’s why she won’t apply for Medicare, or register for the Do Not Call list. She barely fills out a tax return. It’s from her that I get my instinct for self preservation. One of the things she taught me was that in a paranoid world, one of the best protections is being Way Out There.

  She doesn’t say a word while I bite my lip and think all this. Something has set off Ma’s instinct, too, and I am at once anxious for her and deeply, childishly grateful.

  Because I need Mommy right now, big time.

  I blurt it out. “A Federal agent approached me today. At work. He wants me to spy on somebody.”

  “What? On somebody at work?”

  “No.”

  If Agent Jones is listening, he’s kicking himself for revealing even this much. I hope he’s writing me off as a blabbermouth who runs and tells the first person she sees. Surely I can’t be trusted not to say too much to Dr. Katterfelto, too. I’ve realized that Agent Jones could destroy me at work, at the school, without ever even knowing the worst truth about me. All he has to do is draw attention to the fact that my personnel records at the school have claimed that I’m twenty-four for three consecutive years now.

  But it’s a risk I have to take.

  Ma says, “Do you know what he did to get on their radar? The guy they want you to spy on?”

  I chicken out. “Agent Nick didn’t say.”

  “Did he show you any ID?”

  I think. “Shoot. No, he didn’t. I’m an idiot!” I slap my head.

  “Doesn’t matter, honey,” Jilly says, and she sounds so relaxed that I begin to relax too. Ma could relax on the Titanic. “Half the time they show you an ID for one agency and they’re with another. What agency did he say he’s with?”

  “Some magic study slash investigation thing. Which is to laugh.”

  I do laugh, with relief, because I live in such shadow that it hadn’t occurred to me that all the private citizens I’ve ever met who study magic couldn’t find their asses with both hands. The government won’t be able to make a dent. Probably they have huge databases full of incidents and names and pictures, but I’m positive that if they had any expertise whatsoever, they wouldn’t be sending bozos like my friend Jones to terrorize schoolteachers. They’d be too busy annexing anyone with magical knowledge or power into their own agency, before somebody else’s agency could get ’em.

  Then it occurs to me that maybe they know Katterfelto is onto something, and they want to control him, and so far they can’t. Or else their investigation hasn’t gone far enough and they want me to help them figure out how to annex him.

  Then, deep paranoid thought, it occurs to me to wonder if they know what I am.

  I could be very useful to a secret agency with governmentally-sanctioned murders to commit. When I suck somebody all the way down, they turn into a gray powder and blow away.

  I feel the blood drain out of my face, and my hands
go cold.

  “Honey, it’s all right.” Ma puts her hand over mine. Her hand is like a hot coal. “Just say no.”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then. I guess you just have to wait and see. They can’t make you play along if you don’t want to.”

  “Jilly, I don’t want to be a Federal agent. Or a shill for a Federal agency. I don’t want anything to do with them.”

  “Oh, baby, you don’t have to.” She takes me in her arms, carefully, and I hold very still so I don’t jostle any of her needles or drip feeds.

  I shiver in her hot, hot arms. “Hold me, Ma.”

  Jilly holds me and I stop thinking for a few minutes because it feels so good.

  Then I remember what I am. God, after forty-three years of this crap, you’d think I would remember. My own mother.

  I pull myself free with a jerk. I step back from the bed.

  Ma looks at me with sympathy in her eyes, and I know she’s thinking, My poor little cold daughter, she can’t accept affection, I wonder what happened to her to be like this, she used to be so affectionate when she was a child.

  I’m not telepathic. I’ve just lived with her for fifty years.

  “Ma. How do I convince these guys that I will never, ever help them?”

  “You may have convinced him already.”

  “Yeah, and maybe not,” I say through a tight throat.

  She sighs. “Well, you’ve already come running to me and blabbed the whole thing. If they’re bugging this room, then they know you’re a terrible security risk.”

  I look at her in shock. Once again, she’s way ahead of me.

  “If that’s not enough, you could always warn their target, the victim, whatever you call the poor schmuck they’re trying to spy on. Tell him they’ve approached you to do this. Did they tell you who it is?”

  I nod slowly. The nurse opens the door and comes in. Deliberately raising my voice, I say, “It’s some guy named Katterfelto. He’s on cable and the web, this sort of pollyanna idiot who talks a lot of nonsense about magic.”

  Actually, I’m thinking that Katterfelto talks a lot of sense about magic in a way that no one else online does. That’s why I’ve spent so much time at his site. Jones picked his victim well when he contacted me.

  It occurs to me that I’ve been working myself up to contacting Katterfelto myself, and I wonder if Jones isn’t smarter than he looks — or the people who spy on my internet activity are. Might not be Jones himself. It’s hard to imagine the size of the infrastructure behind these guys, if you only see one agent. I’m sure that’s why they make the contact through one agent.

  Paranoia isn’t pretty.

  “Jilly, I’m screwed up. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’ll figure it out.” She pats my hand. “You’re my very intelligent girl.”

  I smile at her and the nurse comes in and unhooks her from about six things and she goes to the bathroom, chattering the whole way about the nurse’s kids and the Bulls game and the price of gasoline, a thing she hasn’t had to worry about since they took her license away fifteen years ago.

  I go home. I have to feed my cat.

  Chapter Five

  Another tense half hour through pink smog gets me home.

  I feed the cat. The cat acts like she’s never been fed, ever, and then she slumps off and hides under the La-Z-Boy. She must have crapped somewhere again. I swear, some people’s cats are cuddly and use the box. Why does mine have to be antisocial and incontinent?

  I find the cat crap, eventually. It’s in my dirty laundry hamper. I count to ten, clean it up, and leave the cat a few extra kibbles.

  Then I walk around the corner to my bar. I need anaesthetic.

  Shawn, my current bartender, is on duty, thank God. He serves me without carding me now.

  Shawn mixes me two Irish car bombs with Kahlua added, which I put away as fast as I can, and then he sets me up with straight Irish whisky and keeps ’em coming.

  I often need brain-numbing. Three things do it for me: Exercise, sex, and alcohol.

  Exercise is the best one. Hence roller derby. Public derby bouts are the best, because I get the exercise, which is at a manic level, and the wonderful, delicious, glorious, guilt-free prana generated by our skating.

  Then there’s sex. The scary one. God, I haven’t had sex in ages. The men who appeal to me above-the-neck are too old to look at a girl who looks as young as I do. And if they are willing to look at a seventeen-year-old, that means they’re creeps who hope to sleep with somebody who doesn’t know what sex is supposed to be like.

  Not that I do. Only tried it the once.

  You’ve heard that term “suck him dry”? The literal version of that is horrific when it happens in medias fuckus.

  So, no sex. I have to be too careful about taking in prana whenever I do it. Which is why I live in a state of constant starvation. And horniness.

  But alcohol. Alcohol numbs my brain, thank God. I don’t like drinking alone. Hence the importance of befriending a bartender who can be convinced that I am either twenty-one or a very persistent, mature, underage drinker with impeccable fake ID.

  Chapter Six

  I’ve told Dr. Springe just about everything. She doesn’t claim to believe or disbelieve, which is very shrinky of her. In my first session I said point blank, “I’m an energy vampire,” and she tried to make me prove it by sucking on her, and I refused. Since then she has respected me, I think. It’s hard to tell. She’s very professional, if a little cold.

  She’s one of the few people I meet who seem older than me. I don’t mean older than seventeen, I mean older than fifty.

  I feel sometimes like Dr. Springe could tell me more about me than I know myself. Not because she’s a shrink. But because she seems to have been around the block more than twice. She’s no stranger to the kinked-up mess that is magic in the real world.

  Today she notices right way that I’m agitated. I spill it. “Somebody came to my school, a Federal agent. I thought I’d been busted. Scared the poo out of me.”

  “A Federal agent? FBI?”

  “No, some magic investigation division. His name is Jones. He wants me to spy on someone here in Chicago.”

  Dr. Springe stiffens. She says carefully, “Spy upon whom?” She tries to pretend that English is her first language, but it isn’t. I’m thinking French. She’s too professional to answer personal questions.

  “Some dude named Katterfelto.”

  Dr. Springe relaxes. “Ah, yes.”

  “He’s got a website, which is how Agent Jones caught me, by watching traffic to the site. Katterfelto is a real goofball. He’s high on happiness or something.”

  Dr. Springe nods. She’s a magic student, too, partly because she’s a shrink and half her patients have problems in the same ballpark as mine, if not quite so far over the fence, and partly because she does a rush hour radio talk show about how there is no magic so we should all relax.

  The city doesn’t pay her to do the show, but I know da mayor approves. It’s an open secret in Chicago that you don’t ask, you don’t tell, you cope with the magic that’s infesting the world. And people who don’t cope, or who complain too loudly, well, they don’t seem to complain twice, if you catch my drift. Dr. Springe’s show is a benign intervention.

  She knows a lot about magic, too, which means I don’t have those awkward sessions I used to have with my old shrink. We can talk shop.

  She says now, “Did he say what it is about Dr. Katterfelto’s work that interests the government?”

  “I didn’t let him get that far.”

  “Hm. It might be worth giving the good doctor’s site another look. I had thought him mired in the usual male midlife concerns,” she adds.

  I grin. “Eternal life and the search for a permanent erection.”

  We both laugh.

  I say, “He seems high to me. I mean, who does that peace-love-dove stuff anymore?”

  “He is high,” she says seriously. �
��He has found the ultimate source of joy and yet he is not satisfied.”

  I’m curious. “The source, huh?”

  “Self love,” she says.

  I shrug. “I can’t argue with that. I’ve been looking for a reason to like myself for years. What more could he ask for?”

  She shrugs now. “World peace?”

  I laugh, but I’m uneasy.

  o0o

  The Federal clown calls me right in the middle of a meeting at the hospital with a woman from Accounts Receivable. The words she has just spoken are, “Four hundred thousand dollars.”

  So I am a little on edge when my phone rings.

  I don’t give my cell number out. It isn’t Ma, because I’ve just watched her drop off to sleep after her meds took effect.

  “What do you want? I’m busy.”

  “I wanted to let you know, Ms. Nagazy, that my agency has freed up some funds for this operation.”

  “Bully for you,” I say. “What are you bothering me for?”

  “Those funds could be available to you, if you choose to assist us.”

  I catch the glance of the woman across the desk. She has “four hundred thousand dollars” in her eye. I feel a prickle all over my body, as if I’ve had a near miss on the expressway. Does he know where I am?

  I don’t say anything.

  “It could amount to fifty thousand dollars,” says the devil in my ear.

  Upstairs, Jilly sleeps in the arms of Morpheus.

  “Double,” I say, letting my eyes roam over the ceiling. Anything to get away from four hundred thousand dollars in hospital bills across the desk from me.

  “Sixty-five,” Agent Nick says.

  “Eighty” I say.

  “Seventy-five,” he says, “And that’s my final offer.”

  “Seventy-nine, and I do it my way,” I say, because I have a very bad feeling, realizing that it is very dumb, when you can’t fix one bad thing, to swallow another really bad thing that’ll last maybe your whole life.