Remote Control

by Stephen White

  The urologist that Demain Jones called next was much more suspicious than Dr. Arbuthnot had been. Adrienne Arvin was Lauren and Alan’s friend and neighbor, but she had never been Lauren’s personal physician, and she did not know Lauren had been arrested. When the jail nurse called identifying one of Adrienne’s good friends as a jail resident with a bladder problem, Adrienne suspected immediately that a serious game was afoot. If Lauren did not possess the sociopathic skills necessary to befuddle Demain Jones, Adrienne was an entirely different breed of adversary. Although Demain had no way of knowing it, she was now hitting against a big-league pitcher with incredibly good breaking stuff.

  Adrienne listened to the nurse’s story and said thanks, she would take care of it. She adopted a tone that was a mix of boredom and irritation. Yeah, yeah. She deflected Demain’s attempts to get more history, said she’d get back to her after she examined her patient.

  After hanging up, Adrienne phoned Alan, didn’t get him, cursed him, said “screw it,” and began the tedious process of bundling up her sleeping toddler for a trip across town to the hospital.

  SIX

  Thursday, October 10. Late afternoon.

  61 Degrees, Sunny

  God,” Emma Spire said as much to the sky as to her companions, “this is humiliating. I thought that when the Star printed pictures of my high school boyfriends that it was the most mortifying black eye I would ever suffer. I was wrong. I am so humiliated right now I can’t even find words for it.”

  The afternoon was warm, the air as dry as smoke. The early end to the day was the only clue to the looming winter.

  Emma had phoned and asked Alan and Lauren to come over and go for a hike with her, explaining to Lauren that she would find it easier to talk if she was walking, and that she desperately needed to talk. To Lauren’s surprise, Emma had specifically included the request that Alan accompany them.

  They started the hike from Emma’s backyard, cutting across a honeyed meadow of drying grasses until they reached a dusty, well-worn trail that led south toward the base of the Flatirons. Lauren walked on Emma’s left side, Alan a step behind her to the right. Their backs were toward the city.

  Alan was curious why he had been invited along.

  The friendship that had developed between Lauren and Emma had never seemed to include him in any role other than Lauren’s spouse. Even from a distance, though, he had felt the artificial magnetism of her celebrity. Lauren occasionally asked his take on Emma. Once, he’d said, “She wastes a lot of energy running in place, sweets. I think she’s terrified of slowing down enough to find out where she is.”

  “It’s understandable, don’t you think?”

  He was surprised that she didn’t disagree. “Of course it’s understandable. And when the time comes that she’s not able to run anymore, she’s going to be glad there’s someone like you close by.”

  But on the trail, Emma’s smile was absent and her eyes lacked any luster at all. Alan feared that the day had come when Emma could no longer run faster than her demons.

  Lauren asked, “Emma? What’s so terrible that you don’t want to talk about it? Did your friend learn something about what happened at the parking garage? Are you in more danger than we thought?” Lauren feared that Kevin Quirk had uncovered some plot to harm or kidnap Emma.

  Emma took two steps before she spoke.

  “You know, maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe I don’t want to talk about this after all. Why don’t we just walk?”

  Alan recognized the informal choreography that indicated to the psychologist in him the initiation of the ritual dance of resistance, and he guessed why he had been asked along on this hike. Emma wanted to be with someone who knew the matching steps, who knew how to follow her lead. Or how to take the lead from her.

  Confronting her reluctance directly, he said, “Talking won’t hurt, Emma. Maybe we can be of some help. Give it a try.”

  She took five steps before she spoke. She said, “I wish my mom were alive.”

  With that as a preamble, Alan figured that whatever words came next were going to be as measured as the last beats of a dying heart.

  Alan said, “If she were here, what would you say to her, Emma?”

  “I don’t think I’d say anything. I’d just let her hold me. I’d tell her not to die. Daddy always thought I was a rock. Mom knew I wasn’t ever as strong as I looked.”

  They had slowed so much that Alan was shortening his strides to accommodate Emma’s meager progress. At this pace the Boulder greenbelt would loom as large as Yellowstone. Lauren and Alan both sensed the need for patience and tried to provide it, matching Emma’s tempo both on the hike and in the conversation.

  Before long they crested a small ridgeline, and Emma finally spoke again.

  “Can we sit?” she asked in a weary voice while settling back against a big sloping rock lined with inky veins of granite, her knees pulled close to her chest. The hiking boots on her feet were scuffed with wear. Above the left knee of her jeans was a hole the size of a quarter. Her index finger slid into the rip and picked at the margins like a ferret tearing at a meal.

  Alan and Lauren found perches close to where Emma was sitting. Emma’s back was to the west, and they saw her silhouetted in profile against the foothills, which were already bathed in evening shadow.

  “Last Sunday, at Ethan’s apartment? Do you remember the demonstration Ethan did with your friend, Diane? After dinner, with the computer and with that…?”

  Alan and Lauren said, “Yes,” simultaneously, in similarly subdued tones.

  “Ethan recorded Diane’s movements through that collar he developed?”

  Another stereo “Yes.”

  “Well, last night…” She pulled some chickweed and tossed it aside and scuffed the hard toe of one boot into the dust. “Last night, he recorded me…while we…while we made love. He recorded me with the same equipment.”

  Lauren was relieved; she had been steeling herself for worse tidings than that. She looked askance at Alan, then back at Emma and said, “I don’t think I understand. You wore that collar while you had sex?”

  Emma looked away, not wanting to meet Lauren’s eyes. She wasn’t prepared to discuss her sexual activities with these two people. And she was bone tired already and wasn’t sure she had the reservoir of energy that was going to be necessary to explain what had actually happened.

  “No, he wore it. I didn’t.”

  Her voice laced with relief, Lauren said, “So it recorded his movements, not yours?” Even a computer-generated parody of Emma’s motions while having sex would cause a stir that Lauren knew Emma didn’t want, or need. But Lauren couldn’t see what trouble Ethan’s animated likeness would cause without Emma’s corresponding image on the recording.

  “I wish it were that simple. God, how I wish it were that simple. Ethan was vague the other night during the party—the equipment he demonstrated records much more than movement. That night, at the party, he was only demonstrating a small part of what it does. But yesterday, last evening, he had the entire apparatus running, the whole thing, and what it recorded was his experience of having sex with me. Everything he felt while we made love was recorded.”

  The breeze was as loud as Emma’s voice, and Alan and Lauren were forced to struggle to find her words in the wind.

  Her eyes were down when she continued. “When I kissed him, it was recorded. When I sucked on his toes, it was recorded. When I had him in my mouth, it was recorded. When he was inside me…it was recorded.”

  An abrupt gust of wind rustled through the tall weeds and whistled through the gnarled pines nearby. Lauren pulled the collar of her sweater tight around her throat. She didn’t want to hear these details and was guessing that Emma didn’t really want to reveal them.

  Emma seemed oblivious to the chill breeze. To herself, infused from some fresh reservoir of horror, she asked, “Oh God, I wonder if it records his lips and tongue. Oh God.” Her imagination carried her to new depths of sham
e.

  Lauren checked Alan’s face, his raised eyebrows evidence he was as confused as she was. Lauren said, “I’m sorry I’m so dense about this. He recorded you? He used a camera?”

  “Worse. No, no. It’s much worse than a videotape.” She sighed the way a big dog does as it settles in to sleep. “Let me try to explain what Ethan’s technology does. What he actually recorded last night.”

  Darkness seemed to descend faster than Alan’s and Lauren’s eyes could adjust. Emma’s features faded into the bronze shadows.

  Emma could feel the dusk as it surrounded her. It felt protective, like a cocoon. To disappear…

  The gravity of the situation finally registering in his technologically naive consciousness, Alan said, “I assume you asked him to erase the disc with the data on it.”

  Emma nodded. “Yes, I insisted. He was reluctant, but he agreed.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Lauren asked, already guessing what the problem was.

  The hole on the thigh of Emma’s jeans was approaching silver-dollar size. “Someone…somehow…broke into Ethan’s flat in the middle of the night while we were sleeping and stole the whole damn disc drive.”

  Lauren scooted to a rock closer to Emma and reached over and touched her friend’s fingertips. “I don’t know what to say. This must be a total nightmare for you. It would be a nightmare for any woman, but it’s a total nightmare for you. If this became public…”

  Alan, too, was anticipating the consequences of the disc being copied and disseminated, his imagination covering territory littered with obscene new violations of Emma’s privacy. Like most of the American public, he had spent more than two years, through the newspapers, magazines, and television, as an occasional voyeur on Emma’s life, never until the last few months considering the consequences of that scrutiny on her. Access to data like Emma was describing would be devastating to her. He winced thinking of the repercussions.

  Emma waited until both Alan and Lauren were looking at her before she continued. “I don’t know what to do. If this disc gets out publicly—if even the fact that this damn disc exists gets out publicly—I’m going to kill myself. That’s it.”

  Alan listened for the threat, for the manipulation, for the cry for help that almost always framed such statements when his patients mouthed them. Listening to Emma he heard nothing but bald intent. He pondered how to intervene.

  Lauren heard the hopelessness and targeted it. “Don’t talk like that, we’ll figure something out.”

  Emma’s voice was minuscule. “No. No. You don’t get it, what it’s like. You can’t. I never used to understand what it was like. When I was little, my parents knew lots of politicians and they always seemed to enjoy it, the notoriety, the attention. When I was engaged to Pico, he always seemed to get pumped up by it.

  “But the difference is that they all chose it, they wanted it. I didn’t. I never did. I don’t. I feel like my…soul has been kidnapped. My relationship with Pico made everything worse. That was a huge mistake on my part—moving to California.”

  She kicked at the dust, tracing circles in the dirt with the toe of her boot. “I love the water. I grew up at the beach in Delaware. Now, I don’t even vacation at the beach anymore because I can’t stand seeing swimsuit photos of me at the supermarket checkout the next week. Since Pico, I’ve stayed away from men because I don’t want to feed the romance rumors that get ignited every time I’m seen with someone. I don’t back causes, even ones I care deeply about. I watch what lectures I attend, what controversies I discuss. My friends buy the books I want to read and the videos I want to watch so that my tastes can remain at least a little private. And each night I go to bed, wondering which friend who isn’t really a friend after all is going to sell me out.”

  Emma’s eyes were focused on the eastern horizon, where a black ribbon of night had descended to wrap the planet like a gift.

  “When my mother died of breast cancer, when I was seventeen, I felt that my world began to shrink. I literally felt it get smaller. She had meant so much to me, there was such a hole in my heart when she was gone. She was my best friend. My dad did his best to help but he didn’t really know how, and then…when he was killed, I felt totally lost, my life…

  “That day—the day of the shooting—in the airport, what I did wasn’t what it looked like on that tape. See, I wasn’t only protecting him, I was saving me. As I was holding him on the carousel, I really felt that I couldn’t go on without him. And then—bang bang—I had to survive alone. I had to find a way.

  “The obsession the public has with me has been as much of a surprise as the gunshots. Maybe more. I knew there were people who hated my father for what he believed. But I wasn’t prepared for the public ever wanting a piece of me.

  “A week ago I would have told you that I thought I knew everything there was to know about losing control. About fateful moments. For two years now, I’ve had nowhere left to hide, almost nothing left to call my own. No close family. No privacy. No secrets. And now—with this stupid disc missing—I’ve somehow managed to lose control over things I didn’t even know a person could lose control over. In the space of one technological leap, I apparently no longer even have a body I can call my own.”

  She hadn’t been looking at her companions but suddenly turned to them. First toward Lauren, then Alan. “Do you realize that I am about to become shareware. Sex with me, by remote control. You, too, can screw America’s princess-of-the-month. I wonder what it will cost. What is my virtue worth, anyway? What do you think? Twenty-nine ninety-five? Or a little more, forty bucks, like a Mike Tyson fight on cable? How long do you think I’ll stay on the charts?”

  Lauren took Emma’s hand.

  “They’ve won. Everyone who ever decided that they had a right to any piece of me that they could reach out and grab, well, they’ve won. I’ve lost everything now. It’s that simple.”

  “We just have to get that disc back,” Lauren said.

  Emma said nothing. Her eyes communicated her hopelessness.

  “You can’t exactly go to the police for help with this, can you?” Alan asked.

  She scoffed, “You think they would manage to keep this a secret?”

  “What about reporting it as a technology theft? Ethan’s prominent enough, he’ll get some attention from the police even on something as mundane as a burglary.”

  “Ethan backs up everything he does from here to Honolulu. Everybody who knows him knows that about him. For him to maintain that he lost valuable data and that he has no backup? It’s just not plausible.”

  “We could get a restraining order, keep anyone from publishing it.”

  “That would be like advertising for the creep who stole it. You think the cyber freaks on the Internet are going to be deterred by a restraining order? This disc doesn’t need to be published. It can be copied and recopied digitally a hundred different ways. Disc to disc, modem to modem. A restraining order? There would be no stopping it.”

  “What about your friend, Kevin? Can he help?”

  “I called him earlier today.” Emma sounded beaten, weary. She was talking now only because she was polite, not because this avenue of inquiry held out any hope. “He’s going to talk to Ethan, see if he can figure out what happened, who might have taken the disc. Kevin will try, he’s sweet. It’s too late.”

  “Maybe Ethan’s wrong about the technology, Emma. Maybe he’ll never debug it; maybe it will never work. Maybe the data is useless.”

  Emma said, “If it were you, Alan, would you be willing to take that risk?” She waited, letting his silence speak. “Alan, look at my life. It’s a nice fantasy—but that’s not the way my luck’s been running.”

  Lauren tried to deter Emma’s hopelessness one more time. “There are always options. We’ll figure something out.”

  For much of a minute, Emma was silent. Then she said, “Yes, maybe you’re right. Let’s go back to the house.”

  Alan’s impression was that Emma was buyin
g into Lauren’s hopefulness mostly as a way to indicate she was done talking. It was possible that Lauren had hit on something that resonated for Emma. But he didn’t feel encouraged.

  When Emma had said she would kill herself, Alan felt she meant it.

  Lauren answered Kevin’s knock and let him in the door.

  Alan had completed a reconnaissance of Emma’s refrigerator and pantry, and having failed to find sufficient ingredients to combine into a dinner for four, had picked up the phone to order a pizza.

  Emma kicked her hiking boots onto the floor and curled into a ball on the sofa, her knees tucked close to her chest. When she picked up the remote control for the TV and flicked it on, she found herself staring at Hard Copy. She shivered for a moment as the anchor promised an exclusive report on Princess Diana’s Caribbean holiday.

  Emma started to cry.

  Kevin arrived at her side before Lauren did. His embrace was a two-armed affair that shut the two of them off from the room.

  The pizza was delivered by a young woman who was already aware that she was at Emma Spire’s house. Although Alan opened the door only eighteen inches or so while he fished out his wallet, the delivery girl was trying desperately to peer around him into the house in hopes of catching a glimpse of the celebrity who lived inside.

  Alan lied, “She’s not home.”

  The girl’s shoulders sank at least two inches. “Drag. She’s so great, isn’t she? I mean, she has such style. And right here in Boulder, can you believe it? Our hair’s the exact same color, don’t you think? Emma’s and mine, I mean.” The lanky kid fingered her honey-colored hair, which was at least a couple of shades lighter than Emma’s.

  “Just like hers. Exactly,” Alan replied, tipping her an extra two dollars, hoping she would go away.

  “Are you her boyfriend?”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just a friend.” To Alan, the conversation they were having felt absurd. He was discussing his relationship to Emma Spire with a teenager who delivered pizza.