Afterparty

by Daryl Gregory

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gupta,” the man said. He leaned in so he could make eye contact with me in the backseat. No: so his eye contacts could make eye contact. His eyes gleamed with the false wet of data overlays. Was Edo watching this video feed?

  “Ms. Rose,” the man said. “Mr. Vik would like to talk to you.”

  Ollie stared at the man. She seemed to vibrate with barely suppressed anger. Whether she was mad at the blond man, herself, or me I couldn’t tell. She’d told me to keep my head down, but did I listen?

  “Your friends can wait here with the car,” the man said. “We wouldn’t want it to get towed.”

  I started to object, but Ollie said in a clipped voice, “We’ll be fine.”

  Yes, but would I?

  * * *

  The lobby was grander and more beautiful than the online photos suggested. I’d noticed this effect before, the first time I’d visited Mikala’s family and stepped into rooms I’d only seen as background in her family photos: There was a resolution limit in capturing really expensive objects. Money radiated in a spectrum that was impossible to record.

  The clerk with the black pompadour didn’t lead us to the elevators, as I expected, but toward another set of doors off the lobby. The blond man gestured for us to enter.

  I hesitated, conscious of the smart pen in my purse. Ollie had better be listening in.

  It was a conference room, with a glossy cherrywood table in the shape of a surfboard. The room was empty except for Dr. Gloria, who sat at the head of the table, writing on her notepad. It was pathetic how relieved I was to see her.

  “Nice of you to show up,” I said in my tough voice. I was, after all, wearing a fedora.

  She looked up, then removed her glasses. “I thought you might need someone to hold you down. Do you think you can get through this?”

  “Of course,” I said. “All Edo has to do is confess everything.”

  The blond man closed the door and asked, “Are you carrying?”

  “You mean like a weapon?”

  He looked me up and down with those gleaming eyes. He blinked entirely too much. “Raise your arms, please? Thank you.” He moved his right palm along my arm, hovering a few inches above it. Then he floated down over my ribs and hip, and quickly repeated the moves over the other side of my body. I had no idea where the scanner was. A ring? His watch? I’d already decided that if he went for the cavity search I was going break his fingers.

  He removed a small black bag from an inside pocket of his jacket and nodded toward the purse, which I’d put on the table. “May I?” Without waiting for a response, he slipped my purse into the bag. He cinched it closed and left it sitting on the table. I had a feeling that if Ollie had been listening, she wasn’t anymore.

  The bodyguard stepped back to the door, blinking again. A few seconds later the door opened.

  It was not Edo, but a younger version of him. Just as tall, pale, and fair-headed as his father, but a hundred pounds lighter and more finely boned, a greyhound to Edo’s bulldog.

  “Little Edo,” I said. “All grown up.”

  He smiled tightly. “I prefer—”

  “Oh, I know. But Eduard seems so stiff. Doesn’t seem to fit the wild kid who got kicked out of two prep schools.”

  “You won’t get far by trying to insult him,” Dr. Gloria said.

  I thought, We’ll see. Eduard was trying to power-play me. That nonsense with the bodyguard? The body scan? Well, that shit went both ways.

  “Where’s your dad?” I asked.

  “He’s in his room. He won’t be coming down.”

  “Call him and tell him to get his fat ass down here.”

  “Please,” Eduard said. “Sit down.” He was holding himself very still.

  “You’re making him angry,” Dr. Gloria said.

  “Good,” I said to her. Then to Eduard: “He has to answer to me, in person.”

  “I’m not sure why you’ve roped Rovil Gupta into our personal business. We’ve received a dozen calls and messages from him in the past two weeks. There is not going to be a … Little Sprout reunion, or whatever you think this is. My father is not a well man. There are very few people he is allowed to speak to.”

  “Allowed? You’re controlling him?”

  “Barely,” Eduard said. He sounded tired. “If you want to send him a message or paint him a picture—you people seem to like that kind of thing—I’ll consider delivering it, as long as it won’t affect his mental health. If you have something to say now, you have two minutes, and then this conversation is over.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “All right, let me do this for you: Sasha is doing very well. She’s healthy, she’s happy, and she’s making excellent progress. She’s getting the best care—”

  “Who the hell is Sasha?”

  He blinked at me. “Your daughter.”

  Dr. Gloria reached out to steady me. For a moment I couldn’t speak. “How—what do you…?”

  “All these calls,” Eduard said. “I always assumed that you’d find out about the adoption eventually.”

  “Edo adopted her?”

  “No,” Eduard said. “I did.”

  I must have made a motion; the bodyguard shifted his weight but did not move from the door.

  Dr. Gloria said, “Sit down. Breathe. You won’t do any good if you faint.”

  I sat in one of the chairs and rubbed my hand over the leather armrest. I pictured the girl I’d seen on Ollie’s screens at the Marriott, a pretty black girl with red highlights in her hair.

  “My wife and I adopted Sasha four years ago. As I said, she’s doing well despite her disabilities.”

  “Disabilities?” I was amazed that I was not screaming at him.

  “She’s mute,” he said. “And in the past she’s experienced hallucinations, though her doctors think that’s under control now. She’s intelligent, though, and she has other gifts.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a piece of smartpaper. He ran his thumb over it a few times, then set it on the table and pushed it toward me.

  I looked at it without picking it up. It was a charcoal drawing, or rather, a picture of a charcoal drawing. On it, a grizzly bear stood on its hind legs, its mouth open in a roar. It was beautifully done, full of mass and movement, and very realistic, except for the fact that the bear was thrusting a curved sword into the air, and wore a black eye patch.

  “Like the rest of you, she’s artistically gifted,” Eduard said.

  I stared at the picture. Like the rest of you. What he was not saying filled the room like a shout.

  “Call your father,” I said to Eduard. “Right fucking now.”

  Eduard regarded me with an expression like pity. “She’s better off with us. Until she’s of age, you won’t be permitted contact with her. You’re obviously…”

  “What?”

  “Unfit,” Eduard said. “Multiple suicide attempts. Multiple drug charges, two DUIs, too many hospitalizations to count. My staff tell me that you’re not even here, because you’re in Toronto under house arrest, serving time for a car accident that injured several people.” He stood up. “I will not allow you to harm my family. If I ever see you again—if I sense you within a mile of me, my father, or Sasha—I’ll have the police haul you back to Canada before you know what hit you.”

  He walked toward the door. The bodyguard followed, but kept his body between me and his boss.

  Eduard paused at the door, then looked back at me. “Get help, Lyda. I mean that sincerely.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Think about it,” I told the girl. “The end of religion.” I say “girl” but she was in her mid-twenties, a sleek brunette in black tights and Marc Caisan shoes. Her pupils were the size of dimes. She worked with Rovil at Landon-Rousse, or perhaps worked for him—I was not in a state to catch details. Half the people in the bar seemed to be employees of Big Pharm. Pharm Boys and Pharm Girls.

  “If you had your own god,” I said. “I
f She was right there with you, what would you need church for?” My voice had gone gravelly from shouting above the music. “You wouldn’t need to seek God. You wouldn’t need to learn about Her. You sure as hell wouldn’t need to learn the rules of your religion—She’s right there! Ask Her!”

  The girl nodded as I talked, her fingers automatically unfolding a white piece of paper.

  Dr. Gloria said, “You’re making a fool of yourself.” She was perched on the back of the loveseat just behind me.

  “Church isn’t for people who already have God,” I said. “It’s where they go when they’re looking for God’s last known address.”

  “Here,” the girl said, and handed me the paper. “You need this.” On its face was a cartoon duck holding a red-and-blue beach ball.

  “Absolutely not,” Dr. Gloria said. “You have no idea what that—Lyda!”

  The paper dissolved in my mouth. “What is it?” I asked. I’d taken a lot of paper tonight. Also a lot of scotch. It turns out that Rovil’s coworkers liked the old-fashioned drugs as well as the new ones. I admired the closed-loop economics of their field: Make the drugs, sell the drugs, use the money to buy the drugs. But where was Rovil? And where was Ollie? Oh right—she was back at Rovil’s apartment. She’d refused to come with us, and gotten angry with me that I was leaving the apartment at all.

  Well, that high horse don’t ride itself. I reached for my scotch glass just as the paper went off in my brain. COLOR BOMB! Maroon and aquamarine light exploded behind my eyes with a thunderclap. Dr. Gloria tumbled off the back of the couch and hit the ground with a thud that shook the building.

  “Paintball,” the girl said.

  I blinked hard. Coral and turquoise smeared across my vision. “I like it,” I said.

  Dr. G pulled herself to her feet, looking bedraggled. She shook out her wings, and loose feathers drifted down. “What was that?”

  “You seem sad,” the girl said. “What do you take?” I gave her a blank look, and she said, “Let me guess—Paxil. I can always tell. You seem like a Paxil person.”

  “Lately I’ve been taking it straight,” I said. “Sorrow, no ice.”

  “Not tonight you aren’t,” Dr. G said. She put out a hand to steady herself.

  “I’m on Nardil and Oleptro,” the girl said. Her skin had turned gecko green. “But not for long, right?” She laughed like I was in on the joke, and I laughed with her.

  “Everyone develops a tolerance to happiness,” I said.

  “Rovil has told you about Stepladder. I knew it. He’s so paranoid about the NDA, but he can’t stop bragging about those mice. As soon as he kicks the tolerance problem, we’re golden.”

  Stepladder? “He does love his mice.”

  “We’ve got some very happy mice. LR is going to sweep the competition with this. Forget Paxil and Marvoset and Nardil. We will own this space.” The girl leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He told you to buy stock, didn’t he? Everyone’s buying stock.”

  Whump. A flash of scarlet and turquoise, and Dr. G stumbled sideways, flapping to keep her balance. I stood, a little shakily. “I need to find Rovil.”

  The girl put a hand on my arm. “Wait.” She wasn’t making a pass at me. Her expression was 80 percent pity, 20 percent high as a kite. “Be careful.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yes, he’s going to make a lot of people rich,” she said. “But he’s a soulless prick.”

  Rovil? “Yes, well, thank you for the…” I pushed off through air rippling with parti-color currents. The bar was crowded and loud, and the synesthesia was kicking in hard now, neon sounds ricocheting off the walls.

  I found Rovil at the bar, talking with a handsome young Pharm Boy in a tight-fitting suit. Rovil broke off the conversation when I approached. “How are you doing?” he asked chartreusely.

  Like I’ve eaten an entire box of sixty-four crayons, I thought. But I said, “That girl thinks you’ll make her rich.”

  The guy in the tight suit raised his glass. “Truth.”

  “She also said you’re a prick,” I said.

  “Also truth,” the young man said, and laughed. The noise zigzagged across the color spectrum, ROY to the G to the BIV.

  Rovil frowned and looked past me. “I’m sorry about that. Ilsa and I once … never mind. Are you ready to leave?”

  “I’m drunk, I’m in New York, and it’s three a.m.,” I said. “I need a fucking slice.”

  * * *

  We walked three blocks, following the map on Rovil’s pen. I was growing hungrier by the minute. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he said. “What exactly did Ilsa say?”

  “She said you’re soulless.”

  A car horn sent up a misty pastel plume, but the effects of Paintball were fading in the cool air. New York was returning to its proper level of grayscale grittiness: black sky, buildings the color of headstones, bone-white sidewalks.

  Rovil shook his head unhappily. “I’m not very good at breaking up. When I realized I could not be with her, I stopped talking to her, stopped taking her messages. She was not happy.”

  “Because you were being an asshole. Is this it?”

  On the map our blue dot had arrived at the pizza shop, but we had not: The place was closed. Long closed, the front crawling with graffiti, the windows shellacked with paper notices of rock bands and lost kittens.

  “This is unacceptable,” I said. I turned in a circle, desperate.

  High overhead, Dr. Gloria said, “Food truck!” and flew off.

  “That way,” I said, pointing after her.

  Rovil hurried to catch up. “I suppose it was because I did not know what to say, and I wanted to stop thinking about what to say.”

  “I get it, kid. I spend most of my energy trying to not think.”

  It was not a food truck but an aluminum trailer, a single guy working a propane grill. Pictures of each food item were tiled across the top and sides, a necessary feature when serving the drunk community. I pointed at a faded picture of a gyro and said, “That. In my belly. Now.”

  Rovil ordered a water. While we waited for my food he said, “Did she talk about our new product?”

  I decided not to get her in trouble. “What product?”

  “Because we have a strict policy at LR. I could be in trouble if one of my staff violated the NDA.”

  “Relax, kid. Your ex-girlfriend is fine.”

  The cart man wrapped up my pita and set it on the counter. Rovil waved his pen at the man.

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ve got the tip.” I dug in my purse. And what a miracle it was that I still had a purse! I never carried the damn things. I found the bronze coin I was looking for and slammed it down on the counter. The gyro guy took one look at it and shook his head.

  “What? Bad juju?” I asked. “One ju? You got something against jus?” At that moment, I believed this to be the most hilarious thing I had ever said.

  Rovil picked up the coin, my six-month AA chip. He obviously didn’t recognize what it was. He read aloud the words on the face: “Unity … Service … Recovery…”

  “Back in the U-S-R,” I said. “Rhymes with User.”

  I saw his expression change as he understood. “Lyda, I’m so sorry. This is why Ollie didn’t want you to go out.”

  I thought, Have you not read my history? I started walking back to the club and Rovil’s car. The gyro tasted wonderful. O steaming slabs of processed lamb! O Tzatziki sauce!

  Dr. G looked at me over the top of her glasses. She was not amused by my little joke with the AA chip. I knew what she was thinking. Day one of sobriety starts now.

  “Well it ain’t dawn yet,” I said.

  “Pardon?” Rovil asked.

  “The women in my life are overprotective.” I wiped sauce from my lips. “There’s nothing you could have done about it—I was going out with or without you. Sometimes my brain needs a little hammering to get it to shut up.”

  “You’re worried about your daughter.” />
  I stopped short. “I don’t have a—wait. I’ve been talking about her, haven’t I?”

  “A lot,” he said. “And not just to me.”

  I flashed on a memory of telling the brunette at the bar about Sasha. And someone else as well—a tall man with a chinstrap beard. And someone else …

  I tossed the remainder of the gyro into a doorway. Rovil looked at me in surprise. I’d only taken a few bites.

  “What was I thinking, buying the street shit?” I said. I started walking again. “All I wanted was a fucking slice. Take me home, Rovil.”

  “Please, one more thing.” He touched my elbow to stop me. “Are we friends?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then please trust me when I ask this of you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Stop fighting your god. You will be happier.”

  “Amen, brother,” Dr. Gloria said.

  “If you do that, I believe you will not need all the other … substances.”

  “Oh, Rovil,” I said. “You better hope the other Pharm Boys don’t hear you say that.”

  * * *

  By the time we returned to Rovil’s place, dawn was muscling its way past the skyscrapers. Ollie was asleep on the living room couch, fully clothed. She jerked awake when Rovil shut the door behind us.

  “Don’t get up,” I said, and headed for the guest room.

  “Where have you been?” Ollie said.

  “Later,” I said. I left the living room before she could turn those Analyst Eyes on me or smell my breath.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  On the edge of the desert there was a very large house where a girl named Sasha lived with a great number of people, some of whom lived there all the time, like Sasha and the maid Esperanza; and some, like the Gardeners Three, who did not live in the house but worked there almost every day; or the Mexican cleaning ladies who came on Mondays and Fridays. Others appeared only when Sasha drew them from the IF Deck, and still others arrived and departed unpredictably, like Grandpop, who lived in the house almost all of the time until he suddenly had to go on a trip, and Eduard and Suzette, who were hardly there at all but could show up on any given day.

  This was one of the rare Full House days. Eduard, Suzette, and Grandpop were all returning to the house together. That morning, Esperanza began frantically picking up all of Sasha’s art supplies and toys and clothes and carrying them to Sasha’s bedroom. Later the maid cut short Sasha’s latest project, forced her to change into a clean outfit (she’d dribbled green paint on her white shirt), and confined her to her room before she could do more damage.