“I don’t want Bomb Bob,” said Kai on the couch. “Momma, I want Lollipops. You read it.”
“That’s not such a nice way to talk,” Peta said. “What do we say when we want something?”
“Read it, Momma.”
“Please. The magic word is please.”
“Please Momma please I want please Lollipops please.”
“But that’s a baby book, Kai. Your Auntie Vi’s book is more for big guys like you. It’s the story of the Secret Service, which is where she works. Look, Kai, there’s a dog. His name is Bob. Can you guess what he’s looking for under that big limousine? When he’s done, he gets a special treat.”
Vi heard something hit the wall.
Peta said, “We don’t throw books, Kai.” Her voice was controlled. “That book was a gift from somebody who loves you a whole lot. Pick it up, son.”
“What’s the magic word?” asked Kai.
“Pick up the damn book.”
Vi couldn’t hear what Kai said.
Peta said, “I’m counting, Kai. One—Two—”
Jens said, “He loses his nerve around three usually.”
“Thank you,” Peta said. “Now get back on the couch.”
Vi listened as Peta read to Kai.
“‘Licky was a lollipop,’” Peta started bouncingly. “‘One day he asked his daddy, “What’s this big stick for?”’”
Kai said, “You’re skipping the beginning.”
“This is the beginning,” Peta said. “See Licky with his daddy?”
“Read the first page—Momma look.”
“Oh all right,” said Peta. She read, “‘Look Out For Lollipops, by Nancy Kleinfelt and Joan Melissa Oates. A My First Reader Book. London. New York. Sydney.’”
Kai turned the page for her.
Peta read, “‘Look Out for Lollipops’ by Nancy Kleinfelt and Joan Melissa Oates. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—’”
Kai sighed. This was his favorite part of every book—his mother’s voice, the certainties.
“‘—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.’”
Kai said, “I love you, Momma.”
Peta said, “I love you too. Now let’s read about Bob. I’m curious, aren’t you?”
Kai said, “No—more Lollipops.”
“‘Licky was a lollipop.’ God I hate this book. ‘One day he asked his daddy, “What’s this big stick for?” His daddy said, “That’s so they can lick you, son—”’”
Kai turned the pages as Peta read them. Together, they followed Licky’s journey of discovery to the candy emperor and finally to the belly of the boy who loved him best of all. They came to the last word on the last page, which was actually all.
Peta said, “The end.” She closed Lollipops solemnly.
Peta carried Kai past Jens and Auntie Vi for a round of sloppy goodnight kisses. The boy climbed out of Peta’s arms into Vi’s lap. Vi hugged the child, arms around his neck. His little hands patted her back and he pecked a kiss on her hair. Vi felt weak suddenly, her nose in the boy’s shoulder. Tears started in her eyes. She did not know why. She barely knew this child.
“Go,” she said, lifting Kai to Peta. “You go and have a good sleep, Kai, okay?”
Peta carried the boy down the hall to his bedroom. Kai bounced on the bed. Peta snapped the lights off.
“Sleep well, Kaiyo.”
“Momma, stay—” said Kai.
“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” Peta said.
“Momma—”
“All right,” Peta said, “I’ll lie down with you, Kai, but only for a minute.”
Vi heard Peta climb into the bed next to the child, the creaking of the wooden frame, a luffing of the sheets.
Jens said, “She’ll be asleep before he is, just watch. We go through this every night.” Jens looked at the wall, listening. He said, “She works too hard.”
Vi said, “Peta.”
Jens was nodding. “She’s always a zombie by eight thirty.”
Vi took an orange from the bowl. She wasn’t hungry for an orange, but she liked the rough, cool feel of it, the rounded weight, the pleasingly astringent cleaning-product smell of a ripe orange. She couldn’t get over how it had felt, Kai patting her back, those tiny hands.
“Mom sends us those oranges from Florida,” said Jens. “She enrolled us in a fruit club of some sort. Once a month, oranges. Also sometimes grapefruit. Never lemons, though. We have the walls for that.”
Evelyn Asplund had moved to a tennis-themed community between Tampa and Dade City. She played doubles every morning, volunteered for her good causes, visited her Boston cousins who had settled in surrounding towns. Rumor had it that she was dating a man from her development, a retired Navy captain, a widower named Burt. Burt had five grown children and a sailboat named The Escapade.
Jens said, “Want a knife to cut that?”
“No,” said Vi, rolling the rough orange in her hands. “I’m not hungry.”
“Take it for the road,” said Jens. “Take six. We’re almost due for the next shipment anyway. I always feel a bit of pressure when the fruit arrives. You feel like you have to eat all of them before they go bad, especially since there’s a club involved—certain obligations are implied. It’s a race against rot, getting all the fruit consumed. We freeze it and make smoothies, that’s our fallback.”
“What’s the word on Burt?”
“They’re just good friends,” said Jens. “Don’t you get the e-mails?”
Evelyn, a New Englander in exile, had taken to e-mail with the fervor of a Concord Transcendentalist. Her e-mails read like the letters of Louisa May Alcott, thoughtful, trenchant essays filled with observations about race relations in mid-Florida, and the country’s moral soul, and the cruelties she saw doing volunteer work at the local shelter for battered and abandoned pets. Cats were brought in starving, dogs were brought in with broken ribs. Evelyn said the problem was that people saw their pets as consumer goods, like shoes or a new hat The towns of Florida coughed up a lot of surplus weirdness in the form of abused pets. The deputies brought in exotic Burmese ferrets, terrified to viciousness, yaks half dead from dehydration—even once a baby Shango monkey (a gentle jungle breed) with strange symptoms, lolling eyes, bleeding gums, a racing heart. Fearing the outbreak of a new disease, a primate version of mad cow, the shelter vets did blood work and it was determined that the monkey’s former owner had gone to the trouble and expense of addicting it to methamphetamines, apparently thinking it was funny to see a monkey stoned and crashing into furniture. Evelyn said that pets and how we treated them were the secret index of our soul, and you could see the future of the nation at any shelter in the land. Her dark e-mails notwithstanding, Evelyn had clearly made or found a happy final phase of life in Florida, healthy from the tennis, busy at the shelter, and Burt was a good man, she said, who had no expectations for their relationship.
Vi said, “I get the e-mails, but I don’t always read them. They pile up when I’m away. The one about the monkey, though—that was truly fucked. I’ve told that story to a lot of people. Everyone gets mad about that monkey.”
“Yes,” said Jens. “But still, it’s pets. There’s something about spilling out that much compassion for a pet. It’s trivial somehow.”
Vi thought of their father, suddenly. She remembered Evelyn and Walter fighting over the mutts Evelyn adopted from the pound. Walter grumbled every time the dogs dug up the lawn, or came home smelling like the Effing River, or barked at something in the marshes at four a.m. and started every dog within a quarter mile barking. Evelyn said she had no choice but to adopt the dogs. “They gas them if no one claims them in a month,” she said. “I can’t bear to see a poor, innocent dog gassed.” Walter, being Walter, marshaled Aristotle, pointing out that gassing
wasn’t punishment, that animals in general were neither innocent nor guilty, that her use of these terms was, in this context, incoherent—a bad thing to be guilty of in Walter’s universe. The soft love of pet owners was beyond him. He said, “They gas the innocent cats too. Why aren’t there forty rescued cats running around here?” And Evelyn said, “Because the dogs don’t like them.”
These were probably the worst fights in what was otherwise a quiet, serviceable marriage. Vi remembered watching from the stairs, hiding behind a banister, as Walter and Evelyn went at it in the front room, the basic opposition, Mom and Dad, a cats-and-dogs-type thing, with Walter very much the dog, ironically, relying on the sheer weight of his reason, and Evelyn the cat, clawing, unpredictable. Evelyn said, “I do what I can. I don’t save every animal, or even most of them, but I do what I can, which is more than you can say, Walt. All your arguments add up to No. No, there is no God. No, there’ll be no Christmas carols in the house. But what have you ever actually done? You scribble on your money. Cross out God. I watch you. But what does that accomplish, other than getting your children beat up in school and creating pointless controversy with a bunch of Air Force bozos?” Vi at the age of eight or nine had felt a nauseous thrill, watching her mother try to wound her father with a word like bozo—it was thrilling, silly, terrifying, in the way a really scary horror movie is always close to being totally hilarious. Vi always took her father’s side as a child. He was Walter, after all, a stubborn, odd, quixotic figure in their town; he seemed to need the protection of a daughter’s loyalty more than Evelyn, who was more like other people, more at home in groups. Vi rooted for her father, watching from the stairs, but thinking of it now, she saw Evelyn’s side too. Vi hoped that Burt the sailing widower was the lighthearted type.
Vi said to Jens, “The monkey isn’t trivial to her. You sound like Walter now.”
Jens stood up and said, “Let’s take a walk.”
“I don’t think about him much. I’ll bet you think about him all the time.”
Jens and Vi were walking down the lawn, a slight slope to a drop-off, beyond which lay the rocks of Effing Head, the crashing surf, the bay. The condo blazed behind them, threw their shadows down the lawn. Their shadows were absurdly tall, gunfighterish somehow.
“Why?” asked Vi.
“Because you were always closer,” Jens said. “You and Dad. You were his favorite.”
Vi said, “That’s bullshit. I remember you guys in the den after supper. He’s reading about how to adjust a toxic spill. You’re reading about ham radio. Two peas in a pod. You were smart, Jens, and Dad respected smart. I was like his little buddy mascot, which was cool with me, I’m not complaining. But you, Jens—you were smart.”
They had come to the end of the lawn. There was no moon. Vi saw the odd flash of whitecap, but otherwise the bay was absolutely black.
Jens was looking out. “You know what he said to me? It was practically my last conversation with him. The game was going great then and the monsters were like runaway best-sellers. So we were talking about the monsters, how I write them, all of that, Hamsterman and Seeing Eye and Farty Pup, except I could never bring myself to say Farty to Dad, so I called him Poopy Pup, whatever. Now, Dad’s a well-read guy, but he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about large software systems, and how hard it is to make something run within x kilocycles or a y-sized byte group. You know what Dad says? He says, essentially, it’s trash. It’s immoral or amoral. All my work. I know the game itself, the stuff you see, the monsters and the plugs for snow blowers and the frequent-flier-mile tie-ins—well, it’s pretty bad. But the code, the engineering—that’s totally different. I don’t expect him to understand the beauty, or frankly the honor, of the engineering. But I do expect him to trust me, trust my judgment. A parent’s attitude should be, if my child’s doing it, it must be worth doing.”
Vi laughed. “We’ll see if you’re still saying that when Kai’s sixteen and getting high off Vicks VapoRub.”
“I wasn’t sixteen,” Jens said. “I was a grown man with a child of my own. He told me I had to quit. Quit? This game is my chance to make some real money. I’m not greedy, but I’d like to get out of the rat race, have more time with Kai, maybe see Peta not have to work so hard, so she’s not a zombie every night. I’d like to do some pure research—and, yes, maybe really leave my mark with something great. Are these wrong things to want?”
“No,” said Vi.
“I made a compromise. Dad thought I wanted the money ’cause I wanted yachts and sports cars. And if that’s your motivation, then sure, working at BigIf is probably pretty shameful. But I’ve never been that way. And that’s what hurt me when he said I had to quit. I looked at him and thought, I’m your son and you don’t even know me. You know how that felt?”
“Pretty shitty probably.”
“It felt lonely. Isn’t that strange? Then I thought about it and it made me mad, and then he died, and that made me even madder, because now I’m stuck being angry at him forever.” Jens turned and looked around the yard. “Remember last time you were here? We went out to the old house, had a picnic for his birthday. I thought it would be good for you, because you and he were so close, and frankly, Vi, you looked like you needed help that weekend. You looked like you’d just come from a train wreck.”
“No,” said Vi, “a flood.”
“So I figured, this will be good for Vi, and she’s my little sister, and she’s the only thing I’ve got left, really, from the old days, so let me try and help her out. But that whole weekend, Vi, and especially at the house, you were giving me these looks, this blankness. I thought it was because of whatever you had just come through.”
Vi remembered the weekend after Hinman, how she couldn’t stop herself from scanning.
Jens said, “Then I realized—no, it’s about me. She thinks I’m a sellout asshole, just like Walter did—of course she does, she was always his favorite. I thought, where does Vi get off judging me?”
Vi said, “Listen, Jens—that’s all in your head. I was all fucked up back then. It had nothing to do with you.”
“You’re telling me the way you look at me has nothing to do with me? Does that sound like it makes sense to you?”
“Well,” said Vi, “it’s true. Not everything in your life has to do with you. It’s easier once you realize that. Give Walter a break. The guy was human, big surprise. If you’re happy in your life, what difference does it make?”
gotv (tuesday)
No movement was simple, but jogging was especially complex. Gretchen would have outlawed jogging altogether as an unacceptable security environment (the dawdling perimeter, the cover of the trees, the problem of thru-traffic, the exposure in 360 of a slowly moving man), but Fundeberg wouldn’t hear of it. The point of jogging, Fundeberg believed, was to beam the people images of a vital, active man, fit for every challenge. This was important anywhere, and more so in New Hampshire, where the VP was losing droves of undecided voters to the senator, a younger man with fresh ideas and much better hair.
Gretchen tried to compromise—let’s jog in a stadium, I can lock it down—but Fundeberg demanded neighborhood backdrops, typical and scenic, and would not consider tracks of any sort. Tracks are laned and banked, he said, a theater of speed. People think Olympics. Our guy, with his pudding-muscled, fiftyish physique, would look pathetic gasping on a track, a disappointed loser reliving high school glory, hearing nonexistent cheers. No, they needed neighborhoods, Fundeberg believed, houses, hedges, and parked cars, a line of picket fences, bikes on the sidewalks, hopscotch chalked out on the driveways. A man jogging past this scene looked disciplined yet friendly, at peace with his surroundings, open to the day. Gretchen hated running through a neighborhood. Cars meant car bombs to the Service, people in their houses couldn’t be evicted, garages and backyards, all those dormer windows—an uncoverable layout. Some nut could be sitting in his living room, eating cereal, oiling his carbine, letting the entourage draw near.
Because the jog was especially complex, Gretchen was up early, making the arrangements. By half past six, she was showered, dressed, and eating breakfast with Elias in the hotel’s coffee shop. Elias had the traffic plan for the jog route. They reviewed it one more time, then Boone Saxon came in and ordered scrambled eggs, and Elias left to prep the route. Boone and Gretchen went over the day’s schedule, the jog, a drop-in photo op at a McDonald’s on the turnpike, a big speech at a rally, then a motorcade to Manchester for seven more events, a brutal campaign day. Rain had been predicted, but it wasn’t raining yet.
“Be snowing by the time we get to Manchester,” said Boone, shaking hot sauce on his eggs.
Gretchen knew a few things about Boone, and one of these was that he liked hot sauce on his eggs, though not on any other food she had ever seen him eat. She had watched him eat a lot of meals over her year as chief-of-detail. Boone briefed her over breakfast on the road and it was usually a scene like this, Gretchen buzzing from the coffee, limited by diet to a toasted bagel (dry), Boone across the table, shoveling his eggs, and talking with professional dispassion about car bombs, right-to-lifers, released mental patients who were former Marine snipers, and whether it would snow in Manchester that day. His voice was comforting, a drone.
Another thing she knew about Boone Saxon was that he had led the search for Lloyd Felker after Hinman. She had learned this in the course of her long talk with the Director on the quad in Beltsville, and it had surprised her at the time. Boone was based at Beltsville, where Felker had spent his prime. Boone, hunting Felker, was hunting a friend. If the job had bothered Boone, he didn’t show it, and it probably didn’t bother him. It was duty, number one. It was logic, number two: Felker on the loose was a giant liability, as Felker himself would have been the first to understand. Knowledge of the Dome was a weakness of the Dome if turned against it. Which meant that Felker, as the father of the Dome, had been consumed by his own creation. Gretchen was still looking for a lesson in the mess, the rise, glory, and destruction of Lloyd Felker, senior analyst in Plans. She wanted to ask Boone—maybe he would know. Boone knew Felker’s story too, or part of it, and the parts he knew he knew better than she did. He was there the day they found Felker at the first-aid station. Boone could tell her how he had looked and talked that day. Was he really nuts? Or had he simply shed a skin of contradictions in the river? Would Boone know the difference? Gretchen doubted it.
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