by Julian Gough
It’s the military guy. He leans forward, she backs off reflexively, and he just walks in, like that.
‘So,’ he says. ‘I’ve been discussing your case.’
He sits on the bed without being invited, and she hesitates by the door. Braces herself for disaster. Who’s going to look after Colt? Maybe she can run . . .
‘We’re prepared to offer you a lab,’ he says.
She almost asks, who’s we? But she knows already, from the clenching of her stomach muscles.
‘Generous resources,’ he says. ‘We’ve got people working in this area already.’
Of course they do. After the break-up, Ryan had employed their whole research group. All her college friends. So she’d have no friends.
‘We’ll give you a top-level security clearance,’ he says. ‘We’ll show you their research. You can have your pick of them.’
‘A lab?’ she says, still standing by the open door, still ready to run.
‘Yes.’
‘My own lab?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Las Vegas?’
‘No. You’d be working out of our research centre in Maryland.’
She’s shaking her head. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘We have state-of-the-art facilities there. Bear in mind, we have several top-quality research teams already working in this area. You’d be assigned a brand-new lab, it’s just been fitted out for exactly this kind of work. It’s a totally secure environment. You can live on or off base . . .’
She realizes with astonishment that he is pleading with her. Cautiously, she closes the door, but keeps her distance from him.
‘Why not upgrade the lab I work in?’ she asks, to test how far this could go.
But he grimaces. ‘Apart from the fact that your lab is a joke . . . If it’s a choice between you moving to Maryland, or us uprooting a research team of fifty, a hundred people . . . what do you think is going to happen, in the real world?’
‘It’s totally impossible,’ she says, with more conviction. ‘I have a son. I can’t disrupt his life like that.’
‘We have a top-quality school on base, and there are several other excellent schools in the area. After all, the existing research team members have kids too.’
‘You don’t understand. He needs routine. He can’t handle change. And, frankly, neither can I. It’s taken me years to build a stable life for my son, where he is happy and able to fulfil his potential. I’m not risking that.’
‘Ms Chiang . . .’
‘Dr Chiang.’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t think you understand. This isn’t a standard job offer. This is the alternative to prosecuting you for—’
‘Get out,’ she says, and swings the door open again so violently it slams into the rubber block protecting the wall from exactly that.
‘—releasing classified information to the enemy—’
‘—the scientific community is not your enemy,’ she says.
‘You’d be surprised,’ he says drily, and it takes her a moment to realize that he’s joking, that he has a sense of humour.
She smiles. ‘I don’t think you’d be stupid enough to prosecute a single mother for giving a research paper at a conference. There’s the court of law and there’s the court of public opinion . . .’
‘You’ve got a Chinese background.’
‘I was born in San Francisco.’
‘Sure. That’s . . . almost America.’ He makes a wry face. ‘But you look Chinese. And your father, with his Party background . . .’
‘He was a very minor official, he left long before . . .’
‘Yeah, taking his bribe money with him . . .’
‘He was vetted, he got his green card . . .’
‘Oh, eventually, in return for some, ah, cooperation . . . but there’s a lot of material in his file, and it doesn’t look good. I suspect the court of popular opinion could, regrettably, come to the disgraceful and entirely erroneous conclusion that you were a security risk. I blame the media.’ He stands up. ‘Stay in the hotel.’
‘But my flight . . .’
‘Our budget will stretch to a new ticket.’
‘It’s not that, I have to . . .’ She stops. Don’t mention Colt is alone. Don’t let them know your weak point. ‘I didn’t bring enough clothes.’
‘With respect, Dr Chiang, you have bigger problems.’
32
Naomi leans against the door after he leaves, as though holding back monsters. Rings Colt again.
A blast of music. Leave a message.
‘I’m going to be delayed, honey. I might have to stay an extra day . . . or two . . . at the conference. It’s nothing serious.’ He might worry about the money. ‘They’re buying me a new flight.’ What else? ‘Make sure to eat. Get enough sleep.’
Naomi finishes the call feeling happy and sad and hungry and free and lonely and restless. Walks up and down the room, thinking, not thinking.
‘Stay in the hotel.’ Like a prisoner. Like a slave. To be ordered around. Her face feels hot. Her eyes sting and her vision blurs, as she blinks away a jolt of angry frustration.
She is still full of adrenalin, it hasn’t burned off. It will go sour, she knows; the breakdown products of unused adrenalin are toxic. She knows what would burn it off.
No.
Yes.
She unchains, unlocks the door.
Takes the elevator down, crosses the lobby without catching the receptionist’s eye, without catching anybody’s eye, and walks out into the morning’s neon and noise.
They’re probably following her. Are they following her? Fuck them. Move fast. Be unpredictable. They may not have organized anything yet. It may be the biggest surveillance machine in world history, but it’s still a government bureaucracy.
Naomi walks into Times Square not thinking about what she’s looking for. She knows she is giving out some kind of signal; men smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. Men haven’t looked at her like this in a while. Some little internal switch has been flicked. The adrenalin.
Not just the adrenalin.
She doesn’t know if she wants to feel like this. She doesn’t know how she feels.
She walks into a cinema lobby and out again, into a theatre lobby, and out again; and now she’s catching men’s eyes, but it’s too early in the day, they’re not alive to the opportunity. She’s catching women’s eyes, too; thoughtful, wary, holding onto their men. Tourist couples, nervous.
A young woman with short blonde hair, smoking a long, slim Dutch joint outside one of those new ironic retro strip clubs; probably working the morning shift; that quiet time between the guys on their way into work and the lunchtime crowd. She looks Naomi up and down, smiles, and sucks hard on her joint till the tip glows, and Naomi whimpers involuntarily as a pulse starts to throb between her legs. Naomi smiles back, walks past her, walks faster. Breathes faster, conscious of her chest rising and falling.
Is someone following her? What will happen, if they catch her? She doesn’t look back.
She passes a dozen elderly deaf Chinese tourists, their guide signing to them, smiling. And she remembers her mother, her cheap, old-fashioned hearing aids that would abruptly cut out, and leave her deaf and frustrated till she could find new batteries.
They’d damaged her mother’s hearing in Nanjing, interrogating her. The year the local Party had cut the bright red cross off the steeple of her shabby Catholic church. Her mother had led the protest; a row of frightened women of all ages, a couple of old men, backed up against the church wall by riot police. Dragged into vans. Beaten. It can happen anywhere.
I want to be brave like my mother.
Maybe not exactly like my mother.
She walks into the next four-star hotel she sees, and goes straight to the bar; just a big area to the side of reception, marked off by armchairs, and trees in pots.
It’s awful early for this; guys are much braver at night; but she buys a glass of red wine anyway, and sits in an
armchair with her legs slightly apart. An older man walks past, smiles at her. She doesn’t smile back.
A middle-aged couple walk past. The man glances over and starts to smile, and she smiles back but just out of politeness, and he stops smiling abruptly and looks intensely sad.
A couple of minutes later, a younger man walks past on his way to the bar.
She smiles at him.
He smiles at her, but he keeps walking.
Oh, crap. It’s so long since she did this. Maybe the rules have changed. Maybe she’s too old.
On his way back from the bar, he stops and says, ‘Would you recommend any shows? I’m only in town for one night, and I . . .’ He runs out of invention, but that’s fine, he has got the first serve over the net.
‘A show?’ She pretends to think.
They talk complete bullshit about nothing for half an hour. She’s decided after a minute. He’s decided after a minute. She couldn’t have made it any clearer.
My God, he’s never going to pull the trigger.
For a moment, Naomi is almost nostalgic for the old San Francisco BDSM scene.
She says, ‘I really need a shower. But my hotel is so far uptown, I don’t think I’ll have time to get back there.’
Unbelievably, he looks like fumbling even this one. But he’s a human being, and five billion years of evolution weren’t entirely in vain.
‘Well, I guess . . . you could always have a shower in my room . . . if you’re really stuck. I mean it’s not . . .’
She says yes, before he can talk himself back out of it.
33
Colt has promised to eat a full meal today. He doesn’t like promises, they weigh heavy on him.
He decides to get this one out of the way. Orders a pizza. Pepperoni and olives. With extra olives.
Half an hour later, ingame, a dry mesquite branch snaps behind Colt, and he swings around, his heart slamming.
No. Crapworld.
The doorbell.
Oh yeah.
Pizza.
While waiting, he had slipped back into the game, and had soon forgotten ordering it. Much of the bliss of the game came from this; that actions taken in the outer world dissolved to nothing and were soon forgotten.
But now, suspended between worlds, he is unsure how to behave, what to do.
He is unsure how dangerous this encounter might be.
A stranger, he thinks. At the door. Oh, Mama. His mother has always opened the door.
He didn’t think this through.
He has never wanted his mother like this before, he has never missed her like this. She has always been here, or close by, a few minutes away; and now she is not.
He stands there, very quiet, locked in the gameworld, but aware of the real world; uncomfortably aware that he is not, in fact, in a cave. And this feeling is very bad, feels very unsafe; to be in the gameworld, but aware that it is not the world, that at any moment the mapping might fail and something terrible and unpredictable might crash in; touch him; make him feel something.
He keeps mapping on. He’s not ready to go outgame.
But he switches off noise-cancellation. Now he can hear sounds in the real world again, as well as the sounds the game converts them into.
He smells something that is not in the game. The smell itself is pleasant, but the fact that it is alien, the fact that the game cannot map it, scares him.
Too late to switch off the light.
He didn’t think this through. He ordered online, and, at some level, thought the pizza would be delivered without human interaction, like the mail.
But of course, Mama likes these guys because they’re traditional. As traditional as a Neapolitan pizza joint in Nevada can get. Buffalo mozzarella, and delivery boys on motorbikes.
Retro bullpoop. Why couldn’t they use drones like everyone else?
He leans forward a little, and rubs the palms of his hands back and forth repeatedly on the tops of his hip bones. In sync; exactly the same number of times each. Soothing.
OK. There must be an encounter, an exchange, a conversation. The other person will not know him, will not make allowances. It could go wrong. It has gone wrong before.
His mother is not there to rescue him, as she did once in Walmart, when he wandered off into the hardware aisle, and a man, fat, and yet somehow with too much skin – so perhaps, thought Colt, he had once been fatter still – caught Colt staring, and grew angry at Colt’s long, detailed explanation of why he was staring, and strode up and loomed over him, shouting, the man’s neck and jowls red and razor-burnt, flapping with rage, like a turkey’s.
Colt’s heart is beating uncomfortably fast and his breathing is all over the place.
But the person on the other side of the door must know he is here. Outgame, there are translucent glass panels around the door. The light is on, straight above Colt’s head, in the hall.
Now Colt hears the doorbell and the snapping of a twig, almost simultaneously.
He reaches for the door ingame, and his hand approaches a rough wooden thing, through which he can see chinks of light, moonlight, and a movement. The game understands the logic of the situation, the mapping is good, and Colt is soothed.
But to open the door, ingame, and try to deal with an outgame stranger; no.
The person on the other side of the door shouts something, and the helmet lets it through, but it’s a little mangled. It was probably ‘Pizza.’ But it could have been something else.
Panic.
Breathe. Breathe.
He turns off the mapping. Breathes.
He turns off the game.
Oh, the disappointing light. The flatness of the world. The lack of energy, contrast.
A door, a wall.
Flat and textureless in the nothing light.
It’s like a stab. The loss.
Leaving his helmet on, looking through the dead visor, he approaches the door and tries to push a word through a throat that has tightened. What his mother says. Say what his mother says. ‘Coming.’ But it comes out so tight and weak, he isn’t sure if it can be heard on the other side of the door.
He has to clear his throat, force it to loosen.
‘COMING.’ That’s too loud.
‘No problem, take your time.’ From the far side of the door. He is shocked to hear a reply, but of course they will reply, of course. Hard to make out the voice, hard to say what kind of person it is.
He tries to imagine the person on the other side of the door, the stranger, to empathize, as his mother so often recommends, in order to predict what they will do next; he closes his eyes, but all he can see in his head is the door from the other side.
A zombie staring at a door.
No feelings, no thoughts.
Staring at the door he hides behind.
A terrible feeling fills him, and he opens his eyes and stares deliberately up into the light above his head to burn out the image.
He is afraid it will be the big man, with the red, swinging jowls. He tries to estimate the probability. The population of Nevada is three point five million . . . No, the probability is vanishingly small. But why then does he feel it is so possible, so likely? He has either calculated the odds wrong, consciously, mathematically, just now; or he calculated the odds wrong unconsciously, emotionally, when he felt that he knew the man at the door. But, either way, half his mind is wrong about this important thing; half his mind misunderstands the world, it’s just a matter of which half; and that is very scary.
If it is the man with the red, swinging jowls, Colt decides he will slam the door, and recalculate the odds, and discover what factor he overlooked.
Colt reaches for the chain, hesitates. Tries to think what his mother would say. Because sometimes she is happy when he does something he is scared of, and sometimes she is incredibly angry, and it is so hard to tell, in advance, which she will be.
34
In New York his mother comes explosively, kneeling on the big hotel bed with her
ass in the air, face crushed down awkwardly, sideways, into a pillow, her hands tied behind her back, and she has forgotten her son, forgotten his name, forgotten his face, for the first time in years.
35
Colt takes off the chain, and opens the door, and the stranger standing there is wearing a helmet.
A full-face motorcycle helmet, bright red, with a dark glass visor.
They stare at each other, almost visor to visor.
No, the stranger is not quite as tall as Colt. Is slim. Is holding a pizza box.
It’s not the big man.
Safe.
Colt untenses his arm, which he had poised to slam and lock the door.
Opens the door fully.
Black leather clothes. Motorcycle clothes.
A bright yellow Yamaha motorbike sits up on its stand behind the stranger.
The stranger takes off the red helmet one-handed.
It is a woman.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,’ she says. ‘Da Vinci Pizza. I know, we’re meant to take the helmet off before we ring the bell, but the rain fritzes my hair.’
It’s raining, yes. Just starting. The rare, sudden, savage rain of the desert. He hadn’t noticed.
She’s looking at him in a way that he doesn’t understand.
‘Oh man,’ she says, ‘I love to ride my bike out here. No speed cams . . . You ride?’
He shakes his head. ‘The lifetime odds of serious injury riding a motorbike are really high,’ he says.
‘Yeah, sure, but if you . . .’
‘Two orders of magnitude higher than for a self-drive,’ he says.
Behind her, in the spill of light from the open door, drops bounce and splash off the hard, dry ground. Stray raindrops swirl in, under the projecting porch roof, as the wind gusts. She raises the pizza box she holds in her left hand, and rests it on her head like a hat. Like a giant mortar board. Drops smack loudly off the lid of the box, and each splash casts a delicate mist onto his face, his visor, a moment later.
‘Very, very dangerous,’ he says. He shakes his head, and looks away from her. Stares down at her red helmet.
His vision whites out for a second. There is, almost simultaneously, a roaring crash that just keeps on going, and now a hot, bright afterimage of her red helmet is dancing in front of his eyes, overlapping the real helmet, and he doesn’t know what’s happening and it’s scary.