by A. G. Riddle
Desmond shook his head.
Yuri ignored him. “Is that something you’re interested in, Conner?”
“Of course,” Conner said quickly. “I’ll do whatever is needed.”
Desmond argued, fought the plan, but in the end, he agreed. Yuri seemed to have anticipated every objection and planned for each one, like a chess game he had already played out in his mind.
Yuri and Conner left the next day. Desmond was there at the pier to see them off, the wind blowing in his hair, the massive cargo ship towering in the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the background.
“Be careful out there.”
Conner hugged his brother. “I’ll get this done for you, Des. I promise. When I get back, it will start.”
The first week brought nearly constant updates from the Rendition team and from Conner and Yuri. The first participants in the trials were recruited from islands in the South Pacific. The results were incredibly positive. No deaths. A few adverse events. The Rendition developers adjusted the device.
And so it went, for months, trial after trial, each port bringing new participants. The rest were held on the ship, told they would be released at the end of the project.
Updates became less frequent, but Desmond assumed all was well.
One Saturday afternoon, he went in to the Phaethon offices and found Avery camped out in the conference room, boxes of file folders open around her.
“Looks like an IRS audit in here.”
She jumped at his voice and held a hand to her chest. “You scared me.” She put the top back on the closest box.
“That’s a first.” He studied the folders. Personnel files. “What’re you doing?”
She swallowed as she put the cover on another box. “Research project…”
She looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week.
Something about the encounter bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Avery seemed to be spending every waking hour at the office, like a college student cramming for finals.
Halloween that year fell on a Friday, and the entire office dressed up. Politicians were well represented. There were three Hillary Clintons, just as many Nancy Pelosis, a few Barbara Boxers, no Donald Trumps, and seven Bernie Sanderses.
Some costumes skewed intellectual. The comptroller wore his usual dark business suit with one exception: the button-up white shirt and tie were replaced with a T-shirt with a line chart on it. The labels below listed the years, starting at 1980 and going up to 2015, a line for every five years. On the left were numbers: zero to twenty. He offered a reward of prime plus ten dollars, $13.50, to anyone who guessed what he was. Desmond instantly realized it, but refrained since the rest of the accounting department was obsessed with the mystery. Until lunch, that is, when he found the accountants crowded around the comptroller’s table, practically grilling him, insisting he was the target fed funds rate.
“No. You’re close, but that’s not it.”
Desmond stepped through the crowd. “Greg, if I’m not mistaken, you’re the LIBOR rate.”
The gray-haired man grinned. “How’d you figure it out?”
“September 2008. LIBOR spiked after Lehman collapsed. The only real divergence with the fed target rate in decades.”
The CFO reached into his pocket and removed an envelope that contained thirteen dollars and fifty cents.
“You’re a real geek, Desmond. You know that?”
“Yes. I’m aware of that.”
The costume voted best was topical. A lab tech had ordered a custom T-shirt from Vistaprint with four images: Gene Roddenberry, Silent Bob, the numeral eight, and a red circle with a line through it. His modern hieroglyphs—representing gene-mute-8-shun, or gene mutation—were lauded throughout the company.
Seeing the costumes reminded Desmond of the house party in Palo Alto the night he had met Peyton, when they had worn matching Mulder and Scully costumes. That had been a good night. There weren’t many that could touch it in his mind.
Like the comptroller, Desmond had also challenged people to guess his outfit, and offered a hundred dollars to the first person to do so. He wore a suit tailored in a mid-1800s style, a green visor on his forehead, and thick chains that hung from his neck and wrapped around his torso. The outfit drew plenty of lookers, most of whom dropped by his office in pairs or trios, peering around the frame as if they were looking into an open tiger cage. Board members were scary animals.
Many of the guesses were the same. Harry Houdini. David Blaine. Some professional wrestlers he’d never heard of. He shook his head and turned back to his computer each time.
Avery stopped by in the late afternoon. She looked terrible—this time purposefully so. Her hair was a rat’s nest, not unlike the first time he had visited her apartment. She had painted her mascara down her face, like Tammy Faye Bakker or a member of Kiss. She wore a teal skirt, tight-fitting, and a white T-shirt. On the front of the shirt the delta symbol was written three times in magic marker. She twirled to let him read the back of the shirt, which read: Bad Decisions.
That stumped him.
He stood for her, letting her take in his outfit.
“Seriously?”
He shrugged. “What?”
“It’s like, almost intellectually self-mutilating.”
“Does that mean you know who I am?”
“It means that I do.”
He cocked his head, surprised. She pointed at his outfit.
“You’re Jacob Marley, the business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge, immortalized in a certain novel titled A Christmas Carol. You are, how do I say this…”
“Lay it on me.”
“Okay. You’re dead.”
“That’s a shot to the heart.”
“Indeed.”
“Tell me more.”
“You’re tortured. A ghost, doomed to walk the Earth forever for your greedy, selfish, and uncaring attitude toward mankind. You roam the world, unseen, but seeing others’ pain, unable to help them. You realize your mistake. And it becomes your cross to bear. You lay it at Ebenezer’s feet, and arrange for three ghosts to visit him: the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. If your partner, Ebenezer, can be redeemed, perhaps you’ll finally know peace.”
“Wow.”
Avery shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
“Unlikely. You must have been a lit major.”
“Nah. Ira David Wood. He did a production of A Christmas Carol in Raleigh every year. It was great.”
Desmond drew out the five twenty-dollar bills he had extracted from the ATM that morning.
Avery held up a hand. “Keep it.”
“I’ll donate it to charity.”
“Grand. Do you… want to talk about your outfit?”
He squinted. “I thought we just did.”
“No, like what it means.”
“That I’m a lover of classic literature?”
“Clearly, but of all the characters in the history of stories, you picked Jacob Marley.”
“And?”
“And he’s a tragic figure. A businessman who realized his life’s work had hurt others. But only after he died and was reborn—after he wandered the world and saw the full truth. He’s a person on a mission to change his partners and pay for his crimes.”
Desmond leaned back in his chair. “Oh. Well, I was thinking, I’ve got this old suit and some chains in the garage, and the visor I bought cheap at a second-hand store. So, no, I didn’t really get that far in my analysis.”
She smiled. “Well, it’s worth thinking about. Just saying.” She turned to leave.
“Hey.”
She stopped.
“I didn’t guess yours.”
She turned back. “All right.”
He studied her chest, the three deltas, tight against her body. He couldn’t remember the words on the back.
“Turn for me.”
The corners of her mouth twisted slightly, but she spun and showed him her backside.
&nbs
p; Delta represented change. “Bad Decisions” was written on her back—they were behind her. And she had clearly been crying. Or in a fight.
“You’re… making changes to leave bad decisions behind?”
“Close. Not quite.”
“Three changes?”
“No changes, actually.”
“Huh.”
She shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. Nobody’s guessed it.”
“What’s the reward?”
“Mystery,” she said over her shoulder as she walked away.
And a mystery she was.
At five o’clock, he stopped by her cubicle, and found her working on another query, with tables he recognized.
“Well,” he said. “Anybody guess it?”
“Nope. You?”
“Nah. No classic literature aficionados around, apparently. What you working on?”
“Your health trait report.”
“That can wait until Monday.”
“I’ve got nothing else going on.”
“No hot date on Halloween?”
“I don’t date.”
He exhaled a laugh. “Me either.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s true.”
“And why is that?”
“Faults that are mine alone.”
She pointed at the chains hanging from his neck. “Character flaws that doom you to wander the afterlife, trying in vain to atone for your shortcomings?”
He smiled. “Something like that.”
“BS.”
He studied her.
“I meant what I said a few months ago.”
“That—”
“You’re a good guy. Aren’t many left.”
“Right, well, I’ll keep that in mind.” He turned to leave.
“Hey.” She stood up in her cube and called after him.
He looked back without speaking.
“Yes,” she said.
“What?”
“The answer is yes.”
“Answer to what?”
“We’ll have dinner at my place.”
He smiled. “I told you I don’t date.”
“Which is the only reason I’m willing to have dinner with you.”
“If we’re having dinner, we’re having it at my place. Because, well, your place is… your place. You know?”
“I know.”
He wrote out the address for her and drove home, feeling a strange mix of excitement and nervousness.
The doorbell rang a few minutes after he entered the motor court. The pizza guy was young, polite, and dressed as the blue person from Avatar—the name escaped Desmond. He tipped the guy excessively and told him to be careful tonight.
Just as he was setting the boxes on the kitchen island, a knock sounded on the solid wood door. Desmond saw Avery’s outline through the blurry, leaded glass as he went to greet her.
She glanced up, then left, into the dining room, and forward, taking in the expansive great room. “Jesus. It’s like Martha Stewart renovated an abandoned insane asylum.”
He howled with laughter, not a polite reaction, but a genuine heartfelt laugh. “Her fees were exorbitant.”
“You must have hired her before prison.”
“This place is an investment.”
“Right.”
He led her down the gallery hall, to the kitchen, where the boxes of pizza were waiting, along with a carafe of water and two bottles of wine.
“I’ve got water and wine, which I believe you like. As well as beer.”
“I’ll take beer.”
He pulled open a refrigerator drawer. “I’ve got Amstel, Bud, Bud Light, Fat Tire—”
“I’ll have what you’re having.”
“I’m just drinking water.”
“Really?”
“I… don’t drink. Used to.”
“Me too.”
“What?”
“I quit recently.”
“Really?”
“Like four seconds ago.”
He smiled. “All right. Water it is.”
He poured two glasses, and they sat at the long island, eating pizza out of the boxes.
“What are you?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“The costume. I’ll never get it.”
“Oh. I’m the walk of shame.”
He shook his head. “I have no idea what that means.”
She scrunched her eyebrows skeptically. Then comprehension seemed to dawn on her. “Oh. That’s right. You never went to college.”
A flicker of insecurity ran through him. It was a foreign feeling, repulsive, like someone was accusing him of something he was innocent of.
“I was kind of poking fun at myself and other sorority girls.”
He relaxed. A sorority was not something he associated Avery with. “Wait. Seriously? You were…”
She nodded. “I was.”
“No way.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“I know, but why—”
“Well, believe it or not, my various… defense mechanisms make it hard for me to make friends sometimes.”
“You don’t say.”
She sighed theatrically. “I’m afraid it’s true. This shell is hard to crack.”
“And your looks no doubt add to the intimidation factor.”
She took another bite of beef and pineapple pizza. “No comment. Anyway, being put into a situation where you have to be friends with people was like, kind of helpful.”
“And you became a Delta, Delta, Delta.”
She let out a laugh as she leaned forward.
“What?”
“We call it tri-delt.”
“Okay, Princess Tri-Delt. What does the back mean?” He tried to remember. Bad decisions?
“It’s like, you gussy yourself up, go to a mixer or a formal—these are events between a sorority and a frat—you walk in classy, have a few drinks, you’re dancing, and the next thing you know you wake up, hair’s out of whack, you’re wearing some guy’s T-shirt, and you’re sneaking out before class, walking across the quad, back to your dorm or apartment, mascara running, looking like a tramp… you know, the walk of shame.”
“That I definitely would not have gotten. I mean, it’s a bit obscure.”
“Says the guy dressed as a minor character in a novel a hundred and seventy years old.”
“Touché.”
They ate in silence a moment. Then he asked, “What do you do for fun?”
“I read.”
“What do you read? Romance?”
“Don’t have the heart for it.”
“Good one.”
“Crime fiction mostly.”
That surprised him. “Why?”
“I think we read about things we don’t have. Things we wonder about, want to see in the world. I think there’s not enough justice in this world. Too many victims—without anyone to defend them.”
“I agree with that.”
“What do you read?”
“Books about ideas.”
“Because that’s what fascinates you.”
“Yes.” It was the only thing that fascinated him. Except for her. But he would never say that. He stared at her, but she didn’t meet his gaze.
“And when you’re not reading? What do you do on the weekend? When you’re not writing SQL queries?”
“Not much.”
“You don’t seem like the idle type.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “I teach tennis.”
“Where?”
“San Jose. Inner city.”
He leaned back on the stool. “Really?”
She mimicked his expression, seemed defensive. “Really.”
“I think it’s cool.”
She shrugged. “It’s something to do.”
“Right. Just something to do.” He stared at her until she made eye contact. “Be honest. Why do you do it?”
She shrugged.
“It has to mean som
ething to you or you wouldn’t do it,” he said.
“Equality.”
“Equality?”
“On the court, it doesn’t matter who you are. Where you came from. Who your parents are. It just matters what you can do. There’s… justice.” She took a drink of water.
“There’s a line ref.”
“And review.”
“So there is.”
“Venus and Serena Williams. They grew up south of here, in Compton, just outside LA. They started playing tennis when they were three.”
“So tennis is like a Cinderella ball? Anybody can make it.”
“Your words, not mine. But yes. Your skill is all that matters. And attitude. It’s about mental and physical toughness.”
Desmond stared at her, finally realizing who she was, what her values were, deep inside, the part beyond the sarcasm and defense mechanisms. He saw it and he liked it.
He set his glass down on the marble counter. “You want to see something cool?”
“I never say no to that.”
They walked to the back staircase and descended to the basement, which held an empty wine cellar and some classic arcade games. Desmond marched into the tasting room, which was lined with empty wooden racks. The walls were clad in tumbled brick. Antique lanterns hung from the ceiling.
Avery held up a finger. “This is usually the part in the movie where bad things happen.”
“You getting scared?”
“Terrified.”
He chuckled as he moved to the back of the room. He pushed in a brick and leaned against the wall. The hidden door swung open with a groan, revealing a mesh steel catwalk enclosed by glass walls.
“This isn’t like, a Fifty Shades room, is it?” She said, eyeing the room beyond.
“You mean a hidden room for pleasure and pain?” He held his hand out, ushering her inside. “See for yourself.”
She squinted at him as she stepped through the opening. On the catwalk, a smile slowly formed. “A racquetball court?”
“They built it under the garage.” He studied her. “Do you play?”
“Not really. I have. A couple of times.”
“I hear it’s like riding a bike.”
“I’m sure.”
He smiled. “If you’re not comfortable with your skill level—”
“Don’t get carried away, Mister.”
“I can loan you some gym shorts—”