Spin

  Wun briefed me on dosage, timing, contraindications, and potential problems. I was dismayed by the long list of attendant dangers. Even on Mars, Wun said, the mortality rate from the transition to Fourth was a nontrivial 0.1 percent, and Jason’s case was complicated by his AMS.

  But without treatment Jason’s prognosis was even worse. And he would go ahead with this whether I approved of it or not—in a sense, the prescribing physician was Wun Ngo Wen, not me. My role was simply to oversee the procedure and treat any unexpected side effects. Which soothed my conscience, although the argument would have been hard to defend in court—Wun might have “prescribed” the drugs, but it wasn’t his hand that would put them into Jason’s body.

  It would be mine.

  Wun Ngo Wen wouldn’t even be with us. Jase had booked a three-week leave of absence for the end of November, early December, by which time Wun would have become a global celebrity, a name (however unusual) everyone recognized. Wun would be busy addressing the United Nations and accepting the hospitality of our planet’s somewhat bloodstained collection of monarchs, mullahs, presidents, and prime ministers, while Jason sweated and vomited his way toward better health.

  We needed a place to go. A place where he could be inconspicuously sick, a place where I could attend him without attracting unwanted attention, but civilized enough that I could call an ambulance if things went wrong. Somewhere comfortable. Somewhere quiet.

  “I know the perfect place,” Jason said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “The Big House,” he said.

  I laughed, until I realized he was serious.

  Diane didn’t call back until a week after Lomax’s visit to Perihelion, a week after Molly left town to claim whatever reward E. D. Lawton or his hired detectives had promised her.

  Sunday afternoon. I was alone in my rental. A sunny day, but the blinds were pulled. All week, balancing time between patients at the Perihelion clinic and secretive tutorials with Wun and Jase, I’d been staring down the barrel of this empty weekend. It was good to be busy, I reasoned, because when you were busy you were awash in the countless but comprehensible daily problems that crowd out pain and stifle remorse. That was healthy. That was a coping process. Or at least a delaying tactic. Useful but, alas, temporary. Because sooner or later the noise fades, the crowds disperse, and you go home to the burned-out lightbulb, the empty room, the unmade bed.

  It was pretty bad. I wasn’t even sure how to feel—or rather, which of the several conflicting and incompatible modes of pain I ought to acknowledge first. “You’re better off without her,” Jase had said a couple of times, and that was at least as true as it was banal: better off without her, but better still if I could make sense of her, if I could decide whether Molly had used me or had punished me for using her, whether my chilly and perhaps slightly counterfeit love equaled her cold and profitable repudiation of it.

  Then the phone rang, which was embarrassing because I was busy stripping the sheets from my bed, balling them up for a trip to the laundry room, lots of detergent and scalding hot water to bleach out Molly’s aura. You don’t want to be interrupted at a task like that. Makes you feel the tiniest bit self-conscious. But I’d always been a slave to a ringing phone. I picked up.

  “Tyler?” Diane said. “Is that you, Ty? Are you alone?”

  I admitted that I was alone.

  “Good, I’m glad I finally got hold of you. I wanted to tell you, we’re changing our phone number. Unlisting it. But in case you need to get in touch with me—”

  She recited the private number, which I scribbled on a handy napkin. “Why are you unlisting your phone?” She and Simon had only a single static land line between them, but I guessed that was a devotional penance, like wearing wool or eating whole grains.

  “For one thing we’ve been getting these odd calls from E.D. A couple of times he called late at night and started haranguing Simon. He sounded a little drunk, frankly. E.D. hates Simon, E.D. hated Simon from the get-go, but after we moved to Phoenix we never heard from him. Until now. The silence was hurtful. But this is worse.”

  Diane’s telephone number might have been something else Molly filched from my household tracker and passed on to E.D. I couldn’t explain that to Diane without violating my security oath, for the same reason I couldn’t mention Wun Ngo Wen or ice-eating replicators. But I did tell her that Jason had been engaged in a struggle with his father over control of Perihelion, and Jason had come out on top, and maybe that’s what was bothering E.D.

  “Could be,” Diane said. “Coming so soon after the divorce.”

  “What divorce? Are you talking about E.D. and Carol?”

  “Jason didn’t tell you? E.D.’s been living in a rental in Georgetown since May. The negotiations are still going on, but it looks like Carol gets the Big House and maintenance payments and E.D. gets everything else. The divorce was his idea, not hers. Which is maybe understandable. Carol’s been just this side of an alcoholic coma for decades. She wasn’t much of a mother and she can’t have been much of a wife for E.D.”

  “You’re saying you approve?”

  “Hardly. I haven’t changed my mind about him. He was an awful, indifferent parent—at least to me. I didn’t like him and he didn’t care whether I liked him. But I wasn’t in awe of him, either, not the way Jason was. Jason saw him as this monumental king of industry, this towering Washington mover and shaker—”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “He’s successful and he’s got some leverage, but this stuff is all relative, Ty. There are ten thousand E. D. Lawtons in this country. E.D. would never have gotten anywhere if his father and his uncle hadn’t bankrolled his first business—which I’m sure they expected to function as a tax write-off, nothing more. E.D. was good at what he did, and when the Spin opened up an opportunity he took advantage of it, and that brought him to the attention of genuinely powerful people. But he was still basically nouveau riche as far as the big boys were concerned. He never had that Yale-Harvard-Skull-and-Bones thing going for him. No cotillion balls for me. We were the poor kids on the block. I mean, it was a nice block, but there’s old money and there’s new money, and we were definitely new money.”

  “I guess it looked different,” I said, “from across the lawn. How’s Carol holding up?”

  “Carol’s medicine comes out of the same bottle it ever did. What about you? How are things with you and Molly?”

  “Molly’s gone,” I said.

  “Gone as in ‘gone to the store,’ or—”

  “Plain gone. We broke up. I don’t have a cute euphemism for it.”

  “I’m sorry, Tyler.”

  “Thank you, but it’s for the best. Everybody says so.”

  “Simon and I are doing all right,” she said, though I hadn’t asked. “The church thing is hard on him.”

  “More church politics?”

  “Jordan Tabernacle’s in some kind of legal trouble. I don’t know all the details. We’re not directly involved, but Simon’s taking it pretty hard. You sure you’re okay, though? You sound a little hoarse.”

  “I’ll survive,” I said.

  The morning before the election I packed a couple of suitcases (fresh clothes, a brace of paperback books, my medical kit), drove to Jason’s place, and picked him up for the drive to Virginia. Jase was still fond of quality cars, but we needed to travel inconspicuously. My Honda, therefore, not his Porsche. The interstates weren’t safe for Porsches these days.

  The Garland presidency had been good times for anybody with an income over half a million dollars, hard times for everybody else. That was pretty obvious from the look of the road, a rolling tableau of warehouse retailers book-ended by boarded-over malls, parking lots where squatters lived in tireless automobiles, highway towns subsisting on the income from a Stuckey’s and a radar trap. Warning signs posted by the state police announced NO STOPPING AFTER DARK or VERIFIED 911 CALL REQUIRED FOR PROMPT EMERGENCY RESPONSE. Highway piracy had cut the volume of small-vehic
le traffic by half. We spent much of the drive bracketed between eighteen-wheel rigs, some of them in conspicuously poor repair, and camo-green troop trucks servicing various military bases.

  But we didn’t talk about any of that. And we didn’t talk about the election, which was in any case a foregone conclusion, Lomax outpolling any of the two major and three minor rival candidates. We didn’t talk about ice-eating replicators or Wun Ngo Wen and we surely didn’t talk about E. D. Lawton. Instead we talked about old times and good books, and much of the time we didn’t talk at all. I had loaded the dashboard memory with the kind of angular, contrarian jazz I knew Jason liked: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins—people who had long ago fathomed the distance between the street and the stars.

  We pulled up in front of the Big House at dusk.

  The house was brightly lit, big windows butter yellow under a sky the color of iridescent ink. Election weather was chilly this year. Carol Lawton came down from the porch to meet the car, her small body shrouded in paisley scarves and a knitted sweater. She was nearly sober, judging by her steady if slightly overcalculated gait.

  Jason unfolded himself slowly, cautiously from the passenger seat.

  Jase was in remission, or as close as he came to remission these days. With a little effort he could pass for normal. What surprised me was that he stopped making the effort as soon as we arrived at the Big House. He careened through the entrance hall to the dining room. No servants were present—Carol had arranged for us to have the house to ourselves for a couple of weeks—but the cook had left a platter of cold meats and vegetables in case we arrived hungry. Jason slumped into a chair.

  Carol and I joined him. Carol had aged visibly since my mother’s death. Her hair was so fine now that the contours of her skull showed through it, pink and simian, and when I took her arm it felt like kindling under silk. Her cheeks were sunken. Her eyes had the brittle, nervous alacrity of a drinker at least temporarily on the wagon. When I said it was good to see her she smiled ruefully: “Thank you, Tyler. I know how awful I look. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Not quite ready for my close-up, thank you very effing much.” I didn’t know what she was talking about. “But I endure. How is Jason?”

  “Same as always,” I said.

  “You’re sweet for prevaricating. But I know—well, I won’t say I know all about it. But I know he’s ill. He told me that much. And I know he’s expecting you to treat him for it. Some unorthodox but effective treatment.” She took her arm away and looked into my eyes. “It is effective, isn’t it, this medication you propose to give him?”

  I was too startled to say anything but, “Yes.”

  “Because he made me promise not to ask questions. I suppose that’s all right. Jason trusts you. Therefore I trust you. Even though when I look at you I can’t help seeing the child who lives in the house across the lawn. But I see a child when I look at Jason, too. Vanished children—I can’t think where I lost them.”

  That night I slept in a guest room at the Big House, a room I had only glimpsed from the hallway during the years I lived on the property.

  I slept some of the night, anyway. Some of it I spent lying awake, trying to gauge the legal risk I had assumed by coming here. I didn’t know exactly which laws or protocols Jase might have violated by smuggling prepared Martian pharmaceuticals off the Perihelion campus, but I had already made myself an accessory to the act.

  Come the next morning Jason wondered where we ought to store the several vials of clear liquid Wun had passed on to him—enough to treat four or five people. (“In case we drop a suitcase,” he had explained at the beginning of the trip. “Redundancy.”)

  “Are you expecting a search?”

  I pictured federal functionaries in biohazard suits swarming up the steps of the Big House.

  “Of course not. But it’s never a bad idea to hedge a risk.” He gave me a closer look, though his eyes jerked to the left every few seconds, another symptom of his disease. “Feeling a little apprehensive?”

  I said we could conceal the spares in the house across the lawn, unless they needed refrigeration.

  “According to Wun they’re chemically stable under any condition short of thermonuclear warfare. But a warrant for the Big House would cover the entire property.”

  “I don’t know about warrants. I do know where the hiding places are.”

  “Show me,” Jason said.

  So we trooped across the lawn, Jason following a little unsteadily behind me. It was early afternoon, election day, but in the grassy space between the two houses it might have been any autumn, any year. Somewhere off in the wooded patch straddling the creek a bird announced itself, a single note that began boldly but faded like a reconsidered thought. Then we reached my mother’s house and I turned the key and opened the door into a deeper stillness.

  The house had been periodically cleaned and dusted but essentially closed since my mother’s death. I hadn’t been back to organize her effects, no other family existed, and Carol had preferred to maintain the building rather than change it. But it wasn’t timeless. Far from it. Time had nested here. Time had made itself at home. The front room smelled of enclosure, of the essences that seep out of undisturbed upholstery, yellow paper, settled fabric. In winter, Carol told me later, the house was kept just warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing; in summer the curtains were drawn against the heat. It was cool today, inside and out.

  Jason came across the threshold trembling. His gait had been ragged all morning, which was why he had let me carry the pharmaceuticals (apart from what I had already set aside for his treatment), a half pound or so of glass and biochemicals in a foam-padded leather overnight bag.

  “This is the first time I’ve been here,” he said shyly, “since before she died. Is it stupid to say I miss her?”

  “No, not stupid.”

  “She was the first person I ever noticed being kind to me. All the kindness in the Big House came in the door with Belinda Dupree.”

  I led him through the kitchen to the half-size door that opened into the basement. The small house on the Lawton property had been designed to resemble a New England cottage, or someone’s notion of one, down to the rude concrete-slab cellar with a ceiling low enough that Jason had to stoop to follow me. The space was just big enough to contain a furnace, water heater, washing machine and dryer. The air was even colder here and it had a moist, mineral scent.

  I crouched into the nook behind the sheet-metal body of the furnace, one of those dusty cul-de-sacs even professional cleaners habitually ignore. I explained to Jase that there was a cracked slab of drywall here, and with a little dexterity you could pry it out to reveal the small uninsulated gap between the pine studs and the foundation wall.

  “Interesting,” Jason said from where he stood a yard behind me and around the angle of the quiescent furnace. “What did you keep in there, Tyler? Back issues of Gent?”

  When I was ten I had kept certain toys here, not because I was afraid anyone would steal them but because it was fun knowing they were hidden and that only I could find them. Later on I stashed less innocent things: several brief attempts at a diary, letters to Diane never delivered or even finished, and, yes, though I wouldn’t admit it to Jason, printouts of some relatively tame Internet porn. All these guilty secrets had been disposed of long ago.

  “Should have brought a flashlight,” Jase said. The single overhead bulb cast negligible light into this cobwebbed corner.

  “There used to be one on the table by the fuse box.” There still was. I backed out of the gap long enough to take it from Jason’s hand. It emitted the watery, pale glow of a dying battery pack, but it worked well enough that I could find the loose chunk of drywall without groping. I lifted it away and slid the overnight bag into the space behind it, then fitted the drywall in place and brushed chalky dust over the visible seams.

  But before I could back out I dropped the flashlight and it rolled even farther into the spidery shadows behind
the furnace. I grimaced and reached for it, following the flickery glow. Touched the barrel of it. Touched something else. Something hollow but substantial. A box.

  I pulled it closer.

  “You almost finished in there, Ty?”

  “One second,” I said.

  I trained the light on the box. It was a shoe box. A shoe box with a dusty New Balance logo printed on it and a different legend written over that in fat black ink: MEMENTOS (SCHOOL).

  It was the box missing from my mother’s étagère upstairs, the one I hadn’t been able to find after her funeral.

  “Having trouble?” Jason asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I could investigate later. I pushed the box back where I’d found it and crawled out of the dusty space. Stood up and brushed my hands. “I guess we’re done here.”

  “Remember this for me,” Jason said. “In case I forget.”

  That night we watched the election returns on the Lawtons’ impressively large but outdated video rig. Carol had misplaced her corrective lenses and sat close to the screen, blinking at it. She had spent most of her adult life ignoring politics—“That was always E.D.’s department”—and we had to explain who some of the major players were. But she seemed to enjoy the sense of occasion. Jason made gentle jokes and Carol obliged him by laughing, and when she laughed I could see a little of Diane in her face.

  She tired easily, though, and she had gone to her room by the time the networks began calling states. No surprises there. In the end Lomax collected all the Northeast and most of the Midwest and West. He did less well in the South, but even there the dissenting vote was split almost evenly between old-line Democrats and the Christian Conservatives.

  We started clearing away our coffee cups about the time the last opposing candidate delivered a grimly polite concession.