Spin

  I took a walk around the grounds after dinner while there was still a little daylight.

  Mike the yard guy had done a decent job. The lawn glowed like a mathematician’s idea of a garden, the cultivation of a primary color. Beyond it, shadows had begun to rise in the wooded acreage. Diane would have appreciated the woods in this light, I thought. I thought again of those summer sessions by the creek, years ago now, when she would read to us from old books. Once, when we talked about the Spin, Diane had quoted a little rhyme by the English poet A. E. Housman:

  The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;

  He has devoured the infant child.

  The infant child is not aware

  He has been eaten by the bear.

  Jason was on the phone when I came back through the kitchen door. He looked at me, then turned away and lowered his voice.

  “No,” he said. “If it has to be that way, but—no, I understand. All right. I said all right, didn’t I? All right means all right.”

  He pocketed the phone. I said, “Was that Diane?”

  He nodded.

  “She’s coming?”

  “She’s coming. But there are a couple of things I want to mention before she gets here. You know what we talked about over dinner? We can’t share that with her. Or, actually, anyone. It’s not public information.”

  “You mean it’s classified.”

  “Technically, I suppose so, yes.”

  “But you told me about it.”

  “Yes. That was a federal crime.” He smiled. “Mine, not yours. And I trust you to be discreet about it. Be patient—it’ll be all over CNN in a couple of months. Besides, I have plans for you, Ty. One of these days, Perihelion is going to vet candidates for some extremely rugged homesteading. We’ll need all kinds of physicians on site. Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that, if we could work together?”

  I was startled. “I just graduated, Jase. I haven’t interned.”

  “All things in time.”

  I said, “You don’t trust Diane?”

  His smile collapsed. “No, frankly. Not anymore. Not these days.”

  “When will she get here?”

  “Before noon tomorrow.”

  “And what is it you don’t want to tell me?”

  “She’s bringing her boyfriend.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “You’ll see.”

  No Single Thing Abides

  I woke up knowing I wasn’t ready to see her again.

  Woke up in E. D. Lawton’s plush summerhouse in the Berkshires with the sun shining through filigreed lace blinds thinking, Enough bullshit. I was tired of it. All the self-serving bullshit of the last eight years, up to and including my affair with Candice Boone, who had seen through my own wishful lies sooner than I had. “You’re a little bit fixated on these Lawton people,” Candice had once said. Tell me about it.

  I couldn’t honestly say I was still in love with Diane. The connection between us had never been as unambiguous as that. We had both grown in and out of it, like vines weaving through a latticework fence. But at its best it had been a real connection, an emotion almost frightening in its gravity and maturity. Which was why I had been so eager to disguise it. It would have frightened her, too.

  I still found myself conducting imaginary conversations with her, usually late at night, offering asides to the starless sky. I was selfish enough to miss her but sane enough to know we had never really been together. I was fully prepared to forget about her.

  I just wasn’t prepared to see her again.

  Downstairs, Jason sat in the kitchen while I fixed myself breakfast. He had propped open the door. Sweet breezes swept the house. I was thinking seriously of throwing my bag into the back of the Hyundai and just driving away. “Tell me about this NK thing,” I said.

  “Do you read the papers at all?” Jason asked. “Do they keep med students in isolation up at Stony Brook?”

  Of course I knew a little bit about NK, mostly what I’d heard on the news or picked up from lunchroom conversation. I knew NK stood for “New Kingdom.” I knew it was a Spin-inspired Christian movement—at least nominally Christian, though it had been denounced by mainstream and conservative churches alike. I knew it attracted mainly the young and disaffected. A couple of guys in my freshman class had dropped out of school and into the NK lifestyle, trading shaky academic careers for a less demanding enlightenment.

  “It’s really just a millenarian movement,” Jase said. “Too late for the millennium but right on time for the end of the world.”

  “A cult, in other words.”

  “No, not exactly. ‘NK’ is a catchphrase for the whole Christian Hedonist spectrum, so it’s not a cult in itself, though it does include some cultlike groups. There’s no single leader. No holy writ, just a bunch of fringe theologians the movement is loosely identified with—C. R. Ratel, Laura Greengage, people like that.” I’d seen their books on the drugstore racks. Spin theology with question-mark titles: Have We Witnessed the Second Coming? Can We Survive the End of Time? “And not much agenda, beyond a kind of weekend communalism. But what draws crowds isn’t the theology. You ever see footage of those NK rallies, the kind they call an Ekstasis?”

  I had, and unlike Jase, who had never been much at home with matters of the flesh, I could understand the appeal. What I had seen was recorded video of a gathering in the Cascades, summer of last year. It had looked like a cross between a Baptist picnic and a Grateful Dead concert. A sunny meadow, wild-flowers, ceremonial white robes, a guy with zero-percent body fat blowing a shofar. By nightfall a bonfire was burning briskly and a stage had been set up for musicians. Then the robes began to drop and the dancing started. And a few acts more intimate than dancing.

  For all the disgust evinced by the mainstream media it had looked winsomely innocent to me. No preaching, just a few hundred pilgrims smiling into the teeth of extinction and loving their neighbors like they’d like to be loved. The footage had been burned onto hundreds of DVDs and passed from hand to hand in college dorms nationwide, including Stony Brook. There is no sexual act so Edenic that a lonely med student can’t whack off to it.

  “It’s hard to picture Diane being attracted to NK.”

  “On the contrary. Diane’s their target audience. She’s scared to death of the Spin and everything it implies about the world. NK is an anodyne for people like her. It turns the thing they’re most afraid of into an object of adoration, a door into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “How long has she been involved?”

  “Most of a year now. Since she met Simon Townsend.”

  “Simon’s NK?”

  “Simon, I’m afraid, is hard-core NK.”

  “You met this guy?”

  “She brought him to the Big House last Christmas. I think she wanted to watch the fireworks. E.D., of course, doesn’t approve of Simon. In fact his hostility was pretty obvious.” (Here Jason winced at the memory of what must have been one of E. D. Lawton’s major tantrums.) “But Diane and Simon did the NK thing—they turned the other cheek. They practically smiled him to death. I mean that literally. He was one gentle, forgiving look away from the coronary ward.”

  Score one for Simon, I thought. “Is he good for her?”

  “He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.”

  They arrived that afternoon, sputtering up the driveway in a fifteen-year-old touring car that appeared to burn more oil than Mike-the-yard-guy’s tractor. Diane was driving. She parked and climbed out on the far side of the car, obscured by the luggage rack, while Simon stepped into full view, smiling bashfully.

  He was a good-looking guy. Six feet tall or a little over; skinny but not a weakling; a plain, slightly horsey face offset by his unruly golden-blond hair. His smile showed a cleft between his upper front teeth. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his left biceps like a tourniquet; that was an NK emblem, I learned later.

  Diane circled the car and stood bes
ide him, both of them grinning up the porch stairs at Jason and me. She was also decked out in high NK fashion: a cornflower-blue floor-sweeper skirt, blue blouse, and a ridiculous black wide-brimmed hat like the kind Amish men wear. But the clothes suited her, or rather they framed her in a pleasing way, suggested rude health and hayseed sensuality. Her face was as alive as an unplucked berry. She shaded her eyes in the sunlight and grinned—at me in particular, I wanted to believe. My god, that smile. Somehow both genuine and mischievous.

  I began to feel lost.

  Jason’s phone trilled. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.

  “Gotta take this one,” he whispered.

  “Don’t leave me alone here, Jase.”

  “I’ll be in the kitchen. Right back.”

  He ducked away just as Simon lofted his big duffel bag onto the wooden planking of the porch and said, “You must be Tyler Dupree!”

  He stuck out his hand. I took it. He had a firm grip and a honeyed Southern accent, vowels like polished driftwood, consonants polite as calling cards. He made my name sound positively Cajun, though the family had never been south of Millinocket. Diane bounded up after him, yelled, “Tyler!” and grabbed me in a ferocious embrace. Suddenly her hair was in my face and all I could register was the sunny, salty smell of her.

  We backed off to a comfortable arm’s length. “Tyler, Tyler,” she exclaimed, as if I had turned into something remarkable. “You’re looking good after all these years.”

  “Eight,” I said stupidly. “Eight years.”

  “Wow, is it really?”

  I helped drag their luggage inside, showed them to the parlor off the porch, and hurried away to retrieve Jason, who was in the kitchen interacting with his cell. His back was turned when I came in.

  “No,” he said. His voice was tense. “No…not even the State Department?”

  I stopped in my tracks. The State Department. Oh my.

  “I can be back in a couple of hours if—oh. I see. Okay. No, it’s all right. But keep me informed. Right. Thanks.”

  He pocketed the phone and caught sight of me.

  “Talking to E.D.?” I asked.

  “His assistant, actually.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Come on, Ty, you want me to let you in on all the secrets?” He attempted a smile, not too successfully. “I wish you hadn’t overheard that.”

  “All I heard was you offering to go back to D.C. and leave me here with Simon and Diane.”

  “Well…I may have to. The Chinese are balking.”

  “What’s that mean, balking?”

  “They refuse to entirely abandon their planned launch. They want to keep that option open.”

  The nuclear attack on the Spin artifacts, he meant. “I assume somebody’s trying to talk them out of it?”

  “The diplomacy is ongoing. It’s just not exactly succeeding. Negotiations seem to be deadlocked.”

  “So—well, shit, Jase! What’s it mean if they do launch?”

  “It means two high-yield fusion weapons would be detonated in close proximity to unknown devices associated with the Spin. As for the consequences…well, that’s an interesting question. But it hasn’t happened yet. Probably won’t.”

  “You’re talking about doomsday, or maybe the end of the Spin…”

  “Keep your voice down. We have guests, remember? And you’re over-reacting. What the Chinese have in mind is rash and probably futile, but even if they go ahead with it it’s not likely to be suicidal. Whatever the Hypotheticals are, they must know how to defend themselves without destroying us in the process. And the polar artifacts aren’t necessarily the devices that enable the Spin. They could be passive observational platforms, communications devices, even decoys.”

  “If the Chinese do launch,” I said, “how much warning do we get?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘we.’ The general public probably won’t hear anything until it’s over.”

  This was when I first began to understand that Jason wasn’t just his father’s apprentice, that he had already begun to forge his own connections in high places. Later I would learn a great deal more about the Perihelion Foundation and the work Jason did for it. For now it was still part of Jason’s shadow life. Even when we were children Jase had had a shadow life: away from the Big House he’d been a math prodigy, breezing through an elite private school like a Masters titleist playing a mini-golf course; home, he was just Jase, and we had been careful to keep it that way.

  It was still that way. But he was casting a bigger shadow now. He didn’t spend his days impressing calculus instructors at Rice. He spent his days positioning himself to influence the course of human history.

  He added, “If it happens, yes, I’ll have some warning. We’ll have some warning. But I don’t want Diane worrying about it. Or Simon, of course.”

  “Great. I’ll just put it out of my mind. The end of the world.”

  “It’s no such thing. Nothing’s happened yet. Calm down, Tyler. Pour drinks if you need something to do.”

  As nonchalant as he was trying to sound, his hand trembled as he took four tumblers out of the kitchen cupboard.

  I could have left. I could have walked out the door, hustled into my Hyundai and been a long way down the road before I was missed. I thought about Diane and Simon in the front parlor practicing hippie Christianity and Jase in the kitchen taking doomsday bulletins on his cell phone: did I really want to spend my last night on Earth with these people?

  Thinking at the same time: but who else? Who else?

  “We met in Atlanta,” Diane said. “Georgia State hosted a seminar on alternative spirituality. Simon was there to hear C. R. Ratel’s lecture. I just sort of found him in the campus cafeteria. He was sitting by himself reading a copy of Second Coming, and I was alone, so I put down my tray and we started talking.”

  Diane and Simon shared a plush yellow dust-scented sofa by the window. Diane slouched against the armrest. Simon sat alertly upright. His smile had begun to worry me. It never went away.

  The four of us sipped drinks while the curtains wafted in the breeze and a horsefly mumbled at the window screen. It was hard to sustain a conversation when there was so much we weren’t supposed to talk about. I made an effort to duplicate Simon’s smile. “So you’re a student?”

  “Was a student,” he said.

  “What are you doing lately?”

  “Traveling. Mostly.”

  “Simon can afford to travel,” Jase said. “He’s an heir.”

  “Don’t be rude,” Diane said, the edge in her voice signifying a real warning. “This once, please, Jase?”

  But Simon shrugged it off. “No, it’s true enough. I have some money set aside. Diane and I are taking the opportunity to see a little bit of the country.”

  “Simon’s grandfather,” Jason said, “was Augustus Townsend, the Georgia pipe cleaner king.”

  Diane rolled her eyes. Simon, still imperturbable—he was beginning to seem almost saintly—said, “That was in the old days. We aren’t even supposed to call them pipe cleaners anymore. They’re ‘chenille stems.’” He laughed. “And here I sit, heir to a chenille stem fortune.” Actually it was a gifts-and-notions fortune, Diane explained later. Augustus Townsend had started in pipe cleaners but made his money distributing tin-press toys, charm bracelets, and plastic combs to five-and-dime stores throughout the South. In the 1940s the family had been a big presence in Atlanta social circles.

  Jason pressed on: “Simon himself doesn’t have what you’d call a career. He’s a free spirit.”

  “I don’t suppose any of us is truly a free spirit,” Simon said, “but no, I don’t have or want a career. I guess that makes me sound lazy. Well, I am lazy. It’s my besetting vice. But I wonder how useful any career will be in the long run. Considering the state of things. No offense.” He turned to me. “You’re in medicine, Tyler?”

  “Just out of school,” I said. “As careers go—”

&nbs
p; “No, I think that’s wonderful. Probably the most valuable occupation on the planet.”

  Jason had accused Simon of being, in effect, useless. Simon had replied that careers in general were useless…except careers like mine. Thrust and parry. It was like watching a bar fight conducted in ballet shoes.

  Still, I found myself wanting to apologize for Jase. Jason was offended not by Simon’s philosophy but by his presence. This week in the Berkshires was supposed to be a reunion, Jason and Diane and me, back in the comfort zone, childhood revisited. Instead we were being treated to confinement at close quarters with Simon, whom Jason obviously regarded as an interloper, a sort of southern-fried Yoko Ono.

  I asked Diane how long they’d been traveling.

  “About a week,” she said, “but we’ll be on the road most of the summer. I’m sure Jason’s told you about New Kingdom. But it’s really pretty wonderful, Ty. We have Internet friends all across the country. People we can crash with a day or two. So we’re doing conclaves and concerts from Maine to Oregon, July through October.”

  Jason said, “I guess that saves on accommodation and clothing expenses.”

  “Not every conclave is an Ekstasis,” Diane shot back.

  “We won’t be doing much traveling at all,” Simon said, “if that old car of ours falls apart. The engine misfires and we’re getting lousy mileage. I’m not much of a mechanic, unfortunately. Tyler, do you know anything about automobile engines?’

  “A thing or two,” I said. I understood this was an invitation to step outside with Simon while Diane tried to negotiate a cease-fire with her brother. “Let’s have a look.”

  The day was still clear, waves of warm air rippling up from the emerald lawn beyond the driveway. I listened with, I admit, partial attention, as Simon opened the hood of his old Ford and recited his problems. If he was as wealthy as Jase had implied, couldn’t he buy himself a better car? But I guessed it was a dissipated fortune he had inherited, or maybe it was tied up in trust funds.