Crosstalk

  C.B. held up a faded and filthy khaki army jacket. “How about this?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “So, about the phone. Are your proposals going to be ready by the meeting, because if they’re not, you need to tell Trent—”

  “Forget Trent. Do you know how many people die on the operating table during brain surgery every year?”

  “I told you, it’s not brain surgery. It’s a minor en—”

  “Fine. Do you know how many people die from”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“‘minor enhancements’? Haven’t you ever seen those pictures on TMZ where the starlet’s nose has slid halfway down her face, under the headline COSMETIC SURGERY GONE WRONG?”

  “An EED is not cosmetic surgery.”

  “Then why has everyone in Hollywood had one? Or you could get a secondary infection like staph or flesh-eating bacteria. Hospitals are breeding grounds for those things. They’re horrible places—bedpans, catheters, gowns that open in the back. I avoid them like the plague, and you should, too.”

  “I—”

  “Or they could give you too much anesthetic. Or, even worse, your surgery could go great and work exactly like it’s supposed to, because telepathy’s a terrible idea—”

  “It’s not telepathy—” she attempted to interject, but he went right on.

  “You don’t want to know. Trust me. Especially what guys think. It’s like a cesspool in there. I mean, it’s even worse than the stuff they say on the internet, and you know how bad that is.”

  “We are supposed to be talking about whether your proposals are ready—”

  “I am,” he said. “Commspan promises the same thing—more communication. But that isn’t what people want. They’ve got way too much already—laptops, smartphones, tablets, social media. They’ve got connectivity coming out their ears. There’s such a thing as being too connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “Wanna bet? Then why does every sentence beginning ‘We need to talk’ end in disaster? Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated—camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they’d tell the truth, but they don’t.”

  “That’s not true,” she said and then remembered texting her family that she was in a meeting and telling Rahul Deshnev’s assistant her nine forty-five appointment was there.

  “They lie constantly,” C.B. was saying, “on Facebook, on eHarmony, in person. ‘Yes, the report’s done. I’m just putting the finishing touches on it.’ ‘No, I don’t think that dress makes you look fat.’ ‘Of course I want to go.’ ‘Of course’ is a dead giveaway that you’re lying. ‘Of course I didn’t sleep with her.’ ‘Of course I like your family.’ ‘Of course you can trust me.’ ”

  “C.B.—”

  “And you know who people lie to the most? Themselves. They’re absolute masters of self-deception. So even if you have this IED and can hear Trent’s thoughts, what good will it do?”

  “You can’t hear other people’s—” she said, frustrated. “I told you, the EED doesn’t make you telepathic! All it does is enhance your ability to sense your partner’s feelings.”

  “Which are even less reliable than thoughts! People have all kinds of crazy feelings—revenge, jealousy, hatred, rage. Haven’t you ever felt like murdering someone?”

  Yes, Briddey thought. I feel like it right now.

  “But your having murderous feelings doesn’t make you a murderer. And having nice ones doesn’t make you a saint. I’ll bet even Hitler had warm, fuzzy feelings when he thought about his dog, and if you happened to pick up his emotions right then, you’d think, What a nice guy! Plus, people have no idea what they feel. They convince themselves they’re in love when they’re not, they—”

  “I did not come down here to hear your theories on love,” she said. “Or Hitler. I came down here because I assumed you wanted to tell me something about your proposals for the new phone.”

  “That’s what I’ve been talking about, my proposals for the phone. What people really need is less communication, not more.” He walked over to the pinup of the 1940s movie star. “Isn’t that so, Hedy?”

  Trent’s right, Briddey thought. He is mentally unstable.

  “Hedy Lamarr,” C.B. said, tapping the photo with his knuckle. “Big Hollywood star during World War Two. She spent her spare time between making movies trying to come up with a frequency-hopping device to hide our radio signals from the Germans so they couldn’t find our torpedoes.”

  He walked back over to the lab table. “She succeeded, too. Patented the device and everything. Unfortunately, they hadn’t invented the technology for it to work yet. She had to wait fifty years, and then they used her device to design the cellphone—unfortunately. But she had the right idea.”

  “Which was?”

  “Trying to hide messages, not transmit them. If you really want to have a good relationship with your boyfriend, you should be having an anti-EED, not—”

  “We are not discussing the EED,” Briddey said. “Do you or do you not have something to show me?”

  “I do.” He dashed over to his laptop and began typing. A screen full of code came up. “Let’s say there’s someone you don’t want to talk to, or you really need to work on something and don’t want to be interrupted.”

  Like this morning, Briddey thought involuntarily.

  “You used to be able to say you couldn’t get to the phone in time or didn’t get their message,” C.B. said, “but thanks to advances in communications technology, those excuses won’t work anymore. So this phone warns you in advance when your ex-boyfriend or your boss is calling—”

  Or my family, she thought.

  “—and gives you a variety of options. You can block the call and have it show up as ‘Call cannot be completed’—I call that the Deadzone function—or you can have it cut off two sentences in. Or if you really hate the person, you can use the Blackball function and automatically reroute the call to the Department of Motor Vehicles—or Commspan’s call menu. ‘Press one if you wish to speak with someone who has no idea what’s going on. Press two if you want to stand here all day trying to figure out which button to push.’ ”

  He clicked to another screen. “And this feature—I call it the SOS app—lets you surreptitiously touch the side of your phone so it’ll ring and you can say you have an incoming call you have to take.”

  I wish I’d had that this morning when I was talking to Jill Quincy, Briddey thought. And Phillip.

  “I call it the Sanctuary phone,” C.B. said. “Me being the Hunchback of Notre Dame and all.”

  Briddey blushed. “How did you know about—?”

  “See what I mean? There’s such a thing as too much communication.” He tapped the computer screen. “So what do you think? Of the phone, I mean, not whether I’m the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

  I think it’s a wonderful idea, she thought, imagining how much easier it would make her relations with her family. But it wasn’t what Commspan needed. “Trent wants a phone that will enhance communication, not inhibit it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” he muttered, and bent over the circuit board again.

  “So you don’t have anything like that?”

  “No, I’ve got just the thing. An app that translates what you say into what people want to hear. I text you, ‘You’re an idiot to be having brain surgery for any reason, let alone for some infantile notion that it’ll bring you true love,’ and the phone sends it as, ‘Wow! Trent asked you to get an EED! How romantic!’ I call it the Hook, Line, and Sinker app.”

  “That’s it. This conversation is over,” Briddey said, and headed for the door. “If you have any other proposals—any serious proposals—they need to be in to Trent before the meetin
g. If you don’t, you need to tell him before that. The meeting’s at eleven. You’ve got an hour.”

  “No, I don’t,” he called after her as she slammed the door. “It’s already ten twenty.”

  Oh, no, it was only forty minutes till the meeting, and she wouldn’t get another chance all day to work out what to tell her family. And when she got home, they’d be camped outside her apartment building waiting for her. Or inside her apartment.

  I need to get my locks changed, she thought. And decide once and for all how to break it to them. And in spite of C.B.’s being down here, this was still the best place to do that. She went back down the hallway, past the elevator to the next hallway over, and began trying doors to find a storage room she could use.

  After half a dozen tries she found one that wasn’t locked, but it was crammed so full of boxes, she could hardly get the door open. But she didn’t need room. She needed privacy, and—

  “There you are!” Kathleen said. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Kathleen!” Briddey said, backing guiltily against the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “We got worried. You weren’t answering any of our messages, and Aunt Oona called me and said she’d had a premonition that something bad had happened, so I came over to find out what was going on.”

  “I didn’t know you’d called,” Briddey lied. “I’ve been down here all morning, and there’s no reception on this level. How did you know where I was?”

  “Charla told me. She said you’d come down here to talk to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, who I assume is the disheveled guy over that way,” Kathleen said, pointing back toward C.B.’s lab, “though I’d call him the Abominable Snowman, it’s so cold down here. He gave me these to give you to give to Trent, by the way.” She handed Briddey a memory stick and a folded note. “Do you know if he’s dating anyone?”

  “C.B.?” Briddey said, unfolding the note. “You’re kidding, right?”

  The note said:

  Sorry about the whole calling you an idiot thing. Here’s a different proposal for the meeting. Don’t worry, your boyfriend will love it. It’s a communication addict’s dream. Signed, C.B. P.S. I’m not sorry about what I said about the EED. It’s a terrible idea. Promise me you won’t do it without thinking about it first. P.P.S. Ask yourself, WWHLD?

  WWHLD? She didn’t have time to worry about what that might stand for. She needed to get Kathleen out of here before she talked to anyone. If I take her up to first and straight out to the parking garage, she thought, we might get lucky and not see anyone.

  “I’m serious,” Kathleen was saying. “I thought he was kind of cute, or he would be if he’d comb his hair.”

  Briddey led Kathleen briskly toward the elevator. “I thought you were dating Chad.”

  “I am, but I don’t know…” She sighed. “That’s why I called you this morning. We had a fight last night.”

  Surprise, surprise. Of all the losers Kathleen had gone out with, Chad had to be the worst. But the priority now wasn’t to do an intervention, it was to get Kathleen out of here, so Briddey kept walking.

  “I caught him sexting some girl,” Kathleen said. “On my phone. And when I called him on it, he got mad and roared off and left me, and I didn’t realize till he was gone that my phone was still in his car.”

  They reached the elevator. Briddey pushed UP.

  “So there I am in the middle of the night, trying to find a phone so I can call somebody to give me a ride.” The elevator arrived and they got in. “Did you know there aren’t any payphones anywhere anymore?”

  Briddey pushed the button for FIRST, and the elevator started up. “So what did you do?”

  “I finally found one outside a 7-Eleven,” Kathleen said, “but then I didn’t have any change, so I had to walk home, and the whole way I kept thinking, I need to break up with him.”

  “Yes,” Briddey said. “You do.”

  “I know. But the thing is, he really loves me.”

  C.B. was right. People were masters of self-deception. The elevator pinged, the door opened, and, blessedly, there was no one there. “Have you talked to Mary Clare about this?” Briddey asked, leading Kathleen firmly toward the parking garage.

  “I tried, but she was too worried about Maeve to really listen.”

  “What’s wrong with Maeve?”

  “Nothing, but Mary Clare thinks she’s been spending too much time online. She’s afraid she’s addicted or something.”

  They reached the door. “Listen,” Briddey said, “I’d love to stay and talk, but I’ve got a meeting in half an hour, and I’ve got to review this proposal of C.B.’s first. So tell everybody I’m fine and I’ll call them—and you—after work.” She opened the door for Kathleen. “Bye.”

  “Wait,” Kathleen said. “I need to ask you something. Why didn’t you tell us you’d decided to have an EED?”

  What? “I…it only happened last night,” Briddey stammered, “and then this morning I had to meet with C.B.”

  “And you haven’t had time all morning to send a simple text,” Kathleen said sarcastically, “or an email. Or return our calls.”

  “I couldn’t. I told you, there’s no reception down there. I haven’t had a chance to tell anyone.”

  “Except apparently the Hunchback guy—what’s his name again?”

  Benedict Arnold, Briddey thought bitterly. “His name’s C.B.,” she said. “C.B. Schwartz. I suppose he’s who told you about the EED. Or was it Charla?”

  “Neither. Maeve told me.”

  “Maeve?” Briddey said. “How did she find out?”

  “From Facebook or Twitter or something.”

  She does spend too much time online, Briddey thought. “Maeve didn’t tell Aunt Oona, did she?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose. She posted it on her Facebook page.”

  “But Aunt Oona’s not on Facebook.”

  “Yes, she is. Maeve set up an account for her.”

  Oh, no, Briddey thought despairingly. Then they all know. “What did Aunt Oona say?”

  “About what you’d expect. ‘By the holy blood of Saint Patrick and all the saints of Ireland, what’s that lass gone and done now?’ ”

  “I haven’t gone and done anything,” Briddey said. “Trent asked me last night to have an EED done.”

  “And you said yes? After only going out with him for six weeks?”

  “You got engaged to Alex Mancuso after two dates, as I recall.”

  “Yes, and that was a mistake.”

  A mistake was putting it mildly. He’d had a wife. And three felony convictions.

  Kathleen said, “I just don’t want you to make the same mistake I did. You can’t possibly know Trent well enough to make a commitment like—”

  “But that’s why we’re having it done. To get to know each other better. The EED—”

  “Save it,” Kathleen said. “You can tell me at supper. Aunt Oona’s having the whole family over for Irish stew and crubeens.”

  And a session of the Irish Inquisition, Briddey thought. “I can’t. Trent—”

  “Is in meetings till ten tonight,” Kathleen said. “Aunt Oona already called his secretary, so you can’t get out of it by claiming he’s taking you to dinner. Supper’s at six.”

  She left, only to return a moment later to say plaintively, “I really should break up with Chad, shouldn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Briddey said.

  “You’re right. See you at Aunt Oona’s. And may Saint Patrick protect ye on your journey, mavourneen,” Kathleen said gaily, and left.

  It was ten fifty, and Briddey needed to check C.B.’s memory stick before the meeting to make sure it didn’t have his Sanctuary phone proposal or some other crazy anti-communication thing on it. She started for her office, only to be waylaid by Lorraine from Marketing, who wanted to tell her how wonderful she thought it was that she and Trent were getting the EED. “How did you manage to talk him into it?” she asked.

  “I
didn’t. It was Trent’s idea.”

  “You’re kidding! How? Most guys won’t even admit they have feelings, let alone let anyone else see them. Gina—you know, Rahul Deshnev’s assistant?—had to practically blackmail Greg into getting theirs. She said it was worth it, though, that she’s never been happier or more relaxed.”

  That’s because she doesn’t have to be somewhere right now, Briddey thought, and said, “I’m late for a meeting—”

  “I’m going to it, too,” Lorraine said, steering her down toward the conference room. “Gina was afraid it might not work. She thought Greg might be cheating on her, and to tell you the truth, so did I. Suki told me—”

  Briddey pulled back. “I just remembered, I need to run by my office and tell my assistant something.”

  “You don’t have time. We’re already late,” Lorraine said, taking her arm. “So, anyway, we were wrong. Greg wasn’t involved with someone else, because they connected, and she says things have never been more perfect. No more misunderstandings or misread cues or secrets. Oh, look, everyone’s here already.”

  They were, and the first order of business was C.B.’s proposal, so Briddey didn’t have a chance to look at it before she gave it to Trent. Fortunately, it wasn’t C.B.’s Sanctuary phone—or his Hook, Line, and Sinker app. It was a design for one called TalkPlus, which made it possible to carry on two phone conversations simultaneously. “No more having to put someone on hold or tell them you’ll call them back, and no more saying, ‘Sorry, I have to take this call,’ or ‘I’m afraid I can’t talk right now.’ With TalkPlus, you’ll be able to communicate with everyone all the time.”

  Very funny, C.B., Briddey thought, but everyone else loved the concept, including Trent, who texted her from across the table, “This is just what we need. Thanks for getting it out of him. Have you filled out Dr V forms yet?”