The Affinities

  I said, “Somebody wants to keep Klein’s data from going public, they have money to spend on hired thieves, and they’re apparently willing to kill for what they want. If they suspect Klein passed us the data, we’re the next logical target.”

  “Maybe. But only as long they figure they have something to gain by intimidating us.”

  “So if they’re going to act,” Amanda said, “they have to act soon.”

  “Right. So we need to be able to protect ourselves. We have two teams here, twenty people in the building during daylight hours if you include the three of us, and any or all of us could be targeted. How do we afford protection to twenty people, either here or when they’re moving freely around the city?”

  “Warn them, obviously,” I said. “House them in one place, even the ones who live here in the city. And we need help. People who know how to do real-world security.”

  Damian nodded. “I’ll get on T-Net this morning and set it up.”

  T-Net was the hidden webspace where sodality reps interacted with each other. A tech guy had once tried to tell me how it worked. All I remembered was that the explanation involved words like “serial/parallel encryption” and “onion routing.” Basically, it was a space where sodality-level Taus could exchange information with minimal risk of surveillance. Through T-net, Damian could put out the word that he needed volunteers with security and military experience who lived in the area or could get to Vancouver on short notice.

  “Okay,” I said. “But are we the only ones at risk?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Amanda said, “He’s thinking of the guys who questioned his new tether, Rachel Ragland.”

  “I doubt she’s in any danger,” Damian said. “They’ve talked to her already, they didn’t learn anything.”

  “Depends on whether they know I’ve been seeing her.”

  “Well, that’s easily fixed,” Amanda said. “Stop seeing her.”

  Damian said, “The guys who came to see her, did she describe them?”

  “Only vaguely.”

  “Do you think you could get a better description from her?”

  “I don’t know. I could try. Why? Do you think they’re the same people who went after Klein?”

  “Could be. It would help if we could give our security guys some faces to look out for.”

  “You mean, like a sketch?”

  “Yeah,” Damian said. “Like a sketch.”

  I said I would get on it.

  * * *

  The first of our new security team showed up that afternoon, a local guy named Gordo MacDonald. Gordo was ex-military, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, chest like a rain barrel, abs so defined you could count them through his t-shirt. Shaved head and one glittering gold earring. I would have flinched when we shook hands, but the look passed between us. The Tau look: a wry curvature of the mouth, something indefinable about the eyes, but it was as if all the threat went out of his face. He gave me a sheepish grin, and I gave him one back. “Hey, bro,” he said.

  I wasn’t a hey bro kind of guy, but I said, “Hey.”

  Gordo told Damian he wanted to start by walking through the building, get to know the layout, “make sure the bad guys don’t have a place to hide.”

  Amanda touched my arm after Damian and Gordo left the room. “I wanted to say, I wasn’t just being bitchy this morning. About Rachel Ragland, I mean. It’s none of my business whether you keep on seeing her. It’s just, I can’t help thinking, a single mom on social assistance, she’s bound to need more than you can give her. A couple of months of great sex and then you’re gone—is that good for her? Does she need that?”

  “I told her what the situation is.”

  “You told her, but did she hear you? You’ve been living in Tau-land. It’s different out there. People lie. Not just to each other but to themselves. People get hurt.”

  “I know that. And I don’t intend to hurt her.”

  “It may not matter what you intend. You’re treating her like a Tau, and she’s not.”

  And that was true. But I needed to see her at least once more. If only to make a forensic sketch.

  * * *

  So when Rachel suggested we get together Saturday afternoon, I said sure. She had a whole day planned, she said. We could drive to Stanley Park with Suze. Walk the seawall. Drop off Suze at her grandmother’s, then have the evening to ourselves. Go out for dinner and drinks, maybe. If I was free?

  I said I was free.

  When I pulled up to the low-rise building in New Westminster, Rachel came out of the lobby with a big backpack over her shoulder and Suze clinging to her left hand. Rachel was wearing shorts and a yellow blouse and a Canucks cap to keep the sun out of her eyes. Suze was decked out in a summer dress and pink plastic Barbie sunglasses.

  “Remember me?” I said to Suze when she climbed in the backseat.

  “No!”

  “From the forest,” Rachel prompted her. “When our car broke down.”

  I told her my name was Adam. Suze gave me a solemn look, then said she was pleased to meet me.

  The car’s sound system had been playing the news from a US netcast, but the announcer’s voice was so solemn and the news so ominous (the India-Pakistan conflict had heated up again) that I turned it off as soon as we pulled into traffic. Suze immediately began to sing the chorus (and only the chorus) of a song from an old kids’ movie: “Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you! Chiddy chiddy bang bang I-love-you!”

  “It’s ‘chitty,’” Rachel told her. “Not ‘chiddy.’”

  “CHIDDY chiddy BANG bang! I LOVE YOU!”

  “Have it your own way. A little quieter, though, okay?”

  Suze grudgingly moderated her chiddies. An hour later we were at the seawall, watching cargo ships glide like iron ballerinas across the water of English Bay. The water was too cold for swimming, but Suze seemed more interested in digging in the sand and chasing gulls. Rachel and I settled into a patch of packed sand in the shade of a sea-bleached drift log. She opened her backpack and took out a selection of plastic-wrapped Wonder Bread sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade. I reached into my own pack and produced a sketchbook and a pencil. She said, “What’s that? You draw?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Is that what you do for a living?”

  “No. I thought about it once, but you go where life takes you. I’m more of a management consultant these days.”

  She gave one of her quick, full-throated laughs. “That sounds like a money-for-bullshit job. No offense.”

  “None taken. Those two men who visited you, you think you could describe them to me?”

  “What, so you can draw them?”

  I nodded.

  “Are they so dangerous you need to know what they look like? No, don’t answer that. Are you, like, a police sketch artist or something?”

  “To be honest, I’ve never tried to draw a face from a description. I’d like to try. But we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, I think we do have to. Since you brought your pencil and paper and all. Afterward, maybe you can draw a picture of me?”

  “I’d like to. Once we get this out of the way.”

  She shrugged. “What do I do?”

  “Start by picking one of the two men. Don’t think about what he looked like, just think about something he did. Like, smile or not smile. Blink. Pick his teeth.”

  She squinted her eyes. “The taller guy. His head…”

  “What about it?”

  “He kept cocking it to the left, like a dog hearing a whistle. Head shaped like a rectangle. Like a loaf of bread with eyes and a mouth.”

  I made some tentative lines, more to encourage her than to accomplish anything. “Hair?”

  “Bald as a bottle cap. I don’t think he shaved it bald, I think it was just bald bald. Narrow eyes, close together. His mouth, when he tried to smile, you could see his clenched teeth. White teeth. He’s got a good dental-care plan, whoever h
e is.”

  “What do you mean, when he tried to smile?”

  “He smiled like he was faking it. He had one of those mouths that opens like a puppet’s jaw, like on a real crude hinge. Wide. Kind of bracketed, the lines at the side of it, not a curvy smile, kind of inorganic, like a robot smile.”

  It turned out I wasn’t especially good at translating any of this to paper, but before too long I had scribbled and erased my way to something Rachel called, “Cartoony, but I guess I’d recognize him from that. Sure.”

  The second guy—shorter, rounder, pig-eyed—took less time. I had just finished when Suze came bounding up, demanding to see what I’d done. I showed her. Her eyes went wide. “Who are they?”

  “Nobody in particular,” I said.

  “Draw me!”

  “I think your mother wants to go first.”

  “Oh, no,” Rachel said. “Go ahead and make a picture of her. I need to stretch my legs.”

  She went off to find a public washroom and smoke a joint. Drawing Suze was fun, though she kept jumping up to see how the picture was coming along. It was pretty good for a rough sketch, I thought. I captured her sandy knees poking out from the hem of her dress, her cautious eyes and wary smile. When it was done I gave it to her. She inspected it critically. “Can I color it?”

  “If you like. It’s all yours.”

  She nodded, tucked the drawing into her mother’s backpack, and rose to return to the holes she had been making in the beach (because they filled up with seawater, she said, and there were tiny shells in them, along with cigarette butts and bits of charcoal from the nearby barbecue pit). Then she seemed to remember something. She turned back and said, “Thank you for making a picture of me.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  When Rachel came back she posed on the drift log, riding it sidesaddle. I produced a quick sketch but a good one; good enough that I was almost reluctant to hand it over to her. She said, “Well, this is bullshit, Adam. I mean, it’s great. But you prettied me up.”

  What I had done was pay attention to the way doubt and mischief took turns with the curve of her lips. “Or maybe you’re just pretty.”

  “More bullshit.” But she grinned. “Time flies. We should collect Suze and take her to my mom’s. She’ll be wanting dinner soon.”

  A few hours in the parking lot had left the car sun-warmed and smelling of sand and ozone. Suze insisted on holding the picture I had drawn of her, and she sang chiddy chiddy bang bang to the hum of the wheels on corduroy blacktop as we crossed the Lions Gate Bridge.

  * * *

  Rachel’s mother struck me as a wearier, more cynical version of Rachel. She had suffered a minor stroke a couple of years back and lived in a public housing complex with two Corgis and a budgerigar named Saint Francis. She didn’t say much—the stroke had left her slightly aphasic—but she surveyed me with unmistakable suspicion, and I did my best to appear small and harmless. “TV dinners?” Suze asked. Her grandmother nodded. “Yay,” Suze said.

  Rachel kissed her mom and promised to pick up Suze by noon tomorrow. Then we were on our own. Rachel wanted to have dinner at a New West bar she liked. It was a working-class bar that smelled of stale hops and was dim as a dungeon, but the tables were reasonably clean and the staff called Rachel by name. We ordered steaks from the grill, and I asked for a beer. “Usual?” the waitress asked Rachel, and she nodded. “Usual” turned out to be a rum-and-Coke. She went through a couple of them while we waited for the food, then ordered another. She eyed the beer I was nursing and said, “You drink like you’re afraid of it.”

  “I’m not much of a drinker.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. About Taus. Big potheads, but not heavy drinkers.”

  Sociologists had been taking long, interested looks at the Affinities for years now. The studies were generally accurate, but the public’s misunderstanding of them had generated all kinds of stereotypes. “That’s true,” I said. “Statistically. But in the real world all it means is that the numbers are a little skewed. We have our share of drinkers. A couple of months ago, in my tranche, we helped a guy get into rehab for his alcohol habit.”

  “Ah, rehab. Where rich people go, because prison’s so darned uncomfortable.”

  The bigger Affinities ran their own rehab and therapy services. It had nothing to do with being rich, but it had a lot to do with being treated by people whose Affinity you shared. Nobody can help a Tau like another Tau. “It’s not always about the money. What else do you know about us?”

  “There’s a lot of LGBT people, I’ve heard.”

  “A few percentage points over the general population.”

  “And you all sleep together.”

  “Not true.”

  “Maybe not as much as Eyns or Delts. I know a woman who joined the Delts. More like her vagina joined the Delts. We used to be pretty friendly, but she started to ignore me once she found a bunch of fuck friends to play with.”

  The steaks arrived from the kitchen, and they were big and unpretentious and reasonably tender. Rachel continued drinking at a steady pace. I did not, which seemed to make her unhappy. I was a bush league drinker; I didn’t like being drunk, I didn’t drink gracefully. So I ordered serial rounds of chips and salsa to keep the waitress happy while some local band began to set up on the tiny stage across the room. The bass player struck an open E that rattled the cutlery.

  “You’re going back to Toronto in a few weeks,” Rachel said.

  I had told her that the first time we had lunch. “Right.”

  “So I guess that means we’re just, we’re … not anything, really. The famous two slips. I mean ships. I keep thinking, I’ll never know him better than I do right now.”

  “It is what it is,” I said. “I like you, Rachel. I don’t want to mislead you.”

  “You like me all right, but I’m not a Tau.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The heat or the alcohol was making her sweat. She ran the back of her hand over her forehead. “You don’t have to. They used to say, ‘All the good ones are gay.’ Or ‘All the good ones are married.’ Well, sometimes the good ones just have an Affinity to go home to.”

  “It’s nice you think I’m one of the good ones.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

  The band launched into a full-tilt cover of some old Tom Petty tune, and suddenly Rachel and I were shouting to each other as if we were separated by an abyss. I suggested it was time to start for home.

  “Hey,” she said, “no! We’re just getting started! It’s fucking early! Or maybe that’s what you had in mind—some early fucking.”

  “Come on, Rachel.”

  “I want to hear the music! Then we’ll go. You can keep it in your pants until then.”

  She began to sing along, loudly and inexactly, to “I Won’t Back Down.” I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the room. A guy at the bar, a tall dude with long pale hair and narrow, angry eyes, had been giving Rachel covert glances for the last hour, and now he was just staring.

  Rachel looked where I was looking. She leaned toward me and yelled, “That’s just Carlos!”

  “Carlos?”

  “Old friend of mine! We had a thing for a while! He gets protective!”

  Great, I thought. Carlos. Then I thought: What if the guy staring at us hadn’t been Carlos? What if it had been one of the insurance adjustors from the drawings? It was possible I was endangering her simply by being with her. “Okay, Rachel. Let’s leave Carlos to his business and go home.”

  She gave me a contemptuous, drunken smile. “Are you afraid of him?”

  “Yeah. I’m terrified.” I took out my wallet and put money on the table. “You coming?”

  She pouted but stood up, gripping the back of her chair to steady herself. She let me take her arm.

  We passed Carlos on our way to the door. I avoided eye contact, but Rachel gave him a look that was half leer, half sneer. Carlos responded by standing up and blocking my way. He put hi
s face in my face but he shouted to Rachel over the music hammering from the stage: “YOU ALL RIGHT THERE, RACHE?”

  Rachel nodded. When it became obvious he hadn’t seen the nod, she said, “YEAH! I’M FINE! LEAVE HIM ALONE, CARLOS!”

  “SURE ABOUT THAT?”

  He was a messy talker. Some of his spittle missed me, some didn’t.

  “YES! DON’T BE AN ASSHOLE!”

  Carlos winced. Then he mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He stepped out of our way, but his nail-gun stare followed us all the way to the door.

  In the car, windows open, cool night air flowing in, Rachel grew moody and quiet. She didn’t say anything until we reached the block where she lived, when she asked in a small voice, “I fucked up there, didn’t I?”

  “Not sure what you mean by that.”

  “Our big evening together. Rachel and Adam. What fun, huh?”

  “Maybe just not my idea of a good time.”

  “I should have known. Taus are potheads, not drinkers. Taus are a little bit prissy, too. So they say on the Internet. I mean—oh, fuck! Now it sounds like I’m calling you names. I’m sorry!” She leaked a tear. “I just wanted us to have fun.”

  I helped her to the door of the low-rise building, helped her get the key into the lock. Helped her down the stairs, though she pulled away and insisted on unlocking the door of the basement apartment herself. The night had gotten chilly, but the air inside was overheated and stale. As soon as I had closed the door she leaned into me, pressed herself against my body, grabbed my hips. The smell of Bacardi and sour sweat swarmed off of her.

  “Bet I know what you want,” she said.

  Bet you don’t, I thought.

  I excused myself for the purpose of using the bathroom. The parade line of brown plastic pill bottles caught my attention again. This time I was less scrupulous about inspecting them. Lithium, Depakine, Risperdol, Seroquel. Some of the prescriptions were old and expired, some were fresh.

  She was slumped on the sofa when I came out. I said, “Rachel…”

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But yeah, I think that’s best.”

  “Because I fucked up.”