Страница 23 из 105
She was obviously terrified E.D. would find her here. She wouldn't speak above a whisper. But, like me, she'd brought Jase something. Not a chicken leg. A wireless Internet browser the size of her palm.
Jason's face lit up when he saw it. "Diane!" he said.
She shushed him and gave me a nervous sideways smile.
"It's just a gadget," she whispered, and nodded at us both before she slipped out again.
"She knows better," Jason said after she left. "The gadget's trivial. It's the network that's useful. Not the gadget but the network."
Within the hour he was consulting a group of West Coast gearheads who modified small engines for remote-control robotics competitions. By midnight he had rigged temporary repairs for the mower's dozen infirmities. I left, snuck home, and watched from my bedroom window when he summoned his father. E.D. traipsed out of the Big House in pajamas and an open fla
Jase, hovering at the door, saw my light across the lawn and gave me a little covert wave of his hand.
Of course, the repairs were temporary. The Gauloises-smoking gardener showed up the following Wednesday and had trimmed about half the lawn when the mower seized and died for good and all. Listening from the shade of the treeline we learned at least a dozen useful Flemish curses. Jason, whose memory was very nearly eidetic, took a shine to God-verdomme min kloten miljardedju!—literally, "God damn my balls a million times Jesus!" according to what Jason pieced together from the Dutch/English dictionary in the Rice school library. For the next few months he used the expression whenever he broke a shoelace or crashed a computer.
Eventually E.D. had to ante up for a whole new machine. The shop told him the old one would cost too much to fix; it was a miracle it had worked as long as it did. I heard this through my mother, who heard it from Carol Lawton. And as far as I know E.D. never spoke to Jason about it again.
Jase and I laughed over it a few times, though—months later, when most of the sting had gone out of it.
* * * * *
I shuffled back to bed thinking about Diane, who had given her brother a gift that was not just conciliatory, like mine, but actually useful. So where was she now? What gift could she bring me that would lighten my burden? Her own presence would do.
Daylight flowed through the room like water, like a luminous river in which I was suspended, drowned in empty minutes.
Not all delirium is bright and frantic. Sometimes it's slow, reptilian, cold-blooded. I watched shadows crawl like lizards up the walls of the hotel room. Blink, and an hour was gone. Blink again and night was falling, no sunlight on the Archway when I inclined my head to look at it, dark skies instead, tropical stormclouds, lightning indistinguishable from the visual spikes induced by fever, but thunder unmistakable and a sudden wet mineral smell from outside and the sound of raindrops spitting on the concrete balcony.
And eventually another sound: a card in the doorlock, the squeal of hinges.
"Diane," I said. (Or whispered, or croaked.)
She hurried into the room. She was dressed for the street, in a leather-trimmed jumper and broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater. She stood by the side of the bed.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Don't have to apologize. Just—"
"I mean, I'm sorry, Tyler, but you have to get dressed. We have to leave. Right away. Now. There's a cab waiting."
It took me some time to process this information. Meanwhile Diane started throwing stuff into a hard shell suitcase: clothes, documents both forged and legitimate, memory cards, a padded rack of small bottles and syringes. "I can't stand up," I tried to say, but the words wouldn't come out right.
So a moment later she started dressing me, and I salvaged a little dignity by lifting my legs without being asked and gritting my teeth instead of screaming. Then I sat up and she made me take more water from the bottle by the bedside. She led me to the bathroom, where I emitted a sludgy trickle of canary-yellow urine. "Oh hell," she said, "you're all dried out." She gave me another mouthful of water and a shot of analgesic that burned in my arm like venom. "Tyler, I'm so sorry!" But not sorry enough to stop urging me into a raincoat and a heavy hat.
I was alert enough to hear the anxiety in her voice. "What are we ru
"Just say I had a close encounter with some unpleasant people."
"Where are we going?"
"Inland. Hurry."
So we hustled along the dim corridor of the hotel, down a flight of stairs to ground level, Diane dragging the suitcase with her left hand and supporting me with her right. It was a long trek. The stairs, especially. "Stop moaning," she whispered a couple of times. So I did. Or at least I think I did.
Then out into the night. Raindrops bouncing off muddy sidewalks and sizzling on the hood of an overheated twenty-year-old taxi. The driver looked at me suspiciously from the shelter of his cab. I stared back. "He's not sick," Diane told him, making a bottle-to-the-mouth gesture, and the driver scowled but accepted the bills she pressed into his hand.
The narcotics took effect while we drove. The night streets of Padang had a cavernous smell, of dank asphalt and rotting fish. Oil slicks parted like rainbows under the wheels of the cab. We left the neon-lit tourist district and entered the tangle of shops and housing that had grown around the city in the last thirty years, makeshift slums giving way to the new prosperity, bulldozers parked under tarps between tin-roofed shacks. High-rise tenements grew like mushrooms from a compost of squatters' fields. Then we passed through the factory zone, gray walled and razor wired, and I slept, I think, again.
Dreaming not of the Seychelles but of Jason. Of Jason and his fondness for networks ("not a gadget but a network"), of the networks he had created and inhabited and the places those networks had taken him.
UNQUIET NIGHTS
Seattle, September, five years after the failed Chinese missile attack: I drove home through a rainy Friday rush hour and as soon as I was inside the door of my apartment I switched on the audio interface and cued a playlist I had put together labeled "Therapy."
It had been a long day in the Harborview ER. I had attended two gunshot wounds and an attempted suicide. Hovering in back of my eyelids was an image of blood sluicing from the rails of a gurney cart. I changed out of my rain-dampened day clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt, poured a drink, and stood by a window watching the city simmer in the dark. Somewhere out there was the lightless gap of Puget Sound, obscured by rolling clouds. Traffic was almost static on 1-5, a luminous red river.
My life, essentially, as I had made it. And it was all balanced on a word.
Pretty soon Astrud Gilberto was singing, wistfully and a little off-key, about guitar chords and Corcovado, but I was still too wired to think about what Jason had said on the phone last night. Too wired even to hear the music the way it deserved to be heard. "Corcovado,"
"Desafinado," some Gerry Mulligan tracks, some Charlie Byrd. Therapy. But it all blurred into the sound of the rain. I microwaved di
Giselle Palmer rented the apartment three doors down the hall. She opened the door wearing ragged jeans and an old fla
"I don't know, Tyler. You look pretty gloomy."