Distraction

“Exactly. ”

She hunched her shoulders and stared at the board. “I can see why your friend likes this game.”

“Yes, it’s very architectural… All right, we’ll try a practice game.” He swept the board clean of stones. “You’re the begi

“That’s a lot of free stones.”

“That’s not a problem, because I’m going to beat you anyway.” He clicked down his first white stone with two fingertips.

They played for a while. “Atari,” he repeated.

“You can stop saying that word now, I can see that my group’s in check.”

“It’s just a customary courtesy.”

They played more. Oscar was starting to sweat. He stood up and turned down the heaters.

He sat down again. All the tension had left their situation. The two of them were totally rapt. “You’re going to beat me,” she an-nounced, “You know all those foul little tricks in the corners.”

“Yes, I do.”

She looked up and met his eyes. “But I can learn those little tricks, and then you’re going to have a hard time with me.”

“I can appreciate a hard time. A hard time is good to find.” He beat her by thirty points. “You’re learning fast. Let’s try a serious game.”

“Don’t clear the board yet,” she said. She studied her defeat with deep appreciation. “These patterns are so elegant.”

“Yes. And they’re always different. Every game has its own char-acter. ”

“These stones are a lot like neurons.”

He smiled at her.

They started a second game. Oscar was very serious about go. He played poker for social reasons, but he never threw a game of go. He was too good at it. He was a gifted player, clever, patient, and profoundly deceptive, but Greta’s game play was all over the map. She was making begi

He beat her by nineteen points, but only because he was ruthless. “This is a really good game,” she said. “It’s so contemporary.”

“It’s three thousand years old.”

“Really?” She stood up and stretched, her kneecaps cracking loudly. “That calls for a drink.”

“Go ahead.”

She found her carpetbag and retrieved a square bottle of blue Dutch gin.

Oscar went to the kitchen and fetched two brand-new bistro glasses from their sanitary wrap. “You want some orange juice with that stuff?”

“No thank you.”

He poured himself an orange juice and brought her an empty glass. He watched in vague astonishment as she decanted three fingers of straight gin, with a chemist’s painstaking care.

“Some ice? We do have ice.”

“That’s all right.”

“Look, Greta, you can’t drink straight gin. That’s the road to blue ruin.”

“Vodka gives me headaches. Tequila tastes nasty.” She placed her pointed upper lip on the rim of her bistro glass and had a long meditative sip. Then she shuddered. “Yum! You don’t drink at all, do you?”

“No. And you should take it a little easier. Straight gin kills neurons by the handful.”

“I kill neurons for a living, Oscar. Let’s play.”

They had a third game. The booze had melted something inside her head and she was playing hard. He fought as if his life depended on it. He was barely holding his own.

“Nine free stones are way too many for you,” he said. “We should cut you back to six.”

“You’re going to win again, aren’t you?”

“Maybe twenty points.”

“Fifteen. But we don’t have to finish this one now.”

“No.” He was holding a white stone between two fingertips. “We don’t have to finish.”

He reached out across the board. He touched his two fingers to the underside of her chin very gently. She looked up in surprise, and he drew a caress along the line of her jaw. Then he leaned in slowly, until their lips met.

A throwaway kiss. Barely there, like eiderdown. He slipped his hand to the nape of her neck and leaned in seriously. The bright taste of gin parched his tongue.

“Let’s get in bed,” he said.

“That really isn’t smart.”

“I know it isn’t, but let’s do it anyway.”

They levered themselves from the floor. They crossed the room and climbed into the square brass bed.

It was the worst sex he had ever had. It was halting, jittery, analytical sex. Sex devoid of any warm animal rapport. All the sim-ple, liberating pleasure of the act was somehow discounted in advance, while postcoital remorse and regret loomed by their bedside like a pair of drooling voyeurs. They didn’t so much finish it, as negotiate a way to stop.

“This bed’s very rickety,” she said politely. “It really squeaks.”

“I should have bought a new one.”

“You can’t buy an entire new bed just for one night.”

“I can’t help the one night; I leave for Washington tomorrow.”

She levered herself up in the shiny sheets. Her china-white shoulders had a fine network of little blue veins. “What are you going to tell them in Washington?”

“What do you want me to tell them in Washington?”

“Tell them the truth.”

“You always tell me that you want the truth, Greta. But do you know what it means when you get it?”

“Of course I want the truth. I always want the truth. No matter what.”

“All right, then I’ll give you some truth.” He laced his hands behind his head, drew a breath, and stared at the ceiling. “Your labo-ratory was built by a politician who was deeply corrupt. Texas lost the space program when it shut down. They never quite made the big time in digital. So they tried very hard to move into biotech. But East Texas was the stupidest place in the world to build a genetics lab. They could have built it in Stanford, they could have built it in Raleigh, they could have built it on Route 128. But Dougal convinced them to build it miles from nowhere, in the deep piney woods. He used the worst kind of Luddite panic tactics. He convinced Congress to fund a giant airtight biohazard dome, with every possible fail-safe device, just so he could line the pockets of a big gang of military contractors who’d fallen off their gravy train and needed the federal contracts. And the locals loved him for that. They voted him in again and again, even though they had no idea what biotechnology was or what it really meant. The people of East Texas were simply too backward to build a genetic industry base, even with a massive pork-barrel jump start. So all the spin-offs moved over the state border, and they ended up in the pockets of Dougal’s very best pal and disciple, a ruthless demagogue from Cajun country. Green Huey is a populist of the worst sort. He really thinks that genetic engineering belongs by right in the hands of semiliterate swamp-dwellers.”

He glanced at her. She was listening.

“So Huey deliberately — and this took a weird kind of genius, I’ll admit this — he deliberately boiled down your lab’s best research dis-coveries into plug-and-play recipes that any twelve-year-old child could use. He took over a bunch of defunct Louisiana oil refineries, and he turned those dead refineries into giant bubbling cauldrons of genetic voodoo. Huey declared all of Louisiana a free-fire zone for unlicensed DNA gumbo. And you know something? Louisianans are extremely good at the work. They took to gene-splicing like muskrats to water. They have a real native gift for the industry. They love it! They love Huey for giving it to them. Huey gave them a new future, and they made him a king. Now he’s power-mad, he basically rules the state by decree. Nobody dares to question him.”

She had gone very pale.

“The Texans never voted Dougal out of office. Texans would never do that. They don’t care how much he stole, he’s their patron, the alcalde, the godfather, he stole it all for Texas, so that’s good enough for them. No, the damn guy just drank himself stupid. He kept boozing till he blew out his liver, and couldn’t make a quorum call anymore. So now Dougal’s finally out of the picture for good. So do you know what that means to you?”