Circuit Of Heaven (21 page)

“Can it, Lawrence. I feel like shit.”

“Look that way, too.”

“Could you give me a hand here?”

Lawrence smiled and tossed his cigarette out the window, waved the smoke away from his face, and crossed his legs. “We rather feel that you should be capable of putting on your own trousers before you set out again.”

Nemo sighed. Just what he needed. The nanny. “Of course you do. Builds character. Stiff upper lip and all that rot.” He yanked his pants on—trying not to wince from the pain in his head—and gave Lawrence what he hoped was a triumphant look as he zipped them up.

“How impressive. We have prepared you a tray.” Lawrence pointed at the bedside table. There was a tumbler of water and some flatbread.

Lawrence was waiting for me to wake up, Nemo realized, looking after me again. He felt like a jerk. “Thanks Lawrence.” Squaring his shoulders and bowing his head, Nemo signed,
I am shamed
, and Lawrence nodded his assent.

Nemo gulped down half the water and started stuffing bread into his mouth as fast as he could chew. The pain in his stomach, he realized, was hunger. He hadn’t eaten anything since night before last.

Lawrence watched him eat for a while. “Slow down, Nemo. You’ll choke yourself.”

He slowed down a little, eating till all the bread was gone, gulping down the rest of the water.

“Better?” Lawrence asked.

Nemo nodded, and it didn’t hurt quite as much to move. He slowly rose to his feet and stood there until the room quit spinning. He shuffled to the closet and started hunting for a clean shirt. Normally, he would’ve washed clothes the day before, but he’d been in the Bin. He finally found one that was a little cleaner than the rest and started working on the buttons.

“We gather you have plans,” Lawrence said.

“I’m going to spend the day in D.C. with Justine, see the sights.”

Lawrence nodded. “You’re thinking about going in for good, aren’t you son?”

Nemo hesitated, his hands hovering over the last button on his shirt. “Yes, I guess I am.”

“We like Justine a great deal.”

“So you don’t think I’d be nuts to go in?”

“It doesn’t matter what we think. The question is, what do you think?”

Nemo gave up trying to find a pair of clean socks that matched and settled on one navy and one black. He sat down on the side of the bed. “I think she’s wonderful. I’ve never met anyone like her. It’s like we’re made for each other.” Just talking about her, he felt better, so he rattled on, telling Lawrence all about their visit to Real World Tours. “They got everything exactly right, even the graffiti down by the river.” He finished tying his shoes and stood up, feeling almost human again, though his head still ached. “They only screwed up once: In there, you were out of cigarettes. The pack was lying on the kitchen table, empty.”

Lawrence shook another cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “We were,” he said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. “We got another pack yesterday afternoon, whole carton actually.”

“Jeez. What did you give for it?”

Lawrence considered the smoke coiling up from his cigarette. “The Elvis boxed set.”

“Lawrence, I don’t believe you! We could’ve gotten a cow for that.”

Lawrence shook his head in disgust. “What the hell you know about cows? Pain in the butt. Nothing stupider on four legs.”

“But a carton of cigarettes—that’s real smart.”

Lawrence glared at Nemo, the scales on his forehead sticking out like windblown shingles. He took a deep drag, and blew the smoke into the room. “Are you still here? We thought you were leaving.”

Nemo yanked on his jacket. He couldn’t believe Lawrence had blown the Elvis boxed set on
cigarettes
. At the rate he was going he’d smoke them up in a week, but it was a done deal now. “I’ll see you later. Victor told me not to stay in more than six hours, so I’ll be home for dinner. Try not to burn the house down.” He started for the door, when it hit him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. “Hey, wait a minute. How did they know?”

“How did who know what?”

“Real World Tours—how did they know you were out of cigarettes when I didn’t even know it myself?”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about. They patched the thing from my upload, right? So how did they know something I didn’t?”

Lawrence sighed. “You are like a dog on a bone. They knew from us, of course.”

“But how? You were out here, right?”

Lawrence heaved a smoke-filled sigh. “Shit.” He waved his hand at the bed. “Well, sit back down. Time for lessons.”

Nemo sat on the corner of the bed, and Lawrence considered him, his eyes mere slits. Nemo felt like a fly sitting on a blade of grass.

“It’s like this,” Lawrence said. “All us Constructs have a chip at the base of our brains. Originally it linked us to a central computer that checked up on us—they didn’t know what the hell we might do. They wanted to make sure we didn’t get screwy—try to run off to the arctic or some damn thing. Inventory control, you might call it. Anyway, when the Bin opened up, and the central computer went in there, we stayed out here. Ever since, everything we know is uploaded into the Bin—do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

Nemo tried to imagine this, and a chill went through him. He remembered Lawrence’s watchful eyes, their long talks. All of that was stored in the Bin. For the first time in his life, Nemo felt afraid of Lawrence. “Everything? All the Constructs?”

Lawrence nodded.

And then another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “That’s how you knew I was coming into the station yesterday, isn’t it? It goes both ways. You knew because Victor knew.”

“That’s right.”

“How come you never told me this?”

He shrugged. “We keep it to ourselves. We ain’t exactly popular out here as it is. How long you think we’d last if certain folks found out we had a direct line to the Bin?”

Nemo cringed at the thought. “How come you’re telling me now?”

Lawrence chuckled. “So you won’t drive us crazy asking.”

“I won’t tell anybody.”

Lawrence clapped a huge green hand on Nemo’s shoulder. “We know that, son, or we wouldn’t‘ve told you. As for going into the Bin, you might want to start by asking yourself why it is you’ve stayed out, and what’s different now. No woman wants a man who’s going to be looking over his shoulder all the time. Don’t go in ’less you’re sure. Now, get gone. And whenever y’all come up for air, tell Justine we said hey.”

NEMO
DECIDED
TO
TAKE
THE
BIN
TRAIN
TO D.C. AT
LEAST
that way, if he felt like shit when he got back, he wouldn’t have another long train ride ahead of him. His stomach churned at the memory of the last one. He took a short ride down to Capitol Square Station where the Richmond VIMs were, mulling over what Lawrence had told him about Constructs. He wondered if anything was ever done with all the information the Constructs fed into the Bin every day, or whether it just sat there like so much garbage at a landfill. He spent a lot of time at landfills digging for CDs. When everything went virtual, people must’ve thrown them out by the boxload. Sometimes he’d find a whole rack of them—rack and all-lying under some worthless computer. He wondered who else besides Real World Tours dug through all that data for what they could use.

There was more graffiti in the Richmond stations than in Pentagon Station, and Capitol Square was the worst. There was a security guard, but she was spread pretty thin. She made the rounds of all the Richmond stations, and she also did maintenance work. Nemo’s longtime favorite—
What would Jesus do
?—was still written over the VIMs in foot-high letters. It was a question he’d never been able to answer, though there was no shortage of folks who presumed to answer for Him.

He stepped into a
VIM
with
666
scrawled on the front of it. It looked like it was done with acrylic squeezed from a tube. The artist probably would’ve preferred red or black, but had to use what he could find—in this case, a mellow chartreuse that gave a decidedly mixed message. As the coffin rotated, Nemo listened with new respect to the orientation tape’s warnings about visiting too long, and braced himself.

But going in was painless. As soon as
UPLOAD
flashed in his face, all his physical symptoms vanished, and he realized how awful he had felt. Now, he felt perfectly healthy, like everyone else in the Bin. He had to admit he didn’t miss his headache. As he stepped out of the coffin, he checked the time, remembering Victor’s warning.

It was 11:20. He had to be back by 5:20, which meant he had to leave D.C. by a quarter to five. That isn’t nearly enough time, he thought. He scurried down the escalator to the platform and caught the train just as it was about to pull out of the station.

His car was full of St. Christopher’s students on a field trip. They looked to be seniors, about sixteen or seventeen, all boys. Their teacher, an athletic-looking guy in a navy blazer just like the boys wore, sat across the aisle from Nemo, watching his charges as they climbed around on the seats, pushing and shoving each other. Every once in a while he’d call one of them down for crossing some invisible line of decorum Nemo couldn’t quite figure out.

“Where are you taking them?” Nemo asked.

“History field trip,” the teacher said. “Arlington Cemetery, the Holocaust Museum, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We’re doing a unit on war.”

One of the boys fell giggling into the aisle, and the teacher said, “Brad, in your seat.” The boy popped up, still laughing, and fell into a seat on top of two other boys.

The history teacher smiled apologetically. “I let them have a good time on the way up. They’ll be much more subdued on the ride home.”

AS
NEMO
RODE
ALONG
,
WATCHING
THE
BOYS
TUSSLE
WITH
each other, he tried to imagine the next few weeks, shuttling back and forth, trying to remember just where the hell he was, keeping an eye on the time, he and Justine always wondering just where they were headed. But he didn’t have to live through those few weeks to know what they came down to in the end: Was he in, or was he out?

In boarding school all the kids were pissed at first when their moms and dads went in. Everybody sounded off. But after only a few weeks of visits, you could tell which ones would end up going in. No matter how tough they sounded, no matter how much they liked to terrify Mum and Dad with the hint they were staying out, you could always tell which ones. Once they made a choice, the real world was just something to get through. They learned a script and played it. They were just marking time.

A handful knew just as quickly that they were
never
going in. They were going to live and die in the real world, and that was that. They were the ones who’d fascinated Nemo. They all had different reasons from plain gut feelings to elaborate philosophical arguments, and he set out to learn them all. He wanted to know what they knew—what they were willing to die for. Most of his friends were in that minority, but he was never really one of them. He never could decide, he never could be sure like they were. And so he stayed out, waiting to be sure.

He envied those who stayed out and knew why. Jonathan knew. His grandmother apparently knew, staying out even when she was old and sick. But he wasn’t like them. He only wanted to be. All he was ever sure of were his doubts. They kept him rooted, in a way. The Bin was a one-way trip. You go in, you stay in. The real world was temporary whether he decided to stay or not. He lived the best life he could, never completely sure he was doing the right thing, staying out day by day.

The St. Christopher’s boys piled off the train at Pentagon Station. Nemo waved good-bye to the history teacher and continued on to Dupont Circle. Lawrence told him to think about what was different now, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out. Now, finally, there was something—someone—he was sure of. He loved Justine. He couldn’t give her up.

He stood in front of the door and waited for his stop.

NEMO
ROSE
INTO
THE
SUNLIGHT
ON
DUPONT
CIRCLE
, hurrying up the escalator two steps at a time, so that when he reached the top, he sprang into the air like a dancer. He moved through the crowd, weaving in and out. No one seemed to be in as big a hurry as he was. He felt fine in here, felt better each step closer to Justine.

At the hotel, he hit the revolving door and left it spinning behind him like a top. He strode across the lobby, just missing the elevator. The clock above the elevator said it was three minutes till noon. He glanced around and found the stairs. It was only six flights. He churned up them without slowing. The racket of his thudding footsteps filled the stairwell. He burst through the doorway to the sixth floor, scaring some poor guy by the elevator half to death. Nemo mumbled an apology and loped down the long hall to Justine’s room, rapping on her door before he’d come to a complete stop. The door flew open, and she jumped into his arms, wrapping her arms and legs around him. He carried her into the room, kicking the door shut behind them. They kissed desperately, passionately, falling onto the bed, tearing off each other’s clothes, laughing.

“I told you I’d be glad to see you,” he said.

She reached down and took him into her hand. “My God, I didn’t know you’d be
this
glad.”

A
COUPLE
OF
HOURS
LATER
,
THEY
LAY
TANGLED
IN A PLEASant heap, slick with sweat, temporarily sated.

“I missed you,” she said.

He kissed the inside of her thigh. “I’m afraid I spent most of the time since you saw me last sound asleep. But I started missing you the moment I woke up.”

She ran her fingers through his hair and let it fall around his shoulders. “What was it like when you went back?”