Skinner (13 page)

Terrence.

Skinner is more hungry for his friend’s words than ever during his exile, these needful parts of him waking up. He can feel them tingling. Much as he still feels the tingle of contact on his skin where his pinkie touched Jae’s hand. No other option, he stops at an Internet kiosk, uses a touch screen that accepts both cash and credit cards, purchases a PIN code with a ten-euro bill, and uses it to log on to the airport network at one of three terminals clustered around a narrow pillar that houses all the required hardware of Web access, a trio of screens and keyboards mounted around its circumference. Tapping in the address for classicsteelbikes, entering his screen name and password. If nothing else, he can toss a bottled message, to be lost in the digital sea. Distracted by what he sees when his account opens, it takes Skinner a moment to realize that standing at the head of the line inside Bagel Street, with a sleek young man in black, frowning at the menu in much the same way that he had a short time before, is Haven.

AS SHE ALWAYS
does, Jae has locked the stall door and then checked that the lock holds firmly before she sits down. She’s done this since the age of twelve, when one of the male teachers at her elementary school walked into her stall uninvited. He’d smelled cigarette smoke, he said later, as the school nurse bandaged the bite marks on his forearm, and had gone into the bathroom to investigate. The story failed to hold water. Jae’s father drew a singular lesson from the incident and outlined it for his daughter:
Always check the lock.

And she does, always, even now in one of Heathrow’s enclosed stalls, even when she is simply sitting on the toilet fully clothed, backpack in her lap, head bowed over it, practicing again her deep breathing in the face of panic.

Brain.

She’s so mad at herself.

Stupid brain.

A not unusual state of affairs.

Stupid fucking brain.

She does her breathing, trying to slow her heart, calm the flush across her cheeks, the jolt of current that seems to run up her spine and over her scalp.

No, really, this is bullshit. I won’t have it.

“I won’t have it. Absolutely fucking not.”

She folds her arms on the daypack in her lap, presses her face into them, and screams. Feeling better almost instantly.

She lifts her face, knuckling the corners of her eyes.

“Unholy bullshit.”

She wants to clear her head, but instead she’s thinking about Skinner. She can’t help it. She’s thinking about how certain she is that Skinner is somehow, disquietingly, falling in love with her.

“Shit.”

His finger touching her hand.

You are my asset.

A tone she’s heard usually in bed, in moments when the words feel pulled out and one is helpless to stop them.

“Insane.”

And so, panic.

She’d like a robot, a tiny one, microscopic, that she could send inside her skull to deal with the disaster that is her brain. A robot to repair the wreckage left from the earthquake of her mother’s death and the long drought of being raised by her father and the floods of alcoholism and the lightning strikes of bad decisions and men and the constant threat of a planet-killing asteroid. The obsessive search for the configurations that first became visible in her mental sky the day her mother was killed by a bee, and which has grown until it blots out most everything, looming over her. A robot to uncross the wires that have left her incapable of seeing anything for itself, but always in configuration.

A robot to make her normal.

She’s looking at the tile floor, smaller and larger squares, and rectangles, a pattern she knows is called
corridor stacked.
She doesn’t remember how she knows that. Cilantro, Blue Spice, and Arrowroot. She must have seen a webpage; the pattern and colors are lodged between the hazardous territories of her brain. The material is Corian, a DuPont product. Easy to clean, to sterilize. Popular in operating theaters and bathrooms. Prefab Corian OT and restroom setups manufactured in India. If this was an American airport the Corian would be from China, but the UK and India have a special history. She can feel the configuration of the tile, the chain of its manufacture and shipping trying to merge with her limited knowledge of the history of the Raj. A British Airways map is unfolding in her mind now, air routes blooming from Heathrow in multicolored arcs. Her brain finds a layer, a European Aviation Safety Agency report on turnaround times, minimum service schedules, levels of compliance among carriers, proposed post-Eyjafjallajökull eruption changes to air control regulations as concerned with closure of airspace, something about tephra particles per square meter and glass-rich ash. A weather map pops up, jet streams. The tiles starting to unlock from one another, floating to different altitudes, ones that remain on the floor tilting up on edge, tiny cityscapes, the floating tiles tracing the BA route map arcs, jet streams overlaid, manufacturing color-coded, the flush of a toilet in the booth next door sending a mental cloud of ash into the air around her.

She hits herself in the face, closed fist, punching her cheek, her head snapping to the side, and the layers and configurations wink out.

“Just a bathroom.”

She closes her eyes.

“It’s just a fucking bathroom, it’s not a Rosetta stone for understanding globalization.”

But the unwonted vision has let her know that her cornucopia of medications are truly flushing from her system. She’s drifting closer to the nexus of her mental disasters. Coordinates unknown, found only by instinct and in inborn sense of direction that forever leads her back to her very own interior Bermuda Triangle. Stay there long enough and all lost things, real or imagined, will rise to the surface.

Something bobs up from the EASA report and into her forebrain.
Direct flights to Stockholm Arlanda are among the shortest turnarounds of all flights originating from Heathrow.

“Shitshitshit.”

She gets up, slinging her daypack over both shoulders so she can move faster, and slams into the stall door when she tries to push it open without unlocking it first. Second try and she gets it right,  coming out into the hallway to find Skinner standing there, a look akin to anxiety on his face. He appears to have been on the verge of coming in after her.

“They’re calling our flight.”

She nods, heading for the terminal concourse.

“Something about having Sweden at the other end of the flight must make them efficient on this route.”

He falls in with her, quickens his pace so that he’s slightly ahead, makes subtle movements, shoulder feints, widening his stride, collapsing the handle into his bag and carrying it swinging at his side, opening a passage for them, for her, clear space. So that, following him, perched, she can feel, in his peripheral vision at all times, she is revisited by the sensation that launched her into the bathroom in the first place. The unnerving calm that fell over her when he spoke those words.

You are my asset.

The panic that dropped down on her just after, the panic of being calm. The irrationality of it. Her mind knowing, the unravaged part of it knowing, that there is nothing safe about being with Skinner. The fact of him in her life meaning that danger is pervasive; she should not be at her ease. And he may have killed Terrence.

But she can’t help it.

She likes the way it feels.

SKINNER HAS BEEN
among the islands of Stockholm professionally; he remembers hitting the trunk of a tree with a dead branch, causing the snow to shake free from above and fall over the dead body lying at its roots, stealing an unlocked bicycle and riding it through slush, snow melting in his shoe. He remembers Stockholm as a peaceful city. And Arlanda airport peaceful as well. Not today.

Protesters are pouring in for the WTO meeting and Bilderberg conference. Unprecedented concentration of power and wealth in an era when Western protest movements have had little luck articulating anything other than rage. Conference attendees arriving, cars plucking them from the runways as they disembark from government charters and private corporate jets.

The protesters are lining up for buses and shuttles or for rides they’ve arranged in advance via Skype with simpatico organizers. There are smartphones in every hand, Tweeting arrivals and calls to arms. The networks here will be straining. Then again, Sweden, they may hum along with bandwidth to spare. Scarcely any line at the taxi stand. A black Volvo V70,
Taxi Stockholm
painted in white on the door. The driver is wearing a taxi company jersey that makes him look like a Formula 1 pit crew chief. His close-shaved bullet head and etched Scandinavian features add to the impression. Skinner has never seen a cabbie look more capable of sudden decisive action. Bruce Willis would look like this if he were a Swedish cab driver. The crew chief opens the door for them, Jae opening her backpack and pulling out her laptop before they even pull from the curb, saying nothing when Skinner leans over her to grab the end of her shoulder belt, pulling it across her body and buckling her safely in. She opens the laptop and dives back into Terrence’s files on the USB, as oblivious to the taxi ride as she was of the flight from London.

The E4 runs smooth, late-melt patches of snow on the sides of the road, thick stands of bare trees that had looked like piled bones when they flew in, dense, tangled, the color of stained ivory. But there is trouble after the exchange to Klarastrandsleden. Running parallel to the rail lines and Barnhusviken river, tail lights flare ahead, and their driver brakes hard enough to make Jae grab the laptop to keep it from slipping into the footwell. A train is frozen on the tracks, passengers being disembarked and led by Swedish Railways employees and police officers wearing high-viz green safety vests over their navy blue uniforms. Parked at the edge of the rail bed are a few V70s checkered in white, blue, and more of the green high-viz,
Polis
painted on the door, but otherwise easily mistaken for more cabs. A few hundred meters up the road the cause of the traffic jam is revealed. A half dozen protesters on the tracks, chains looped under the rails, wrapped around their bodies, secured with some very good locks. The cars ahead began to pick up speed as the drivers get, each in turn, their own eyeful of this distinctly un-Swedish spectacle. Accelerating away, Skinner can see a red Scania truck pulling up at the tracks. More of those high-viz squares, a theme on Swedish security and emergency vehicles, it appears.
Räddningstjänsten
emblazoned in white paint.

Skinner tries saying it aloud.

“Räddningstjänsten. Rescue Services.”

Skinner nods at the driver’s back.

“Who will they rescue?”

The driver waves a hand over his head.
Everyone.

“Ach!”

Skinner looks at the driver, impressed by his ability to imbue the guttural exclamation with all the frustration and hostility of a truly great and heartfelt obscenity. At an exit marked Kungsbron, just ahead, a tall Iveco Daily panel van, unmarked rental, pulling onto the traffic island in the middle of the intersection, side door sliding open, a half dozen passengers in Gitmo-orange coveralls, surgical masks and safety goggles, jumping out to unfurl a spray painted banner that stretches across the width of the road. Their driver cuts the wheel again, perhaps more at home in an F1 cockpit than changing its tires, taking them east, two wheels bumping up on the same traffic island where the Daily has come to rest, crossing a short bridge onto Kungsholmen.

This latest maneuver finally getting at least a share of Jae’s attention as she rescues the laptop again, hugging it to her chest.

“What the fuck?”

Skinner points back at the clog of vehicles forming behind them.

“Protesters.”

She turns around in her seat to look.

“What did we do? We just got here.”

The driver looks in his rearview, trying to see some of the chaos he’s saved them from.

“World Trade Center.”

Jae winces.

“Excuse me?”

Skinner raises a hand.

“Not Ground Zero, the Swedish WTC is back there.”

He looks at the reflection of the driver’s eyes.

“Yes?”

The driver looks back at the road.

“Yes. The WTO meeting. I had a plan to get around the police cordon, but no plan for that. We’ll go this way. Longer.”

He turns right, taking them back toward the river again, a street lined on both sides by anonymous office blocks, then across the bridge, a tall span over the water and the rail yards, a view to the north that includes the immobilized train, and to the south the building traffic cataclysm they just eluded.

Jae looks from one to the other.

“How long has it been like this?”

The driver tucks his chin close to his chest.

“Days. Forever.”

He looks at them in the mirror again.

“Foreigners.”

Said in a way that suggests he doesn’t mean poor immigrants from southern climes pouring into his country in hopes of government subsidies but, rather, meddlesome, educated Westerners, fucking up his roads.

An eloquent man.

Skinner half smiles, nods, acknowledging his own foreignness here.

“We’re on business.”

The driver grunts, takes a left, reserving further judgment.

The office blocks have disappeared behind them. Narrow streets now, a small urban square, trees and grass starting to hint at spring lushness around the corner. Townhouses and small apartment buildings, nothing less than a hundred years old, small sleek cars parked tight along the low curbs, lean pedestrians in dark, well fitted fall attire, just the occasional flash of color, red, blue, green; true frivolity will wait until the season has definitively changed.

At the corner of Holländargatan, a middle-aged woman stands at the edge of the limestone sidewalk, out where the light streams down the narrow street, body turned to the northern sun, face tilted upward, eyes closed, basking.

Jae watches her as they pass, then closes the laptop and puts it away in her backpack.

“I like it here.”

The driver runs his hands up and down the arc of his wheel.

“Spring is coming.”

He smiles. Having apparently decided that Jae, at least, is worthy of his country.