Spin (13 page)

They—and by “they” I mean agents of the Chaykin administration or their allies in Jakarta—were interested in us for a number of reasons. Because of the drug, of course, and more important the several digital copies of the Martian archives we were carrying. And they would have loved to interrogate us about Jason’s last hours: the monologue I had witnessed and recorded, everything he had told me about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin, knowledge only Jason had possessed.

I slept and woke, and she was gone.

I spent an hour watching the balcony curtains move, watching sunlight angle up the visible leg of the Arch, daydreaming about the Seychelles.

Ever been to the Seychelles? Me neither. What was running in my head was an old PBS documentary I had once seen. The Seychelles are tropical islands, home to tortoises and
coco de mer
and a dozen varieties of rare birds. Geologically, they’re all that remains of an ancient continent that once linked Asia and South America, long before the evolution of modern humans.

Dreams, Diane once said, are metaphors gone feral. The reason I dreamed about the Seychelles (I imagined her telling me) was because I felt submerged, ancient, almost extinct.

Like a drowning continent, awash in the prospect of my own transformation.

I slept again. Woke, and she still wasn’t there.

Woke in the dark, still alone and knowing that by now too much time had passed. Bad sign. In the past, Diane had always come back by nightfall.

I’d been thrashing in my sleep. The cotton sheet lay puddled on the floor, barely visible in the light reflected by the plaster ceiling from the street outside. I was chilly but too sore to reach over and retrieve it.

The sky outside was exquisitely clear. If I gritted my teeth and inclined my head to the left I could see a few bright stars through the glass balcony doors. I entertained myself with the idea that in absolute terms some of those stars might be younger than I was.

I tried not to think about Diane and where she might be and what might be happening to her.

And eventually I fell asleep with the starlight burning through my eyelids, phosphorescent ghosts floating in the reddish dark.

Morning.

At least I thought it was morning. There was daylight beyond the window now. Someone, most likely the maid, knocked twice and said something testy in Malay from the hall. And went away again.

Now I was genuinely worried, though in this particular phase of the treatment the anxiety came through as a muddled peevishness. What had possessed Diane to stay away so intolerably long, and why wasn’t she here to hold my hand and sponge my forehead? The idea that she might have come to harm was unwelcome, unproven, inadmissible before the court.

Still, the plastic bottle of water by the bed had been empty since at least yesterday or longer, my lips were chapped to the point of cracking, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had hobbled to the toilet. If I didn’t want my kidneys to shut down altogether I’d have to fetch water from the bathroom tap.

But it was hard enough just sitting up without screaming. The act of levering my legs over the side of the mattress was nearly unendurable, as if my bones and cartilage had been replaced with broken glass and rusty razors.

And although I tried to distract myself by thinking of something else (the Seychelles, the sky), even that feeble anodyne was distorted by the lens of the fever. I imagined I heard Jason’s voice behind me, Jason asking me to get him something—a rag, a chamois; his hands were dirty. I came out of the bathroom with a washcloth instead of a glass of water and was halfway back to bed before I realized my mistake. Stupid. Start again. Take the empty water bottle this time. Fill it all the way up. Fill it to brimming. Follow the drinking gourd.

Handing him a chamois in the garden shed behind the Big House where the landscapers kept their tools.

He would have been about twelve years old. Early summer, a couple of years before the Spin.

Sip water and taste time. Here comes memory again.

I was surprised when Jason suggested we try to fix the gardener’s gas mower. The gardener at the Big House was an irritable Belgian named De Meyer, who chain-smoked Gauloises and would only shrug sourly when we spoke to him. He had been cursing the mower because it coughed smoke and stalled every few minutes. Why do him a favor? But it was the intellectual challenge that fascinated Jase. He told me he’d been up past midnight researching gasoline engines on the Internet. His curiosity was piqued. He said he wanted to see what one looked like in vivo. The fact that I didn’t know what in vivo meant made the prospect sound doubly interesting. I said I’d be happy to help.

In fact I did little more than watch while he positioned the mower over a dozen sheets of yesterday’s
Washington Post
and began his examination. This was inside the musty but private tool shed at the back of the lawn, where the air reeked of oil and gasoline, fertilizer and herbicide. Bags of lawn seed and bark mulch spilled from raw pine shelves among the spavined blades and splintered handles of garden tools. We weren’t supposed to play in the tool shed. Usually it was locked. Jason had taken the key from a rack inside the basement door.

It was a hot Friday afternoon outside and I didn’t mind being in there watching him work; it was both instructive and oddly soothing. First he inspected the machine, stretching his body along the floor beside it. He patiently ran his fingers over the cowling, locating the screw heads, and when he was satisfied he removed the screws and set them aside, in order, and the housing next to them when he lifted it off.

And so into the deep workings of the machine. Somehow Jason had taught himself or intuited the use of a ratchet driver and a torque wrench. His moves were sometimes tentative but never uncertain. He worked like an artist or an athlete— nuanced, knowing, conscious of his own limitations. He had disassembled every part he could reach and laid them all out on the grease-blackened pages of the
Post
like an anatomical illustration when the shed door squealed open and we both jumped.

E. D. Lawton had come home early.

“Shit,” I whispered, which won me a hard look from the senior Lawton. He stood in the doorway in an immaculately tailored gray suit, surveying the wreckage, while Jason and I stared at our feet, as instinctively guilty as if we’d been caught with a copy of
Penthouse
.

“Are you
fixing
that or
vandalizing
it?” he asked finally, his tone conveying the mixture of contempt and disdain that was E. D. Lawton’s verbal signature, a trick he had mastered so long ago it was second nature to him now.

“Sir,” Jason said meekly. “Fixing it.”

“I see. Is it
your
lawn mower?”

“No, of course not, but I thought Mr. De Meyer might like it if I—”

“But it’s not Mr. De Meyer’s lawn mower, either, is it? Mr. De Meyer doesn’t own his own tools. He’d be collecting welfare if I didn’t hire him every summer. It happens to be
my
lawn mower.” E.D. let the silence expand until it was almost painful. Then he said, “Have you found the problem?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet? Then you’d better get on with it.”

Jason looked almost supernaturally relieved. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I thought after dinner I’d—”

“No. Not after dinner. You took it apart, you fix it and put it back together. Then you can eat.” E.D. turned his unwelcome attention my way. “Go home, Tyler. I don’t want to find you in here again. You ought to know better.”

I scurried out into the afternoon glare, blinking.

He didn’t catch me in the shed again, but only because I was careful to avoid him. I was back later that night—after ten, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw light still leaking from the crevice under the shed door. I took a leftover chicken leg from the refrigerator, wrapped it in tinfoil, and hustled over under cover of darkness. Whispered to Jase, who doused the light long enough for me slip inside unseen.

He was covered in Maori tattoos of grease and oil, and the mower engine was still only halfway reassembled. After he’d wolfed down a few bites of chicken I asked him what was taking so long.

“I could put it back together in fifteen minutes,” he said. “But it wouldn’t work. The hard part is figuring out exactly what’s wrong. Plus I keep making it worse. If I try to clean the fuel line I get air inside it. Or the rubber cracks. Nothing’s in very good shape. There’s a hairline fracture in the carburetor housing, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t have spare parts. Or the right tools. I’m not even sure what the right tools
are
.” His face wrinkled, and for a moment I thought he might cry.

“So give up,” I said. “Go tell E.D. you’re sorry and let him take it out of your allowance or whatever.”

He stared at me as if I had said something noble but ridiculously naive. “No, Tyler. Thanks, but I won’t be doing that.”

“Why not?”

But he didn’t answer. Just set aside the chicken leg and returned to the scattered pieces of his folly.

I was about to leave when there was another ultraquiet knock at the door. Jason gestured at me to douse the light. He cracked the door and let his sister in.

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 flannel shirt and stood with his arms crossed while Jason powered up the mower, the sound of it incongruous in the early-morning dark. E.D. listened a few moments, then shrugged and beckoned Jason back in the house.

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 running from?”

“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.