Spin (14 page)

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.

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 dinner and ate it without tasting it; then I abandoned all hope of karmic equanimity and decided to knock on Giselle’s door, see if she was home.

Giselle Palmer rented the apartment three doors down the hall. She opened the door wearing ragged jeans and an old flannel shirt that announced an evening at home. I asked her if she was busy or if she felt like hanging out.

“I don’t know, Tyler. You look pretty gloomy.”

“More like conflicted. I’m thinking about leaving town.”

“Really? Some kind of business trip?”

“For good.”

“Oh?” Her smile faded. “When did you decide that?”

“I haven’t decided. That’s the point.”

She opened the door wider and waved me in. “Seriously? Where are you going?”

“Long story.”

“Meaning you need a drink before you talk about it?”

“Something like that,” I said.

Giselle had introduced herself to me at a tenants’ meeting in the basement of the building last year. She was twenty-four years old and about as tall as my collarbone. She worked days at a chain restaurant in Renton, but when we started getting together for coffee Sunday afternoons she told me she was “a hooker, a prostitute, it’s my part-time job.”

What she meant was that she was part of a loose group of female friends who traded among themselves the names of older men (presentable, usually married) who were willing to pay generously for sex but were terrified of the street trade. As she told me this Giselle had squared her shoulders and looked at me defiantly, in case I was shocked or repelled. I hadn’t been. These were, after all, the Spin years. People Giselle’s age made their own rules, for better or worse, and People like me abstained from passing judgment.

We continued to share coffee or an occasional dinner, and I had written requisitions for blood work for her on a couple of occasions. As of her last test Giselle was HTV-free and the only major communicable disease for which she carried antibodies was West Nile virus. In other words, she had been both careful and lucky.

But the thing about the sex trade, Giselle had told me, was that even at the semi-amateur level it begins to define your life. You become, she said, the kind of person who carries condoms and Viagra in her purse. So why do it, when she could have taken, say, a night job at Wal-Mart? That was a question she didn’t welcome and which she answered defensively: “Maybe it’s a kink. Or maybe it’s a hobby, you know, like model trains.” But I knew she had run away from an abusive stepfather in Saskatoon at an early age, and the ensuing career arc wasn’t difficult to imagine. And of course she had the same ironclad excuse for risky behavior all of us of a certain age shared: the near-certainty of our own mass extinction. Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

She said, “So how drunk do you need to get? Tipsy or totally fucked? Actually we may not have a choice. Liquor cabinet’s a little bare tonight.”

She mixed me something that was mostly vodka and tasted like it had been drained from a fuel tank. I cleared the daily paper off a chair and sat down. Giselle’s apartment was decently furnished but she kept house like a freshman in a dorm room. The newspaper was open to the editorial page. The cartoon was about the Spin: the Hypotheticals portrayed as a couple of black spiders gripping the Earth in their hairy legs. Caption: do we eat them now or wait for the election?

“I don’t get that at all,” Giselle said, slumping onto the sofa and waving at the paper with her foot.

“The cartoon?”

“The whole thing. The Spin. ‘No return.’ Reading the papers, it’s like… what? There’s something on the other side of the sky, and it’s not friendly. That’s all I really know.”

Probably the majority of the human race could have signed off on that declaration. But for some reason—maybe it was the rain, the blood that had been spilled in my presence today—what she said made me feel indignant. “It’s not that hard to understand.”

“No? So why’s it happening?”

“Not the
why
. Nobody knows the
why
. As for the
what
—”

“No, I know, I don’t need that lecture. We’re in a sort of cosmic baggie and the universe is spinning out of control, yada yada yada.”

Which irked me again. “You know your own address, don’t you?”

She sipped her own drink. “Course I do.”

“Because you like to know where you are. A couple of miles from the ocean, a hundred miles from the border, a few thousand miles west of New York City—right?”

“Right, but so what?”

“I’m making a point. People don’t have any trouble distinguishing between Spokane and Paris, but when it comes to the sky all they see is a big amorphous mystery blob. How come?”

“I don’t know. Because I learned all my astronomy from
Star Trek
reruns? I mean, how much do I really have to know about moons and stars? Things I haven’t seen since I was a little kid. Even the scientists admit they don’t know what they’re talking about half the time.”

“And that’s okay with you?”

“The fuck difference does it make if it’s okay with me? Listen, maybe I should turn on the TV. We can watch a movie and you can tell me why you’re thinking about leaving town.”

Stars were like people, I told her: they live and die in predictable spans of time. The sun was aging fast, and as it aged it burned its fuel faster. Its luminosity increased ten percent for every billion years. The solar system had already changed in ways that would render the raw Earth uninhabitable even if the Spin stopped today. Point of no return. That’s what the newspapers were talking about. It would not have been news, except that President Clayton had made it official, admitted in a speech that according to the best scientific opinion there was no way back to the
status quo ante
.

And she gave me a long unhappy stare and said, “All this bullshit—”

“It’s not bullshit.”

“Maybe not, but it’s not doing me any good.”

“I’m just trying to explain—”

“Fuck, Tyler. Did I ask for an explanation? Take your nightmares and go home. Or else settle down and tell me why you want to leave Seattle. This is about those friends of yours, isn’t it?”

I had told her about Jason and Diane. “Mostly Jason.”

“The so-called genius.”

“Not just so-called. He’s in Florida…”

“Doing something for the satellite people, you said.”

“Turning Mars into a garden.”

“That was in the papers, too. Is it really possible?”

“I have no idea. Jason seems to think so.”

“But wouldn’t it take a long time?”

“The clocks run faster,” I said, “past a certain altitude.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s he need you for?”

Well, yeah, what? Good question. Excellent question. “They’re hiring a physician for the in-house clinic at Perihelion.”

“I thought you were just an ordinary GP.”

“I am.”

“So what makes you qualified to be an astronaut doctor?”

“Absolutely nothing. But Jason—”

“He’s doing a favor for ah old buddy? Well, that figures. God bless the rich, huh? Keep it among friends.”

I shrugged. Let her think so. No need to share this with Giselle, and Jase hadn’t said anything specific…

But when we talked I had formed the impression that Jason wanted me not just as a house doctor but as his personal physician. Because he was having a problem. Some kind of problem he didn’t want to share with the Perihelion staff. A problem he wouldn’t talk about over the phone.

Giselle had run out of vodka but she rummaged in her purse and came up with a joint concealed in a box of tampons. “The pay is good, I bet.” She clicked a plastic lighter and applied the flame to the twist of the joint and inhaled deeply.

“We didn’t get into details.”

She exhaled. “
Such
a geek. Maybe that’s why you can stand thinking about the Spin all the time. Tyler Dupree, borderline autistic. You
are
, you know. All the signs. I bet this Jason Lawton is exactly the same. I bet he gets a hard-on every time he says the word ‘billion.’”

“Don’t underestimate him. He might actually help preserve the human race.” If not any particular specimen of it.

“A geek ambition if I ever heard one. And this sister of his, the one you slept with—”

“Once.”

“Once. She got religion, right?”

“Right.” Got it and still had it, as far as I knew. I hadn’t heard from Diane since that night in the Berkshires. Not entirely for lack of trying. A couple of e-mails had gone unanswered. Jase didn’t hear much from her either, but according to Carol she was living with Simon somewhere in Utah or Arizona—some western state I’d never visited and couldn’t picture—where the dissolution of the New Kingdom movement had stranded them.

“That’s not hard to figure out either.” Giselle passed the joint. I wasn’t totally at ease with pot..But that “geek” remark had stung. I toked deeply, and the effect was exactly what it had been back in residence at Stony Brook: instant aphasia. “It must have been awful for her. The Spin happening, and all she wanted to do was forget about it, which was the last thing you or her family would let her do. I’d get religion too, in her place. I’d be singing in the fucking choir.”

I said—belatedly, behind the buzz—“Is the world really so hard to look at?”

Giselle reached out and took back the joint. “From where I stand,” she said, “yes. Mostly.”

She turned her head, distracted. Thunder rattled the window as if it resented the dry warmth inside. Some serious weather was coming in across the Sound. “Bet it’s gonna be one of those winters,” she said. “The nasty kind. I wish I had a fireplace in here. Music would help. But I’m too tired to get up.”

I went over to her audio rig and cued a download of a Stan Getz album, the saxophone warming the room the way no fireplace could have. She nodded at that: not what she would have picked, but yeah, good… “So he called you and offered you this job.”

“Right.”

“And you told him you’d take it?”

“I told him I’d think about it.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Thinking about it?”

She seemed to be implying something, but I didn’t know what. “I guess I am.”

“I guess you’re not. I guess you already know what you’re going to do. You know what I guess? I guess you’re here to say good-bye.”

I said I guessed that was possible.

“So at least come and sit next to me.”

I moved to the sofa lethargically. Giselle stretched out and put her feet in my lap. She was wearing men’s socks, a slightly ridiculous pair of fuzzy argyles. The cuffs of her jeans rode up her ankles. “For a guy who can look at a gunshot wound without flinching,” she said, “you’re pretty good at avoiding mirrors.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means you’re really obviously not finished with Jason and Diane. Her especially.”

But it wasn’t possible that Diane still mattered to me.

Maybe I wanted to prove that. Maybe mat’s why we ended up stumbling together into Giselle’s messy bedroom, smoking another joint, falling down on the Barbie-pink bedspread, making love under the rain-blinded windows, holding each other until we fell asleep.

But it wasn’t Giselle’s face that floated into my mind in the dreamy aftermath, and I woke a couple of hours later thinking: My god, she’s right, I’m going to Florida.

In the end it took weeks to arrange, both at Jason’s end and at the hospital. During that time I saw Giselle again, but only briefly. She was in the market for a used car and I sold her mine; I didn’t want to risk the drive cross-country. (Road robbery on the interstates was up by double digits.) But we didn’t mention the intimacy that had come and gone with the rainy weather, an act of slightly drunken kindness on someone’s part, most likely hers.