Spin (36 page)

I waited until I had seen Lomax’s helicopter lift off and his imperial cavalcade depart by the front gates; then I cleared my desk and tried to think about what I wanted to do. I found my hands were a little shaky. Not MS. Anger, maybe. Outrage. Pain. I wanted to diagnose it, not experience it. I wanted to banish it to the index pages of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
.

I was on my way past reception when Jason came through the door.

He said, “I want to thank you for backing me up. I assume that means you aren’t the one who told E.D. about Malmstein.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Jase.”

“I accept that. But someone did. And that presents a problem. Because how many people are aware I’ve been seeing a neurologist?”

“You, me, Malmstein, whoever works in Malmstein’s office—”

“Malmstein didn’t know E.D. was looking for dirt and neither did his staff. E.D. must have found out about Malmstein from a closer source. If not you or me—”

Molly. He didn’t have to say it.

“We can’t blame her without any kind of evidence.”

“Speak for yourself. You’re the one who’s sleeping with her. Did you keep records on my meetings with Malmstein?”

“Not here in the office.”

“At home?”

“Yes.”

“You showed these to her?”

“Of course not.”

“But she might have gained access to them when you weren’t aware of it.”

“I suppose so.” Yes.

“And she’s not here to answer questions. Did she call in sick?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t call in at all. Lucinda tried to get hold of her, but her phone isn’t answering.”

He sighed. “I don’t exactly blame you for this. But you have to admit, Tyler, you’ve made a lot of questionable choices here.”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said.

“I know you’re angry. Hurt and angry. I don’t want you to walk out of here and do something that will make things worse. But I do want you to consider where you stand on this project. Where your loyalties lie.”

“I know where they lie,” I said.

I tried to reach Molly from my car but she still wasn’t answering. I drove to her apartment. It was a warm day. The low-rise stucco complex where she lived was enshrouded in lawn-sprinkler haze. The fungal smell of wet garden soil infiltrated the car.

I was circling toward visitor parking when I caught sight of Moll stacking boxes in the back of a battered white U-Haul trailer hitched to the rear bumper of her three-year-old Ford. I pulled over in front of her. She spotted me and said something I couldn’t hear but which looked a lot like “Oh, shit!” But she stood her ground when I got out of my car.

“You can’t park there,” she said. “You’re blocking the exit.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

Molly placed a cardboard box labeled dishes on the corrugated floor of the U-Haul. “What does it look like?”

She was wearing tan slacks, a denim shirt, and a handkerchief tied over her hair. I came closer and she took an equivalent three steps back, clearly frightened.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.

“So what do you want?”

“I want to know who hired you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you deal with E.D. himself or did he use an intermediary?”

“Shit,” she said, gauging the distance between herself and the car door. “Just let me go, Tyler. What do you want from me? What’s the point of this?”

“Did you go to him and make an offer or did he call you first? And when did all this start, Moll? Did you fuck me for information or did you sell me out at some point after the first date?”

“Go to hell.”

“How much were you paid? I’d like to know how much I’m worth.”

“Go to hell. What does it matter, anyway? It’s not—”

“Don’t tell me it’s not about money. I mean, is some
principle
involved here?”

“Money
is
the principle.” She dusted her hands on her slacks, a little less frightened now, a little more defiant

“What is it you want to buy, Moll?”

“What do I want to
buy
! The only important thing anybody
can
buy. A better death. A cleaner, better death. One of these mornings the sun’s going to come up and it won’t
stop
coming up until the whole fucking sky is on fire. And I’m sorry, but I want to live somewhere nice until that happens. Somewhere by myself. Some place as comfortable as I can make it. And when that last morning arrives I want some expensive pharmaceuticals to take me over the line. I want to go to sleep before the screaming starts. Really, Tyler. That’s all I want, that’s the only thing in this world I really really want, and thank you, thank you for making it possible.” She was frowning angrily, but a tear dislodged and slid down her cheek. “Please move your car.”

I said, “A nice house and a bottle of pills? That’s your price?”

“There’s no one looking out for me but me.”

“This sounds pathetic, but I thought we could look out for each other.”

“That would mean trusting you. And no offense, but—look at you. Skating through life like you’re waiting for an answer or waiting for a savior or just permanently on hold.”

“I’m trying to be reasonable here, Moll.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. If reasonability was a knife I’d be losing blood. Poor reasonable Tyler. But I figured that out, too. It’s revenge, isn’t it? All that sweet saintliness you wear like your own suit of clothes. It’s your revenge on the world for disappointing you. The world didn’t give you what you want, and you’re not giving anything back but sympathy and aspirin.”

“Molly—”

“And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between
being
in love and
conducting yourself
like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.”

I turned and walked back to my own car, a little unsteadily, shocked less by the betrayal than by the finality of it, intimacies wiped out like penny stocks in a market crash. Then I turned back. “How about you, Moll? I know you were paid for information, but is that why you fucked me in the first place?”

“I
fucked
you,” she said, “because I was
lonely
.”

“Are you lonely now?”

“I never stopped,” she said.

I drove away.

The federal election was coming up fast. Jason intended to use it for cover.

“Fix me,” he had said. And, he insisted, there was a way to do that. It was unorthodox. It wasn’t FDA-approved. But it was a therapy with a long and well-documented history. And he made it clear he meant to take advantage of it, whether I cooperated in the effort or not.

And because Molly had almost stripped him of everything that was important to him—and left me among the wreckage—I agreed to help. (Thinking, ironically, of what E.D. had said to me years ago: I
expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment
. Was that what I was doing?)

In the days before the November election Wun Ngo Wen briefed us on the procedure and its attendant risks.

Conferring with Wun wasn’t easy. The problem wasn’t so much the web of security surrounding him, though that was difficult enough to negotiate, but the crowd of analysts and specialists who had been feeding at his archives like hummingbirds at nectar. These were reputable scholars, vetted by the FBI and Homeland Security, sworn to secrecy at least pro
tem
, mesmerized by the vast data banks of Martian wisdom Wun had carried with him to Earth. The digital data amounted to more than five hundred volumes of astronomy, biology, math, physics, medicine, history, and technology at a thousand pages per volume, much of it considerably in advance of terrestrial knowledge. Had the entire contents of the Library of Alexandria been recovered by time machine it could hardly have produced a greater scholarly feeding frenzy.

These people were under pressure to complete their work before the official announcement of Wun’s presence. The federal government wanted at least a rough index to the archives (much of which was in approximate English but some of which was written in Martian scientific script) before foreign governments began to demand equal access to it. The State Department planned to produce and distribute sanitized copies from which certain potentially valuable or dangerous technologies had been excised or “presented in summary form,” the originals to remain highly classified.

Thus whole tribes of scholars battled for and jealously guarded their access to Wun, who could interpret or explain lacunae in the Martian text. On several occasions I was chased out of Wun’s quarters by frantically polite men and women from “the high-energy physics group” or “the molecular biology group” demanding their negotiated quarter hour. Wun occasionally introduced me to these people but none of them was ever happy to see me, and the medical sciences team leader was alarmed almost to the point of tachycardia when Wun announced he’d chosen me as his personal physician.

Jase reassured the scholars by hinting that I was part of the “socialization process” by which Wun was polishing his terrestrial manners outside the context of politics or science, and I promised the med team leader I wouldn’t provide medical treatment to Wun without her direct involvement. A rumor spread among the research people that I was a civilian opportunist who had charmed his way into Wun’s inner circle and that my payoff would be a fat book contract after Wun went public. The rumor arose spontaneously but we did nothing to discourage it; it served our purposes.

Access to pharmaceuticals was easier than I’d expected. Wun had arrived on Earth with an entire pharmacopoeia of Martian drugs, none of which had terrestrial counterparts and any of which, he claimed, he might one day need in order to treat himself. The medical supplies had been confiscated from his landing craft but had been returned once his ambassadorial status was established. (Samples having no doubt been collected by the government; but Wun doubted that crude analysis would reveal the purpose of any of these highly engineered materials.) Wun simply supplied a few vials of raw drug to Jason, who carried them out of Perihelion in an obscuring cloud of executive privilege.

Wun briefed me on dosage, timing, contraindications, and potential problems. I was dismayed by the long list of attendant dangers. Even on Mars, Wun said, the mortality rate from the transition to Fourth was a nontrivial 0.1 percent, and Jason’s case was complicated by his AMS.

But without treatment Jason’s prognosis was even worse. And he would go ahead with this whether I approved of it or not—in a sense, the prescribing physician was Wun Ngo Wen, not me. My role was simply to oversee the procedure and treat any unexpected side effects. Which soothed my conscience, although the argument would have been hard to defend in court—Wun might have “prescribed” the drugs, but it wasn’t his hand that would put them into Jason’s body.

It would be mine.

Wun Ngo Wen wouldn’t even be with us. Jase had booked a three-week leave of absence for the end of November, early December, by which time Wun would have become a global celebrity, a name (however unusual) everyone recognized. Wun would be busy addressing the United Nations and accepting the hospitality of our planet’s somewhat bloodstained collection of monarchs, mullahs, presidents, and prime ministers, while Jason sweated and vomited his way toward better health.

We needed a place to go. A place where he could be inconspicuously sick, a place where I could attend him without attracting unwanted attention, but civilized enough that I could call an ambulance if things went wrong. Somewhere comfortable. Somewhere quiet.

“I know the perfect place,” Jason said.

“Where’s that?”

“The Big House,” he said.

I laughed, until I realized he was serious.

Diane didn’t call back until a week after Lomax’s visit to Perihelion, a week after Molly left town to claim whatever reward E. D. Lawton or his hired detectives had promised her.

Sunday afternoon. I was alone in my rental. A sunny day, but the blinds were pulled. All week, balancing time between patients at the Perihelion clinic and secretive tutorials with Wun and Jase, I’d been staring down the barrel of this empty weekend. It was good to be busy, I reasoned, because when you were busy you were awash in the countless but comprehensible daily problems that crowd out pain and stifle remorse. That was healthy. That was a coping process. Or at least a delaying tactic. Useful but, alas, temporary. Because sooner or later the noise fades, the crowds disperse, and you go home to the burned-out lightbulb, the empty room, the unmade bed.

It was pretty bad. I wasn’t even sure how to feel—or rather, which of the several conflicting and incompatible modes of pain I ought to acknowledge first. “You’re better off without her,” Jase had said a couple of times, and that was at least as true as it was banal: better off without her, but better still if I could make sense of her, if I could decide whether Molly had used me or had punished me for using her, whether my chilly and perhaps slightly counterfeit love equaled her cold and profitable repudiation of it.

Then the phone rang, which was embarrassing because I was busy stripping the sheets from my bed, balling them up for a trip to the laundry room, lots of detergent and scalding hot water to bleach out Molly’s aura. You don’t want to be interrupted at a task like that. Makes you feel the tiniest bit self-conscious. But I’d always been a slave to a ringing phone. I picked up.

“Tyler?” Diane said. “Is that you, Ty? Are you alone?”

I admitted that I was alone.

“Good, I’m glad I finally got hold of you. I wanted to tell you, we’re changing our phone number. Unlisting it. But in case you need to get in touch with me—”

She recited the private number, which I scribbled on a handy napkin. “Why are you unlisting your phone?” She and Simon had only a single static land line between them, but I guessed that was a devotional penance, like wearing wool or eating whole grains.