The God Patent (51 page)

He forced himself to relax. The fixation that she was dead was irrational. He had to muster the strength to keep from surrendering to it. Wasn’t that the mistake he’d made all those years ago in the face of methamphetamine? Surrendering to the pain instead of fighting?

Something cold, sharp, and prickly poked his hand. His arm was resting on a boulder where he’d been tapping his fingers, but now the pelican was standing on the back of that hand, its webbed feet digging into his skin. The pelican stared back. Ryan leaned forward and faced the bird. Its breath smelled fishy, like fresh fish. It reminded Ryan of the sushi on his first date with Emmy.

The distraction was good. It helped him dispel the ghosts and ask the fundamental question: where the hell is that kid?

The pelican poked its beak into a crevice between two rocks and struggled. It had found a crab, but the gap was too small for it to pull the crab out. Something else was stuck in the crevice, a sheet of graph paper. Ryan pulled on the pelican until it let go of the crab. It complained with the sound of a duck imitating a seagull.

Ryan worked the sheet of paper out of the rock. It was wet, making it difficult to decipher, but he discovered several other sheets of paper in higher cracks that were shielded from the ocean spray. No question, they were Katarina’s—a flowchart of
the last neural net that she’d described to him. But there was some doodling too, like that cloud on the ceiling in her room with the big raindrop over the pelican-Ryan’s head. This one was a diagram of a multiple feedback neural net; the feedback loops all leaked down from other neural networks in the cloud.

Ryan couldn’t help but think of the drawings of helicopters that da Vinci had made—it was Katarina’s all right, the mathematician with the heart of an artist.

D
odge leaned back in his chair with two files open on the desk in front of him. In one were notes from Dodge’s contacts about teenage girls who had been seen between Petaluma and Houston, a separate sheet for every girl. The other contained details of girls recently reported missing.

Foster said, “You’ve located half a dozen runaways.”

Dodge replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Have you connected them with their parents?”

“Don’t really give a fuck, Reed. I’m looking for Kat.”

It was easy to match sightings and reports. Foster reached across and pulled the phone over. When it was halfway across the desk, it rang, startling him. Dodge reached across and jerked it away.

Dodge answered with, “What have you got?” He took a legal pad and flipped to a blank page.

At the other end, the voice said, “What will you give me for it?”

Dodge said, “Ah-ha, would this be slippery Jeff Spilling?”

“I found the kid.”

“Put her on.”

“Can’t exactly do that, Nutter. First I need some recompense.”

“Where is she?”

“Kimball Junction, just outside Salt Lake City.”

Dodge grabbed the stack of paper from Foster and flipped through it. “I had two reports from I-80; neither of them panned out.”

“Well, she’s here and you know what I need.”

“If you can deliver the kid, you can forget your warrants in Michigan.”

“You mean LA?”

“Whatever.” Dodge drew a little empty square in the margin of the blank sheet and wrote
clear Spilling in LA
. “Put her on.”

“Like I said, I can’t exactly put her on, but I’m pretty sure this is the kid you’re after. Weird clothes—skirt’s all marked up with designs, suede boots like Boy George wore in the eighties. She had a laptop and a couple of notebooks. Lots of diagrams.”

Dodge could hear him flip through pages. “You have her stuff but not her?”

“Nutter, I’m at the morgue. The kid’s dead, thrown from the back of a truck. Drunk driver plowed into a pickup on I-80 almost a week ago. She was in back. Dude driving the truck said she was hitching—picked her up in Vegas, said her name was Kate.”

“Hang on.” Dodge cupped a hand over the mouthpiece and spoke to Foster. “Go get my sister.”

Foster did what he was told. Dodge waited until Emmy came in. “Guy on the phone thinks he has Kat’s notebook.” Then, into the phone, “I’m putting on someone who will know if it’s Kat’s book or not.” Dodge handed the phone to Emmy.

Emmy asked Spilling to describe the diagrams and drawings. Her voice got louder as she grew frustrated that the man didn’t understand her questions. Eventually, she handed the phone back to Dodge. “Okay, those are Kat’s notes. Where is she?”

Dodge spoke into the phone. “What’s next?”

“The cops need the next of kin to ID the body.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Just pictures—she’s kind of mangled, but it’s a match. So I’m clean in LA?”

“Oh.” Dodge hung his head. “Yeah, come Friday no one will want you in LA either.” He hung up the phone and stared at a space on the desk between Foster and Emmy. “She died in a car accident. The cops need Jane to ID her.”

Foster took a deep breath.

Emmy turned away. She made a sharp agonized sound and covered her face with her hands.

Dodge wrote three addresses on a pad along with directions to the cemetery, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Emmy. “Jane’ll be at one of these places. If her bike isn’t there, she isn’t either. When you find her, tell her we heard something. Don’t tell her that her kid is dead—I will handle that.”

Emmy took the sheet and walked out.

Dodge tapped on the desk, staring at the revolver.

Foster sighed and looked up in the shadows of the dark office.

Neither spoke for several minutes. Finally, Dodge leaned down, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out two shot glasses and the bottle of Irish whiskey. He poured both full and slid one across the desk to Foster, motioning him to pick it up. When he did, Dodge held his glass and said, “Here’s to Kat. This planet’s not worth a shit without her.”

Foster said, “Bless her soul.”

“Bless my ass.”

Foster didn’t respond.

They knocked back their drinks.

Dodge filled the glasses again. He pushed Foster’s glass over and took the revolver from the gavel pad. He twirled it around on his thumb. He could feel his face twisting into grief and tried to shake it off, shake off his whole association with life on Earth.

Foster shuffled the edge of one of the legal pads like it was a deck of cards. “That’s it then. That was the last chance.”

“What?” Dodge’s mouth fell open. This guy couldn’t be serious. “No. No, you piece of shit, don’t tell me—”

“She had the answer. She could have made it work.” Foster sipped from the glass, set it down, and shrugged. “I was so sure. Where did I make the wrong turn?”

In a life that could be described as brimming with repulsion, Dodge had tasted a lot of bile but never this flavor. He smiled at Foster and spoke gently, with a tone of understanding and compassion. “You think it’s about you?” Dodge pointed the gun at Foster.

Foster looked at the revolver. “Hold it.”

“Don’t worry. I just want to help. I can tell that you don’t get it.” Dodge pulled the hammer back, clicking it into position, poised a quarter of an inch from the chamber. “You can prove right now that there’s a God.” He set the gun, cocked and loaded, on the desk between them, pointed at Foster.

Foster drank the whiskey and set his glass carefully against the end of the gun, as if it could block a bullet. “I apologize. I was wrong.”

Dodge refilled Foster’s glass.

Dodge stared at Foster, daring him to make eye contact. He didn’t. “First you want to bless her, and then you want to damn her because she got herself killed before she could make you rich. Is that right?”

He drank half the glass. “It boils down to the precept of faith. God wants faith, but all along I thought He was guiding me so that I could show the world the nature of His power.”

“Tell me this, Foster Reed, PhD, are you being presumptuous?” He clinked his glass against the gun, as though in a toast. The gun spun on the desk.

The light that reflected from the gun seemed to capture Foster’s gaze. “But everything lined up perfectly. I couldn’t have been completely wrong. I’m missing something.”

Dodge said, “No one cares about you.”

“I know that,” Foster said. He tapped his glass. “I honestly believed my wife was an angel, that she was sent to guide me. Me, yes, to guide me to some kind of glory. I truly believed that those patents were written with divine guidance—”

Dodge moved the gun up against Foster’s hand. “I thought you wrote those submissions to get a down payment on a boat.”

“The boat—that’s right. Yeah, it was a boat.” Foster laughed and then drank. “I thought it happened for a reason. I thought Ryan’s misfortune was meant to happen so that my destiny could be fulfilled.” His shoulders sunk together. “Why would God break down the Heisenberg barrier to satisfy my ego?”

Foster swallowed more whiskey, choking slightly as it went down.

Dodge spun the gun again. He knew just how hard to touch it to get the effect he wanted. He did it again and again. Foster couldn’t take his eyes off of it, and each time it stopped spinning, it pointed at Foster. Dodge asked questions the way that a cat toys with its victim, questions designed to stoke Foster’s doubts. “When you demand that God create energy for you, isn’t that using the Lord’s name in vain?” Then he’d spin the gun again, wait for it to stop, and ask another question. “If you would have no God before Him, then where do you get off demanding that He expose Himself to you? Why you?” And like an injured mouse, Foster grew weaker. “You did it for a boat. The patents were bogus and you knew it. You stole, you coveted, you gave false witness…”

Dodge refilled Foster’s glass less often as time passed and managed to synchronize spinning the gun with moments where
Foster’s doubts were boiling to the surface. When Foster started to nod off, Dodge poured a capsule into his drink. He didn’t even try to hide it, just popped open a capsule—a mix of caffeine and ephedrine—and tapped it into the glass. The powder floated over the surface of the amber liquid, and Foster drank it. As the sun rose, Dodge began to find the game tedious.

“You see, Foster,”—Dodge topped off the glass and Foster took it—“you keep saying that you’re doing God’s work, but this time you’d actually be helping Him out.”

“How?” Foster said. “What do you mean? I can’t help Katarina, and it’s too late to help Ryan. What can I do?”

“You could kill yourself…” Dodge picked up the gun and stared at it. The greenish light from the desk lamp reflected off the dark blue steel. “You know why I leave this gun here?”

Too drunk to focus, too wired to pass out, Foster shook his head as though he hadn’t heard clearly.

“I leave this gun out to remind myself that being alive is optional. Truth is, no one else really cares whether you live or not.” He worked the hammer loose and set it gently on the chamber, spun the cylinder, and cocked it again. The gun made a satisfying click. Dodge held it up to his head, placing the barrel just in front of his ear, pointed so that the projectile would travel through his brain and out behind the other ear. “Every night, I hold this gun up to my head like this and ask myself a question.” He smiled. “You want to know what the question is?”

“You’re crazy.”

“I ask myself if I want to see tomorrow. Do I really want to go through it again? And so far, I’ve decided to keep going.” Dodge took the gun away from his head and offered it to Foster, handle first. “You should try it. Go on, do God’s work. Just what you need, really. And don’t worry, I’ll be happy to clean your mortal remains from my walls.”

Foster took the gun and held it in his palm as though weighing it.

Dodge sipped from his glass. “You’ll feel better. We’ll all feel better.”

The cold metal in his hand seemed to rouse Foster’s consciousness, so Dodge took another swipe. “When you think of sin: theft, murder, adultery—those are the easy ones. But you went for the big one, didn’t you? Idolatry, name in vain.”

“He was right,” Foster whispered. “The Nobel laureate was right and Ryan knew it. He knew it and didn’t tell me because he knew I wouldn’t listen.”

“That’s right. Tell me what happened. Tell me how you failed your God.”

“I gave a talk last month at a physics meeting, and a man asked a question.” He looked at Dodge, and his eyes focused for the first time in hours. “I answered it. I thought it was a good answer too. He told me that I’d done something wonderful. And I did do something wonderful but not divine.”

Foster went quiet. His hand drooped to the desk under the weight of the gun.

“Do you want to see tomorrow? Do you?” Dodge whispered. “Why?”

Foster looked at the gun, and as he looked, his hand rose and tightened.

“Don’t worry,” Dodge said, “it’s cocked, ready to go. Just ask yourself the question.”

Foster looked at the gun. His hand slowly rotated so that he was looking down the barrel.

“Let’s add it up, Reed. Why would you want to see tomorrow? First, you ripped off everyone you know. Your wife loved you, and instead of returning her love, you made her into a fucking angel—how hard do you think it was for her to live up to that?
Second, you fucked over your best friend. The way I heard it, you could have said one word to Ryan’s wife and she wouldn’t have thrown him out. Wasn’t that your bachelor party? Third, you betrayed your God and religion. Fourth, you lied to the whole world, and why? Because you decided that God chose you personally for glory. And fifth, you were trying to have God give you credit for the work of a fourteen-year-old girl.” Dodge shook his head and released a long, slow sigh. “That’s quite a tab. I advise you to close it.”