Uncaged (21 page)

“Hey! How’d you get out of the bedroom?”

Shay called out for Emily, but Emily hadn’t returned. She walked back to the bedroom, half expecting the door to be knocked off its hinges. It was merely open, as if the dog had pushed it open just enough to let himself out.

“Weird,” she said to herself. “Guess I didn’t shut it tight.”

With the dog watching her, Shay filled another one of Emily’s pottery bowls with too much food, and freshened his water.

“All right,” she said. “You didn’t trash the place, so I’m not going to lock you up. But be good. I’ve gotta go to work.”

He watched her all the way out the door.

Shay mixed paint, washed brushes, and bagged up disposable rags that Twist used by the hundreds. “Today,” he said, “I’m going to show you how to stretch and prep canvases. There’s only one acceptable way to do this—”

“Your way,” Shay said.

“I was going to say
perfectly
, but now that I think about it, those are the same thing,” Twist said.

He showed her how to do it; it wasn’t rocket science, but like ironing the seams straight in a pair of pants, it was trickier than it looked. She spent four hours at it—in the first hour, she got ninety-five percent of it; another three percent in the next hour; one percent in the third hour; and in the fourth hour, she felt like she was going backward.

“You’re doing fine,” Twist assured her. “Stretching canvas is a pain in the ass, and I will be happy to unload it on you. Next we talk about how to apply a ground. People call it gesso, but it’s not, it’s an acrylic dispersion …”

When the morning’s work was done, she went back to the room to check on the dog. Emily was there, and they talked about Shay’s new job, and Emily said, “I’d bet my truck he’s training you to be his assistant.”

“He is not,” said Shay, embarrassed at the teacher’s-pet tone in Emily’s voice. But now she was curious. “Has he ever had one?”

Emily put a finger on one cheek, which she did when she was miming that a thought process was going on, then said, “Not for a long time. He had this one girl who left right after I got here, almost two years ago.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“She went to Harvard,” Emily said.

“Seriously?” Shay said, impressed.

“No. Sorry. I don’t know. She moved in with her boyfriend, I think. I mean, some of us do eventually check out.”

X watched them talk, but still wouldn’t take any food or water. Emily went back out the door on another mission, and Shay spent an hour trying to crack the password code. Nothing worked. She didn’t need to grind on it, she thought, she needed to
contemplate
it.

Restless, she walked out to a Starbucks and went online to Facebook, and found nothing. Where was he? Where could he be? Rachel said she would call when there was news, but could Odin even find
her
again?

Still restless but feeling that the computer wouldn’t help, she drifted back to the hotel. She didn’t want to sit alone with a sick dog, and so took the elevator back to Twist’s studio. The steel outer door to the studio was half open, classical music with a lot of anxious violins coming from the other side. Shay knocked and then pushed through.

Twist was working on one of his smaller landscapes and turned, frowning, as she walked in. “Why are you back here?”

“I owe you six hours.”

“Huh,” he said, not pleased. “One thing: work, but don’t talk. Can you do that?”

“I dunno. I could try.”

He led her to the far wall, where three huge canvases, big as billboards, had been leaning for the last week.

“We’ll be putting on three coats of gesso, the same stuff you were putting on the small canvases, with a light sanding in between,” he said. “When I say
we
, I mean
you
.”

The first two coats would be white, the last coat a steel gray. “I’ll show you how to mix that when we get there. Right now, we focus on the white stuff.”

He opened the first pail, and she found the gesso had the consistency of a runny pudding. “I like to add a little water,” he said. “Maybe a few teaspoons per quart. It’s ready when it dribbles off your spoon like cream,” he said, demonstrating. “Voilà.”

He handed her a house-painting brush and nodded at an aluminum ladder that could get someone onto a second-story roof. “You’ll need that eventually, but we start right in the middle and brush out to the sides and the top and the bottom.”

The plan was for Shay to lay the first coat on all three canvases. The next time she came, she’d give each canvas a light sanding and repeat the painting process on her own until the job was finished. “Got it? Now paint; don’t talk.”

“Can I ask you one thing?”

“Just one.”

“How’d you get them in here?”

“We made them in here,” he said. “Fifty yards of raw Belgian linen, two staple guns—one will always jam—and stretcher frames made to my exact specifications by Dum, who is good with a chop saw.”

“But how …”

“Ah-ah. Only one question. Now shut up.”

Shay said, “This isn’t a question, it’s a statement: If you don’t let me ask one more question, I’ll be mumbling all afternoon.”

Twist looked at her for a long moment, not in a funny way, then asked, “Do you ever lose?”

“No. Now, how are you going to get them out?”

He pointed at the skylight. “That opens. We lift them up there
with a block and tackle, and lower them down the side of the building. When I say
we
, I mean
other people
. Guys who move pianos.”

“Ah. No more questions. Sir.” The
sir
was as insolent as if she’d said
dumb-ass
.

With occasional monitoring from Twist, Shay started putting down the first coat on the first canvas. He gave her a few tips, then let her go, moving to a drawing table at the far end of the room. She got into the painting, into the rhythm of it, and began thinking about the whole Odin/dog problem. She didn’t see Twist step back toward her until he said, “Hey, Shay. Don’t have to work it that much. Just get it on, smooth as you can. You don’t have to force it.”

“Right,” said Shay, almost surprised to see she’d been painting at all. Freaky, how a part of the mind can run on autopilot while some other part wanders off into the past or future.

She put her focus back on her brushstrokes, left to right.

“Shay!”

Emily plowed through the studio door, her complexion drained white as the gesso. Twist was at the drawing table and looked up. Shay, working through her third can, knew it had to be about the dog.

“Problem,” Emily said, and pulled Shay in close for confidentiality, though whispering wasn’t her strong suit.

“The dog just had a seizure.”

Shay sagged. Odin hadn’t said anything about seizures. X was getting worse. “Is he all right?”

“Unclear. It lasted about a minute, then I texted Cruz to come watch him so I could come get you.”

White paint splattered on her cheeks and in her hair, Shay put down the stirring spoon and called over to Twist. “I have to quit.”

“It’s only been a couple hours.”

“So I still owe you four.”

Twist shrugged. “Go.”

They ran down the stairs, and when Shay burst into the room, she found Cruz crouched next to the dog, who was lying on his right side breathing spasmodically. “He had another one,” Cruz said.

The dog lay dazed between the beds, his long, pale tongue hanging out the left side of his wire muzzle, drool pooling on the floor.

“Ohmigod,” Shay said. “What happened?”

“Don’t know. He got up after Emily left. He started pacing, and I thought he was looking good. Then, all of a sudden, he falls on the ground and he starts, like, running, and kicking.… It was so loud, the way he was kicking his legs and banging his head, and then, just like that, he was done.”

The dog’s glassy eye had yet to focus on Shay or anything else. She bent down to him, set a gentle hand on his shoulder, and said, “Hey, buddy, are you okay?”

The dog didn’t look at her, didn’t seem aware of any of the people around him.

“We need to get him to a vet,” Cruz said.

“No,” Shay snapped.

Cruz and Emily exchanged a look. “Something’s really wrong with him,” Cruz persisted.

“I can’t do it, okay? He’s microchipped. My brother thinks the abusers he rescued him from will get him back if he’s scanned. He said vets always scan new patients, so no—”

The dog’s hind legs thumped against the floor and his head
started to twitch. Shay fell back on her hands to get out of the way as his body exploded in a new round of violence.

This time, it didn’t stop for nearly two minutes. Shay crawled back over and spoke gently to the dazed animal, and he seemed to be trying to focus on her, seemed to know that she was trying to help.

“We’ve got to do something,” Emily said. “He’s dying.”

“Stay with him,” Shay said, and sprang to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”

Shay reentered Twist’s studio, scared but determined. She walked up to him, shook a finger at him. “I broke one of your rules. You want to be a hard-ass, I’ll be out of here tonight. But right now, I need your help, and with all this political stuff you’ve had me doing, you owe me.”

Twist rubbed his nose and got a little red paint on it. “I don’t see it that way.”

“I don’t care how you see it, you’re the only one who can help me. Come down to the room.” On the way out, she grabbed a paper rag from one of the yellow boxes that dispensed them. “Stop,” she said, and wiped the acrylic paint off his nose. “It made you look like a clown.”

“Uh …”

“C’mon,” she said.

As Shay was bursting into Twist’s studio, Sync, Harmon, and Thorne were meeting at Singular headquarters four hundred miles to the north. Sync got right to it. “What does the little shit know?”

Thorne said, “He knows it ain’t about Parkinson’s. That we’re not up in Eugene building a cure.”

“Any hint where the drives are now?” Sync asked.

Harmon shook his head. “Nope.”

“Are there copies out there?”

“Don’t know yet,” Harmon said.

“Does the Remby kid know who we are?”

“Meanies,” Harmon said.

“Harmon,” Sync said sharply.

Time to pay a little lip service to rank. “Look,” Harmon said, “the kid’s a little funny in the head. Excitable. Had a meltdown when we showed him video of Thorne’s monkey roundup, and the unfortunate exterminations that had to be done on account of him
and his misguided friends. So … give him a few hours to think about it.”

Sync leaned over the desk and an artery pulsed in his cheek. A facial tic Harmon had seen any number of times in Afghanistan, and which tended to presage a loss of composure.

Sync said, “You’re pushing hard.” Not a question.

Thorne rubbed his palms together. “We’re not running a bucket yet, if that’s what you’re asking. But we could. The capability is there.”

Harmon: “I don’t think—”

Sync stood up angrily and slapped the desktop. “If we don’t get some answers soon, I’ll waterboard the kid myself.”

The tension was broken by Sync’s desk phone.

He checked the caller ID, then picked up the receiver and asked, “What?”

He listened and said, “Cut everybody else out and then put it on P54A. Okay, good. I’m gonna watch it right now. Find West, tell him to come up here.”

Sync hung up and said, “We’re looking at media outtakes from the beach where the whales were grounded. The imaging guys were pulling all the stuff out of the sky. They ran ID tags on the different faces in the crowd after they got a positive ID on the Rembys …”

“Let’s see it,” Harmon said.

Sync picked up a remote and pointed it at the curtains, and they rolled across the windows. Another click and the lights went down and a sixty-inch flat-screen lit up on the wall behind Sync’s desk.

Some symbols flickered in a corner, then a digital clockface came up and the video began and they were looking at the beach. A pale
orange circle appeared, surrounding a girl who was throwing water on a whale, and a caption came up:
SHAY REMBY
.

There wasn’t continuous coverage of the girl because the media wasn’t interested in her; she was just another body throwing water. They watched as she flicked from one passing view to the next, as the whales began to die, as a baby whale got pushed off the beach.

They watched for another five minutes, and then Sync’s secretary beeped him on the intercom. “Mr. West is here.”

“Send him in,” Sync said, and quickly to Harmon and Thorne, “He doesn’t know we still have Remby. Let’s keep it that way.”

There was a knock, and West rolled through the door in a wheelchair. Sync stopped the video and said, “We’re looking at the tapes from the beach.”

Thorne added, “That was a nice piece of work, by the way, finding the sister.”

West nodded and said, “Thanks.” He knew Thorne by sight, but not exactly what he did.

Sync turned back to the video screen and said, “Watch with us.”

They watched Shay Remby on one piece of video and then on another, in changing image sizes and orientations—sometimes the media cameras were north of her, sometimes south, sometimes looking down from the bluff above the beach.