Woke Up Lonely (7 page)

“Ned Four Four Four,” she said. “Sit.”

There are men, it’s true, who like to be bossed around. Men who want to be called
bitch
and
slave
and
whore.
Typically these are men in power who just want to give it a rest. Ned knew such men. His father—his
faux
father—was such a man, though no one had known. At least not until two months ago, when he had confessed, in his sleep, to having affinities at odds with his wife’s temperament in bed, so much so that he was pleading for things of which she had never heard. What, for instance, was a hog tie?

His mother might well have let it go—a dream is but a dream—but she didn’t. Instead, she flew into such a rage that she intimated gratitude for Ned’s lineage unknown—thank God he could not inherit this sickness, this depravity!—at which point, she realized, the game was up. The truth will out: he was adopted. Ned left home with a folder of documents and letters, and a sense that the wasteland he’d come to regard as his inner life owed its provenance to strangers.

He sat. The woman produced a clipboard. “Drugs?” she said.

“No.”

“Illnesses?”

“None. My dad has hypertension, but then I guess that means nothing for me anymore since he’s not really my dad.”

She checked things off as she spoke.

“This is efficient,” he said. “Do you multitask at home? I’ve got it so I can piss, shave, and brush my teeth at the same time. Assuming you’re man enough to sit on the toilet, it’s no problem.”

“You’re very talented,” she said, and she seemed to lean forward, though perhaps it was just the illusion produced by her nose and jaw, as though these features wanted off her face and were just waiting for the chance.

He checked his watch. Seven minutes to go. He said, “What’s your name?” and looked at his date card. Because, in a way, this bossy little woman was hot. Twenty years older than him, but hot. Go figure.

“My name is Lynne.”

He leaned forward, wanting to whisper something about the security detail, only as he moved in, so did they. One got his forearm between Ned and Lynne so fast it came down like a tollgate. The arm appeared to say: Sit back. Good thing Ned had powers of deduction, since the man also appeared incapable of speech. He was so much brick, there were probably bricks all up and down his throat.

The woman waved him off—“Martin, enough”—and the Brick went back to his corner.

Ned retracted. Pulled out his chair. “This is getting uncomfortable,” he said. “I don’t think I’m the guy for you.”

But Lynne kept to the script. Fears? Phobias? Allergies?

“I don’t handle eggplant all that well.”

“Anything you can tell me that your basic spy wouldn’t catch within a week of surveillance?”

He had to think. He scratched his back with kitchen utensils, wore
Star Wars
costumes to relax, and sometimes talked to Kurt Vonnegut in the bathroom because the man’s photo—from a magazine—was taped to the mirror.

“No,” he said. “Probably not. Though if you had someone spying on me, it’d be for a reason, which would make me way more interesting than I am. So it’s sort of an unfair question.”

“Okay, let me ask you this: Do you ever feel like you want to do something great? Something that will make you king of the world?”

He sat back. Studied her face. Did he know this woman, too? He didn’t want to risk asking.

“I guess,” he said. “That’s why I study weather modification. I mean, if you can turn water to ice, you are powerful. You are
all
powerful. So who knows? Defy Nature in a small way and maybe you can do it in a big way.”

“And that appeals to you?”

“I’d like to be in charge of my own life, yes.”

She seemed to approve. “So you just found out you’re adopted, is that right?”

“How could you know that?” he said. “Okay, please tell me you are just really into me and did some research.”

“Is that what you’d prefer?”

“Don’t write that down! Am I safe in assuming we’ve long since ended our date? I’m going to try to be smart about this and venture you are from Interior and are, uh, interviewing me for one reason or another.”

“Don’t be silly. I just overheard what you said earlier. And anyway, here comes the bell.”

“You are weird,” he said. “That was weird.”

“Nine-minute dating is weird. Get over it.”

He watched her leave the room, security on either flank.

In the lounge were the bartender and backs. A few guys watching golf highlights. A woman saying it might be nice to watch the minority response to the State of the Union, and another saying: Bohhhring.

Ned grabbed his coat from the stand. He felt for his gloves and was reassured to find them there. Outside the window, he caught sight of one of his dates getting in a car with the security guy of brick. One date and then another, and Lynne bringing up the rear. Well, how do you like that? The silent brick thing was not supposed to work. The Helix said so. Equity theory said so—only people in receipt of a self-disclosure will respond by sharing about themselves at a companionable level of intimacy, which was code for putting out, and yet there was the Brick with half the bar in his pants. Ah, the world was a mystifying place. And being in it was not so much an exercise in humility as disjuncture.

Ned checked his watch. It was only nine. Guess he’d go home and pelt the TV with wasabi peas. Or have a drink like his boss, the Secretary, who would inherit the earth if the Capitol blew up on this night of all others. Somewhere in a safe house mandated by the doomsday caveat to the Succession Act of ’47, the Secretary was sipping Bénédictine and napping through the State of the Union like everyone else. Probably, though, Ned would go home and study the weather. Rawinsonde data from balloons one hundred thousand feet in the air; thunderstorm identification, tracking, analysis, and nowcasting info; Stüve diagrams and the CAPEs of every cloud deck within ten miles. An hour’s worth of study that would help him counter dread of the unknown with his command of the fates. He needed all the help he could get for that moment when he’d find his sister and disclose their kin. He had, after all, seen
Star Wars
a thousand times.

LUKE: I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.

LEIA: You’re
who?

He spotted Anne-Janet on her way out and ran to catch up with her. “Hey,” he said, “if you’re not doing anything right now, maybe we could have a beer or something?” Because, romance or not, it’d be nice to have a friend at work. Share your boredom, and next you know, you’re streaking the Pentagon for kicks.

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to get back to the hospital. Mother calls.”

He nodded and felt like he didn’t need the Helix to get this one right. He understood perfectly. We are put on this earth to rue the family that comes apart. Look after you and yours.

Anne-Janet took the long way back, and when she found out her mom was still asleep, she went to the lounge. Most unhappy place ever, the hospital lounge, except maybe the playground after a miscarriage. It was empty but for a coffee station and snack machine with offerings strangely antagonistic to health. Not just candy bars and chips, but the really caloric foods, like Marshmallow Fluff shortbread and maple honey buns. Honey buns in a bag. Anne-Janet bought water and a pack of gum. She sat on a couch frayed at the arms and pecked with holes. Nails burrowed into the fabric while people waited for death.

She retrieved her Helix membership card from her back pocket. She should laminate the thing and yoke it to a string around her neck, just to advertise her need. That or rip it up because, really, those people were lame, the socials were lame, and just because the energies of the lonely tended to mobilize in vigilant and constant pursuit of an end to loneliness, that did not make their aggregate any less lame.

Even so: Nine men, one match. Ned Hammerstein. She’d spent most of her first weeks at Interior trying to find out more about him. But the results were minimal. So either he was this wonderful enigma or the most boring man ever. It didn’t matter which, only that Anne-Janet liked to know in advance what she was getting into. She hated surprises. As a girl, just knowing when her father was coming took the edge off the assault. In time, she hardly cared what he did because she was prepared. On the other hand, nights he showed unexpectedly, she sobbed into the dishrag he thrust in her mouth.

She put the card away and crossed her ankles. Was about to go to her mom’s room when Nurse Lynne plunked down on the couch and said, “There you are. Been looking all over.” She seemed out of breath. And looked as if she’d applied her eyeliner in an earthquake. What kind of nurse had a hand that unsteady?

“Why? How’s my mom?”

“Down for the count. I gave her a sedative.”

“Another one?” And because Anne-Janet was a little afraid of her, she looked at Lynne’s shoes. Not the rubber clogs made famous by that fat Italian chef, but black suede pumps. “I’ve never seen a nurse wear those,” she said.

Lynne outstretched her foot. “Shift’s over. I’m on my way out. Just stopped to check on you.”

“Oh. Well, that’s nice.”

She noticed that Lynne’s calves were tremendous. Water balloons. Amazing.

Lynne scratched one with the tip of her pump. She said, “Your mom tells me you work for the Department of the Interior. What’s that like?

It sounds grand.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I mean it. I’m a nurse, what do I do all day? A man came in this morning, he weighs five hundred pounds. We had to get him from the gurney to a bed. Exciting, right? But you work for the government. You’re doing something that matters.”

Anne-Janet blushed. She had never thought of herself as a woman who did work that mattered. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s
sort of
grand. I don’t know how up you are on the divvying of responsibilities in government, but my department pretty much runs the show. I mean, the fundamentals. Land, water, energy.”

“Wow. And what’s your part?”

“Research.”

“Yeah? Do you go out into the field or whatever?”

Anne-Janet sat up with zero regard for the crossroads before a giant lie and said, “Yes. I am out there all the time. Oil production, gas lines, reservoirs, coal mines—you wouldn’t believe what would happen to these things if we didn’t step in. People need guidance. They need oversight.”

“It’s great they have you,” said Lynne.

Anne-Janet smiled. She plumed and bluffed and grinned.

“But I’ve been thinking,” said Lynne—and here her face lost that admiring ingenue quality Anne-Janet had quickly come to love—“I’ve been wondering: is it hard working for the government these days? Because of what’s happening?”

“What do you mean?” Though the fact was, even World War III would have registered but faintly on Anne-Janet’s screen. Such was the colonizing tyranny of cancer; you hardly noticed anything else.

“Oh,” Lynne said. She looked disappointed. “So you’re not involved with how to deal with the Helix? The movement’s so big, there are rumors of an Indian land-claim thing going on. Like they want to be self-sufficient. Carve up the states. I hear Thurlow Dan is a
secessionist.
”

“Uh, yeah,” Anne-Janet said, feeling the need to recoup Lynne’s respect tussle with the need to defend or conceal her patronage of the Helix—she wasn’t sure which. “We’re on top of that,” she said. But also: Carve up the states? What? There were rumors, yes, but they were stupid conservative rumors. The Helix wasn’t militant. It was about reconciliation, and, in Anne-Janet’s exercise of the fundamental option of faith, it was about consigning the pitch of your heart to God and letting him restore what being human fractures to bits every day. So, in fact, the Helix was about the opposite of secession. And Thurlow Dan? He started the thing. Had devoted his life to bringing unity where there was strife. Who knew what this nurse was on about. She was an idiot.

“Aha,” Lynne said. “So you’re not interested?” She inched forward with a disregard for personal space that gave Anne-Janet the creeps. Already Anne-Janet had retreated to the edge of the last cushion; any farther and she’d fall off.

“No, I am. I’m interested.”

Lynne was squared before her; their knees touched. “What do you really know about the Helix?”

Anne-Janet frowned. “Is there any chance you’re talking DNA because we’re in a hospital and my mother broke her hip and maybe I am next because osteoporosis is genetic?”

“No.”

“Okay then. As far as I know, the Helix has a pretty comprehensive website. Lots of info. Events, literature, stuff like that. In its name, people get together to talk and share about their lives. Make new friends. You know.”

“Yes, fine, but I mean—oh, never mind. Why am I even asking you.” Lynne pulled back a good two feet.

Anne-Janet took offense. It was bad being crowded in but worse to repel the crowd once it had started. She thought hard.
Did
she know anything about the Helix that departed from what anyone else knew? Some nights the only info she got on just what Interior did was from collecting strips of paper from the shredder bins on the Hill and recreating the original sheets. Her mother would say, “Oh, honey, go out, get a boyfriend,” and she’d say, “I am dating the shredder.” Last week, she’d pieced together a memo, which she’d forgotten about until now, that did say something about Dan and his people in Cincinnati. Was this what Lynne was talking about? Her mother’s nurse, Lynne?

She said, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. There
is
something afoot with the Helix. I think it’s at the Defense Department, but I can’t talk to you about that. I don’t even know how you’d get that kind of information. I guess people talk. Loose lips. No respect for confidentiality.”

She said this and felt indignant and then bolstered, equally by the idea of herself risen above the leaking crowd as by Lynne’s face, which had reinterested itself in her life.

“
Do
they talk?” Lynne said, sitting up. “Like, everyone, or just a few people?” Her tone was a little aggressive. Again she leaned.