Heathern Read online

  "He doesn't seem to be a very sentimental person otherwise," said Lester.

  "He is. And everybody had heroes."

  "Does Bernard enjoy what he does?"

  "It's grown on him," I said. "He's a natural at advertising. He started in product development but couldn't stand the sight of blood."

  "Thatcher trusts him?"

  "More than anyone except Susie, I think."

  "What sort of relationship does Gus have with Jake?" he asked, after a minute or so more. "Besides that of a teacher?"

  "Nothing abnormal," I said. "Avi once told me Gus wanted to get married and have a son. I asked him how he knew, and he said he could tell from Gus's handwriting."

  "Did you want to get married?" he asked me.

  "Once," I said. "Nobody wanted to go all the way."

  Some did, truly, but that would have ruined it; I could never allow the men I'd loved the most to become my lovers. Genuine friendship between men and women was such a rare thing that to admit sex into such relations was unfailingly destructive, as if you were to carve your initials into a pearl.

  "Lester-"

  "Did you want to have a baby?"

  "Not until I had him."

  "Abortion's not illegal if you make enough money," he said, embracing me as if assuring that one of us would not abandon the other before the time was right. "We both know that. Why didn't you-"

  "Thatcher's pro-life."

  After Lester left I fell asleep and dreamed I saw his family's house. The ruin stood as desolate as an old English church, yet it couldn't have antedated America's Civil War; its stones could never have known the touch of a slave's hand. Attached to the chimney's outer wall was a bloody diadem, a rusted basketball hoop. Opening the front door I tiptoed in as if entering a nursery. No rags of memory clothed the room's nakedness; his house's amnesia was as profound as mine. I saw Lester standing in the kitchen. The pantry door was off its hinges and the room beyond appeared only recently unsealed. In the center of the far wall's fairness an aureola of punctures ringed an abyss blown into the plaster: an inoculation scar, the mark of an angel's bite, Saturn gathering his children around him.

  -What happened to your family? I heard myself ask.

  -Misunderstandings, his image said.

  SEVEN

  Susie left the next morning for the Westchester estate, departing ahead of the others that she might oversee Thanksgiving preparations. Her personality's buds took full bloom, removed from Thatcher's shadow; Avi had heard that the year before two members of the kitchen staff killed themselves within a day of her arrival. Sitting in Bernard's office the next morning, waiting for Thatcher, I thumbed through the pages of her newspaper, seeing signs that the season was upon us. In Ohio a woman found her herald of the new millennium emblazoned in mold on the wall of her garage; analysts agreed that the stars proclaimed that stores remaining open would show profits this year; devil-worshiping cults were to be soon exposed in the north of England. There'd been a murder in St. Patrick's Cathedral: while confessing a venial sin, the confessant was overcome by the need to com mit a mortal one, and so kicked his priest to death in the stall.

  "Isn't Thatcher overreaching himself?" Bernard mumbled. Before I could answer, he responded, "No. Not this time," and I realized he was only voicing some mental catechism as he dallied over his paperwork. "What can he do to the Japanese except turn people against them?"

  I threw the paper aside, having seen inspiration enough within to last a lifetime. Deciding to dawdle additional time away under the guise of work, I pulled a thick folder marked Otsuka from Bernard's outbox. Within were snapshots of the man taken years before, photos that by their angles suggested he had no notion that they were being taken. Pages of statistics referred to his businesses, his buyouts, his mergers and steals. I came upon some of his poems within, one of which had its lyric transcribed from Japanese into English.

  "It reads like a transcript," Lester commented, studying the page from over my shoulder.

  "No petals on wet black boughs for our allies," said Bernard, distracting himself from his unsolvables long enough to annotate. "He's fond of using found material in his constructs. Even in Japan he's quite askew from the norm."

  "He seems almost interesting," I said.

  "Thatcher would seem interesting, seen from Mars," said Bernard. "Otsuka's older, that's all, and he's had more time to elaborate upon himself. His followers worship him for having stayed alive against all odds." We might as well not have been in the room; Bernard was again transfixed by his desktop screen's fluttering green auroras. "Try not to evidence untoward fascination, Joanna, they've distractions enough."

  "We're no longer involved, Bernard."

  "You'll be involved, long as you work for him. I did forget we're playing minister and the choir girl for the nonce, however. Keep an eye on both of them, that's my suggestion. Prepare to duck."

  "You're as paranoid as they are."

  "With reason," he said. "Make sure the agreement gets signed. Progress on this computer is essentialed."

  "Which computer?" Lester asked.

  "You take an interest in technology? I'd imagine you'd think it superfluous," Bernard said. "As we apparently keep no secrets from you at present, I suppose I can detail a bit. Thatcher requires that a new super-super oversee company operations by the end of the decade; preferably next week. Without Japanese assistance it won't be done. Our team goes into conniptions working with fifth generation models. The masters from the east play with number sevens to unwind after drinking all night. Thatcher's logic is such that he believes if we combine the groups we'll shortly produce a number twelve, or what in theory is called, I believe, the Algorithmic Logistical Interactive whatchamacallit hoozis. How the language suffers at the tongues of these buffoons."

  "A talking computer, I suppose," said Lester. "How'11 it sound?"

  "Mellifluous. Speaking only Latin for safety's sake, I'm tempted to say. It'll be a thinking computer, in theory. Independent thought. If it works as they believe it will, then no one will ever need God again." Bernard forever pretended to recognize his social faux pas a beat too late. "Oh, Macaffrey, obsolescence hits everyone in time."

  "This is what Thatcher wants now?" I asked. "Every time I hear it he's added a little more."

  "It's junior's backup, under any circumstance. A wise move, certainly. Where is Thatcher, anyway? Why isn't he down here yet?"

  "He said he needed to brief the guards."

  Bernard stared into his screen as if attempting to divine the future from entrails. "Stuff something in his mouth if and when he starts adlibbing."

  Thatcher stuck his head through the doorway, giving us an impression of delight. "How's everybody this morning?" he asked, barreling in, clapping his hand on Lester's shoulder as if testing its friability. "What's the holdup? Can't sit around here all day."

  "We can't?" said Bernard, harvesting folders from the fields of his desk. "Peruse the background material, Thatcher. You've seen the agreement you're signing, haven't you?"

  "I'll wing it."

  Our three guards trailed him into the office, each garbed in identical black suits with double-breasted jackets and baggy trousers, in toto resembling the fourth-string dance line at a deb ball. Jake scratched his nose, taking care not to remove any part of it with his still-attached scalpel. Avi, seeing Lester, allowed his eyes to lose their focus until they appeared to sink within his head. Gus's look held so little life I thought he might have had a dentist sever his facial nerves, so he would never again have to worry about giving anything away.

  "Never felt so up," said Thatcher. "Had a hell of an appetite this morning. I could've et a dog-"

  "Otsuka's not Korean, Thatcher," said Bernard. "Make do with sashimi. Go there, talk, sign, and leave. Simple?"

  "It's handleable. Take care of Lester while we're away. Start pushing on that new info."

  "Everything's under control," Bernard said. "What isn't, will be. Come back with the agreement signed--<
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  "Or don't come back?" Thatcher asked, laughing. "Don't come in your pants about it, hell-"

  Bernard's blush was so intense that for an instant he could have passed as Susie's brother. "Some people are more useful alive, Thatcher. Remember that."

  "We'll see how the jury calls it," he answered.

  I never worried about Lester's safety when he left my house at night; in daylight, at Dryco, there seemed so much more to fear. He'd be with me that night, I knew all the same. As our quintet departed, Gus radioed the lobby before boarding the elevator, that multitudes might be warned.

  "Dryden party descending. Please prepare."

  Thatcher almost bounded off the elevator walls as we dropped to earth, in the cab's dim light appearing to toss off sparks. "They got the wounds," he said, chuckling. "I got the salt." Peering into the lenses affixed to the corners of the elevator's ceiling, he made faces, picked his teeth, slammed his fists against his enclosure. If I hadn't known he never touched the product, I could have only imagined that he'd done a snootful before allowing his feet to touch the floor that morning.

  Jake dashed into the lobby as we landed, investigating all surrounding, sheer performance of his job sending him into paroxysms of mindless ecstasy not unlike Thatcher's. Our route to the exit transversed the breadth of the building's lobby and then the width of the outdoor plaza. Innumerable times Gus warned Thatcher that his chosen path was forever insecurable; hearing such truth only assured Thatcher that he should pass no other way. Gus snapped his fingers; lobby guards drew around us, shouldering guns and clutching long batons in their knobby hands. Once we exited, the guards formed two long unbroken lines, forcing hundreds of late-morning passersby into pedlock while we ambled to our car.

  "Jake," Thatcher shouted ahead. "That guy. Watch him."

  A man wearing a suit cut to appear as expensive as Thatcher's attempted to crash the line, refusing to break his stride for those either of heaven or of earth. As our barricade pushed him away he lost all reason, slinging his attache case to the sidewalk, aiming curses at anyone near. When Jake approached he stepped forward again, leaning in between members of the line.

  "Queer bastard!" he yelled, his tight collar buried beneath his billowing jowls. Spinning en pointe, Jake flung out his hand as if miming, for younger children, the sway of an elephant's trunk. The man tumbled onto the sidewalk. Thatcher, edging by, threw himself into the car; sinking into the back seat's leather, he breathed deep of the Siberian air within.

  "Good to get out among the folks," he murmured. Gus sat next to the driver; Jake and Avi perched in the jumpseats facing us.

  "Where are we meeting Otsuka?" I asked. Such details went unrelayed while they might be overheard and put to evil purpose.

  "Midtown," said Thatcher, folding his arms before him. From the side of his mouth he spoke into the intercom. "How long till we get there, Gus?" Inches of lucite and steel separated our compartment from the rest of the car; Thatcher enjoyed pointing out that were we to be bombed, some of us could survive.

  "Twenty minutes," said Gus, his voice crackling around us as it broke through the fuzz. "Depending on traffic."

  Jake gripped the edge of the seat with his unapplianced hand so as to avoid being jostled to the floor as the car lurched across potholes, swinging north onto Broadway. Once the avenue ran one-way downtown from Columbus Circle; Thatcher, surely for no reason other than to show that he could have it done, decreed that its traffic should race salmon-like upstream.

  "What a wonderful world," he said, sighing, seeming so overcome by its beauty as to lose every remnant of worry and care. A riot was underway at the Federal Building, several blocks north of City Hall. Police restrained leashed Alsatians and faced a crowd of black citizens: front-line protesters wore knee-length coats; demonstrators in the rear carried signs, and clubs of impromptu design. GREENASSES OUT OF HARLEM, many of their placards read. Some of the others, ones hoisted by immigrants or the supporters of immigrants, demanded FREE BROOKLYN NOW. As we glided uptown, unbothered so long as we kept to our isolated center lane, the protesters moved in: those in the front pulled cats from beneath their coats and threw them onto the dogs; the others surged ahead, swinging.

  "Can't depend on cops to do shit these days," said Thatcher, watching as if he was interested. "No excuse for it. Complain, complain, nothing those people've done for fifty years but complain-"

  "It's their only right, Mister Dryden." Avi never feared putting his beliefs into words, knowing that no one who spoke freely could be harmed so long as words were flung forth without matching action.

  "They got the right to work with what they're given," Thatcher said, concluding, "Hell. Didn't l?"

  We bore north; Army vehicles headed south to balm the suffering they found. The turret of the lead tank swung right and fired at a News4 van parked close to the disturbance, bringing forth a yellow blossom that shot hot metal spores into the surrounding crowd. As our car rocked with the concussion I turned to look behind us; soldiers welled up from the skin of the tanks, raising their rifles, firing into the people blocks before the disturbance proper.

  "Your news station, Mister Dryden," Avi pointed out.

  "My Army," he said. "Joanna, you get a chance to look over the agreement?" I nodded. "You read the particulars? See anything funny?"

  "Not at all."

  With Thatcher's blessing the Army was at work farther north, constructing a concrete wall from river to river down the center of Fourteenth Street. They intended that each Manhattan neighborhood would thereby be better secured from agitators drifting in from other neighborhoods to assault the productive; to live thus would be no different from living in heaven, in a sense, where the quieting awareness of existing eternally beneath unblinking eyes was never forgotten.

  "You think this will take long?"

  "No," said Thatcher.

  Throughout the twenties and thirties clusters of people bundled rags lay sleeping against the locked doors of vacant buildings; knowing a moment's peace, aware that few cared enough to harass them.

  "Why do you hate the Japanese so, Mister Dryden?" Avi asked.

  "What'd you say?" Words do stick, sometimes, if hurled at the proper moment. Thatcher was silent for a minute or two trying perhaps to rationalize an explication of beliefs never before challenged. "I'm sorry, I heard you. Let me try to explain," he said. "Two men want the same woman. She pretends to be indifferent to both of them. Till one comes out ahead she's not going to let on how she feels about the one who's winning. Might not matter to her which one wins." He sat forward in his seat, newly intent on his metaphor. "Does to them. Maybe they're old friends. Maybe they hate each other. Could be that if they hadn't fallen into the situation they'd never have given a good goddamn what happened to the other one. Give it time. Soon enough they'll do anything to get the advantage. Anything. People'll do anything if they want something bad enough, period. I don't have anything against the Japanese. But they're there. They want my woman."

  "What if the woman's indifference is genuine?" I asked.

  "The fight takes on its own life," he said. "After a while she might as well not even be there. Love or business, politics or war, same difference in any situation. Sooner or later you'll be doing stuff you'll find painful to remember, later on. Stuff you won't want to tell your kids about. Do things you don't believe you're doing even as you're doing 'em. It's in the nature of the beast to do 'em just the same."

  I could conjure in my mind an image of what West Fifty-sixth surely had been like when I was a child. Brick apartments, fifteen or twenty stories high, would have stood at the avenues; along the byway proper old brownstones, converted livery stables, perhaps one or two small lofts would have covered the lots. Cheap restaurants and clubs would have frayed awnings extending to the curbsides. The shopkeepers of the street would know you as a customer as they'd known your mother; as they believed, and you believed, they'd know your daughter.

  Otsuka's building, one of those architectural ma
rvels that appear so sublime, alone upon the draftsperson's cold screen, took up almost the entire south side of the block. The tower, outlined with aqua neon, rose to unguessable heights; the upper floors were cantilevered over the lower, and so the street knew daylight for so brief a time at every noon that were the city to be abandoned, grass would have never sprouted between the cracks in the pavement. The atrium within was as tall as the building enclosing it; the empty elevators were as transparent bullets fired through long glass guns.

  "He's the only one has an office in here," Thatcher said, eyeing the lobby guards within. "Check them out."

  Gus identified our group; the guards directed us to enter the center tube, their voices carrying heavy accents. As they spoke among themselves they used a melodious Caribbean patois. Stepping into the elevator I saw that its floor was as clear as its sides. Gus stared at the ceiling, at the cables along the sides; I'd never realized that he was scared of heights. "I don't remember the Japs being real big on affirmative action," Thatcher said.

  Upon leaving the elevator we emerged in Otsuka's reception foyer. The spoor of our own floor's decorators was present wherever we looked: there were curved charcoalcolored sofas, dusty rubber plants overgrowing their ceramic pots, nubby walls with the feel of a three-day beard. The seats of the sofas were cunningly tilted, so that those who waited could not linger long without sliding off. An HD monitor listed incoming figures from the Asian exchanges. The receptionist, a willow-thin Japanese woman, stood and bowed, something about her smile suggesting more of surgery than of training. When she spoke, her voice came from a place other than her mouth.

  "Mister Otsuka expects you, Mister Dryden."

  Taking a ballpoint from his pocket, he flipped it toward her; the pen flew through her image, bouncing off the wall behind. In the ceiling we discovered the lens that produced her hologram.