Craving (29 page)

“Do you want to end up like
her,
” he insisted, “torturing the truth out of people as if it mattered?”

“Well . . .”

“Then just chill!”

Stunned, I sat back and looked away. Suddenly, I didn’t like Jinx so much. He reminded me of my first grade teacher and her quest to make me stop dotting my “i’s” with stars. Disgruntled and more than a little betrayed, I got up and snatched his coffee cup from the table. Before he could say anything, I had finished it and replaced it.

“You first!” I turned to walk away, but his gloved hand shot out and took hold of my unblemished wrist. When I looked back, I found him staring at the open window of the bindery in hesitation.

“Wait.” He heaved a sigh and stood up. “You’re right. If he didn’t want you to know, he’d never have left you with me. I’m shit for secrets. Not as if I wanted to keep them. They fall into my brain just before people’s better judgment intervenes.”

“And you can’t keep them because your mouth runs faster th—”

He rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Lily, I feel better already.”

I looked at his hand, still holding my wrist, and then back to his worried eyes. “You gonna do something, or just hold my hand, kid?”

He twitched in place like a child doing the potty dance. “Shit!” he hissed and without any further commentary tugged me toward the front door. The bell rang above our heads as he cursed at me in a stream of expletives the likes of which I’d never heard. At the curb, he halted and rounded on me, gesticulating wildly. “He’s gonna know! I mean, it’s not like we’re anything more than allies, but fucking cockmongers, Lily, I want to
stay
allies!”

I blinked at him, taken aback. “Jinx, are you . . .?”

“No!” the boy denied with a huff. “Arthur’s the nicest person ever. He’d never do anything to me.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

He waved me silent. “There are some things you can’t learn by listening, some things you have to figure out on your own. That’s just the way it is!”

I nodded, willing to allow him whatever freedom he needed to make amends with the idea of defying Arthur’s plans for me.

He was battering my face with glances, beginning phrases that he cast aside, moving his hands as if there was something he wanted to explain, but by the very attempt, would fail to express. Finally, he dropped his arms and stood looking at me.

“Fuck it,” he grumbled. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” He tossed a wave at a lime green and black motorcycle parked in the loading zone that looked
very
fast.

“Nice ride. Is it a Ninja?”

He smiled, but it was clear he was still upset. “Put this on.” He threw me a helmet so sleek it almost looked like a giant Magic Eight Ball.

I shook it.
Am I going to die in a fiery crash?

“No,” he muttered as he straddled the seat. “I’ve had a motorcycle since 1956. The crash wasn’t my fault.”

Three weeks ago, I’d been standing in my living room, divorce papers in hand, looking around at my house and hating it for its stability, lamenting that I had never gone on some grand adventure. Now I was riding on motorcycles with immortal hackers and uncovering age-old conspiracies. Shaking my head, I sat behind him, wrapped my arms around his tiny waist, and squeezed.

“Can’t we take my car?”

With a lurch, we sped away from the curb and down the street. The cool, early morning air felt good to my skin. I’d been cooped up for days in a heightened state of stress, and it felt freeing to fly through the city, a hair’s breadth away from danger.

I expected him to drive us out to the older buildings, to a warehouse like Ursula’s hovel by the meat packing plant, or to an abandoned building that he and some squatting friends had tagged up with neon, but he made for the heart of the residential district. The farther we got from the river, the nicer the houses seemed, until we found a golf course and a mansionette surrounded by a gate.

The iron grating rolled open as we neared and tiny black security cameras followed our progress. The long circular drive was full of motorbikes of varying ages, some antiques in mint condition. He stopped in front of the large wooden door, and the bike coughed politely into silence.

“So, this is my crib.”

I took off the helmet. “Isn’t this . . .?”

“Gouache and so not me? I didn’t want to build here, but it was the only area with a new power grid. A total necessity.”

I looked at the palatial, Spanish architecture and chuckled. “I expected modern, glass, and at least one life-sized replica of C3PO.”

He blinked at me in shock. “Since when do you have geek cred?”

“I know, right? I keep it in my utility belt.”

“And I keep the life-sized
R2D2
in my study.” He snickered, leading the way inside. “It’s a kickass trashcan.”

We passed into the circular foyer, wrapped around by the large spiral staircase. At the very next doorway, the entire house changed. The common areas were filled with memorabilia, posters, and as he had claimed, action figures. From varying eras and canons, his collection lined walls and sat in mounted shadow boxes. It was like a science fiction museum, cooled down to mandatory temperatures and lit with funneled natural daylight from above.

I looked around, impressed. Jinx knew how to invest and indulge his every
trishna
. It was the exact opposite of Arthur’s monastic existence. Something in me went all maternal and shook its head at him in adoration.

“How old are you again?”

He narrowed his eyes and put on his headphones. “Shut it.”

“No, don’t get me wrong, it’s really . . .” I followed him through the living room that was really a home theater with a giant projector screen. “Amazing.”

Jinx looked over his shoulder at me in disbelief. “Yeah, right, and you’re just dying to move in with me.”

“Do you have friends over often? Lots of D and D . . .”

“Kiss my ass.”

The beanbag was sitting on the floor beside the coffee table, smiling up at me in what seemed like contentment.

You fit right in.

We walked through a darkened doorway and into what must have been a den. It was noticeably colder than the rest of the home and surrounded with free-floating glass shelves wide enough to house all of his electronics. The walls painted black with what seemed to be chalkboard paint, a shelving unit with innumerable CD cases, and the multicolored wires and cables stuck in bundles beneath the desks were all perfect accents.

“I don’t know, I could see myself here, but my room would have to be a little more . . .”

“Why do people always use the word Zen to describe décor?” he grumbled. He collapsed into a rolling chair designed to look like the captain’s chair from the Enterprise and slid across the stone floor to a bank of monitors. The computer from Arthur’s sat on the floor, and while he reabsorbed it into his setup, I stood watching him. “A truly
Zen
house would be a dirt floor and a bohdi tree to sit under.”

“Ha! I think they’re talking about the Shinto-inspired rock—”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything Zen?”

“Composure confining nature without breaking it or something like—”

“Yeah, but…” He sat up and flipped several switches, and the machine hummed back to life aside its fellows. “Why limit, why edit your existence? What’s the point of living forever if you can’t immerse yourself in life?”

“True, but your bedroom is a place to . . .”

He looked up at me sardonically. “I don’t sleep.”

I sat down on a cubical ottoman positioned right next to the robot trashcan. “Okay, yeah. I just thought that all of you enlightened . . .”

He was already scowling and held out his gloved hands. “Okay, let’s just get this straight. I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a mathematician. Yes our memeplexes overlap, but we’re not the same. We’re totally different species. And secondly, there’s no such thing as
enlightenment
, it’s a myth.”

I opened my mouth.

He smeared his face and spun away to turn on his vast array of monitors. “Wow, you’re ignorant.”

“Gee thanks, Jinx, I feel—”

“Do you know anything about oncology?”

“You—”

“So when a cell mutates, and then divides, the cell it creates will be mutated. Then that cell will make mutants and so on. Tumorgenesis is a domino effect of one mutation leading to further mutations until the cells have no utility whatsoever. Metastasis is when that mutation spreads, so that it’s possible for you to have liver cancer in your lungs, or anywhere in your body.”

I frowned and folded my hands in my lap. “What does that have to do with . . .”

“That’s how it happens.”

I looked at his face, suddenly the very picture of maturity, despite its odd framing of blue and the shiny smattering of metal studs.

“There’s the source and then there’s the mutations that come from it, because no matter how hard we try, we can’t keep the ideas from changing.” He perched on his captain’s chair and stared into space. “It’s because they’re all different. No one thinks the same, no matter how similar. That’s the curse; a good idea is only good for the person who thought it first; for everyone else, it’s a knockoff.”

I almost felt as if I should whisper, the air was suddenly so tense. The computers droned, the air vibrated, and in that audible silence, my nervousness grew.

“So . . .”

His little chin rested on his knees and his eyes slid to me. “I feel sorry for them, in a way.”

I managed to look curious.

“The Arhat.”

“Why?”

He opened whatever program he was using to decode Eva’s books. The text yielded by the first set of modulus coordinates glowed on one of the flat screens. With a few quick taps, he set it to work picking out the sense from the noise. “They just don’t get it.”

“I wish I got it,” I mumbled. “I have no idea why Arthur’s protecting me. You all don’t seem too bad off, so what’s up?”

He looked serious. “If I tell you what I know, you won’t be much better off. In fact, you may be worse.”

I raised my eyebrow comically as if to tell him that I was already quite sure of that fact. “Just tell me what it means to be infected?” I thought of the flaky scrolls in their hermetically sealed room. “Why would they let her read the Sutras if they knew she’d—”

“That’s obvious,” Jinx muttered. “I get it, why don’t you?”

I glared in his general direction, intending to swear at him in exasperation. “Arthur—”

“Doesn’t tell me anything,” Jinx explained, still working over Eva’s documents. “What I know, I’ve figured out while doing odd jobs for him or researching for myself. He’s as much a mystery to me as he is to you.”

My mouth fell open, but not in any unspoken phrase. I just stared at him in wonder. “But . . .”

“I said we were allies, but I didn’t say we told each other everything. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. I do my thing, he does his, and sometimes those two overlap, because I agree with what he’s doing. I mean, it isn’t every day you meet someone who distrusts even their own kind.”

“Then . . .”

His finger stabbed the keyboard as if to shut me up. “Five years ago, I was on my way south. I stopped in the coffee shop and there he was. I’ve been helping him off and on ever since.”

“Why were you . . .?”

His eyes narrowed. “I had another thing I was doing.”

“Thing?”

“I was heading toward a coven in . . .”

I snorted. “Coven? So what, now we’re all Anne Rice fans or . . .?”

“Hey, that’s what they call
themselves
; they’re not Arhat, so whatever. They wanna be posers, it’s they’re business. I just hook them up with networks and shit. Do their webpages.”

My snort evolved into chuckling that I tried to keep hidden. “You’re the vampiric tech support department?”

“Fuck off.” He glowered at the screen as if determined not to speak, but failed miserably. “I have skills. I’m unique.”

“I’ll say.”

“I’m infamous. I’ve got a rep.”

I refused to say what he knew I was going to. “So how many memeplex, um, immortality cancer thingies . . .?”

“There’s only a few.” He began scrolling through her list of coordinates, as if trying to plan out how he’d attack her problem, jotting notes on a mechanical pad that scrawled onto the monitor at my right with whatever color he decided to use. “The Sangha are the largest, by far, but there are even a few smaller groups of Arhat, which is why we draw a distinction.”

Amazed, I leaned even farther forward. “How many math-based?”

“We’re all self-infected. There’s this other guy in Germany. Two dudes who travel around Asia. Probably a few more, but who can say? We’re kind of solitary, asocial. Closest we get to a Sangha or coven is a comic book convention.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“France.”

“Like the Coneheads’ France or . . .”

“I have blue hair because I like the way it complements my skin,” he grumbled. “I’m not an alien.”

“Have you”—I hesitated and tried to come up with better verbiage—“
infected
anyone?”

He looked up at me, insulted. “Um, no. Duh.”

“But you know each other when you meet?” I tucked my arms and legs up into a ball and peeked over my elbows at him. “Is it like the Highlander sense?”

He glanced at me skeptically, but it was obvious he wanted to laugh. “You’re a closet nerd, right? The chick who dates the popular guy, but in the right company is always the first one to admit she Tivos anything starring Rutger Hauer?”

I giggled. “I just liked the story. It was romantic.”

He shook his head as if trying to dislodge his growing smile. “I bet, immortal man falls in love with woman, continues to love her after her death, is haunted by her memory, all set to the dulcet tones of Freddy Mercury. Who wouldn’t? No wonder you’re all over him.”

“All over who?”

His childlike face smoothed into a wry askance.

“We haven’t even done anything,” I insisted like an eighth-grader.

His eyebrow ring jiggled.

“Did he say something to you?”

Jinx snorted. “You’re totally smitten. It’s
so
obvious.”