The Chronoliths (6 page)

I had no opinion of my own. We were all whistling through the graveyard in those years, even those of us who paid attention, analyzing the Chronoliths (by date, time, size, implied conquest, and such) so that we could pretend to understand them. But I preferred not to play that game. The Chronoliths had shadowed my life since things went bad with Janice. They were emblematic of every malign and unpredictable force in the world. There were times when I was profoundly afraid of them, and as often as not I admitted that fact to myself.

Is this obsession? Annali had thought so.

I tried to sleep. Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve, etc. Sleep that kills the awkward downtime between midnight and dawn.

But I didn’t get even that. An hour before sunrise, my phone buzzed. I should have let the server pick it up. But I groped for the handset and flipped it open, afraid—as always when the phone rings late at night—that something had happened to Kait. “Hello?”

“Scott,” a coarse male voice said. “Scotty”

I thought for one panicky moment of Hitch Paley. Hitch, with whom I had not spoken since 2021. Hitch Paley, riding out of the past like a pissed-off ghost.

But it wasn’t Hitch.

It was some other ghost.

I listened to the phlegmy breathing, the compression and expansion of night air in a withered bellows. “Dad?”

“Scotty…” he said, as if he couldn’t get past the name.

“Dad, have you been drinking?” I was courteous enough to refrain from adding,
again
.

“No,” he said angrily. “No, I—ah, well, fuck it, then. This is the kind of—the kind of treatment—well, you know,
fuck
it.”

And he was gone.

I rolled out of bed.

I watched the sun come up over the agricultural coops to the east, the great corporate collective farms, our bulwark against famine. A dusting of snow had collected in the fields, sparkling white between empty cornrows.

Later I drove to Annali’s apartment, knocked on her door.

We hadn’t dated for more than a year, but we were still friendly when we met in the coffee room or the cafeteria. She took a slightly maternal interest in me these days—inquiring after my health, as if she expected something to go terribly wrong sooner or later. (Maybe that day had come, though I was still healthy as a horse.)

But she was startled when she opened the door and saw me. Startled and obviously dismayed.

She knew I’d been fired. Maybe she knew more than that.

Which was why I had come here: on the off chance that she could help make sense of what had happened.

“Scotty,” she said, “hey, you should have called first.”

“You’re busy?” She didn’t look busy. She was wearing loose culottes and a faded yellow shirt. Cleaning the kitchen, maybe.

“I’m going out in a few minutes. I’d ask you in, but I have to get dressed and all that. What are you doing here?”

She was, I realized, actually
afraid
of me—or of being seen with me.

“Scott?” She looked up and down the corridor. “Are you in trouble?”

“Why would I be in trouble, Annali?”

“Well—I heard about you being fired.”

“How long ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you known I was going to be fired?”

“You mean, was it general knowledge? No, Scott. God, that would be humiliating. No. Of course, you hear rumors—”

“What kind of rumors?”

She frowned and chewed her lip. That was a new habit. “The kind of work Campion-Miller does, they don’t need trouble with the government.”

“The fuck does that have to do with me?”

“You know, you don’t have to shout.”

“Annali—trouble with the
government
?”

“The thing I heard is that some people were asking about you. Like government people.”

“Police?”

“No—are you in trouble with the police? No, just people in suits. Maybe IRS, I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s just people talking, Scott. It could all be bullshit. Really, I don’t know why they fired you. It’s just that CM, they depend on keeping all their permits in order. All that tech stuff they ship overseas. If somebody comes in asking questions about you, it could endanger everybody.”

“Annali, I’m not a security risk.”

“I know, Scott.” She knew nothing of the sort. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Honestly, I’m sure it’s all bullshit. But I really do have to get dressed.” She began to ease the door shut. “Next time, phone me, for God’s sake!”

She lived on the second floor of a little three-story brick building in the old part of Edina. Apartment 203. I stared at the number on the door for a while. Twenty and three.

I never saw Annali Kincaid again. Occasionally I wonder what sort of life she led. How she fared during the long hard years.

I didn’t tell Janice that I had lost my job. Not that I was still trying to prove anything to Janice. To myself, maybe. To Kaitlin, almost certainly.

Not that Kait cared what I did for a living. At ten, Kait still perceived adult business as opaque and uninteresting. She knew only that I “went to work” and that I earned enough money to make me a respectable if not wealthy member of the grownup world. And that was fine. I liked that occasional reflection of myself in Kait’s eyes: Stable. Predictable. Even boring.

But not disappointing.

Certainly not dangerous.

I didn’t want Kait (or Janice or even Whit) to know I’d been fired… at least not immediately, not until I had something to add to the story. If not a happy ending, then at least a second chapter, a what-comes-next…

It came in the form of another unexpected phone call.

Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.

Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.

Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.

To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.

“Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”

We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.

Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.

He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”

“ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”

“Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.

“What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”

“You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”

“I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”

“Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”

“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”

“Well, it’s not for certain, but—you remember Sue Chopra?”

Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”

Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.

It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant surprise was that Sue had no interest in failing anyone. She had put together the course description to scare away parvenus. All she wanted with the rest of us was an interesting conversation.

So “Metaphor and Reality-Modeling in Literature and the Physical Sciences” became a kind of weekly salon, and the only requirement for a passing grade was that we demonstrate that we’d read her syllabus and that she must not be bored with what we said about it. For an easy mark all you had to do was ask Sue about her pet research topics (Calabi-Yau geometry, say, or the difference between prior and contextual forces); she would talk for twenty minutes and grade you on the plausibility of the rapt attention you displayed.

But Sue was fun to bullshit with, too, so mostly her classes were extended bull sessions. And by the end of the semester I had stopped seeing her as this six-foot-four-inch bug-eyed badly-dressed oddity and had begun to perceive the funny, fiercely intelligent woman she was.

I said, “Sue Chopra offered me a job.”

Janice turned to Whit and said, “One of the Cornell profs. Didn’t I see her name in the paper recently?”

Probably so, but that was awkward territory. “She’s part of a federally-funded research group. She has enough clout to hire help.”

“So she got in touch with
you
?”

Whit said, “That’s maybe not the kindest way to put it.”

“It’s okay, Whit. What Janice means is, what would a high-powered academic like Sulamith Chopra want with a keyboard hack like myself? It’s a fair question.”

Janice said, “And the answer is—?”

“I guess they wanted one more keyboard hack.”

“You told her you needed work?”

“Well, you know. We stay in touch.”

(I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.)

“Uh-huh,” Janice said, which was her way of telling me she knew I was lying. But she didn’t press.

“Well, that’s great, Scott,” Whit said. “These are tough times to be out of a job. So, that’s great.”

We said no more about it until the meal was finished and Whit had excused himself. Janice waited until he was out of earshot. “Something you’re not mentioning?”

Several things. I gave her one of them. “The job is in Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“Baltimore. Maryland.”

“You mean you’re moving across the country?”

“If I get the job. It’s not for sure yet.”

“But you haven’t told Kaitlin.”

“No. I haven’t told Kaitlin. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is really sudden. The question is how upset Kait will be. But I can’t answer that. No offense, but she doesn’t talk about you as much as she used to.”

“It’s not like I’ll be out of her life. We can visit.”

“Visiting isn’t parenting, Scott. Visiting is… an
uncle
thing. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s best. She and Whit are bonding pretty well.”

“Even if I’m out of town, I’m still her father.”

“Insofar as you ever were, yes, that’s true.”

“You sound angry.”

“I’m not. Just wondering whether I
should
be.”

Whit came back downstairs then, and we chatted some more, but the wind grew louder and hard snow ticked on the windows and Janice fretted out loud over the condition of the streets. So I said goodbye to Whit and Janice and waited at the door for Kait to give me her customary farewell hug.

She came into the foyer but stopped a few feet away. Her eyes were stormy and her lower lip was trembling.

“Kaity-bird?” I said.

“Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby.”

Then I figured it out. “You were listening.”

Her hearing impairment didn’t prevent her from eavesdropping. If anything, it had made her stealthier and more curious.

“Hey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re moving away. That’s all right.”

Of all the things I could have said, what I chose was: “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, Kaitlin.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, and turned and ran to her room.

Janice called me a day before I was due to leave for Baltimore and an interview with Sue Chopra. I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone—she seldom called except at our agreed-on times.

“Nothing wrong,” Janice said at once. “I just wanted to, you know, wish you luck.”

The kind of luck that would keep me out of town? But that was petty. I said, “Thanks.”

“I mean it. I’ve been thinking this over. And I wanted you to know—yes, Kaitlin’s taking it pretty hard. But she’ll come around. If she didn’t care about you, she wouldn’t be so upset.”