The Incrementalists (17 page)

Oskar closed the distance between us, glaring down into my eyes. Celeste raised my face to him. Far away, I knew everyone in the room was on their feet. “Your neurochemistry is crude sonar, nothing more,” Celeste whispered up at Oskar. “It graphs a black-and-white outline of the ocean bed. It shows you nothing of the water’s clarity or temperature, speed or salinity. Nor any information about the slippery little fish of meaning.”

Oskar stood over me and smiled the wolf’s bare-fanged smile of a clean, swift kill.

“All of those things are knowable, Celeste. You try to drown yourself in your unknowable sea, thinking nothing will disturb you in its depths. You speak of an ocean in which you’re afraid to swim. But truth is real, and it is objective, and it will find you sooner or later. You chose a poor analogy in the ocean, because I do know something of its Salt. I know you’re out of it.” He dropped my eyes and reclaimed his barstool as though newly crowned. “Celeste has been hiding,” he said to Ramon. “Ren is a viable spike. Celeste is recessive in her, and I am in the Salt.”

“That is the tradition,” Ramon noted. “If Celeste is simply lost in Ren, there can be no debate.”

“There can be all kinds of it,” Phil said, standing and coiled. “And I can promise you there will be. On every front. Of every kind. Debate is what we do. But not about this. Not now.”

Ramon put a hand on Phil’s arm, and I thought it brave of him, considering. “There must be nothing—no decision made, no judgment passed”—he said—“until we find and free the alpha-lock.”

I sat down.

“I feel like shit,” I said.

“Finish your tea,” Irina suggested.

“You people are nuts,” I observed. “And I have a headache.”

“We have asked too much of you,
ma chère,
” Jimmy said.

I finished my tea, pulled myself out of my chair, and got my bag from where I’d dropped it under the Kovacs painting by the front door. “I’m going to go lie down,” I said. “I have a couple things I need to do for work, and then I’m going to graze for Celeste. If she is hiding, I want to know where.”

I met Phil’s questioning eyes with my swimmy ones.

I walked between Oskar and Jimmy, past Irina and Ramon to take Phil’s hand and squeeze it. “I’m okay,” I said. “Take your time. But wake me when it’s over.”

I walked back through the web of unspoken questions whose answers belonged only to us, and went into Phil’s bedroom. I shut the door, undressed, and climbed into his bed.

Phil

“Phil,” said Jimmy for the second or third time, and I finally looked away from the bedroom door.

“What?”

“Are you all right?”

“No, Jimmy. I’m not all right. Any other questions?”

“What’s wrong?” said Ray.

I didn’t answer. Irina said, “I proposed stubbing Ren.”

Oskar said, “Really! You’re that afraid of me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then you don’t know Phil as well as I’d thought you did, or you’d have proposed it with him out of the room and never seeded any of it until after the fact.”

“Why?” said Ray.

“Christ, Ramon,” said Jimmy.

“What?”

“I think,” said Irina, “that we ought to at least discuss it,” and there was a little pulse at her throat, which might have been enough, but she brought her knuckle up to rub her upper lip as she spoke, so I couldn’t have missed it if I’d wanted to.

“You folks carry on without me,” I said. “I need to putter.”

I went into the kitchen and poured some lemon juice and water into a soup bowl, heated it in the microwave, then soaked a washcloth in it. I put some butter on a piece of French bread, sprinkled garlic powder on it, and heated that. I made a glass of instant iced tea. I lit the candle. I set all of these delicacies on a tray, then found “Childhood’s End” by Pink Floyd. I turned the volume down to a whisper, and set it to playing in the living room while I carried the tray in. I put the tray in front of Irina, picked up the washcloth, smiled, and ran it gently over her forehead. The conversation stopped, everyone watching me.

“What did you do to Ren?” I asked her.

Her eyes widened, and for a second she tried to fight it, but it was too sudden, and too complete. “I put concentrated benzodiazepine and opium in her tea,” she said.

“Jimmy—” I said.

“On it,” he said, and closed his eyes. A horribly, horribly long ten seconds later he opened them and said, “Flumazenil. Point two milligrams in saline over fifteen seconds to start, repeat at one-minute intervals if necessary.”

Ray stood. “We have time. I’ll graze for a pharmacy on the way and have it back here before the EMTs could figure out what to do.”

I tossed him my car keys. “Go,” I said.

He went.

Jimmy said, “Irina, leave now,” at which point I realized that Jimmy was standing between me and her.

She stood up without a word and left.

He should have told her to take her fucking flowers with her.

Ren

Phil’s bed was soft, and his room was dark, and I was miles more tired than I had been even an hour ago. I could remember Celeste’s anger in my chest, but not her words. Or even Phil’s. She had churned the whole casing of my torso and left it pulped and muddy.

I didn’t know if I could graze. I turned my cheek into Phil’s pillow to touch my temple with the back of my fingers, but my head wouldn’t turn and my hand didn’t move. I wanted Phil’s arms and our dancing. I wanted him to come to bed.

But he would be talking. With the rest of them. Always talking. And where was the little dog with the red collar to match my ghostly toes already sinking into mud? I would have called him, but my lips were numb.

And I did not know his name. He was never one of mine. They never are, my nightmutts in the garden of good and plenty. But he was black and blond, like licorice.

But where were the overlays that candy-coat this black goo? What had Phil told me to say? What does he say when he closes his eyes? I would take even his Jurassic date palm.

It had been about that long. Sad.

But my jeans were rolled up too high, like clam diggers at the beach with my dad, because the mud was touching them. We made mud angels, like the snow ones but harder to get out in the laundry, and Mom said it was disgusting. But I knew that memories should wrap me up, cocoon me, and the beach and the green bucket of clams were only words.

I lay down in it.

How deep did the mud go? What did it hide?

“Ren!”

His bark was calling out of the sky a long way above. No dogs on the sea air.

“Ren!”

My pink-and-blue dragon without her Play Family Castle, my poky puppy with his muddy paws, and the gold tags like a tiny charm on a red cord.

Silly puppy, tricks are for pigs.

“Ren, listen to me. You’re in trouble. I need you stay awake, okay?”

Big dogs tell no tails.

“Ren, stay with me. Can you open your eyes?”

My hair was in the mud. I did not like it in my ears.

“That’s good, Ren. Can you see me?”

Yes, with your sweet puppy mouth of wolf teeth.

“Stay with me.”

I said that to someone once. But the puppy left. Maybe the vulture got him in her sharp brown claws and ate him with bright red poppies and mint. But my ears were full of the mud now so it did not hurt. And heavy on my chest. Too much to breathe in. And vast and empty, circling over me, the carrion sky.

TEN

A More Reasonable Question

Phil

I held her hand while Ray administered the injection. Her hand was limp, which was bad, but warm, which was good.

“Is that enough?” I asked him.

He gave me that look professionals get when amateurs question them.

“All right,” I said. “Do we need to get her to the hospital?”

That, apparently, was a more reasonable question. “I’ll watch her. Avoiding the hospital would be better, or she’ll spend the next three years meddling just to get her life back.”

“Unless we tell them what happened. Then Irina will.”

“No, then we all will.”

Jimmy came in and handed me a glass of ice water. A little later Oskar came in, put a comforting hand on my shoulder, and left.

Ray checked her pulse, put his head on her chest to listen to her breathing or heartbeat or something, and grunted. I drank some water. You can repeat that sequence several more times.

Eventually, Ray looked up and said, “She’ll be okay. She’s just sleeping now.”

“Thanks, Ray.”

“It’s Ramon,” he said, and left me alone with Ren.

I took a breath and let it out slowly, closed my eyes and put my temple against hers. I was not, goddammit, going to cry twice in two days. One day? Three days? How long had it been since I’d walked into that café to do a typical first interview with a potential recruit? Was the WSOP over? How were the Pirates doing? Christ. Too much to handle; Fibonacci couldn’t deal with all of this, with Celeste, with Ren, with Irina, with the goddamn mud sucking at my shoes not wanting to pull me down as much as to keep me, to make me stay, one place, one goddamn fucking place just for a little while, was that so much to ask?

I’d loved Pittsburgh with her steel mills and her frame houses and theaters and restaurants in the back of people’s homes, and Vienna with her tiny winding streets like Baghdad, which they fucking bombed and was that coffee shop with the fat man who always shook his head when he laughed, was it still there, or had it been bombed we should have stopped it God help me maybe Oskar is right, but the Sahara is so fucking hot I’d promised myself never again that far from lakes and rivers and oceans and here I am in Las fucking Vegas, but where next I just wish I just wish I just wish I could stop, make it all stop, but screens filter out everything in the mud that isn’t alive, and what’s left keeps me moving, pushing, play the next hand, the next session, the next day, the next lifetime, yes life, it really does mean that much, whatever else you do to someone, the end of life is the end of hope and hope can’t can’t can’t end so pick your feet up out of the mud and wave to the living things but pass on.

You want to know what sucks? Pope Gregory VII was real. You want to know what doesn’t? So was Spartacus. And even, in a way, Robin Hood. I mean, sort of. Yes, we Incrementalists made him up, but not out of whole cloth. And we had nothing to do with the popular reaction to him. Resistance to tyranny takes many forms, and the fact that we—Incrementalists and amnemones alike—make heroes out of those who resist, says something fine about us all and is one of the things that keeps me pulling my feet out of the mud.

But what is tyranny, anyway? It’s just the result of ambition pushed a little too far. And ambition is how we all got out of the mud.

Here’s the thing, though: Small changes are just what lead to big changes. Can’t help it. That’s how nature works. Water gets a little hotter, and a little hotter, and a little hotter, and then you have steam, which is a pretty big change if you happen to be a water molecule. So even if you try to do something small, you’ll end up doing something big, and if you do something big, then people are going to get hurt. God help me, maybe Celeste is right.

Ren took my hand to pull me out of the mud, and suddenly it wasn’t holding me, but we were skating along atop it, me in my slick shoes, her in her bare feet, and we were twirling, and we were laughing, and when we fell down we got up again, still laughing. A dream created within a construct of the mind? Go ahead, interpret
that,
Sigmund. But I was good with it, because I was moving again, and I realized that I was never going to stop moving, and that would be all right if I had someone to move with me.

“Phil?” said Ren for the second or third time.

“I’m right here, my love,” I told her. My voice sounded harsh in my own ears, but her hand felt so good in mine.

“I’m glad,” she told me. “Come to bed.”

Ren

I threw up. Then I lounged for a while on the clean solid tile wearing Phil’s robe, twitching with cold and slick with sweat. Then I threw up again.

I answered Jimmy’s discreet knocking with a mumble, and he came in and started reading the bottoms of Phil’s tiny shampoo bottles. He selected one and poured its contents into a little paper cup he found on the sink. He filled the cup the rest of the way with water and handed it to me.

“Medicine,” Jimmy explained, “distilled from your previous healing and personal comfort. They take a long time to formulate, so good titans build their pharmacopoeia as they do their research, well before contact with a recruit is made.”

I nodded and drank. The water was cool and tasteless, and it lay still in my twisting stomach.

Jimmy studied the rows of little bottles. “Huh,” he said. “This must be the first time you’ve encountered something for which Phil had prepared.”

“Poisoning?” I croaked.

“Nausea.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said. He inclined his head gallantly and seated himself on the tub edge. “Did you sleep on the barstool all night?” I asked. “I saw you when I came in to puke.”

“Yes. I wasn’t sleeping.”

“But you knew I’d want the first few minutes on my own?”

He nodded.

“Why’d you stay?” I asked him.

“It was the only way Phil would sleep.”

I pulled his robe closer around me to feel wrapped in his body. “It’s lonely being poisoned,” I said. “I needed him. Thank you.”

“It was nothing.”

“Why else did you stay?”

His bleary eyes focused. He shrugged. “To persuade him to, if the comforts of his bed were not enough to keep him here.”

I waited.

“Ramon argued against any further delay. To him, lifetimes out of tribe, rage, loyalty, and revenge are trivial compared to the alpha-lock. He suggested we make peace with Irina. Matsu is on his way.”

“It was Irina?”

“She spiked your tea.”

I used a bad word.

Jimmy smiled without humor. “Phil said much the same.”

I sang, “So why’d you put that poison in my tea?”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Flash Girls song. I’m going to throw up,” I said.