Whatever Lola Wants (4 page)

She made light. “Well, look, I'm sorry. Specially since I won't be back tonight.”

“Oh?”

“I told you. Helen's party. Her number's there if you need me.”

“Under what?”

Sarah sighed, and told him.

“Well, I can't remember all your friends' names.”

She waited. “There's fish frozen.”

“I'll probably eat out.”

“Get somebody to join you.” Someone female preferably. But Driscoll no longer knew how to make himself appealing, and least to women. “Somebody to talk to.”

“I'll see.”

He wouldn't. He spent his time with people who could help him advance. Except, at the Boston office, he was already number one. “I'll be home tomorrow night. If the roads are passable.”

“Here it's freezing rain right now. Wish I was in Washington. See you tomorrow.”

“Okay. Bye.” She waited for his click and set the phone down. She stared out at the swirling snow. So? Nothing had changed. She'd told him a week ago she planned to spend the night at Helen's, repeated it this morning. A storm was raging out there, she couldn't get home safely even if she wanted to. Dammit, nothing would undermine her evening. And night.

She put on jacket, toque, mitts, and went out to the storage shed. The wind blew sharp shards against her face. Snow, inches deep already. The radio had said a foot was coming, maybe fifteen inches. Back inside she divided up four sacks full of ant goodies, confirmed the modulated thermostat settings, checked the lamps to guarantee late winter daylight for her babes, and set the backup generator.

She drove carefully to Nate's place, a log house. Over a dozen years he'd added on, first a wing, then a garage, then a rear deck, then he covered and insulated it, then closed in the garage and made it winter-proof. Three summers ago a second story went up over the central house and garage. In each room, his collections. In the wing, butterflies. In the one-time rear deck, beetles. An earthworm farm in the garage. Upstairs, his research records and a bedroom. A wife had moved out when the garage insulation arrived.

Sarah now kept some clothes here, including her purple silk dress—a birthday present from Nate back in August, a sunny afternoon, a striking match to her gray-green eyes. She'd put it on for him, felt her belly glow, wore it for the half hour before they made love. This evening after they made love, though it was a summer dress, she put it on for the party. And her long down coat over.

Nate's car crept forward, four inches already and mounds of drift. The party began slowly, not till nine did everyone arrive. At nine-thirty Helen, with partner Dan at her side, raised her glass. Dan clinked it with a fork. The room grew silent.

“We have some announcements,” Dan said.

“We have some news,” Helen said.

They looked at each other, nodded, turned to their guests. “We're pregnant!”

Delight, cheers, ribald comments, congratulations. These two, Dan and Helen, had been trying to have a child for four years. Due mid-October. Yes, all was well, just a little nausea.

Nate put his arm about Sarah's waist. She drew in to his chest, rested her head against his neck.

Again Dan's fork pinged the glass. “Quiet, quiet. So the kid's birth present will be—” A pause: “A married mother and father!”

“You're all invited,” said Helen.

More cheers, mocking boos, back-slapping, kisses. Champagne appeared. Bad jokes, like those driving the farthest needing the most booze to keep warm.

Sarah and Nate left. For our own celebration, Sarah thought. Their secret, more open all the time. More visible, less outlaw. The wind howled. Inside the warm car, in the down coat, in her silk dress, she shivered. Would she like to be pregnant? Not tonight, she'd taken care of that. Here was Nate, warm beside her, soon warmer inside her. What more could she want?

She woke at quarter to six, the windows laced with ice. Helen, Dan, a baby. When Driscoll might have wanted a baby, she'd been miles from ready. After a couple of years she started thinking, Maybe yes. But then Driscoll said, Not yet. No, never a child with Driscoll now. With Nate?

She got up just after six-thirty, Nate heavy with sleep. Just as well, she wasn't ready for sex again just yet. She showered, got coffee going, watched the news. Locally the storm was the big story, fourteen inches and still coming down. The phone beeped. Answer? At Nate's at seven twenty-two in the morning? The signal stopped.

She poured herself more coffee. A shame the babes couldn't fully feed themselves, she'd like a day snowbound, Nate had extra snowshoes, they might—

Nate came into the kitchen. “It's for you. It's Helen.” His brow had gone crinkly.

She picked up the phone. “Hi. Congrats again.”

“Sarah? Your husband just called, he—”

“What'd you tell him?”

“That you were on your way to the lab, the storm was bad, it'd take you a while to get there.”

“Bless you. What did he say?”

“You should call him.”

“Something wrong?”

“He didn't mention anything. He sounded sort of funny.”

“Okay. Thanks, Helen.” She set the phone down.

“Everything all right?” Nate stood beside her in his dressing gown.

She liked the morning this way, domestic. “He asked me to call.” She sipped her coffee.

“So? Go ahead.”

“From the Center. We have call display.” A half hour later Sarah dialed her apartment. Driscoll did sound weird. She'd be in Boston before evening.

By the time she arrived he was dead. Only her sister Feasie would come to the funeral. Sarah had said to her, “If I'd been home, he'd still be alive.”

•

“But what happened to Driscoll?” Lola stepped toward the edge and leaned over.

“I don't know yet.”

“I guess he didn't
AA
.” She shook her head.
AA
, that's to Achieve Ascension.

“A less than Immortal type,” I noted. “Let alone a God.”

“Ted—” She took a deep breath and turned to me. “Why am I one? A God?”

I stared at her. I'd never heard a question like that. I sometimes think odd thoughts when I'm organizing a story, but to question a thing so basic? Not possible. “What do you mean?”

She waited. “I don't know.”

“Then why're you asking?”

She shrugged. “It was sort of floating around. Inside my head.”

Strange, this. Gods don't ask for explanations. The very definition of being a God is to live in an eternal infinite realm,
eir
, of self-pleasure, large or larger. How could a God even think of thinking beyond self-pleasure? Becoming a God means, precisely, dwelling within the ultimate reward. There's not even a pretense of any other mode of experience. Even if, say, a God could fear a thing, or suspect some unhappiness—which they can't, so this is pure surmising—then such a moment would be understood as the pleasure of fear, the pleasure of unhappiness. The past, an imperfect time, is completely forgotten, as are the complicated people one lived among in the down below—one's dealings with them so imperfect their very names and faces have gone absent. In Lola's mind, a place where uncertainty could float? It made no sense. “But how'd the question come to you?”

“It was eerie.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “When you were talking before, I thought, Why is Ted an Immortal, and I'm a God?”

Here was dangerous ground, wandering close to the border of what one is. I felt a sudden shiver. Could she step out of her God-realm? I wanted her close, yes. But not by putting her at such risk. She could hardly become an Immortal. And mortality was done with.

“How did we evolve to what we're seen as here?”

“Lola—” I can't say what came over me: I took her hand. “I have no idea.”

Though her question did come close to another I've at times considered: What in fact is the process of deciding who becomes a God, who an Immortal? In fact, who decides who gets to
AA
altogether? I do know that about 99.9999 percent of us in the down below never pass beyond our graves. Let's say there are about six billion people down there. If an average worldwide lifespan is sixty, one-sixtieth of the world population dies each year, or one hundred million people. Of these, one in a million, or about one hundred people,
AA
annually. Mostly we demise and get forgotten. A few of us are obvious and become Gods, but most here are Immortals. Myself, one day I died, and
AA
ed, and found myself here. So I get to be around forever, a sweet yet curious privilege. Why me? I can only guess. We
AA
because of something we did down there. They say it all depends on how long we're going to be remembered, and by how many. But by what device can anyone tell that in advance? In the down below I wrote stories for a living. I never made huge amounts of money.

I should amend some of this. They say for almost everyone, Gods and Immortals, it's the pre-departure that defines us. Heroic leadership, or resplendent singing, or a theory that holds the world together for a while, or curing some terrible disease, or privileged martyrdom, that kind of thing gets one to
AA
. They also say a very few of us have managed to
AA
some time after the demise moment—a celebratory posthumous biography, a momentous re-evaluation of one's work, fabulous underground word of mouth that bursts to the surface, deserved sainthood. Myself, I don't know anybody who got up here like that.

None of which explains Lola's questions. But I had to draw her back from them. Which I did, walking away from the cloud's edge, the pleasure of the touch of her hand against mine.

Yes, pleasure. Unusual, and we Immortals are different from the Gods in that way. We too function in the eternal infinite realm,
eir
, but under normal circumstance we feel relatively little pleasure. Immortals are content with the privilege of going on forever, having no responsibilities. Still, by doing certain important things, the pleasure sensation can arise. For me, by telling stories I get pleasure. I've been doing it even up here because I found I could. And I've observed how others get a jolt in their own pleasure-sphere by listening. Now with Lola here—

“Why so silent?” she asked.

“Why're you so full of questions?” I grinned at her, playful-hard.

She didn't take to the tease and pulled her hand away. “You're not being serious.”

“Yes, very.” I felt a sudden growing melancholy. Which is impossible, since passion dies with our arrival here. “More than you can imagine.”

She found my eyes with hers, and held them, the left, the right. Her earthly beauty, undiminished, filled my chest with pain. She said, “I should go back.”

I forced myself to nod. Technically she was right.

“See you tomorrow?” She spoke softly.

A smile must have made its way to my bobbing face. “I'll look forward to that.”

She took my hand, squeezed my fingers, and was gone.

What, what were we doing? We function by the laws, and one of the most ancient says Gods and Immortals must spend a minimum of two parts in three of time space with their own kind. It's a law so old no one's ever needed to invoke it. What God would want to pass time space with Immortals? And why would a God let an Immortal spend time space with her?

I drew myself over to an edge of cloud and watched the happenings below. Tomorrow I'd tell her what I saw.

•

4.

C. Carney worked his Ram
between snow-covered shoulders of the back-country highroad toward his appointment, a consultation with Dr. Theresa Bonneherbe Magnussen. She'd written that she needed help with a potential catastrophe, she'd like some guidelines. So maybe she hadn't made her mistake yet. He had called her.

“Sorry,” her secretary told him. “Dr. Magnussen doesn't speak on the telephone. Shall I set up a meeting?”

“What does she want?”

“I'm afraid I don't know.”

Carney took a curve, banking against ice. Woods on the left, ahead the lake, then Burlington stretched along the shore. Clients normally blurted out the problem in the first minute, but Magnussen hadn't even come to the phone. Why did he agree to meet her? On all sides white ground, blue sky, black trees; the world simplified to three basic shades.

For the last week he'd lived mostly with filth-laden orange, a methane fire out of control thirteen miles north of Median, New Hampshire, a town he knew well. At two-fifteen equinox morning he'd gotten a call from Mrs. Staunton, embodiment of the communication center at Carney and Co. She had the Median town manager on the line. It took Carney just three minutes to turn the man's bombast to a squeaky “Please! Help us.”

Carney headed up jobs these days only if they looked to be some new kind of disaster, or a disaster so immense he had to be there himself. Methane fires weren't all that dangerous. But the others were dealing with disasters elsewhere. So Carney drove through the jaws of a spring storm so thick he was less than eighty yards from the fire before he saw smoke. Municipal solid waste in a litter dump the size of three football fields, and the most obvious precautions hadn't been taken. All they'd needed to do was let the methane release properly by covering the waste with adequate soil, simple as that. Now the peripheral temperature had reached 600 degrees Celsius and the local firemen had no idea how to handle it. “Thanks for coming,” said the chubby town manager, reaching out his hand. Then he said, “We're in trouble, aren't we.”

Carney studied the fire, getting as close to the filthy flames as he dared without face mask and body protection. The town manager trailed him. “Well,” he said, “what's it going to cost?”

Always the first question. Never, How can we be sure no one gets hurt here? or, What can we do to keep this from becoming a long-term disaster? “It's a standard project. My costs, billed to you, plus twenty-five percent.”