Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"I don't understand."

"You'll laugh if I tell you."

"I won't, honest."

"It's connected. My gift. I mean the languages. I have to abjure sex until I'm married, I mean if I ever get married. Otherwise, it'll be taken away from me."

"You mean… like that thing with the girl and the unicorn?"

"Yes, pretty nearly."

"Lucy, that's insane. You have a… a rare genetic variation, that's all. Like people who can extract ten-digit primes in their heads or tell you the day of any date, or become chess grand masters. You can't lose it because you think you're violating some medieval rule."

"Yes, that's what Morrie Shadkin says."

"Does he want to get you into bed, too?"

"No, although he does want to marry me. I pointed out to him that he's already married and has two kids. He says, 'Lucy, that's such a technicality!' He hates to let me out of his sight. He'd go nuts if he knew I was in dangerous, uncivilized West VA."

"She drags me into the Tunnel of Love to boast about her other boyfriends."

"Oh, Morrie's not a boyfriend. He's the neuroscientist who's trying to figure out how my brain works. Anyway, about your rare genetic variation-the experts of the whole world have looked into my head, CAT scans, fMRI, PET scans, and, yeah, there are small variations, but not explanatory variations. Physically, I'm the same as anyone else, but I can do stuff that no one else can do, except another freak, a fifteen-year-old boy in Russia. So forgive me if I regard it as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Look, what if you knew that if you did something, it would mean that after you couldn't tell a quark from a lipton?"

"Lepton."

"Lepton. How would you feel?"

"I'm prepared to risk that."

"Well, I'm not. And besides, it's wrong. Do you love me?"

"Love you? Christ, I just met you."

"Yes, but you're willing to use me to slake your lust. So say I want to slake my lust, too, and so we slake them, and slake them, and then we get bored with it after a while, or find someone who's more attractive or more interesting, and the whole thing starts over again with someone else."

"All right, fine!" he snapped.

After some silence, she said, "You're pouting now."

He was inclined to pout. He was horny as the devil and he was attracted to her without really understanding why. He had never been attracted to such a girl before this, and it irked him a little. He was a modern kid and had enjoyed plenty of sex from an early age. While it was true that he tended to go for girls who wanted a different sort of boy, he had never had much trouble scoring. His high school had, of course, been full of girls who were born-again and self-consciously Christian, and he had mocked them along with the rest of the bright crowd he had hung out with. This one, however, was not like any of them. He found now, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not want to pout, did not want to push her away, wanted… something, he didn't quite know what. Without thinking about it, he flung his arm around her again and gave her a squeeze. "Oh, well, so we'll be pure. I can't believe this. This is like 1903."

She relaxed against him. "Or 1403. Look, we're emerging." There was brightness ahead around a curve, and then a heart-shaped slice of the real world, glowing and making them squint their eyes.

"Where's Lucy?" asked Karp.

Marlene blinked awake and looked around. "Isn't she in the pool?" She sat up and saw that Lucy was not. The twins were there, playing with a ball and a net set up at the side of the pool. "I must have dozed off. The sun got to me." She sat up, rubbed her face, looked around. "Mm, I don't know. She was with the Heeney boy. They're probably off in the bushes somewhere, playing doctor."

"Yeah, psychiatrist, maybe. I just wanted to tell you I'm going out with Hendricks."

"Anything going on?"

"We had another sighting. They bought a case of beer at a grocery in Selden. That's north of here at the junction of 712 and 11. They look like they're getting ready to liquor up and come to town. Wade is gathering the forces. Also, Hawes called. Bledsoe sprung Emmett on a hundred grand bail. He's coming here, but it looks like it might be over by the end of the day, if Wade does his job."

"You want to be in on the kill, do you?"

"Yeah, I do. I deserve it." He sat on the edge of the lounger. "Speaking of which, are you going to tell me how you psyched Ernie Poole up from Death of a Salesman to Clarence Darrow?"

"Oh, that. You know, womanly wiles, tee-hee."

"Really."

"I went to his office, where he was trying to climb into a bottle, but had only got a leg in so far, and I told him I knew he had got Amos Jonson to drag me into that shack with his story, and then I expatiated on how you were going to cream Emmett Heeney in court. And he cursed out Hawes for a corrupt fuck, and you and me for fools. He was pretty eloquent, and I said Hawes wouldn't be a factor, you'd be running the case, and you were ten times the lawyer he was, even when he was cold sober, and I walked out."

"That was it?"

"Yes. It came down to a penis-measuring contest between you and him, as I find most litigation does in the end. He's nuts about me, the poor sap, and I manipulated him shamelessly. It's going to break his heart not to be able to beat you up in court."

"He couldn't beat me up in court on his best day and my worst," said Karp, winking John Waynesque.

"Right. I rest my case."

"Now that we've done the cultural riches of the greater McCullensburg area," Dan said, "how about looking into the lowlife?"

They were walking with their arms around one another by the side of a little lake, on a kind of sandy promenade. There was a bathing beach full of shouting children, and the smell of barbecue fires, broiling meat, and charcoal starter fluid. Lucy had never done this with a boy before, but thought she could get to like it. Small town, girl and boy, summer, a lakeside carnival, the hallucination of innocence. She understood that it was hallucinatory, America having given up innocence along with unleaded gas, but she was enjoying it nonetheless. And the badinage.

"There's lowlife in McCullensburg?" she said, miming wonderment. "I'm shocked! Shocked!"

"Yep. There's a roadhouse on Route 11 just outside of Selden. They got a pool table and a jukebox with all country favorites. A couple of pinball machines, too."

"You can see my eyes are sparkling, I guess. Did you also hope to get me drunk, so as to make me more pliable?"

"Be honest? Yeah, it had crossed my mind. There's a motel right behind the roadhouse." He hugged her more closely. "Come on. We're young. It's summer. Look at these people." She looked. They seemed to fall into two general classes: parental couples jiggling with fat, mostly lard-pale except for the blue-collar sunburns on the men-face, neck, and lower arms-and rail-thin teens in gaggles and couples, poking and pawing one another. He meant the adults.

"Soon we'll be fat and ugly, too, with mortgages and bratty kids. You want to look back and think you never once did anything just because you had the urge? Seize the day, Lucy!"

To his surprise, she giggled. "Seize the day? My God, you're such a pagan! You should be wearing a helmet with horns on it and a greasy beard. Look, let me explain something. If you believe that you're basically an animal, and you're only going to live a certain little bit of time, and for most of it you're going to be in decline, then 'seize the day' is the right take on life. On the other hand, if you believe that your real destiny is entirely outside of time, and that you were made to be with God forever, then the right take is 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' In other words, forget the crap from the past and what you're plotting for the future, such as, in your case, getting into my pants. Live for eternity, which means, among other things, behaving in a certain way."