Robert Wilson - Vortex

Orrin smiled when he saw her. His face was guileless, transparent to every emotion. Big head, high cheekbones, eyes pleasant but open too wide. He looked like he would be easy to lie to. “Dr. Cole, hi! They told me I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

“Another intake physician has been assigned to your case, Orrin. But we can still talk, if you like.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“I spoke to Officer Bose yesterday. Do you remember Officer Bose?”

“Yes, ma’am, of course I do. Officer Bose is the only policeman who took an interest in me.” Poe- lease -man, in Orrin’s trailer-park accent. “He’s the one who called my sister Ariel. Is she in town yet, have you heard?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll be talking to Officer Bose later—I can ask.” She added, not knowing how to approach the subject except bluntly, “He mentioned the notebooks you were carrying when the police picked you up.”

Orrin seemed neither surprised nor upset that Sandra knew about the notebooks, though his sunny expression dimmed a little. “Officer Bose says the police have to keep them for now but I can have them back sooner or later.” He frowned, buckling a V under his high hairline. “That’s true, isn’t it? No matter what they decide about me here?”

“If Officer Bose says so, I think it’s probably true. Are the notebooks important to you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I suppose they are.”

“May I ask you what’s written in them?”

“Well, that’s hard to say.”

“Is it a story?”

“You could call it that I guess.”

“What’s the story about, Orrin?”

“Well, it’s hard for me to keep in my mind. That’s why I like to have the notebooks, so I can refresh my memory. It has to do with a certain man and a certain woman. More than that. It’s about… you could say God? Or at least the Hypotheticals.” Hah-poe- thet -ickles.

“Did you write the story yourself?”

Peculiarly, Orrin blushed.

“I wrote it down, ” he said finally, “but I don’t know I can say for sure I wrote it. I’m not much of a writer. Never was. A teacher at Park Valley school—that’s back in North Carolina—told me I don’t know a noun from a verb and never will. And I guess that’s true. Words don’t come easy to me, except—”

“Except what, Orrin?”

“Except those words.”

Sandra didn’t want to push it any harder. “I understand,” she said, though she didn’t. One more stab at it: “Turk Findley… is that someone in your story, or is he a real person?”

Orrin’s blush deepened. “I don’t guess he exists, ma’am. I guess I made him up.”

It was obvious he was lying. But Sandra left it at that. She smiled and nodded.

When she stood up to leave, Orrin asked her about the flowers growing in the small garden outside the window of his cinderblock room: did she know by what name they were called?

“Those? They’re called ‘bird of paradise.’”

His eyes widened; he grinned. “That’s their real name?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Huh! Because those flowers surely do look like birds, don’t they?”

The yellow beak, the rounded head, the single drop of crystalline sap that glinted like an eye. “Yes, they do.”

“It’s like a flower that has the idea of a bird inside it. Only nobody put it there. Unless you could say God did.”

“God or nature.”

“Maybe comes to the same thing. You have a nice day, Dr. Cole.”

“Thank you, Orrin. You too.”

Bose finally returned her call midafternoon, though his voice was hard to hear, coming through a background of what sounded like mass chanting. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m down at the ship channel. It’s some kind of environmental demonstration. We have about fifty people sitting on the railroad tracks in front of a string of tanker cars.”

“More power to them.” Sandra’s sympathies were entirely with the demonstrators. The environmentalists wanted to ban the import of fossil fuels from beyond the Arch of the Hypotheticals, in an attempt to keep global warming under five degrees Celsius. Sufficient unto the planet are the carbon resources thereof, they believed, and to Sandra it was ridiculously obvious that they were right. As far as she could tell, the exploitation of the vast oil reserves under the Equatorian desert was a disaster in progress, enabling a mad prosperity purchased at the price of redoubled CO 2emissions. The generation that had grown up in the wake of the Spin wanted cheap gas and boom times and no cavilling voices at the table, and the whole world was (or would be) paying the piper.

Bose said, “I’m not sure having an activist crushed by a freight train would be absolutely helpful. You got the document I sent?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering how to proceed.

“You read it?”

“Yes. Officer Bose—”

“You can just call me Bose. My friends do.”

“Okay, but look, I still don’t know what you want from me. Do you honestly believe Orrin Mather wrote the text you sent me?”

“I know, it hardly seems plausible. Even Orrin is a reluctant to take credit for it.”

“I asked him about that. He told me he wrote it down, but he wasn’t sure he actually wrote it. As if somebody dictated it to him. Which I guess would explain a few things. Anyway, what do you want from me exactly? Literary criticism? Because I’m not much of a science fiction fan.”

“There’s more to the document than what you’ve seen. I’m hoping I can send you another batch of pages today and maybe we can get together face-to-face, like say lunch tomorrow, to talk about the details.”

Was she willing to take another step into this strangeness? Oddly, she discovered she was. Put it down to curiosity. And maybe compassion for the bashful child-man she had discovered in Orrin Mather. And the fact that she had found Bose to be reasonably pleasant company. She told him he could send along more pages but she felt compelled to add, “There’s a complication you ought to know about. I’m not Orrin’s case physician anymore. My boss turned him over to a trainee.”

Now it was Bose’s turn to pause. Sandra tried to make out the chanting in the background. Something-something our children’s children . “Well, damn,” Bose said.

“And I doubt my boss would be willing to take you into his confidence, no offense. He’s—”

“You’re talking about Congreve? People at HPD say he’s a bureaucratic prick.”

“No comment.”

“Okay… but you still have access to Orrin?”

“I can talk to him, if that’s what you mean. What I don’t have is any kind of decision-making authority.”

“Complicates things,” Bose admitted. “But I’d still like your opinion.”

“Again, it would help if I knew what’s so important to you about Orrin and these notebooks of his.”

“Better if we discuss it tomorrow.”

Sandra negotiated the lunch details, a place reasonably close to State Care but slightly more upscale than the strip mall alternatives; then Bose said, “Gotta go. Thanks, Dr. Cole.”

“Sandra,” she said.

You want to know what it was like, what happened to Vox and afterward?

Well, here it is.

Something to leave behind, you might say.

Something for the wind and the stars to read.

I was born to the name Treya and a five-syllable suffix I won’t repeat here, but it might be better to think of me as Allison Pearl Mark II. I had a ten-year gestation, a painful eight-day labor, and a traumatic birth. From my first full day of life I knew I was a fraud, and I knew just as truly that I had no choice in the matter.